The Fragility of Goodness

Introduction

Nussbaum’s first major book, published by Cambridge University Press in 1986, asks how far a good human life depends on things beyond our control. Readings of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Hecuba show tragic conflicts in which every choice violates something of value. Plato, in the Protagoras, Republic and Symposium, tries to make the good life invulnerable through reason, but in the Phaedrus, Nussbaum argues, revises that hope. Aristotle accepts vulnerability as part of a life of virtue shared with friends and fellow citizens. Nussbaum also argues that literary form, and not only argument, can convey ethical knowledge, a theme of her later Love’s Knowledge (1990).

Connections

Builds on

• Symposiumc. 385 BCE · Plato
• Nicomachean Ethicsc. 340 BCE · Aristotle

More works by Martha Nussbaum

• 2006Frontiers of Justice