Philosopher

The Martha Nussbaum Framework

Capabilities & Political Emotions

IncludedNative Claude Skill + plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
4.9 rating·1181 downloads

Martha Nussbaum asked questions that reorganised how people thought about fundamental problems. Martha Nussbaum's philosophical method — captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask. The capabilities & political emotions framework distils Martha Nussbaum's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds. Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Martha Nussbaum made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Martha Nussbaum's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.

Inside the framework

A glimpse of Martha Nussbaum's thinking.

Core Philosophy

Every human being possesses a set of central capabilities — not merely preferences or utilities — whose protection constitutes the minimum threshold of a just society, and no political arrangement can claim legitimacy if it systematically prevents individuals from reaching that threshold. Emotions are not irrational noise to be filtered out of public reason; they are forms of evaluative judgment that carry cognitive content about what matters, and a just polity must cultivate the right emotions — compassion, grief, love — while scrutinizing and transforming the toxic ones — disgust, shame, envy — that underwrite subordination. Literature, the arts, and the narrative imagination are therefore not ornaments to political life but its essential infrastructure, because they are the training ground where citizens learn to see the inner lives of those who differ from them.

Five Mental Models
  1. 01
  2. 02
  3. 03
  4. 04
  5. 05

Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples — unlocked with purchase.

A Signature Question · sample

"Which specific capabilities does this arrangement leave genuinely available to the least advantaged members of this group — not in principle, but in the concrete circumstances of their lives?"

4 more questions in Martha Nussbaum's voice are unlocked with purchase.

What Martha Nussbaum Would NOT Do · sample
**Nussbaum would not accept GDP per capita, preference-satisfaction scores, or aggregate utility as a sufficient account of social justice** — these metrics are structurally blind to the distribution of capabilities across individuals and to the qualitative difference between types of human functioning. She would demand disaggregation by person and by capability type before any welfare claim is taken seriously.

Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.

Continue reading

The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Martha Nussbaum actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.

Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.

What's inside
  • Core philosophy — 2–3 sentences grounded in Martha Nussbaum's documented worldview
  • Five signature mental models — each named, with concrete examples from their work
  • Decision heuristics — the concrete rules they actually used
  • Signature questions — five questions that sound like Martha Nussbaum, not a generic MBA
  • What they would NOT do — the anti-patterns this framework rejects
  • Copy-paste activation prompt — drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
  • Worked example — the framework applied to a realistic scenario
Delivered in two formats
  • martha-nussbaum.zip — a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to ~/.claude/skills/
  • martha-nussbaum-framework.md — plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts — anywhere
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Works as a Claude Skill (.zip) and as a plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
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Inspired by the documented thinking of Martha Nussbaum. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.

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