The lion and the lamb Wider implications of Martha Nussbaum’s animal ethics

Martha Nussbaum’s recent attempts to translate her list of human capabilities into one for animals contain many quite controversial assumptions and prescriptions. If one takes her arguments to their logical extremes, as I intend to do here, the controversial and some might say absurd aspects may easily overshadow the ‘sensible’ parts of the argument. Admittedly, Nussbaum’s theory is demanding, at least as demanding as other types of animal ethics but having demanding implications (or, depending on one’s point of view, controversial or absurd consequences) cannot by itself count as an argument against a prescriptive theory. Such qualifications may simply reflect temporal and local prejudice. Demanding a degree of say education for women on the basis of their capacity for rationality promised in its days to have utterly absurd implications and consequences, and yet once the premise was accepted, the only course of action left was to redefine absurdity.