Thinker

Martha Nussbaum

She built a list of ten things every human being needs to be able to do, and measured economies against it.

Philosopher, born 1947

Martha Craven Nussbaum was born in New York City in 1947. She studied theater and classics at New York University, then earned a master’s degree and doctorate in classical philosophy from Harvard. She has taught at Harvard, Brown, and, since 1995, the University of Chicago, where she holds appointments in both the law school and the philosophy department.1

Working alongside Amartya Sen at the World Institute for Development Economics Research in the late 1980s, Nussbaum developed the capabilities approach into a concrete philosophical framework. Where Sen had argued that development should be measured by what people can do, Nussbaum specified what that meant.2

In her 2000 book Women and Human Development, she laid out a list of ten central human capabilities: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses and imagination, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, relation to other species, play, and control over one’s environment (both political and material).3

The list was not a menu of preferences. It was a threshold. Any society that failed to provide these capabilities to its citizens, Nussbaum argued, was failing in a way that GDP and employment statistics could not detect. A country could have low unemployment and high growth while its workers lacked the ability to participate in political decisions, maintain bodily health, or exercise imagination.4

Central human capabilities Nussbaum identified as the minimum threshold below which no society should allow its citizens to fall.

Her framework challenged the assumption that earning a living and living a good life are the same thing. Work, in Nussbaum’s analysis, is valuable only when it supports the full range of human functioning, not when it substitutes for it.5

Nussbaum has published more than twenty books and received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2016. Her capabilities list has been adopted by the United Nations Development Programme and influenced constitutional debates in South Africa and India.6 The list continues to function as a benchmark that exposes the gap between what economic systems measure and what human beings actually need.

Timeline

1993

Nussbaum and Sen co-edited The Quality of Life, deepening the philosophical foundations of the capability approach.

2000

Women and Human Development presented ten central capabilities as a threshold for human dignity.

2011

Creating Capabilities summarized the framework for a broader audience and connected it to policy.

2016

Nussbaum received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.

Endnotes

1 University of Chicago Law School, Martha C. Nussbaum faculty profile.

2 Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

3 Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 78–80.

4 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 70–86.

5 Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

6 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, various years; Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 185–190.