Philosophers have long said that animals deserve better from humans. Ashoka (c. 304-232 BCE), a Hindu emperor who converted to Buddhism, wrote about his attempts to refrain from activities that harm animals. In ancient Greece, Plutarch (46-119 CE) and Porphyry (c. 234-305 CE) tried to persuade people to treat animals better by demonstrating the highly developed qualities that animals exhibit. In modern times, Peter Singer’s 1975 book “Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals” decried “speciesism” — the human bias for favoring our own interests over those of other species. Ingrid E. Newkirk, a founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, called Singer’s work a “philosophical bombshell” that “forever changed the conversation about the treatment of animals.”

Today, pleas to stop exploiting animals are mainstream — including denunciations of factory farming and advocacy for vegetarianism and veganism. But Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, claims human cruelty to animals has only continued to grow. The devastation, she says, has resulted in a “long overdue ethical debt.” Unfortunately, Nussbaum insists, the leading theories defending animal rights aren’t up to the challenge of helping people appreciate what animals deserve and inspiring them to act.

In her upcoming book “Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility,” Nussbaum spells out this ethical debt and explains what it would take to address it. Nussbaum has been working for many years on what she calls the Capabilities Approach. The theory holds that the well-being of any creature — whether it’s a human, your pet dog, or an animal in the wild — arises from the freedom to live in a way that is deeply connected to the creature’s capabilities and functions. So instead of exploiting animals, we should give them what we also want for ourselves — opportunities to flourish.

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