Martha Nussbaum

Quick Facts

• Who: American philosopher of ethics, political philosophy, law, feminism, ancient philosophy, emotions, education, and animal justice
• Born: 1947
• Main role: Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago
• Best known for: the capabilities approach, a theory of justice built around what people are really able to do and be
• Main question: what a decent society must secure for each person so that life can be lived with dignity
• Major works: The Fragility of Goodness, Women and Human Development, Upheavals of Thought, Frontiers of Justice, Creating Capabilities, Justice for Animals

The Big Question

Nussbaum asks: what should we look at when we judge whether a life, a law, or a country is doing well?

Her answer is: look at each person's real opportunities. Not just income. Not just happiness scores. Not just rights printed in a constitution. Ask whether people can actually live, learn, move safely, use their minds, form relationships, take part in politics, choose work, play, and shape a life they have reason to value.

In One Minute

Martha Nussbaum is a leading contemporary philosopher of justice. Her central idea is simple and demanding: society should be judged by what it makes possible for each person.

She calls these real possibilities "capabilities." A capability is a genuine chance to do or be something important. A legal right to vote is not enough if intimidation, distance, disability, or poverty makes voting practically impossible. A formal right to education is not enough if girls are kept home, schools are unsafe, or hunger makes learning impossible.

Nussbaum also argues that emotions are not just irrational surges. Grief, fear, anger, love, compassion, and shame contain judgments about what matters. Because human beings are vulnerable, political life has to care about bodies, relationships, education, fear, humiliation, and hope.

What They Taught

Nussbaum taught that justice should begin from the individual person. A government can boast about economic growth while many people cannot read, travel safely, get medical care, escape violence, own property, or speak in public without fear. For Nussbaum, those failures show that the society has not treated people with dignity.

Her capabilities approach separates three things that are often confused. A resource is something a person has, such as money, a school, a bicycle, or a legal right. A functioning is something a person actually does or is, such as being nourished, being educated, or taking part in an election. A capability is the real freedom to achieve that functioning if one chooses.

That difference matters. Two people may have the same resource but different capabilities. A bicycle gives mobility to one person, but not to someone who cannot ride it or who lives where roads are unsafe. A school gives education only if the student can attend safely and is not blocked by hunger, disability, caste, gender rules, or violence.

Nussbaum's version of the capabilities approach is more specific than a general concern for freedom. She argues that every society should secure a threshold level of central capabilities for each person. "Threshold" means a decent minimum. It does not mean everyone must live the same way. It means no one should be pushed below the level needed for a dignified life.

Her central capabilities include life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses and imagination, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, concern for other species, play, and control over one's political and material environment. The list is meant to be universal but not micromanaging. A society should protect play, but it should not tell everyone what game to play. It should protect religious freedom, but it should not tell everyone what to believe.

Two capabilities carry special weight. Practical reason means the ability to think about what kind of life is worth living and to plan one's life. Affiliation means living with others as an equal, with friendship, respect, political voice, and protection from humiliation. Without these, the other capabilities become thin. Health without choice can become mere management. Education without respect can become training for obedience.

Nussbaum also argues against "adaptive preferences." These are desires shaped by deprivation. If a girl is told all her life that school is not for girls, she may sincerely say she does not want school. Nussbaum thinks that statement matters, but it cannot settle the question of justice. Oppression often teaches people to lower their hopes. A just society should not use lowered hopes as evidence that nothing is wrong.

Her work on emotion fits the same picture. Emotions are intelligent responses to what we judge important. Grief shows that a loved person mattered. Fear shows that something valued seems threatened. Compassion notices another person's serious suffering. Anger can protest a wrong, though Nussbaum later worries that anger often carries a wish for payback that damages justice.

Across her work, Nussbaum presents human beings as active and vulnerable. We reason, choose, love, work, imagine, and argue. But we also need care, food, education, safety, friendship, and political institutions. A good life is not produced by willpower alone. It depends on the world around us.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Capabilities: real opportunities to do or be something. Political participation is a capability only if voting, speaking, organizing, and running for office are genuinely available, not merely legal on paper.
• Functionings: the achieved activities or states that capabilities make possible. Being literate is a functioning. Having a school, books, safety, and time to learn is part of the capability for literacy.
• Dignity: the worth of a person as a thinking, choosing, feeling, embodied being. Dignity is violated when someone is treated as a tool, a burden, or a body to be controlled.
• Flourishing: living well as a whole person. For Nussbaum, flourishing includes bodily life, thought, emotion, relationships, play, political voice, and control over one's environment.
• Threshold justice: every person should have each central capability up to a decent minimum level. A society cannot excuse extreme illiteracy by saying average income rose.
• Practical reason: the ability to ask, "What kind of life should I lead?" Forced marriage, censorship, and religious coercion attack this capability.
• Affiliation: the ability to live with others as a respected equal. Segregation, caste humiliation, sexual harassment, and political exclusion damage affiliation because they tell people they do not fully belong.
• Adaptive preferences: preferences narrowed by fear, poverty, or social training. If workers accept dangerous conditions because they think no better life is possible, their acceptance does not prove the conditions are just.
• Emotions as judgments: emotions carry thoughts about value. Shame can make a person feel small. Compassion can help citizens see suffering as politically urgent.
• Animal flourishing: animals have forms of life proper to their species. An elephant, a crow, an octopus, and a dog need different opportunities, but each can be harmed by conditions that block its own way of living.

Major Works

• The Fragility of Goodness (1986): A study of Greek tragedy, Plato, and Aristotle. Nussbaum argues that good lives remain exposed to luck. Love, friendship, health, politics, and loss can shape a life in ways moral effort cannot fully control.
• Cultivating Humanity (1997): A defense of liberal education. Nussbaum argues that democratic citizens need history, literature, philosophy, and cross-cultural imagination so they can see others as full human beings.
• Women and Human Development (2000): Her major feminist statement of the capabilities approach. It argues that development policy must face gender injustice directly, especially poverty, violence, unequal property rules, and blocked education.
• Upheavals of Thought (2001): A long argument that emotions contain judgments about value. It studies grief, compassion, love, childhood, culture, music, and literature to show why ethics needs a theory of emotion.
• Frontiers of Justice (2006): A challenge to social contract theories that imagine independent, roughly equal citizens making a bargain. Nussbaum extends justice to people with disabilities, foreigners, and nonhuman animals.
• Creating Capabilities (2011): A clear overview of the human development approach. It explains why GDP, the total size of an economy, is a poor measure of progress and why policy should ask what each person can actually do and be.
• Justice for Animals (2023): Her fullest statement of animal justice. It extends the capabilities approach to animals, arguing that each species needs opportunities to flourish in its own way.

Why It Matters

Nussbaum gives a practical test for social criticism: ask what people can actually do and be. A country can have a rising economy and still fail its people if children are malnourished, women are unsafe, disabled people cannot move through public space, or minorities are humiliated into silence.

Her work also gives feminism a clear language for global justice. The question is not only whether women have formal rights. It is whether they have bodily safety, education, property, work, political voice, friendship, play, and the chance to plan their own lives.

She matters in law because she shows how emotions shape public judgment. Disgust can enforce stigma. Shame can be used as punishment. Fear can fuel religious intolerance. Compassion can help people notice suffering that policy normally hides. Democratic politics should educate emotion instead of pretending politics is emotion-free.

Her animal ethics changes the question from "Can animals feel pain?" to "What kind of life should this animal be able to live?" Pain matters, but so do movement, social bonds, play, exploration, habitat, and species-specific forms of agency.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Nussbaum's deepest philosophical ancestor is Aristotle, especially the idea that ethics concerns flourishing and practical reason. She takes that concern in a modern liberal direction. Unlike Aristotle, she argues for equal dignity across gender, class, nationality, disability, and species boundaries.

She developed the capabilities approach in close conversation with Amartya Sen, who helped shift economics and development theory away from income alone and toward freedom. Nussbaum agrees with that shift but gives a more definite political list of central capabilities.

Her work is central to feminist philosophy because it treats gender inequality as damage to real freedom, not just as private cultural difference. It also reshapes liberalism by arguing that liberty needs social conditions: education, health, safety, material support, and protection from domination.

Critics often focus on the list. Some worry that a universal list of capabilities smuggles in Western values. Others ask who gets to decide the list and where the threshold should be. Nussbaum answers that the list is open to public argument and local specification, but that some claims are still universal: rape, hunger, illiteracy, political exclusion, and humiliation are not made acceptable by calling them tradition.

Other critics worry about measurement and policy. Capabilities are harder to count than money. A government can measure school enrollment more easily than real educational freedom. Nussbaum's reply is that easier measurement is not the same as better justice.

Utilitarian opponents reduce social choice to overall welfare or happiness. Nussbaum rejects that because totals can hide the suffering of individuals. A policy can raise average happiness while leaving a minority unsafe, voiceless, or humiliated. Social contract theories are another target when they imagine citizens as independent bargainers and leave out dependency, disability, migration, and animals.

Related Pages

• Aristotle
• Amartya Sen
• Feminist Philosophy
• Liberalism
• Nicomachean Ethics