The contradictions of Nussbaum's liberalism

Abstract

The paper argues that there is a fundamental tension in the work of Martha Nussbaum between its implicit materialist foundations in what John McMurtry calls life-value, and her political liberalism. The genuinely universal values of life-requirement satisfaction and human capability development that form the core of Nussbaum's ethics cannot be fully and coherently realized, I will argue, within the framework of liberal-capitalist society, whose surface problems she criticizes but whose depth social dynamics and normative justifications her work leaves intact. The problems particular to Nussbaum's position are of general importance in so far as they expose the structural limitations of liberalism as a critical social theory.

Keywords:

• Nussbaum
• liberalism
• materialist ethics
• life-value