Justice for Animals by Martha C Nussbaum review – how we became the tyrants of the animal kingdom

A scholarly look at how badly we treat other species employs moral principles to shame us into acknowledging their rights The physicist Stephen Hawking once hosted a party for time travellers, but only sent out the invitations after the date had already passed. No one came. If people from the future had turned up, what would most appal them about our society today, apart from Love Island and Suella Braverman? For the prominent American philosopher Martha C Nussbaum, the answer is our treatment of animals, which her sober and sobering new book argues is a moral crime on a monumental scale. To make her scholarly case, Nussbaum points to the “barbarous cruelties of the factory meat industry”, “habitat destruction” and “pollution of the air and seas” – but casts the ethical net even more widely to ensnare all of us who “dwell in areas in which elephants and bears once roamed” or “live in high-rise buildings that spell death for migratory birds”. We’re all complicit, she argues, no matter how right-on we think we are – and we have “a long overdue ethical debt” to work off. Continue reading...
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