Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being.”
Martha Nussbaum · Capabilities approach · Modern · 1986
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is the problem of moral luck. What I am praised or blamed for depends on much that I did not make: health, other people's choices, accidents of birth and of politics. A competing reading hears an excuse, a claim that no one is responsible for anything. She is asking how ethical evaluation can survive that dependence, not cancelling evaluation. The sentence opens the problem of The Fragility of Goodness (1986), a book about Greek tragedy and philosophy. Creating Capabilities, already in this library as a paraphrase, is a much later theory of justice about what people are able to do and be. Luck, in this earlier sentence, is the exposure of a good life to what it does not control. The capabilities approach will care about that exposure for political reasons. This sentence is the ethical problem, stated before that political theory. The badge records that the opening is an argument, and this is its short form.
Did Martha Nussbaum really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. The problem as Nussbaum states it at the start of The Fragility of Goodness. The sentence is hers in substance and is widely quoted from the opening. It is marked as a close rendering of that statement rather than as a line to be carved without the book. It is not the capabilities paraphrase already in this library.
Where it comes from
The Fragility of Goodness (1986), the statement of the problem of moral luck in the opening chapter
Approximate date: 1986.
How to use it
Praising a pupil for a result that required a quiet house, a parent who could help, and a body that slept is praising a mixture. Her sentence says the mixture includes what the pupil did not make. It does not say the effort was nothing. A report that cannot say which part was luck and which part was work has not yet faced the problem the book is about.
A mindset reading
Exposure is not the same as helplessness. The habit is to name the uncontrolled part without erasing the part a person did. She thinks Greek ethics is serious because it refuses both the erasure and the fantasy of total control.
Understand the philosophy
The Fragility of Goodness starts from this dependence of character and action on luck. The key term is what I did not make. The later capabilities sentence, already here, asks what a person is able to do and to be. Upheavals of Thought, a further card, argues that emotions are part of reasoning. The three belong to one career and they are not one quotation.
- ethics
- self
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is the problem of moral luck. What I am praised or blamed for depends on much that I did not make: health, other people's choices, accidents of birth and of politics. A competing reading hears an excuse, a claim that no one is responsible for anything. She is asking how ethical evaluation can survive that dependence, not cancelling evaluation. The sentence opens the problem of The Fragility of Goodness (1986), a book about Greek tragedy and philosophy. Creating Capabilities, already in this library as a paraphrase, is a much later theory of justice about what people are able to do and be. Luck, in this earlier sentence, is the exposure of a good life to what it does not control. The capabilities approach will care about that exposure for political reasons. This sentence is the ethical problem, stated before that political theory. The badge records that the opening is an argument, and this is its short form.
Did Martha Nussbaum really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. The problem as Nussbaum states it at the start of The Fragility of Goodness. The sentence is hers in substance and is widely quoted from the opening. It is marked as a close rendering of that statement rather than as a line to be carved without the book. It is not the capabilities paraphrase already in this library.
Which work is it in?
The Fragility of Goodness (1986), the statement of the problem of moral luck in the opening chapter Approximate date: 1986.