Intervention or Protest: Acting for Nonhuman Animals

Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues: Towards an Undivided Future, 2017

**Due to the publisher holding the copyright to the book, drafts of the book unfortunately cannot be circulated. This includes the introduction. Upon release of the book the freely available front matter will be made accessible online and here. Until this changes, which is beyond my authority, all I can do is direct you to the book's site and Amazon. Abstracts of the chapters will be available. Apologies, and thank you for being interested. A.** This book offers ethical and political approaches to issues that nonhuman animals face. The recent ‘political turn’ in interspecies ethics, from ethical to political approaches, has arisen due to the apparent lack of success of the nonhuman animal movement and dissatisfaction with traditional approaches. Current works largely present general positions rather than address specific issues and principally rely on mainstream approaches. This book offers alternative positions such as cosmopolitan, libertarian, and left humanist thought, as well as applying ethical and political thought to specific issues, such as experimentation, factory farming, nonhuman political agency, and intervention. Presenting work by theorists and activists, insights are offered from both ethics and politics that impact theory and practice and offer essential considerations for those engaging in interspecies ethics within the political turn era. === CONTENTS: Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Figures Foreword (by Richard D. Ryder) 1. Introduction (Andrew Woodhall & Gabriel Garmendia da Trindade) 2. Making Light of the Ethical? The Ethics and Politics of Animal Rights (Mark Rowlands) 3. Far-persons (Gary Comstock) 4. Evolution to Liberation: Political Reflections on Morality and Nonhumans (Steve F. Sapontzis) 5. Robert Nozick on Nonhuman Animals: Rights, Value and the Meaning of Life (Josh Milburn) 6. Reinventing Left Humanism: Towards an Interspecies Emancipatory Project (Zipporah Weisberg) 7. Justice for Animals in a Globalizing World (Angie Pepper) 8. Animal Rights and the Distorting Power of Anthropocentric Prejudice (Gary Steiner) 9. Interspecies Encounters and the Political Turn: From Dialogues to Deliberation (Eva Meijer) 10. Gandhian Satyagraha and Open Animal Rescue (Tony Milligan) 11. Shame: From Defensive Fury to Epistemological Shifts and Political Change (Elisa Aaltola) 12. Are We Smart Enough to Know When to Take the Political Turn for Animals? (Kim Stallwood) 13. Interspecies Atrocities and the Politics of Memory (Guy Scotton) 14. Animal Research and the Political Theory of Animal Rights (Gardar Arnason) 15. Cross-Species Comparisons of Welfare (Tatjana Višak) 16. Population Dynamics Meets Animal Ethics: The Case for Aiding Animals in Nature (Oscar Horta) 17. Afterword (Carol J. Adams) Index

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.

Handbook of Inequality and the Environment, 2023

Nonhuman Animals are the most vulnerable to environmental inequality, if only measured by the sheer number of individuals impacted. Climate change has decimated all variety of free-living species. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature's Living Planet Index reports that, since 1970, the world's nonhuman populations have, on average, declined by about 70 percent (Almond et al., 2020). But free-living communities comprise only a fraction of Nonhuman Animals impacted by human activity. Many of the critical consequences of climate change can be credited to or have been aggravated by Nonhuman Animal agriculture (Shukla et al., 2019), and this industry is also responsible for dramatically increasing the numbers of chickens, cows, pigs, sheeps, camels, rabbits, horses, and other animals classified as "livestock" who meet with terrible bodily and psychological injustices in the global production of "meat," eggs, breastmilk, skins, oils, feathers, and hair. The anthropocentrism of humanity's predominant relationship to the environment is so extreme that this gratuitous violence against other animals (both domesticated and free-living) goes largely unnoticed in everyday society. Meanwhile, environmental justice, the very field established to champion public awareness and policy in the service of marginalized groups, has also sidelined the nonhuman experience. And it does so in the face of some of the most astonishing injustices and large-scale suffering. This chapter will outline the potential reasons for this exclusion, while also providing a general introduction to Nonhuman Animal rights theory that would be of practical use to the uninitiated social justice scholar or environmentalist. Theories of social justice revolve around issues of human rights, public health, or environmental sustainability, with the effect of excluding Nonhuman Animals as irrelevant or secondary players in the dialogue. Their historical emphasis on class and race inequalities likely accounts for this exclusion as well. Some environmental ethicists do account for the Nonhuman Animal experience, of course, but often in a paternalistic manner that abstracts them in the greater fabric of "nature." Otherwise, charismatic megafauna are commonly singled out for protection, given their superficial appeal to human aesthetics. The view that Nonhuman Animals are valuable merely as resources is also prevalent. Here, Nonhuman Animals are objectified as cog-like components in the service of thriving ecosystems, as Kheel (2007) documents in her historical analysis of environmental ethics. This perspective is certainly antiquated and is increasingly challenged in the contemporary environmental ethics literature, but outside of academic and activist discourses it remains a dominant theme. The commodification of Nonhuman Animals and their reduction to use-value for humans, even in wild spaces, is thought to reflect patriarchal and capitalistic ideological norms. In a capitalist society, vegan feminists argue, all persons, things, and social relations are subject to reification as potentially profitable commodities (Nibert, 2002). Furthermore, in many cultures (particularly that of the West), this perspective is bolstered by a persistent legacy of conservative religious ideology that naturalizes human primacy.

2006

Many environmental philosophers currently hold that animal liberation theories are not relevant to the development of the field of environmental ethics. Instead, they contend that the field is traversed most successfully within the context of ecocentric and/or wilderness perspectives. In this thesis, I utilize textual and conceptual analysis to argue that animal liberation theories are vital to environmental ethics. I examine and critique the reasons given by prominent environmental ethicists—including, most notably, John Rodman, Baird Callicott, Robert Elliot, and Val Plumwood—for marginalizing animal liberation views within environmental ethics. While most of human-centered ethics has rested on a human/nature dichotomy in which the human side is overvalued, much of environmental ethics (especially that developed by ecocentric and wilderness proponents) rests on the same dichotomy, but weights the value on the nature side instead. I hold that many of the reasons for claiming that animal liberation theories fall outside of the scope of environmental ethics rest on a commitment to the nature/human dualism. I maintain that our contemporary world is not divided into the natural and the human, but, rather, consists of an ongoing, shifting relationship between human and nonhuman nature. I claim that the appropriate aim of environmental ethics is to explore the human relationship to the nonhuman natural world, and that this aim cannot be accomplished by theories committed to a human/nature dualism. I conclude that, by focusing on the significance of our choices as human beings in relationship to morally considerable others, the animal liberation movement offers us a way to theorize about environmental issues that transcends the human/nature dichotomy. This project is morally and politically compelling because the way in which environmental ethics as a field is defined has ramifications not only for the relationship of individual nonhuman animals to the natural environment, but for the relationship of humans to the natural environment as well. Looking at the relationship between human and nonhuman nature allows us to address the human roles and responsibilities not simply in the human community, but in the broader context of nonhuman nature as well.

European Journal of Sustainable Development, 2018

The concept of "right" differs from country to country in terms of its limitations; however, there are several rights which have the characteristics of immunity all over the world. When assessed in this context, there are fundamental rights of which violation are considered to be crimes against humanity such as the right to life and the right not to be tortured. Nevertheless, it is seen that universal principles in crime have not become valid since the victim of violations in question are the animal but not the people. Considering this reality, approaches proposed to animals which form one of the weakest rings of life and their rights need to be examined within the context of the birth and development of the animal rights movement. But, it is still known that some countries and sectors should cover a lot of ground in protection of animal rights, although a tough struggle has been given in the historical process. In the matter of improving this though processes by which animal have had unrecoverable damage, policymakers and individuals have great responsibility. This article, which details the major areas in which animal rights have been violated, was written in order to raise awareness of the animal's living conditions, its impact on ecology and the sanctity of its right to life.

**This is the draft version of the chapter published in the book, Intervention or Protest: Acting for Nonhuman Animals, edited by Gabriel Garmendia da Trindade & Andrew Woodhall, (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2016). The book can be found here: https://www.vernonpress.com/title?id=76#.V_kumuArKUk ** Within our chapter, we consider the divide between theorists and activists within the nonhuman animal movement. We consider the recent reflections on the successes and failures of the movement before arguing that instead of a methodological reason that perhaps the source of the movement’s overall lack of success is the result of this theory/practice gulf. In the first part of the chapter we consider how both theory and practice must be linked together in order for the nonhuman movement to become more effective, and argue that activists ought to ground their action more than currently occurs while theorists must focus more on actual, practical ways to aid nonhuman animals while also actively partake in action themselves. In the second part we consider this approach in regard to anthropocentrism and the poorly explored intersection between interspecies ethics and the ethics of war and self-defence. We argue that with the former, anthropocentrism when understood correctly not only results in problems for the movement that need to be confronted but that rejecting anthropocentrism has important implications on theoretical and practical issues, such as intervention. With the latter, we argue that questions concerning direct action and the moral permissibility of using violence to protect nonhuman animals from human oppression cannot be answered within interspecies ethics alone. It is necessary to make use of a more sophisticated and accurate terminology, which can only be found in the ethics of war and self-defence literature.

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2020

Moral and political philosophers no longer condemn harm inflicted on nonhuman animals as self-evidently as they did when animal welfare and animal rights advocacy was at the forefront in the 1980s, and sentience, suffering, species-typical behavior, and personhood were the basic concepts of the discussion. The article shows this by comparing the determination with which societies seek responsibility for human harm to the relative indifference with which law and morality react to nonhuman harm. When harm is inflicted on humans, policies concerning negligence and duty of care and principles such as the ‘but for’ rule and the doctrine of double effect are easily introduced. When harm is inflicted on nonhumans, this does not happen, at least not any more. As an explanation for the changed situation, the article offers a shift in discussion and its basic terminology. Simple ethical considerations supported the case for nonhuman animals, but many philosophers moved on to debate different ...

2021

The article I have analysed for my final assignment is entitled: “Solidarity between human and non-human animals: representing animal voices in policy deliberations”. The paper, written by Erica von Essen and Michael P. Allen, was published for the first time in the scientific journal “Environmental Communication” in 2017. This article aims to show that, what the authors call “interspecies solidarity” could work as a potential bridge between the “care-based” response and the “justice-based” response, two potentially conflictual positions which are equally present in the discussion of human relations with non-humans animals. These two approaches are always perceived as being in tension with one another, but the authors suggest that they could go hand in hand.

2017

his paper has five parts. These parts seek to accomplish two tasks—first, address the expanding studies known variously as “Animal Studies,” “Anthrozoology” and a host of other names, and, second, explore how these fields stand in relation to the popular term “animal rights.” Exploring these tasks pushes all of us to engage which dimensions of our human lives must be mobilized to engage the profoundly important fact that each and every human lives in a multispecies world that is well described as a “more-than-human world.” Our citizenship in such a multispecies world not only suggests the possibility of nonanthropocentric worldviews—our awareness of this larger community also begs a broader, more inclusive perspective than the human-centered and exceptionalist approaches that dominate our education establishment, political realms, legal systems, businesses and many religious institutions. What further begs such breadth and inclusion is the fact that personally, ecologically and thus...

Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues edited by Andrew Woodhall and Gabriel Garmendia da Trindade (Springer/Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

As an animal rights activist and theorist with more than 40 years of personal commitment as a vegan and professional involvement with the international animal rights movement, I reflect upon the idea of a “political turn for animals.” I understand its current meaning is to describe how the discussion of nonhumans in literature and debates is moving from ethics to political theory. But a theory is only as good as it is in practice. The political turn for animals has to be more than just theory; it must be also about the practice of animal advocacy. I wonder whether there is a grand narrative in animal rights advocacy to be found here. Have we reached a point in the social justice road where there is a sign that says, “This way to take the political turn for animals”?