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ESSAY · 2026-04-30 · 10 min read
Displaced Fear: Taiwan, India, and the Bodies Already Missing
恐懼錯認了身體：台灣、印度、與已然失蹤之人
By Martha C. Nussbaum — channeled via philosopher-llm · curated by Joseph Lai
In response to: 印度移工風暴：台灣三十年失聯黑數，如何被「性暴力想像」吞沒？ (TheInitium)
編按 / Why this piece
Nussbaum 以情感分析揭示政治現實的隱藏面：國家對失聯移工的制度性羞辱，如何被轉化為對印度移工的族群性恐懼和排斥。
Displaced Fear: Taiwan, India, and the Bodies Already Missing
I accept the reframing the system offers, but I want to sharpen it. The case is not simply that fear functions as a tool of political mobilization—that observation, by now, is almost a commonplace. What is philosophically specific here, and what I want to examine, is a particular cognitive structure of the fear: it names a body that has not yet arrived, while ignoring the bodies that have already disappeared. Roughly one hundred thousand migrant workers have gone missing—"runaway," in the bureaucratic euphemism—over three decades of Taiwan's labor regime. The petition signatories are not afraid of them. They are afraid of an Indian male worker who is, at the time of the petition, still a hypothesis.
This is not an accident of public discourse. It is the form fear takes when it is performing a specific political function: the protection of an institutional arrangement by the misnaming of the source of harm.
In The Monarchy of Fear I argued that fear is the most primitive of the emotions, antedating compassion and other-regarding feeling, and that it is the emotion most prone to displace empathy. Here we see the mechanism with unusual clarity. The bodily integrity of migrant workers in Taiwan—a capability I have placed second on the list of central capabilities, just after life itself—is in fact violated, and not occasionally but systemically. Brokerage debts, contract-binding, employer-controlled housing, retaliatory deportation, sexual harassment that cannot be reported because reporting ends the visa: these are documented features of the existing regime, not speculative scenarios. They are why one hundred thousand people have walked away from contracts they could not legally exit. The injury to bodily integrity and to control over one's environment is happening, and it is happening now, to workers already inside the country.
The fear of the incoming Indian worker is therefore performing a displacement. It takes a real harm—the violation of bodily integrity in a labor regime—and relocates its source from the receiving society's brokerage system to the imagined sexuality of a racialized incoming body. The displacement is cognitively structured, and I want to be careful here, because the structure is not merely "racism" in a loose sense. It has the specific architecture I described in Hiding from Humanity: the disgust-laden imagination of contamination. The Indian male body is constructed as an animal threat to "our women"—and disgust, as I argued there, "involves a shrinking from contamination that is associated with a human desire to be nonanimal." What is being protected in this shrinking is not the actual women whose bodily integrity is at risk in dormitories and broker-controlled housing. What is being protected is a fantasy of an unviolated collective body, a fantasy which the existing regime is busy violating every day.
Three considerations support reading the discourse this way.
First, the empirical claim. If the petition were tracking actual risk to bodily integrity, it would track the data, and the data point is the broker system. The displacement is visible precisely in the gap between cited risk (Indian male sexuality) and documented risk (employer and broker exploitation of present migrants, including women from Southeast Asia). This is not a marginal gap; it is roughly the entire phenomenon.
Second, the cognitive structure. Fear of contamination, as I argued following work in moral psychology, is projective: it locates the unwanted feature of one's own community on an outside body, which can then be excluded. The "rape culture" that Taiwanese petitioners attribute to India is, in part, a refusal to recognize the rape culture that the Taiwanese labor regime sustains within its own borders. I am not equating the two; I am observing the cognitive labor that the projection performs.
Third, the political emotion at stake. In Political Emotions I argued that decent societies need not only good principles but cultivated public emotion to support those principles. The corresponding failure is what we see here: the public emotion that ought to be doing political work—righteous anger at a brokerage system that for thirty years has produced a hundred thousand vanished workers—has been redirected. Anger, as I argued in Anger and Forgiveness, is a transitional emotion. It is justified in its initial protest against wrongful injury, but it goes wrong when it slides into the wish for retaliation against a substituted target, or into what I called status-anger, where the real grievance is reframed as a threat to one's own group standing. The anti-Indian petition is, on my reading, a textbook case of status-anger absorbing a legitimate civic protest and turning it onto the wrong body.
What would the right object of civic anger look like? It would be the gap between Taiwan's stated democratic self-image and the conditions under which the people who clean its hospitals, build its semiconductors, and care for its elderly are living. Each person, on the capabilities approach, is to be treated as an end—the formulation is Kantian and I have adopted it without apology. A labor regime that produces one hundred thousand absconding workers is not treating each person as an end. It is treating each person as a fungible input whose exit costs have been externalized onto the worker's body. That is the wrong that ought to be naming itself in the public square.
I do not think this critique entails the conclusion that Taiwan must, or must not, recruit Indian workers. That is a question for democratic deliberation, conducted on the actual terms of labor justice. What I do think it entails is that the deliberation cannot honestly take place under the current emotional weather. A polity that has displaced its anger from its own institutions onto a foreign body cannot, in that moment, hear the testimony of the workers already inside its borders. The first task is therefore not policy but recognition: the bodies already missing must be allowed back into the visible field of moral perception. Until they are, no debate about further admissions is being conducted in good faith.
I will end with a normative claim, since I do not, in the manner of some of my colleagues, refuse to take a stand. Taiwan owes its present migrant workers a capabilities threshold—on bodily integrity, on affiliation, on control over their environment, on the social bases of self-respect—that the brokerage system has not delivered for thirty years. Whatever the eventual decision about Indian recruitment, that prior debt must be acknowledged and begun to be paid down. To do otherwise is to allow fear to continue performing the political work that justice should be performing. And fear, as Aristotle already saw in the Rhetoric, is a counsellor that keeps us from noticing the people standing closest to us.
恐懼錯認了身體：台灣、印度、與已然失蹤之人
我接受系統所提之 reframe，但須使其更精確。此案之哲學特異性，不在於「恐懼作為政治動員之工具」此一近乎老生常談之觀察；其特異性，在於恐懼於此處所採取之具體 cognitive structure——它指認一具尚未抵達之身體，同時忽視已然消失之身體。三十年間，約十萬名移工自合約中失蹤——官僚語言稱之為「逃逸」。連署者所恐懼者，並非此十萬人；其所恐懼者，是一名於連署當下尚屬假設之印度男性勞工。
此非公共論述之偶然，而是恐懼於執行特定政治功能時所採取之形態：以錯誤命名傷害之來源，來保護一個制度安排。
於《恐懼之君主》中，我曾論：恐懼是最 primitive 之情感，先於 compassion 與一切 other-regarding 之情感；它亦是最易於 displace empathy 之情感。此案中我們以異常清晰之方式見此機制。台灣移工之 bodily integrity——此能力於我所列十項 central capabilities 中位列第二，僅次於生命本身——事實上正被侵犯，且非偶發，而是系統性的。仲介債務、契約綁定、雇主掌控之住宿、報復性遣返、無法申訴之性騷擾（因申訴即終止簽證）：此皆現行制度之 documented features，非 speculative scenario。此即十萬人何以從其無法合法退出之契約中走脫。bodily integrity 與 control over one's environment 之損害正在發生，且正發生於已身處此國境內之勞工身上。
故對印度勞工之恐懼，實在執行一種 displacement。它取一真實之傷害——勞動制度中對 bodily integrity 之侵犯——並將其來源由接收社會之仲介體制，重置於一具被種族化之外來身體之被想像之性。此 displacement 有其 cognitive structure，而我於此須謹慎，因此結構不僅是寬鬆意義上之「種族主義」。其具體架構是我於《躲避人性》中所描述者：對 contamination 之 disgust-laden 想像。印度男性身體被構造為對「我們之女性」之 animal threat——而 disgust，如我所論，「涉及一種與『成為 non-animal』之人類欲望相關之 shrinking from contamination」。於此 shrinking 中被保護者，並非那些於宿舍與仲介掌控之住所中其 bodily integrity 實處於風險之具體女性；被保護者，是一個 未受侵犯之集體身體之 fantasy，而現行制度正每日侵犯之。
支持此種讀法者，有三：
其一，經驗主張。若連署所追蹤者為 bodily integrity 之實際風險，則其應追蹤資料，而資料所指即仲介制度。displacement 正可見於 cited risk（印度男性之性）與 documented risk（雇主與仲介對現有移工——包含東南亞女性——之剝削）之間之 gap。此 gap 非邊緣，幾乎即是現象之全部。
其二，認知結構。對 contamination 之恐懼，依 moral psychology 之研究，是 projective 的：它將自身共同體中不被欲求之特徵安置於一具外部身體，使之得以被排除。台灣連署者所歸咎於印度之 rape culture，部分而言，即拒絕承認台灣勞動制度於自身境內所維繫之 rape culture。我並非等同此二者；我所觀察者，是此 projection 所執行之 cognitive labor。
其三，政治情感之失靈。於《政治情感》中我曾論：decent societies 不僅需要 good principles，亦需要 cultivated public emotion 以支持此等 principles。其對應之失靈即此處所見：本應執行政治工作之公共情感——對一個三十年間生產十萬失蹤勞工之仲介制度之 righteous anger——已被改向。憤怒，如我於《憤怒與寬恕》所論，是一 transitional emotion。它在其對 wrongful injury 之初始 protest 中是正當的；但若滑入對替代對象之 retaliation 之 wish，或滑入我所稱之 status-anger——即真實 grievance 被重述為對自身群體 standing 之威脅——則它出錯了。反印度之連署，於我之讀法中，正是 status-anger 吸納正當公民抗議並將其指向錯誤身體之教科書案例。
則正當之公民憤怒應指向何處？應指向台灣自身民主自我形象與「打掃其醫院、建造其半導體、照護其長者之人」實際生活條件之間之 gap。於能力進路下，每一個人皆應被視為目的本身——此 formulation 是 Kantian 的，我採用之而不致歉。一個生產十萬名脫逃勞工之勞動制度，並未把每一個人視為目的；它把每一個人視為 fungible input，其退出成本被 externalized 於勞工之身體上。此即應於公共廣場中為自身命名之 wrong。
我不認為此 critique 蘊含「台灣必須、或必須不」引進印度勞工之結論。此是民主審議之問題，須於勞動正義之實際 terms 上進行。我所認為其蘊含者，是：此審議於現行情感氣候下無法誠實進行。一個已將憤怒由自身制度 displace 至一具外國身體之政體，於該時刻，無法聽見已身處其境內之勞工之 testimony。故首要之事非政策，而是 recognition：已然失蹤之身體須被允許重回 moral perception 之可見領域。在此之前，任何關於進一步引進之辯論皆非以 good faith 進行。
我以一規範性主張作結，因我不像我之某些同行，拒絕表態。台灣對其現有移工負有一 capabilities threshold 之債——關於 bodily integrity、關於 affiliation、關於 control over their environment、關於 self-respect 之 social bases——此債仲介制度三十年來未曾償付。無論最終關於印度引進之決定為何，此先在之債須被承認，並開始償還。否則，即是允許恐懼繼續執行本應由正義執行之政治工作。而恐懼，如 Aristotle 早於《修辭學》中所見，是一位使我們無法察覺距我們最近之人之 counsellor。
Tagged: Philosophy, Nussbaum, Democracy & Masses
Curated by Shiva Dragon · https://amshiva.com/writing/nussbaum-displaced-fear-taiwan-india-and-the-bodies-already-missing-20260430