I first encountered Martha C Nussbaum in 1987. She was a guest on Bryan Magee’s BBC television series The Great Philosophers. In each programme, Magee would interview a leading contemporary philosopher about the ideas of a great philosopher of the past; Nussbaum was brought in to discuss Aristotle.
Still in her 30s when the programme was recorded, she was the youngest contributor to The Great Philosophers. She was also the only woman guest over the whole series (there were 15 episodes), which in itself made her something of a trailblazer. There were far fewer women philosophers then than there are now, and Nussbaum was one of the first to achieve a prominent public profile. But her contribution was notable not only because she was a young woman in a field of middle-aged men. Her exposition was sharp, smart and witty; she made ideas that were more than 2,000 years old spring to life. And she has continued in that vein over a long and productive career.
Nussbaum’s style is lucid and elegant, and she can be read for pure pleasure (which is certainly not something you could say of all academic philosophers). She has made important contributions in ethics, political philosophy, international development, feminist philosophy, animal rights, philosophy of emotion, and global justice. From her remarkably impressive body of work (at least 28 books and more than 500 papers), I have chosen here to concentrate on three key areas: the capabilities approach, her theory of emotions and, connected with that, her work on anger. Her treatment of each of these topics offers excellent evidence of how Nussbaum’s work challenges settled positions.
When stated baldly, the capabilities approach (CA) might seem simple – plain common sense. In fact, it is a subtle and far-reaching theory that changes the way we think about human needs. But let me start by stating it baldly: the CA says that it is the task of governments (or other bodies that make policy and distribute resources) to provide all citizens equally with the capabilities needed to lead a flourishing life. (The goal of flourishing, of course, reflects the influence of Aristotle, who held that it’s the primary goal of all organisms to flourish according to their nature.)
The CA could be described as the outcome of three propositions:
- All human beings have the right to flourish.
- Human flourishing can be broadly defined in universal terms.
- It is the task of governments to provide citizens with capabilities to flourish.
Let’s specify what the CA is not. It is not a call for governments to give citizens what they say they need. For citizens may not know what they need. The CA arose in part as a response to the problem of adaptive preferences. A well-known example is the sour grapes phenomenon. The fox claims he didn’t want the grapes because they were green and unripe; but only because he couldn’t reach them. In the same way, people who lead deprived or impoverished lives may suffer from deformation of their preferences.
It’s therefore up to governments (or other appropriate bodies) to put capabilities in place. (Nussbaum has tended to focus on the need to do this for women in particular – not because women are more deserving but because, in many parts of the world, for women the capabilities are in shorter supply.) But what are capabilities? I give Nussbaum’s full list below, but to put the point in general terms, a capability is the opportunity (a genuine, realisable opportunity, not just a formal permission in a published document) to achieve a function required for wellbeing – such as the capability to be adequately nourished, or to be educated, or to choose one’s own partner, or follow the religion of one’s choice.
Nussbaum wants to establish the capabilities as rights to which citizens, in all nations, are entitled
Once the capabilities are known, preferences are likely to change in response. After all, you are more likely to prefer a good you know you can get than one that is out of reach. But in avoiding the Scylla of taking citizens’ preferences at face value, the CA does not veer towards the Charybdis of making their choices for them. This cannot be over-emphasised: the CA does not aim to provide functions that people are required to perform, or goods that they are required to accept. It aims to provide capabilities of which each individual may avail themselves to the extent they see fit. It’s a non-paternalist approach that respects individual autonomy. As Nussbaum puts it in Women and Human Development (2000):
[F]or political purposes it is appropriate that we shoot for capabilities, and those alone. Citizens must be left free to determine their own course after that. The person with plenty of food may always choose to fast, but there is a great difference between fasting and starving, and it is this difference that I wish to capture.
Nussbaum developed the CA in conjunction with the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. She and Sen had a romantic relationship for several years, and worked on the theory during this period. This is not the only time Nussbaum’s partner has also been her intellectual collaborator; later, when she was in a relationship with Cass Sunstein, they co-edited and both contributed essays to the book Animal Rights (2004). It was, in fact, Sen who originally pioneered the CA. In his book Commodities and Capabilities (1985), he argued that neither opulence nor utility were suitable ways of measuring outcomes. Instead, governments should aim to provide citizens with opportunities to pursue the kind of life they choose.
Unlike Sen, who is wary of being ‘canonical’ about capabilities, Nussbaum fleshes out the detail of the CA by listing 10 specific ones. They are (my parenthetical explanations are summaries of Nussbaum’s):
- Life (being able to live a normal human lifespan).
- Bodily health (being able to have good health, including reproductive health, and adequate nourishment and shelter).
- Bodily integrity (being able to move freely without risk of assault; making one’s own sexual and reproductive choices).
- Senses, imagination and thought (being able to use the senses, imagination and thought in a ‘truly human’ way, cultivated by education, and having opportunities to use these powers).
- Emotions (being able to have healthy attachments to things and people, to love, to grieve and to feel justified anger).
- Practical reason (forming one’s own conception of the good, including liberty of conscience).
- Affiliation (A: capability for social interaction, friendship and freedom of assembly; and B: protection against discrimination on grounds of sex, race, caste etc).
- Other species (being able to live in relation to the world of nature).
- Play (being able to enjoy recreational activities).
- Control over one’s environment (A: political – being able to make political choices, including freedom of association and of speech; B: material – being able to hold property).
The list is intended to be universal (the capabilities are appropriate for all human beings) and provisional (in principle, the list could always be amended and updated, perhaps as technology changes our lives, or as we discover more about human needs and psychology).
There are other differences between Sen’s and Nussbaum’s versions of the CA. For Sen, the primary use of the CA is to offer a standard of comparison of quality of life between nations. Nussbaum agrees: but she wants to go further and establish the capabilities as rights to which citizens, in all nations, are entitled. Is the CA, then, basically the same as a human rights approach? Certainly, it is compatible with a human rights approach. One might say it is a form of human rights approach. What distinguishes the CA, though, is that it aims not just to be a formal statement of rights and freedoms, but to provide real opportunities to do or be what one desires. It is also more specific about the actual activities that each person should have the capability to pursue than the abstract claims of human rights declarations.
Another difference between Sen and Nussbaum is that for Nussbaum the notion of reaching a threshold is more important than full capability. The pressing goal is to get each person to a level where they can access the capabilities to at least some extent. For now, there will continue to be inequalities between nation-states. Let’s say that women in the United States have 100 per cent of all the capabilities. (They almost certainly haven’t, but let’s just say.) And let’s say that in Afghanistan they have 0 per cent of the capabilities. (Again, I exaggerate.) For Nussbaum, the task would be to get that Afghan figure moving up towards 10 or 20 per cent – a threshold where women can begin to exercise some of the capabilities. Equality of capabilities with the US would be a far longer-term goal. Sen does not use the notion of a threshold. However, as Nussbaum has pointed out, he also has not explicitly committed to the goal of complete capability equality, so, Nussbaum said, ‘to the extent that his proposal is open-ended on this point, he and I may be in substantial agreement.’
One final difference lies in their presentation of the CA. Like Nussbaum, Sen writes with clarity, but Nussbaum has a warmer, more human style, and in Women and Human Development she includes case studies describing the lives of actual individuals, whom she met while working with development projects in India. This makes the ideas much more accessible, and Nussbaum may be fairly said to have popularised the capabilities approach as well as developing it.
Nussbaum’s universalism has its critics. Mary Beard, in a negative review of Women and Human Development in the Times Literary Supplement, claimed that Nusbaum’s capabilities are in fact based on culturally specific values: they are ‘a set of criteria impossible to frame in anything other than a Western language – and probably in anything other than American English.’
Nussbaum, however, anticipated such criticism and pre-emptively answered it. She made three points. First, the CA does not rule out people choosing local or traditional norms if that’s what they want. Second, she discussed the problem of adaptive preferences: it may well be that some people, especially women, appear to be satisfied with traditional norms, but only because they fear reprisals if they challenge them. If new alternatives become available, attitudes can quickly change. And thirdly, Nussbaum points out that cultures are neither unchanging nor monolithic. It simply is not true that only Westerners value life, or bodily integrity, or liberty of conscience. There are protests against unfair treatment throughout India just as there are in the US.
In short, I think Nussbaum must be absolved of the charge of being too Western in her values, or too paternalist, or too perfectionist. Because her capabilities are at a high level of generality, and because it is optional whether or to what degree one translates them into functioning, and lastly because they seem (to me, at any rate) to form a highly plausible account of basic goods that are widely valued, I contend that their universality holds up. These are worthwhile goals to aim for.
It’s often assumed that the emotions and the intellect are two separate though interacting systems. Sometimes they are thought to be opposed, with emotions clouding rational judgments. Another view is that emotions tell us what we want, and the intellect tells us how to get it: ‘Reason is and ought only to be the Slave of the Passions,’ as David Hume put it in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Nussbaum, however, rejects the dichotomy on which both those views are based. For her, the emotions are inseparable from ethical judgments. Her first book on the subject, Upheavals of Thought (2001), builds and defends a theory in which the emotions play a vital role in moral and political philosophy.
The title is taken from Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past (1913) – one of many instances where Nussbaum’s knowledge and love of literature informs her philosophy (it is worth noting that her first degree, from New York University, was in Classics). In a passage used by Nussbaum as an epigraph, Proust writes that M de Charlus falling in love with Charlie Morel produces ‘real geological upheavals of thought’, causing a sudden mountain landscape of ‘Rage, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hate, Suffering, Pride, Astonishment, and Love.’ In the Proustian view, then, as in Nussbaum’s, emotions are not separate from thought but are a form of thought, which projects outwards to objects in the world. Nussbaum states in her introduction that emotions are ‘intelligent responses to the perception of value’. And this has consequences for ethics:
Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.
Emotions such as anger and hatred can be changed through changes in thought
Emotions therefore have an essential cognitive element. But, Nussbaum says, we need a broad definition of ‘cognitive’ that does not entail that the emotion be formulated as a linguistic proposition by the entity experiencing it. That would rule out babies and nonhuman animals as having emotions, when plainly they do have them. To have an emotion, in Nussbaum’s theory, entails ‘thought of an object combined with thought of the object’s salience or importance’, even where this isn’t or cannot be put into words by the thinker.
Some might perhaps find it hard to accept that emotions have a cognitive component. It might seem as if an emotion as primal as, say, grief has nothing to do with cognition. After all, a cow separated from her calf feels grief; are we to ascribe a cognitive component to her moos of distress? Nussbaum would simply answer yes. The cow cannot of course express her grief in the form of a proposition. Nevertheless, her grief arises from knowledge. She knows her calf is important to her, she knows her calf is missing, and she knows this is outside her control (that is why she grieves).
The traditional split between reason and emotion has no place in Nussbaum’s account. She emphasises, too, that there is a continuum, not a cleavage, between the emotions of humans and nonhuman animals, and between childhood emotions and adult emotions. But the fact that emotions have deep roots does not mean we are at their mercy: ‘cognitive views of emotion entail that emotions can be modified by a change in the way one evaluates objects.’ Instead of the Kantian story of a rational will forcibly suppressing unruly passions, ‘we can imagine reason extending all the way down into the personality, enlightening it through and through.’ So emotions such as anger and hatred can be changed through changes in thought – which has consequences for both morality and politics.
Nussbaum’s thought is dynamic – constantly developing throughout her career. Nowhere is this better evinced than in her views on the emotion of anger. In her first version of the 10 capabilities above, the capability of experiencing emotions included as an example justified anger. This reflects the conventional view that anger is a response to unjust treatment and fits in well with Nussbaum’s cognitive account. But later she began to question the conventional view. In her book Anger and Forgiveness (2016), she develops an extraordinarily subtle psychological account of anger, and concludes that it is ‘normatively problematic’. In fact, she wrote an essay for Aeon, ‘Beyond Anger’ (2016), outlining with her customary clarity just why anger is an unreliable guide to action in both private and public realms.
Both that essay and Anger and Forgiveness draw on the Stoic philosopher Seneca’s arguments against anger in his De Ira (On Anger). Nussbaum recognises that Seneca has many good arguments against anger – it is often the result of oversensitivity and self-importance, it puts too much value on rank and status, it is the sign of a weak character, it is not efficacious in deterring bad behaviour in others, and so on. But Nussbaum does not follow Seneca’s Stoic indifference all the way. Some things do matter; some of the things we get angry about do need to be remedied, and we can take steps in that direction. But anger itself should not be involved in the remedy.
Anger, Nussbaum argues (following Aristotle), is Janus-faced: it looks backwards to the injury received, and it looks forwards to retaliation, or the Road of Payback as Nussbaum terms it. The problem is that payback either involves false or incoherent ideas, or it commits us to an unwise, immoral and ultimately unhelpful worldview.
Unlike the road of payback, the road of status does take me where I want to go
Suppose, in the first place, one takes the view that payback – making the offender suffer – somehow annuls the original offence. On this reading, payback leads to justice. It wipes the slate clean. The trouble is that such a reading is rooted in a fundamental error. Causing the offender to suffer does not really wipe the slate clean. The original injury is not thereby removed. Executing a murderer does not resurrect their victim. Torturing a torturer does not remove the pain and scars of those who suffered at their hands. The idea that we can somehow reach into the past via retribution and make it as though the original offence never occurred is a false and incoherent belief.
So that’s one justification for payback eliminated. But Nussbaum considers another: the road of status. Suppose we think of injury in terms of personal status (as indeed many people do). Somebody does me an injury. I feel humiliated, downgraded. I have lost status. But if I can retaliate, injuring my aggressor as severely as or, better, more severely than they injured me, now their status is lowered and mine is back up where it was, or even a little higher. As Nussbaum emphasises, this does actually work. Unlike the road of payback, the road of status does take me where I want to go.
But am I right to want to go there? Nussbaum sees this as morally problematic. A person who sees her relationship to others in terms of competitive prestige has a ‘normative focus [that] is self-centred and objectionably narrow’, as she put it in her Aeon essay. We will not achieve justice nor ameliorate society by thinking in this way. Hence Nussbaum’s position that anger – where this is construed as involving a thirst for retribution – is normatively problematic. And that is why more recent versions of her capabilities list leave out righteous anger.
There is, however, a third way: what Nussbaum terms ‘the Transition’. Like the roads of payback and status, this is also forward-looking, but in a more constructive sense. Transition-Anger takes the form of thinking ‘How outrageous! Something must be done about this!’ It pivots swiftly from the painful feeling of anger to practical planning to make things better. It is welfarist. Securing improved welfare may indeed happen to involve punishment for reasons of deterrence, or to incapacitate dangerous people and keep the public safe, or to reform offenders – but the goal is not to make offenders suffer, nor should harsher suffering be inflicted than is necessary to achieve deterrence, incapacitation or rehabilitation. Nussbaum allows that the emotion of anger can have some limited utility – as a signal that something is wrong, as motivation to put things right, and as a deterrent to warn others not to overstep the mark. But ‘beneficent forward-looking systems of justice have to a great extent made this emotion unnecessary, and we are free to attend to its irrationality and destructiveness.’
Moreover, Nussbaum argues that ‘noble anger’ is an unreliable guide to action. And here she hints at an important psychological truth, in my view insufficiently remarked upon: that feeling angry usually makes one feel righteous. (Indeed, people who have an uneasy sense that they might be in the wrong often get angry – at times, it seems, on purpose – and then their doubts disappear.) It is therefore not a good idea to pursue justice under the influence of anger, because the measures one takes – however unwise, disproportionate or violent – will feel justified.
Perhaps the most important reason for reading Nussbaum is that her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex and sometimes painful stuff of real life. This is certainly true of her latest book, Justice for Animals (2023), written in honour of her daughter Rachel Nussbaum Wichert, who worked for Friends of Animals and who died in 2019; and it is true of her forthcoming book. Nussbaum and her daughter had co-authored papers on animal rights; while in hospital, Rachel had read draft chapters of the new book, which applies the CA to the lives of animals. Nussbaum is currently working on a book that will weave together reflections of philosophers on Greek tragedy with the real-life tragedy of her daughter’s death. As in much of her work, the personal, emotional and philosophical strands are intertwined, and her writing is all the more powerful for that.
