Justice & Law Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee sidesteps the courtroom and aims straight for the conscience, which is both his moral strategy and his literary one. “Strictly speaking” is the tell: a lawyerly phrase used to dismiss lawyerliness. He grants that “legal rights for animals” is the public, actionable demand people expect to debate, then quietly demotes it as insufficient. Rights, in this framing, are a technical fix that can soothe human self-image without disturbing the underlying hierarchy that made animals exploitable in the first place.

The real target is the emotional machinery that keeps cruelty feeling normal. A “change of heart” sounds soft, even sentimental, but Coetzee uses it as a radical demand: not better rules, but a different kind of person. He’s pushing against the modern habit of treating ethics as policy design, where suffering becomes an administrative problem and compassion gets outsourced to institutions. Law can prohibit certain practices; it can’t reliably produce attention, imagination, or shame.

The subtext is also skeptical about how rights discourse can become a moral alibi. You can be pro-rights in the abstract and still live comfortably inside systems that turn animal bodies into food, labor, and research material. Coetzee’s broader work (especially The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello) stages this discomfort: he’s less interested in winning arguments than in exposing the evasions that arguments enable. The line insists that the real battleground isn’t legislation but perception: whether we can be made to feel animals as fellow creatures rather than raw material.