I.
Animal predation is an ethical problem. Smart human intervention is required to address it. Or so Martha Nussbaum argues in Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022):
We need above all to convince people that predation is a problem. Too many people grow up excited and enthralled by predation, and this has had a bad effect on our entire culture. It’s important to keep pointing out that antelopes were not made to be food, they were made to live antelope lives. The fact that they so often do not get to live those lives is a problem, and since we are in charge everywhere we need to figure out how much we can and should do about it (252).
Nussbaum’s analysis of “the wild” comes late in Justice for Animals (see chapter 10, “The ‘Wild’ and Human Responsibility”), and there is a reason for that: the idea that we should somehow intervene in “the wild,” especially in “wild” behaviors like animal predation, will likely strike many readers as totally bizarre.
So, it’s important to step back and acquaint ourselves with the development of Nussbaum’s argument before we directly engage the character of animal predatory behavior as an ethical problem in chapter 10.
Below is an outline of what is covered in this overview:
- What is justice? (chapter 1, section II. below)
- Inadequate approaches to animal ethics (chapters 2-4, section III. below)
- Nussbaum’s Capability Approach (CA) to animal justice (chapter 5, section IV. below)
- Sentience and the subjects of (in)justice (chapter 6, section V. below)
- When is death a harm? (chapter 7, section VI. below)
- The Problem of Predation (chapter 10, section VII. below)
I conclude by considering a few serious philosophical and ecological objections to interference with “wild predation.” I ultimately side with Nussbaum. For now, our task is to trace the ecological and philosophical trajectory of Nussbaum’s overall argument in Justice for Animals, namely that animals are subjects of (in)justice.
II.
Nussbaum begins by defining what she means by justice. She defines justice largely by contrasting it with injustice. “[T]he general intuition should be emerging more clearly: injustice centrally involves significant striving blocked by not just harm but also wrongful thwarting, whether negligent or deliberate” (7-8, emphasis original).
“Significant striving” means that particular animals move with intention to obtain what is significant to them (e.g., shelter, play, friendship, etc.). When significant striving, deliberate movement to obtain “what is reasonably significant” to a particular animal, is unjustly blocked, it entails more than harm.
An animal may encounter any number of harms in the course of their significant striving, harms such as illness or a storm that destroys their nest (or worse). These harms are no one’s fault. Wrongful thwarting entails fault.
We are right to think that when someone with the power to act does so in a way they know, or should know, will wrongfully thwart another animal’s thriving, we are dealing with unjust action. We are also right to think that when someone with the power to act fails to exert that power in a way they know, or should know, will prevent the wrongful undermining of another animal’s thriving, we are dealing with unjust inaction (i.e., neglect).
For example, a child destroying a bird’s nest is wrongful thwarting of a bird’s significant striving. Likewise, a parent standing idly by as their kid smashes the nest is inaction that constitutes a wrongful thwarting of a bird’s significant striving. Justice, by contrast, is related to laws, norms, and institutions that reasonably support and enable significant striving.
But how do we (human animals) come to understand animal lives in terms of (in)justice? How do we get beyond the view of someone like John Rawls, who thought that while animals are worthy of our compassion, “they could not be treated justly or unjustly” (9)?
The ultimate answer to those questions is animal sentience. But for now, Nussbaum emphasizes three emotions that “have the potential to help us beyond our daily context” (9). They are:
- Wonder, “like love, is epistemic: it leads us out of ourselves and awakens a nascent ethical concern” (12).
- Compassion is feeling “pain at the significant suffering of another creature” (12).
- Outrage “is a form of anger . . . . [this] species of anger turns to face forward, and its aim is to create a better future. For that reason I will call it Transition-Anger [because it is without a retributive wish]” (15).1
When these emotions are ethically attuned and joined together, they lead us in the right direction: “Wonder arrests our attention and draws us out of ourselves, inspiring curiosity about an alien world. Compassion links us to the suffering animal in a powerful emotional experience. Transition-Anger prepares us for action” (16).
In addition to these ethically attuned and intertwined emotions, we need a good theory for comprehending animal lives as subjects of (in)justice. Nussbaum carefully assesses three major approaches to animal ethics, and she points out how they fail to adequately comprehend animal lives as subjects of (in)justice.
III.
The “So Like Us” approach to animal ethics is the first of the three approaches Nussbaum reviews, and it is the subject of chapter 2. The most influential advocate of this approach is Steven Wise.
The idea is that certain animals are like human beings, approximating human capabilities, and so they should be treated accordingly. Nussbaum contends that “[t]his theory is too narrow, unworthy of the alienness and sheer diversity of animal lives. And it is counterproductive as a strategy to expand animal entitlements” (19-20).
Yet, this approach has managed to move US judges with a basic Western education. Nussbaum defines Western education to further highlight why the “So Like Us” theory is too limited in scope and inadequate to guide our future efforts toward animal justice.
Underlying a basic Western education in animal ethics is the religious idea of the scala naturae: a fixed, natural ladder with humans at the top and other animals descending a scale of value/worth. This religious idea is often attributed to Aristotle. Nussbaum, however, is not convinced it is his idea, at least not in its popular, religious form.2
The “So Like Us” theory plays on the religious idea of the scala naturae, arguing that while apes, for example, have not risen to the level of human beings on the ladder, they have come up pretty close. So, it would seem reasonable to grant them legal rights associated with human personhood.3
There are many problems with this view. They are:
- “[M]ost of the animal world still lies outside [as they are too unlike us] in the dark domain of thinghood” (31).
- “The image of the scala naturae is not drawn from looking at nature, and it does not correspond to what we see when we look at nature . . .” (31).
- “It leads to ugly projects in which humans imagine transcending their animal bodies by casting aspersions on the smells and fluids of the body” (32).
- “[I]t leads to a focus on artificial performances that are not really characteristic of the species as it lives its life in the wild [i.e., (sign) language abilities]” (33).
- Wise and others, like Thomas White, privilege “likeness over strangeness [although White has since adopted the CA approach]” (38).
The second view of animal ethics Nussbaum assesses is that of the British Utilitarians. They are the subject of chapter 3. While they emphasize “the commonality of all animals in our shared pain,” they still come up short of animal justice in some essential ways (39).
The British Utilitarians Nussbaum has in mind are Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. She also includes Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher and close follower of British Utilitarian ideas, in her analysis of Utilitarian thought applied to animal ethics.
Utilitarian thinkers advance animal rights in critical ways. Bentham, for example, compared “our treatment of other animals to slavery” (40). He also recognized that animals suffer; “suffering [is] a common bond among all animals” (56).
The key ethical facts for Bentham are pleasure and pain. “The aim of a rational politics should be to maximize the net balance of pleasure over pain in the universe” (40).
Bentham also challenged the idea of the natural ladder. “[Animals] should not be treated as things or property, and their interests should be treated with as much attention as those of humans, ‘allowance made for the difference in point of sensibility.'” In other words, “similar interests should be treated similarly, but something that is irrelevant to the interests of the creature should not matter in thinking about its needs” (43).
Utilitarians also recognize animal sentience and the importance of sentience as a threshold for defining the subject of (in)justice (see section V. below). The main problem with Utilitarian animal ethics is the singular focus on pain and pleasure.
While Mill takes a more nuanced view of pleasure (including the fact that we may take pleasure in terrible things, like killing animals), the singular focus on pleasure and pain ignores the fact that animal “lives have other relevant aspects: dignity, social capacity, play, planning, and free movement among others” (56).
The third theory of animal ethics Nussbaum reviews is that of Kantian Christine Korsgaard. Korsgaard fashions animal ethics in Kantian terms: animals are ends in themselves and not merely means. The difficulty with her theory is the character of and undue emphasis on human rationality or moral reasoning.
Kant did not hold animals in high esteem because he believed they lacked “the capacity for ethical choice” and so, citing Kant, they may be used “as we please” (58). Kant did, however, argue against the cruel treatment of animals. He thought unkindness to animals made humans unkind to one another. Nonetheless, Kantian ethics is important for its emphasis on the “inviolability and dignity of the individual creature” (58).
The central idea Korsgaard takes from Kantian ethics and applies to animal ethics is the second version of the Categorical Imperative: “So act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (my emphasis). How this imperative applies to animals, and not just to “humanity,” requires further explanation.
Kant thought that humans, on account of our unique ability to reflect ethically and to make choices, are the only species “who can be obligated and have duties” (65, emphasis original). Korsgaard argues that it does not follow that “we are the only creatures who can be the objects of duties, creatures to whom duties are owed” (65, emphasis original).
Korsgaard is right, but for Aristotelian reasons. Aristotle thought animals are “self-maintaining systems who pursue a good and who matter to themselves” (65).
If we accept this view, as both Korsgaard and Nussbaum do, it follows that human animals are ethically obligated to respect and value the, to use Nussbaum’s term, “significant striving” of animals. We have an ethical obligation to treat animals as ends and not merely as means, that is, if we wish to be ethically consistent.
The fact that my cat is an animal with goals and purposes does not, however, collapse the difference(s) between my cat and myself, leading us back to a “So Like Us” approach to animal ethics. My cat is to be treated as an end and not merely as a means because of his catness and not because he resembles something approximating my humanness. Korsgaard, Nussbaum contends, “avoids most of the errors of the ‘So Like Us’ approach, but in the end she ties herself to a version of it: the value of animals is derivative from likeness to humanity” (67).
The significant difference between Korsgaard and Nussbaum is the line the former draws between special human rationality (i.e., autonomous will) and animal nature. For Nussbaum, “all of our capacities are part of our animal nature” (65).
So, human rationality, human ethical reasoning, may make me different from, say, my cat, but it doesn’t make me somehow less animal (to be clear, Korsgaard rejects human superiority), and it doesn’t make my cat a machine of instincts, a creature incapable of a cat-specific kind of ethical reasoning.
Animal studies alert us to the ethical capabilities of many kinds of animals. “[Sperm whales, macaws, chimpanzees a]ll have social mechanisms for teaching young members appropriate social norms, thus developing instinctual endowments in a direction that promotes group and individual welfare. And isn’t that really what all good parents are trying to do?” (75). In other words, good sperm whale parents teach their children how to be good sperm whales.
Nussbaum takes from Kant the emphasis on individual animal worth. She takes from Aristotle the emphasis on the dignity of all animals. Developing her own approach, she avoids all the pitfalls mentioned earlier: the split between rationality and nature, the myopic focus on maximizing aggregate pleasure, and the emphasis on animal likeness to human animal capabilities.
IV.
In chapter 5, Nussbaum describes her Capabilities Approach (CA) and begins to show how it applies to animal ethics. What is the Capabilities Approach?
The CA “argues that a society is even minimally just only if it secures to each individual citizen a minimum threshold amount of a list of Central Capabilities, which are defined as substantial freedoms, or opportunities for choice and action in areas of life that people in general have reason to value. . . it emphasizes material empowerment more than do many rights-based approaches [, and] it leaves spaces for individual freedom” (80, emphasis original).
Like Korsgaard’s Kantian-inspired theory, CA understands “each individual creature . . . as having dignity that law and politics must respect, treating that individual as an end, not simply as a means” (81). It does not, however, set human moral powers above “other aspects of animal living, and it sees all human powers as parts of the equipment of a mortal and vulnerable animal who deserves a fair shake in life—as do all sentient animals” (81).
CA moves beyond a simple, singular focus on GDP, a national measure of economic health. “Short-sighted development policies often aim to make people feel good rather than to empower them. ‘What are people (and what is each person) actually able to do and to be?’ The [CA] asks, and answers, that very practical question” (84, 86). Again, CA recognizes significant striving, in this case, the fact that we humans, each of us, are “active beings seeking a flourishing life that they themselves create” (87).
Each human being needs certain things, certain entitlements or rights, in order to flourish. The 10 central capabilities are listed below (see 89 for a full explanation of each). “One way of thinking about what all the items on the list have in common is that they all seem to be inherent in the intuitive idea we form of a life that is worthy of human dignity” (91):
- Life
- Bodily Health
- Bodily Integrity
- Senses, Imagination, Thought
- Emotions
- Practical Reason
- Affiliation
- Other Species
- Play
- Control Over One’s Environment
We don’t all need—or want—all of the above capabilities (at least not every aspect of each); each of us is free to choose among them to create the lives we want for ourselves. Yet, if any one of the capabilities were removed, we would rightly feel that human life is being treated as a means rather than an end.
The role of government, of law and policy, is to secure “the capabilities for all.” The capabilities list “is a list of fundamental tasks of government” (92).
Critically, “[t]his doesn’t mean that people always should rely on government to solve their problems. . . . But it does mean that the whole matter of justice depends on getting a stable political structure that is able, enough of the time, to deliver the capabilities to the people who chose and empowered it” (92, my emphasis).
Both Nussbaum and Korsgaard go beyond the Kantian focus on human dignity, incorporating an insight from the Utilitarian John Mill: “all sentient animals have a dignity of their own, which deserves respect” (92). Human dignity is, of course, different from the dignity of a dolphin, and the dolphin’s dignity is different from the elephant’s. But dignity is there, made manifest in each animal’s “pursuit of valued goals” (96).
What follows from this insight is an emphasis on a “characteristic form of life.” “Each form of life is different. . . . Being more like a human would not be good or pertinent for a magpie. We humans are similar to magpies, dolphins, and elephants in groping for survival and flourishing in a mostly hostile world; we differ in the specific nature of the goods we seek” (97).
If we concede that our human “strivings should not be thwarted,” why would we allow the thwarting of the particular strivings of other animals? While humans make laws, why must we make laws only for humans?
Animals cannot speak in Congress, but they do “speak” to us about their situation. Why should animals not have collaborators in Congress and in the courts, experts who carefully observe them and describe their situations to us? We do something similar when we hire an attorney to speak for us and make our case before a judge in a court of law.
There are many, intricate issues Nussbaum clarifies in this chapter, but I focus on only a few here. First, Nussbaum emphasizes individual dignity. Species-level thinking is helpful, and each species requires its own capabilities list (though Nussbaum’s CA list can act as a general guide for, say, what might be important capabilities for octopuses), but the individual, and their freedom to choose which capabilities are important to their own form of life, is privileged. Individual freedom within an entitlement structure is what is in view here. So, any one list may need to be modified to accommodate unforeseen capabilities.
Focus on the species takes on importance to the degree that, say, opportunities for affiliation is what individual members of a species need to flourish (e.g., for some octopuses, hanging out with their own species is not a big part of what they seek, although it is necessary for reproduction. However, many do seem to value community with different kinds of octopuses and with different species, with fish like groupers and with humans).
But are “rights” the right way to think about animal (in)justice? It’s difficult, for many reasons, to think animal rights, rights that can actually be reasonably guaranteed or supported. One reason is animals do not live neatly within local or even national borders. Nussbaum, following Kant, argues, “[a]t the base of our rights is a very simple idea: every human being has a right to be where he or she is. . . to having a share of control over what happens in the world” (114).
Extending rights to animals is a consequence of their dignity. They, too, have a right to be where they are, and so, like us, to have “a say” in what happens to them.
Animal rights are “‘imperfect rights’ . . . rights not against any definite person or animal, but, rather, against all human beings, against humanity imagined as capable of collective action” (113). Some animals, like dogs and cats, may be assigned specific responsibilities/duties to other animals (e.g., not to attack humans, other dogs, or birds), but animal rights are largely what human animals owe to all other sentient animals.
V.
In his elegant and moving book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, Republican Matthew Scully gets at why, in Nussbaum’s words, we need a “working boundary,” like sentience, when thinking about animal rights.
Scully cites animal rights skeptic, his friend and conservative, Joseph Sobran:
This would put us, the human race, in the position of policing the entire animal kingdom, making sure they don’t violate each other’s rights . . . . We would reduce our workload by allowing each species to police itself . . . even (if we mean business) the fly against the spider. . . (136).
Sobran’s intention is to mock animal rights, or, in Scully’s words, to mock “any notion of moral status for animals,” by showing that it “ends in absurdity” (136). The concept of sentience serves as “a working boundary” in Nussbaum’s approach to animal rights, and it is a critical idea, that is, if we want to avoid the absurdity of “policing” in the relationship between flies and spiders.
The subjects of (in)justice are sentient animals. Sentient animals are entitled to rights because they are animals capable of significant striving. But what does sentience mean more exactly?
Sentience means that the world looks like something to you. It relates to subjective experience, a way of feeling about the world and what is possible for you in the world.
Sentience means that you do not simply avoid pain and move toward pleasure. It means you pursue what you take as good for you and avoid what you discern is bad for you.
Sentience is, as Nussbaum observes, often reduced to the ability to feel pain (and pain is, as she notes and you know well, very bad for sentient creatures). But it also means that you have an opinion of yourself; you see yourself in a certain way, and you see others in your group, and other objects in the world, in a certain way. And you move accordingly, in a way that aligns with your sense of yourself and your sense of how the objects in your world conform to your understanding of what is good and bad for you. That is sentience.
“What I am saying,” Nussbaum writes, “is that my core notion of injustice can apply only to creatures who are capable of significant striving, and that involves [sentience]” (119). And most animals are, we know from scientific studies, sentient, “including all mammals, all birds, and teleost (hard-boned) fish . . .” (119).
Nussbaum goes on to lay out the reasoning, the evidence grounding the identification of sentient creatures, including humans. Nussbaum concludes, “Significant striving, then, includes subjective perception of things that are helpful and harmful (the world looks like this to the animal), plus a variety of subjective attitudes, such as pain and pleasure, and, in addition, numerous other subjective states that motivate behavior: desires and emotions. The sentient animals we are describing have all of these abilities” (140).
In existential terms, sentient species—and individuals—inhabit a world.
It is not always easy to identify sentient animals (and, in the age of AIs, sentience may no longer be limited to animals4). For example, there are serious reasons to doubt that insects are sentient. Thus, we need not worry too much about rights for flies or spiders (although flies and spiders [and trees and plants and sharks] merit other kinds of ethical concern). However, bees may be sentient.
What we know with certainty is that the most ambiguous cases need not keep us from identifying the subjects of justice. Those animals that are, just as clearly as we are, sentient and so capable of significant striving.
VI.
Is death an injustice? Or, is death a harm? Does killing constitute a wrongful thwarting of significant striving?
We know that pain harms the significant striving of sentient creatures. So, we might think that killing animals humanely, that is, in such a way that they experience little to no pain, and for “legitimate” human purposes (e.g., to eat), is acceptable.
While one may take such a view, which is far better than that of those who believe animals may be killed however and for any reason, this view does not live up to the demands of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Killing animals humanely and for legitimate human purposes is to treat them merely as means and not as ends.
The main subject of chapter 7 is the “fringe” case of humans killing animals that are reasonably healthy and have lived reasonably long, good lives.
Nussbaum also draws our attention to the fact that animals kill one another, a topic she takes up in chapter 10. Moreover, animals killed by factory farming are not killed painlessly, and so their deaths are not the topic of this chapter. Furthermore, killing a companion animal because their cancer is incurable is also unrelated to the topic of this chapter (see 156).
The main philosophical source of this chapter is Epicurus. He argued that death is no harm because when I die, there is no “I” to which to attach harm. The argument is compelling, but there is a problem: it does not take into account how our human lives actually unfold.
Nussbaum expands on what she calls the “interruption argument.” “[D]eath [not only ‘premature death’] interrupts activities that unfold over time,” activities like love and friendship, reading a long novel, planting a garden and so forth (160). “Death. . . cuts short the pleasant flow of life’s many projects. . . . Epicurus, then, builds on an impoverished picture of human life and value . . . many or most deaths are bad for the person who dies . . . in a perfectly straightforward way: they change the life that was lived, and for the worse” (160, 161).
The goal of this argument is to make a descriptive distinction (not a new ladder of worth) between those animals who undertake projects and those who do not undertake projects. “When a life contains a temporal unfolding of which the subject is aware and which the subject values, death can harm it. However, not all [sentient] creatures are like that. . . and therefore the argument does not establish that death is a harm to all creatures” (161, emphasis mine).
But allow me to underscore an important point: MANY creatures, almost all the creatures we kill and love to eat, are aware of a temporal unfolding that they value.
Temporal awareness is, in some cases, especially complex. For example, bony fish. Bony fish are sentient, but they seem to live mostly in the moment, moment to moment. So, a painless death may be no harm to them, as such a death does not interrupt a temporal unfolding of their species’s specific lives.
And much else follows from this. For example: “Even if it [painlessly killing and eating fish] doesn’t actually harm their being, it is still a kind of domination over that other life,” the very thing rights-based approaches are meant to stop (171).
The possibility then arises that while we are not harming fish when we painlessly kill and eat them, we may nonetheless be doing them an injustice. Humility and vigilance are required of us: “With our specific life-form comes responsibility” (171).
VII.
We are now prepared to grasp the sense of Nussbaum’s argument that our responsibility extends to animal predation and that it is a problem that requires a smart human response.
The following ideas are in the background as we work through Nussbaum’s thinking on animal predation in chapter 10:
- (In)Justice: Justice is bound up with the enablement of a creature’s significant striving, while injustice is the wrongful thwarting (actively or passively) of the same.
- The Subjects of (In)Justice: Sentient creatures, those who significantly strive in characteristic life-form ways, are the subjects of justice and so are to be treated as ends and not merely as means. Most animals are sentient.
- Harm, Injustice, and Death: Death is, generally, a harm to sentient creatures, as it interrupts their significant projects. While it may not constitute a harm to all sentient creatures, especially creatures incapable of significant projects, death may well constitute an injustice when it is a form of domination of one species over another.
The question framing chapter 10 has to do with what role humans are to play in “the wild,” if any. What role should we play in treating wild animal illnesses? Should we address starvation in the wild? What of zoos as a form of intervention? Should we fashion “a cooperative multispecies society, where wild animals are concerned?” (223-224). And, our question, what should humans do about animals killing other animals, if anything?
Concepts like “the wild” and “nature” are, Nussbaum points out, wildly Romantic. “The Romantic idea of ‘the wild’ is born of human anxieties, particularly about urban and industrial life. Nature, in this conception, is supposed to do something for us; the idea has little to do with what we are supposed to do for Nature and other animals” (225). “Other animals” includes rural humans; romanticism idealizes rural poverty.
As both Scully and Nussbaum point out, “the wild” is a great deal more “benign” than factory farming, but, as Mill thought, “Nature is cruel and thoughtless” (228). Moreover, ecological thought has taught us that there is no such thing as the “balance of nature.” There is no such thing as “the wild,” either.
Humans control everything: land, sea, air. And so, when we make a case for “the wild,” what we are saying is that we do not want to take responsibility for the world that our species, in every way, dominates.
And “it is not clear that we can ethically be standoffish, even in instances where we have not caused the problem. If we are looking on, in control and monitoring animal habitats, it seems like callous stewardship indeed if we permit . . . . thoroughly ‘natural’ types of pain and torment” (230). Human stewardship and animal autonomy are not incompatible, as “Nature is not a glorious site of freedom” (231).
The contours of (in)justice are starting to form: humans, in ways both deliberate and neglectful, thwart animal thriving. We either smash the nest or we stand idly by while it is smashed by another animal or disease or event.
So, just stewardship of “the wild” must not be avoided. It must be ethically principled (see 232). And it must be attuned to the kinds of animal capabilities we are responsible for recognizing and protecting (233-237).
It is a common practice (and widely accepted) for humans to intervene in “the wild” when there is starvation, drought, and so forth. We are likely to blame for all of that anyway. But something feels different to us about predation, about the act of animals killing other animals.
We are cautioned against interfering in predation for several reasons. First, instincts. Predators are not doing anything wrong when they attack and kill other animals.
That is true. What predators are doing is expressing something characteristic of their life-form. Our interference may, in fact, degrade their dignity, wrongfully impeding their significant striving by frustrating instincts important to them.
And, though Nussbaum does not make this exact point, it is equally possible that our interference in predation would frustrate the gazelle’s important instinct to recognize and to evade dangers.
Instincts, however, can be redirected in many different ways—ways that do not entail the unspeakable suffering of another creature or the end of a supposed thrilling existence of constant vigilance and escape.
We are cautioned against interfering in predation for another reason, too: we have no idea what impact such interference would have on animal populations. Yet, predation and hunting are not the only ways to manage animal populations. They are certainly not the most painless ways of managing animal populations.
And even if we think there are good reasons for not interfering in animal predation generally, we may think it unsavory for humans to enjoy it or to become predators in “the wild” themselves. Therefore, we will oppose sado-tourism, the practice of humans taking great enjoyment in scenes (and paying a lot to see them) of vulnerable creatures being torn to bits by, for example, wild dogs. We must also outlaw big game hunting, the practice of humans killing, for example, elephants with weapons of war.
Additionally, we may think there are good reasons for not interfering in animal predation generally, but we may also identify some special circumstances where we think intervention is necessary. For example, we may seek to protect animals that have not evolved to recognize and evade the dangers posed by non-indigenous threats (think of the kakapo).
Speaking of the kakapo, predation may even be encouraged in certain circumstances. The CA allows for self-defense, so rats may be acceptable objects of predation, becoming a food source for creatures, like cats, also managed out of eating the kakapo. There may be other “nuisance animals” that fall into this category.5
Animal predation is not a simple phenomenon, one that requires little to no thought or concern on our part. Nussbaum’s approach to it is nuanced and cautious, and even so, we have identified instances of acceptable and reasonable human interventions in “the wild,” specifically in animal predation.
VIII.
We are now well situated to understand why most instances of animal predation constitute a serious ethical problem that require smart human responses.
To start, animal predation is not, not straightforwardly, an injustice. The lion, for example, is not somehow in the wrong for killing and eating a warthog.
Yet, the unspeakable suffering the warthog experiences as it is eaten alive by the lion—and the threats to life and limb the lion risks to kill it—should at the very least alert us to the possibility that predation is, nonetheless, a serious harm to the warthog and, potentially, to the lion.
Lions are not in a position to recognize that, and warthogs aren’t, either. But we are in a position to recognize it and do something about it.
It is also highly questionable that respecting the dignity of both lions and, say, gazelles requires predation as a capability, namely the capability to hunt and the capability to escape being eaten.
Must lions kill other animals to be (happy) lions? We have no reason to believe so. Moreover, we may grant that all creatures are, indeed, food (or are edible), but is that what sentient creatures, like the gazelle, want, at least while they have a say in the matter, while they are still living? Again, we have no reason to believe so.
Finally, death does harm to both the lion and to the gazelle, to each of their respective projects. And, as we saw in the case of fish, death may become an injustice when it represents a tool of domination of one species over another.
Predation seems to me to qualify as a form of domination. While the lion cannot recognize their eating of the gazelle as a form of domination, and while the gazelle, even if it could recognize the harm of predation, is powerless to do anything about it, we can both recognize predation as a problem and do something about it.
There are serious ecological and philosophical objections to intervening in animal predation. I have alluded to some of them above. The substance of these arguments extends well beyond a straightforward concern for what we do not know (e.g., how such interference will affect animal populations) or a respect for the dignity of animal lives.
One is right to ask: Are human interventions in animal predation a form of domination, a means of humanizing the entire animal world?
Another question: Would we fault a bat, for example, for using its capabilities to eliminate harms or to address injustice in human life? No, I don’t think we would.
Nussbaum’s argument, namely that we humans have an ethical responsibility to use our capabilities to enable and foster all sentient life, stands up well against serious objections. Even if you are not convinced, her argument is worthy of your sustained attention and serious consideration. Or so I think.
Footnotes:
