Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven, May 6, 1947, in New York City) is one of the most influential and wide-ranging philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. An American philosopher and legal scholar, she is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, with joint appointments in the Law School and Philosophy Department, and associate roles in classics, divinity, political science, and Southern Asian studies. Her work spans ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, ethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, feminism, the philosophy of education, law, and animal rights. She has authored more than two dozen books, hundreds of articles, and has received major international prizes including the Kyoto Prize (2016), Berggruen Prize (2018), Holberg Prize (2021), and Balzan Prize (2022).
Nussbaum grew up in a relatively privileged East Coast family; her father was an attorney and her mother an interior designer who became a homemaker. She attended Wellesley College briefly before leaving to pursue theater in New York, then earned a BA in theater and classics from New York University in 1969. She moved to Harvard University, receiving an MA (around 1971–1972) and a PhD in classical philology in 1975 under G.E.L. Owen, with a dissertation on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium. She taught at Harvard (where she was the first woman Junior Fellow but was denied tenure in classics), Wellesley, Brown University (1980s–1990s), and Oxford before joining Chicago in the mid-1990s. She was married to classicist Alan Nussbaum from 1969 to 1987 and has a daughter, Rachel.
Her early scholarly work focused on ancient philosophy. Her 1978 edition and commentary on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium remains influential. The breakthrough came with The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), a best-selling work that challenged Platonic ideals of self-sufficient rational control. Drawing on Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and Aristotle, Nussbaum argued that a good human life is inherently vulnerable to luck, contingency, and external circumstances. True flourishing (eudaimonia) involves accepting emotional attachments and the risks they bring rather than aspiring to invulnerability. This neo-Aristotelian emphasis on human vulnerability, emotion, and particularity became a lifelong theme.
Nussbaum continued exploring emotions and literature in Love’s Knowledge (1990), arguing that literature offers unique ethical insights unavailable to purely abstract philosophy, and in The Therapy of Desire (1994), which examined Hellenistic ethics (especially Stoicism) as practical therapies for the passions. She developed a sophisticated cognitive theory of emotions: emotions are intelligent appraisals of value, not mere irrational disruptions. This view is elaborated in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) and later works such as Political Emotions (2013), Anger and Forgiveness (2016), and The Monarchy of Fear (2018). She contends that democratic societies need cultivated public emotions—compassion, love of justice—rather than pure rational detachment, while warning against destructive forms of anger and disgust.
Nussbaum’s most widely applied contribution is the capabilities approach, developed in collaboration with economist Amartya Sen beginning in the late 1980s (they co-edited The Quality of Life in 1993). While Sen pioneered the idea as a critique of welfare economics focused solely on resources or utility, Nussbaum gave it a distinctive philosophical and political form. The central question is not “How much does a person have?” but “What is each person actually able to do and to be?” Capabilities are substantive freedoms—real opportunities to achieve valued functionings. Nussbaum proposes a list of ten central human capabilities that a minimally just society must secure at a threshold level for all citizens, grounded in the idea of human dignity: (1) life; (2) bodily health; (3) bodily integrity; (4) senses, imagination, and thought; (5) emotions; (6) practical reason; (7) affiliation; (8) other species; (9) play; and (10) control over one’s environment (political and material).
This approach underpins Women and Human Development (2000), Frontiers of Justice (2006)—which extends justice beyond Rawlsian social-contract theory to include people with disabilities, non-citizens, and animals—and the accessible Creating Capabilities (2011). It has influenced the UN’s Human Development Index, development policy, constitutional law, and human-rights advocacy. Nussbaum emphasizes that the list is open to revision through democratic deliberation and that the goal is capability (opportunity), not forced functioning, preserving liberal respect for individual choice.
Her feminism is liberal and universalist rather than purely postmodern or cultural-relativist. In Sex and Social Justice(1999) and related essays, she defends women’s equal dignity, bodily integrity, and opportunities while criticizing both traditional patriarchal practices and certain radical feminist excesses. She has written on LGBTQ rights, religious liberty (Liberty of Conscience, 2008), and multiculturalism, arguing for a cosmopolitan yet nationally rooted liberalism. In education, Cultivating Humanity (1997) and Not for Profit (2010) champion Socratic self-examination, narrative imagination, and the humanities as essential to democratic citizenship against purely utilitarian models of schooling.
More recently, Nussbaum has extended the capabilities framework to nonhuman animals in Justice for Animals (2023), arguing that many animals possess forms of sentience and striving that ground ethical and political obligations. Throughout her career she has insisted that philosophy should engage public life: she has advised the UN University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, chaired committees of the American Philosophical Association, and written accessible works on contemporary political crises.
Nussbaum’s style combines rigorous classical scholarship, analytic precision, literary sensitivity, and passionate moral urgency. Critics sometimes charge her capabilities list with residual perfectionism or cultural bias, or question the feasibility of her global justice ambitions. Yet her influence is enormous: she has helped reorient discussions of development, justice, emotion, and education around human (and animal) flourishing rather than abstract rights, utility, or GDP. By recovering the Aristotelian insight that we are vulnerable, emotional, embodied creatures whose good lives depend on supporting social and political conditions, Nussbaum has made ancient philosophy urgently relevant to modern liberal democracies and the global struggle for dignity.