The physicist Stephen Hawking once hosted a party for time travellers, but only sent out the invitations after the date had already passed. No one came. If people from the future had turned up, what would most appal them about our society today, apart from Love Island and Suella Braverman? For the prominent American philosopher Martha C Nussbaum, the answer is our treatment of animals, which her sober and sobering new book argues is a moral crime on a monumental scale.
To make her scholarly case, Nussbaum points to the “barbarous cruelties of the factory meat industry”, “habitat destruction” and “pollution of the air and seas” – but casts the ethical net even more widely to ensnare all of us who “dwell in areas in which elephants and bears once roamed” or “live in high-rise buildings that spell death for migratory birds”. We’re all complicit, she argues, no matter how right-on we think we are – and we have “a long overdue ethical debt” to work off.
Over the years, there’s been no shortage of Cassandran prophets alerting us to the cosmic tragedy of species loss and biodiversity destruction. Elizabeth Kolbert, in The Sixth Extinction, attempted to bludgeon us into seeing sense with flinty facts and hard logic. Harvard biologist EO Wilson tried by showing us the wondrous complexity and interconnectedness of life on Earth.
Nussbaum is going a different way, taking aim at the entire system of moral thought that, consciously or not, has led us to treat living things as objects and trash the Eden of our natural world. For her, the original philosophical sin is the idea that animals are “dumb beasts… automata without a subjective view of the world”.
As Justice for Animals rigorously argues, the latest scientific research reveals that the opposite is true: “all vertebrates feel pain subjectively”, many animals “experience emotions like compassion and grief” and display “complicated social learning”. For Nussbaum, the implications are “huge, clearly”. Once we recognise there’s no easy demarcation between human sentience and that of animals, “we can hardly be unchanged in our ethical thinking”.
Make no mistake, this is a serious work of philosophy – and probably not most people’s idea of an ideal beach read, with its earnest interrogation of Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. That being said, the book does tell the sad stories of specific animals, such as Hal the humpback whale whose complex song constantly changed “apparently out of sheer fashion and interest in novelty”, but who starved to death with 88lbs of plastic trash in his guts.
Some readers may view these tales as tacky emotional vibrato in what is otherwise a scholarly read. Nussbaum defends herself, making the point “extinction never takes place without the suffering of individual creatures”, whether that’s “the hunger of a polar bear, starving on an ice floe” or “the mass extinctions of songbird species as a result of unbreathable air, a horrible death”.
Having forensically dismantled other philosophical arguments for protecting animals, such as the “So Like Us” school of thought that only bestows special treatment on species such as apes and dolphins that are closest to us in intelligence and behaviour, Nussbaum sketches out what a more all-encompassing morality may look like.
Her vision is a global legislative framework that acknowledges and protects animal rights, but she understands full well this won’t happen overnight. “The world’s legal systems are in a primitive condition,” she writes, highlighting, among many examples, the way that the US Animal Welfare Act completely excludes cold-blooded creatures.
She draws a parallel with how women were once treated under the law – as objects or property controlled and used by men. Fast-forward to today and women have rights and freedoms that would have been unthinkable two centuries ago. “The same thing can happen,” writes Nussbaum with a righteous optimism, “with the rights of animals.”
It was John Maynard Keynes who, in his quaintly gendered way, observed that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. In other words, ideas matter. If we’re to have any hope of resetting our abusive relationship with the natural world, a foundational shift in our moral philosophy may be essential. Or as Nussbaum puts it: “The remedy really requires the evolving consciousness of humanity.” A daunting prospect, but Justice for Animals is a timely and weighty reminder that a positive future is possible and worth fighting for.
• Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha C Nussbaum is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
