Martha C. Nussbaum

Utah Valley University bucks the trends.

Terrorism gets our attention, but we have a harder time feeling compassion for the millions who die from more mundane causes.

A flourishing economy requires the same skills that support citizenship, Martha C. Nussbaum writes.

On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the station of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of Hindu pilgrims who were returning from a trip to the purported birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier, angry Hindu mobs had destroyed the…

In 55 BC, the Roman leader Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants. Surrounded in the arena, the animals perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, they then “entreated the crowd, trying to win its compassion with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a…

The law, most of us would agree, should be society’s protection against prejudice. That does not imply that emotions play no legitimate role in legal affairs, for often emotions help people to see a situation clearly, doing justice to the concerns that ought to be addressed. The compassion of judge…

John Rawls, who turned 80 this year, is the most distinguished moral and political philosopher of our age. Initially isolated in a world of Anglo-American philosophy preoccupied with questions of logic and language, Rawls played a major role in reviving an interest in the substantive questions of…

It is late afternoon in rural Bihar, in northeastern India. The girls of the village, goat-herds by day, are starting school. They come together in a shed, all ages, to attend the literacy program set up by Adithi, a dynamic nongovernmental organization run by Viji Srinivasan. Adithi is one of the…