Justice for animals and expanding our communities

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2014

I argue that non-human animals are claimants of justice, using an interest-based approach to theorizing about justice. I critique two liberal defenses of animals, and then offer an alternative view that appeals to the principle of equal consideration, a principle which should appeal to consequentialists and deontologists alike. I demonstrate that this principle, when applied at the level of social structures rather than particular actions, compels us to conclude that animal commodification is an injustice that is remediable only through the adoption of a view I refer to as “radical abolitionism,” which requires the abolition of humans’ use of non-human animals as resources. In the course of this argument, I reply to the arguments of Robert Garner and Alasdair Cochrane which purport to demonstrate that the commodification of animals is compatible with humans’ moral duties to animals.

Intervention or Protest: Acting for Nonhuman Animals

Contemporary animal ethics literature has focused predominantly on examining the ways in which animals are wronged by human practices and institutions. Consequently, academics and activists alike have pursued interspecies justice by debating, disseminating, and upholding the moral and political obligations humans owe to other species. Our paper argues that this duty-oriented approach to animal scholarship and advocacy is important but incomplete. Analysing silence and avoidance as the active products of particular cultures of denial, we suggest that an exclusive focus on human obligations to animals hinders the conception and realisation of interspecies justice in four ways. First, it neglects the ubiquitous and deeply embedded cognitive, emotional, and social barriers to our attentiveness to animal suffering and exploitation. Second, it fails to grant explicit normative and political significance to those barriers in terms of how they impoverish or remove conditions for recognizing and fulfilling our obligations to animals. Third, the duty-centric approach may foreclose opportunities for open, good faith dialogue between animal rights supporters and “mainstream” academics and laypersons. Fourth and most broadly, it constrains the prospect of collectively striving for a rich and nuanced yet accessible vision of what is required to live well together. By identifying and examining these obstructions to intellectual and emotional engagement with the plight of animals, we demonstrate the plausibility and significance of the assertion that humans are wronged through their unknowing and/or unwilling complicity with animal exploitation. As moral and political agents, humans are owed the possibility of living just and reflective lives; we are owed the right not to be perpetrators. Synthesizing an analysis of denial with the right not to be a perpetrator, our paper offers to animal rights discourse a more robust and inclusive approach to cultivating public engagement with just forms of interspecies community.

This dissertation defends the following thesis: the legal status of non-human animals as property is politically illegitimate. Instead, I argue that humans should be legally understood as guardians over those animals under their tenure. This guardianship relation involves limits on what humans may do to animals, limits which do not currently exist in our society. Most notably, guardians are required to act in the interest of their wards, and so guardians cannot kill or transfer the animals under their tenure unless doing so would be best (or at least good) for the animal. My position broadly fits with, but importantly differs from, much of the recent political philosophy literature focused on animals. I agree that ownership is inappropriate, but argue that considerations of political legitimacy lead us to the guardianship relation rather than full legal personhood. This position falls out of taking seriously the public reason challenge to justice for animals, which appeals to public reason liberalism to argue that the pursuit of justice for animals would be illegitimate. Thus, I examine important debates in public reason liberalism to develop an attractive model of that theory of legitimacy and then apply it to the question of the legal status of animals.

In this book of lectures about the politics and ethics of animal and human relations, I explore Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, Zoopolis by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, and Animal Rights and Human Morality by Bernard Rollin. I criticize the Rawlsian political liberalism and Taylorian multiculturalism of Zoopolis and develop a pragmatic anarchist alternative for resolving animal human relations in the future.

Intervention or Protest: Acting for Nonhuman Animals, 2016

"...It is within this atmosphere [of widening consideration of nonhuman animals/nonhuman animal issues, changes in the field, divisions in the movement, and so on], and towards this fractured ‘movement’, that this book is conceived. The title of this anthology is Intervention or Protest: Acting for Nonhuman Animals, a somewhat simple heading but one that captures, and attempts to highlight and address, the main points brought out above. The aim of this book is to be both theoretical and practical, to be both a contribution to the scholarly debates but also to put forward positions that can, and intend, to be real-world practicable. Further, this book considers issues that are important in making a difference to nonhuman animals. With this practical aim, and the careful theoretical deliberations behind them, these two foci are intended to influence both the way the movement and the scholarly fields go forward. It is the hope that this not only bridges the gap between theory and action, and shows that this division need not be, but also that by working together an effective way forward for nonhuman animals can be reached. And so the aim of this book is twofold: first, to be both a contribution to theory and practice, and second, to highlight ways forward on actionable issues for nonhuman animals that are also critical for theorists to consider. In line with these aims this book is focused on four key areas: (i) how can the movement for nonhuman animals be strengthened or how should it go forward?, (ii) how should we act for nonhuman animals?, (iii) ought we intervene for nonhuman animals, and if so how far and in which areas (e.g. direct action, violence, protest, in nature)?, and (iv) what other areas can we act for nonhuman animals in that we may not be considering already? These four questions are large areas that have both theoretical and practical importance within interspecies ethics/studies and society/the movement. Within current political, social, and ethical debates – both in academia and society – activism and how individuals should approach issues facing nonhuman animals have become increasingly important ‘hot’ issues. Individuals, groups, advocacy agencies, and governments have all espoused competing ideas for how we should approach nonhuman use and exploitation. Ought we proceed through liberation? Abolition? Segregation? Integration? As nonhuman liberation, welfare, and rights’ groups increasingly interconnect and identify with other ‘social justice movements’, resolutions to these questions have become increasingly entangled with questions of what justice and our ethical commitments demand on this issue, and the topic has become increasingly significant and divisive. These four areas essential questions to be asked in regard to each of these, and within this volume they are answered by drawing on both theory and practice, theorists and activists, and interdisciplinary ideas in order to provide grounded, yet actionable, ways forward. The contributors within this volume offer new insights into all of these areas, and while allowing further debate to flourish they offer concrete suggestions for action and change in everyday practice; both on a large and small scale. This book is therefore intended not only to provide new and interesting insight into the area and important contemporary discussions, but also to constructively aid the nonhuman movement and unite theory and practice on the crucial issues. With the nonhuman movement and its past approaches currently being questioned as a success, more nonhumans than ever being harmed and exploited, and a growing gulf between activists and scholars, this book attempts to be a bridge over these gaps and move both theory and practice – and thus the movement and field – forward. The literature on interspecies ethics/studies is, if not as wide as other fields, still significant and growing daily. Within this literature questions on intervention have only recently been receiving attention. With the current ‘political turn’ in the field – i.e. a move away from more traditional ethical approaches to nonhuman animal issues to more politically-based positions – questions regarding how the field, and the movement as a whole, can be improved and have more impact have also begun to be raised. It is by regarding these recent debates that this book specifically fits within the literature. As such, this book can be broken down into three areas. While each chapter covers various topics which often overlap others, the chapters have been arranged both in order to complement each topic with those that come before and after, and as they fit with these three themes. The first five chapters largely focus on broad issues that are of importance to interspecies ethics/studies and the movement as a whole. Questions such as how the movement can be improved, what can be learned from other social movements, and how activism in general should move forward can be found in this section of the book. Chapters six through eleven consider questions relating to intervention in various situations, differing scales, and in regard to different questions. Questions such as whether intervention is conceivable, how we should intervene, how far, in what circumstances, and whether we should recompense nonhuman animals for past wrongs are the focus of this section of the book. Finally, while all of the contributions to this volume offer new insights, chapters ten and eleven also provide new areas within the debate to consider, and new topics for activists to take into consideration...." (Excerpt from the book's introduction) -Contents- Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction 1. Saving Nonhumans: Drawing the Threads of a Movement Together Andrew Woodhall & Gabriel Garmendia da Trindade 2. Putting Nonhuman Animals First: A Call for a Pragmatic and Realistic Turn in Normative Theorising Jens Tuider 3. Animal Activism and Interspecies Change Eva Meijer 4. The Role of Activist and Media Communication in Helping Humanity Establish its Responsibility toward Fellow Animals Carrie Packwood Freeman 5. Beyond Complicity and Denial: Nonhuman Animal Advocacy and the Right to Living Justly Kurtis Boyer, Guy Scotton & Katherine Wayne 6. Nonhuman Animals and Sovereignty: On Zoopolis, Failed States, and Institutional Relationships with Free-Living Nonhuman Animals Josh Milburn 7. Are Nonhuman Animals owed Compensation for the Wrongs Committed to Them? Julia Mosquera 8. And the Animals Show Their Veins: Predation, Vivisection and Moral Innocence Wayne Williams 9. The Limits of Intervention in Nature on Behalf of Wild Animals and the Limits of Ethics Patrizia Setola 10. A (Human) Rights-Based Approach to Natural Disaster Intervention for Nonhuman Animals Lauren Traczykowski 11. Climate Justice for Wildlife: A Rights-Based Account Julius Kapembwa & Joshua Wells Index

Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 2022

Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues edited by A. Woodhall and G. Garmendia da Trindade G (Palgrave Macmillan)., 2017

In this chapter, I argue that we must think about justice for all animals through the cosmopolitan lens. After some preliminary remarks about global justice and cosmopolitanism, I explore the ways in which the current global order maintains and exacerbates systems of violence and oppression that target nonhuman animals. I argue that the theoretical foundations of cosmopolitanism necessitate the inclusion of many, if not all, sentient animals. Furthermore, I suggest that defenders of nonhuman animal rights should be cosmopolitans about global justice and explain why this does not require us to forsake our special relationships. I conclude with a plea to both mainstream defenders of cosmopolitanism and defenders of political justice for nonhuman animals to unite in developing genuinely inclusive theories of justice.

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 34/2 (2014): 200-219.

Citizenship has been at the core of struggles by historically excluded groups for respect and inclusion. Can citizenship be extended even further to domesticated animals? We begin this article by sketching an argument for why justice requires the extension of citizenship to domesticated animals, above and beyond compassionate care, stewardship or universal basic rights. We then consider two objections to this argument. Some animal rights theorists worry that extending citizenship to domesticated animals, while it may sound progressive, would in fact be bad for animals, providing yet another basis for policing their behaviour to fit human needs and interests. Critics of animal rights, on the other hand, worry that the inclusion of 'unruly' beasts would be bad for democracy, eroding its core values and principles. We attempt to show that both objections are misplaced, and that animal citizenship would both promote justice for animals and deepen fundamental democratic dispositions and values.

2015

This article argues that aspects of the animal rights view can be constructively modulated through a communitarian approach and come to promote animal welfare through the social contexts of expanded caring communities. The Nordic welfare state is presented as a conceivable caring community within which animals could be viewed and treated appropriately as co-citizens with solidarity based rights and duties.

Political Studies, 2013

In this paper I propose a cosmopolitan approach to animal rights based upon Kant's right of universal hospitality. Many approaches to animal rights buttress their arguments by finding similarities between humans and non-human animals; in this way they represent or resemble ethics of partiality. In this paper I propose an approach to animal rights that initially rejects similarity approaches and is instead based upon the adoption of a cosmopolitan mindset acknowledging and respecting difference. Furthermore, and in agreement with Martha Nussbaum, and Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, I endorse the view that theories of animal rights need to be theories of justice and include a political component. Contra to Donaldson and Kymlicka however, I argue that the starting point for analysis of political theories of animal rights should be at the global rather than national level. Taking animals as strangers, I propose adopting a Kantian cosmopolitan mindset and ethic of universal hospitality towards them. I address how a ius cosmopoliticum that is hospitable to the interests of non-human animals can govern interactions with animals on fair terms, and I respond to concerns that cosmopolitanism cannot accommodate non-human animals because it is a democratic ideal, demands reciprocity, or rests upon ownership of territory by humans.