SOURCE: Griffin, Jasper. “Mastering the Irrational.” Times Literary Supplement (4 July 1986): 730.

In the following review, Griffin asserts that The Fragility of Goodness is an important, ambitious book that is both formidably intelligent and persuasively emotional.

The subject of this long and closely written book [The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy] (small type and large pages—561 of them) is an ambitious one: an investigation of the role played by luck in the area of human excellence and the activities associated with it. That means the whole nexus of questions about the role in moral thinking and in the good life of all those elements which cannot be reduced to rationality: external relationships such as love, friendship, political activity, attachment to possessions; and internal drives of a non-rational kind, the appetites, feelings, passions and needs. Martha Nussbaum develops a coherent argument as she goes through...