Nussbaum

Abstract

Martha C. Nussbaum is well known for her view that literature can and should play a key role in morality. In recent works, she has argued for a close link between empathy, literature, and global citizenship. In this part, I will reconstruct and critically examine her position, using Upheavals of Thought (2001), Cultivating Humanity (1997), Poetic Justice (1995), and Love’s Knowledge (1990). I will further engage with her thought and refer to For Love of Country (1996) and Frontiers of Justice (2006) in Chapter 9 (Cosmopolitanism). In this chapter, I will clarify what she means by empathy, how she understands its relation with literature, and how she relates empathy and literature to the cultivation of global citizenship. I will also take a closer look at some of Nussbaum’s sources, in particular Aristotle, pragmatism, Hume, and Adam Smith. In the next chapter, I will present my objections to her view. I will point to problems if one interprets Nussbaum as putting empathy in the centre of moral reasoning, criticise Nussbaum’s exclusive stress on literature and on novel as means to stimulate empathy, and argue that her account of empathic world citizenship as it stands is ill suited to capture the complex problems associated with understanding moral and political reasoning involved in global citizenship since it lacks a workable conception of the political, of citizenship, and of judgment.