What matters for justice, Nussbaum contends, is not maximizing pleasure over plain, as utilitarians say. Instead, Nussbaum proposes an inclusive theory of basic justice, or rather injustice: “Injustice centrally involves significant striving blocked by not just harm but also wrongful thwarting, whether negligent or deliberate.” Nussbaum develops this theory by uniting it to her long-standing “capabilities approach,” hitherto used as a guide to human societies, and here extended to animals. Nussbaum’s philosophical targets include utilitarian accounts, for focusing too narrowly on pleasure and pain alone Christine Korsgaard’s Kantian view, for involving unnecessary and divisive metaphysical claims and any arguments involving the old idea of a hierarchical “chain of being,” or scala naturae, for being fundamentally wrongheaded. The sort of liminal uneasiness we find in “Bisclavret” has no place here.
It is also a plea, with dramatic upshots on questions like the justice of humans eating animals - even the justice of animals eating animals. The book is an intriguing attempt to find a simultaneously comprehensive and minimally metaphysically committed account of what we owe animals. The boundary between these two kinds of being is always ready to dissolve by moonlight.īut that boundary feels bright and clean in Martha Nussbaum’s latest rationalizing project, Justice for Animals, even if she draws it in a different place. We are beasts among beasts, and something qualitatively different. We cannot be sure what animals are, because we cannot be sure what we are.
This moment of recognition captures an uneasiness lodged deeply in all human-to-beast transformation stories: animal brides, werewolves, Actaeon torn apart by his own hounds. The wolf, with his sudden, feudal, vividly human actions, is no longer neatly categorizable: He is at once beast and quarry, vassal and supplicant. This beast understands, feels like a man.”
The King sees this, and feels great fear In “ Bisclavret,” a twelfth-century narrative poem by Marie de France, the moment in which the unwilling werewolf is recognized as a disguised human is one of wonderment mingled with fear.
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