American philosopher, classicist, and the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago — and one of the most prolific and consequential American moral and political philosophers of the past forty years. Trained in classical philology before turning to philosophy, Nussbaum has built a body of work that holds together strands the modern academic profession had largely separated: ancient Greek ethics (especially Aristotle and the Stoics), contemporary liberal political philosophy, feminist theory, the philosophy of literature and the emotions, and global development practice.
Her central constructive project is the capabilities approach, developed in collaboration with Amartya Sen and given its fullest theoretical articulation in her own work — Women and Human Development (2000), Frontiers of Justice (2006), Creating Capabilities (2011). Where Sen kept the list of capabilities open and context-dependent, Nussbaum proposed a specific list of ten central capabilities (life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; control over one's environment) that any decent society must secure for all its members above a threshold. The approach is explicitly indebted to Aristotle on human flourishing, to Mill's On Liberty and The Subjection of Women on the conditions of free human development, and to a Kantian insistence on the inviolable dignity of each person.
Her feminism (Sex and Social Justice (1999), Hiding from Humanity (2004), From Disgust to Humanity (2010)) is in the explicitly Millian line — universalist about the conditions of human flourishing, comparative across cultures, willing to make evaluative claims about practices that constrain women's capabilities. Upheavals of Thought (2001) is a long argument that emotions are cognitive evaluations and therefore proper subjects of ethical analysis. The Monarchy of Fear (2018) and Citadels of Pride (2021) extend the analysis of emotion to contemporary politics. Anger and Forgiveness (2016) argues, against a long tradition, that anger is a cognitively defective emotion that political life would be better without — a position contested by readers in the Black freedom-struggle tradition who hold anger to be sometimes morally appropriate.