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Portrait of Martha Nussbaum

Philosophy

Martha Nussbaum

born 1947 · American

Neo-Aristotelian ethics; the capabilities approach; liberal political philosophy

Martha Nussbaum is an American philosopher and classicist who has written more than thirty books on Greek ethics, the emotions, feminism, animals, education and global justice. With the economist Amartya Sen she developed the capabilities approach, which measures how a society is doing by what its people are actually able to do and to be rather than by GDP. A prolific and combative public intellectual, she has collected most of the major international prizes in the humanities, adding the Library of Congress's Kluge Prize in September 2026.

How to spot them

  • ▸The capabilities approach — a list of central human capabilities, developed with Amartya Sen
  • ▸Trained as a classicist; Greek tragedy and Aristotle underpin almost everything she writes
  • ▸Emotions as intelligent judgements about what matters, not irrational surges
  • ▸Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago
  • ▸Kyoto Prize 2016, Berggruen 2018, Holberg 2021, Balzan 2022, Kluge 2026

Key works

A 1986 study of tragedy and ethics arguing that a flourishing life is necessarily exposed to luck, against the philosophers who tried to make it invulnerable (1986)

The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy — the book that made her name.

A 2000 book on the lives of poor women in India, proposing a list of central capabilities as the true yardstick of a country's progress (2000)

Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach.

A 2001 book of more than 700 pages arguing that emotions are intelligent judgements about things we value and cannot control, opening with the author's grief at her mother's death (2001)

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.

A 2006 book extending the social contract tradition to the three groups it left out: disabled people, foreigners, and non-human animals (2006)

Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership.

A short 2010 alarm call about the squeezing of the humanities and the arts out of schooling in the name of economic growth (2010)

Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

A 2016 book arguing that payback-seeking rage rests on a magical error, and that moving beyond it is a political task as much as a private one (2016)

Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice.

A 2023 book applying her capabilities framework to other creatures, rejecting both the they-are-like-us test and a pure calculus of pain (2023)

Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility.

A 2026 book on opera and political freedom, published shortly before she was named that year's Kluge Prize winner (2026)

The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, April 2026).

Key ideas

  • The capabilities approach: justice is assessed by what people are actually able to do and to be — her list runs from life and bodily health to play, emotions, practical reason and control over one's environment
  • Capabilities, not functionings: the state should secure the real opportunity, and leave people free not to take it
  • Moral luck: a good life is vulnerable to fortune, and a philosophy that makes virtue invulnerable has purchased safety at too high a price
  • Emotions are cognitive: they contain judgements about what matters, which is why they can be right or wrong, and why literature educates them
  • The 'narrative imagination' — reading novels trains the capacity to picture another person's inner life, which democratic citizenship requires
  • Disgust and shame are unreliable guides to law; her writing on 'hiding from humanity' attacks laws that encode revulsion

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in New York City in 1947 and raised in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; she converted to Judaism in 1969 and had a bat mitzvah in her sixties
  • •Took her PhD in classical philology at Harvard in 1975; her early work is on Aristotle's De Motu Animalium
  • •Developed the capabilities approach with the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen at the UN's World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki
  • •Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, with appointments in philosophy, law, classics, divinity and political science
  • •Has written around thirty books, edited over twenty more, and holds honorary degrees from more than seventy institutions
  • •Won the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2016), the Berggruen Prize (2018), the Holberg Prize (2021) and the Balzan Prize (2022)
  • •Named winner of the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity on 22 September 2026
  • •Studied theatre as well as classics at New York University before turning to philosophy; opera and the performing arts run through her later work
  • •Testified as an expert witness in the 1993 Colorado case Romer v. Evans, drawing on Greek attitudes to same-sex relations

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources