Animal Rights Theory, Animal Welfarism and the ˜'New Welfarist' Amalgamation: A Critical Perspective

Abstract

Adherents of the 'new welfarist' approach advocate welfare reforms as essential short-term steps en route to the ultimate ideal of animal rights. A critical engagement with the ideological underpinnings of animal welfare theory and animal rights theory illustrates the contrasting moral spaces that the animal occupies in these theories and that the 'new welfarist' approach is philosophically unsound in assuming that these approaches are ideologically compatible. Karin van Marle's '˜jursiprudence of slowness' and Jacques Derrida's exposition of the sacrificial logic underlying Western culture's exclusion of animals from the 'thou shalt not kill' proscription provides a framework within which to illustrate and engage with the ideological purlieu that separates these theories.