Martha Nussbaum is a leading thinker on matters of justice, including justice for animals. But she never accounts for the need to create just and mutually empowering relations, in the actual birth, development and emancipation of the humans who will interact with nonhumans. How does justice without that need fulfilled benefit animals?
At the end of this post we ask her to prioritize fulfilling that need now.
Introduction
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. There is no form of justice, and certainly not animal justice, that ignores the actual creation of human and nonhuman relations. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so true justice first focuses on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Nussbaum’s work ignores this primary issue – the largest determinant of animals lives.
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 together are killing many as temperatures rise.
How did Nussbaum, in her work, account for how children entering the world impacts nonhumans? This is not a complex question. Where in her work does she account for the injustice of her birth positioning, derived from a form of reproductive autonomy devoid of racial or nonhuman equity? Did her drawing attention to downstream forms of justice, while ignoring the fundamental role of inequitable growth, decoy efforts away from effective work, and exacerbate situations like heat exposure combined with 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 the immediate horrors of things like growth-exacerbated heat waves, much in the modern animal protection movement – like the academy and its questionable impact – seems more like a self-aggrandizing garden club that has been funded by the clear cutting of local forests than drivers of 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 there was no connection between human intergenerational and animal justice, suggests that’s exactly what she, and they, are doing.
Liberalism, and freedom, mean being empowered. How could that possibly happen outside of the context creation, development and emancipation? Are academics exempt from this relative positioning? Those who reject fair creation obligations limit themselves to a version of freedom that is leading to the death of others. Why not change the entitlements default while engaged in the discourse to avoid that? Would Martha have focused on this change, decades ago, if she had known how the climate crisis would unfold?
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 parental delay and readiness incentives would themselves fall outside the scope of being owed protection because there would never be a way to explain why they have shown the reciprocity necessary for membership. Deserving that, being included in a legitimate system, is not onerous and could just require backing high level birth protections for infants.
That is all 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 their degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy.
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 have spent 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 of what white kids deserve, while assuming those 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.
Whatever Nussbaum said, she lived a life of benefiting from not having to assure her own values in the birth-creation of others’ power relations, for example, in the funding that would have backed her work. All of that wealth would have been made in disregard of the lives of animals and the most vulnerable children because their interests are absent in the fundamental family creation norms that entitle wealth.
Abstract academic debates about ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to exacerbate the results of the climate crisis by forestalling law and policy reforms. Many of the debates derive from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism described above – the historic entitlement of wealthy families to exploit birth positionality relative to colonized nations – nesting in the human-rights regime.
Most of the academics in these debates contradict in their writings the basic values they exhibited throughout their lives, e.g., seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions, etc.
You can identify these academics because they will avoid discussions of how shared values relate to the actual creation of power relations. They will pontificate on values while enjoying the benefits of their birth lottery outcome.
They will silo off values, like animals’ rights, from the issue of who the humans – the performance of which those rights depend on – should be. They will avoid discussions of their full positionality. They will avoid explicitly conditioning state authority on empowering each person equally.
If the micro-liberation of nonhumans looks like open rescues at factory farms, the macro would look like “real new deal” social contract demands for reparations in exchange for child-centric planning that would ensure a truly climate-restored and bio-diverse future in which humans are empathetic enough to be inclined to treat nonhumans well. But many academics, whose interests do not align with macro reforms, ignore the latter.
These academics often assist funders in coaptating the values, imitating and redefining things like animal rights and mutual self-determination of humans and nonhumans, creating something that looks like the value but more aligned with their interests.
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 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 given their decoy effects.
We should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring all 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. Doing so would allow us to 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 – and more backed by guns than collective reason and understanding.
Nussbaum’s work and claims contain the same self-serving baseline error as the work of Cass Sunstein. But as the climate and relate crises worsen, there are fewer reasons to continue to make that mistake. In essence, if we do not change the standard, we are inclined to “double dip,” to ignore birth positionality – the fundamental system most driving the outcomes, the main determinant, while pretending we are saviors ensuring justice.
Nussbaum is a luminary. She is also a person who simply benefitted at deadly cost to others, as many of us have. She can be a leader in fixing the fundamental cause of that.
TAKE ACTION: Contact Nussbaum and urge her to admit the harm done, and back concrete reforms in human rights law that would ensure all children a fair start in life as the first and overriding human right.
For example, we could ask whether she would consider who – between wealthy families uniquely responsible for the climate crisis seeking to defend their wealth, and impoverished would-be mothers needing resources to defend their future children’s choices in life, would have a superior claim to use state violence?
