Listening to the Nonhuman World: On Including Other Life-Forms in Politics

In this first of a two-part essay, Jonathan Blake considers recent books on the political rights of nonhuman beings.

By Jonathan S. BlakeMay 3, 2025

• Environment

• Politics

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part essay. The second part will be published one week from today.

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IN 1726, AN ENGLISH surgeon and sea captain published an account of his extraordinary adventures to extraordinary lands: a land of tiny people and a land of giants; a floating island and a land of rational, talking horses, the Houyhnhnms. Of all his harrowing and mind-boggling experiences, it’s the talking horses that finally does Lemuel Gulliver in. After living among horses far more “orderly and rational, […] acute and judicious” than his fellow human beings, Gulliver, upon returning home, forsakes society and shuts himself off to the outside world. He even finds his long-suffering wife repugnant compared to the noble horses, stuffing his nose with herbs to avoid her “very offensive” human odor.

Reverence was not his immediate reaction to meeting the Houyhnhnms, however. As with most Europeans of his day, the idea of intelligent horses was, at first, too much for Gulliver to process. But with time and familiarity, he came not only to accept but also to admire the “wise and virtuous” equines. He became most besotted with their “government of reason,” which operated so prudently and without rancor that it only required quadrennial “grand assemblies,” a “representative council of the whole nation,” where the horses govern themselves through deliberation and often “unanimous consent.” How different this was from the senseless, spiteful, typically belligerent politics of the royal courts of Europe!

Gulliver and his escapades were, of course, fictional—the invention of Jonathan Swift in one of the great satirical novels in English. Swift dispatched his hapless protagonist on voyages to unbelievable, absurd places to ridicule the England of his day. Gulliver’s time with the “governing rational animals” was Swift’s send-up of English politics. Readers would doubtless know that nothing was more absurd than animals speaking a language “much more graceful and significant” than any in Europe, and that there was nothing more devastating than to say that Houyhnhnms were more reasonable, deliberative, and politic than George I, Robert Walpole, the Old Pretender, Louis XIV, Philip V, and all the rest.

But why was the comparison to animals so obviously a punch line and an insult? How did the idea of thinking, communicating creatures become utterly ludicrous? And when did we shunt the thought that animals might engage in some form of politics to the restricted realm of the unimaginable? When, in other words, did our impression of nonhumans become so small? When did our relationships with the teeming and splendorous assemblage of pulsing, murmuring life-forms—the glory of our planet, from unicellular algae to the giant sequoia—go so wrong?

Perhaps we took a wrong turn with Swift’s predecessors in 17th-century Europe, when thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke laid the foundations of Western modernity firmly in the sands of human exceptionalism and superiority. Or must we reach back further, to Western civilization’s origins in Athens and Jerusalem? Back then, the God of Genesis commanded humans to “have dominion […] over every living thing,” while Aristotle asserted that nonhumans “exist for the sake of human beings.” Or maybe it’s just a human thing, a trait that Homo sapiens carry with us wherever we go. Early human migrations to new continents during the Pleistocene were always followed in short order by the extinction of local megafauna. Hello, humans; goodbye, saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths.

We can debate when exactly we banished consideration of the rest of nature and became the source of its ruin. But there is no question that the biosphere has suffered immense devastation in human hands, and it is now in an accelerating spiral of crisis. The most recent UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (already over five years old) reached the dire conclusion that nature is “deteriorating worldwide” at an “unprecedented” rate. One million species currently face extinction, and without drastic action “there will be a further acceleration in the global rate of species extinction, which is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.” Hello, humans; goodbye, Christmas Island whiptail skink (declared extinct in 2017), splendid poison frog (2020), and mountain mist frog (2022).

Greed, indifference, and other psychological and ideological pathologies certainly motivate our mistreatment of the rest of nature. But these motives wouldn’t mean much without being enabled by human power.

Discussions of power are inevitably fraught. Suggesting that a homogeneous “humanity” wields power is problematic because we all know the extreme differences in status and authority between various groups and individuals. In most contexts, it makes no sense to speak of an American billionaire and a Congolese farmworker as holding similar power. But when it comes to the power that humans hold over other forms of life, both those individuals do in fact share something basic.

All humans hold the power to destroy nonhuman life with no immediate consequence. Any human, even the most marginalized, can uproot a weed or swat a mosquito. There is no doubt that wealthier humans can, and do, cause vastly more damage and at a larger scale, but at a fundamental level, we all possess power over nonhumans. When it comes to nonhumans, in fact, we are in a position of not just power but also domination.

Two books from 2023, Martha C. Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility and Sharon R. Krause’s Eco-Emancipation: An Earthly Politics of Freedom, explore this condition of human domination. “Our world is dominated by humans everywhere: on land, in the seas, and in the air,” writes Nussbaum on the first page of her unflinching book. “No non-human animal escapes human domination.” Krause, meanwhile, uses page one of her vibrant, learned work of political theory to bring attention to the shadowy, shape-shifting “specter of a domination that shapes every aspect of our lives while being virtually invisible to us: the domination that human beings exercise in relation to nonhuman nature.” Despite taking off from the same observation, however, Nussbaum and Krause steer toward different destinations.

Nussbaum takes us in the direction of justice. Her argument, in its barest form, is that sentient animals are not mere objects “whose suffering does not matter” but, as decades of scientific research has demonstrated, complex, intelligent, and feeling beings who strive for “a flourishing life”—just like us. We humans “thwart this striving” in ways big and small, deliberately and unthinkingly, causing animals to endure “impeded lives.” Blocking sentient animals—those with “a point of view on the world”—from striving toward their own characteristic form of flourishing is not just wrong—it’s unjust.

To remedy this ubiquitous injustice, Nussbaum offers the Capabilities Approach (CA) that she and Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen have developed over decades. In Justice for Animals, Nussbaum extends this approach, which was created for humans, to the more-than-human world. Under the expanded CA, “each individual creature is seen as having a dignity that law and politics must respect, treating that individual as an end, not simply as a means.” The goal, then, is to give each individual sentient animal the freedom and opportunity “to lead its own characteristic form of life”—that is, to “flourish in its own way” rather than suffering an impeded life. Justice has been achieved when sentient animals (including humans) “have been enabled by laws and institutions to live a decently flourishing life, as defined by a list of opportunities for choice and activity that the creature has (or lacks).” Where laws and institutions frustrate an animal’s striving, injustice prevails.

This, of course, describes our world. “Animals suffer injustice at our hands,” Nussbaum states, not mincing words. Nussbaum, one of the most distinguished living philosophers (her laurels include the million-dollar Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture awarded annually by my employer), teaches both philosophy and law at the University of Chicago. Befitting her appointments, she develops not just an ethical critique of human domination but also a political response. She understands that, for a problem such as this, virtuous individuals are insufficient; the collective must act.

It is the government’s role to secure the conditions that provide every sentient being the chance to pursue their own vision of flourishing. “Humans will have to take the lead in making the laws and establishing the institutions of government,” Nussbaum argues, “but there is no reason why humans should do this only for and about other humans.” This claim, for some, is already a radical move, a fundamental challenge to the basic purpose of government. But Nussbaum pushes further. She can find no “good reason why only humans should participate actively in legislation and institution-building.” Self-rule should be open to all sentient creatures, she contends, regardless of species.

Human beings, a burgeoning body of science is revealing at breathtaking speed, are not the only ones on earth with articulated needs and desires. Recent research shows that nonhumans may communicate differently from humans, but they communicate nonetheless. It is “our responsibility,” as the animals in the political “driver’s seat,” to listen and to seek to understand, Nussbaum instructs, “to attend to those voices, to figure out how animals are doing and what obstacles they face.”

Bringing nonhumans into our democracies may be less radical than it first appears. Nussbaum is quick to clarify that attending to the political voices of animals does not mean giving them a vote in our elections, which “would quickly become absurd.” Her vision is not of beleaguered pets marching down our grand boulevards demanding the vote for every Sparky, Buddy, and Princess. Rather more modestly, she proposes that “duly qualified animal ‘collaborators’ should be charged with making policy on the animals’ behalf, and bringing challenges to unjust arrangements in the courts.” The goal is not to force animals with “little interest in political participation in the human-dominated world” to suddenly take part in “elections, assemblies, and offices.” Nussbaum’s ambition, rather, is for expert guardians to give the “creatures who live in a place […] a say in how they live.”

The “creatures” at the heart of her account are individual, often named animals—Virginia the elephant, Lupa the dog. “[T]his is a book about loss and deprivation suffered by individual creatures, each of whom matters,” Nussbaum states. “Species as such do not suffer loss.” The elevation and celebration of the individual makes for a coherent moral philosophy that can guide our interactions with other humans, pets, and livestock, but doesn’t translate well to ecological realities. Already in 1935, the British botanist Arthur Tansley displaced the “individual organism” as the primary object of interest for ecologists. The true “basic units of nature” are “systems” of interacting life-forms and inorganic matter, which he called, in a seminal essay, “ecosystems.” We might have noticed this earlier, Tansley argued, had we not been blinded by “our natural human prejudices” directing our attention toward fellow living creatures. Nussbaum remains beholden to those prejudices. Individual (sentient) organisms matter to her, not the wider ecosystems they are part of. Humans have, she admits, “ethical duties” to “the natural environment,” but these are less than the ethical duties we owe sentient animals. Ecosystems for Nussbaum are merely the set dressing for an animal drama, and we do not owe them justice.

Ecology is clearly not the basis for Nussbaum’s thinking about the natural world. So what is? Justice for Animals, though rejecting liberalism’s anthropocentrism, is a product of the liberal tradition. In many ways, Nussbaum positions her claims on behalf of animals as the logical next step in the forward march of liberal inclusion. The story liberalism proudly tells about itself is the steady transformation of politically excluded objects into politically included, rights-bearing subjects. She points, for instance, to “the progress of women” as evidence for “the evolving consciousness of humanity.” “The same thing can happen, and, I believe, is happening, with the rights of animals,” Nussbaum writes toward the book’s end.

Nussbaum errs in adopting liberal individualism for a multispecies politics. Liberalism’s individualist fetish (and concomitant denial and denigration of interdependences) has been a leading cause of our current crises; it would be a mistake to reproduce it as we try to expand our political imagination. Her dogged individualism, moreover, mirrors and recreates Christian logics of human supremacy that appoint humans over nonhumans and individuals over communities. Nussbaum’s liberal individualism, like Christianity, is premised on the notion that individuals are endowed with some ineffable quality that gives them dignity and value. For Christians, that quality is a soul. For Nussbaum, it is sentience. Those that lack this special quality find themselves without salvation. For example, her stated solution to the “predation problem” is to feed predators “permissible” prey—insects, which don’t suffer harm, and “rats and some other nuisance animals,” which can be killed and eaten “under a self-defense principle.” In dividing living beings into two camps—souled and soulless, sentient and nonsentient—these principles invite domination of the lesser by the greater.

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Krause’s Eco-Emancipation is also attentive to individuals’ needs and potential for suffering but is more concerned with the well-being of species and ecosystems—collectives built upon webs of relations and “circuits of vitality” among living matter and “the material environment.” Krause wants us to see individual creatures, even individual species, “as parts of a larger whole that has value, rather than as the only things that have value.” As a result, the human domination that concerns her is the domination of nonhuman nature in toto. Diverging from Nussbaum on the proper subject of politics—who and what matters—sends Krause in a more fruitful direction. Her “holistic approach” proves more flexible and capacious than Nussbaum’s strict individualism, and it helps her avoid the awkward conclusions that ensnare Nussbaum.

Krause, a political theorist at Brown University, begins by pointing out that modern democracy is designed to protect humans from domination (not that it always succeeds) but has few such checks against the domination of nonhumans. This neat division between the domination of humans and the domination of nonhumans quickly falls apart in her deft analysis, however. Krause’s key concept is “ecological emancipation”: “the liberation of the Earth from human domination, and the liberation of human beings from a way of life that is at once exploitative and exploited, complicit and entrapped.”

Unlike Nussbaum, Krause explicitly makes the case that human domination is bad for humans too. Though we, especially in the Global North, clearly benefit from the exploitation of the earth, at the same time “we ourselves, including both poor people and privileged ones, are confined and exploited by the forces through which the domination of nature transpires.” Our quest for cheap gas, cheap smartphones, and cheap meat ends up degrading not only the planet but people as well. Building from the foundational fact that “human beings are a part of nature not separate from it,” Krause argues convincingly that “the human domination of nature circles back to subjugate people too, albeit in different ways and to different degrees depending on how we are positioned in human hierarchies.”

To fight our way out from under this structure of domination, she stresses that we must start from another basic point, yet one that too many find difficult to acknowledge—that the human place on earth is one of both “embeddedness” and “distinctiveness.” “We do not stand outside nature,” she observes, “but there are certain things that only we can do within it.” This middle position—what she calls “a new kind of human exceptionalism”—should be the obvious one. But currently fashionable academic fads, especially in the “environmental humanities,” often end up denying any human distinctiveness at all, while the vast majority of the population continues to promote business-as-usual ideas and beliefs that deny human embeddedness.

The way to address this system of double domination from within it is to transform “the basic structure of human power by means of new political institutions.” Krause’s answer is to build “a new kind of political order” that institutionalizes “political incorporation for nonhuman nature” to secure limits on human power over nonhumans. These “certain limitations on us as people” must serve to end “nature’s condition of systematic vulnerability to human power […] so as to allow a freer life for all of us over time.” Since, as Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, “privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily,” Krause understands that the imposition of limits to human power must be “backed up by the coercive force of law.” As is too often the case, efforts to expand not merely the circle of moral concern but also the “circle of the ‘we’”—that is, the boundaries of membership in a political community—require state power to overcome reactionary resistance.

What might such “new kinds of political community” look like and how might they function? Like Nussbaum, Krause is clear that “political inclusion” doesn’t mean “asking cows and rainforests to vote or run for office.” But her positive vision is, understandably, vague. Human beings will still have “a distinctive place” as decision-makers due to our unique abilities for deliberation in a political assembly, but we “must consider” the interests and desires of nonhumans when making decisions that affect them—a “nothing about us without us” rule that spans the phylogenetic tree. The multispecies representation and “regimes of rights” that she imagines will somehow “force nonhuman well-being to count with human decision makers.”

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Where for Nussbaum the goal of nonhuman political inclusion is to give nonhuman individuals the power to pursue justice, for Krause it is to give nonhuman nature the power to pursue nondomination. Nondomination, befitting a word prefixed with a negative, is largely defined via its counter-concept, domination. Following republican political theory, Krause defines domination as “being subject to insufficiently checked power and exploitation.” It is a “condition of systematic vulnerability to the power of others.” Crucially, “domination is not every bad thing,” she writes, and its absence does not equal “perfect harmony.” Where Nussbaum limits the pursuit of justice to sentient individuals—“justice applies only to animals that have a point of view on the world,” as she puts it—Krause’s frame of reference is emancipation of the entire biosphere. Krause’s aim, at once modest and expansive, is to end humankind’s unchecked and arbitrary interference in the natural world.

With nondomination of nature, rather than justice for individuals, as her North Star, Krause presents a more workable view of the natural world. “To live on the Earth,” she correctly recognizes, “is inevitably to consume, transform, and destroy. Life entails violence.” In observing the biosphere as a whole, Krause can be clear-eyed and analytic about the brutality of earth’s metabolic systems and the law of the conservation of energy. Nussbaum, taking the perspective of the suffering individual animal, also sees violence in nature, but she finds it unnatural. “Nature is not a glorious site of freedom,” she argues, giving a negative valence to the fact of life that all animals (us included) have to eat. “From the perspective of creatures who are victims of [the] violence [of ‘Nature’], the fact that it’s all ‘Nature’ is no consolation.”

I suppose this is true. I also wouldn’t want to be eaten by a lion. Though it doesn’t follow that “to say that it is the destiny of antelopes to be torn apart by predators is like saying that it is the destiny of women to be raped. Both are terribly wrong, and demean the suffering of victims.” Predators need to eat, but men do not need to rape. Both acts produce suffering victims, but only one of them is “terribly wrong” and demands intervention.

Nussbaum is confusing a “natural fact” for a “social fact.” The claim that social facts (like race, gender, and nationality) are in fact natural facts has long been a motivation and rationalization for all sorts of grave injustices (slavery, racism, misogyny, poverty, etc.). But simply reversing the formula does not generate justice. Nature is not a morality play. Our human categories, social facts, and moral judgments don’t apply. “There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey,” Nietzsche wrote, “but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs.” Eagles and falcons have to eat; we can’t hold it against them. There is no room for moral thinking in this context. Any ethical theory that equates eating with rape requires serious rethinking, starting with its basic premise.

By centering the sovereign individual and holding that “all creatures count equally,” Nussbaum misses the forest for the trees. (In fact, trees and other plants, as nonsentient life-forms, don’t directly concern her in this book: “[P]lants do not have entitlements based upon justice.”) Her arguments demonstrate great empathy and logical rigor, but by ignoring the interdependence of all living beings, she ends up taking nonsensical positions.

Luckily, Krause shows us a different path. By embracing individuals and the systems of exchange in which they live, Krause doesn’t have to twist herself into uncomfortable stances. Two arguments stand out here. First, Krause is unbothered by “the defense of basic human interests”—such as our “perfectly legitimate aim” for “a secure and comfortable life”—because she understands that the use of nature is not automatically domination but rather “a necessary condition of existence, one that holds for all living things.” While Nussbaum maintains “that we should not give any absolute priority to human interests,” Krause takes a more ethically defensible and politically acceptable position that allows “us to defend ourselves against pests and predators, and to provide for our own well-being, even when this requires damage to nonhuman nature.” Her demand is for us humans to cease “the unreflective degradation of nature for the purpose of satisfying endless consumerist desires and the boundless pursuit of profit, or in thoughtless reaction to the inconveniences that life in a biotic community inevitably imposes on all its members.” Krause’s goal is neither a diminished human existence, a misanthropic reduction to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” nor a multispecies campfire rendition of “Kumbaya.” Krause simply asks for “our best efforts and good faith in being attuned and responsive to others”—to think before we act, to consider nature before we assert our power over it.

Second, Krause accepts that conflict between living beings is unavoidable. There are incommensurable needs between humans and nonhumans, between different nonhuman individuals, between species and ecosystems, and so on, that we can’t engineer our way out of, as Nussbaum sometimes suggests (feeding predators lab-grown or plant-based meat, for instance). Rather, they require prioritization and mediation—that is to say, politics. Nussbaum’s criterion for prioritization—sentience—is often unhelpful: it can’t guide us to resolve a conflict between sentient animals, and it tells us to prioritize all sentient creatures above, say, bacteria, which are the foundation of all life on earth. Krause’s criterion is preferable, even if still imperfect: centrality to a thriving biosphere. Some species and ecosystems “are more central to the flourishing of life on Earth than others,” she observes, “and we may have reason to prioritize their well-being over that of more marginal things when unavoidable conflicts arise in the context of mitigating human impacts.”

Centrality is a property of collectives, not of individuals: we have keystone species, not keystone individuals. No single individual creature, human or otherwise, is indispensable to an ecosystem, to say nothing of the biosphere as a whole. Krause’s ethics of systemic integrity recognizes this tragic fact of life (tragic, at least, from the perspective of individuals). Nussbaum’s ethics of individualism, conversely, does not allow her to act on the knowledge that some species are more important to the well-being of an ecosystem than others. Yet this sort of triage is precisely the action called for in the Anthropocene era.

It’s too late for us to pursue justice for all of earth’s creatures. Not only must we prioritize victims; we must also make difficult decisions about which sources of harm to tackle first. Krause’s priority is to rein in “unchecked human power and exploitation in relation to nature.” Eco-emancipation, she is clear, may serve to include nonhumans in our politics but “remains a distinctively human ideal,” one meant to change how we interact with nature. It is decidedly not a project “to reconstruct the relations that nonhuman beings and things have with one another.”

Nussbaum, conversely, is eager to reconstruct the relations between and among nonhumans. Her argument that such interventions in “nature” are necessary because our “ubiquitous activity” is the cause of “the largest ‘natural’ problems facing animals” in the “wild” is only sometimes convincing. When she pushes it too far—which she does in the book’s admittedly “most controversial” and “provocative” chapter, on wild animals—she unwittingly reveals that her ultimate aim isn’t to end human domination; her mission, rather, is to eliminate the suffering of sentient beings. And, in the name of promoting the flourishing of individual creatures, she is willing to disrupt the natural order to do so.

Nussbaum duly notes the likely negative consequences of human “proactive” interventions like providing veterinary care to wild animals (“a grave risk of upsetting the animal’s form of life”) and preventing predation in the wild (“very likely [to] cause disaster on a large scale”). But in each case, she quickly resolves in favor of human action. Nussbaum, following Kant, argues that humans have a “moral imperative” to move against the “suffering of vulnerable creatures,” regardless of anticipated consequences. Why stop at the “remediation of human harms” when “for millennia, Nature has meant hunger, excruciating pain, often the extinction of entire groups”?

Justice, by the book’s end, seems less like Nussbaum’s goal than the means to some grander project of transformation. She seeks justice not to undo human domination of nature but to extirpate sin and redeem the world. Not even “charges of ‘playing God’” will scare her away from her interventions on behalf of the meek and the suffering. She is, after all, working to save souls.

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Justice and redemption have been knit together since the Hebrew Bible, especially in the soaring, searing teachings of the prophets. Nussbaum’s problem is how to pursue justice in our unredeemed world. She will neither accept that humans can ever take precedence over other sentient animals nor stomach mass human suffering, so she ends up in a bind. “In a world where humans are starving and dying from lack of medical care,” she asks, “can we possibly justify spending any substantial amount of time and money at all in caring for other animals?” Her response is to reject the premise—always the instinct of those lacking an answer. “The dilemma is falsely posed,” she insists. “[M]ost of the current threats to human life from poverty and disease come from the absence of effective governmental institutions, not from ‘natural’ limits to the earth’s capacities.” Her analysis may be correct, but it leaves us with no clues on how to act. Given that she acknowledges that this is “the largest conflict of all,” I expect her to provide an answer in a book that aspires to transform the law toward “real accountability.” In fact, however, the conflict between human and nonhuman animal needs is not “falsely posed”; it’s very real.

In August and September 2024, Zimbabwe and Namibia announced plans to kill wild elephants and other wildlife to feed their human citizens facing a drought-induced famine. Elephants are sentient creatures that are, according to Nussbaum, owed justice. Indeed, the beloved and charismatic elephant is an example she turns to frequently. Given that humans are on the brink of mass starvation, what should these governments do? To which of their sentient denizens should they answer?

Krause’s answer is clear and humane: since “human life is a condition of its possibility,” respect for nature cannot demand action that would “make it impossible to meet basic human needs.” If Nussbaum were in charge, what would she do? She would surely argue forcefully and persuasively that foreign governments must supply food aid as an immediate measure—and pursue global justice as a longer-term solution.

I agree—but unfortunately, I don’t run the State Department. If her arguments don’t convince global leaders by tomorrow, what should the governments of Zimbabwe and Namibia do? African elephants (Loxodonta africana) and humans (Homo sapiens) are both sentient beings, so Justice for Animals doesn’t know how to resolve their conflict. Still, I must admit that this debilitating moral equivalence is far preferable to the way the world usually works. Where Nussbaum, sensitive to the suffering of all, sees two moral beings striving to live good lives, the rest of our unredeemed world, when scanning the African savannah, only thrills at the sight of two entrancing elephant eyes.

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Featured image: Sawrey Gilpin. Gulliver Taking His Final Leave of the Land of the Houyhnhnms, 1769. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1981.25.312). CC0, yale.edu. Accessed April 30, 2025. Image has been cropped.