The Other Species Capability & the Power of Wonder

ABSTRACT

I argue that the Other Species Capability (OSC) in Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach deserves a more central place in our thinking about human capability than has often been thought. In order to do so, I explain how the OSC protects the human power of biocentric wonder, which in turn has a power that is architectonic in some ways even to capabilities such as Practical Reason and Affiliation. The bulk of the paper explains the main history surrounding the OSC, what biocentric wonder is, why it should relate to an expanded understanding of freedom, and how these things relate to self-reflection and our capacity for moral regard. Our capacity to relate to other species ought to be seen as central to our ability to come to terms with who we are and to grasp moral regard for each other.

KEYWORDS:

• Capability approach
• freedom
• wonder
• moral regard
• self-reflection
• other species capability

Acknowledgments

Case Western Reserve University resides on the ancestral lands of the Lenape (Delaware), the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Shawnee, Wyandot Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and other Great Lakes tribes (Chippewa, Kickapoo, Wea, Pinakashaw, and Kaskaskia). This land of the ‘Northwest Territory’ was ceded under force from the U.S. military by 1100 chiefs and warriors signing the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. Subsequently, the treaty wasn't honoured by the United States of America just as all 374 treaties with Native Americans ratified by the U.S. Senate have not been. Today, there are nearly 28,000 Native American people who live in Northeast Ohio – neighbors, coworkers, classmates, and community members, who represent over 100 tribal nations.

I am grateful for the patient work of the editorial team at the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities and for an anonymous reviewer whose comments spurred me on to writing this paper in its present form. I am also grateful to the participants at the International Society for Environmental Ethics annual (virtual) meeting in 2020. Finally, I am grateful to Hannah Doyle of Oxford University Press for sharing Basl's work.

This paper emerged from a different paper given at the Human Development and Capabilities Association annual conference in 2019 at the University of London. I am grateful to Nicolas Delon, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Amy Linch for that panel, Amy especially for her scholarly dialogue leading up to the event. I wish also to thank Christine Winter for a comment immediately after the event about the possibility of reciprocity with other animals. Finally, I remember Rachel Wichert, in memoriam, for her contribution to the panel and for her advocacy for other animals, her research on cetaceans, and her collegial work with a number of us over the last half decade.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Some further precision about technical terms in the paper may be useful for philosophically inclined readers. This terminology helps us picture the operation of wonder and will be tacit throughout the paper. Although one can make precise distinctions between a species, a kind of life, a living kind, the ‘kind’ in humankind, the form of life, a life-form, a form of being and even a way of being, I will emphasize only two distinctions in this paper. One is between the form of life and a kind of life, and the other is between the form of life and a way of being.

The form of life is the structure of life for a kind of life in which it may express a range of ways of being. ‘Form’ is focusable, such that we can talk intelligibly about the particular form a life takes as well as the general form of life of a kind of being. The form of life of the human being involves seeing clearly for most of one’s life, but my life is limited in what I can’t see without my contacts or glasses. ‘Form’ focuses us on the ways it is possible to be for living beings. However, I will always use a kind of life generally. I speak to being human, myself included, impaired vision or not.

Why shouldn’t we use ‘kind,’ then, only for the general shape of the life of a species and use ‘form’ for the particular structure of a particular life within a species? The reason is that when we turn to wondering over life, the way I will describe wonder will be with reference to how it engages with the form of life at many levels. Its reflective nature can move from the particular to the general, just as from the general to the particular; in so doing, it moves along with – i.e., considering – form (‘it forms judgments by considering form’ is a handy motto). A kind of life is the beginning and end of wonder over life, but the wondering in between is about life’s form. Our wondering over life may start with kinds of lives and end with them, but along the way it considers form.

Finally, a way of being has a complex relation to the form of life. For one, when we work within the form of our lives, we often appeal to ways of being in order to learn how to live. Some of these ways of being come from other forms of life, as when we take heart from a salmon’s persistence in swimming upstream (Bendik-Keymer 2006, lecture 4). Its form of life teaches us something about how to focus ourselves, namely, with persistence against the current toward our worthy goal, despite the zigs and zags. Thus it conveys to us a way of being, that is, a way to be in our lives. Even more deeply, the form of life shapes ways of being. That for a being of my kind, I must sleep in order to live is a form given to my life, but how I manage to sleep on a regular basis is part of my way of being. To put all three terms together, we can say that for our kind of life (i.e., a human kind of life), the form of our lives structures and involves many ways of being.

2 On subjective value preferences, compare Sandler 2012, chapter 2.3.

3 The expression comes from Lucretius. The Latin is: in luminis oras.

4 One might remark that egoism need not be egotistical, and that some egoism is a part of healthy self-interest. This is true. The emphasis Nussbaum places on wonder being non-egotistic is an indication, I believe, not of the way in which the ‘me’ is decentered in being open to another one – the one over which or over whom one wonders. When wondering, ‘it’s not about me,’ one might say in colloquial American English.

5 One area I have not broached in this paper is the connection between wonder and personal acquaintance. As Kieran Setiya (2021) argues, personal acquaintance is an important dimension of our human form of life by which and only by which some things of elemental value to human dignity and the meaning of life are possible. These things include love. In other work, I mark this category of normativity ‘relational reason,’ as opposed to practical and theoretical reasoning. Relational reasoning is the domain of considerations centered on and opened up by knowing by acquaintance, rather than know-how or knowledge-that (Bendik-Keymer 2012). I do not see how personal acquaintance can open up without the non-narcissistic orientation toward others involving the power of wonder (Nussbaum 2013).

6 But della Mirandola’s neo-Platonism can be said to undercut the anti-essentialist interpretation of him in this tradition.

7 The ability to imagine how many others would view the same problem as you

8 On the distinction between concept and conception, see Rawls 1971, 5.

9 The allusion to Nicomachean Ethics 1.7 is to the moment in Aristotle’s lectures on ethics (as transcribed by Nicomachus) when Aristotle realizes that human excellence – relative to our kind of life – appears in and through thoughtfulness generally.

10 The play on words here is welcome. Berlin (1969) understands ‘positive’ freedom as freedom for things of value – most generally as self-realization. He contrasts this with ‘negative’ freedom – freedom from interference – which happens also to be classically liberal freedom.

11 One can think of biocentric freedom as traditionally related to Stoic oikeiosis – the propensity of all living things to seek their own kind of flourishing. Modern counterparts appear in Spinoza’s conatus and Rousseau’s amour de soi-meme. In the United States of America’s philosophical tradition, Thoreau was perhaps its first proponent. See Cafaro 2004; Bendik-Keymer 2005.

12 I say ‘belong to’ because there would appear to be more to our self-realization than reflective freedom to determine our lives by what makes sense to us. This rationalist part of our self-realization is not sufficient to live well as a human being. We have also, for instance, to be connected with others. A human life without personal acquaintances is profoundly tragic and cannot be moral for that person.

13 Obviously, these elements of the concept of biocentric freedom demand more clarification. At present, I am unclear how we should resolve the tension between teleological form in ‘natural historical judgments’ (Thompson 2008) and what Basl (2019) calls ‘etiological teleology’ – a teleology not internal to the form of life but external to it in evolutionary histories of selective adaptation. My use of teleology above, however, is neo-Aristotelian (Thompson 2008).

14 This is why the use of teleology is Thompsonian/neo-Aristotelian.

15 Personal acquaintance is also central to life being good for human beings, and it is not per se a reflective judgment, although it both involves and contributes to them.

16 An old English word implying destiny, that is, historical direction of some sort.

17 He claims that natural goodness approaches (1) fail to explain how insentient kinds of life have a ‘pro-attitude’ toward their well-being, (2) focus on flourishing for the kind rather than the welfare of the individual apart from its kind, and (3) fail to understand how ‘assessments of welfare are not kind-relative’ (Basl 2019, 60–61, 66-67). However, I believe Nussbaum would agree with Michael Thompson (2008) that the logical possibility implicit in (2) and (3) is incoherent. As Thompson showed, we cannot figure out what it is for a life to go well or ill without assuming the logic of living kinds. Moreover, (1) is narrow and unimaginative, for all life strives in its own way, with the propensity to seek the good for the kind of life in question found in the specific form of striving, conscious or not. This is the ancient Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis (see also Bendik-Keymer 2014).

18 There are very complicated issues in meta-normativity at this point, between the subjective eye of the beholder and the objective features of something. What I hope to indicate for the interested metaphysician is that my account of wonder focuses on the way wonder tracks complex possibilities in meaningful form. For something to be worthy of wonder is for it to present a complex possibility of meaningful form. After that, or in it rather, what is wonderful depends also on how significant the thing in question is. Cf. Vasalou 2016 and Fisher 1998.

19 Obviously, this normative pressure could swamp a finite agent’s attention and become overdemanding. But the presumption isn’t that the weight of considerations must be equal or that no conflicts of obligation obtain in our interpersonal relations existing alongside. It’s that we exist always already beholden to the meaning of things and have to balance our way through life thoughtfully. Our obligations help here by setting some ‘presumptive constraints’ (Wallace 2019, chapter 2).

20 What is called ‘moral standing’ in the deontological tradition is disclosed not by wonder per se but by second personal considerations (Darwall 2006) that necessarily involve wonder in their phenomenology. These reasons depend on personal acquaintance – the space of interpersonal or ‘relational’ reason (Bendik-Keymer 2020) between people, including non-human personae. One might argue that the reason why Nussbaum (2006) singles out justice to sentient animals is that she is sensing the tacit role of the space of interpersonal morality and its deontological commitments found by our plausible ability to project personification along with sentience. Setiya (2021) argues that personal acquaintance doesn’t depend on the second personal, but he seems to miss the way that unreciprocated love, for instance, still depends on the loved other being someone whose presence makes claims on us. The space of the interpersonal is a potential for the actualization of personal acquaintance.

21 In a humorous objection, Steven Vogel asked why there shouldn’t be an ‘Other Thing Capability (OTC)’?

22 Basl begins his book with Albert Schweitzer but seems to miss how the latter’s justification for his biocentrism is consistency with the strong analogy he wonders over when faced with other forms of life (Basl 2019, 1), a ‘compulsion’ to ‘show to all’ living beings the ‘same’ ‘reverence’ he shows to his own. Perhaps Schweitzer’s only mistake is collapsing analogy into identity with the word ‘same.’

23 Here, I would argue that the analogy with self-realization is weak but understandable, whereas with living forms, the analogy is quite strong for logical reasons deriving from the logic of taking something as a living form (cf. Thompson 2008).

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Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer holds the Beamer-Schneider Professorship in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University and is an Associate Professor of Philosophy there. He is also senior research fellow with the Earth System Governance Project, Universiteit Utrecht.