Factually! with Adam Conover - Justice for Animals with Martha Nussbaum

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

What, exactly, do we owe to our fellow animals? Which animals are conscious, and how do we tell? How can we know what’s best for animals that cannot tell us their preferences and needs directly? This week, Adam is joined by one of the most eminent philosophers in the world, Martha Nussbaum, to discuss her new book Justice for Animals. Pick up a copy at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. Thank you so much for joining me once again. As I, you know what I do. I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing shit they know that I don't know. And that you might not know.

And both of our minds are going to get blown together. You've heard the spiel. You know what we do here. I am so excited that you're joining me on the show again. Now, I want to remind everybody, if you want to support the show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash adamconover for a whole bunch of awesome perks and to join our community of curious people who love learning. Oh, and I want to let you know that I am headed back out on tour this year. We got some new tour dates coming up.

The first one is at Cap City Comedy Club in Austin this March. Come on out if you live in that area. But I'm also going to have more tour dates up soon. So keep checking at adamconover.net if you want to see where I'm going to be doing stand-up near you. Now, this week, let's talk about animals. Ooh, I love talking about them so much. They're so cute and cuddly, but they can also be pretty confusing. You know, in the territory of how smart are they and how much should we care about their well-being.

Okay, let's do a little review. We know that animals are really impressive and brilliant and complex. We know, for instance, that whales have a musical culture, that they can learn and imitate songs with completely different melodies and structures, and that they actually have fads that can take off like wildfire in whale world across huge stretches of ocean. We also know that birds are similarly dynamic. We know that macaws and African greys can learn to take a non-edible token

instead of food and use it later for food they like better. This is to say that birds know how money works, okay? If a species can, you know, exchange currency for goods and services, it seems like they're pretty high up on the consciousness and sapience ladder, you know what I mean? As my guest today wrote in a piece for the New York Review of Books last year, quote, Animals use tools, they solve problems, communicate through complex systems, interact socially with intricate forms of organization, and even have emotions such as fear, grief, and envy. This is not conjecture. This is not just me being empathetic.

These are scientific facts. But how do we use those facts to figure out what we should or shouldn't do in relation to animals? Like, okay, let's grant that we have some kind of moral responsibility to animals, and let's also assume that we're not entirely living up to it. I think that's pretty clear if you look around at what humans are doing on planet Earth today. But how do we decide what exactly our responsibility is? I mean, forget about just eating meat or not for a second, because that's what we always reduce our conversation about animals to. You probably already

have an opinion on that, so do I. But beyond that, what exactly do we owe animals? It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and one that we've tackled on this show quite a few times. About a year ago, we spoke with Emma Maris about what our ethical responsibilities towards animals might be. We talked about, for instance, do we have an ethical responsibility to go out into the forest and vaccinate wild animals from diseases that they might have? And she pointed out very correctly that how we decide to make that decision depends on our values, on whether we value their suffering or pain or whether we value their wildness and their separateness from humanity more. And that's a surprisingly difficult question to answer, even just for yourself. Last summer, we spoke with Alice Crary and Lori Gruen about

solidarity with animals, about how we might address their needs better if we realize that we're all in the same boat with them, that we all live on the same planet, and that what affects them also affects us. And these are great starting points, great additions to the conversation. But how do we get more specific? If we look at it really rigorously, how do we figure out what justice for animals would actually be? And then how do we put it into practice? Well, today on the show, we have an incredible guest to talk about this topic. She is one of the most eminent living philosophers on Earth today. And her recent book, Justice for Animals, presents a theory on how to account for animals and what needs to be done for them.

Her name is Martha Nussbaum. She's a professor at the University of Chicago, and she has published widely and famously for decades on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and so much else. I mean, I actually remember reading her articles as an undergraduate, getting my own degree in philosophy. Millions of other undergraduates have as well. I'm just thrilled to have her.

It is such an honor. So please welcome Martha Nussbaum. Martha, thank you so much for being on the show. It's such an honor to have you. Thank you so much for inviting me. So you have a new book out, just came out called Justice for Animals about, well, please tell me in your words what it's about. I don't want to summarize it for you. Well, it's a new theoretical approach to animal rights, because I argue that all the existing theories of why animals have rights and why we

should care about them are not good, and they direct public policy badly. And I have a new theory of my own called the capabilities approach, based on work that I've done in development economics over the years. And I argue that that's a better approach. And I try to show why we need such an approach and why the other approaches are flawed and how it will direct public policy better. This is funny because it's a topic that we've covered on this show quite a bit over the last couple of years. We've had a number of thinkers on to talk about it. I'd love to start by asking, what are the bad theories? Very briefly before we get into your good one.

Okay. Well, I discussed three that are currently being used. The first you may know, everyone may know about the cases where a chimpanzee was argued to be a person and they were, Stephen Wise, the lawyer who's in charge of the non-human rights project, got this chimpanzee out of his confinement and transferred to a wildlife sanctuary. And he also tried, more recently, to get an elephant named

Happy out of her zoo, the Bronx Zoo, and transferred to an elephant sanctuary. But the theory that he uses is that among the animals, there are a few species, great apes and elephants, that are very like human beings. So I call this the so-like-us approach. And he brings out the things that he thinks will make judges see them as like us and argues that because they're so like us, they should count as persons in law and be given special privileges. So that, to me, just gets things the wrong way around.

Because first of all, any theory that benefits animals should be because of them, not because of us. For us, it's not a good reason to treat another kind of being well. But second, it leaves the worst horrors completely unattended. So animals in the factory farming industry, all the birds who are crashing into buildings and dying with air pollution, all of these are completely unattended because he's carved out this little niche for apes and elephants. So that just doesn't seem very helpful. And I know, I mean, I know Steve and I think he's a very courageous activist. He does this because he thinks that's where judges are. And he calls this the thin end

of a wedge. So it isn't like he doesn't care about the other species. He just thinks we have to begin this way. But I think that's a mistake. I think if you begin with the wrong theory, you go down a wrong path. The first theory. The second, you also probably know from Peter Singer's work, is utilitarianism. So already in the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham said that the crucial issue is the commonality between humans and animals in suffering pain. And for Bentham, pain is the one bad thing. Pleasure is the one good thing. And because humans and animals alike feel pain, he thought there was absolutely no difference between humans and animals.

Now, that's a lot better. And if we could all only end the unnecessary pain that animals suffer at our hands, that would be huge progress. But the problem is it flattens the world too much because animals do need freedom from pain. So do we. But there are other things that are meaningful to animals that are not connected with pain. For example, the opportunity to have affiliation and society with whatever number of beings are part of their social group, the ability to move freely over wide ranges of territory. And these things, an animal might not feel pain when it's deprived of them because an

animal might grow up in the zoo and not even know that usually elephants do roam 200 miles in a day or that a dolphin socializes with a pod of 30 to 40 dolphins. But so they don't feel agony when they miss them, but they do still miss something important. So that I think is the real thing. The other problem is that like all utilitarian theories, it's an average. So we're aiming for the best average. And that means that there's no special attention to the ones who are at the bottom. So, oh yeah.

One final thing about utilitarianism. The goal is a state, either pleasure in Bentham's case or satisfaction of preferences in Singer's case, but people and animals don't just want to be in a state. They want to act and they want to take charge of their own lives. So it doesn't take agency into account enough. So that's my problem with that.

Now, the third, you probably don't know very well, or people who listen don't know, but Christine Korsgaard, a very important philosopher, wrote a few years ago a wonderful book called Fellow Creatures, with a lot of which I agree, and I think the practical recommendations that we make are rather similar. But because she's a Kantian, she follows Kant too much in the end, in the following way. She thinks that because, according to Kant anyway, human beings are the only creatures who can deliberate and take active thought for how their lives go. Therefore, in public policy, humans are the only ones who can be what she calls active citizens. Animals can only be passive recipients of a benefit. But that just, to me,

it shows, first of all, ignorance of biology. And she really doesn't study biology. I have a lot of biology in my book. Because we know by now, first of all, that our reasoning and deliberation are part of our evolutionary heritage, and that many animals have deliberative capacities that they use in social groups. Apes resolve conflicts, and they have many skills for that. Birds deliberate in many ways about how to get their food. So all of these things that we now know make that sharp distinction between active and passive citizens not very useful. And in fact, animals give plenty of indications about what they want and what they're striving for in their behavior and in their vocalizing. So I'm saying they too should be active citizens, meaning that their preferences, as they indicate them, should be taken into account when policies are made. And of course, the ones who go into court

and who make the policies will have to be human beings because our world is set up to be totally controlled by human beings. But the animals can be the beneficiaries in the sense of being active collaborators with the human representative. Think about children with cognitive disabilities. They can go into court as plaintiffs. Now, that doesn't mean that they argue their own case. Of course, a lawyer does it. And they'll also very likely have a guardian or surrogate who will present the case to the lawyer. But why can't animals be the same as that? There's no reason at all. So that's my recommendation is that animals can be, in that sense, active citizens, that their preferences and their expressed wishes are taken account of when

policies are made. It actually makes me think of the cliche from, you know, I don't know, children's television of like, who really owns the dog and let the dog decide who should the dog run to? Yeah, absolutely. And of course, everyone who lives with a dog or a cat knows this. If you're a good companion, you don't just call the shots all the time. You let the dog decide sometimes, where shall we walk today? And so, of course, in cities like mine, there aren't very many places where dogs can be off leash. So it's harder to see that.

But anyway, people do know what that means. And yet, somehow people have forgotten about that. And they think that animals are just somehow passive recipients of benefit. At least that's what Korsgaard seems to think. And I think even though her book is tremendous, she was actually a former student of mine long, long, long ago. And she wrote her dissertation on both Kant and Aristotle. There's a lot of Aristotle in this book. And it's a wonderful book. But that one part of it, I think she feels constrained to stick very close to Kant as much as she can, although she completely rejects what he said about animals, namely that they're just things that we can use as we please.

So she diverges from Kant, but not enough. Yeah. The piece of yours that made me want to have you on was a piece, I think in the New York Review of Books you wrote called What We Owe to Our Fellow Animals, which I really love that framing of them being our fellow animals. So if I were to just ask you, what do you feel that we owe to them? What is it?

where they're capable of pursuing the kind of life that's characteristic of their species, at least as a rough cut. I mean, we know that species is a rough cut. But basically, what the capabilities approach says is capabilities are not inner abilities. They're spaces within which, in the case of people, they're able to choose things that they value. Well, I've now extended the approach to animals and said, each species has a set of opportunities that it needs, that's characteristic of that species.

And the good, just world would be one in which all the species that are sentient, we can talk about that later, are capable of pursuing their own good as they see it up to a threshold level. It's not trying to maximize, but just move them up above some reasonable threshold. And the list of what those capabilities are, of course, is made in effect by the animals themselves as they exhibit in their behavior and in their striving what they think is good for them. But there'll have to be human interpreters who write this all down. And there are by now. There are people who've lived with baboons for many years, people who live with elephants for years. Whales, it's more difficult

because they can't kind of live down in the ocean with them. But the people that I cite in the book, they spend six months a year on a little boat and they go down in a diving bell quite often and they get as close to the lives of whales as they can. So these are the people and hopefully more than one that we would trust to make up the slightly tentative list for each kind of animal. list for each kind of animal. And so I want to return to what you said about capability, because there's the piece of it that is the ability that you have as an organism to do X, Y, Z, but there's also the piece of it that's the environment that that being is in, right? That gives them the affordances that they need to... Well, right. Capability could mean an inner skill, but that's not what... Oh, yeah. Yeah. You're drawing that distinction. Could you just unpack that a little bit? Okay. The theory that Amartya Sen, the

economist that I have developed, defines the capability as a substantive freedom. That is a space for choice, not an inner skill. Now, of course, one thing that's required for that freedom is the training and development of inner skills. But it's all a question of how the environment enables you to get the things that you value most. So that's what a capability is. It's used differently in other parts of economics, so it can be sort of confusing. But we define it very clearly in our work with humans. And then with animals, it just means that we're not trying to make the animals more skilled. We're trying to give them more space to select the things that they value.

So you brought up the case of the fellow trying to establish legal rights for a chimpanzee based on they're so much like us and you disagreed that approach. Is there an example of if we were to put this theory into practice, how we would make an argument of that sort differently? Or is there a particular animal that you would focus on in that way? Well, I mean, of course, every animal. There are so many things that are wrong. And I guess practically speaking, I would like to start with the worst abuses. The factory farm industry does not give any animals the chance for any kind of meaningful life. You take

female pigs, they're thrust into a gestation crate. It's a metal box just the size of their body. So what capabilities do they lack? They lack the capability to move around, even to lie down. They lack the capability to be clean. Pigs are very clean animals, but they're forced to defecate right where they are into some sewage lagoon below the box. And they lack society. Pigs are very social animals and they can't associate with any other pig. So they lack all the meaningful capabilities of pig life. But that's one example would be that. i do think that we should not be killing pigs at all for me but it would be a lot better to have a humane farm where a pig could at least live its own pig life up to the point of pain let's hope painless slaughter that would be better than

the factory farm but let me just give you an example of a court that decided a case. Please. Right. Okay. Well, the U.S. Navy, obviously, is a pretty powerful organization. The sonar program is an important part of national defense. But now that sonar program, starting in 2016, has been declared illegal on grounds that it violates a law called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So it's one of statutory interpretation. They had to rely on the luck of having a good statute, but they interpreted

it in a particular way. Other judges previously had looked for evidence that the sonar program causes pain to whales, but there was no evidence of that. But what the judges said is it impedes their characteristic activities. It stops them from, it makes them delay mating, delay migration. They migrate with reduced energy reserves because the noise just disrupts their whole way of life.

They were listening and they talked about emotional health, all the capabilities that would be on my list anyway, they referred to, not because they knew this work, of course, but they just looked at whales and they said, what matters to these creatures? What do they need? And the program was disrupting that. So that would be a template for where judging should go in the future. I'm really curious about how, you mentioned factory farming, but I'm really curious about how you mentioned factory farming, but I'm really

curious about how you apply this to animals that have been domesticated for many, many millennia, horses and other animals like that, that historically humans have used for our own ends, but now have been around humans for so long. has this changed their characteristic way of life at all? My girlfriend is a horse person, and so this often comes up where, actually, if I can give you an example, I'd love your take on this. We had a, here in Los Angeles where I live,

there are these pony rides where there are miniature ponies on public property. It was in a public park, and children would pay $5 and ride are miniature ponies on public property. It was in a public park and, you know, children would pay five dollars and ride the little ponies around. And some animal activists really protested, you know, over the last year this concession because they would look at the ponies and they would say, oh my gosh, look, don't these ponies look so sad? Their heads are drooping. They're so unhappy, you know. Uh, whereas a lot of the horse people who my, uh, girlfriend knows because she's part of that community said, no, these ponies are actually quite happy. Uh, ponies at this level, they like to be ridden. They need the exercise.

They're well-treated. Um, and it's not in fact abusive. Uh, and this was to me a case where, you know, the, the city, the, you know, the, the city council was like rather flummoxed by the issue because they didn't know how do we prioritize what these two different groups are saying are the needs of the animals. And I'm curious if your approach would give any insight to that. Well, the first thing to say is I think there's nothing at this point wrong with animals living in symbiosis with humans and eating humans. Some people think that we should just simply breed out all the domestic species because they argue that long, long, long ago, long was done to these animals by making them such that they do

depend on humans. So with others like Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlicka, I say, look, we can't litigate millennia-old wrongs, but what we should do is look at them right now and see that dependency in itself is not shameful. A creature can live a very good life dependent on another species. And I think dogs, cats, and horses are like that. So the question is, how do they live in dependencies? And there are lots of things that we do with companion animals whom we pretend to love that are really bad. One, of course, with dogs is not giving them enough attention. A lot of people think, oh, I'll adopt a dog.

And then they go off and they lead their lives. This is why I don't have a dog, because I travel a lot. I teach a lot. And I just wouldn't have a dog because I travel a lot and I teach a lot and I just wouldn't have the time to treat the dog properly. I see dogs in my building with six dogs on their leashes being walked by one person because that's the dog walker in the building. That's not a good life for the dog. You need the careful attention of the companion. And the other thing is they need a lot of exercise. So most cities, it's very hard to give a dog a good life. There are not enough dog parks in

Chicago, lots of problems. And cats, it's a little bit different. I think cats on the whole should be kept indoors given the disease issues that come up. Yeah. And the threat to birds, which is a whole set of animals with their own lives to live. And the threat to birds, which is a whole set of animals with their own lives to live. And the threat to birds, absolutely. But then we have to give them interesting activities indoors, give them things to play with, give them scratching posts. Now with horses, I do know people who think horses should not be ridden. They should just go out into the pasture. I knew a young woman who was a superb equestrian, winning prizes in hunter-jumper shows. And she was feeling guilty all the time that she was harming the horse. I don't think that makes sense because a really good hunter-jumper is bred for that.

It's like a fine athlete that gets pleasure out of winning, you know. And it's no worse than a human being jumping over jumps in order to get the pleasure of winning. So long as the horse is fed well, exercised well, and treated with care, not overridden, not, you know, not whipped, of course, and so on. Now, the question about the ponies would be, how are they cared for? I know that carriage horses in both New York and Chicago have been shown to give the horses terrible lives, and it's being phased out in both of those cities. So the question would be, are they being beaten? Are they being starved? Are they being treated like things to make a profit, not really like companions that you love? So those would be the

questions that I would ask. And if those questions were answered rightly, I think there's nothing wrong with giving children pony rides, but I fear that it's all too likely that the answers will not be answered rightly. I mean, in this case, we don't need to get into the details because we'd have to go look at the records of how the ponies were kept. But I think in principle, that's a wonderfully clear answer. And I have so many more questions for you about this, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Martha Nussbaum.

Okay, we're back with Martha Nussbaum. So you wrote in the introduction to the book, I'd love an explanation of this. You wrote that we know that animals have a subjective experience from experimentation. And I'd love to unpack that a little bit. How do we know that? Okay, well, what does that mean? It means having a point of view on the world, looking out through their eyes, and the world means something to them. How do we know that? Well, of course, it doesn't just mean dealing with subjective feeling

of pain, but that happens to be the easiest thing to do experiments on. So it's usually through experiments on the feeling of pain that we prove that about an animal. Now, at this point, no one has any doubts about large mammals. No one has doubts anymore about birds, given their extremely fine-tuned responsiveness to all sorts of things and their very high deliberative abilities. But the doubt in recent years has been about fish. So to see whether fish feel pain, there's a wonderful book by Victoria Braithwaite called Do Fish Feel Pain? And what she did was to set up experiments in such a way that if the fish just was trying to avoid an obstacle but didn't really feel pain, it would behave one way. And if it really did feel a disturbing feeling, it would behave another way. I won't

describe the detail of that but she did it really very convincingly and very well and you know again and again fish are different species proved capable of feeling pain so that is really interesting and it's not what was expected at first. The only scientist who objects is someone who seems to be in the employ of the fishery. Predictably so. So anyway, that's the kind of thing. Now, that's what I call sentience. That is that there's someone at home behind the eyes. There's an inner life there. There's an inner world that we could have a picture of. the eyes. Yeah, there's an inner life there. There's an inner world that we could have a picture of, yeah. Inner world. And most of the animals I've just talked about, I mean, they all have that, but then there are still doubts about some. Most people think that insects do not have

that, that they do perform aversive behaviors, but without the subjective feeling. And there are doubts about bees. There are people who think that maybe bees have a subjective feeling. And there are doubts about bees. There are people who think that maybe bees have a subjective feeling. There are experiments like the fish experiments about bees that are inconclusive up till now. But then the other group that's in doubt, well, there are two other groups that are in doubt. So I said fish feel pain, but cartilaginous fish, sharks, seem to be in a different category because they will actually cannibalize parts of their own body. And they seem to show no awareness at all that they are doing that. So that does seem strongly suggested that they don't feel pain and there are other things as well. So that's one group that seems possibly not sentient. Cephalopods of the octopus and the squid clearly

are sentient, and they're actually highly intelligent. But crustaceans, there's much more doubt. Some people think that crabs do feel pain. There's a wonderful book by the philosopher Michael Tai called Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs. Wonderful title. And he is doubtful. In the end, he concludes that insects are not sentient, crabs maybe, and so on. So I'm kind of with him. But I think what's important is not so much the application of the criterion, but getting the criterion right so that as research progresses, we can apply the standard in more and more accurate ways. And so right now I'm just trying to articulate the standard. Yeah. I was so fascinated by this question. And, you know, when I was getting my

bachelor's in philosophy 20 years ago, this was the question that fascinated me was how we can draw the conclusion that another being has a consciousness or an inner life from just observing what it does. And I do wonder, as you're drawing those distinctions, how do you know that you've picked the right criterion in order to make the cut at the right place? Okay, well, I guess it's a multi-pronged standard. First of all, we look at neuroanatomy, and that tells us a lot about what the basis is for a certain kind of experience.

But it's not entirely conclusive. So for many years, birds were thought not to have very complicated experience because their neuroanatomy was so different from ours. They don't have a neocortex. And later it was concluded that, well, by convergent evolution, they came up with the same abilities, but with a very different anatomy. But start with neuroanatomy and where insects are concerned, that's pretty much a knockdown issue because they just don't have an there there that they could feel

something with. But the second thing we would do is observe their behavior under many different circumstances and then use what philosophers call inference to the best explanation to say this, you know, given the behavior we're observing, that they feel pain is the best explanation. In other words, most economical, all the things that philosophers of science have for long years. That's why I do what I do when I feel pain. And so if this being is doing the same thing when it feels pain, it's reasonable to conclude. Yeah, exactly. And of course, that's what we do with other humans. How do we know? How do I know that you are sentient? It's a complicated, I? It's a complicated issue.

I mean, I know very likely what your neuroanatomy is like. And then I observe your behavior. And I think, well, yeah, you could be a very fiendishly complicated automaton. And I guess as time goes on, that gets more and more likely. But actually, the simplest and most powerful explanation is that you, like me, feel pain and whatever else. Yeah, so that's what they do. And it's important to remember that ascribing these properties to other humans is just not easy. And we do the same with other humans as we do with animals.

And I want to say one more thing. Please. You mentioned consciousness. do with animals. And I want to say one more thing. So you mentioned consciousness. Consciousness is usually thought of as not just subjective perception, but as a kind of second order perception and awareness that you perceive. Well, that's plays only some part in human life. It's not as big a deal as sometimes people think. I think most of our activity goes on with plain, ordinary, direct awareness without reflecting on it. But sure, sometimes we reflect on it. But it turns out that animals too, lots of animals, not as many as Neil Payne, but quite a few, have that property

too. Any animal that's capable of deceiving others, deceiving others requires that you think at a meta level, what they are thinking, and then you do something to foil them. So like when a squirrel figures out where to hide a nut, they are thinking, but the other squirrels will think. There are other squirrel minds out there that I need to take into account when I bury my nut. Or sometimes it's squirrel minds, sometimes that I need to take into account when I bury my nut. Or sometimes it's squirrel minds, sometimes it's other predators, whatever. And of course, we all know that dogs have that ability very, very greatly. Anyone who is a companion of a dog knows that they can deceive the companion in many ways.

So that shows that animals, too, have meta-awareness. Yeah. Oh, that actually makes me think that, well, my dog certainly thinks of me as a conscious sentient being because it tries to deceive me. It jumps up on the couch when I'm out of the house. And when I surprise it and come back home, it jumps off because it knows that I'm aware of things. So I should probably give it the same respect and treat it as though it's also a conscious sentient being. Oh, yeah. And of course you have extra evidence from your own subjective feelings, but I guess it's the same,

you have the same evidence about the dog that you would about another person who lived in your household. Yeah. And so why, you know, why draw the sharp line at the species barrier why just not use the explanation that seems the most plausible yeah and it is much more plausible than devising well it could be this kind of automaton that we don't know yet but it might somehow you know it's

like descartes an evil genius. They could imagine that some of his experiences might have been caused by an evil genius. And then he said that he can be sure that some of them are not like that. Well, the argument is complicated, but anyway, from his own case, he was able to generalize and say, well, surely the case of others is like that too. You mentioned earlier that you don't feel that we should be killing pigs for meat. I'd love to talk about that a little bit. To me, I often sort of regret the fact that so much of the conversation about animal welfare, at least in America, is completely bound up by eating meat or not. For a lot of people, they reduce it down to simply that question um when i think it's i'm always looking for ways to complicate it which is why

i'm excited to talk to you but do you uh have a have a view on that on on meat eating per se or is it about the conditions of factory farming and the um you know the etc the the capabilities that you talk about most of my book is about giving the animal a shot at having a decent life. So it's about the life, not the death. But then when we start thinking, and of course we could agree that the death, if there is one, should be painless. When would we be justified in inflicting death on an animal? Well, first of all, we have to ask, is death bad for an animal?

And under what circumstances? And that's not an obvious question. Philosophers have asked that for a long time. I think Harris thought that death wasn't really a bad thing because if the death was painless and after that, there's no you who's harmed by it. Right. The person who died because they're not there anymore. And there's no other person. You're just sort of imagining that there's this little you who survives, who's looking at the deprivation. But of course, that's a fantasy. So I think the thing that's wrong with Epicurus, and I had

written about that long ago in writing about the Hellenistic philosophers, was that he doesn't take account of the fact that life can be damaged and thwarted by being cut short in midstream. So imagine that you're a young person trying to get into law school. You spend all your time studying for the LSAT. You don't do anything else to shortchange your friends and your family. And then you die before you get into law, much less into a law career. Well, then your life has been thwarted in a particularly bad way because the premature death casts a backward light on the life. This project that was in midstream never got past its preparatory

stage. You never got to enjoy the fruits of that project. So this is what I call the interruption argument. So I think what death is bad for is that it interrupts valuable activities that people are pursuing over time. And sometimes, of course, valuable activities take a long time to develop. The project to form a friendship is usually a very long-term project, and the project to have a child and raise a child, etc. Even if the project is a very short one, you still might want to do it again. You might want to watch that same movie again, so you're deprived of a plan that you have. So I say that so long as the person has projects of that sort that extend over time, that can be thwarted by death, and so long as the person is still interested in them and carrying

them forward, then death is a harm. Now we look at animals. Now animals, not all of them, have projects that extend over time. A while back, I mean a very short while back, utilitarian philosophers, including Bentham, thought that they had no sense of time, that no animal had a sense of time, and that therefore this kind of argument would not apply to them. They just live in the moment. And even quite recently, Jeff McMahon, in his book about killing, which is a wonderful book, he does say this, that animals live in the moment, so death doesn't cut short any projects. By now, we know that that's not true. Large mammals, you know, they have a very strong sense of time and repetition and so forth. But I do believe up till now, and I'm

rather tentative about this in the book, you can always learn new things that fish are like that, that they, they do feel pain, but they live in the moment. So I myself, I'm a pescatarian. Lots of people will heartily disagree with me, but I talk about the fact that I'm a 75 year old woman who exercises a lot and I need a lot of protein. I need 70 grams of protein a day for basic health. And I can't digest lentils. So I have a hard time getting the protein. And on the whole, I think the fish version of that is, if the fish are humanely farmed and painlessly killed, is better than the dairy version of that. Because the dairy industry is very cruel. It deprives the mother of her young

and the young of the mother. And there's no way, I mean, the egg industry can be reformed because we already know that there can be cage-free eggs, still leaving enough eggs left for the chicken to take care of, that no one has thought of a way of reforming the dairy industry that's not emotionally cruel in that way. So anyhow, that's what I think, that we should not eat any large mammals. That I feel pretty confident of. And of course, let me add that we could if it was the animal who had gotten to a point in life where all its interests had ceased, which might be the case with some, let's say, extremely old humans too, right? Although my grandmother died at the age of 104, and she was still in full vigor, and she had lots

of interests. So it depends on the person. But of course, no one proposes to eat an aged animal. Using Asia for a dog or a cat who's reached old age and doesn't seem to have a life worth living, that seems to me perfectly fine. But then, of course, it has nothing to do with eating. Yeah. Yeah. We eat, unfortunately, are in the prime of their lives. And so they're definitely going to be thwarted, cut short. So I do think fish are an exception right now, but I may change my mind depending on the research.

And then we just have to ask what else? Now, fortunately, we live in an era where science can cut through some of these problems. We already have, of course, vegetarian meat that's selling very well for people who care about the health issues, the impossible burger and so forth. But even more important, there's now lab-grown meat grown from stem cells. It's marketed already in Singapore. Pretty soon it's going to be available here. And I mean, I'm not going to care about that because I don't like the taste of meat. But people who do can eat that without the feeling that any animal life is being cut short. So I think we're ready to solve that problem. Yes. That's a wonderful answer. We have to take another

really quick break. We'll be right back with more Martha Nussbaum. Okay, we're back with Martha Nussbaum. You mentioned that there are a few, you call them four areas of moral unease, areas that really give us a lot of difficulty when we're thinking about animals. Medical experimentation and issues like that. Is there one that you could pick to talk to us about that you find particularly interesting or of great concern? Hey, folks, Adam here. So we had a little bit of a technical glitch right here. We missed part of Martha's answer, just the beginning though. So I want to give you a little context to understand what she is saying when she comes back. She talks about medical

experimentation and other problems like these as very difficult because we lose something no matter which choice we make. And she uses the myth of Agamemnon as a metaphor, as a way of explaining that. So I think you should be able to get it from this point forward. So let's keep rolling the interview. Agamemnon was told by the gods, either you kill your daughter right now, or else you will be responsible for the immediate death of all your army and you and the daughter. So in that case, probably in the immediate instance, he has to kill the daughter because she'll die anyway. And a lot of other people will be saved. But it's tragic because he's doing a terrible wrong. So tragedy is full of these things. Often it takes

the form of civil war where people have to fight against the people they love. So we have these issues in our relations with animals a lot. And one of these, so the structure is there are two choices and both involve doing wrong. What do we do? So medical experimentation is like that because it does produce great benefits for both humans and other animals that we don't right now have any other way of getting. But right now, it also does great harm to the animals who are used. Well, the first thing we can do is draw a line and say, no experimentation that does this or this or this. And people have already done that and a new criteria for medical experimentation. But that's not enough, because even the premature death of an experimental animal, I think, is wrong. So in that case, the philosopher Hegel

thought that what we should do when we're faced with such a case is to look ahead to the future and ask, what can we do to change the world so that that choice doesn't face well-intentioned people any longer. He was thinking of the plot of Sophocles' Antigone, where Antigone was ordered to violate her religious obligations in order to do her civic duty. And he said, well, the modern liberal state has built in the regard for religion so that you're not going to violate your civic duty if you honor the claims of your religion so the tragedy has been as he puts it alcohol sublated taken up and removed that's what i think we should try to do now how can we do that well with the meat i we just talked about that that is inventing a way of getting meat without killing animals.

With medical experimentation, same sort of thing. We are already able to do a lot of experimental procedures by computer simulation, more and more that's used in hospitals. Animal experiments are not that reliable. You know, models on rats and mice don't translate very well to humans. You know, models on rats and mice don't translate very well to humans. So in reliability terms, they're not ideal anyway. So if we can work as fast as possible to a world where computer simulations use rather than animal experimentation, then that puts an end to that tragedy. And that is what actually is already going on. But I think it needs to happen more rapidly.

Yeah. One thing that I really love about the way that you talk about these things is that so often these ethical issues are presented to us very abstractly or very, very simply that, you know, a lot of people say, I don't need anything with a face or I don't need anything that I feel can feel pain or et cetera, you are very, very focused on like the biology of the particular animals and what we have learned about them, what we're learning about them in the future and the details of the system that we create

that causes harm to them or not. And I find that really fascinating. I don't know if you have anything in particular to say about that approach. What I want to say is in the last 30 years, science has made such great leaps. We've learned so much. And I myself, I mean, I'm a humanities person. I've never learned much science, but for this book, I read so much biology and really lots of things that people would enjoy reading. And often the books are illustrated so we can actually see the animal that's being discussed. So there are books and

books out there that people can read and lots of films too. So it's easy, you know, and very, very pleasant and fun to acquaint yourself with animal behavior. Yeah. And I find that often I, I'm, I sometimes find myself talking to people who are very concerned with animal rights or animal welfare, but don't know that much about the animal that they're talking about or aren't intimately acquainted, you know, um, uh, again, sort of the example of people who are concerned about, uh, horse welfare without maybe knowing, you know, the details of, of what horses want or, or care about. Um, and, uh, so, so, you know, the details of what horses want or care about. And so, you know, having that sort of deep understanding, it seems really fruitful to me. You also write that this book is a work of

love and constructive mourning. And I just, I would love to know what you mean by that phrase, constructive mourning. Well, my daughter, Rachel, died in 2019 of a fungal infection after successful transplant surgery. It was a devastating loss for me, but she was a lawyer for animal rights. She worked for a small NGO called Friends of Animals who worked particularly with wild animals. So that was her job, but she was particularly interested in marine mammals. So we coauthored four papers together where I supplied the philosophy and she supplied the law. And so, you know, we just had great fun doing that. And she got me really excited about writing this book and read drafts of it in its early phases and so forth. But when she actually died, you know, of course, it's the worst thing that can happen to a parent to lose an only child.

But I thought, well, what shall I do now? But the answer was pretty clear that I should continue with this book that she knew about, that she valued, and that embodied some of her deepest commitments to animal welfare. And I should try to make it as good as possible and then hope that it catches on and that people care about it. And that's my way of keeping her alive. I talked about the philosopher Cicero, the Roman philosopher. He also lost a daughter at around the same time in his life and the same time in the daughter's life. And he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out how to pay tribute to that daughter. But what he did was to build a monument. And he was all occupied with buying the land on which to build this shrine for Tulia.

And you know, it's not that meaningful, a shrine. But I think this, I hope, it's more meaningful. It embodies her commitments and her work. It's really about her. And I hope it carries them forward. I'm sure it does. And what a beautiful, what a beautiful way to honor her memory. This has been such a wonderful conversation, Martha. I can't thank you enough for being here and sharing it with us. Thank you very much. I really love this interview

and I really enjoyed all your questions. So thank you so much for inviting me. Well, thank you once again to Martha Nussbaum for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that conversation, please check out her book, Justice for Animals. You can pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank my producer, Sam Roudman, my engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. And it's been a little while since I've done it, so I'm going to read every single one of your names. Here we go. Alan Liska, Anne Slegel, Antonio LB, Ashley, Aurelio Jimenez, Benjamin Birdsall, Benjamin Cornelius Bates, Benjamin Rice, Beth Brevik, Black Cat Jackster, Brian Gregory, Brighton, Camu and Lego, Charles Anderson, Chase Thompson-Bow, Chris McKinless, Chris Mullins, Chris Staley, Clifton Vargas, Comrade Crunchy, Courtney Henderson, Daniel Halsey, David Condry, David Conover, Devin Kim, Diane McCullough, Drill Bill, Duck Moo, Dude With Games, Eben Lowe, Ellie Mary, Ethan Jennings, George Rohack, Garner Malegis, Harmonic, Hillary Wolkin, J. Scott Christensen, Jason Burbage, Jay Saul, Jeff Nash, Jim Myers, Jim Shelton, Joanna Ligenfelter, Joker on the Sofa,

Russell, Caitlin Flanagan, Kel Crow, Kelly Casey, Kelly Lucas, Kevin France, Kevlar, Lacey Tigenoff, Lacey Garrison, Lara Willing, uh, Larry Latouf, Larry Studenmeier Studenmund, sorry, I got that wrong, Larry Studer Studenmund, I'm sorry, Larry, Lauren Sanborn, Lisa Matoulis, Lauren Fieldhouse, Maggie Hardaway, Manuel Garcia, Mark Long, Martin J. Lawler, Marvin Tithonium, Marvin Weichert, Matt, Miles Gillingsrud, mom Named Gwen, Mrs. King Coke, Neil Gampa, Nicholas, Nicholas Morris, Nikki Patelli, Noah Dowd, Nuyagik Ippoluk, Oren Cohen, Paul Malk, Paul Schmidt, Peter Zeglin,

Rachel Nieto, Richard Watkins, Robin Madison, Ronald C. Waits, Rosamund Sturgis, Rosie Gutierrez, Roy Ziegler, Ryan Shelby, Samantha Schultz, Sam Ogden, Sasha Chu, Sean Smith, Senior Bosa, Scooper, Super Duper, Spencer Campbell, on to page three. Here we go. Susan E. Fisher, Thomas Lewis, Tim Kearns, Tim Esroot, Vincente Lopez, Vornack, Weeb Milk, WhiskeyNerd88, Will Bogey, and Zach Zim. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover, and I will thank you for doing it.

If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover, and I will thank you for doing it. In the future, I'll probably pick five random names out of the hat to read because, oh boy, that was taxing on the old vocal cords. Oh, I also want to thank Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me at adamconover.net. You can also find my tour dates there and at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything.