1) Her Biography:
The current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago is American philosopher Martha Craven Nussbaum (born May 6, 1947). She holds combined appointments in the philosophy and law departments at the university. Her areas of interest include political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, ethics, and animal rights. She is also particularly interested in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. She is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, holds associate appointments in political science, religion, and classics, and serves on the board of the Human Rights Program. Previously, she was a professor at Brown and Harvard.
The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1998), Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), and From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010) are among the books written by Nussbaum. She received the 2021 Holberg Prize, the 2018 Berggruen Prize, and the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.
2) Main Works:
The Fragility of Goodness:
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy addresses the moral conundrum that people who are profoundly committed to fairness are yet susceptible to outside forces that may seriously impair or even completely negate their capacity for flourishing as human beings. Nussbaum explores philosophical and literary materials to evaluate the extent to which reason may promote independence. She eventually rejects the Platonic idea that human goodness can totally shield against danger, siding with tragic playwrights and Aristotle in seeing vulnerability as a necessary step toward realising the good that is possible for humans.
Cultivating Humanity:
Classical Greek texts are used as a foundation for the defence and reform of the liberal education in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Nussbaum traces the evolution of this idea through the Stoics, Cicero, and finally the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, beginning with the aspiration of the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes to transcend “local origins and group memberships” in favour of becoming “a citizen of the world”. In the perspective of ethical universalism, Nussbaum promotes diversity, advocates scholarly research on race, gender, and human sexuality, and expands on the idea that literature can be used as a tool for ethical imagination.
Sex and Social Justice:
According to Sex and Social Justice, feminism and social justice share similar concerns since sex and sexuality are morally meaningless distinctions that have been forcibly enforced as elements of social hierarchy. Nussbaum suggests functional freedoms, or fundamental human capacities, as a measure of social fairness in response to anti-universalist criticisms.
Hiding from Humanity:
In Hiding from Humanity, Nussbaum expands on her work in moral psychology by examining the justifications for two emotions—shame and disgust—becoming valid bases for legal conclusions. According to Nussbaum, people often project their worries of contamination, which causes them to reject their physical flaws or animality. Because we are unable to transcend the animality of our bodies, this cognitive response is unreasonable in and of itself. In the end, Nussbaum rejects disgust as a trustworthy foundation for judgement after pointing out how projective distaste has incorrectly justified group subjugation (mostly of women, Jews, and homosexuals).
Regarding shame, Nussbaum contends that it has an overly broad scope and attempts to ingrain humiliation in a way that is both intrusive and restrictive of human freedom. In limiting the scope of legal concern to actions that result in a specific and ascribable harm, Nussbaum agrees with John Stuart Mill.
From Disgust to Humanity:
Nussbaum examines the part disgust plays in American law and public discourse in her 2010 book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law. As part of its larger thesis addressing the “politics of disgust”, the book examines issues including anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, antisemitism, and the caste system in India in addition to the constitutional legal problems that gay and lesbian Americans face on a daily basis.
According to Nussbaum, individuals who support legal limitations against gay and lesbian Americans do so out of a “politics of disgust”. These legal limitations include the denial of protection for sexual orientation under anti-discrimination legislation, sodomy laws against consenting adults, and constitutional prohibitions against same-sex marriage. Nussbaum contends that laws that still exist against some behaviours, such as indecent behaviour on private property, indecent behaviour on private beaches, indecent alcohol possession and consumption, and indecent gambling, are complicit in the politics of disgust and should be repealed.
Creating Capabilities:
A novel theory on the capability approach, also known as the human development approach, is presented in the book Creating Capabilities, which was originally published in 2011. Nussbaum has a unique perspective but depends on the beliefs of other prominent proponents of the capability approach, such as Amartya Sen. She suggests selecting a set of skills based on some of John Rawls’ ideas about “central human capabilities”. These ten traits include every aspect of living a life that one values, according to Nussbaum.
3) Main Themes:
Our happiness is largely beyond our control:
Nussbaum disagrees with those who hold that emotion has no place in ethics, such as the Stoics and Immanuel Kant. They argue that ethics is all about what we can control. It concerns things like our thoughts and virtues that cannot be lost or taken from us. For instance, Kant argued in his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals that as long as you performed with “good will”, your acts would “shine like a jewel” even if terrible luck or circumstance meant you failed in everything you tried to do.
Nussbaum, on the other hand, is of the opinion that the fact that our intents, wishes, and hopes can be frustrated by other factors teaches us something very significant about flourishing, which is philosopher-speak for leading a fulfilling life. Specifically, that it is weak and fragile.
When she stated that living an ethical life “is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility”, she may have had Kant’s writing in mind.
In our society, the idea of risk is terrifying. We don’t like to think about it, and we’re not very accurate judges of it. We dislike uncertainty, which contributes to some of that. However, Nussbaum exhorts us to reconsider our perspective on vulnerability and recognise it as a distinctive feature of what it means to be human.
Politics doesn’t work without emotion:
The majority of political philosophers and analysts are cautious about the role that emotion plays in politics. It’s simple to concentrate on emotions like fear, hatred, and envy and how they might taint our political life when we consider the role that emotions play in politics. It makes sense to think that politics would be better if there were less emotions involved. Nussbaum disputes this. She says that removing all passion from politics would be like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Although we must be careful how emotions play a part in politics, they are necessary for our survival.
For starters, it is feelings like love and compassion that transform idealised concepts like truth and justice into authentic, long-lasting ties with specific groups and individuals. Human dignity is an idea that captures what we all share, but effective democracies tend to accept the differences between groups and individuals.
Emotions assist us in striking a good balance between our ties to particular locations, people, and histories and our loyalties to ideas and organisations. Nussbaum’s perspective may aid in achieving a balance between society-wide principles and specific cultural variances for Western democracies that are having to deal with various cultural groupings and ideologies.
Additionally, political regimes have always fostered the emotions that work best for them, according to Nussbaum. For instance, monarchs encourage the development of dependent, childish feelings, and dictatorships frequently profit from a mix of nationalism and terror. These feelings foster cooperation around a shared political identity, albeit in ways that some find objectionable.
According to Nussbaum, this is fertile ground because, if we can identify the emotions that are most conducive to democratic life, we can then develop these feelings and produce better citizens. Ritual, public art investments, and a live sense of cultural and national history, such as the rewriting of America’s founding fathers in Hamilton, are some of the ways she believes we might achieve this.
Rather than absolute wrath for an impossibly high standard of perfection, Nussbaum suggests that we might cultivate the emotions necessary for citizenship by doing whatever “helps us to see the uneven and often unlovely destiny of human beings in the world with humour, tenderness, and delight”.
Educate for citizenship, not profitability:
Nussbaum specifically criticises the educational system in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. She makes a foreboding prognosis. Nations and their educational systems are carelessly losing skills necessary to preserve democracies out of a thirst for national profit. If this pattern continues, the world will soon be creating generations of utilitarian machines rather than fully realised individuals who can think independently, question established customs, and appreciate the importance of another person’s struggles and accomplishments. The future of democracy around the world is at stake.
According to Nussbaum, the education system, from pre-school to tertiary, is essential in producing a new breed of citizens. We require individuals who are imaginative, emotionally bright, and empathetic rather than economically productive and functional. She also criticises the American education system’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, which increased pressure on schools to boost student performance. They were interested in learning if test scores were rising because they thought higher educational results would aid in ending the cycle of poverty. But according to Nussbaum, by concentrating on results, they gave memorization precedence over the philosophical education she feels democracies require.
You can question whether those mired in a cycle of poverty require a philosophical education. It is reasonable to consider the urgent requirement to be economically productive and employable to be more urgent and significant. Although a compromise may need to be reached in this situation, Nussbaum’s work is still significant. It gives us a different perspective on education and enables us to see the assumptions that underlie our existing views on education.
4) Her Legacy:
Since she published several books examining the nature of emotions and discussing the desirable (and occasionally undesirable) role of specific emotions in the formulation of public policy and legal judgments, Nussbaum has gained widespread recognition for her ground-breaking work in the philosophy of emotion. She focuses especially on compassion and love in her 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, which is a detailed systematic analysis of the structure, operation, and importance of a wide spectrum of emotions to human flourishing.
At the same time, it challenges conventional philosophical notions that the emotions are merely animal impulses that can obstruct reasoning and prevent comprehension or serve as irrational “supports or props” for ethical decisions, which should only be made by the intellect based on rationally established principles. Nussbaum outlined a “neo-Stoic” view of emotions as complex moral assessments, or value judgments, about things or people outside of one’s control but of “great importance” for one’s well-being or flourishing, drawing on history, developmental psychology, ancient philosophy, and literature.
According to her, emotions “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”. Therefore, not only are emotions cognitive in and of themselves, but they are also crucial to ethical reasoning, making any normative ethical theory that excludes them or does not incorporate a realistic understanding of the emotions unworkable.