The capabilities approach starts not from a hypothetical state of nature but from the question: what does a life worthy of human dignity require?
Philosophers
Martha Nussbaum
Leading American ethicist and classicist (1947- ), Distinguished Service Professor at Chicago. Co-architect with Amartya Sen of the capability approach; recipient of the Kyoto Prize (2016) and Holberg Prize (2021).
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Martha Nussbaum's Other Quotes
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.
We should not feel pity for those who suffer; we should feel compassion, which involves regarding their well-being as our own concern.
Compassion is the basic social emotion.
Related Quotes
Treat humanity, in your own person or in another, always as an end and never merely as a means.
-- Immanuel Kant
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.
-- John Rawls
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
-- John Rawls
Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.
-- John Rawls
What right have we to rob an innocent nation that it has hitherto been our boast to protect and support?
-- Maria Theresa of Austria