Levinasian Ethics and Animal Rights

Inquiry 54 (6) (2011): 633- 649

In this essay I show that while Levinas himself was clearly reluctant to extend to nonhuman animals the same kind of moral consideration he gave to humans, his ethics of alterity is one of the best equipped to mount a strong challenge to the traditional view of animals as beings of limited, if any, moral status. I argue that the logic of Levinas's own arguments concerning the otherness of the Other militates against interpreting ethics exclusively in terms of human interests and values, and, furthermore, that Levinas's phenomenology of the face applies to all beings that can suffer and are capable of expressing that suffering to me. Insofar as an animal has a face in Levinas's sense through which it is able to express its suffering to me, then there is no moral justification for refusing to extend to it moral consideration.

Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal

This article situates the texts in which Emmanuel Levinas directly addresses questions of animality against the backdrop of his larger oeuvre and argues that, despite an explicit attempt to arrange a privileged ethical (dis)position for humans, Levinas' ethical logic opens onto a deeper conception of ethics without boundaries or a priori content. Juxtaposing Levinas' ethical subjectivity with the relational structure underlying the prominent models of animal rights, it proceeds to examine the implications of Levinas' ethics for a theory of animal rights. The article concludes that Levinas' theory is not logically consistent with a thematisation of the ethical claims of animals in the language of rights and that it is best utilised as a framework within which to deconstruct the inherent anthropocentric character of current models of animal rights.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015

In this brief article we reply to Michal Piekarski's response to our article 'Facing Animals' published previously in this journal. In our article we criticized the properties approach to defining the moral standing of animals, and in its place proposed a relational and other-oriented concept that is based on a transcendental and phenomenological perspective, mainly inspired by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. In this reply we question and problematize Piekarski's interpretation of our essay and critically evaluate ''the ethics of commitment'' that he offers as an alternative. Keywords Animal ethics Á Moral standing Á Other Á Moral language Á Virtue ethics Á Transcendental methodology Á Essentialism Á Heidegger Á Levinas We thank Michal Piekarski for his thoughtful review and response to our article 'Facing Animals' (Coeckelbergh and Gunkel 2014), which will likely stimulate further discussion about the moral standing of animals and related issues. However, in spite of the positioning of his article as a polemic and as being in disagreement with ours, we believe that the arguments made are similar and that Piekarski shares our critique of the properties approach to deciding the question of moral standing and our interest in questioning the hegemony of this procedure and the anthropocentric forms of ethics it has informed and enabled. If there is any

In this article I discuss the thesis put forward by David Gunkel and Mark Coeckelbergh in their essay Facing Animals: A Relational, Other-Oriented Approach to Moral Standing. The authors believe that the question about the status of animals needs to be reconsidered. In their opinion, traditional attempts to justify the practice of ascribing rights to animals have been based on the search for what is common to animals and people. This popular conviction rests on the intuition according to which we tend to treat better those beings that are closer to us and resemble man in one way or the other. The attempts to ascribe a special status to animals are therefore based on the question ''What properties does the animal have?''. However, the question is not well formulated because it leads to a number of ontological and epistemological problems. The question should rather be ''What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?''. Whilst fully subscribing to the suggestion, I cannot agree to the way the question is understood by both authors. I will demonstrate that the question opens up a transcendental dimension of reflections and may provide a clear justification of the need to engage in animal ethics. To do so, I will separate the easy and hard problems of animal ethics and use a different approach from the one suggested by Gunkel and Coeckelbergh to demonstrate how the need to pursue animal ethics may be justified.

The Turn, 2020

This article begs the question why is it, that despite Jewish tradition devoting much thought to the status and treatment of animals and demonstrating strict adherence to the notion of preventing their pain and suffering, ethical attitudes to animals are not dealt with systematically in the writings of Jewish philosophers and have not received sufficient attention in the context of moral monotheism. What prevented the expansion of the golden rule: »Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD« 2 and »That which is hateful to you do not do to another« 3 on to animals? Why is it that the moral responsibility for the fellow-man, the neighbor, or the other, has been understood as referring only to a human companion? Does the demand for absolute moral responsibility spoken from the face of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas emphasized in his ethics, not radiate from the face of the non-human other as well? Levinas's ethics explicitly negates the principle of reciprocity and moral symmetry: The ›I‹ is committed to the other, regardless of the other's attitude towards him. Does the affinity to the eternal Thou which Martin Buber also discovers in plants and animals not require a paradigmatic change in the attitude towards animals?

Theories of rights are many and engaging in a detailed discussion of those theories is beyond the scope of this essay. However, here we shall start with the views of the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes, which informed attitudes towards animals well into the 20th century. Descartes based his rights arguments on cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am 1. Therefore consciousness and thought were central to his views on humans and animals. In part five of Discourse on Method published in 1637, he examined the nature of animals and how they were distinguished from humans. Mind, for Descartes, was not part of the physical universe; it was a separate substance and a link between humans and the mind of God. This link to God i.e. mind was unique to humans and non-humans had no mind and therefore no link to the mind of God. 2 His views suggest that the use of language is a sign of rationality and only beings that possess minds and souls are rational and argues that animals do not have immaterial minds or souls and are therefore not rational. It therefore follows that animals do not have sensations like pain, thirst or hunger. Animals for Descartes, were therefore nothing more than a "complex automata" and the squeals of pain, were mechanical reactions of the animal to external stimuli and not evidence of any sensation of pain. Humans on the other hand have minds or rational souls hence their capacity to use language and feel sensations like hunger, thirst and pain and this justifies their entitlement to holding rights. Furthermore, philosophers such as Locke and Grotius attached great emphasis on the ability of humans to reason, which for them justified their equal access to rights. However, the basis proposed by Descartes, Locke, and Grotius and defended by modern philosophers such as Georodie Duckler is being increasingly questioned. Questions are being asked about the moral standing of animals and whether their interests should also be considered. Amongst the commentators who have increasingly questioned the justification for focusing exclusively on human interests to the exclusion of all other species is Peter Singer who has attacked the basis of the theories of natural law. Singer is an advocate of utilitarianism and in Animal Liberation Movement, he refers to the proposals of equality of consideration by many philosophers, but points to their failure to recognize that this principle also applies to members of other species and not only humans. 3

This paper examines the claim that our moral commitments to non-human animals (henceforth, “animals”) are best captured in terms of a framework of political, rather than ethical, theory – or, at the very least, that the former provides an essential antidote to the failings of the latter. In particular, I shall focus on what I take to be a canonical statement of this view: Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. In this book, Donaldson and Kymlicka (henceforth, D&K) argue that standard ethical animal rights theory (henceforth, following them, ART) is importantly incomplete, and requires supplementation with a political theory of animal rights (henceforth, PTAR). I going to argue that while ART, as it has standardly perceived, has shortcomings, these are more perception than reality, and are certainly not intrinsic or essential features of ART. Consequently, the supplementation of ART with PTAR is not necessary. The distinction between ART and PTAR is a disguised, and somewhat misleading way, of talking about another distinction: the distinction between animals as objects of moral concern and animals as subjects of motivation and action.

The central purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the relationship between ethics and nonhuman animals. That is, in what way ethics has been understanding and incorporating nonhuman animals as participants in our moral community. To that end, I present how some of the different ethical perspectives concur to offer a more adequate response to the question of how we should include nonhuman animals in morality. The theoretical contributions offered by Peter Singer (utilitarianism), Tom Regan (law), Karen Warren (care) Martha Nussbaum (capabilities) and Maria Clara Dias (functionings) are called for the construction of this panorama and to the development of this debate.