Episode 122, ‘Justice for Animals’ with Martha Nussbaum (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion)

The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast

Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane

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4.8 • 604 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Whaling, poaching, factory farming: we know they’re wrong. Yet, most of us do nothing about them. In fact, for each trip around the sun, we satisfy our collective tastebuds with over seventy billion land animals and seven trillion sea creatures. Still, one might ask, what is it that’s wrong with how we treat our fellow creatures? This is the central question of Martha Nussbaum’s latest book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility.

Nussbaum, who has won the most prestigious prizes in the field – including the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2018 Berggruen (Bergruin) Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2021 Holberg Prize – is currently the Ernst Freund (Froind) Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. With over twenty-five books, five hundred academic papers, and fifty-five honorary degrees, it’s safe to say that Martha Nussbaum is one of the most prolific and distinguished philosophers of our time.

For Nussbaum, humans have a collective responsibility to support the activities and conditions that allow our fellow creatures to flourish. It’s time we put a stop to the injustice and bring about a better world. Her call to action? Justice for Animals.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan
0:05.3	Scicast
0:08.4	Part 2, further analyses and discussion. In our previous installment, we spoke about the view
0:27.8	that Martha Nussbaum defends in her new book, Justice for Animals. We discussed how some of the
0:32.8	major theories of animal ethics make significant progress for how they all come up short in one way or another.
0:40.1	Instead, Nussbaum defends a view called the Capabilities Approach, which maintains that
0:44.6	injustice is the wrongful impeding of a sentient animal's life activities.
0:49.2	Now, we'd like to begin this instalment by getting clear on what that looks like in practice.
0:55.4	If you're right, Martha,
1:01.0	one might ask whether we ought to be advocating for the legal representation of animals,
1:06.6	the end of factory farming, the end of ocean polluting, the tearing down of high-rise buildings and the creation of animal-friendly spaces. With this in mind, let me ask you two simple questions.
1:12.2	What are the ultimate goals and what can our listeners do right now today if they're
1:17.5	persuaded by your arguments? Well, I think the ultimate goal is that each kind of animal
1:22.5	would have a chance to live a life characteristic of that kind of animal. And it involves quite a lot of the
1:29.3	things you have mentioned on your list, maybe not tearing down of high-rise buildings, but making
1:35.0	them bird friendly so that birds don't die by crashing into them, therefore turning lights out at
1:40.9	night and putting stickers on the windows and all the things that are happening.
1:45.3	But anyway, what can people do now? I think the beauty of this time that we're in is that people,
1:51.4	wherever they are, there's something they can do. And I don't think people should always be
1:55.7	focused on the big picture. They should think, here I am, you're the things that I'm capable of, what can I do now?
2:03.1	The things involve personal habits. And I think it's very important to try not to get rid of
2:08.8	single-use plastic, for example, which pollutes the oceans and chokes whales and so forth.
	...

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