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.
Compassion is the basic social emotion.
We should not feel pity for those who suffer; we should feel compassion, which involves regarding their well-being as our own concern.
Related Quotes
Treat humanity, in your own person or in another, always as an end and never merely as a means.
-- Immanuel Kant
Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.
-- 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
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.
-- John Rawls