Animals deserve to be treated with respect and as active citizens in the world, Dr. Martha Nussbaum said in a lecture to a standing-room-only audience in the Clarke Building at Utah Valley University on Sept. 20.

“Creatures who live in a place should have a say in how they live,” Nussbaum said.

Even if animals cannot speak or otherwise communicate directly in ways humans can understand, they still deserve freedom of speech, she said. “It’s not that animals don’t speak; it’s that humans usually do not listen.”

Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Law School. Her lecture, entitled “Justice for Animals: Practical Progress Through Philosophical Theory,” covered the history of past philosophical approaches regarding the ethical treatment of animals and her own proposals, which focused on a list of rights that allow animals to determine their own course of treatment.

Nussbaum began by describing three possible positive and negative treatment scenarios for individual animals, stressing the importance of giving them proper names to grant them dignity while studying them. She used these scenarios to illustrate her definition of injustice — “the wrongful thwarting of a sentient being’s striving” — and to demonstrate how that definition applies to animals.

In discussing past flawed ethical approaches to treating animals, Nussbaum emphasized that animals don’t have to be similar to humans to deserve dignity, as this attitude ignores the suffering of creatures less like humans.

She also said that treating animals as passive citizens who cannot act for themselves is doing them a disservice, and that humans can learn how to advocate for animals by studying their lives and striving to see what matters to them.

Finally, Nussbaum discussed a list of capabilities that every minimally just society provides each citizen: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment. She said this list may sound too “human” to be a good guide for the rights and treatment of animals, but that each could be applied with the proper research and understanding.

“In effect, the list is really made by the animals themselves as they express their deepest concerns, as they try to live,” she said.