Every Sunday for two years, from October 2023 to October 2025, protesters gathered in the center of Melbourne, Australia, to march against Israel’s war on Gaza. With numbers sometimes swelling to up to 25,000, the protests became a recurring moment for those horrified by the IDF’s actions to come together and share their anger and their grief. These mass displays of outrage and solidarity were met in some quarters, however, by a mix of irritation and bemusement: What could such protests possibly hope to achieve, here on the other side of the world, in a state that—if we’re being honest—ranks as a middling power at best?
In 1985, philosopher and environmentalist Val Plumwood went canoeing in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. Alone and far from any human habitation, Plumwood was attacked by a saltwater crocodile—arguably the most ferocious of Australia’s native animals. After miraculously surviving, here is how she described that encounter:
“This was a strong sense, at the moment of being grabbed by those powerful jaws, that there was something profoundly and incredibly wrong in what was happening, some sort of mistaken identity. My disbelief was not just existential but ethical—this wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. The world was not like that! The creature was breaking the rules, was totally mistaken, utterly wrong to think I could be reduced to food.…With indignation as well as disbelief, I rejected this event. It was an illusion! It was not only unjust but unreal! It couldn’t be happening. After much later reflection, I came to see that there was another way to look at it. There was illusion alright, but it was the other way around. It was the world of ‘normal experience’ that was the illusion, and the newly disclosed brute world in which I was prey was, in fact, the unsuspected reality, or at least a crucial part of it.”
There is a storied tradition within philosophy, as well as in many religions, that humans have equal and inherent worth simply in virtue of being human. The reasons given may differ—because we alone are God’s children; because we alone can give ourselves laws for the Kingdom of Ends; because we alone have language, or reason, or agency, or…but the implication is always the same: that we humans are one another’s equals and our worth far surpasses that of all other creatures.
I think this tradition is both mistaken and pernicious. It is pernicious not only for the obvious reason that it serves to justify our exploitation and abuse of non-human animals; it is also pernicious, I want to suggest, because it absolves us of what I take to be a core moral obligation: to actually do the work of constituting the equal worth of fellow human beings.
To make this case, I offer a reading of Plumwood’s encounter with the crocodile and put it in conversation with the work of philosopher Colin Bird, as a way of presenting a different approach to human worth. This alternative approach, I will go on to suggest, offers a rebuttal to those who see protesting distant atrocities as a pointless gesture.
On my reading of Plumwood’s encounter, the “newly disclosed brute world” that she glimpses in the eye of the crocodile is one in which she has no inherent worth. She is, in another memorable phrase from her essay, merely “a particular kind of food, food with pretensions.” This worthlessness is not unique to her, though: In this disenchanted world, consisting of nothing more than hunter and prey, nothing has inherent worth. It is a world without value.
The philosophical insight contained within Plumwood’s encounter is thus that value is impossible in the absence of valuers. That is to say, when Plumwood’s world was reduced to just herself and the crocodile, the conditions did not exist for anything to have value. The human worth she had so easily taken for granted and around which she had built her self-conception as the kind of being who could not be food, was exposed in that moment for the social artifact it is—as much of an artifice, in the world she shared just with the crocodile, as the money in her wallet.
To build on this idea, I turn to the work of Colin Bird. In his recent book Human Dignity and Political Criticism, Bird develops a fascinating analogy between economic worth and human worth (the latter being what he calls dignity). Noting that economists of all ideological stripes have long since abandoned the notion that goods have a “real” value, converging on the view that a good’s value is something that emerges from a complex system of market transactions, Bird suggests a similar revolution in thinking is overdue for our belief in human worth. To be clear, his idea is very much not that human worth reduces to market price. Rather, his claim is that there is a system analogous to the market from which human worth emerges. That system, according to Bird, is one of treating one another with respect. In other words, human worth is constituted by public enactments of respectful treatment: Each moment in which we respect someone plays its own small role in constituting their worth, just as each time we buy something plays its own small role in constituting the price of that good.
While it’s important not to push the analogy with economic worth too far, one feature that is shared with human worth is the importance of putting one’s “money” where one’s mouth is. A hypothetical openness to paying a certain amount isn’t going to change the price of bread; only actual market transactions can do that. So, too, private beliefs in the worth of other human beings don’t suffice to secure that worth—what matters is what we do, especially what we do publicly. Human worth, like economic worth, is the end result of patterns of valuing across time.
Let’s return to our protestors in Melbourne. With Bird’s framework in hand, I think a case can be made that at least one of the things public protests of this sort do is constitute the worth of those they are protesting for. (This isn’t to say, of course, that such protests do nothing else—very often, they are also pushing for material political change—but it’s just that, even when political change is unforthcoming, protests are not thereby rendered futile.) To make this case, though, Bird’s framework needs to be broadened out. Rather than taking respectful treatment to be the sole analog of market transactions, I think demonstrations of moral outrage, rituals of care, and loving attention are equally relevant phenomena in constituting human worth. Alongside protest, then, we can also constitute one another’s worth through practices such as candlelight vigils, moments of silence, and even just attending lovingly to news of one another’s suffering.
If there’s anything to this claim, then turning up to protest distant atrocities matters. And it is especially vital because atrocities such as we have been witnessing in Gaza function to devalue the lives of those they target. Moreover, such acts of devaluation are exacerbated if atrocities are met with widespread indifference. Through focusing attention on suffering, through mourning those who have died, and through expressions of anger at those responsible, protestors like those I described at the outset are (re)establishing the worth of those for whom they protest.
This is not the lesson that Plumwood drew from her encounter with the crocodile. In fact, her ethical commitments might—at least initially—seem in tension with the claims I have made above. For Plumwood, the realization that she was “just food,” like all other animals, led to a rejection of the dominant worldview in which we humans occupy some elevated place in the moral universe. Is such a rejection of the elevated worth of humans compatible with my exhortation that we actively work to constitute one another’s worth? I think—or at least hope—that it is. If we can learn to see worth as something that we bestow upon one another, rather than something that we have inherently, it can help disabuse us of the temptation to see humanity as fundamentally superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. Such a humble attitude can coexist, I take it, with a firm commitment to bring about a world in which we are in fact one another’s equals.
Suzy Killmister
Suzy Killmister is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Australia. Her current research sits at the intersection of social metaphysics, political philosophy, and ethics, and she is currently writing a book on humanity as a social construct.
