Over the course of her long career, the distinguished and highly decorated philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has written key books about foundational human subjects: sex and gender, ethics, politics and justice, to name a few. With her upcoming book, though, she has fully turned her formidable attention to the nonhuman as well. In “Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility,” which will be published on Jan. 3, Nussbaum, who is 75, argues for, among other things, increased legal standing for animals as well as an ethical framework in which animals’ right to pursue flourishing lives is not subordinate to our own — a quietly radical proposition. (The book is dedicated to her daughter Rachel, an animal rights lawyer who died in 2019 at 47 from an infection following transplant surgery.) “Each individual animal of each kind should have a decent shot at living a life that’s characteristic of that creature,” Nussbaum says. “But so many problems stand in the way.”

It seems clear that things like factory farming and illegal poaching impede animals’ right to pursue flourishing lives, which is a right humans take for granted. It also seems reasonable that animals should have legal recourse when that right is impeded. But does it then follow that we think of animals’ lives as being equal in value to humans’? For example, if a passer-by saw a dog and a child in a burning house and saved only the child, I suspect that most people would think that was an understandable decision. But if it was the reverse, and a passer-by saved the dog instead of the child, I’m guessing that would be seen as an egregious moral error. Why is that? I think it’s about the same thing that would make us want to save a member of our own family over a stranger: an intuitive sense of affiliation. That’s not terribly bad. It has guided us well in many cases, but what it misses is that both choices involve wrongdoing. It’s a kind of Sophie’s choice. If we do save just one on the basis of affiliation, we have to recognize that it was wrong that the other one perished. That would lead to redoubling our efforts to make sure animals don’t perish in the future. In personal life a sense of affiliation is OK, but public policy should not be based on interest-group affiliations. What’s good is to have a theory of justice that guides the large scope of our public actions and then leaves spaces where within that, we can favor our own children or whatever. It’s the difference of spheres.

How do we delineate separate spheres when it comes to justice for animals? Their lives and well-being are so completely intertwined with humanity. There are two models of this. The first would be, What can we do now? The other would be, What kind of long-term goal are we aiming for? My book is mainly about the second question. If we have a sense of the long-term goal — what I call the virtual constitution¹ — that the world should be aiming at, then we can say more sensibly, OK, where do we begin? I’m an incrementalist. We have to start with correcting the worst abuses. The factory-farming industry, they’re subsidizing actions that create a false veneer of acceptability over the practices of the meat industry.² We have to get people to know what’s going on and then try to figure out different ways that we can take concerted action toward justice. It’s hard because some animals are within national boundaries, some wander across the world. We have most hope where action can be locally coordinated. If you want to stop puppy mills from marketing their wares in Chicago,³ you can do that. But we have to have a long-term goal, and I’m trying to articulate that.

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