ATTENTION TO SUFFERING: A FEMINIST CARING ETHIC FOR THE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS

Abstract

Many feminists, including myself, have criticized contemporary animal welfare theory for its reliance upon natural rights doctrine, on the one hand, and utilitarianism on the other. The main exponent of the former approach has been Tom Regan, and of the latter, Peter Singer. However incompatible the two theories may be, they nevertheless unite in their rationalist rejection of emotion or sympathy as a legitimate base for ethical theory about animal treatment. Many feminists have urged just the opposite, claiming that sympathy, compassion, and are the ground upon which theory about human treatment of animals should be constructed. Here I would like to further deepen this assertion. To do so I will argue that the terms of what constitutes the ethical must be shifted. Like many other feminists, I contend that the dominant strain in contemporary ethics reflects a male bias toward rationality, defined as the construction of abstract universals that elide not just the personal, the contextual, and the emotional, but also the political components of an ethical issue. Like other feminists, particularly those in the caring tradition, I believe that an alternative epistemology and ontology may be derived from women's historical social, economic, and political practice. I will develop this point further below. In addition to recent feminist theorizing, however, there is a long and important strain in Western (male) philosophy that does not express the rationalist bias of contemporary ethical theory, that in fact seeks to root ethics in emotion-in the feelings of sympathy and compassion. Why this tradition has been overshadowed by rationalist theory is a question beyond my scope; what I would like to do here is, first, to summarize the main components of this sympathy tradition; second, extend recent feminist theorizing on the subject; and third, conclude with the idea that what we need is a refocus in our moral vision-a shift in the cultural ethical episteme-so that people will begin to see and attend to the suffering of animals, which is happening all about them. Here I will rely on theorizing about attentive love developed principally by Iris Murdoch (under the influence of Simone Weil), but anticipated by more