Evanston Harper Lecture: Aging, Stigma, and Disgust

Age is the only category of discrimination that includes all human beings—if they live long enough. The bodies of aging people remind younger people of their own frailty and mortality, and popular discourse portrays those bodies as incompetent, unattractive, even revolting. Aging people themselves often come to feel disgust with their own bodies, as new research proposes. As philosopher and law professor Martha Nussbaum will argue, this stigma is itself a social problem leading to various forms of injustice, such as discrimination in employment and in informal social interactions, not to mention the social evil of compulsory retirement. Age discrimination may well be the new issue for our time, since it deprives all societies of valuable human capital.

To register or find out more information, please click here.

Featured Faculty

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Department of Philosophy. She won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and the National Endowment for the Humanities named her its 2017 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities. Her most recent books are Anger and Forgiveness (2016) and Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret (with Saul Levmore, 2017). Check out Professor Nussbaum’s Aging Thoughtfully.

To learn more about the entire Harper Lecture Series, please visit the UChicago Alumni Association's page.

Questions? Contact alumniassociation@uchicago.edu or 773.702.2150.