What Makes Man Different from Animals.18

"The capabilities approach, by contrast, sees rationality and animality as thoroughly unified. More generally, the capabilities approach sees the world as containing many different types of animal dignity, all of which deserve respect and even awe. The specifically human kind is indeed characterized, usually, by a kind of rationality, but rationality is not idealized and set in opposition to animality; it is just garden-variety practical reasoning, which is one way animals have of functioning. Sociability, moreover, is equally fundamental and equally pervasive. And bodily need, including the need for care, is a feature of our rationality and our sociability; it is one aspect of our dignity, then, rather than something to be contrasted with it."

"Thus, in the design of the political conception of the person out of which basic political principles grow, we build in an acknowledgement that we are needy temporal beings who begin as babies and end, often, in other forms of dependency. We draw attention to these areas of vulnerability, insisting that rationality and sociability are themselves temporal, having growth, maturity, and (if time permits) decline."

--Frontiers of Justice, Martha Nussbaum