Martha Nussbaum is a leading thinker on matters of justice, including justice for animals. 

But the climate crisis is intensifying, and killing millions who had little role in causing or exacerbating it. At the same time a small percentage of persons have become obscenely wealthy. Many are asking if there has been a fundamental failure of justice – in the actual creation, at birth, of power relations – that we should all address. Many entities in those nations most responsible for the crisis are using the same fraudulent political systems, and impact / reporting standards, that caused the crisis in order to hide liability.

Fact: The failure of world leaders for decades to ensure a measurable fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, for all children has done more to harm the practice of justice than Nussbaum and other luminaries have done to further it.

This is a failure many funding the fields of animal law and justice are eager to ignore because they made their wealth on the growth and inequity that caused a climate crisis that will kill countless animals and humans.

 

 

How did Nussbaum, in her work, account for how children entering the world impacted nonhumans? This is not a complex question. Did her drawing attention to downstream forms of justice, while ignoring the fundamental role of inequitable growth, exacerbate situations like heat exposure and racial disparities in access to air conditioning?

Fair Start is writing Nussbaum openly for a reason:

For years Fair Start activists had been encouraged to engage in private academic discourse and debate about our work while also assuming and benefitting from default systems of birth entitlements (like white wealth), protected by the violence of the legal system, that were contrary to the ideals of animal justice.

That backchannel and time consuming discourse is what one might call distracademia. In light of horrors of things like growth exacerbated heat waves, much in the modern animal protection movement  – like the academy – seems more like a self-aggrandizing garden club that has been funded by the clear cutting of local forests than a true social justice movement.

At a meta level, beyond the façade, is Nussbaum assuming entitlements she should not? A recent exchange with her students – who felt their was no connection between intergenerational and animal justice, suggests that’s exactly what she, and they, are doing. Their version of freedom, or liberalism, is leading to the death of others. Why not change the entitlements default while engaged in the discourse?

It’s very possible we should define fundamental political group membership, and the deserving of collective protection, based on the level of protection members would extend to infants and animals. Those rejecting self-determining protections for these vulnerables through things like delay and readiness incentives would themselves fall outside the scope of being owed protection.

That is what below we are asking Nussbaum to do – to consider resetting the default for protection while she engages in discourse.

There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should first focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

 

 

All evidence suggests that not ensuring all children a measurable fair start in life, and birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment has done more to harm all social justice goals, including individual freedom, than any other efforts have done to further them. In many cases when one factors in loss of political equity, or one’s effective shares in democracy to control the influence of others, many public interest organizations spend more on lavish travel and events than furthering their missions.

 

But we don’t talk about this because it means admitting the historic subversion of civil rights through family inequity, and the treating of children of color as deserving a fraction as what white kids deserve, while assuming children of color should suffer the brunt of the climate crisis. The wealth we see in the world today carries massive debt because we all benefitted from the violation of children’s rights to make it, bringing children into the world as means and not rights-bearing ends.

Our language, by not including the impact children entering the world has on our values, work, and missions, hides costs we foist on others and blocks our ability to derive obligations to follow the law back to a condition of its actually measurably empowering those subject to it. The hiding means we value the things in our lives by taking the idea of self-determination out of context, ignoring how our lives very much determine others – climatologically for example.

As discussed below, one solution is to legally require disclosures contrasting claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alters that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs.

We have all benefitted at deadly cost to future generations, a fact quickly manifesting now as as the climate crisis intensifies.

None can be allowed to ignore creation ethics / positionality. Where, when and with which resources we are born is the largest determinant of outcomes in things like the climate crisis. And in terms of justice, and political obligation, there is no more basic a choice than how to deal with and offset our creation positionality, and the benefits and costs it conveys, intergenerationally for example.

 

 

Our collective failure to deal with the unjust and unsustainable system of growth that created our own birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionalities is leading to the death of millions. Academics are not immune from this systems of benefits and costs. In fact leaders in the academy are some of the most responsible, and we should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring children the fair start in life justice required.

Doing so now, and changing policies to internalize the costs we foist on others, can save lives. The move would require fundamental social coordination around a norm which is infinitely easier to use than a written constitution of the sort we have in the U.S., a thing unknowable to most more backed by guns than reason.

 

Ask anyone claiming to good work in the world to account for children being born without what the Children’s Rights Convention promises those kids in resources and rights. Then ask the person claiming to do good to reassess their claims. You will see a lot of good that many claimed to do actually fall away, by metrics we all believe in, with harm escalating as temperatures rise.

Nussbaum’s work and claims contain the same self-serving baseline error as the work of Cass Sunstein. But as the crises worsens, there are fewer reasons to continue to make that mistake.

Nussbaum is a luminary. She is also a person that simply benefitted at deadly cost to others.

TAKE ACTION: Contact Nussbaum and urge her to admit the harm done, and back reforms in human rights law that would ensure all children a fair start in life as the first and overriding human right.