Martha Nussbaum asks one blunt question of every society: what can people do?
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum helped build the capabilities approach, which judges a society by what each person is actually able to do and to be. Her list runs from life and bodily health to play, imagination and control over one's surroundings, and she extends dignity to animals too.
Born Martha Craven in New York City in 1947, she grew up in what she called a sterile East Coast elite obsessed with money and status, and later described her public-minded philosophy as a rejection of that upbringing. She left Wellesley to try theatre in New York, took a degree in theatre and classics at New York University in 1969, and drifted into philosophy at Harvard, earning her doctorate in 1975 under G. E. L. Owen.
Harvard's classics department denied her tenure in 1982, so she moved to Brown, and in 1995 to the University of Chicago, where she holds a joint post in law and philosophy. By then The Fragility of Goodness of 1986 had made her famous across the humanities. It argues that people devoted to justice remain exposed to luck, and sides with the Greek tragedians and Aristotle against Plato in treating vulnerability as part of a good human life. Her reading of the Symposium, where the drunken Alcibiades drags attention back to bodies and desire, drew particular notice.
Working alongside Amartya Sen, she developed the capabilities idea into a demanding standard: governments owe everyone at least a threshold of ten capabilities, including practical reason, affiliation, emotions and a relationship with other species. Much of this work concerns women's unequal freedoms, and she has argued that liberalism at its best requires rethinking the family itself. She also writes on the emotions, defending a neo-Stoic view that they are judgments about things beyond our control that matter to our flourishing, and has analysed grief, compassion, disgust and shame.
She is a sharp critic, dismissing Jacques Derrida on truth and faulting Allan Bloom for caricaturing humanities departments. Cultivating Humanity, her defence of liberal education grounded in Diogenes' ideal of the citizen of the world, won the 2002 Grawemeyer Award. The Kyoto, Berggruen and Holberg prizes followed in 2016, 2018 and 2021.
Source: Martha Nussbaum
