Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum (born May 6, 1947, New York, New York, U.S.) American philosopher and legal scholar known for her wide-ranging work in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, the philosophy of law, moral psychology, ethics, philosophical feminism, political philosophy, the philosophy of education, and aesthetics and for her philosophically informed contributions to contemporary debates on human rights, social and transnational justice, economic development, political feminism and women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, economic inequality, multiculturalism, the value of education in the liberal arts or humanities, and animal rights.

Nussbaum’s father, George Craven, was an attorney and her mother, Betty Craven (née Warren), an interior designer and homemaker. Nussbaum studied at Wellesley College and at New York University (NYU), from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1969. At Harvard University she earned master’s (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in Classical philology. She subsequently taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Brown University, and the University of Chicago, where she was named Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics in 1996 and elevated to Distinguished Service Professor in 1999. At Chicago she held joint appointments in the university’s Law School and Divinity School and in the departments of philosophy, classics, and political science.

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While at NYU she met and married Alan Nussbaum, then a linguistics student, and converted from Episcopalianism to Reform Judaism. The couple divorced in 1987.

In her first major work, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Nussbaum drew upon the works of the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to challenge a middle-Platonic conception of the good life (the life of human flourishing, necessarily encompassing virtuous character and behaviour) as “self-sufficient,” or invulnerable to circumstances and events outside the individual’s control. In that assessment she sided with Plato’s student Aristotle, whose own ethical theory acknowledged the contingencies upon which human flourishing may depend and the inherent vulnerabilities involved in commitments and attachments that partly constitute a good human life. She also argued, again against the middle Plato, that the works of the Greek tragic poets were (and remain) a valuable source of moral instruction because their portrayals of the struggle to live ethically were generally more complex, nuanced, and realistic than those of most philosophers. More broadly, Nussbaum asserted that certain works of non-Classical literature, such as Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), can also be studied for their insights into human moral psychology and for that reason should be treated, along with Classical literature, as a nontheoretical genre of ethical philosophy.

In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Nussbaum appealed to the ancient ideals of Socratic rationality and Stoic cosmopolitanism to argue in favour of expanding the American university curriculum to include the study of non-Western cultures and the experiences and perspectives of women and of ethnic and sexual minority (e.g., gay and lesbian) groups. Responding to right-wing critics of multiculturalism in higher education—whom she likened to the Athenians who put Socrates on trial for “corrupting the young”—Nussbaum demonstrated how programs focused on non-Western cultures, feminism and women’s history, and the experiences and perspectives of sexual minorities have advanced the ancient (and Enlightenment) ideal of liberal education: the liberation of the mind from “the bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world.” Multicultural education furthers this goal by helping to develop three crucial abilities: to rationally examine oneself and one’s society in the Socratic fashion, to understand one’s commonalities with people outside one’s local region or group, and to exercise one’s “narrative imagination” by considering “what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself.”

Nussbaum also stressed, however, that empathetic understanding of other cultures does not preclude moral criticism of them, much less imply a kind of ethical relativism, which she emphatically rejected. She accordingly dismissed the views of some postmodern proponents of multiculturalism, who asserted that the Western philosophical ideals of Socratic rationality, truth, universalism, and objectivity lack any independent validity and are merely intellectual devices for justifying the oppression of women, minorities, and non-Western peoples. (Indeed, Nussbaum dismissed postmodernism altogether as a form of shallow sophistry, “an outpouring of bad philosophy” from “our newly theory-conscious departments of literature.”) The exercise of Socratic rationality, she argued, is particularly important for the functioning of democracy, because “democracy needs citizens who can think for themselves rather than simply deferring to authority, who can reason together about their choices rather than just trading claims and counterclaims”—as Socrates himself pointed out at his trial, according to Plato’s Apology. Nussbaum further explored the political importance of liberal education in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010).

In her essay collection Sex and Social Justice (1999), Nussbaum developed and robustly defended an augmented form of liberal philosophical feminism based on the universal values of human dignity, equal worth, and autonomy, understood as the freedom and capacity of every person to conceive and pursue a life of human flourishing. Her approach emphasized internationalism and acknowledged the ways in which society shapes (and often distorts) individual desires and preferences. As in Cultivating Humanity and other works, Nussbaum sharply criticized postmodernist objectors to liberal universalism, some of whom also condemned feminist activism to improve the lives of women in non-Western societies. The universals Nussbaum defended were, she argued, grounded in realistic assessments of the capacities, functioning, and basic needs of all people—“the fruit of many years of collaborative international work.” (In the 1980s and early ’90s Nussbaum worked with the World Institute for Development Economics Research [WIDER] and the United Nations Development Programme on projects related to quality-of-life assessments in various developing countries; she also worked directly with women’s groups in India, China, and elsewhere.) “We can hardly be charged with imposing a foreign set of values upon individuals or groups,” she insisted, “if what we are doing is providing support for basic capacities and opportunities that are involved in the selection of any flourishing life and then leaving people to choose for themselves how they will pursue flourishing.”

Nussbaum’s emphasis on capacities, the “capabilities” (or “capability”) approach to liberal universalism, represented a philosophical adaptation of a framework in development and welfare economics for assessing public policy in terms of whether it advances individual capacities to function in certain ways (i.e., to engage in certain activities or to achieve certain states of being), pioneered by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. In Nussbaum’s hands, the approach became a means of normatively evaluating political arrangements, and understanding justice, in terms of whether individual capacities to engage in activities that are essential to a truly human life—“a life in which fully human functioning, or a kind of basic human flourishing, will be available”—are fostered or frustrated. For Nussbaum, those capacities include the capacity to live a life of normal length, to have good health, to have bodily integrity, to use one’s mind in ways “protected by guarantees of freedom of expression,” to have emotional attachments, and to meaningfully participate in political decision making, among many others. Her later work, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011), was a comprehensive restatement of the capabilities approach.

Nussbaum is well known for her groundbreaking work in the philosophy of emotion, having published several works examining the nature of the emotions and discussing the desirable (and in some cases undesirable) role of particular emotions in the formulation of public policy and legal judgments. Her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) is a detailed systematic account of the structure, functioning, and value to human flourishing of a wide range of emotions, focusing in particular on compassion and love. It is at the same time a refutation of traditional philosophical views of the emotions as mere animal impulses that may distract from rational thought and impede understanding or as nonrational “supports or props” for ethical judgments, which are properly made by the intellect on the basis of rationally established principles. Drawing on history, developmental psychology, ancient philosophy, and literature, Nussbaum expounded what she called a “neo-Stoic” view of the emotions as complicated moral appraisals, or value judgments, regarding things or persons outside one’s control but of “great importance” for one’s well-being or flourishing. “Emotions,” she held, “involve judgments about important things, judgments in which, appraising an external object as salient for our own well-being, we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control.” Thus, the emotions are not only cognitive in themselves but also essential to ethical thinking, and any normative ethical theory that fails to account for them—that does not encompass a realistic theory of the emotions—will be untenable.

Nussbaum’s many other works included Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000), Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010), Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013), Anger and Forgiveness (2016), The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2019), and Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation (2021).