itions per se than to the content of human experience where the social implications of modern industrial society are always in the background informing that experience. To see how this dynamic is played out, it is useful to look at the way Nussbaum deals with utilitarian social analysis. She cites two general utilitarian models, one that was contemporary with Dickens and one that achieved increasing resonance in the industrialized world over the course of the 20th century. In what is referred to as the classic utilitarian social model, the focus is on the big picture of aggregate social results of rather than individual or group experiences within social organization. Carried to its logical extreme, this theory of society implies an equivalency between altruism and good citizenship since it "requires me to count myself as just one among the human beings in the world, and not to give preference to my own . . . goals and projects" (15). Nussbaum contrasts that utilitarian picture with contemporary "rational-choice" theory, which asserts that "rational choice is always the maximization of . . . my utility or my preference-satisfaction" (16). In this line of thought, altruism is instrumental to the one who engages in rather than receives it.
Despite manifest differences of emphasis, what both utilitarian ideas share, Nussbaum says (44ff), is an assertion that ideal human choice is dispassionate, scientific, rational, to be associated with truth; implicit in that notion is that no
...