Martha Nussbaum b. 1947

Martha Nussbaum is an American philosopher whose work spans ancient Greek ethics, political philosophy, the philosophy of emotion, and feminist theory. The Fragility of Goodness recovered an Aristotelian and tragic conception of the good life as exposed to luck, while Upheavals of Thought offered a comprehensive cognitive theory of the emotions. With Amartya Sen she helped develop the capabilities approach to human development, defending in Women and Human Development and Creating Capabilities a list of central human capabilities as the proper measure of social justice.

Martha Craven Nussbaum was born in New York City in May 1947 and grew up in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She took her bachelor's at New York University in 1969 in theatre and classics, her master's and doctorate at Harvard in classical philology — the doctorate in 1975 under Owen and G. E. L. Lloyd — and was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. After teaching at Harvard and at Brown, where she held the David Benedict professorship from 1985, she moved to the University of Chicago in 1995 as Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, with joint appointments in philosophy, the law school, the divinity school, and the classics department.

Her books include The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Love's Knowledge (1990), The Therapy of Desire (1994), Cultivating Humanity (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1999), Women and Human Development (2000), Upheavals of Thought (2001), Frontiers of Justice (2006), Liberty of Conscience (2008), Creating Capabilities (2011), Political Emotions (2013), Anger and Forgiveness (2016), The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2019), and Justice for Animals (2023). She has received the Kyoto Prize (2016), the Berggruen Prize (2018), and the Holberg Prize (2021).

Nussbaum has developed, in dialogue with Amartya Sen, a capabilities approach to social justice that lists the substantive freedoms a decent society must secure for every person; she has read Greek tragedy and Hellenistic ethics as resources for contemporary moral psychology, argued for the constitutive role of the emotions in rationality, and extended her framework to women's rights, religious liberty, animal welfare, and cosmopolitan world order.