Dec 27, 2022
A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.
Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day.
The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world’s most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights, ethics, and law.
From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.
Author
Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear.
Reviews
“The most important book on animal ethics written to
date, Justice for Animals is a
brilliant and remarkably comprehensive exploration of the ethical
issues connected with human treatment of nonhumans. a
milestone in the field.”—Thomas I. White, author of In
Defense of Dolphins
“With urgent clarity, Martha Nussbaum explains why we must and how
we can take responsibility for the multi-species world
that is our
reality. Justice For Animals is a
celebration of the human potential for love and mutuality
and a song of hope, as much as it is a steely-eyed analysis of our
callous dominance of the nonhuman world.”—Amy Linch, Penn State
University
“Martha Nussbaum’s work has changed the humanities, but in this
book her focus is startling, born of an ardent
love for her late daughter
and for all animals on Earth.”—Jeremy
Bendik-Keymer, Case Western Reserve University, and Senior
Research Fellow, Earth System Governance Project
“Martha Nussbaum takes an honest look at how animals may survive
in a human-dominated world, and lays out a plan of action to help
creatures great and small in important and critical
ways.”—Dr. Denise Herzing, Founder and Research Director of
the Wild Dolphin Project
“A provocative book. Nussbaum lays out a
foundation for the political rights of animalsand
asks what creating a world where animals could be our
friends would look like. An essential read for anyone
interested in what we owe to our fellow
creatures.”—Nicolas Delon, Associate Professor of Philosophy
and Environmental Studies, New College of Florida
“The morality of the human-animal relation urgently needs updating.
We can’t wish for a more insightful and compassionate
guide than philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She urges us to look beyond
pain and pleasure and to consider all animals, not just those
that resemble us. Each species’ specific needs and capabilities
offer a guide of how they should be treated.”—Frans de Waal, author
of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a
Primatologist
"A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the
diverse creatures of Earth." —Kirkus Reviews
"This trenchant and masterful blend of political analysis,
philosophical study, and call to action is a
must-read.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Philosophy Podcast. This is August Baker and
Philosophy Podcast is where we interview leading philosophers about
their recent books. Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking
with Professor Martha Nussbaum, who's really needs no introduction,
won several prizes. I looked at one of these prizes, the 2016 Kyoto
Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The other winners in addition to
Professor Nussbaum are Popper, Quine, Ricœur, Habermas, Charles
Taylor, Spivak, and Latour, and really needs no introduction. I
told one of my other interviewees that I was interviewing her and
they said, "Well, she's the most important living and active
philosopher," so I'm very delighted that she joined us today. She
is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and
Ethics, appointed in the philosophy department and the law school
at the University of Chicago. Welcome, Professor Nussbaum.
Martha Nussbaum:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me on. Great pleasure.
August Baker:
Thank you. I'd like to start with your introduction. I
appreciate the vulnerability really that you showed in the
introduction. You speak about your daughter, losing your daughter
when she was 47 in 2019. And some of the things you said here, you
say, "As long as I live, I will see the sparkle in her green eyes
and her subversive smile. We were a study in contrasts, I with
curly blonde hair, she with a black almost buzz cut, I with femme
colorful dresses, she with all black pants suits; but so deeply our
hearts were allied. This is not a book about that tragedy. This
book is different: it looks forward attempting to further the
causes she loved, with a theory she knew about and supported," a
version of your capabilities approach.
And then later you say, at the end of the introduction about
animal rights, "Now I believe is the time of a great awakening: to
our kinship with a world of remarkable intelligent creatures, and
to real accountability for our treatment of them that is genuinely
global, including all sentient beings. I hope this book will help
direct that awakening, giving it moral urgency and theoretical
structure, and inspiring new people to take up the cause of justice
for animals-just as Rachel's passion for marine mammals made me
curious, willing to embark on a difficult voyage that has proven
more rewarding than any other journey in my life, apart from the
journey of motherhood."
It was just fascinating to me that this had become... I mean,
of all the work you've done and books you've written, this one
seems to have been even more rewarding than others?
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, yes, in a very personal way. I think what people may not
know from what you read is that Rachel was a lawyer for animal
rights. She worked for an NGO called Friends of Animals, and she
worked in the wildlife division. So it was through her that I got
to know so much about wild animals and particularly marine mammals,
which were her passion. And we co-authored four papers together
about that, where she supplied the law and I supplied the
philosophy. So yeah, I mean, she started me on this journey. And
therefore after she died, she had already read some chapters of the
book, but the book was not nearly finished, and so I poured all the
energy of my mourn into making the book as good as I could make it,
and thinking that I was at least keeping alive the causes that she
loved and doing something for the animals that she loved. So I
think it had a special personal meaning for me in that sense.
August Baker:
Let's talk about the capabilities approach. It seems like one
of the places to start, or one of the core intuitions here is the
difference between flourishing lives and impeded lives.
Martha Nussbaum:
Yeah.
August Baker:
Could you explain that essentially? I think...
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, the question I was trying to ask is, what really is
injustice? Have to start with a clear idea, as clear as we can get
it, of what it is we're talking about. And justice is such an
elusive idea. So I suggested that the best way of thinking about
justice is thinking about what it is to be going ahead with your
life, trying to flourish, and then to be suddenly blocked or
thwarted by wrongful or negligent action. So it doesn't have to be
malicious, but it might be just negligent, but it's wrongful. And
that I think is something that both humans and animals have in
common. We're all trying to flourish and then we get blocked. And
the blocking, sometimes it's just an accident, but very often it's
wrongful human conduct that we should be dealing with, with law and
with activism. So that was what I was trying to do, because
justice, it's just a word until you give it some content.
But if we give it that content, then it makes sense to think
that what we need to be focusing on is what a flourishing life is
for the different kinds of animals and how that's related to the
human effort to seek flourishing. And then what are the different
things that can block that flourishing? Some of which are, as I
said, just accidental. But some of them are wrong and some of the
wrong ones are malicious: as when let's say a person beats a dog.
But a lot of them are just negligent: as when we permit global
warming to destroy habitats, as when we fill the seas with plastic
trash, and so forth. So that was the idea, to start the book with
an intuitive probing of the very idea of justice.
August Baker:
And I think one of the interesting things is there's several
different levels you could talk about. Well, it would be virtuous,
it would be nice to treat animals better. Then it seems like a
second level would be to say no, that it actually rise to the rises
to level of morality. And then even a higher level would be that it
rises to the level of justice. Do you think of them as three
different levels?
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, I guess that that's a good way of putting it. Sure. I
mean, I think for example, John Wall has always said, well, we
should have compassion for animals, but they don't have rights.
Now, Christine Korsgaard, a Rawlsian and a Kantian, has said, look,
the reasons that Kant gave for thinking that humans have rights,
these reasons apply to animals. And so we can talk about that later
if you want.
But yeah, I think first of all, there might be some degree of
concern. Then we have to establish that it's ethical concern. But
there are many things that are objects of ethical concern, which I
would not think are involved in an idea of justice. For example, I
think plants and the non-sentient, natural environment all around
us, that can be an object of ethical concern. But for reasons that
I give in the book, I don't think it's a question of justice. I
don't think you can do an injustice to a tree because a tree is not
a sentient being pursuing a life. And that's, I think, the core of
the idea of justice.
August Baker:
And to say, once it reaches this level of justice, then that
means practically that it means that there can be... Once one
commits and says, okay, this is a justice, this reaches at the
level of justice, then it says, now we can use laws, people who
aren't acting the right way can be punished. Is that the [inaudible
00:08:22] force?
Martha Nussbaum:
Yeah. And I think really, if it's a question of justice, then
we are obligated to make laws and to try to enforce it. Just like
the closely related idea of rights entails duties, we have to take
upon ourselves the duty to fix this. This is why I call the
subtitle of the book is Our Collective Responsibility. Because if
animals have rights, then the question is who has the corresponding
duties? And I think we can easily specify that in some cases if the
animals live in a local place, but a lot of animals roam around in
different countries. So we can't say, oh, this country or this city
has the duty to fix this problem. But instead, the duty is held
collectively by all human beings. Think about plastic trash. So I
mean, we don't want to waste time thinking who put that plastic
bottle in the ocean and when. No, we just have to fix it. We have
to get together, get our act together and fix it.
August Baker:
A big question is, okay, if we're going to include more than
humans in terms of creatures that we have duties to that fall under
morality or justice, how big is this new circle going to be? And
you referred to this idea of sentience. That's where you're going
to draw the line, not all living creatures, but those that are
sentient. Is that close to subjectivity or consciousness?
Martha Nussbaum:
Exactly. It is the idea of sentience. And I learned this from
scientists. I spent a lot of time and had great joy learning what
scientists have been doing in the last 30 years. There's been a
real revolution in the understanding of animal lives. So basically
what scientists think sentience is, is the idea that there's
someone at home in there, there's a subjective point of view on the
world, and therefore not just aversive reactions, which might be
mechanical or route. There are creatures who do act to ward off
disaster, but there's no reason to think that they feel anything or
have a subjective perception of what's happening to them. But so
it's that ability to avoid the bad and pursue the good, plus a
sense that they feel something.
Now, experimentally, usually what people are looking for is
the feeling of pain. But that's not the only thing. It's just that
that's the easiest thing to do experiments on. What would be a
larger part of sentience would be to see something from your own
point of view, to have the perception that feels like something.
But as I say, pain is the thing that people experiment on. So when,
for example, people have very successfully demonstrated that fish
are sentience, what they typically do is to devise experiments
where the behavior would change only if they feel pain, not just
see a danger, but feel the pain.
So anyway, that's what I mean by sentience. And then, once you
get that standard and things to look at what people currently think
about how to apply it, but we could always change that. So right
now, what scientists think is that insects are not sentient. They
are their disciplined voices, but I'm going to just summarize the
consensus. Insects are not sentient. Crustaceans are probably not
sentient. Cephalopods like the octopus and the squid almost
certainly are sentient. And then there are disputes of various
kinds within that. I mean, some people do think, well, bees might
be sentient, but the point is the standard. And as we learn more,
we'll probably apply that same standard in different ways. And we
might discover that more and more creatures qualify for justice in
my theory.
August Baker:
Right. No, that was a very interesting chapter, to read about
all the different types of animals and to also learn about this
scientific evidence about it. I think I have some questions about
it still. At one point you said, "Let's not oo and aah over
sentience. It's a useful trait." And I thought that was interesting
because I mean, let's take two creatures on either side of this
line. Let's say it's been decided that, or we know for sure that
salmon are sentient and stingrays are not. Are we saying that the
salmon's life is better?
Martha Nussbaum:
No.
August Baker:
Yeah. What is it you're saying?
Martha Nussbaum:
No, we're just saying that as they've evolved, they've
developed a tool which is extremely useful to them, and that tool
enables them to see the world from a distinctive subjective point
of view. And even the further ability, which I call meta
consciousness, that is awareness that you're having a certain view
on the world, awareness that somebody else has a different view on
the world; lots of animals have that too. But again, they have that
because it's useful to them.
So for example, when a squirrel hides a nut, it needs to know
where other squirrels will not look. And of course we're familiar
with this very clearly in the lives of dogs, because dogs can
deceive, they can hide things and they know how to fool us. But
that's also true of many, many other animals, many kinds of birds,
many rodents and so forth. So these are things that of course we
could [inaudible 00:14:15] about, but the crucial thing is they
evolve because they're useful.
August Baker:
And we would owe justice or moral obligations to one and not
the other. Is it basically because we have more, this is something
that we have compassion for, this is something we can see
feels...
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, I [inaudible 00:14:34] no moral [inaudible 00:14:35]. I
think obligations of justice is what I'm talking about in this
book. We might well have moral obligations such as to preserve them
as part of a habitat, and we could go on and on about that. But my
book is about justice. And I've tried to say that justice is about
the idea that there is a striving being who has goals. So sentience
is essential for having goals, not just things that you by rote
avoid. And so it's part of the whole picture of being a striving
being with goals and then goals that could be thwarted.
August Baker:
And then we can, obviously humans can have wrongful actions
towards these creatures, either by intentional actions or
negligence such as the plastic in the sea.
Martha Nussbaum:
Yeah.
August Baker:
So then you come to a very strong place, as I understand it,
all sentient beings interests have equal weight. And this standard
western view, which puts humans above the others, ranks and rates
beings with considerable unjustified narcissism. As I understand
it, you're saying there's no real good reason to put humans
higher.
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, look, the first thing is I don't want to make
generalizations about West and non-West. I think in the Western
tradition of philosophy, we just have forgotten about a lot of
voices that really did treat animals within tremendous concern,
such as the Neoplatonists, Porphyry and Plutarch. So that's
something I mentioned.
There are dissident traditions also in Judaism and in
Christianity. So we could talk about the different parts of each
tradition. In non-Western traditions, again, Indian philosophy has
Buddhist and some Hindu sources for the good treatment of animals.
And that's one reason why I think India is the one place where if
you're flying from city A to city B, you will be asked veg or
non-veg, that it's just a routine question. There are many more
vegetarians in India than in most countries. But on the other hand,
many animals are treated very badly in India too.
So each tradition is plural. Indigenous peoples are also
plural. I mean, of course it is a commonplace, in a way, that
indigenous people live with animals and they often show concern for
animals in their practices, but often it's not fully adequate
concern. Indigenous people's hunt whales and hunt deer and so
forth. So I think we really should just focus on the goal that
we're trying to reach. And the goal I think, is that all creatures,
all sentient creatures, should be enabled to lead the lives that
they're trying to lead up to a certain threshold point. So it's not
a maximizing theory, it's a sufficientarian theory, and it's saying
we have to get each one up above a certain threshold. Human beings
are not special, in that, we're one of the animals that is trying
to get up above a certain threshold.
Now, I think you think that that's a very surprising idea, but
it's an idea that really has deep roots in both Western and
non-Western philosophy. It's just that those voices have usually
been the minority voices and they've been eclipsed by the desire to
use animals for our own pleasure and our own profit. So those
voices have been dominant, but the others have always been
there.
August Baker:
I thought it was very interesting, once you start talking
about how to implement this, there becomes a whole new set of
theory, all, well, new to me, set of theories about how one would
put this into practice. And you talk about constitutions. The idea
is, how would one devise a constitution? One of the things I
wondered if you could share was this idea about political
principles should be narrow and thin.
Martha Nussbaum:
Okay, let me go back and say just one more thing about the
former question, because I think I didn't fully answer the idea,
why shouldn't we think that human beings are better? Well, I mean,
as both I and Christine Korsgaard think, there's no way of ranking
one creature against another anyway, because all value is internal
to a way of life. But if we think that we have something that the
other animals don't, I think we better think again. What do they
have that we don't have?
And first thing is we have five senses, but there are senses
we don't have that some other animals do have. Birds can perceive
magnetic fields, which we cannot do. That's how they're able to
migrate across the globe. Dolphins can sense what's inside an
object they approach by their capacity for echolocation. I tell
this story about a trainer whose pregnancy was signaled to her by
the dolphin she was working with. She didn't know she was pregnant,
but the dolphin sensed that there was something inside and he gave
a signal to her, which had been used between them before to
indicate pregnancy. So anyway, that's something. We should just
look at what's there. And the world contains amazing horizontal
variety, and ranking and ordering just doesn't make much sense
[inaudible 00:20:08]
If we even think about avoiding a conflict, many animals have
more sophisticated and more successful peacemaking strategies than
we do. Frans de Waal's book, Peacemaking among Primates is a great
description of the bonobo capacity for peacemaking. They also have
great capacities for constructing elaborate aesthetic structures.
So anyway, we could go on and on about this, but that's just
something that I wanted to add.
August Baker:
Sure.
Martha Nussbaum:
So now back to your other question. I think in the
capabilities approach, which Amartya Sen and I jointly developed,
and then I used in connection with constitutional law, says in my
version that all citizens should be supplied with a threshold level
of ten central capabilities. And that means that a nation is only
minimally just if it's been able to bring all its citizens up above
that threshold.
So that's the idea that when I ask how can we apply this to
the non-human animals, well, the answer is pretty complicated
because they don't live in a nation. Some do, and then we could
say, well, each nation should also have an animal constitution or
similar legislation. And of course a lot of nations do, but they
just don't enforce it. So we have an Animal Welfare Act that does a
lot of the things I want. It's just that number one, it leaves out
all the animals we eat very explicitly. And second, it just is
never enforced because there's no one who has standing to go to
court, and that's something I want to talk about later.
But anyway, so here we are. What do we do with the animals who
don't live in a particular nation? And so what I say is at least we
need to know where we're heading. When we have international
agencies and international deliberations such as the International
Whaling Commission, we at least should have a goal in view. And so
I think of the capabilities approach, which would then make a list
of the central capabilities for each type of animal, as supplying a
virtual constitution. It can't be a real written constitution
because nations would never agree to it and nations would never
write that down. But it's what a cooperative gathering of nations
should be striving for. So that's the idea behind the virtual
constitution.
August Baker:
My understanding was I thought that a virtual constitution
meant that your vision would be ultimately that there would be a
constitution, but in the meantime, out of respect for the fact that
there's a wide variety of opinions on this, that we would start
with a virtual one.
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, that's partly true. That's true of animals who are
localized within a given nation, but many animals are not. And I do
not think that it's even a good idea to aim for a world
constitution for humans or for animals because I think a world
state would be a horror and it would quickly become corrupted
because it would lack accountability to the voices of the citizens.
So, in the international realm, we are already dealing with a
virtual constitution. What are the various human rights documents
but exactly that. They're statements of what rights people have,
but they won't have teeth unless nations incorporate them into
their legal systems, which of course it would be good for them to
do. But that's the idea I have in mind. It's going to be a list of
animal rights, just like we have lists of human rights.
August Baker:
And I thought one of the interesting things is that these are
not abstract. You have in mind using experts who have a lot of
experience with particular animals. In a way, it's the animals
talking or speaking as it were to say what is important to
them.
Martha Nussbaum:
Exactly. So animals do speak in the sense that even the ones
that don't have an elaborate language, and of course quite a few
animals do. The language isn't understood by us. We can't even hear
much of the sounds that elephants make. And bird language is very
complicated. It has a rich syntactic structure in many cases, but
we don't understand it. But what animals do certainly is signal to
us what they want and what they don't want. And those behavioral
signals are perfectly capable of guiding legal action if we only
took them seriously. If you think about human beings with severe
cognitive disabilities who, let's say, don't use language, we still
get an idea of what they want and what would be good for them by
living with them and caring about them. And sometimes we make
mistakes, but then we correct their mistakes.
Eva Kittay in her book Love's Labor and her other books about
her daughter Sesha, who has very severe cognitive disabilities, she
reports how she made mistakes about what Sesha wanted. And then
later she had some other data and she corrected her mistakes.
That's what we need to do with animals. But with some of the
animals, we have plenty of data already from what we live with. But
with others, we have to figure out who knows what they're
doing.
I think there are experts like Barbara Smuts with baboons,
Joyce Poole with elephants. It's important to have more than one
because each one is fallible. We would want to have a group, and a
group that recognizes its own fallibility because of course we want
to have this as a tentative and evolving list. But the idea would
be to select the most important capabilities, which means not
internal skills, it means a space for choice, so the most important
substantive opportunities that would be part of this animal's life.
And then they would write that down. And there is a thing called
the elephant ethogram that reports what the most important parts of
an elephant's life are. So something like that, probably with a
little more normative guidance about which are the most important
parts, but that would be made by people who live with
elephants.
August Baker:
That was fascinating. So you can think of it varying, some
animals would be more social than others. Some would want to roam
more widely, some wouldn't.
Martha Nussbaum:
Yeah, exactly. So for example, to keep an orca in a marine
park as the film Blackfish showed, that's a terrible ruination of
that whale's life because orcas are extremely social. They have a
very complicated social structure. They live with a large group in
which different responsibilities are held by different members of
the group. And for example, so orcas, they're the only species
other than humans that we know that where the females have
menopause and live a lot of their lives after menopause. Well, the
postmenopausal females do a lot of teaching because orcas, like
many, many other animals, don't just have a genetic program that
sort of blossoms at a certain time. They have to learn socially.
And so who teaches? Well, the other females are busy giving birth
and being pregnant. So the postmenopausal females are the aunties
who teach orca behavior. And so that's one example. So they need a
quite large group.
But others, for example, parrots are loners and they may even
be happy being alone, but if at most they would mate with one mate
and remain with that mate throughout life. So there's great
variety.
August Baker:
It's fascinating, really. I think that a common reflex
reaction to these ideas is that, you're just taking human values
and putting them into animals. But this is clearly not that because
you're really relying on humans that are with these animals.
Martha Nussbaum:
We really have learned so much. And it's just thanks to this
great work that scientists have done in the last 30 years that we
can even talk about how to apply this. I mean, birds were thought
to be really, really stupid because they had no neocortex.
August Baker:
Bird brain.
Martha Nussbaum:
Bird brain. Yeah, exactly. Now we know that by a process
called convergent evolution, they arrived at some of the same
behaviors through a very different process and therefore through
different anatomical structures. And we know some of them by people
who actually live with them. Like Barbara Smuts spent years with
nobody else but baboons around her until it was very strange to her
to come back to human society. And you have to learn to behave like
a baboon, because if you look at that baboon in the eye, they think
it's a threat. So you have to learn that the proper way to look is
to look down and so on and so on. But anyway, there are other
animals that that's not possible, like quails. Dolphin's a little
more possible because they swim near shore. And so we can have
examples of humans who interact with dolphins in that way.
But whales, the scientists that I've talked to, and I know Hal
Whitehead. And he's a really great whale scientist, that's why I
named one whale that I talk about in the book Hal after him. He
spent six months of every year with his partner Luke Rendell on a
small yacht. I mean, it's an amazing thing because it's a sailboat
out in the very threatening and cold temperatures. I mean, if you
see these guys, their skin is so weathered, it's really, you can
see the life they're living. But in any case, they know them as
well as anyone. But of course they can't go down there and sort of
hang out with them. They have to maybe occasionally go down in the
diving bell. But for the most part, they're just observing
behavior.
So people do what they can. And with birds, I think the
knowledge has grown exponentially. I would particularly give credit
to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is a wonderful repository
of all the things we know about all the birds in the world. It's
quite amazing. You just go to their website and you can hear the
calls of thousands of different kinds of birds. So anyway, that's
one group that's done fantastic work. But yeah, we're just learning
by leaps and bounds. And there are now these people who I would
call them really friends of those animals.
I would love to be a friend of an elephant. I really have this
deep desire to be a friend of an elephant. And I sometimes think,
oh well, if they could genetically engineer for size, because they
have identified the gene for size, then there could be an elephant
that's the size of a dog. And I would like to adopt that elephant.
But of course I never would because it would be cruel to the
elephants because they wouldn't have other elephants around them.
But anyway, so I also can't go and live with the elephants because
you have to be a researcher and you have to know what you're doing
and you have to have a project and so forth. So that's just not my
life. But I really admire the people who do that.
August Baker:
I think one of the things that, we have a lot more information
now about animals, people who've lived close to them. Sometimes you
talk about the meat industry or the meat farming industry. So I
once lived near a meat market and I just had to walk by it, and I
was a vegetarian the entire time I lived there. It seems like, I
think initially, well, meat farmers are just meeting demand and
they're not making a lot of money. But I guess my understanding
would be from what you say, that they're keeping information out
that we, or that we are not... I don't know that most people want
to see the conditions. It's kind of like I'd rather not know.
Martha Nussbaum:
Exactly. Exactly. But they deliberately do. They've gotten
almost every state at one time or another, they've gotten them to
pass laws that are called ag gag laws, meaning gagging the
information of the agricultural industry. That means that you can't
photograph and you can't [inaudible 00:32:48] what goes on in these
facilities.
So I mean, meat market of course could have humanely raised
pigs and chickens. There might be such things in a meat market. But
what I'm talking about right now is I don't think we should be
eating pigs and chickens anyway. But I do feel that it's important
to say the horrors that should be stamped out first. Because I'm an
incrementalist and I think it is important to start with the worst,
are in the factory farming industry, which has great power in
American politics like no other country.
If you look at the laws that have been passed in Europe, most
of the countries in Europe have much better regulation of how pigs,
chickens, and cattle need to be treated. But we can't have those
laws because of the power of that industry. And it's got its claws
deep into Washington politics. I know people who were up for
confirmation to a post that needed Senate confirmation, they had to
sit down with the American Farm Institute and persuade them that
they weren't going to be a threat who weren't going to try to
regulate that industry. So we've got to reckon with that. And I
think luckily the public is beginning to be on guard. And there are
some good books that describe these conditions now. I refer to some
of them in the book. And a lot of states that had the ag gag laws
have either repealed them by legislation or the laws had been over
overturned by State Supreme Courts under state constitution free
speech clauses. So we're making progress and that has to continue.
But before long, I think the horrors will be open to view.
And the fact, for example, so pigs are really intelligent
animals. And they are very social, highly intelligent, and they are
very clean animals too. Contrary to this stereotype, they actually
do not ever defecate near where they live and so on. Now, a
gestation crate is a thing into which sows who are pregnant are
forced. It's a metal cage just the size of the pig's body. I think
I said cow, but I mean pig, the pig's body. And the pig stands
there in this metal cage, cannot lie down, cannot turn around and
is forced to defecate right into a sewage lagoon that's right below
that cage through some slats in the floor. Imagine that as a life.
That's the whole life of that pig. And it's just so shocking and
horrible. I mean, I don't think we should be killing pigs for food
anyway. But I do feel that at some times in history and on certain
humane farms today, pigs are treated not like things, breeding
machines, but they're treated really creatures with some dignity.
So I do want to make that distinction.
August Baker:
When I said I lived near a meat market, I don't know if that
was the right term. Basically I saw these carcasses every day that
hanging there, these cow carcasses. The question then would be
whether people want to look at it, because it seems like if you did
look at it, you would change your mind. But it's also revolting to
look at.
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, I think disgust is not a very useful emotion ethically.
And that is why I would agree with you, that if you're revolted,
that doesn't inspire constructive action. It just makes you turn
away and ignore the whole issue.
So yeah, I don't think that's an emotion that's helpful. I
think much more helpful is the kind of getting outraged by this. I
don't want to say angry in the retributive sense, that is no help,
but outraged in the sense of saying, this is outrageous what's
going on here. Let's move forward and make sure that doesn't happen
anymore. Martin Luther King Jr. distinguished between these two
kinds of anger, as I do myself. And [inaudible 00:36:59] the
backward looking kind that just wants to punish people is not any
use, but the useful kind is getting upset going forward and saying,
we got to fix this. And that would be the right way. So to get
people to feel that, I think it's important first that they see the
animal in its flourishing condition.
August Baker:
It makes a lot of sense.
Martha Nussbaum:
You understand what pigs are like, then the whole idea of
putting that pig in that cage seems absolutely unacceptable.
So I think we now have so many ways of teaching children. It's
so easy. And you don't have to be rich and go on a safari. You
don't even have a trip. And of course, in most cases, I wouldn't
recommend a trip to a zoo because I think at least for large
vertebrates, they're not well kept in zoos. They need a social
community and so forth. But I do think there are films, videos,
books; there's so much out there. And scientists have been very
public spirited because they spend a lot of time creating picture
books for the general public. I love these books and I have them
all over my house with wonderful pictures of dolphin behaviors and
whale behaviors and so on. But pig behaviors too.
So I think children need to start early and learn these. And
of course fiction can be helpful, but it has to be fiction of the
pretty accurate kind, not sentimentalizing fiction. I mean, Black
Beauty, which I was raised on, it did some good to wake people up
to the horrible treatment of horses. But it wasn't particularly
accurate. I actually prefer Tolstoy's wonderful short story called
Strider about a horse. It's the most... Because Tolstoy loved
animals, but horses in particular. So you can even see I'm
rereading Anna Karenina for the enth time now, and Brodsky's
interactions with his horse, who he called Frou-Frou. So Vrosky and
Frou-Frou are much more intimate actually than Vrosky and Anna, I
believe. Because Vrosky has no... There's no interest in his honor
that's threatened by Frou-Frou.
So anyway, and that short story about a horse could be read by
anyone. And there's stories about other animals. I was raised on
the Babar books. Now, I feel on the one hand that's not a good
portrayal of elephant society and it's full of French colonialism
that in retrospect is pretty objectionable. But it awakened me to
the love of elephants and to the idea that humans and elephants
could be friends. The part where Babar is an orphan elephant
because his mother has been shot by a hunter and he wanders around
and he wanders into a city. And then it's a woman known as the old
lady who takes Babar into her home and helps him buy a green suit
in a department store. And so all of this is quite artificial, but
at least it contains the essential idea that elephants are badly
treated when their mothers are shot by hunters and that they can be
well treated by humans who care about them.
August Baker:
When you talk about the different kinds of anger, it seems to
me that the difficult part there, even if you're really trying not
to be backward looking, is that first of all, anytime someone comes
up with any sort of moral standard, there will be people it seems
who just don't like someone telling them what morality they should
have and just will almost therefore pick the opposite side. And I
think it's difficult to take something... I mean, let's say if
you've been, I mean this isn't me, but suppose there's someone
who's been fishing their whole life or hunting and now they're
being told that there was something questionable about that, no
matter how you frame the anger, it's difficult for that not to come
to an impasse and...
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, I don't really agree. I do think there are approaches on
this issue that are not pragmatically helpful for the reasons you
give. I have read books that make me feel guilty. And if I feel
guilty, my diet isn't perfect, et cetera, et cetera, then that's
not a good approach too, because people will turn away, they'll
feel hectored. But that isn't my temperament. I guess with any
issue, with gender issues, which I've worked on all my career, my
approach is we should find a way forward and we should find a way
to live together. And that's my approach on this issue too, that we
should really listen to the voices of animals and think seriously.
But I think our attention can be arrested not by chastising, but by
rather saying, look how beautiful and how wonderful they are. And
do you really want those wonderful creatures to be tortured in this
way?
When, with a little more thought you could get rid of single
use plastic items and help clean up what's out there and all of
those things, I think everyone can contribute something. And I
don't think we have to have everyone living a perfect life in my
terms. We just need enough people who care, and who think, well,
what can I do? And I think, for example, people can adopt a shelter
animal. I'm not going to do that myself because I travel too much
and I wouldn't be a good parent for that dog because I live in a
small apartment and I live right on the lake shore of Chicago,
which is lovely, but there's no dog park there. So I just really
couldn't give the dog the exercise that it would deserve. And I see
in my building, all these lovely dogs who are being walked by
servants of the people, so like six dogs held by one person because
the so-called owners are out of town. They've gone to Arizona.
So I mean, this is not a good life for a dog, so I'm not going
to do that. But I think that people who can offer the love and the
care that a dog needs, or a cat, and this is just as big a decision
as the decision to have a child, can do that and that can be their
contribution. Or they can help teach children about this just by
going teach in a school, or in a university you can teach that. And
of course I do that all the time. I think I've helped move young
lawyers in this direction. Actually, one of my current research
assistants who's about to graduate this year, has convinced her big
New York law firm to create a pro bono program for animal
welfare.
August Baker:
There you go.
Martha Nussbaum:
So there are many, well, entrance points to this cause.
August Baker:
No, that's great. It's great because I don't know, sounding
like when you think of morality or justice, it's like, oh, let's
freeze up here.
Let's talk about standing and this idea of how legal standing
and how... Well, for example, I don't like the little mice in my
house and I never really even thought about it before, but I've
trapped them with these. Until I read your book, I hadn't even
really thought about it. It was like this nice thing I did to get
rid of the mice. Clearly, we're not talking about that then that
mouse family would then be able to sue me. It's rather, how would
that this work in your [inaudible 00:44:33]
Martha Nussbaum:
Okay, well, the first thing to say is that my principles do
have a self-defense principle. So if the creature is threatening
either your wellbeing or that of other creatures, you could use
lethal force against that creature, but you should think of other
possibilities. So I think for mice and rats, sterilization is a
much better possibility. And it's being used already in big cities.
I think New York has had a lot of success with that. But in any
case, so that's the first thing to say. But the other thing is that
if you want to... Well, so let's see. I want to back up and see
where we were now with this question. What we...
August Baker:
Was it about the standing [inaudible 00:45:14]
Martha Nussbaum:
So who goes to court.
August Baker:
Yes.
Martha Nussbaum:
Now the first thing is you don't have to be a lawyer to go to
court. Of course, most of us don't know law. And I myself
[inaudible 00:45:25] have a law degree. So if I had to go to court,
I would hire the best lawyer I could and I wouldn't do it myself.
And even if I did have a law degree, I probably would hire somebody
else to do it. But then there might be many people, and there are
many people who can't even do that. They can't indicate their
preferences to a lawyer because they have cognitive disabilities,
either lifelong or because they aged a certain amount. And then
they need two things. They first need a guardian, and then the
guardian would hire the lawyer. And of course there are many rules
and laws bristling with rules about how the guardian has to behave,
what fiduciary duties of the guardian are and so forth.
And this is the kind of thing that I think we really need for
animals. There's absolutely no reason why, let's say a friend of
mine who now has Alzheimer's disease is and is in a nursing home,
why he should be able to go to court in his own name as the
plaintiff of an action, even though, of course the guardian would
bring the action and then the lawyer would argue the case and an
animal could not do that. There's absolutely no reason. There's
absolutely no constitutional reason, it's been agreed by legal
experts. And the thing is, a lot of times there are laws regulating
how that animal should be treated, but those laws are not enforced.
So it's already come up many times, who can go to court to demand
the enforcement of these laws.
Well, it turns out that a human has to show, to have standing
you have to show a particularized injury. Now, what human being has
a particularized injury when the laws against animal cruelty are
not being enforced? Well, courts have wrestled with this for
decades, but what they emerged with is something pretty crazy. It's
that the human being has to say, I have an aesthetic injury. My
eyes [inaudible 00:47:22] because this is so ugly, what... They
don't even count an ethical injury. But the injury that gets you
into court, it's got to be an aesthetic injury. This is just crazy.
The injury is to the animal and so it should be the animal that
goes to court.
Four countries in the world already allow animals to be legal
plaintiffs. One is India, we've already talked about that. But
there's Argentina, Ecuador, and Columbia. Now, Columbia was really
interesting because Pablo Escobar brought all these other wild
animals to Columbia because he liked them. And hippos bred very
prolifically and they were causing a nuisance. And so the
legislature said, let's go and shoot all the hippos. And they
passed the law that the hippos would be shot. But a humane
organization went to court, but the hippos were the plaintiffs, the
legal plaintiffs because they do give animals standing in Columbia.
And they won. And then so right now there's a contraception program
that's been substituted for the killing program. So that is a good
idea.
And there's no reason legally why the US can't do this. It
just seems very threatening [inaudible 00:48:33] people, and of
course, particularly to the industries that make a great profit off
of animal suffering.
August Baker:
And that was also a fascinating discussion in the book. I
guess I will throw out some objections that, probably only have
time for one, but that I think a lot of people would have. Which is
I think a lot of people will think, I understand it's not good to
dominate other humans, and I can respect that, but once we talk
about our being animals and being similar to other animals,
shouldn't we recognize our own... And here's this assumption, I
have no idea where it comes from or whether it's founded, but that
we have this inner beast in ourselves or this aggression, and it's
part of our nature to want to dominate other things, other animals,
that it's natural for us to do that. I would think that would be
something you might hear.
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, yeah. You can certainly hear. But like a lot of animals,
we learn, and our behavior is not purely from genetic heritage, but
from social learning. And I think most of the aggression that
humans engage in is from bad social learning. We know from
psychological experiments that the minute a baby cries, it's gender
labeled. Even if the person in the experiment doesn't know what the
real gender is, they say, "He's angry. He wants to get what he
wants." And so that behavior is projected onto that little baby.
And as the baby grows up, they learn, that's the proper behavior
for a little boy. And so that, of course, I don't think all
aggression is male gendered, but a lot of it is and that is
learned.
Now, we also know that we can deflect whatever aggressive
impulses we have into other more fruitful courses. So I mean, what
are sports really, but a way of deflecting the bodily part of the
aggressive urge. I don't think some of them do it very well. My
previous book before this was partly about sexual assault in the
sports world. And there's so much aggression that's not properly
deflected in that world, but it's getting better. And I think we
are learning better and I think certainly particularly in baseball
and in basketball, the norms are really good right now. And the
norms for proper conduct, both domestic violence and sexual assault
are really evolving in a good way. So animals are like that too.
They can learn.
Now, how much and where and so on? Not clear for every
species, but we do know that most behavior of the large mammals is
learned behavior. So why should we... I mean, we know that we are
irresponsible if we don't train a companion dog to behave well, if
the dog is aggressive. Any pit bull has an aggressive, let's say,
genetic capacity. But it doesn't have to manifest itself. As people
who own... And, well, I won't say own, who are companions of pit
bulls know very well they can be loving and very reliable
companions if they're properly trained. So too with human beings,
it's like if you just think, oh, because I'm a human, I get to beat
my wife, that's not correct.
August Baker:
Yeah, no, I understand. That makes sense. Unfortunately, our
time is up and I realize I was so nervous at the beginning that I
forgot to even name the book, which is Justice for Animals: Our
Collective Responsibility by Professor Martha C Nussbaum.
Professor, thank you so much for joining me today. I really
appreciate it.
Martha Nussbaum:
Hey, thank you. I really enjoyed that. It was a good
conversation.
August Baker:
Thank you.
Martha Nussbaum:
Thank you very much.
August Baker:
Bye.
Martha Nussbaum:
Bye.