Animal Life

Martha C. Nussbaum is internationally renowned for being one of the leading moral and political philosophers of our time, and is highly regarded for her work on the role of the emotions in moral and political reasoning. In this interview, in dialogue with her interlocutors, she discusses her work over the past four decades, and gives insights into her book in progress on opera and its relationship to liberal political ideals, The Republic of Love. In addition to declaring her love of Italian culture, she clarifies her stance on some contemporary issues, including the controversy on sex and gender, animal rights, the relationship between philosophy and natural sciences, and the importance of liberal arts and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.

Our paradoxical relationship with other animals is most apparent in relation to whether we consider them to be ‘food’ or ‘friends’ (Masson 2003; Spencer et al. 2006; Jepson 2008; Cole and Stewart 2010). Rabbits, for example, may be perceived as ‘pets’ or ‘food’, ‘vermin’, ‘entertainment’ or laboratory ‘equipment’, depending on circumstances (Stewart and Cole 2009).1 While some animals are seen as essential parts of our emotional lives and granted subjectivity, others are viewed and treated as objects. This is despite the fact that objectified animals are those with whom we have the most intimate of all relationships: the incorporation of their flesh, eggs or bodily secretions into our own bodies. Consequently, those animals with whom we have our closest relationships are reduced to ‘animal machines’ (Harrison 1964). As individuals, these animals and their conditions of life and death are usually invisible to us although exceptionally, as we will discuss later, ‘farmed’ animals may act in ways that make it harder for us to deny their capacity for individual agency. The difficulty of sustaining a subject-object distinction is also manifest in the attempt to maintain the objectification of ‘food animals’ at the same time as appearing to grant them subjectivity, in the ‘happy meat’ phenomenon (Cole 2011; and see e.g. http://www.happymeats.co.uk/ or http://www.wellhungmeat.com/index.php). This is achieved through allowing selective visibility of the lives and deaths of these animals. In constructing some animals as subjects, or more accurately quasi-subjects who approximate to human subjectivity and others as objects, we categorize them depending on our use for them.