Episode 69 - Martha Nussbaum on Animal Justice Transcript

Ellie: 0:00

Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to note that my audio is not quite up to our usual standards. I was having some technical difficulties. It's only a problem with my audio stream, and I hope you don't find it distracting, but just wanted to state our apologies off the bat for that. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:29

The podcast where two philosophy professors apply philosophy to everyday life.

Ellie: 0:34

I'm your co-host, Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:37

And I'm your co-host, Dr. David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:40

David, we just had an episode on Heroes, and how fitting is it that in this episode we get to talk to a real life hero, a living legend, if you will.

David: 0:51

And I will. A real legend.

Ellie: 0:53

Absolutely. I devoured her profile in the New Yorker in 2016 on a long plane ride. This amazing article talking about her trajectory as a philosopher. All of the incredibly important work that she's done, and this was published at a time when I was really needing some inspiration and feeling a bit lost. Having just finished my dissertation, not sure where I was going to go next. Like reading this 2016 New Yorker profile brought me so much joy and so much life, and solidified her status as hero to me.

David: 1:25

Yeah, and of course the her in question is Dr. Martha Nussbaum and we're so happy to have her on with us today. We both have been reading her work for a long time. In your case, Ellie, I believe you began with her work, Upheavals of Thought. I've been reading her since I was an undergrad, and she's had a fascinating and influential career. So definitely a powerhouse in the contemporary philosophical world.

Ellie: 1:53

For real. She has worked in so many different areas. She has truly helped shape the world that we live in and hopefully will continue to do so in future decades. Not to mention she's won all of the fancy awards. She's a recipient of the Kyoto Prize, which is basically the highest prize possible for fields not eligible for a Nobel, as well as the 2018 Berggruen Prize, which is literally a 1 million award given to a significant living philosopher and the Holberg Prize. All of this is for good reason because her work has been, as I said, extremely influential. David, give us a breakdown of her career trajectory thus far for those who may have heard of Martha Nussbaum but aren't quite sure how she's been influential.

David: 2:34

One way to think about what unifies a lot of her work is the fact that she goes back to Greek and Roman thought in order to see what lessons it still holds for us for thinking about morality, about politics, and about law. Her early work was on Greek tragedy and its relationship to moral theory. For instance, she wrote a book called The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. This was published in 1986. And in this book, she makes the argument that if we want to think much more richly about what it means to lead a moral life, maybe we shouldn't go back to ancient philosophers like Plato as much as we should to ancient tragedians, the classics of Greek tragedy, because the tragedians really understood something that Plato didn't understand as well, which is human life is ridden by luck, by fragility, by accidents, in short, by tragedy and moral theory really needs to account for the fact that we are not masters of our own destiny. Now after this early work on tragedy, she began working on a number of subjects. She wrote a book that I read as an undergrad called Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, where she's entering into these debates that are happening in the 1990s about whether or not academia should become multicultural. How do we incorporate non-white, non-European perspectives in university classrooms, in administration, just in the institution of higher learning? And for thinking about that question, she does that same return to antiquity this time. She goes back to the stoics and she looks in particular to the stoic value of cosmopolitanism as a way of arguing that one way to come to the defense of multiculturalism in the 1990s is by framing it in terms of the stoic ideal of the cosmopolitist, a citizen of the world. Now, today, she is very well known for what we're going to be talking to her about, which is her capabilities approach which is a way of thinking about morality and politics that is largely inspired by Aristotle and especially the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, which can be roughly translated into flourishing. And the core idea behind the capabilities approach that Professor Nussbaum advocates is that people are entitled to all the necessary resources and opportunities that they may need in order to fulfill their potential or to actualize their capabilities. She first developed this in connection to sex in a 1999 book called Sex and Social Justice, and then she expanded it to discrimination on the basis of disability for example, in the book that you first read of hers, Ellie, Upheavals

of Thought: 5:28

The Intelligence of Emotions, which came out in 2001, and now she's coming out with this new book called Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, where she explains what this capabilities approach has to say about how we should treat other animals.

Ellie: 5:46

And I think this is such an exciting new direction, not only for her work, but also for philosophy in general. This idea that this really influential capabilities approach, which was originally developed in connection with human flourishing can be extended outside of the domain of human life to that of non-human animals, so I can't wait to talk about it with her. I will also say I, I love this trajectory you've given David, and this is only part of the story because she has written plenty of other books too. She is so prolific. Not to mention she is, like I said earlier, just fabulous, like has great style, is kind of unabashedly okay with being overtly femme. She'll talk about her femme style in various publications, and as somebody who you know, has kind of similar tendencies, I feel like there's a, I don't know, just like a cool thing going on there. She's paving the way for those of us who want to be taken seriously as let's say, heavyweight philosophers as while also being interested in a good sweater. And not to mention, she also has a background in theater. So we have, we have some other similarities as well.

David: 6:58

Yeah. I, I, I read online that she initially wanted to pursue theater in New York and then, you know, pivoted over to philosophy. And because she looks back to ancient tragedy quite a bit, that interest continues

Ellie: 7:11

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David: 7:11

in her work. And not only does she have this background in theater and heavy hitting, philosophical wit,

Ellie: 7:19

She's also a legal scholar.

David: 7:20

Yes, exactly. And so she comes to the defense on the international legal arena for a much more qualitative, humanistic way of thinking about what it means to really flourish.

Ellie: 7:34

Today we are interviewing Martha Nussbaum about her most recent book, Justice for Animals.

David: 7:40

How has the impact of humans systematically harmed non-human animals the world over?

Ellie: 7:46

What are our ethical responsibilities to animals and what are their responsibilities to each other?

David: 7:51

And how can laws facilitate the flourishing of non-human animals?

Ellie: 7:59

Dr. Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freind distinguished Professor of law and ethics, appointed in the Department of Philosophy and the law school at the University of Chicago. She previously taught at Harvard University, Brown University, and Oxford University. Professor Nussbaum is internationally renowned for her work in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy in the arts. She has received numerous awards and honorary degrees and is the author of over 22 books, including, and these are all only in the last six years, Anger and Forgiveness, Aging Thoughtfully, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, and Citadels of Pride. Today we speak with her about her newest book, Justice for Animals. Dr. Nussbaum, we could not be more excited and honored to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.

David: 8:47

Welcome.

Martha: 8:48

Thank you so much for having me on the show. Great pleasure.

Ellie: 8:52

It's wonderful to be able to talk about your new book today. And I wanted to start off by just pointing out how exciting an intervention this book is into contemporary debates about animal ethics and animal rights. And one thing that really struck me is that you begin by stating that arguments for treating animals well are not new. For instance, the ancient Indian Emperor Ashoka and the Greek philosopher Periphery argued against cruelty to animals and in favor of vegetarianism. Yet in the intervening millennia, not only have humans continued to mistreat animals, things have gotten a lot worse. There's environmental destruction, and thanks to this, there's not an animal on earth today whose life has not been influenced by humans most often for the worse. Can you tell those who haven't yet read your book about why this situation is so dire? And maybe you can mention one or more of the animals that you discuss in the book.

Martha: 9:44

Yeah, well, the, the situation, first of all, human beings dominate everywhere on the land where the habitats of many large animals are contaminated beyond repair, in the sea, where whales and other marine mammals are choked by plastic trash and driven from their, their habitat, by sound pollution from oil drilling, and in the sky where burns migratory birds are large numbers from air pollution. So it's everywhere. We are, humans are, in control everywhere. And furthermore, the very crowding that has ensued over the years has created problems that didn't exist before. I think animals always had a lot of trouble, but now they're competing for habitat with human habitations, and there's great adversarial struggle in these, especially in Africa. The other thing that didn't exist a long time ago was the factory farming industry, which I think should really be terminated in the short term. That, my first goal for the near future is to get rid of that, and animals are tortured in terrible ways in that industry. There are pigs who live in these gestation crates, which is a metal enclosure, just exactly the size of the pink's body with Neville slats through which the pink defecates into a sewage lagoon below, and she can't even turn around, she can't lie down, she can't have any company of any kind. So this is a real torture for an intelligent, clean and social animal to be forced to defecate and hear where she lives and eats. That's not what pigs like to do, and to have no company at all. Another might be the, the whale that I, I give the name Hal to this humpback whale, like the one on the cover that I saw on the whale watching boat because Hal Whitehead is one of the greatest whale scientists, and Hal lives very well right now off the Great Barrier Reef. He's able to migrate with his pod. They sing together this wonderful, mysterious whale song, and people love to watch them, but they don't interfere. But now increasingly, all types of whales are suffering from human domination. So some species, like white whales and gray whales are almost extinct because of harpooning, but also because of the fishing lines that are used to catch lobsters that wrap around their bodies and cut them to shreds. But Hal would be out in in the deeper waters and he would suffer most from plastic trash. There are whales that have washed up on the beaches and in the Philippines and other places that are found to contain 88 pounds of plastic trash, single-use items like bottles, but even a pair of flip flops. So that's what happens to whales. They swallow it because it looks appetizing, but it doesn't give any nutrition, but it stays in their digestive tract so that they can't really eat anything else. So Hal might, well, in the future, starve to death like that. So that is what happens to well, birds. Well, there are many things that happen to birds, the ones we eat and do worse because they're part of the factory farming industry. But even migratory birds suffer from air pollution the same way we do, and in fact, they also crash into buildings. So that's just a sample of the things that can happen.

David: 13:24

Well, let me ask you a follow up about this, because you began by saying that humans dominate all over the place. We dominate on land, we dominate in the oceans, we dominate the air. And this is something that comes up explicitly in the chapter of your book, where you talk about the wild and the notion that there is no such thing as the wild anymore. There is no last refuge for animals where they can exist outside of all human influence. And this is the reason that you give for arguing that we cannot follow some members of the animal liberation movement who argue for a complete detachment of human from animal life. And so I'm wondering whether you can talk a little bit about that, about how you think about human intervention, given that in fact, animals are subject to human domination anywhere they are found.

Martha: 14:16

Well, the notion of the wild was a romantic fantasy anyway, that made more by human beings who wanted to reinvigorate their lagging emotions by imagining the charge that you get out of being in the wild. But now it's just false. There are no spaces that are not curated and maintained by humans in many ways, either benignly or malignantly. So you take a large animal refuge in Kenya, and that is a benign space. They try to take care of the animals in certain ways without, without interfering too much in their way of life. But they do spray the areas where seat sea flies. They treat various curable disease that the animals might contract, and in general, they just watch over the animals. They, they take care who comes in. Not too many people can come in and poachers absolutely cannot come in. So that that's a place where humans are trying to take care of the animals, but it's only in virtue of human intervention that those animals are not slain in massive numbers by poachers and die of various treatable diseases. So other spaces that are not curated, like the open sea, terrible things happen. First, I would mention that in the coastal waters, animals can be to some extent taken care of. So there has been litigation about the Navy Sonar Program and the US Navy Sonar Program has been declared illegal under the marine animal protection act because it has what are called in the law, adverse impacts on the lives of whales. They delay reproduction, they delay migration. They show heightened levels of stress, hormones and so on. But once you get out into the deep seas, all bets are off. And the oil companies are eager to find oil, of course, beneath the sea. And what they do when they're, they, before they even drill, is to send air bombs down to the floor of the sea. These make a huge amount of noise. So all of the time, threats of air bombs are going off. And whales who negotiate their world primarily by sound, not by side or smell, it's very disturbing and they have shown heightened levels of stress all over the place. So that's the example of the space that people might have thought was a world open, wild frontier. But it isn't. Human beings are on the scene everywhere, and of course, the skies are an example too.

David: 16:49

Now I want to pivot here to thinking now about the philosophical core of your book, because the central argument that you make depends on the claim that justice for animals is about promoting opportunities for animals to flourish in accordance to their own ways of living. In the sense you apply a philosophical theory for which you are very well known, your capabilities approach to animal ethics. What are capabilities on your view and why do you argue that the capabilities approach works better than other ethical frameworks for doing justice to the fullness and the complexity of animal life?

Martha: 17:27

Okay. Well, the capabilities approach was introduced both by me and by economist, Amartya Sen, who developed it in a slightly different way. And at first it was an approach to how we measure the goals of development in the human world. How do we decide whether people in the nation are doing well? And there the claim was we don't just look at gross national product per capita, but instead we should look at what people are actually able to do and to be. So what capabilities are, are answers to that question, what are these people actually able to do, what to be? Their spaces open for choice, opportunities? To do, for people to do things that they value. Now, I have just decided that this is a perfectly good approach to use for non-human animals as well, and what I want to suggest is the question should be, are these animals able to choose to live a life that's the characteristic life of that type of animal, which of course must allow for sufficient individual variation. And that's part of what we would want to allow. Uh, but we would make a capabilities list, I mean, our made one for humans. We would make a list for each species of animal, and it would be a list of the opportunities that we ought to protect up to some reasonable threshold level for each animal. Now, the other approaches that are in play right now, some very influential, do not do that. And let me explain. The first one is the approach that I call the so like us approach. And this is used by a very influential legal activist, Steven Wise, who uses it to litigate to get certain animals that he thinks are very like human beings into better conditions. An ape in one case, an elephant in another. And what he says is that because these animals are very like human beings. Therefore, they ought to have the status of persons in law and they ought to be able to have better conditions. Now, first of all, of course, that just does nothing for so much animal suffering, all the other species, because he thinks only great apes, elephants, and navy whales get into this exalted category. But second, it trigs on the old religious idea of the latter of nature with humans ensconced to the top, theorist to God. And the rest of nature trickling along down to the lowest one. In fact, it's just an idea that's empirically wrong. Animals are complicated beings. They have varieties of cognitive complexity, some of which humans don't have. Dolphins can look at what's inside an object by their kind of echolocation. They can send reverberations toward the object and the reverberations that come back tell them what's inside the object. We, we can't do that one. Dolphin actually realized her trainer was pregnant by her capacity for echolocation before the trainer herself knew that she knew.

David: 20:26

Whoa.

Martha: 20:28

So that's a, an example of something we can't do. Birds can, of course, wonderfully travel all over the globe and find their way back again because they can sense magnetic fields. It's like an extra sense that they have. So in short, there's just not a single vertical ranking. Animals have wonderfully different forms of intelligence and complexity and the ones that suit their particular ecological niche. But the second problem with the theory is that it just got ethics backwards. We should be caring about what happens to animals because of them. But for Steven Wise, it's because of us. Because they're like us. We do something good for them. And so these are the reasons I don't really think this approach is very useful. But the second one is, is a lot better. This is the approach, very philosophical approach of Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill. And today, Peter Singer. Now this utilitarian approach was a big revolutionary development Bentham sounded a clarion call to concern for animals in his famous footnote in The Principles of Morals and Legislation by saying that they're equal to humans in their capacity for suffering, and that that is the criteria of good treatment. And just as we shouldn't deny people equal rights because of the color of their skin, so too the hairiness of the skin or the curvature of the spine should not be reasons to deny the sensitive being from a chance to live free for ping. So that is really great and it does have radical implications. Bentham, who already opposed hunting and fishing for sport. Singer of course, has been one of the great people objecting to the factory farm industry. But the problem is it flattens the world too much. So for Bentham and the Benthamites, pain is the one bad thing, pleasure, or in Singer's case, the satisfaction of preferences is the one good thing. But actually animals want many things, not just freedom from pain. They want society of other animals of their kind, or in some cases, different kinds. They want free space to move around here. They want playing and fun. There's so many things that, that they want, and it's not the case that these are all reducible to. Some animals who have grown up in zoos don't actually feel pain when they're denied company and a lot of space to move around in because they can't even imagine what they've never known. Animals are not just genetically programmed to live a certain life. They learn a lot by social learning, and if you don't have that, you don't know that you should be walking 200 miles in the jungle. Nonetheless, it is the deprivation, and so he just leaves out something that's very pertinent into the animal lives because these preferences are what I would call adaptive preferences, that's something that economists use to designate preferences formed under conditions of domination. Therefore, they're not accurate indications of what the animal really should have. So one further problem with the utilitarian approach is that it focuses on a state. So what you're supposed to get at the end of the day. State of satisfaction now for both humans and other animals that ignores agency. We don't want to just sit in a state of satisfaction. We want to do now, get whatever we get, remain even fail, forget by our own effort and engagement. But that's true of other animals too. So the utilitarian approach is heroic and, and was very promising at one time. But I think it's day has passed now the third is Christine Korsgaard the Kantian philosopher's approach in her recent book, Fellow Creatures. Now, Chris was a doctoral student of mine, actually she wrote her thesis on Aristotle and Kant, and actually in this book there's a lot of Aristotle here. There's a whole sense that Athens have a form of life is there, but her main allegiance is to come. She totally rejects his actual views about animals, that they're just things that we can use as we please. But she claims to Kant too much to suit me when she says that because animals, other than humans, lack the higher moral abilities of self-identity formation and deliberation. Therefore, they can only be what she calls passive citizens. What she means by that is they can be helped by us, you know, given a handout, but they can never take an active role in saying, lives they can have where they want to have, but actually that's not true. Animals can indicate their preferences in all kinds of ways. Many have a kind of language that we increasingly understand, but even if not, they indicate what their preferences are in all sorts of ways. There's anyone who lives with a companion dog or cat knows all too well. You, you can't get away with ignoring the animal's preferences. So we need an approach that allows animals to be active indicators, active participants in the creation of a society. And you know, that doesn't mean that they go and vote and they hold offices because lots of humans don't do that. Very young children, people with extreme cognitive disabilities. All of these are represented by surrogates, by guardians. And so the same could be true of animals. Their interests can be represented when legislation is made by humans who are attended to the preferences that animals express. So my approach comes along and says, what we really want is an approach that fosters the opportunities of each kind of extensioned animal. And I'll say something about sanctions in a minute. To live the kind of life that's characteristic of that species. So the capabilities that are protected are spaces, the animal doesn't have to use them, and that allows rollout of individual variation. But in any case, the capabilities that are protected are the ones that are roughly characteristic of that species. Now, of course, we have to say which, which animals? And I think the right place to draw the line, and here's where I kind of chime in with the utilitarians, is sentience. That is the ability to feel pain. But not only that, the ability to perceive the world from a point of view. The idea that there's really someone at home in there, so to speak, and that as it turns out, and my book is full of current research, I love doing this reading because there's so much good scientific work now. This includes, sentience includes all vertebrate. And some invertebrates. It definitely includes fish and what I devote a lot of time to really interesting experiments with fish that show that they actually feel pain, but they're invertebrates, well, cephalopods like the octopus are included. There are some that there's a lot of doubt about crustaceans. There's a lot of doubt. And insects. I, I think it's pretty clear that most insects are not sentient. There's debate about these, and we can keep on refining the specifics, but basically the idea that that ability creates a dividing line in nature between animals that were subject to a theory of justice, because I think justice has to do with striving and not being thwarted in your striving. And other creatures that we could care about for other reasons, for ethical reasons. And of course plants who are, are not sanctioned, but we should still care about them for many other reasons, but not for reasons of justice. So that's basically the theory that I try to map out.

Ellie: 28:36

Yeah, thank you. I, and I think really reframing it away from just the capacity to feel, pleasure and pain and more towards the capability of actually, you know, being an agent in the world is so rich and it has a lot of resonance with a number of views. I think that you get in the history of philosophy around what it means to be sentient, whether that's Spinoza's canatist, this kind of striving, this basic sense of striving or Nietzches will to power or Aristotle's eudaimonia, perhaps closer to the inspirations from which you're drawing. But on a concrete level, one thing that I know I had some, some questions about which you address in the book, but I noticed we were also recently asked in a New York Times interview is about the role of predators here. What do we do about the fact that it seems to be part of what it means to thrive for some animals, for them to eat other animals, but then not potentially impinges on those other animals' ability to thrive themselves?

Martha: 29:38

Okay, well that of course, first of all is way down the road because I'm only concerned suffering that humans inflict and most of the suffering of animals is human inflicted.

Ellie: 29:48

Human inflicted, absolutely.

Martha: 29:51

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Ellie: 30:10

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Martha: 31:12

So creatures are harming other creatures. What should we think about? Well, there's one philosophical view that I think we should reject, and that's Jeff McMahon. He didn't actually endorse the view, he just floated it in an oped, so I'm not going to pin the view on him, he thought because of these harms, we should engineer the obsolescence of all predatory species. Now that we're not all big a mess of the environment and ecosystem, there's a reason to be self vindictive towards these animals. They're not doing anything that's wrong by their lights. You know, they don't have the awareness of, of the wrongness and the pain that they're inflicting. So there is a problem. We can't get out of the problem by just waving the wand of nature and saying, oh, that's all nature. Now what do we do? Well in our homes when we have companion animals, I think we do quite a lot. That is a cat, is a predator, and yet most people do not allow their cat to go and eat little birds. They do things well if they keep the cat indoors. Then they give the cat other things to do that exercise. Its predatory abilities like playing with balls or scratching posts and doing various kinds of things that prevent the pain of frustration of its capacities, but not allowing the little bird if the cat goes outside while it's more difficult, have to watch over the cat. But I think most people do. They don't like the idea that the cat would be chasing a little bird. So that's what we do in our homes, and I think with dogs as well. The dogs, there's a lot that we do by education to prevent predatory behaviors. So there are breeds like the pit bull, which if trained in a certain way can be very predatory towards small humans and other animals. But that's not the way people train them and they're actually held legally accountable. We're not training them in the bad. That's what we do with companion animals and same with horses and other animals we live with. But out in the wild it's, it's different If we could have these predatory animals in zoos, well, we know that one good zoos do because they know that people don't want to see a tiger tearing a little kid now limb from limb. They do give the tiger a weighted ball to play with and they try to arrange that its predatory capacities would not be frustrated. But we would still not kill other animals and they give it humanely raise me. But obviously if the animal's not in an enclosure, that that won't work. So what, what can we do? Well, I think, I think there's nothing morally wrong with interfering with the lives of creatures in the so-called wild in small ways that allow it to continue leading its form of life, for example. Curing certain diseases or doing surgery on a tiger, if it breaks, its slim and so on. But to actually stop predation would would just mess up the ecosystem so much that if we tried to do that, it would be an instance of hubris that would wreck a lot of lives. So I think we shouldn't interfere. Given our tremendous ignorance of consequences, we should not interfere except at the margins. Now, what might those margins. Well, one thing is that we know that predation is actually staged by nations that have a big tourist industry in wild animals know that one reason tourists pay a lot of money to come to that country. And I'm thinking of Botswana, where I recently was on an eco safari, is to see predation. People love it. It's like the Roman gladiatorial games go out at 4:00 AM in the Jeep to see a whole pack of wild dogs. Very rare type of dog, leap on an antelope and tear it limb from limb before the antelope is even dead. It's a very bad death, really a cruel death. And people love watching now, so I, I sound that quite disgusting and horrible. But anyway, that's what people pay money for. So I think you should stop that. You should stop staging it. And I know very well that the people of Botswana artificially keep up the numbers of those wild dogs that do the predation because they know that you, you, if you want to see predation by a leopard or by a tiger or a lion, it's very hard. It might not happen because it's always at night and so forth, but we, they, they do know that these wild dogs, which hunt at about five in the morning, they're very reliable and you can always see predation. So they aren't officially prop up the numbers of those dogs, and they make sure that they stage a predation for every group so I would say, I call that sato-tourism, and I want to say, just as human beings should learn to deflect our predatory instincts onto harmless projects, one of them might be sports or maybe it might not be so harmless. But anyway, we should not allow the predatory instincts of animals to be objects for human greed and human gloating. So that would be one interference at the margins that I would be willing to contemplate.

Ellie: 36:28

And one of the things that I found really interesting in your discussion of this as well is the proposal that perhaps for say a tiger, we would have them play around with a weighted ball, but then actually feed them humane meat. And I think this kind of, I don't know if we want to call it engineering, but a sort of crafting of animal's environment in a way that's not actually doing term to them in the sense of, like the factory farm that you mentioned at the beginning leads into questions about sort of how, how we're viewing the status of animals within their own societies versus within our society. And so I want to return to the question of the passive versus active citizen that you brought up earlier because in your view, as you mentioned, you're really viewing animals as active citizens rather than passive creatures who await human protection as Korsgaard suggests. And so they're agents who are going to tell us when they're frustrated and when their lives are diminished. It's just that we don't really listen and justice requires that we take these claims from animals seriously and incorporate them into our legal and political institutions. So I'd be curious to hear what you think some concrete ideas might be for what it means to incorporate animals into political life, given that animals don't seem to be aware of or interested in, say, human politics.

Martha: 37:50

Yeah. Well the first thing I, I want to go back, uh, to the beginning of your question and say that that example of the tiger playing with the weighted ball is not what I think we should try to create in the world where tigers live outside of zoos. And given that, I don't think tigers are ethically kept in zoos. That's not, that's just an example. It's not a suggestion for something I should really,

Ellie: 38:12

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's helpful.

Martha: 38:13

Okay. So I mean, take a city like Chicago now, of course, we've already talked a little bit about companion animals and how they have to have not only opportunities and I think there should be a lot more opportunities for running off leash for dogs, a lot more dog parks and a lot more opportunities also to signal abuse. I agree with people who've suggested that there should be a ministry of animal welfare that's similar to the Department of Child and Family Services in Chicago, where people like me would be mandatory reporters of witnessed abuse with animals, so, so all of that I think would be hat we would have. Now the animals also have to have some duties too. So that clearly has to be exercised partly through the partnership with the companion. But the animal has to learn not to bite and to inhibit its any instincts it has to be a, a danger to other people. And the cat might have to learn not to pray on other people's birds and so all of that is happening. And then it can be the object of litigation if people don't do it. So people can be sued for having a dog who bites other people. But then there are animals who more recently come into the city who people just don't know quite what to do. Coyotes in Chicago now, at first the reaction would've been, oh, let's defend ourselves against this dangerous animal. Let's just shoot them all. That was just ignorant because coyotes are not dangerous. They don't approach humans. They're very shy, and they will only bite if they're cornered. So people now understand that the right thing to do if a coyote is bothering some people in a residential neighborhood is not to go in and shoot the coyote, but rather to treat it gently and relocate it to a forest preserve or somewhere surrounded. So just learning how we can live together. And there's a growing literature, even in philosophy about what are called liminal animals, heart, wild, and part domestic, and right there are the animals we don't like so much like rats. Now, I do think that killing and self-defense is okay and defense of others, and so we might use that to stamp out some rats. However, in law of self-defense, you know, that most good laws of self-defense require you to back up first before you use lethal force. So just like that. I think we should try some other means of keeping the rat infestation down before we would actually go and massively kill rats. And contraception and sterilization is, has already been tried, and that's tried a lot on insects too, mosquitoes, and so it's the most infective way to keep the mosquito population down. And it's a very effective way of keeping the rat population down, so, so I'm all in favor of using animal contraception in cases like that, where the alternative would be conflict. In so-called wild spaces, which I don't, which are not really wild. There's a lot more conflict, for example, between elephants and villagers in Africa now. The elephants aren't doing anything wrong, and they're not even predatory. You're just trying to get the bark on trees that they need to live, but they go into these villages and they strip the bark from the tree in a way that causes the villagers great loss of livelihood and great frustration. So I, I went to Botswana thinking, oh, everyone loves elephants. Of course, I find that they are much less loved predators because they do direct horror to the village. So what can we do? Well, there are groups involved in negotiation there and thinking about how do we allot territory and how do we allot populations in order that we can all live together. First of all, humans have to keep their population growth down. That's a must. In some cases, not the elephant case because elephants are endangered. But in cases like Elks, there may be a need for animal contraception. But not for reasons of sheer greed. Like when the warmers in Wyoming want to have fewer wild horses than they want the wild horses to have contraception. That's because of greed, because they want more tattle to graze on the lands. So we don't want to use contraception to bolster greed, but we might use it if, let's say a given population, whether it's deer or elks, are overgrowing in such a way that they would be starving. And the alternatives though, right now are being used are things like introducing hunters to shoot them or introducing wolves to tear them limb from limb. And I, I don't like those solutions. I think contraception is a better solution than those. So anyway, you're just thinking about what a multi-species world will look like. A very hard job, but we have to do that job and try to figure out how, how we can all live together.

David: 43:20

Yeah, and I, I have to say, your book is so rich with concrete detail and, uh, I, I am so impressed by the fact that you don't run away from those moments of tension or tragedy, actually. In fact, you run directly to them and try to get us to think practically and pragmatically about what it would mean to create a world where those conflicts would not emerge. And at some point in the book, you identify yourself as a liberal reformist with a revolutionary streak. And I thought that was well reflected in in the work that you've done here. Now we're running out of time today, so I just have one final question and hopefully you can give us a couple of morsels of thought for us to chew on here. Vegetarian morsels of thought, really.

Ellie: 44:02

Or or mainly lab grown meat morsels.

David: 44:06

One of the chapters in your book is about companion animals and you point out that unfortunately because people think of companion animals as pets, as fashion accessories, as maybe a really fancy piece of sentient furniture to add to the house. It creates this paradox where those who think that they love animals the most end up being the ones who abuse them most systematically out of ignorance and out of an unwillingness to learn about the capabilities that they should be cultivating in those species. And so can you tell us a few things about what you think our obligations are to those animals like cats and dogs with whom we share a domestic and often a family dynamic?

Martha: 44:54

Yeah, I think you're right that people are very obtuse sometimes, but I do think people are getting better because there are so many ways they, they can get the knowledge they need. I think it's rather like the decision to have a child. To take an animal, a dog or a cat into your life, whether it's adopting a shelter animal or getting an animal from a breeder, which I don't favor because a lot of breeders do a very bad job of the conditions under which the animals are raised, they're bad, but anyway, it's a big decision. People during COVID would adopt an animal and then when things open up, they need to travel. They just take the animal back. So not that you are stuck with that animal and it's part of your life, and that means an obligation to listen to it, it's preferences and obligation to exercise sufficiently. A lot of dogs do not get enough exercise, and that's one reason I don't have a dog. Given that I travel a lot, I would have to use dog walkers and they would go out and give it two walks a day, and that would just not be enough, and it wouldn't involve any free running for the dog. That's partly the problem of the city that has only a couple dog parks. But anyway, so exercise is one thing, but attention and love are really crucial. The example that I use a lot in the book and a book that I recommend to everyone who listens to this podcast is George Pitcher's book, The Dogs Who Came to Stay. He was one of the first philosophers who wrote about emotions, but he also, with his partner, Ed Cone, adopted two dogs who were abused and then he made a life with them. And he describes this life that they made. And it includes such particular knowledge, such attention, such love, such willingness to spend money on medicine and doctors. And so forth. You know, just the way you would for a member of your own family. So I think that's a template or example of what we could do if we tried. I do think that one difference is that spaying and neutering should be permitted and indeed encouraged. Most animal organizations require it. Actually, you can't even adopt a shelter animal in Chicago without signing a contract saying you spayed or neutered the animal. Now, I believe it would be best if animals could have one litter. You know, giving it one chance to exercise that capability and then the spayed or neutering but that's not the world we're in. The world we're in is the world where there are a lot of animals that are wandering in the streets and they die a horrible death. Cats especially, but dogs too. So in that situation, I think spaying and neuturing is really a good idea and we could justify it by a kind of principle of hypothetical consent. Take the female cat. It's exhausting to have many, many litters and just as human beings, human females don't want to have litter after litter, after litter. But we would like the right to control our own reproduction. I think, you know, female cats, hypothetically, we could reason don't want to have endless, endless litters and kittens, especially knowing, of course, as they would that the kittens would've to be taken from them and probably wouldn't even find homes. Male cats, well, the thing is cats who spray are not pleasant companions. And so they would be let out and they would become strays, and then again they would've a horrible life. So, so these are the things that would make me think that spaying and neutering, passives, the principle of hypothetical consent and uh, still allows the animal some chance to exercise its capabilities, at least ideally.

Ellie: 48:35

These are all so beautiful. So such beautiful recommendations. To kind of pick up on what David, you said earlier, the, the fact that this book as well as I think your work in general really runs toward the trouble rather than away from it and is so willing to terry with. With the practical implications and proposed practical solutions while also having a kind of humility about the ongoing nature of the more we learn, the more things you know, the more these proposals might actually shift a bit. But I, I think there's so much to chew on both theoretically and practically. I'm so grateful. David, you were going to say something as well, it sounded like.

David: 49:08

No, I, I was, I. going to say thank you so much, not just for your time, but for this wonderful work of philosophical scholarship that really inspires what you call ethical wonder, which is a way of thinking about the lives of other animals in such a way that it, it makes us want to strive for a better world in which their strivings are respected.

Martha: 49:29

Oh, thank you very much. And I have to say it went partly my beginning because I started with Greek tragedy and you know, that is the case of facing up to the problem and not letting it run away. And I do have a whole chapter in the book about the tragic dilemmas that arise in animal lives. So yeah, that is.

Ellie: 49:49

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Listeners, be sure to check out Dr. Nussbaum's new book, justice for Animals and Dr. Nussbaum, it's been such, such a pleasure and honor to interview you.

Martha: 50:00

Well, it's great pleasure to meet you and learned something about this podcast, so, so thank you so much for doing this. I'm really enjoyed this a lot.

David: 50:16

If you're enjoying, Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content, and more.

Ellie: 50:34

David, we just finished our interview with Martha Nussbaum. What did you think?

David: 50:39

Woo. Woo. I was so nervous because she's so good. Uh, but she was also very gracious with her answers and, uh, I thought it was really good and really enlightening. And as we mentioned in the interview with her, one of the virtues is that she just goes into so much detail about very practical concerns. You know, what are our duties to animals in the wild? What are our duties to animals that are liminal, that kind of live between the wild or between human societies? What are our responsibilities to domestic companions?

Ellie: 51:11

So what question that I have, which is a very basic question. How we know what other animals' capabilities are and what their modes of flourishing are. This question tends to come up for me pretty much anytime we're talking about animal ethics. And maybe it's a little bit of an unfair question because I don't know that it's necessarily all that obvious what other humans want either and how they're going to flourish. And so I don't mean to imply that we definitely know what all humans want either. But I do think that there are obviously some barriers when it comes to language, et cetera, for thinking about how what might make an animal flourish. I'm thinking, for instance, about the famous essay, What is it like to be a Bat by the philosopher Thomas Nagle, who says that the bat's way of living is so fundamentally different from our own, that it's pretty impossible for us to imagine what the bat's life is like. And I think by extension it would be pretty impossible for me to imagine what a bat's mode of flourishing would be.

David: 52:11

I think there's a difference to be drawn between the limitations that Nagle talks about in that essay, which is about my capacity to imagine the world from the perspective of a bat, I never know what it's like to have echolocation or to move through the world with wings, at most, I can imagine what it is like for a human to imagine that. So we might want to draw a distinction between that and a reasonable assessment and appraisal of how well or how poorly the life of an animal is going in light of its material conditions of existence. So maybe I don't know what the world of the bat looks like, but I can tell when a bat is malnourished, I can tell when a bat is socially isolated. I can tell when a bat has a broken wing, and she says this at one point in the book, even though we might need to create species specific lists of capabilities that we then come to cultivate, in general, we can take the same list of human capabilities that she began with in her work on human wellbeing and human development, and use that as a load star for thinking about the needs of other animals because all the capabilities that she identifies in connection to humans like nourishment, like the development of our cognitive capacities, like sociality. She says those are things that we have not by virtue of just being human, but by virtue of being animals who are vulnerable to, to the world.

Ellie: 53:41

And in respect, I think it might be helpful to quote from the book where she talks about what she means by the kinds of creatures that she has in mind as being candidates for this life of flourishing. She says that this kind of life involves a life of significant striving, and she says, significant striving then includes subjective perception of things that are helpful and harmful. Plus a variety of subjective attitudes such as pain and pleasure, and in addition, numerous other subjective states that motivate behavior, desires and emotions. And I guess another way of phrasing the question is just how we know from the outside that these animals have such subjective attitudes, and this is not a criticism of her book. This is actually a question that I posed to you about your book as well, David, because I I sometimes just get a little bit caught up in wondering like, well, how do we really know based on scans or scientific experiments and stuff like that?

David: 54:37

I don't, Ellie, I love that a lot of your work is about living in the in between and embracing ambiguity, but what, when it comes with animals, like you're like, give me a hard and fast line and do not let there be any porosity in it.

Ellie: 54:51

I said it might be unfair. I, it just always comes up for me.

David: 54:55

Well, it, it might be unfair, but it is interesting and it is a task of delineation and demarcation that Professor, uh, Nussbaum takes on directly in the book, she has a chapter where she says, I'm going to go through different categories of animals, and I will tell you if I think that they make it or don't make it into this domain of subjects of justice. Now, I have to say that I, I would draw the lines differently. There are some difficult cases where she falls on one side and I fall on the other. Just to give you a couple of examples.

Ellie: 55:25

Yeah, please do.

David: 55:26

You know, she talks about insects and she says, well, based on current research on insects, I really don't think they have significant striving. There I I have a, a slightly different intuition and a slightly different reading of contemporary scientific research on, on insect experience and and when she talks about fish, she also draws a distinction between hard bone fish and what are known as elast branch fish, which don't really have hard bones. And she says the latter group don't really meet the conditions that I have for sentient and significance, striving. And so she, she's not afraid to tell us which animals make it and which don't, but in her defense, she's very clear that the lines that she has drawn are tentative and provisional and will need to be revised as our best scientific knowledge about different animals evolves with time.

Ellie: 56:23

Yeah, and that's, as I mentioned in the interview, one thing that I really respect about her work is this willingness to create practical suggestions while also being open to the possibility that they may change in the future. I'm curious to see if this has any implications for plants or if people end up wanting to take things in that direction, because of course, this book is called Justice for Animals, and it is about animals. She very clearly says that the lives of significant striving that she's talking about have to do with sentience, which is an animal characteristic that not even all animals have. But I can't help but sort of have a little bit of the Deleuze in the back of my brain of thinking about how everything in the entire world has this striving, at least on, on his view. I don't know if I agree with him, but I think that would be a Deleuzian rebuttal, which is that not only plants, but really everything is alive.

David: 57:18

Everything is alive. Yes. I mean, plants definitely are alive and she says that and

Ellie: 57:24

Yeah, of course. I, it's of like a weird slippage should go from sentience to, to aliveness, but you know what I mean?

David: 57:30

No, no, but I mean she, she says very clearly that on her view, plants are just not part of the equation, even though they are alive and even though they exhibit some form of intelligence that we are yet to try to figure out the best way to describe. And for her, it has to do with the fact that plants don't have movement, which is important. They don't have that the setting of goals that are then pursued under variable circumstances. And she has a really interesting section of the book where she says, look, ultimately plants are just not even individuals right in, in the sense in which we want to identify an individual animal that is the subject of justice, right? Do we take the branch? Do we take the root? What about those plants you cut a piece and then another one grows. Um, is it the same individual? Is it not? It's just not the right kind of entity for the theory of justice. So even though plants literally flower for her, they just don't flourish. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 58:38

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David: 58:44

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Ellie: 58:54

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 59:01

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.