Creature comforts This scholarly look at how badly humans treat animals employs moral principles to shame us into recognising their rights

The physicist Stephen Hawking once hosted a party for time travellers, but only sent out the invitations after the date had already passed. No one came. 

- Rohan Silva

If people from the future had turned up, what would most appal them about our society today? For the prominent American philosopher Martha C Nussbaum, the answer is our treatment of animals, which her sober and sobering new book argues is a moral crime on a monumental scale.

To make her scholarly case, Nussbaum points to the "barbarous cruelties of the factory meat industry", "habitat destruction" and "pollution of the air and seas" - but casts the ethical net even more widely to ensnare all of us who "dwell in areas in which elephants and bears once roamed" or "live in high-rise buildings that spell death for migratory birds". We're all complicit, she argues, no matter how right-on we think we are - and we have "a long overdue ethical debt" to work off.

Over the years, there's been no shortage of Cassandran prophets alerting us to the cosmic tragedy of species loss and biodiversity destruction. Elizabeth Kolbert, in The Sixth Extinction, attempted to bludgeon us into seeing sense with flinty facts and hard logic. Harvard biologist EO Wilson tried by showing us the wondrous complexity and interconnectedness of life on Earth.

Nussbaum is going a different way, taking aim at the entire system of moral thought that, consciously or not, has led us to treat living things as objects and trash the Eden of our natural world.