A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the diverse creatures of Earth.
The acclaimed moral philosopher advances a theory of justice that enables animals to lead empowered, safe, and dignified lives.
According to Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago and author of more than 20 books, humans and animals are moral equivalents and, as sentient beings, merit equal justice. This means substantial opportunities for choice and action in the areas of their lives that they value along with protection from injustices that wrongfully impede a flourishing existence. The latter is particularly critical given the cruelty, deprivation, and neglect that animals suffer. At the core of the argument is her previously developed Capabilities Approach, which valorizes a person’s (and, now, an individual animal’s) capacity to act and learn within enabling environments. She considers this theory superior to a “so like us” approach, which values animals for approximating human attributes such as speech but lacks “wonder at the diversity of nature [and] love of its many distinctive forms”; a utilitarianism that focuses on a calculus of pleasure and pain but ignores, for example, the sociability of animals; and a Kantian perspective that treats all creatures as ends rather than means while denying animals moral capacity. However, only beings that are intelligent, sentient, and striving (i.e., active in pursuing their goals) qualify for justice, hence omitting crustaceans, coral, and (maybe) bees. The robustness of Nussbaum’s approach becomes clear as she reflects on how we should think about animal death; “tragic dilemmas” that pit humans against animals, as in medical experimentation; companion animals; and animal-human friendships. Central to attaining animal justice are legal supports that confer rights on animals and give them standing in the courts. The author is particularly insightful on “four areas of moral unease: medical experimentation, meat eating, questions raised by the hunting practices of threatened traditional cultures, and, finally, larger and more general conflicts over space and resources.”
A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the diverse creatures of Earth.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982102-50-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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