Foreword: Martha Nussbaum and her Critics

It is to Professor Martha Nussbaum’s credit that she recognises that more is demanded of a serious moral philosopher than to be merely a passive and dispassionate analyst. In her Hochelaga lectures, building upon much previous work, she constructs a moral framework designed to be of practical use in the project of improving humankind. She aims, as she puts it, to ‘supply definite and useful guidance’. In this foreword, I sketch Nussbaum’s line of argument and some of the criticisms made by the four respondents to her lectures. Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities’ approach is advertised as an improvement on views espoused by John Rawls and Amartya Sen, but, I argue, when it comes to hard cases, Nussbaum fails to grasp the nettle.