Philogossip: i cazzi della Nussbaum

Dé, biografia all'ameri'ana...

Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947) is a leading American philosopher, with a particular interest in ancient philosophy, law and ethics. She was born in New York, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, a homemaker. She studied theatre and classics at New York University (NYU) (BA 1969), gradually moving to philosophy while at Harvard (MA 1972; PhD 1975). This period also saw her marriage to Alan Nussbaum (divorced in 1987), conversion to Judaism, and the birth of her daughter Rachel.

During the 1980s Nussbaum began a collaboration with economist Amartya Sen (with whom she was also romantically involved) on issues of development and ethics. With Sen, she promoted the "capability approach" to development, which views capabilities ("substantial freedoms", such as the ability to live to old age, engage in economic transactions, or participate in political activities) as the constitutive parts of development, and poverty as capability-deprivation. This contrasts with a common view that sees development purely in terms of GNP growth, and poverty purely as income-deprivation. It is also universalist, and therefore contrasts with relativist approaches to development. Much of the work is presented from an Aristotelian perspective.

Nussbaum has used the capability approach to reinterpret John Rawls's Theory of Justice. For her, Rawls's Liberty Principle is only meaningful if viewed in terms of substantial freedoms, i.e. real opportunities based on personal and social circumstance. Likewise, inequality in the Difference Principle has to be clarified in terms of capabilities.



Since 1995, Nussbaum has been Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago law faculty. Her current partner is Cass R. Sunstein, a constitutional scholar, also at Chicago.