In her new book, philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum examines humanity’s ‘long-overdue ethical debt.’
Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, by Martha C. Nussbaum (Simon & Schuster, 358 pages, $28.99)
For most people, most of the time, fellow feeling toward animals comes naturally. Who doesn’t wish for them decent treatment, deliverance from needless suffering, and “flourishing lives,” the three great aims of Martha C. Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility?
Yet our benevolence tends to be selectively bestowed, following loose rules of moral consistency. Some animals, if they could put words to their encounters with humanity, would extol our gentleness and amazing altruism; others would ask how we can be so ruthless. We rightly question ourselves sometimes, wanting to better align what we believe with what we do or permit. We wouldn’t be “the rational animal” if we didn’t. What do we owe our fellow creatures? What does justice require?
In this task of recta ratio, we have an astute and sensitive guide in Martha Nussbaum. A noted philosopher, scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, and teacher of ethics and law in standing-room-only lectures at the University of Chicago, Professor Nussbaum in this book, her 23rd, lives up to her billing. Among her bestsellers: Citadels of Pride, The Fragility of Goodness, Sex and Social Justice, and The Therapy of Desire. Along with vast learning, she’s got the formula for catchy titles, and in her seventies (her book on that: Aging Thoughtfully) she has enough academic prizes, honorary degrees, and magazine profiles to outshine the collection of any celebrity intellectual.
That such a gifted, eminent figure should trouble herself with so arduous and often distressing an ethical problem — the bitter lot of the creatures sacrificed for human ends, a social issue never really in fashion — invites our careful attention. And her command of the classics serves the subject well. Theoretical works on animals typically come wrapped in new “isms” and ideologies, as if other creatures were just the world’s largest grievance group and their cause a uniquely modern concern. But alert men and women, Nussbaum reminds us, have thought seriously about cruelty for about as long as human beings have thought seriously about anything.
Indeed, she observes, much of our recent knowledge about animals is but a rediscovery of ancient insights. The Platonic philosophers Plutarch and Porphyry described their intelligence and sentience and urged an end to animal exploitation — the latter making his case in On Abstinence from Animal Flesh. Aristotle likewise detailed their cognitive and emotional capacities, concluding, Nussbaum writes, that “the goal or end of each is the life and flourishing of each, and no creature exists for the sake of other ‘higher’ species.” In the Bible, too, we find living creatures with a place and purpose of their own. A convert in her twenties to Judaism, the author cites Genesis to show that human authority over animals is, in her polite phrasing, “not best read as entitlement to plunder and abuse animal creation.” And we could supply other assurances from Scripture that animal suffering is worthy of divine attention. That “groan of travail” in Romans 8:22 is the sound not just of humanity.
Even so, in our era, unsentimental people and industries dismiss their critics as destructive and extreme — as if moral concern over cruelty, and not the cruelty itself, were a drag on human progress. We’re to think of ethical scruple as something strange and radical, hindering practices that are sanctioned by time and denying us products that are ours by right.
That’s one way to look at things, but any appeal it might hold, as examples in Justice for Animals show, quickly fades when we turn to the particulars: Marine mammals captured for sale to aquatic theme parks. Whales, dolphins, and other sea creatures drowning in nets, choking on plastic, or ensnared and killed. Elephants hunted for ivory and for “trophies,” along with the sportive slaughter of other animals who have it hard enough already in the wild. “The torture of animals in experimental research,” involving primates, dogs, cats, rabbits, and others. Newborn calves torn away from their mothers for dairy and meat production. Billions of factory-farmed animals treated, as Nussbaum writes, “as if they were just meat already,” until “they die before ever having decently lived.”
In so many ways, “human domination has increased exponentially.” And in the case of today’s worldwide system of factory farming, what is strange and radical is not the ethical objection but the extent and intensity of the torment, even as the emotions and social natures of these animals are well understood, and even as the products are readily replaceable. By supporting this “moral horror,” Nussbaum tells us, “most humans have continued to treat most animals like objects, whose suffering does not matter.” And the abusers are better at concealing their practices (when did you last see news footage from inside an industrial animal farm or animal laboratory?), thereby removing the problem from our consciousness and from rational moral inquiry.
To “face squarely the moral gravity of these predicaments,” the author contends, we need to establish the unequivocal moral standing of animals, their rightful due. Any such entitlement must carry obligations of justice that a reasonable person, in any society, will recognize as binding, to far extend legal protections already in effect, and to assure they are actually enforced.
In the short version — no substitute for her longer one, a model of orderly and graceful argumentation — she rejects the scala naturae concept ascribed (in error, she suspects) to Aristotle and handed down through the ages, whereby we humans survey all beasts of the field, sea, and air, comparing each with our august selves, and “give prizes for likeness to us” in the form of partial and selective protections. And modern utilitarian theory, though it “deserves enormous respect for its keen sensitivity to animal suffering,” has a reductive underside that often spells trouble. In due course, she arrives at an ethical framework adapted from her work in developing nations to codify threshold-level freedoms and protections necessary for a flourishing, dignified human life: the capabilities approach.
Animals, to the extent we determine the fate of each, should, according to this approach, “have the opportunity to flourish in the form of life characteristic for that creature,” unhindered in seeking its natural ends. No sentient creatures should be sacrificed to human designs that ignore, frustrate, or crush their fundamental needs and innate desires: their right, “inherent in the dignity of each individual animal,” to live the life of the creatures that they are, instead of as mere objects awaiting our use or disposal. When we see animals as they are, “rather than only through narcissistic fantasy,” concern extends not just to their collective welfare, but also to “loss and deprivation suffered by individual creatures, each of whom matters.”
There is more beyond these central ideas, addressing questions her readers will have, but already Nussbaum’s capabilities approach wins the day against “empty nonarguments,” as she describes them, by which animal-use industries and their lobbyists explain away practices that she would reform or, at least in aspiration, abolish. It’s only more impressive, in reading Justice for Animals, to observe this exemplary mind in action, patiently arguing and proving the case for moral entitlement, when so much animal abuse passes with hardly a pretense anymore of moral justification, revealing a mix of indifference, special pleading, bad faith, and what she terms (quoting John Stuart Mill) the “superstitions of selfishness.” Her framework, in any case, has the wholesome effect of returning us to first principles and encouraging questions about our own sense of entitlement.
Though laid out in the painstaking terms of the trained philosopher — “higher order” stuff, no shortcuts on the march from is to ought — her capabilities approach also squares with moral common sense: Animals aren’t just nothing, though they are often treated that way. We don’t confer moral worth on them, or deny it, as it suits the purpose. Animals have value quite apart from our uses of them. They merit our respect and compassion — and while we’re at it, as Nussbaum writes, “a sense of ethically attuned wonder.” Animals cannot speak for themselves, much less defend themselves against cruelty: We hold all the power. From that simple angle, the book is a beautifully presented case that to exploit them endlessly is a terrible thing, incompatible with a just society.
Notable, too, is a resemblance of her approach to natural-law ethics, as applied to animals, a point Nussbaum would perhaps resist. Though not exactly in vogue in the academy these days, natural law is an objective and reliable framework, the idea being that the moral claims of any creature are evident in its nature. From the essential, defining capacities that make for well-being and fulfillment, compared with subjugation and misery when these capacities are impeded by humans, we can discern the ultimate good toward which a creature strives, and for which rights are the necessary means. All of our own rights, in practice, are protections against human interference, neglect, or wrongdoing. On that same basis, as every cruelty statute assumes, animals have claims to be asserted on their behalf.
Contemporary theorists don’t care for natural-law ethics — or for Nussbaum’s talk of “flourishing” — because it seems to contain a religious premise of purposeful design, and to involve a leap from fact to value that we are told cannot be taken. But the idea predates the Catholic version these theorists have in mind. The prior order that natural law detects is not a strictly religious assumption. The approach tethers theory tightly to reality, providing a fixed and nonarbitrary point of reference for ethical standards, even if ultimate metaphysics are left unsettled. And, with all that going for it, you would think that so enduring an idea in Western moral thought, the very source of human rights and freedom as we understand them, could only advance the cause of justice for animals.
A further benefit of natural-law ethics, as applied for instance to our nightmarish factory farms, is self-knowledge: a realization that human beings have no right to put our every little wish above the fundamental needs of other animals, in disregard of their extreme and preventable affliction and of their dignity as fellow creatures. To do so is an abandonment of duty and contrary to our own rational nature and moral interests, and to the extent we live off such abuse we ourselves are hardly flourishing.
Then again, when Martha Nussbaum is the teacher, one had better be careful about the offhand theorizing, especially where the wisdom of antiquity is concerned. There is a reason why the profilers and reviewers so often call this woman “formidable.” Here, as in other works, her arguments are thorough, elegantly written, and compelling — so finely tuned that Aristotle himself would need to be in top form to engage her on the subject.
As if Justice for Animals needed more than that, in the introduction we learn of its inspiration: the author’s daughter, Rachel Nussbaum Wichert. An accomplished person in her own right, an attorney “whose dedication to improving the lives of abused and suffering creatures was intense, and beautiful,” Rachel tragically died in 2019. The book, says Professor Nussbaum, is “a work of love and, now, of what I might call constructive mourning,” right down to a cover featuring Rachel’s favorite of all animals, a whale.
To both of these greathearted women, then, we are in debt for what is sure to become a classic of ethics, giving the abused, suffering, and innocent creatures the masterful defense they deserve.