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Martha Nussbaum (1947–)

Nussbaum’s project bridges moral philosophy, political theory, and classical scholarship around a single question: what does a life worthy of human dignity require? Her answer is the capabilities approach — a list of central human capabilities (life, bodily health, practical reason, affiliation, play, among others) that any just political order must secure for its citizens. Where Sen leaves the capability approach procedurally open — the list should emerge from democratic deliberation — Nussbaum insists on substantive content: some capabilities are non-negotiable, and a political order that fails to provide them falls below the threshold of justice regardless of its other virtues.

Life

Born in New York in 1947. She studied theatre and classics at New York University, then philosophy at Harvard, where she was among the first women admitted to the programme. Her doctoral work on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium launched a career that has moved between classical philosophy, ethics, political theory, law, and development economics.

She taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford before joining the University of Chicago in 1995, where she holds appointments in philosophy, law, and divinity. Her public engagement is extensive — she has written on disability rights, animal rights, LGBTQ rights, religious liberty, and the role of emotions in law and public policy. She is one of the most widely read philosophers of her generation, unusual in combining scholarly depth with public accessibility.

The capabilities approach

Nussbaum’s capabilities approach builds on and departs from Sen’s. Like Sen, she evaluates political arrangements by the capabilities they provide — the real freedoms people have to function in ways that constitute a worthy human life. Unlike Sen, she specifies a list of ten central human capabilities:

  1. Life — being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length
  2. Bodily health — adequate nourishment, shelter, health
  3. Bodily integrity — freedom of movement, security against assault
  4. Senses, imagination, and thought — education, expression, religious practice
  5. Emotions — attachment, love, grief, justified anger
  6. Practical reason — forming a conception of the good and planning one’s life
  7. Affiliation — living with and toward others, having the social bases of self-respect
  8. Other species — living with concern for animals, plants, the natural world
  9. Play — laughing, playing, enjoying recreation
  10. Control over one’s environment — political participation, property rights, equal employment

The list is offered as a minimum threshold — each capability must be secured above a baseline for a life to count as fully human. The capabilities are plural and irreducible: they cannot be traded against each other (more wealth does not compensate for the loss of political participation). They are also architectonic — practical reason and affiliation organise and pervade all the others.

Emotions as judgments

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) argues that emotions are not blind forces opposing reason but cognitive appraisals — judgments about the world that involve beliefs about value. Grief is a judgment that something valuable has been lost. Fear is a judgment that something threatening is near. Anger is a judgment that a wrong has been done. The emotions are intelligent: they track what matters to the person, and they can be more or less accurate, more or less appropriate.

This is a neo-Stoic position (the Stoics treated emotions as judgments — false ones, to be eliminated) with a crucial revision: Nussbaum argues the Stoics were right that emotions are judgments but wrong that they should be eliminated. The vulnerability that emotions reveal — our dependence on things outside our control — is a constitutive feature of a good human life, not a defect to be overcome. The Fragility of Goodness (1986) makes the argument through Greek tragedy and Aristotle: the good life is exposed to fortune, and that exposure is part of what makes it good.

Political liberalism and human development

Nussbaum positions the capabilities approach within the tradition of political liberalism — specifically, as a form of “political, not metaphysical” theory (following Rawls’s formulation). The list of capabilities is offered not as a comprehensive doctrine of the good life but as a political conception that citizens with different comprehensive views can endorse for their own reasons. The threshold is a floor, not a ceiling — above it, citizens are free to pursue their own conceptions of the good.

Her work with the United Nations Development Programme (the Human Development Reports, the Human Development Index) translates the philosophical framework into policy. Development is measured not by GDP but by what people are able to do and be — education, health, political participation, gender equality. The capabilities approach provides the normative foundation for the human development paradigm.

Where Nussbaum stops

The fixed list is the source of both the approach’s political force and its philosophical vulnerability. Nussbaum argues the list is universal — it applies across cultures, not just to Western liberal democracies — and that it can be endorsed from within different religious and philosophical traditions. Critics have challenged both claims: the list reflects specifically Western, liberal, and Aristotelian commitments (practical reason and affiliation as architectonic, individual capabilities as the unit of analysis), and the claim to cross-cultural endorsement may understate the depth of disagreement about what a worthy life requires. Sen’s procedural alternative avoids this problem at the cost of political determinacy; Nussbaum accepts the cost of substantive commitment in exchange for a framework that can ground actual constitutional provisions.

The relationship between individual capabilities and collective life is a second boundary. The list is oriented to the individual — what each person can do and be. Affiliation is on the list, but it is framed as an individual capability (being able to live with others, having the social bases of self-respect), not as a feature of the community as such. How communities constitute capabilities, how collective goods that are not reducible to individual capabilities figure in justice, and how the capability of a community relates to the capabilities of its members are questions the framework identifies but does not fully develop.

Key works

See also: Sen · Rawls · Aristotle · MacIntyre