Professor Martha Nussbaum On Humanity's Obligation To Protect Animal Rights

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1:56Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:46Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't want to leave anyone out here, so if I do, please forgive me. But there are a few living luminaries in the field of stoicism today, translators, scholars on stoicism. Gregory Hayes, who obviously I've raved about many times, is one of them. Brad Sellers is one. Massimo Pigliucci is one. Donald Robertson is one, although not necessarily an academic. Shadi Barch, who we've had on the podcast, is certainly one. And then there is Martha Nussbaum, who is not just a leading scholar on stoicism, but one of the leading philosophers of our time, one of the best known philosophers.

3:36She pops up in the New York Times. She gave the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment of the Humanities in 2016. In 2016, she won the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. She won the Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture. In 2020, she won the Goldberg Prize. 2022, she ran the Balzen Prize. She happens to be a distinguished service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is one of the few professors jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department. And she just has a wide range of philosophical interests, ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, ethics.

4:15And more recently, as we talk about in today's podcast, Animal Rights, She is picking up the baton of her daughter, who was an animal rights activist and passed tragically young. So when we talked about Stoicism for today's episode, we weren't just talking about this sort of dry, abstract thing, this academic thing. But again, something that Martha herself was having to lean on, as Cicero did, as Marcus Aurelius did, as many of the Stoics did, and people in the ancient world did when they were overwhelmed by grief and loss and tragedy and pain, right? And I would say also, as they did now and we do now, as they struggled to make an imperfect world a bit more just, right?

5:09And that is the subject of Martha's new book, Justice for Animals, Our Collective Responsibility, which came out in January. She's written a book called Not-for-Profit, Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, The Monarchy of Fear, Upheavals of Thought. And she is also a prolific translator of the Stoics. She is one of the translators of a very interesting work of Seneca called Anger, Mercy, and Revenge, the Complete Works of Seneca, which I quite enjoyed and we talked about in today's episode. Anyways, an absolute fascinating thinker, writer, philosopher, and human being who I was very happy to talk to in today's episode.

5:51And I think you are going to get a lot out of. So thank you to Martha for all of her work. Thank you for her inspiring example. And thanks for coming on the podcast.

6:05You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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7:19To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it.

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8:21Well, it's lovely to talk with you. I am a big fan. And I think this is my first one from you. your translation of Pumpkinification. Oh, okay. I didn't recognize the cover because I think the first edition was a different color. But anyway, I'm glad you like that. So tell me what areas we're going to cover. Are we going to focus on the new book? Yes, yes, I have it here. I read it. I thought it was quite good. I have a bunch of questions for you on that. And I want to talk about the Stoics in general. But let's start with that. So I've always been curious, do you think part of the reason, and you talk about this in the book, that there was this sort of supremacy, especially amongst the Stoics, that humans are special, animals are brutes, and this somehow justifies our indifference to their suffering or their feelings or the things that we inflict on them.

9:22How much do you think the indifference to the suffering of other species was part and parcel of just life being so profoundly full of suffering then that they weren't capable or didn't have the capacity to care for others? Well, I think not at all. I think the Stoics are unique in this respect. I mean, Aristotle thinks a lot about animal capacities. And I'm just writing a new paper on Aristotle. Although we don't know what he thought about animal ethics, none of that survives. He has a very high opinion of animal intelligence. He thinks animals have reasoning, have emotions, have traits of character.

10:04And the Stoics, the Greek Stoics anyway, didn't read Aristotle. So that's the first problem. They were heirs to Plato and Plato didn't say much about animals. But then the Epicureans also had a very high opinion of animals. So did the skeptics. So it really is just them. And the question is, why them? I actually think a lot of it is simply ignorance. I mean, they say things about animals that are just ridiculous when you know anything about animals. And their opponents, like Plutarch, for example, who was a kind of a Platonist who was very pro-animals and pro-animal rights, he said, you know, you can see just if you observe a dog that, okay, a dog comes to a fork in the road, there are three paths, it sniffs down the first path, nothing there.

10:51It sniffs down the second path. And without stopping to pause, it just darts down the third. And he said, that's really the disjunctive syllogism. The dog has mastered that. So he was a big defender of animal intelligence. And then of course, later, Porphyry wrote the greatest treatise on animal intelligence and animal rights in the ancient world. So Richard Surabji in his book, Animal Minds and Human Morals, said it was the Stoics alone, and I agree with him, who set the history of philosophy in a bad direction. And although, of course, the Christianity and Judaism contributed to that later on, the Stoics had a very powerful influence on Christian ethics, and they had a huge, huge influence on early modern philosophy.

11:36Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Adam Smith, they all were mainly indebted to the Stoics. So I think they were really in a way villains in this history. Yeah, I don't know. When I read Meditations and when I've read Seneca, I did sense, for instance, a kind of weariness and an aversion to the gratuitous violence in the gladiatorial games. So there was, I think, an aversion in them to needless suffering, but there didn't seem to be much past that. It was almost like it was in bad taste to them as opposed to a violation of the virtue of justice. Well, I think that's a very good point. But I do think that they're very opposed to human anger and aggressiveness.

12:26That they are. And they think it achieves no useful purpose and that it betrays the fact that you're too concerned with external goods that you don't control. So it's true that the Stoic sage would be gentle and would probably not inflict a lot of needless suffering, out of anger and violence, but not because of respect for those creatures. There's full respect for human creatures, but not for any other species. Yeah. And the reason I ask about just this sort of general weariness about suffering is that there are some passages in meditations where you get the sense that the war and the violence that Marcus Aurelius sees in his life sort of desensitizes him.

13:10He talks about seeing a severed arm and a foot. He talks about capturing barbarians basically like flies. I just wondered if this otherwise very sensitive and kind man, maybe at the individual level, just sees so much of the awfulness of Roman life that it prevents him from, say, thinking about what it's like to be a cow or a dog or some other animal. Well, don't forget that he was leading the army in the regressive war. So it wasn't like he backed off from the suffering. He just thought if you're in the middle of it, you have to distance yourself or you won't be able to stand it. But he persecuted the Christians and he persecuted the Jews and he carried on this war.

14:02Most of Meditations was written on campaign in Parthia. So I wouldn't give him such a free pass as you would. I do think it's true that if you're in the middle of a lot of craziness, the Stoics thought you could bear it if you retreat to the inner citadel, the nice word that Pierre Adot uses for his book on the meditations. But yeah, but that doesn't mean you're good to other people and things. Yeah, no, that's true. I don't see him as seeking out said wars the way a Caesar or an Alexander the Great would. And maybe this is a distinction without a difference in your view. But I just, I see him as someone, but there's a reading for me of meditations where this is a guy who's just somewhat disgusted with how awful human beings can be to each other and maybe no longer believes that he has much agency to do anything about it, which I'm not excusing him for.

15:03I'm just trying to get where he comes from in the same way that a person might look out at our world today and see a war in Europe, see sweatshops and concentration camps in China, see factory farming and just go, it is what it is. What am I supposed to do about it? Well, OK, he probably did believe that the universe in some way was just and it was directed by Zeus for some good end. but he didn't try to direct himself toward the best ends. I mean, if you think of other Roman emperors, Titus was well-known for going out of his way to be merciful to his opponents and to giving them a break. The lovely Mozart opera La Clemenza di Tito is all about that and about how even someone who tried to assassinate him gets mercy.

15:51But Marcus was not like that. And, of course, the movie Gladiator makes him look a little bit better because in the movie he chooses some non-related person who's, what is it, Russell Crowe, who's a very fine person. But he actually chose Commodus to be his successor, who was his son, and who was the one with the most terrible. A psychopath. Psychopath and bloodthirsty and so forth. So I don't know. I mean, I think he says that he grew up as a card-carrying Stoic. He said his first lesson from his tutor was not to be a fan of the greens or blues at the races or the light-armed or heavy-armed gladiators at the circus.

16:35And that means you don't care which side wins. Now, that, of course, means you probably, if you were the commander and that was your role in life was to lead this war, you lead it without really caring whether you win. But you lead it quite vigorously and you don't care about mercy or compassion either. And, of course, the things that usually people do when they're compassionate, like trying to feed the hungry and heal the sick, that doesn't matter to a Stoic because all those things are part of Zeus's plan and tragedies that depict people. Of course, think about the Stoic view of tragedy. So all these tragic heroes who say, oh, oh, I'm suffering.

17:15I've lost my relatives, my family, my country. They think these tragic heroes are fools. Tragedy is defined by Epictetus as what happens when chance events befall fools. And so they're really rewritten by Epictetus so that Oedipus is supposed to say, oh, I don't care about my crown or my diadem. I don't care about anything. And I only care about Zeus's plan. But, you know, that's a recipe for not caring when people suffer, when your own people are oppressed, when people are hungry, when your family is suffering. So I think the Stoics made many great contributions to philosophy. And as you know, my own view of what emotions are is largely based on the Stoic view, but not the normative view of what emotions we ought to have, what we ought to care about.

18:07Because, of course, they explicitly say you should not have compassion any more than you should have anger or fear. Well, I see this most vividly in Rusticus, Marcus Aurelius's philosophy teacher, who, Marcus gets a plum job as basically the governor or the mayor of Rome. And this guy, Justin, comes across his desk for supposedly speaking against the gods. And you have such a cruel sentence being handed down without even the slightest bit of mercy. I think Seneca's essay on clemency is so beautiful. And then I contrast that with how some of the later Stoics operated when they were in the position to be merciful.

18:58And I see that as, yeah, where the rubber meeting the road and not in a good way. Yeah, that's good. But I'm not going to give De Clemente a total pass either, because he tells Nero he should not have compassion, no misericordia, but only mercy because that's the virtue of the powerful, you know, it's the origin of the merchant of Venice, the quality of mercy droppeth, et cetera, like the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. So it's a virtue of monarchs who just show their immense power by showing mercy, but it's not real compassion. And I think, I mean, my own favorite in the Roman world is actually Cicero, because he tries to be a balanced person, but he cares about what actually happens.

19:46And he cares about the Republic. Well, of course, he cares deeply about his daughter, but he says the two things he cares about most in the world, his daughter and the Roman Republic, both died in that same year, and he lost his life trying to save the Republic in this last-ditch effort. I think people ought to care about what happens, and they ought to get involved. And of course, that's what the Stoics explicitly want you not to do. They have various ways of papering that over. And so in Lucan's Varsalia, Cato is an admirable hero leading his army through the desert, etc. But is that a consistent picture of what a Stoic would do?

20:26I don't know. I don't really think so. And of course, there are many other depictions of the Stoic hero that are a little bit fishy in trying to make them compatible with Roman norms. But to me, you know, Cicero reads the Stoics. He thinks about them. He really frames a lot of his ideas in terms of Stoic values, the Tusculum disputations. He's largely agreeing with the Stoics about limiting and getting rid of anger and grief and so on. But when the rubber meets the road, as you put it, you know, then he mourns for his daughter in an outsized way that Atticus criticizes, tells him people are mocking you and they're saying you should come back to the city.

21:07But he cares. And he cares, of course, about the Republic. And he actually stuck his head out of the litter and got the axe. So that was Cicero. It's so fascinating, right? Because, you know, writing about these things is one thing. And then you have to be a human being in the world. I can't imagine Marcus does not grieve the half dozen children that he has to bury. I don't care how much stoic philosophy you've studied, it's going to rip your heart out. I don't know how he got out of bed in the morning. I sometimes think about that. How does this guy keep going? You think about the blow after blow that life deals this guy.

21:50Two decades of peace under Antoninus, and then he takes over and one thing after another happens professionally. And then personally, You know, is his wife unfaithful? He's burying child after child. Commodus is deeply problematic. And, you know, he not only gets out of bed every morning, he's writing in meditations about how he has to basically do it with a smile and a sense of purpose and eagerness. It is remarkable in that sense. Well, I think the children, I wouldn't agree with you so much, because I think, first of all, men in that era didn't have much to do with their children. They were barely aware of them.

22:31But the death of children was so common that I think no one really attached themselves to the child until the child was maybe six months or a year old, at least. And so I think, you know, we've changed. And we do think every newborn child is very precious. But I don't think anyone in the Greek and Roman world actually thought that just because of infant mortality. I don't know. I don't know. There's a couple letters between him and Fronto where they're both talking about grief and loss, particularly about young children. I don't know. Maybe I'm projecting, but I have to believe it affected him.

23:08Well, you know, maybe. But to the extent that it did, he would have to say that's a failure in my stoic self-fashioning. That's so sad. He shouldn't. It is that, I believe. But of course, they're right about some things. So it's not so simple. They're right about not overestimating the role of money in human life. They're right about not overestimating the role of reputation in human life. I love the part of date era where Seneca lectures himself and says, oh, you let the rudeness of this doorman get to you. And you were very offended. And then when the host seated you at a lower place at the table, you were offended again.

23:46He said, stop that and I'll pardon you. So, you know, those things, I think they're right about that. So it's like they just don't want to get into the difficult work of making the discrimination between things that really have worth and things that don't have worth. They'd rather say none of the externals have worth and then they don't have any hostages to fortune. Do you think they were afraid of compassion then and that was that compassion was opening Pandora's box or something? Because it seems to me that compassion and justice are related to each other. And in fact, compassion is what propels one's sense of justice.

24:28But they were trying not to see it that way, it feels like. They were. Well, you know, I think, I don't know psychologically how they got there. But they started from this philosophical position that no external goods have worth. only your inner world, which you allegedly control. Now, of course, Aristotle had already cast doubt on that by saying, if you imagine the sage on the rack, you can't imagine that that person is actually thinking noble thoughts, that pain is too interactive with thought. But they did maintain that idea. And, well, I think they just, it's not so much afraid. They thought compassion was part and parcel of a whole network of emotions, which were mostly problematic.

25:16So if you got rid of the ones that are obviously problematic, you have to get rid of that too. And they were just afraid to make distinctions. I mean, for example, they might've said, you shouldn't feel compassionate when somebody loses a fortune. That's not such a big deal. That's not a real tragedy. That's a comedy maybe. But you should feel compassion for somebody who's lost a child or a country or whatever else. So they just didn't get into that fine tuning the way an Aristotelian would. They just instead just said junk the whole thing. Yes, there is a sense of like, if I don't think about it, if I don't care about it, then it won't affect me.

26:01But I would argue that by not being compassionate, by walling oneself off from other people and the things that befall them, you actually are harming yourself. You're closing yourself off. You're losing touch with what makes you decent and good and just. Oh, I totally agree. And I also think if you don't grieve when you lose somebody that you love, well, that means you never loved in the first place. And that means your personality is dried up in some way. It's not deep. And I do think that grief is an excruciatingly painful emotion, but it's also part of a deepening of the personality. It's rededication to the value of things that are worth caring about.

26:50but they didn't agree. They just said they're not worth caring about. Yeah. There's this story about Marcus Aurelius. He's young. He hasn't fully sort of become the hardened stoic that he becomes and he loses one of his tutors and he's weeping. And the story is that one of his tutors goes to, one of the other tutors goes and says, hey, stop that. You know, that isn't stoic. And Antoninus says, let the boy be human for once. He says, empire and philosophy does not take away natural feeling. And I do think Antoninus, who is more the intuitive philosopher as opposed to the dogmatic or orthodox philosopher, has a better sense of the middle ground there between being overwhelmed and at the mercy of one's emotions and shutting them off completely and pretending that they don't agree.

27:45exists. Right, except that he puts it in terms of natural human feelings, and of course that's part of what emotions are, but I think we ought to cultivate the ability to care deeply about things outside ourselves. We're not born with the love of our children. We don't have children yet, and you have to learn what it is to have a child and what it is to love a child. So I think it's part of an intelligent, cultivated sense of the world. No, I totally agree. There's a quote, I forget who said it, but it's something like, there are parts of you that you just can't understand until you have loved a child.

28:27And you can let that process open you up, or you can not let it open you up. It's a choice. I think cultivation is the right word there. Where is this passage? It's not from a philosopher. It's more like a random quote you'd see on an inspirational website, I think. But I love the quote. I think it's certainly true. And I think what's remarkable about Cicero is he does allow that love of Trulia to open him to the fullness of grief. And then he brings that also to his grief for the Republic. And he says to Atticus, well, you know, I don't really care what people are saying about me not coming to the city because I can't stop grieving.

29:09And furthermore, I don't think I ought to stop grieving. And that powerful grief, as you see from my animals book, I identify with that deeply because I lost my only child in 2019 when she was about the same age as Tulia when she died. I'm so sorry. And so I feel the same pain. and I do think it is one of the most excruciating things one can experience. But, you know, really it's an important deepening of your personality and it's changed my work, it's changed what I dedicate my life to because she was a lawyer for animal rights and I thought, well, what is this life? Well, the person is no longer there but the commitments are still there and it's possible for me, although I can't get the person back, to carry her commitments on and make them vibrant and make them live and do good in the world.

30:02So yeah, I mean, it's something that grief revealed to me is what I must do next.

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33:10Seneca does write his beautiful essays, his consolations. And one thing that I always took from them, he says, you know, how would the person that you're missing want you to feel? Would they want you to feel miserable and be paralyzed with grief? Or would they want you to carry on and sort of follow their example? But I do think that that's quite beautiful to to carry on that work and that legacy. The answer is you shouldn't be deeply grieving and that you should realize, well, it's a brief thing and you come right back to the city, et cetera. But that just isn't the way I think deep love translates into mourning.

33:51Mourning, I mean, think about our recent guidelines in the U.S. The mourning is pathological after a certain number of months. I forget how many. Americans want a quick fix for life's problems. Yes. And that's one reason why they don't like psychoanalysis, why they'd rather take a pill. Anything that's wrong with you, you can cure with a pill. And that's just not the way life is. And if you think that way, you're just not going to have deep love in your life at all. So let's talk about animals and the idea of justice. I mean, I do feel like there is some basic framework. there's something in the Stoics, I think, akin to like the way we might look at the work of Jefferson, where they had some noble ideas.

34:38They put forth a framework that they were not even close to living up to, but that we can find the truth in and try to expand and live better through. I think of the work of Hierocles, for instance, the sort of circles of concern, the idea that sure, we're naturally kind of selfish and we care most about the people we're related to or look like us or live near us, but that the work of justice is how to, to borrow Peter Singer's phrase, how to sort of expand that circle or bring those outer rings closer and closer to us. Yes, I think that's a beautiful image that they have. I don't think it's a complete guide to how we should think, because of course it allows us to be privileged toward our own species and toward our own relations.

35:29And, you know, there are some contexts in which that might make sense. I think that Cicero has powerful arguments that the republic should come first in your thinking about political distribution, that you can't create a just world unless you start with your own republic, because that's where you share citizenship, and that's an order that's accountable to you. But of course, even there, there are animals there. Are they citizens or are they not? And of course, Cicero didn't think they were, but I think that in whatever unit you're starting with, whether it's a city or even a family, the animals that are there are also citizens and we ought to think about them.

36:09I do think that in terms of work for animals, it makes a lot of sense to start with the local because you can control that much more and it's accountable to you. So, for example, our university has certain policies on child experiments involving children, but we should have also policies involving animals on our campus. Now, there are policies on animal experimentation, but the child policy says that if anywhere on your campus you see a child who's hungry, who doesn't have a coat, then you must immediately phone the local Department of Child and Family Services and report that as an instance of child abuse.

36:52I think there should be a similar department of animal services so that if I were to see an abused dog wandering across the Midway, that's part of the campus, I would immediately call up this department and I'd say there's an abused dog out there. I would have a place to report it right now, except for the most horrible instances of, you know, dog rings and horrible dog abuse. There's not much investigation going on. And if people are abusing their companion animals or any other animals, nothing much is done about it. Then there's no guardian of the animals who has standing to bring a case in court on the animal's behalf.

37:33If a child with intellectual disabilities is being abused, human beings have standing to bring a lawsuit on that child's behalf. There's no reason why the same arrangement can't be made for animals, as Cass Sunstein said in his famous article, Standing for Animals. but you know it just isn't happening in our country just yet i i do see signs of hope within the country so the recent supreme court case that allowed california to make stringent regulations of the confinement of pigs you know california has the best animal welfare laws in the country and they passed laws saying that no pork sold anywhere in california can be can be sold if the animal is not in certain, certain conditions, a certain amount of space to move around.

38:20None of these so-called gestation crates where the animal can't even lie down, has to urinate through metal slats and so forth. So they banned all this stuff. And then the, of course, the pork industry didn't like that. And they brought suits saying California has no right to do that. And even the Supreme Court said, yes, they do. So federalism is good because then it sets up a kind of competition. And of course, it also means that Californians can't buy pork produced in Iowa that's produced under these bad conditions. So it sets norms that others have to obey. And it's really totally changed the egg industry all over the country because the market in California is a very large market.

39:03Free range eggs are not terribly much more extensive to produce. And so mostly now, everywhere you go, you find free-range eggs. So in short, I think both local and national law are the places where a concerned person is wise to begin because we can do something about that. at the end of my book, I talk about the weakness of international law. And of course, it's weak all over the place. Human rights laws, there are human rights treaties out there, but who's going to enforce them? Nobody. I mean, people are paying lip service to those treaties and they're not enforced unless, in addition, nations have passed statutes that incorporate them.

39:45And with animals, Well, the case I discussed is the International Committee on Whaling, and the whales are governed by this international treaty. But number one, the purpose of the treaty was to preserve enough whales so that people could hunt them down and harpoon them. So it's really just conservation of what they call whale stocks, as though the whales are things in a store. and so of course with that beginning you can't expect that they're going to do very much about even about the cruelty in harpooning which is getting a little bit better regulated because gradually more humane people creep into that organization but then we see the terrible weakness which is that only countries that voluntarily sign up are part of this group so japan signed up and they were part of the group until they start started to be told sorry you can't hunt whales anymore.

40:41And then they just quit the group. So what do you do about that? And it's very, very difficult, of course. And it's difficult for human rights. But with human rights, you know, look at Biden claiming that with Uganda's terrible new law on same-sex relations, he's actually going to use sanctions against that nation. And I think he probably will. And then the country will probably support him in that, because no one in the U.S. actually supports these terrible laws, not even conservatives. But what about - Yeah, I saw even Ted Cruz talked about it. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, it doesn't surprise me that much.

41:18But, you know, suppose on the other side, somebody said, well, let's subject to the treatment of pigs in such and such country. Well, of course, we're one of the worst abusers anyway. American politicians are absolutely terrified of saying anything about the animal issue at the national level. Now, local, it's different, and the city of Chicago is quite good on many things. But only Cory Booker, among politicians with a national ambition as a presidential candidate, has come out in favor of the defense of animal rights. And he is a vegan, and so I admire him greatly, because he's sticking his neck out, and he's basically, like Cicero, he's sticking his neck out of the litter, getting it chopped off because he's never going to be a viable presidential candidate.

42:07But the meat industry is so powerful. If a lot of politicians came out, then things would change. But I remember a young friend of mine who was an animal rights activist. She was then around 12 years old. She came up to Hillary Clinton when we met her after an event. And she said to Mrs. says, Clinton, what do you think of the animal rights? Hillary Clinton turned pale and almost fainted. And she said, oh, well, I'm very in favor of human rights. So you see, the cowardice. She didn't want to touch the third rail. No, she didn't want to touch it at all. She didn't want to say a thing. She didn't want to say something bad.

42:46She didn't want to say something good. So she just changed the subject. But Cory Booker is different, and quite admirably so, but it's not going to do him any good in national politics. In other countries, there are actually, you know, even prime ministers. The former prime minister of Ireland, Varadkar, was a vegan and very much in favor of animal rights. And there are, I think, politicians in Luxembourg in particular. And all over Europe, there's much more support for animal protective laws. The laws that they have are much, much better. But the economics of the meat industry in the United States is just so huge.

43:25It's such a big part of America. They think it's a big part of the American economy. I don't agree. I think it actually hurts the economy overall because it also, animal agriculture contributes to global warming and all of this causes great trouble for farmers and so forth. But until we get a coalition of politicians, farmers, humane animal raisers, I'm doing an event shortly for a group, a humane farm in New England called Sweet Farm. And they want to say, you know, we haven't gone as they don't haven't don't go as far as me because I still think one should not eat these animals and kill them.

44:05But they at least say we should give them a good life while they're alive. So, you know, we need a coalition of many types of people. And I'm not somebody who takes an extreme position and refuses to talk to people who have a less extreme position. Anyone who wants to move the needle. And Peter Singer is like this, too. He, you know, is willing to make a coalition with people who don't agree with him, so long as it will move the needle from where we are to a better place. well i you have a you you have a quote in one of my books i wrote this book on stillness and i have a chapter on on what i would call oneness and i wanted to read this this quote that i i took from a an article you wrote which i thought was pretty beautiful you said we share a planet with billions of other sentient beings and they all have their complex ways of being whatever they are all of our fellow animal creatures as aristotle observed long ago try to stay alive and reproduce more of their kind.

45:02All of them perceive, all of them desire, and most move from place to place to get what they want and need. I think there's something about trying to see, obviously there's a problem with anthropomorphizing, but we should try to see the commonality that we have with animals. And then that allows us to go, well, how would I want to be treated if I was in that position? Or how would I feel if this was happening to me? And sort of that extension of the golden rule when we see our commonality between us and other species, which is what I do think the Stoics were trying to do with their sort of early notions of cosmopolitanism that, you know, borders and distinctions between people and races was largely artificial.

45:49They didn't quite get there as far as doing anything about it, but they did try to see themselves in the other. Yeah, absolutely. And so that idea of commonality is already in Aristotle. I wrote my PhD dissertation on Aristotle's De Motu Animalium, a little treatise in which he, without referring to any particular species, never singling out the human being, never saying the rational beings and the non-rational beings, he actually shows that there is a commonality in how you explain animal movement. They all move through some kind of thought, which might be sense perception, it might be imagination, and it might be deliberative thought, and some form of desire, which might be emotional desire, it might be appetitive desire, it might be deliberative desire.

46:41And so that's what he's doing in that little treatise. And I've come back to that recently. I'm about to go to Finland for a conference in memory of a great Aristotelian philosopher, Simo Knutila. And so I decided I would revisit my doctoral dissertation and bring De Motu Animalium into the present day. And there has been recently a lot of work on it anyway, because a great scholar in Germany, Prima Vesi, did a new edition of the text. And I'm delighted to say that he found new manuscript support for a conjecture that I had made long ago, that there was a third independent manuscript family. So I've worked with Prima Bessie a bit on this.

47:20And he and Christophe Rapp have now edited this great volume of the Symposium Aristotelicum, which is a triennial meeting about an Aristotle topic. And this meeting was on De Motu Adamalium. The book came out in 2020. So I'm just digesting it now, and I wrote this paper talking about some of the new work on that treatise and the commonality, but it's called Aristotle's Dei Motu Animalium Yesterday and Today, saying, well, you know, there are things we might change about Aristotle, and of course, we must supply an ethical dimension that doesn't show up in the Dei Motu Animalium. It's not an ethical work.

48:01But about the commonality, I guess the thing that I would change is that I think he almost goes too far because he thinks that the stationary animals like carls and sponges and so on are very are similar they're sentient beings just like other animals and i think the evidence shows that no they're more their movements are more like automata but anyway they're just these things that if he knew how to do the experiments we could do he would fine grain he'd fine tune it a little bit more. But boy, I think it's a big contribution because a lot of scientists don't want a common explanation either because they think, oh, that will lead to phony anthropomorphism.

48:45But there's phony anthropomorphism, but there's true commonality. And that's what we have to find. And so I really think Aristotle has a lot to show us. How do you reconcile someone who's sort of progressive in the sense that he's thinking about animals and what they're feeling and going through and wanting to extend the notion of justice to them. And then sort of also at that time, okay with slavery. How do you think about that in the ancient world? Well, yeah, I mean, how do you think about any of these things? I think Aristotle, of course, what did he mean by natural slaves? I think he doesn't mean the people who were conquered in battle and then enslaved as a result.

49:34He says it has to be people who, from birth, are unable to use their reason. And that would have to mean that they're, you know, some sort of person with a lifelong disability and that they're born that way. And that would not be a whole race of people who would just have to be one by one. And then how many such people are there that you could actually use to do all the heavy labor on your estate? So I don't know. It's a weird passage because it may be some people have thought it was a reductio of the whole idea of enslavement. But in any case, yeah, you should not, of course, even if there's a being with a lifelong disability, you should not do bad things to that being.

50:14And of course, we know that Aristotle was in favor of infanticide of disabled children. And so at least that we need to get rid of. And of course, the people who think they invoke Aquinas and they think that the whole ancient world was against abortion. Not only are they wrong about abortion. Aristotle thought abortion is fine up until the sixth month. But they also, and so did Aquinas, by the way. But they also thought that there's nothing wrong with infanticide post-birth if the child has a serious disability. So there are all these things that we have to get rid of. And of course, we have to especially get rid of their terrible denigration of women and the role of women in the world and in the economy and so forth.

51:01And there, the Stoics are actually dead because they're so rationalist that they don't care what kind of body somebody has. But so for the wrong reasons, they treat women a bit better. But I think we just have to do it differently. We have to think that the body is dignified and each body has its own dignity. and must not be abused, whether it's human or from another species. Yeah, the subtitle of your book, I think, is really interesting. You say, our collective responsibility. This idea of there being a common good and that we all have an obligation to each other, particularly to the lesser or the most vulnerable.

51:42To me, that's the essence of what justice is. And that's kind of what, maybe this is a perversion of it a What I think on clemency is really about is it's saying that sort of how you treat the people or the things that can't do anything for you, but you have power over. That says everything about who you are. That's very nicely put. I think the way I talked about the collective responsibility started from the fact that there are a lot of people in philosophy, a lot of very good philosophers who are largely Kantians, who think that if there are rights, then you must be able to assign duties to some definite specific actor.

52:29And Nora O 'Neill, for example, has said this. And so if you can't assign the duties to this or that particular person, then there are no rights. Now here, I'm with Christine Korsgaard. I don't agree with her on everything, but she's the kind of Kantian that I can agree with and make common cause with. And in her wonderful book, Fellow Creatures, she says that we have to start with the fact that the arguments in favor of rights that a Kantian would give, namely starting from your right to be where you are, we have to conclude that other creatures also have the right to be where they are. Especially if they were there first.

53:06Yeah, well, and it entails control of property. So the right to be where you are is very broad. And then the question is, to whom do we assign the duties relative to these rights? And she then says what I say. Well, we can't yet assign it to particular individuals because legal systems are in their infancy, but we can say all humanity has a collective obligation to protect these rights.

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55:39And this is, to me, some of the progress we're making. First off, just to think that the invention of, say, natural parks and national monuments and wildlife preserves are relatively new. right? As far as inventions go, if we're talking about Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, the idea that, you know, we would protect the grazing land of a buffalo or something, these are relatively recent innovations in how we think about things. I think that's really beautiful. But now some of these things like wildlife corridors or these land or wildlife bridges. There's one here in Texas, like, hey, mountain lions want to cross over this or coyotes want to cross over this.

56:25And if we're going to build a highway through their places of travel, then we have to provide means for them to get across too, just as we would do for cars and pedestrians and semi-trucks. Yeah, absolutely. And this is a place where law has a lot to do. And in fact, one of the things my daughter was working on, she worked for an NGO that dealt with the rights of not domesticated animals, but wild animals. And she was dealing with wild horses. And they have exactly that problem, that they exist in Wyoming, they exist in Colorado, but they need corridors. And of course, the ranchers don't like the creation of these corridors because they want to use them for grazing their cattle.

57:10So there's a constant combat between the ranchers and the wild horses. and then the ranchers say, oh, well, let's cull the wild horses. There are too many of them. So it's an endless battle. But yes, wildlife has property rights. And there's a very good book that one of my students wrote recently, University of Chicago Press, about animal property rights. So I cite that in the book. And yeah, there's a lot of work to be done. It's interesting that you brought up federalism earlier, how you do need strong central governments or legal systems to be able to enforce these things. I mean, one of the reasons slavery lasts so long, particularly in the US, but Britain has a little more success with it early on, there's this argument that, hey, I'm legally allowed to do this thing.

58:03So if you're going to, but now you're insisting that these people have rights or this thing has rights, That infringes on my rights or my property or my bank balance. And you do need a government to step in and say, well, OK, fine, we'll compensate you if a wolf eats your cow. Right. You need mechanisms and you need the sense of collective responsibility to deal with the individuals who are negatively impacted by the elevation of previously disenfranchised or unprotected species or organisms. Yep, that's very good. If you think about the 19th century, children were thought to be the property of their parents.

58:51And when people started to introduce laws for compulsory education of young children, the parents, of all things, got very upset. They said our survival is using the children for child labor. So eventually, of course, there were limits on child labor that got better and better. But the compulsory education was a huge step. And so, you know, that's how it goes. You have to fight for people who just imagine parents thinking, I would rather use my child for hard labor than I would give the child an education. People don't think that way today. But the reason they stop thinking that way is that visionary people, and in fact, the British Liberal Party actually split over this issue.

59:32T.H. Green, the philosopher, was in the vanguard, and he actually was a Liberal Party politician. They stuck their necks out, and they really went to bat for these abused children. And the same thing has to be done with animals. And I think, you know, look at what California has been able to do by forming public opinion in a certain way. Here in Chicago, we've made a lot of progress. One issue I talk about is puppy mills. People think, oh, I'm going to buy a cute little puppy. And they don't ask where it's coming from. But there are these immoral breeders. And unfortunately, most of them are located in the state of Missouri, it happens.

1:00:11and Missouri because they're located there and they have great political power. Missouri doesn't control them. So you can't control them at the point of origin. They're bringing up these puppies with parasites, diseases, not enough room to move around. And then they market them while they're so cute and young in pet shops all over the country. So at least at point of sale, you can control that. It's much harder than if you could regulate at the point of origin. But Chicago has actually cracked down on that by saying the only kind of animal you may purchase, and it's really a kind of an option, is a former shelter animal, and the pet stores so-called would be in the business of giving for a nominal fee those abused animals.

1:00:56Then the puppy mill people sort of recostumed themselves as shelters, and there were a whole bunch of bogus shelters, and they would say, oh, here's a rescue dog, but it was really a puppy mill dog. So eventually they had to make a law against that too. So it's a constant vigilance and constant work. And I have great respect for the alderman, Brian Hopkins, who watched out for that issue. He really made that his issue. You know, it's hard if you're a politician because it's not terribly popular. But, of course, it doesn't solve the whole problem because somebody can, And, you know, Missouri people can sell it in some other town that doesn't have good laws.

1:01:38People can drive out to the town if they really want it. But in the process, the public gets educated. And I think the main thing that we have to do is to raise the consciousness of humanity. And I do feel that's happening. It's hard and it takes a long time. But law contributes to that, even though law isn't a perfect solution. Well, don't you think that's another area that perhaps stoicism falls short or the more fundamentalist or dogmatic view of stoicism falls short, which is, okay, let's say buying a puppy from a puppy mill or eating factory farmed meat. Let's say you extend out stoicism to say that's a matter of justice.

1:02:18So the stoic would say, well, what's in my control? I am not going to participate in that system. I'm not going to eat at Chick-fil-A. I'm not going to buy a purebred puppy milled dog. I'm not going to participate. But there's something woefully insufficient about simply looking at these matters as far as our individual contribution to them goes. A lot of these problems, the matters of justice for our time, whether we're talking about genocide or pandemics or animal rights. These are collective action issues. And I sometimes wonder how stoicism can operate in that domain. It can't just be, I'm not going to contribute to it myself.

1:03:13You have to do something about it. I think that's totally right. And thinking about Cicero, again, His best friend Atticus was not a Stoic but an Epicurean, but on this issue they had a similar view. Namely, the Epicureans thought, don't get involved in politics. Too much anxiety, too much fear. And Atticus lived all the way through the civil wars. He was a wealthy banker, so everyone wanted him to be healthy and rich and so on. and he didn't really stick his neck out to save Cicero. He intervened only when he thought it was low cost. He was Cicero's best friend, and I think it was a wonderful friendship, but I sometimes wonder what did Cicero really think about that way of life.

1:03:58And, you know, it's just not the right way of life in a time of trouble. That doesn't mean that everyone should be on the front battle lines. There are many, many ways that people can contribute to progress on an issue. People can contribute by bringing up children who have a refined ethical consciousness about animals. They can teach about the wonderful abilities of animals. They can have dialogues with their colleagues. I've just been exchanging views on this with a colleague who really didn't think very much about the abilities of animals. And then she said to me, well, isn't it amazing what abilities animals have?

1:04:36But my chosen mode is one that I feel is good for me, namely writing and arguing. And then, of course, after that, you go and give talks like this talk and try to spread the word because writing the book is not any good unless somebody reads the book. But, of course, that's just my profession. And I teach courses, too. I've developed at our law school, I've developed a scholarship, in fact, endowed a scholarship for a student particularly interested in animal law. And we're just starting that this year. But I've also developed a curriculum on animal law. I'm going to teach a new course next year that will be for all first year law students on animal law.

1:05:21But it will be across. So there'll be philosophy students in there as well. And, you know, that's what I can also do is send the word out. I gave the book as a seminar before it was finished. And the students who were in that seminar really gave me a lot of help in refining the book. And now they're graduating. But they're going to do good things. So they got good jobs in big law firms. But one of them, who was my research assistant, said, I'm not going to accept your offer to this big New York law firm unless you tell me what I could do. for animals in this job. And they said, well, we do a lot of pro bono work.

1:05:59And if you can design it, we'll allow you to do a pro bono program with some humane organization that helped them out. So this is the way these things happen, that people can't go out into the world and they don't necessarily give their whole life to animal welfare, but they insist. Their firm has got to do its part. And I think that's how things change. Yeah, I think it was Emerson was talking about Clarkson, the abolitionist, and he said, the entire movement is the shadow of one man. And one person pushing forward ideas, your coaching tree of all of your students and what they go on to do, all your readers, what they go on to do, this has a profound impact.

1:06:47It changes the culture. It changes the laws slowly and steadily. And it might not be, you know, it's not the emperor snapping their finger and radically changing, you know, all of the laws. That's not our system anymore. It's a more organic and incremental form of progress, but it's a powerful one. But the good thing about books is they're not limited to the place where you are. and I don't have to travel all over the world because now I can do these lectures online. That's one good thing. But the book has been translated already within only a year into five languages and there are more coming.

1:07:30And it's been on the front page of the Times of India. India, of course, has a more elevated consciousness of animal welfare. It's one of the few nations in which animals do have legal standing. So they're in advance and so forth. But in any case, it was nice to be on the front page of the Times of India for this issue. And I hope that that will spread the word, you know, just wake up people who might be more curious to find out what somebody like me would have to say. But I think it's important that you're saying this because there is an imperative to get involved and make a contribution. I write this email every day, the Daily Stoic email, which goes out to about 600 ,000 people.

1:08:12And sometimes I'll talk about the political issues of the day, whether it's women's rights or gay rights or speaking out about political violence or speaking about this Stoic idea of justice. And I'll sometimes get emails from people and they'll say, please stay away from these things. They'll say, you're alienating some of your audience. Don't you know? I think differently about this. They go, what would the Stoics say about you getting political? And I go, look, the Stoics were not perfect. But the one thing they were is political. They held political office. They engaged in the polis. They spoke out about the things they thought that mattered of the time.

1:08:53And in many cases, we're willing to give not just their voice to an issue, but in the case of, say, Cato, give their lives to said issue. And I think the lives of the Stoics show us that justice isn't just this thing you pay lip service to, but that you have to see it as an obligation or responsibility. And you have to take action. You have to participate. Even if that's as simple as something as voting, you have to participate. It's not just your individual behaviors that matter, but the actions that you take. Absolutely. I'm not sure it's entirely consistent with their stoicism. You started out with my pumpkinification translation.

1:09:33And you know what I think about that, that Seneca there betrays a very emotional commitment to political justice that is not consistent with his stoicism. But anyway, whatever we think about this consistency or non-consistency, right, these people did stick their necks up. I like Cicero better because he says, well, it's not fully consistent, but it's what I must do. And I do feel it's very, very important for faculty to do these things because we're very privileged people. Are you teaching someplace? Nope, just a private citizen. Oh, well, anyway, we who teach in tenured positions, wow, are we privileged.

1:10:16We get to spend the whole of our lives doing what we love and engaging with wonderful young people. And so I think I owe the world some return on that. And I really feel certain books that I write are because I love writing them. I'm writing a book about music now, and I'm writing another book about opera. But there are some books that I write both because I love them and because I feel it's my duty to write and wake people up on some issue. To whom much is given, much is expected. If you have protected employment, how could you not use that to speak out on behalf of people who don't have the same protections or security?

1:10:59Right. Absolutely. Well, I think we need to wrap up pretty soon, don't we? Because it's almost one o 'clock. So I just want to say, this has been a great pleasure. It's so nice to talk about the Stoics. And you obviously know a lot about Marcus, more than I know, because I've never actually worked a whole lot on Marcus. So it's been a lot of - Well, I have learned a lot about Seneca from your writings. And I think you're doing very important work. And I think it's important that we, yeah, we don't, the distinction which Seneca talks about between the Stoics and the Epicureans, the idea that one gets involved because they feel compelled to, and the other, he says, only gets involved if they have to.

1:11:42You know, I think that's the distinction or the choice that we all have to make with the issues of our day. Yeah, well, I think that's right. I love teaching the Stoics because all these issues come up in the class and they're among the most living of all the philosophers that I teach. Well, Professor, it's an honor. Thank you so much for all your work. It's a great pleasure. I really enjoyed it hugely.

1:12:12Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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