#martha nussbaum
« [A] revolution in knowledge is revealing the enormous richness and cognitive complexity of animal lives, which prominently include intricate social groups, emotional responses, and even cultural learning. We share this fragile planet with other sentient animals, whose efforts to live and flourish are thwarted in countless ways by human negligence and obtuseness. […] If injustice involves wrongfully thwarted striving—and I think that’s a pretty good summary of the basic intuitive idea of injustice—we cause immense injustice every day, and injustice cries out for accountability and remediation.
But to think clearly about our responsibility, we need to understand these animals as accurately as we can: what they are striving for, what capacities and responses they have as they try to flourish. […We] also need an ethical theory to direct our efforts in policy and law. [The Utilitarian] theory holds that pain is the one bad thing and pleasure the one good thing. [It] looks like a beginning: if we were only to get rid of the torture to which we subject animals daily—through the manifold harms of the meat industry, through habitat destruction, through lethal pollution—we would improve animal lives considerably.
[But Utilitarianism] lacks curiosity about the diversity of goals each animal life pursues. An elephant in a zoo enclosure, or an orca in a pen, might possibly lack pain if well cared for, but she would still lack free movement over a large terrain and the company of a large social group. […] People who care about animals have therefore increasingly turned to a theory known as the Capabilities Approach (CA), [in which] the central question is “What is this creature actually able to do and to be?”
For each species, it must identify the most significant activities and a minimum threshold beneath which we should judge an animal’s life to be unjustly thwarted. It must also allow plenty of room for the individual choices of different members of the species. And then we must propose strategies for achieving that threshold in law and policy. […]
A favorite case of mine is Natural Resources Defense Councilv.Pritzker(2016), in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the US Navy’s sonar program on the grounds that it violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act by impeding several characteristic marine mammal activities […]. This novel interpretation of the statute is exactly what the CA would recommend. Even though the sonar did not cause physical pain, the fact that the whales were unable to live their characteristic lives was sufficient to make it a violation of the statutory requirement to avoid “adverse impact” on marine mammal species.
[…] Achieving even minimal justice for animals seems a distant dream in our world of casual slaughter and ubiquitous habitat destruction. One might think that Utilitarianism presents a somewhat more manageable goal: Let’s just not torture them so much. But we humans are not satisfied with non-torture. We seek flourishing: free movement, free communication, rich interactions with others of our species (and other species too). Why should we suppose that whales, dolphins, apes, elephants, parrots, and so many other animals seek anything less? If we do suppose that, it is either culpable ignorance, given the knowledge now so readily available, or a self-serving refusal to take responsibility, in a world where we hold all the power. »
— Martha Nussbaum, “What We Owe Our Fellow Animals” in The New York Review of Books
