Cosmopolitanism in a Carnivorous World

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.

Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 2011

Globalization has exacerbated speciesism both socially and economically. Veganism and its subsequent labeling schemes have arisen as an important political site of resistance to growing non-human animal inequality. This paper explores globalization‘s impact on non-human animals, veganism and vegan labeling, as well as important divides within the modern non-human animal rights movement in regards to utopian and pragmatic approaches to alleviating growing speciesism.

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.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016

The paper would attempt to dwell into the wider philosophical and ontological implications of vegetarianism and in the process offer a deconstructive critique of the more physicalist currency of vegetarianism advocated by many animal rights activists, philosophers and writers like J.M. Coetzee. Taking up Jacques Derrida's notion of Anthropocentric "Carno-Phallogocentrism" , the paper would argue how any parochial notion of vegetarianism (including those by J.M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello) actually reserves the kernel of a certain anthropomorphic Enlightenment humanism and thus partakes in a kind of epistemic violence upon the animal "other" even while it poses to speak on behalf of them. The trajectory of this paper would take up post-humanist thinkers like Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas to trace the kernel of anthropocentric humanism even in the positing of the post-cartesian subject and attempt to locate an etymological anthropocentric inheritance of the same in the differential humanism of animal philosophers like J.M. Coetzee.

Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, 2016

All cosmopolitan approaches to global distributive justice are premised on the idea that humans are the primary units of moral concern. In this paper, I argue that neither relational nor non-relational cosmopolitans can unquestioningly assume the moral primacy of humans. Furthermore, I argue that, by their own lights, cosmopolitans must extend the scope of justice to most, if not all, nonhuman animals. To demonstrate that cosmopolitans cannot simply ‘add nonhuman animals and stir,’ I examine the cosmopolitan position developed by Martha Nussbaum in Frontiers of Justice. I argue that while Nussbaum explicitly includes nonhuman animals within the scope of justice, her account is marked by an unjustifiable anthropocentric bias. I ultimately conclude that we must radically reconceptualise the primary unit of cosmopolitan moral concern to encompass most, if not all, sentient animals.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2015

This paper considers the under-analysed ethical issues involved in feeding flesh to companion animals, and, in particular, how cats – nonhuman animals who may need to consume flesh to survive – might fit into an animal rights-respecting, vegan, state. I cautiously take it for granted that the current ways cats are fed are ethically untenable, but suggest that only as a last resort could states endorse cats’ extinction. Instead, this paper considers, but rejects, a rights-based “size matters” argument – the suggestion that it is better to kill a small number of large creatures than a large number of small creatures – as a solution. The paper then develops a moral risk argument to suggest that, though we have an obligation not to kill nonhuman animals who are plausibly sentient, such as shellfish, when the gains from doing so are very minor, we may be permitted to kill them when the gains are significant. In practice, this means that we are not permitted to kill these animals to satisfy our gastronomic curiosity, but we are when it allows us to avoid the need to make cats extinct. This suggestion, though, should be understood in the context of a broader vision of a society in which no sentient nonhuman animals are killed for consumption. As the argument necessarily relies on uncertainty, it could only ever be a temporary solution.

Animal Studies Journal, 2020

This paper offers a novel argument against the eating of meat: the zoopolitical case for vegetarianism. The argument is, in brief, that eating meat involves the disrespect of an animal's corpse, and this is respect that the animal is owed because they are a member of our political community. At least three features of this case are worthy of note: First, it draws upon political philosophy, rather than moral philosophy. Second, it is a case for vegetarianism, and not a case for veganism. Third, while it is animal-focussed, it does not rely upon a claim about the wrong of inflicting death and suffering upon animals. The paper sets out the argument, responds to two challenges (that the argument is merely academic, and that the argument does not go far enough), and concludes by comparing the case to Cora Diamond's classic argument for vegetarianism.

2012

Journal of Political Ecology

Many political ecologists and geographers study ethical diets but most are curiously silent on the topic of death in the food system, specifically what or who is allowed to live and what is let die in the "doing of good." This article aims to show how the practice of eating produces the socio-ecological harm most ethical consumers set out to avoid with their dietary choices. I examine the food systems that produce ethical products for 1) the hierarchical ordering of consumer health in the Global North over the health and well-being of workers in the Global South and 2) how vegetarianism involves the implicit privileging of some animals over others. The article takes take a genealogical approach to the political ecology of food ethics using Black and Indigenous studies in conversation with animal geographies. I draw on Mbembe's (2016) necropolitics, Weheliye's (2014) "not quite human" and Lowe's (2015) critique of humanism to develop a conceptual frame...

Between the Species, 2022

In this paper I draw together the notion of the absent referent as proposed by Carol J. Adams, and the notions of literal and symbolical sacrifice by eating the other — or ingestion — advanced by Jacques Derrida, to characterize how animals are commonly perceived, which ultimately forbids productive arguments for vegetarianism. I discuss animals as being literally and definitionally absent referents, and I argue, informed by Derrida’s philosophy, that it is impossible to aim at turning them into present referents without reinforcing symbolic ingestion by linking symbolic ingestion to epistemic appropriation or conceptualization. With this, I highlight the ethical importance of discussing symbolic ingestion in animal philosophy.