Martha Nussbaum thinks we shouldn't lose our tempers. Good luck with that

by Julian Baggini / August 18, 2016 
For all her disdain of status anxiety, Nussbaum also seems to still be in the grip of it, needlessly dropping into an anecdote that she has delivered the prestigious Locke Lectures. She dedicates the book to Bernard Williams and their sometimes troubled history was deeply connected with Nussbaum’s status issues. In his obituary she confessed, “For some years, albeit not right at the start, I have wanted to dislodge these feelings of passionate inferiority, to establish some basis of equality, proving that I had something that was just as good as that jet-pilot velocity.”
But the most astonishing way in which Nussbaum undermines the virtuousness of her position comes when she offers a series of four real-life examples of how to deal with anger. For this she creates a fictional alter ego named Louise “to provide an additional layer of fictionality and a fig leaf of protection for the other people who are represented as fictional characters here.” This conceals nothing, as she as good as tells us. Remarkably, she then tells a story against one of Louise’s Nobel Prize-winning colleagues who spoke at a panel “inaugurating a new research centre Louise’s university was opening in a developing country.” People in Nussbaum’s professional circle will know who is behind the leaf instantly and I could find out very quickly with a Google search. She talks of his “characteristic delay tactics” and “infantile narcissism” and says she tells herself “if you really have to work with him, treat him like a selfish genius two-year-old.”