March 20, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, I introduced some of Martha Nussbaum’s thoughts from Justice for Animals. The idea of granting capabilities to animals is unique to Nussbaum. However, even she admits that it will be problematic to assign capabilities to species that are so completely other from us as to be unintelligible. Here, I insert the example of sharks, our focus of the past two blogs.
Sharks offer an excellent example for Nussbaum’s approach. First, they have been evolving for nearly 450 million years, in comparison to humans roughly 200,000 years. Next, sharks live in the ocean, which is a difficult environment for humans to enter and an even more difficult environment to research. The ocean can be intimidating on many levels: no oxygen, high pressure, darkness, and temperature are all factors in a human approach. To a very superficial human eye sharks appear entirely instinctual. Humans can only scratch the surface of their actual existence though because much of their world lies in deep, remote, secluded places.
To study sharks, humans must bait waters and draw sharks to the surface (a place where they spend very little time). Humans then inject tags into them meant to provide information such as location, depth, and migration patterns. It’s a step toward trying to understand sharks, but if we’re trying to determine intelligence or intention, we probably won’t get very far.
Conservationist Ocean Ramsey, aka The Shark Whisperer, tries a different approach. Raised in the ocean, Ramsey began to search out sharks while leading scuba diving groups. Each interaction increased her interest in shark behavior. Soon, she dove specifically to locate sharks. Being in the water with the sharks enables her to see their behavior in a different way. Sharks have gills and don’t need to breathe, which means they don’t need the surface like other marine mammals. So any surface interaction already puts the shark on guard. They do need meat, however, and so they can be tempted by carcasses. In various interviews, Ramsay explains that sharks are the “white blood cells of the ocean. They pick off the dead, dying, and sick keeping the populations of organisms below them healthy and in balance.”
So, rather than relying on instrumentation, Ramsay inserts herself into shark communities. This highly controversial behavior also informs her advocacy. She admits the risk, but calls attention to the fact that any study of sharks involves an artificial insertion of some kind – either instrumentation such as tags and sound beacons, or a human. Due to the risk, shark research progresses very slowly. It is estimated that humans have killed roughly ninety percent of the shark population. Ramsay explains that it’s easy to kill something you don’t understand. In the style of Nussbaum, Ramsay advocates for sharks since they cannot advocate for themselves. Her intimate observations open conversations of whether sharks have intentions, bonds, relationships, language, emotions, etc. While the data is anecdotal and circumspect, she has demonstrated that sharks aren’t always killers. This complicated narrative intersects with Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach because it attempts to foreground the shark, not the human.
While The Shark Whisperer may be overly romanticized, it does ask us why apex predators have evolved in the ways that they have. Echoing Melville, it reminds us that humans are apex predators as well. In Justice for Animals, Nussbaum offers some absurd (to me) ideas such as teaching apex predators to eat vegetables or synthetic meats. In other words, Nussbaum imagines a day in which earth will have no predators because her true goal is to find a notion of justice for animals, which is obviously complicated by natural predation. Are there instances of healthy predation – or as Ramsay says – are predators the white blood cells of the planet? Does predation serve a purpose? And if so, how might we delineate the system of enough?
In chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope,” Ishmael returns us to the quintessential image of predation: feasting sharks. While attempting to skin the whale, Ishmael is tied to Queequeg. Ishmael pulls Queequeg to keep him upright as Queequeg slides around on the dead whale’s back carefully avoiding shark mouths. At the same time, Dagoo and Tashtego (the harpooners), throw darts aimed at the sharks which narrowly miss Queequeg. Ishmael thinks: “Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends.” In truth, the spades are as dangerous as the sharks, so the things meant to aid Queequeg (the spades) also endanger him. Perhaps Melville posits that justice doesn’t really exist.
Perhaps Melville indicates that justice requires delicacy, specificity, an open mind, and attention. Throughout the novel, Melville continually notes that all past attempts to know whales have been superficial at best. Drawings, bones, anecdotes, measurements – none of these add up to a whale itself. But Melville really wants the reader to see the whale, so we move through all those shabby measurements, pull off the flesh and disembowel it along with the whalers. Like sharks, readers feast on the whale. Like sharks, humans are predators. And like sharks, humans must come to recognize when their bellies are full.
Although Melville recognizes the need for a theory of enough, not even he has an answer to the problem. Other than to teach us to see, he provides no answers. Ocean Ramsay, too, enters the sharks’ space to study their behavior, not just with tags and machines, but with awareness and senses. She assumes the risks for herself. Because of the obvious issues, we struggle to find equatable and humane ways to share a changing ocean. Ramsay would give all rights to the sharks who need oceans to survive while also reminding us that we need the sharks to clean the ocean. Her approach might be seen as a foil to Nussbaum who explores ways of training predators not to prey. This impractical approach continues a problem that Nussbaum finds in others: she unwittingly foregrounds human behavior as exemplary. She hopes to altogether remove the situations which give rise to injustice which is problematic because predators must prey. Combined together, these voices highlight some of the problems associated with over-consumption, predation, and human interference, but as of yet, they provide no easy answer.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ JT_lookinglass
