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Martha Nussbaum (; Craven; born May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department.
Nussbaum's work has focused on Greek philosophy and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights. She also holds associate appointments in classics, divinity, and political science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown University. "Martha Nussbaum" , University of Chicago, accessed June 5, 2012.
She has written more than two dozen books, including The Fragility of Goodness (1986). She received the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2018 Berggruen Prize, and the 2021 Holberg Prize. In recent years, she has also been considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
After studying at Wellesley College for two years, she dropped out to pursue theatre in New York. She studied theatre and classics at New York University, getting a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969, and gradually moved to philosophy while at Harvard University, where she received a Master of Arts degree in 1972 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1975, studying under G. E. L. Owen.
Nussbaum's other major area of philosophical work is the emotions. She defended a neo-stoicism account of emotions that holds that they are appraisals that ascribe to things and persons, outside the agent's own control, great significance for the person's own flourishing. On this basis, she has proposed analyses of grief, compassion, and love,Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. and, in a later book, of disgust and shame.Nussbaum, Martha C. Hiding from Humanity: Shame, Disgust, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Nussbaum has engaged in debates with other intellectuals, in her academic writings as well as in the pages of semi-popular magazines and book reviews and, in one instance, when testifying as an expert witness in court. She testified in the Colorado bench trial for Romer v. Evans, arguing against the claim that the history of philosophy provides the state with a "compelling interest" in favor of a law that sought to overturn local anti-discrimination laws. A portion of this testimony, dealing with the potential meanings of the term tolmêma in Plato's work, was the subject of controversy, and was called misleading and even perjury by critics. The Stand by Daniel Mendelsohn, from Lingua Franca September 1996. Who Needs Philosophy?: A profile of Martha Nussbaum by Robert Boynton from The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1999. , 2016]] She responded to these charges in a lengthy article called "Platonic Love and Colorado Law".Martha C. Nussbaum. "Platonic Love and Colorado Law: The Relevance of Ancient Greek Norms to Modern Sexual Controversies" , Virginia Law Review, Vol. 80, No. 7 (Oct. 1994), pp. 1515–1651. Nussbaum used multiple references from Plato's Symposium and his interactions with Socrates as evidence for her argument. The debate continued with a reply by one of her sternest critics, Robert P. George.George, Robert P. '"Shameless Acts" Revisited: Some Questions for Martha Nussbaum', Academic Questions 9 (Winter 1995–96), 24–42. Nussbaum has criticized Noam Chomsky as being among the leftist intellectuals who hold the belief that "one should not criticize one's friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness". She suggests that one can "trace this line to an old Marxist contempt for bourgeois ethics, but it is loathsome whatever its provenance". Among her academic colleagues whose books she has reviewed critically are Allan Bloom,Martha C. Nussbaum, Undemocratic Vistas , New York Review of Books, Volume 34, Number 17; November 5, 1987. Harvey Mansfield,Martha C. Nussbaum, Man Overboard , New Republic, June 22, 2006. and Judith Butler.Martha Nussbaum, The Professor of Parody, The New Republic, February 22, 1999; Copy Other academic debates have been with figures such as John Rawls, Richard Posner, and Susan Moller Okin. What Makes Martha Nussbaum Run? (2001, Includes a timeline of her career, books and related controversies to that time.) Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism a 1994 essay The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, audio and video recording from the World Beyond the Headline Series David Gordon, Cultivating Humanity, Martha Nussbaum and What Tower? What Babel? , Mises Review, Winter 1997 In January 2019, Nussbaum announced that she would be using a portion of her Berggruen Prize winnings to fund a series of roundtable discussions on controversial issues at the University of Chicago Law School. These discussions will be known as the Martha C. Nussbaum Student Roundtables.
Nussbaum asserts that all humans (and non-human animals) have a basic right to dignity. To provide human dignity, she states that governments must provide "at least a threshold level" of the following capabilities: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought, emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one's environment, including political and material environments.
Nussbaum dated and lived with Cass Sunstein for more than a decade. They had been engaged to be married. She had previously had a romantic relationship with Amartya Sen.
Her interpretation of Plato's Symposium in particular drew considerable attention. Under Nussbaum's consciousness of vulnerability, the re-entrance of Alcibiades at the end of the dialogue undermines Diotima's account of the ladder of love in its ascent to the non-physical realm of the forms. Alcibiades's presence deflects attention back to physical beauty, sexual passions, and bodily limitations, hence highlighting human fragility.
Fragility brought attention to Nussbaum throughout the humanities. It garnered wide praise in academic reviews,Barnes, Hazel E. Comparative Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 76–77Woodruff, Paul B. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Sep. 1989), pp. 205–210 and even drew acclaim in the popular media.Bernard Knox. "The Theater of Ethics". The New York Review of Books Camille Paglia credited Fragility with matching "the highest academic standards" of the twentieth century,Paglia, Camille. Sex, Art, & American Culture. NY: Vintage Books, 1991. pp. 206 and The Times Higher Education called it "a supremely scholarly work".Hodges, Lucy. And you may ask yourself... Nussbaum's reputation extended her influence beyond print and into television programs like PBS's Bill Moyers.
At the same time, Nussbaum also censured certain scholarly trends. She excoriated deconstructionist Jacques Derrida saying "on truth he simply not worth studying for someone who has been studying Quine and Hilary Putnam and Davidson". She cites Zhang Longxi, who labels Derrida's analysis of Chinese culture "pernicious" and without "evidence of serious study". More broadly, Nussbaum criticized Michel Foucault for his "historical incompleteness and lack of conceptual clarity", but nevertheless singled him out for providing "the only truly important work to have entered philosophy under the banner of 'postmodernism.' Nussbaum is even more critical of figures like Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will for what she considers their "shaky" knowledge of non-Western cultures and inaccurate caricatures of today's humanities departments.
The New York Times praised Cultivating Humanity as "a passionate, closely argued defense of multiculturalism" and hailed it as "a formidable, perhaps definitive defense of diversity on American campuses".Shapiro, James. Beyond the Culture Wars. The New York Times Nussbaum received the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for Cultivating Humanity.
Nussbaum discusses at length the feminist critiques of liberalism itself, including the charge advanced by Alison Jaggar that liberalism demands ethical egoism. Nussbaum notes that liberalism emphasizes respect for others as individuals, and further argues that Jaggar has elided the distinction between individualism and self-sufficiency. Nussbaum accepts Catharine MacKinnon's critique of abstract liberalism, assimilating the salience of history and context of group hierarchy and subordination, but concludes that this appeal is rooted in liberalism rather than a critique of it.Nussbaum, Martha C. Sex & Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 55–80.
Nussbaum condemns the practice of female genital mutilation, citing deprivation of normative human functioning in its risks to health, impact on sexual functioning, violations of dignity, and conditions of non-autonomy. Emphasizing that female genital mutilation is carried out by brute force, its irreversibility, its non-consensual nature, and its links to customs of Patriarchy, Nussbaum urges feminists to confront female genital mutilation as an issue of injustice.Nussbaum, Martha C. Sex & Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 118–130.
Nussbaum also refines the concept of "objectification", as originally advanced by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Nussbaum defines the idea of treating as an object with seven qualities: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Her characterization of pornography as a tool of objectification puts Nussbaum at odds with sex-positive feminism. At the same time, Nussbaum argues in support of the legalization of prostitution, a position she reiterated in a 2008 essay following the Spitzer scandal, writing: "The idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque."Martha Nussbaum, " Trading on America's puritanical streak ", The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 14, 2008
Sex and Social Justice was highly praised by critics in the press. Salon declared: "She shows brilliantly how sex is used to deny some people—i.e., women and gay men—social justice." The New York Times praised the work as "elegantly written and carefully argued". Kathryn Trevenen praised Nussbaum's effort to shift feminist concerns toward interconnected transnational efforts, and for explicating a set of universal guidelines to structure an agenda of social justice.Trevenen, Kathryn. "Global Feminism and the 'Problem' of Culture". Theory & Event 5.1 (2001). Patrick Hopkins singled out for praise Nussbaum's "masterful" chapter on sexual objectification.Hopkins, Patrick D. "Sex and Social Justice". Hypatia 17.2 (2002): 171–173. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin faulted Nussbaum for "consistent over-intellectualization of emotion, which has the inevitable consequence of mistaking suffering for cruelty".Dworkin, Andrea R. "Rape is not just another word for suffering". Times Higher Education. August 4, 2000.
Nussbaum's work was received with wide praise. The Boston Globe called her argument "characteristically lucid" and hailed her as "America's most prominent philosopher of public life".Wilson, John. You Stink therefore I am. The Boston Globe Her reviews in national newspapers and magazines garnered unanimous praise. In academic circles, Stefanie A. Lindquist of Vanderbilt University lauded Nussbaum's analysis as a "remarkably wide ranging and nuanced treatise on the interplay between emotions and law".
A prominent exception was Roger Kimball's review published in The New Criterion,Kimball, Roger. The New Criterion. Does Shame have a Future? in which he accused Nussbaum of "fabricating" the renewed prevalence of shame and disgust in public discussions and says she intends to "undermine the inherited moral wisdom of millennia". He rebukes her for "contempt for the opinions of ordinary people" and ultimately accuses Nussbaum herself of "hiding from humanity".
Nussbaum has recently drawn on and extended her work on disgust to produce a new analysis of the legal issues regarding sexual orientation and same-sex conduct. Her book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, as part of their "Inalienable Rights" series, edited by Geoffrey Stone.
Nussbaum posits that the fundamental motivation of those advocating legal restrictions against gay and lesbian Americans is a "politics of disgust". These legal restrictions include blocking sexual orientation being protected under anti-discrimination laws (see Romer v. Evans), sodomy laws against consenting adults (see Lawrence v. Texas), constitutional bans against same-sex marriage (see California Proposition 8 (2008)). Nussbaum also argues that legal bans on conducts, such as nude dancing in private clubs, nudity on private beaches, the possession and consumption of alcohol in seclusion, gambling in seclusion or in a private club, which remain on the books, partake of the politics of disgust and should be overturned.Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity, 154–155.
She identifies the "politics of disgust" closely with Lord Devlin and his famous opposition to the Wolfenden report, which recommended decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts, on the basis that those things would "disgust the average man". To Devlin, the mere fact some people or act may produce popular emotional reactions of disgust provides an appropriate guide for legislating. She also identifies the 'wisdom of repugnance' as advocated by Leon Kass as another "politics of disgust" school of thought as it claims that disgust "in crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it".
Nussbaum goes on to explicitly oppose the concept of a disgust-based morality as an appropriate guide for legislating. Nussbaum notes that popular disgust has been used throughout history as a justification for persecution. Drawing upon her earlier work on the relationship between disgust and shame, Nussbaum notes that at various times, racism, antisemitism, and sexism, have all been driven by popular revulsion.
In place of this "politics of disgust", Nussbaum argues for the harm principle from John Stuart Mill as the proper basis for limiting individual liberties. Nussbaum argues the harm principle, which supports the legal ideas of consent, the age of majority, and privacy, protects citizens while the "politics of disgust" is merely an unreliable emotional reaction with no inherent wisdom. Furthermore, Nussbaum argues this "politics of disgust" has denied and continues to deny citizens humanity and equality before the law on no rational grounds and causes palpable social harms to the groups affected.
From Disgust to Humanity earned acclaim from liberal American publications, and prompted interviews in The New York Times and other magazines. It was criticized by a conservative magazine, The American Spectator.
Nussbaum's book combines ideas from the Capability approach, development economics, and distributive justice to substantiate a qualitative theory on capabilities. She criticizes existing economic indicators like GDP as failing to fully account for quality of life and assurance of basic needs, instead rewarding countries with large growth distributed highly unequally across the population. The book also aims to serve as an introduction to the Capability approach more generally; it is accessible to students and newcomers to the material because of the current lack of general knowledge about this approach. Finally, Nussbaum compares her approach with other popular approaches to human development and economic welfare, including Utilitarianism, Rawlsian Justice, and Welfarism in order to argue why the Capability approach should be prioritized by development economics policymakers.
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