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moral significance, they attempt to illustrate how chimps or pigs (being more intelligent than some individuals) have more worth. It is this argument that forms the basis of their advocacy to stop animal testing, the eating of meat and a host of other reasons that humans have to kill animals. Most worrying about McMahan’s comments in this remarkable exchange is: “The question is what is it about people like your daughter that makes moral demands on other people that nonhuman animals can make on any of us.” In other words, why should anyone care about or help pay to support the life of someone like Kittay’s daughter, Sesha? As with most deeply disturbing conversations, Kittay has found the words to illuminate her argument only afterwards. “I now see how I must reply,” she wrote recently. She reminds us that Singer and McMahan acknowledged the special relationship that Kittay has with her daughter and that that relationship is more morally significant than any relationship she could have with an animal. In this concession, Singer and McMahan have ascribed personhood to Sesha. The care of children in our society is not simply a private matter — we have laws and policies that ensure there is a public duty to fund their good upbringing. The moral significance of the mother/child relationship is greater than the significance of our relationship to animals. “It takes a village to raise a child” takes on political meaning here. If Kittay is right, and I believe she is, looking after our most vulnerable citizens really IS a public concern. And we should care about this exchange of views, because the ideas of ethicists, even expressed in the faraway and rarefied settings of Ivy League universities, have a way of ending up in our own hearts and minds when we are asked about the rights and wrongs of difficult questions.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Worthy of Dignity
    If she ever met him, I wonder what the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum would make of Nicholas. I wonder if she would see him as worthy of sympathy, but not respect.
    When Nussbaum began to work with Sen on Capability matters, she decided that Sen’s ideas needed fleshing out for the real world. So, she devised a list of ten essential capabilities that, if reached to a minimum level, constituted the ingredients of a decent life — a life worth living. Nussbaum calls these minimum core social entitlements for a decent life the “Central Human Capabilities.”
    1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.
    2. Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.
    3. Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence, having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice matters of reproduction.
    4. Senses, Imagination and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason — and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonbeneficial pain.
    5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing,