Nussbaum & Nozick: Strange Marriage

Today, I happened across a New York Times Opinion Editorial by Martha Nussbaum, professor at the University of Chicago and artificer of an iteration of the capability approach. When it comes to political philosophy, I take Nussbaum’s stances seriously though I don’t buy into them personally. When it comes to her views of the relationship that does and ought to exist between human beings and their nonhuman counterparts, I think she is just spot-on. Attached is an excerpt from “What Does It Mean to Be Human? Don’t Ask”:

“We humans are very self-focused. We tend to think that being human is somehow very special and important, so we ask about that, instead of asking what it means to be an elephant, or a pig, or a bird. This failure of curiosity is part of a large ethical problem.

The question, 'What is it to be human?' is not just narcissistic, it involves a culpable obtuseness. It is rather like asking, 'What is it to be white?' It connotes unearned privileges that have been used to dominate and exploit. But we usually don’t recognize this because our narcissism is so complete."

It strikes many as odd that I align myself politically as a libertarian yet have such a strong affinity for arguments that are animal-rights-based in nature. There are, however, notable libertarians who have expressed deep concern for the well-being of nonhuman animals, among them being the father of modern-day libertarianism himself: Robert Nozick.

In his Philosophical Explanations, Nozick offers a profound and compelling argument for the intrinsic moral value of nonhuman animals:

“Theorists of the arts often extol the virtues of unifying diverse and apparently unrelated (or not so tightly related) material; the order of the work effects this unification. Unity in a painting can be established in many ways: by the ways forms leads the eye through it and by relationships of forms, textures, thematic material, color, tones, and so on. A unified painting will be tied together by various of these modes of relationship. However, it is not merely its degree of unity that determines the value of a painting. A canvas painted monochromatically will be as highly unified in color as any other. (But will it be as unified by the other relationships as well?) The degree of diversity enters, also. The more diverse the material gets unified (to a certain degree), the greater the value.

…

There is some disagreement about what ‘higher’ would mean for organisms, but let us assume we can rank organisms roughly in accordance with their degree of organic unity, so that most plants come below most animals, with higher animals coming above the lower ones. Sentience and then consciousness add new possibilities of unification over time and at a time, and self-consciousness, being an ‘I’, is an especially tight mode of unification.

Thus the ranking of organisms in accordance with degree of organic unity matches our value ranking of them, with people above other animals above plants above rocks” (415-417).

It is clear that Nozick does not arbitrarily ascribe worth to beings on the basis of species categorization. Rather, he calls upon the principle of organic unity developed by aesthetician G.E. Moore. Nonhuman animals can be understood to have intrinsic value. But it may still be the case that (most) human beings and (some) nonhuman animals will be attributed intrinsic value that is qualitatively different than the kind ascribed to beings that fall lower on the totem pole of organic unity.

It strikes me that Nussbaum’s criticism of human superiority can be easily reconciled with Nozick’s view. For Nozick does not ask, “What is it to be human?” Rather, he asks, “What is it to have value?” Humanity is no longer the benchmark for moral consideration. It is the fabric of each individual being’s existence which dictates the obligations owed to them. Here, I feel there is fodder for a generative conversation about the obligations, both ethical and political, that we as human beings may have to nonhuman animals. Moreover, these obligations would be grounded in something that both Nussbaum and Nozick could bear, though neither (I suspect) would be entirely satisfied.

I hope to revisit these ideas for a longer project, but for now I wanted to shine light on the convictions that are shared by people across the ideological spectrum.