Nussbaum trained as a classicist and philosopher simultaneously and has never quite stopped being both. Her central contribution is the capabilities approach, developed alongside the economist Amartya Sen: instead of measuring welfare by income or preference-satisfaction, ask what people are actually able to do and be. Her list of central human capabilities (life, health, bodily integrity, sense and imagination, emotion, practical reason, affiliation, living with other species, play, and control over one's environment) provides a floor below which no just society should allow people to fall. She has applied this to gender, disability, and sexual orientation, and devoted a parallel career to the emotions, arguing that feelings are not noise in the moral life but forms of intelligent evaluative response. She has written on grief, anger, compassion, and especially disgust, which she thinks does more damage in public life than almost any other emotion.
Published The Fragility of Goodness in 1986, reading Greek tragedy and philosophy as a single argument about luck, how much of a good life depends on what we cannot control. The book remade ancient philosophy's place in ethics and made her reputation.
Words
“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself.”