Wherever you look, animals are in trouble. Our world is dominated by humans everywhere: on land, in the seas, and in the air. No nonhuman animal escapes our domination, which inflicts wrongful injury on animals through the barbarous cruelties of the factory meat industry, pollution of the air and the seas, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love.
BY MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
ETHICS
In a way, this problem is age-old. Both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions have deplored human cruelty to animals for around two millennia. The Hindu emperor Ashoka, a convert to Buddhism, wrote about his efforts to give up meat and to forgo all practices that harmed animals. In ancient Greece, the Platonist philosophers Plutarch and Porphyry wrote detailed treatises deploring human cruelty to animals, describing other creatures’ keen intelligence and their capacity for social life, and urging humans to change their diet and their way of life. But by and large, these voices have fallen on deaf ears, even in the supposedly moral realm of the philosophers, and most humans have continued to treat most animals like objects, whose suffering does not matter.
Today, we have, then, a long-overdue ethical debt: to listen to arguments we have refused to hear, to care for what we have obtusely ignored, and to act on the knowledge of our bad practices that we can so easily attain. In Porphyry’s world, animals suffered when they were killed for meat, but up to that point, they lived pretty decent lives. There was no factory meat industry that today breeds these animals as if they were just meat already, confining them in horrible conditions, cramped and isolated, until they die before ever having decently lived.
Animals were long hunted in the wild, but for the most part their habitats were not taken over for human dwellings or invaded by poachers seeking to make money from the murder of intelligent beings like elephants or rhinoceroses. In the seas, humans have always fished for food, and whales have long been hunted for their commercial value. But the sea was not always full of plastic trash that can choke them to death. Nor did companies drilling for undersea oil create noise pollution everywhere, making life increasingly difficult for social creatures whose sense of hearing is their primary mode of communication. Birds were shot for food, but those who escaped did not choke
