"Justice for Animals" Book Reaction

This post is a quick sanity break for me from Product Fundamentals season 2 prep, mostly in order to recommend and sing the praises of philosopher Martha Nussbaum's recent book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility.

The book makes the persuasive case for a much broader and more inclusive notion of treating animals with justice than most of us carry, including those of us who already think of ourselves as animal-lovers. You should read it.

Background

Martha Nussbaum is a celebrated philosopher and a professor at my dear alma mater, The University of Chicago. While at Chicago many years ago, I got to hear Nussbaum speak, and she certainly made an impression. Sharp, incisive, grounded in and motivated by earthy problems, simultaneously a modern activist and a serious interlocutor of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers – I'll admit to a bit of an intellectual crush.

So, when I heard that she had recently published a book on the topic of justice for animals, I immediately slotted it in at the top of my reading list and plowed through it.

Nussbaum's big idea in public philosophy is the Capabilities Approach to well-being. This approach, developed with Amartya Sen, is a set of requirements for a good political order: an order in which each individual is able to realize a broad set of capabilities (e.g., living a natural long life, enjoying good health), make choices in a broad set of domains (e.g., when and if to reproduce, where to live), and enjoy the fruits of the good life (e.g., laugh, enjoy sex, live with self-respect).

Capabilities are harder to satisfy than legal rights, because a state of deprivation can make a right irrelevant. The person must really be able to exercise their capabilities, not merely have a theoretical right to do something.

The goal of the Capabilities Approach is, effectively, a modern and democratic update of the goal of Aristotelian ethics: a state of eudaimonia, or human flourishing.

A respect for the capabilities of others leads to the Kantian categorical imperative: we must not treat other people merely as means to our own ends. We must see others as ends unto themselves, even as we also use those people as means toward our ends (for example, in the employer/employee relationship).

What about the animals?

In Justice for Animals, Nussbaum argues that the Capabilities Approach cannot legitimately be confined to humans, but necessarily applies to a broad set of non-human animals.

I'll admit that I was convinced of this from the start, so I'm not bringing the greatest deal of critical rigor to evaluating that claim. I find the argument for including animals under the umbrella of "agents deserving of justice" quite straightforward. Nussbaum puts it in this intuitive form:

"All animals, both human and non-human, live on this fragile planet, on which we depend for everything that matters. We didn’t choose to be here. We found ourselves here. We humans think that because we found ourselves here this gives us the right to use the planet to sustain ourselves and to take parts of it as our property. But we deny other animals the same right, although their situation is exactly the same. They too found themselves here and have to try to live as best they can. By what right do we deny them the right to use the planet in order to live, in just the way that we claim that right? Typically, no argument at all is offered for that denial. I believe that any reason supporting our own claim to use the planet to survive and flourish is a reason for animals to have the same right."

There is, in essence, no place for us to stand from which we can say "we deserve to have our capabilities respected, but all other creatures do not." Nussbaum goes on to dismiss existing common justifications for treating only small sets of animals with justice, such as by weighing their similarity to humans, their degree of social complexity, their use of language, and so on. Nussbaum roundly rejects any notion of a great chain of being, where some animals are higher than others.

Instead, Nussbaum applies a binary distinction:

"According to the CA [Capabilities Approach], each sentient creature (capable of having a subjective point of view on the world and feeling pain and pleasure) should have the opportunity to flourish in the form of life characteristic for that creature."

The opportunity to pursue flourishing isn't rooted in being human. We are all in this together.

Non-sentient creatures (all plants, most insects, some fish/crustaceans/mollusks) are outside this sphere of capabilities. But every mammal, every bird, and many other animals are inside it. While not trivial to measure, sentience can be evaluated by scientific study, so over time, the set of animals considered sentient may shift. But if a creature has a point of view and experiences pain (which becomes rather entangled with the idea of working toward deliberate goals), then that creature deserves justice.

Scientific evaluation is key to the model, both in evaluating the sentience of a creature, as well as in determining "the form of life characteristic for that creature." Nussbaum's model requires a particular understanding of each kind of animal, because the flourishing of a whale is different than the flourishing of a parakeet.

Consequences

Some of the consequences of the argument are logically trivial (if still monumentally difficult to address). Obviously factory farms are an abomination, as are dairy farms. Obviously whaling and the poaching of elephants are abominations, as are cramped zoos. But these things are also so shocking to the conscience that essentially all modern democratic people consider them appalling if we stop to think about it; we deliberately organize ourselves so as not to think about it. While the book engages briefly with these institutions, it doesn't bother to go into them in depth; they're understood to be prima facie awful.

The most far-reaching consequence of the argument is that, because the Capabilities Approach is a fundamentally political framework, non-human animals are entitled to political rights. Nussbaum models the proper treatment of non-human animals on the treatment of children and the cognitively disabled: when they are unable to participate in political or legal life directly, their interests must be represented by a guardian or collaborator. Nussbaum imagines government agencies to monitor animal welfare, similar to the agencies that look out for children. Organizations with a deep understanding of the needs and typical form of life for different animal populations might be deputized to represent their interests in legal proceedings, and to bring legal action on their behalf.

It's worth noting that while the full effects of taking a Capabilities Approach to the well-being of non-human animals would be enormous, there is no tension between CA's ambitious goals and incremental utilitarian-esque progress. Factory farms are a gross moral offense. That said, they can be made better, run in ways that increasingly acknowledge the dignity of the animal. A dignified life and a painless death are better than a tortured life and a painful death, so we should pick up those gains.

Justice and pets

One of the more provocative topics in the book, and the one that made me want to write this post, is Nussbaum's treatment of pet ownership. That's because she (politely and sometimes subtly) challenges most pet ownership as immoral.

I was particularly excited to see this argument made because I have long felt that pet ownership was almost always immoral, and as a result, I have often been told that it's because I "just don't love animals." I've always been offended by that assertion. Nussbaum argues, I think quite effectively, that pet ownership is not a healthy form of love.

Nussbaum dismisses the word "pet" altogether as an anthropocentric violation of the categorical imperative. Pets are ornaments for humans, acting as class markers, emotional support tools, playthings, and so on, rather than entities with their own ends that we are obliged to respect.

Instead, Nussbaum prefers "companion animals." She doesn't categorically forbid companion animals, but in describing the acceptable forms of relationship between humans and companion animals, it sets a very high bar.

Rather than pet and owner, or even pet and "dog mommy," the paradigm for just companionship must be friendship. Discussing friendship in the light of the Kantian categorical imperative, Nussbaum writes,

"[F]riendship is dynamic: friends are active, seeking to benefit one another for the other’s own sake, not one’s own.... Treating another person as an end always involves respect for that person’s form of life. This is rarely commented on in discussions of human friendship, since it is taken for granted that humans share a basic form of life. However, it is important, because humans have different values and plans of life, and befriending someone on condition that this person will drop all her own plans and accept your values and choices is far from a true friendship."

Thus when humans have a companion animal, they cannot reshape the animal's life to fit the human's goals. The animal must be able to pursue its goals in its own normal way of life. This means developing relationships of its own choosing with members of its own kind, controlling its own movement, engaging in its natural forms of play, and getting release for its natural urges for things like sex and hunting (whether directly or through substitute activities).

Yet, so much of pet ownership is predicated on negating the animal's normal form of life. Pet owners mutilate their animals' bodies, limit their ability to interact with other members of their species, control their reproduction, control their access to food, confine them in small spaces for most hours of the day, and so on. This is a terrible model of friendship. It is exploitation for our own purposes, with a thin layer of justification in the form of squishy toys.

Nussbaum considers but rejects the abolition of companion animals altogether: while the process that made domesticated dogs and cats dependent upon humans for survival may or may not have been immoral when it occurred in the murky past, the only practical way to achieve abolition today would involve systematic violence against those very dependents, negating their capabilities.

But Nussbaum is also not on principle opposed to population control, especially through contraception (rather than culling). Because non-human animals cannot control their reproductive urges, she argues, it is appropriate for humans to spay or neuter companion animals if the offspring could not be afforded a life consistent with the goals of the Capabilities Approach.

Since it is so difficult provide a companion animal with an environment in which it can flourish under its characteristic type of life, it seems to me that most domestic animals would be neutered or spayed in a CA world. Combined with Nussbaum's advocacy for neutering stray dogs and cats, and for the abolition of puppy mills and pure-breed programs, it seems to me an all-but-inevitable conclusion of the Capabilities Approach that domestic pet ownership would be greatly curtailed.

For what it's worth, I am fine with this conclusion. I think that most pet ownership is exploitative, and that "Fluffykins loves me" is often a poor paint job over "I've trapped Fluffykins in a state of total dependency upon me." While there are conditions under which companion animals may flourish, those conditions are a far cry from nearly all of the pet ownership relationships I've ever seen. In a just world, there would be far fewer animals living in domestic captivity.

Again, I am the farthest thing from a leading light here: while I don't own a pet and have no desire to do so, I eat lots of meat, and I can't claim any health justification for that strong enough to counterbalance the negative effects. I'm a total hypocrite. But hypocrites can still engage in moral reasoning.

So what?

I strongly encourage picking up Justice for Animals. It is a well-reasoned and compelling argument for an expansive notion of the proper treatment of animals, both wild and domestic. It is a call for a basic reworking of humans' relationship with the many other sentient inhabitants of the world.

The book deals with many topics I didn't touch on here, including predation, our responsibilities with regards to wild animals, the distinctions between the Capabilities Approach and competing models of animal rights, ongoing legal battles in various countries, and more.

If you're already interested in the well-being of animals in the wild and in agriculture, you'll find a fresh and well-articulated argument to refine what you probably already believe.

In particular, if you haven't critically examined the morality of pet ownership, you'll find a provocative mental model that, while not irreconcilable with all forms of animal companionship, raises important moral challenges to much of pet ownership as really practiced.