If human beings rise, must other life necessarily fall? We rarely ask because we’ve never learned to see beyond ourselves, understanding that cost starts with understanding how we imagined our place in the world.
Human beings have become a species capable of deciding the fate of almost everything around us: deciding where forests remain, where roads are built, where rivers flow, where wildlife may move, which animals are confined, and which habitats are altered for human purposes. Yet the power to decide does not necessarily create a right to decide.
Beneath these choices lies an anthropocentric hierarchy where human interests are treated as primary while the interests of other living beings are considered secondary whenever they conflict with human preferences. Against this hierarchy, I rely on Martha C. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to examine whether human interests should automatically prevail when their pursuit restricts the fundamental capabilities of animals.
In Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, Martha places animals in the sphere of justice and argues that justice requires more than preventing suffering. It requires securing the conditions necessary for animals to flourish according to their species-specific nature. The precise content of flourishing necessarily differs between each species. A bird requires opportunity to fly, a fish requires an aquatic environment in which it can swim and behave according to its nature, and a wild animal requires habitat, movement, ecological relationships, and the ability to exist without constant human control. For Martha, the problem is not simply suffering. It is capability deprivation.
The human domination over animals is not accidental; it is structural and deeply embodied in our political, cultural, social, and economic systems. It does not arise merely from individual cruelty but from institutional arrangements designed around human benefits. Around the world, animal laws and conservation policies are structured within an anthropocentric framework. Animals are protected, conserved, and regulated not as right-bearing beings, but as resources to be managed for human benefits.
Like, in Pakistan, animals are largely protected through welfare-based laws, not through a capabilities-based framework. The primary legislation, such as the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1890 largely focuses on preventing visible cruelty rather than ensuring the flourishing of animals. Similarly, the provincial laws prioritize conservation of wildlife for human benefit rather than justice for animals themselves. The absence of a capabilities-based legal framework means that animals are still treated as objects of ownership and trade. Fish and birds sold on Pakistani streets are not perceived as beings whose rights are violated; instead, they are seen as commodities. They are viewed as property rather than beings of justice, where exploitation becomes habitual, invisible, and unquestioned.
Human interests are not morally uniform. Human beings require food, shelter, health, security, transportation, livelihood, and infrastructure. But human societies also pursue convenience, entertainment, aesthetic preferences, commercial profits, and cultural habits. These interests cannot carry the same moral weight. A preference for cheap entertainment cannot automatically be placed on the same level as an animal’s basic freedom of movement.
Fish trapped inside transparent plastic bags, under the complete control of a fish vendor on the streets of Lahore. Their aquatic life is reduced to a small plastic world where they remain alive, but are deprived of the space and freedom to live according to their nature. Photo by the author.
Commercial tourism cannot automatically justify disturbing wildlife. Infrastructure development cannot justify destroying habitat where an alternative route or design is available. Martha’s framework, combined with necessity and proportionality principle, distinguishes the moral weight of different human claims. First, the human interest must be legitimate and sufficiently important. Secondly, the particular interference with animal capabilities must actually be necessary to achieve that interest. Lastly, where a less harmful and reasonable alternative exists, the more harmful practice should not be permitted merely because it is cheaper, easier, or customary. These tests distinguish human interests into non-essential, significant but non-vital, and vital human interests.
Martha makes it clear that unnecessary human interests carry no moral or legal exception when they exploit an animal’s capabilities. Zoo confinement is a clear example of how entertainment and profit function as human interests that undermine animal rights. These animals are removed from their natural habitats and placed in artificial, restrictive environments, often in noisy and polluted urban settings. Zoos deny their freedom of movement, bodily integrity, and natural behavior’s, reducing them to spectacles for human amusement and revenue generation.
The same analysis applies to the roadside sale of birds and fish. Birds confined in cages and fish sold in plastic bags are alive but incapable of flourishing. Even when sellers claim livelihood necessity, this interest remains non-essential because alternative businesses are available. The human right to business or livelihood cannot justify the exploitation of sentient beings. When business models depend on violating animal capabilities, they are illegal and should be prohibited. Justice requires banning such practices and supporting alternative livelihoods that do not rely on animal suffering.
The commercial activities in protected wildlife areas reflect another form of human interest. Glamping and overcrowding disrupt wildlife migration patterns, feeding habits, breeding cycles, and freedom. While it generates profits, these benefits are not necessary for human survival and cannot justify the erosion of animal capabilities. Deforestation and unchecked urbanization also conflict with animals flourishing. They are built upon a hierarchy that privileges human expansion over interspecies justice. When forests and green belts are cleared for commercial use, animals lose the ecological foundation necessary for their existence. Habitat destruction fragments ecosystems, eliminates nesting and breeding grounds, and increases starvation and human-wildlife conflict. When forests are valued only for timber, and land and rivers are valued for commercial use, animals are reduced to externalities.
In these cases, the principle is clear: human interest must be necessary and regulated. Economic gain, entertainment, and convenience cannot justify the deprivation of animal capabilities, particularly when alternatives exist or when such practices serve no essential human needs. If animal exploitation becomes normal and the state fails to regulate unnecessary human interests, the animal’s existence will become impossible.
The limitation on human interests does not mean eliminating human freedom, but it means regulating and restricting activities that commodify living beings unnecessarily. Martha’s theory reminds us that animals are not objects of convenience; they are subjects whose capabilities impose limits on our ambition.
The fish trapped in plastic, birds in cages, and zoo animals remind us that flourishing is a right, not a privilege, and human interest, no matter how convenient or profitable, must stop where the capabilities of other sentient beings begin. Limiting unnecessary and exploitative human interests is not a moral preference but a legal obligation in a just society committed to interspecies dignity and coexistence. It underscores that human freedom, while important, is not absolute and must yield when it conflicts with the flourishing of other species.
