Theory Of Animal Rights Research Articles

Predation Catch-22: Disentangling the Rights of Prey, Predators, and Rescuers

Predation poses a serious challenge for animal ethics of whatever ilk. For animal rights theory especially, the problem is potentially fatal as animal rights appear to require or permit interfering in nature to prevent predation, an implication that appears to be absurd. Several philosophers have written to deflect this challenge by showing how that implication is not absurd or how the allegedly entailed prescription to intervene does not follow from animal rights theory. A number of philosophers have taken different routes to arrive at the same conclusion that intervention in wildlife predation is not morally permissible or required on the rights view. In this paper, I explore a route hitherto unused to the conclusion that intervention in predation is neither required nor permitted by animal rights theory. I deploy the Hohfeldian analytical framework of rights as well as aspects of the theory of self- or other- defence. This, in my view is the most thorough-going rights perspective on the predation problem. I expose some ad hoc, incoherent, utilitarian, and even speciesist arguments among animal rights solutions to the predation problem. The approach I have used avoids these flaws. Taking animal rights seriously means guarding against any tacit speciesism. I think using Hohfeld’s framework goes some way in keeping rights analysis free of implicit bias that might pollute our arguments in favour of human beings.

Raw, roast or half-baked? Hogarth’s beef in Calais Gate

Scholars of human–animal studies, literary criticism and art history have paid considerable attention of late to how the visual representation of nonhuman animals has often and sometimes to great effect been used in the imagining of national identity. It is from the scrutinies of these several disciplines that the broad backcloth of this article is woven. Its focus is the neglected coupling of patriotism and carnism, instantiated here by its deployment in William Hogarth’s painting Calais Gate (1749). A pro-animal reading is offered of the English artist’s exhortation that it is in the nature of ‘true-born Britons’ to consume a daily dish of roast beef served with lashings of francophobia and anti-popery. The article suggests that alert contemporary viewers of Calais Gate would nevertheless have noticed that Hogarth’s painterly triumphalism ironically rekindles the repressed memory of English military defeat and territorial loss. Because the political and religious borders between England and France were so easily defaced and refaced, the accompanying air of uncertainty over national identity would also have infiltrated the perceived authenticity of English roast beef. The article draws on animal rights theory, on nonspeciesist green criminology and on green visual criminology in order to oppose the historical dominance of human interests over those of other animal species in discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm.

On Some Difficulties of Putting in Dialogue Animal Rights with Anthropological Debates: A Historical View in Three Episodes

In this paper, I try to identify the reasons why the dialogue between sociocultural anthropology and animal rights theories and movements continues to be difficult and scarce. At first sight this weakness of communication is surprising, if one looks at the amount of anthropological studies on human/animal relationships, in most cases pointing to how animals are considered in many cultures as non-human subjects or persons. For understanding the roots of this state of affairs, I compare the ways anthropologists and animal rights theorists and activists have engaged with the issue of the differences and commonalities between human beings and nonhuman animals. For this aim, I contrast the search, among philosophers and activists, for a universal rational ethical foundation of animal rights, to which natural sciences’ findings can give support, with sociocultural anthropologists’ focus on the embeddedness of human/animal relationships in symbolic systems and in political relationships. In spite of the paradigmatic shifts intervened in a century and half of sociocultural anthropology, I show, through a critical review of the recent works of Ingold, Descola, Viveiros de Castro and Kohn, that even today this difference in approach is far to be overcome.

Two Forms of Abolitionism and the Political Rights of Animals: A Case Study

Abstract Political theorists advocating the abolition of instrumental uses of groups of animals are divided with respect to how they evaluate welfare reforms. Radical abolitionists maintain that welfare reforms are only dubiously described as moral improvements while pragmatic abolitionists maintain that welfare reforms are moral improvements, even if the conditions they permit are unjust. This article examines Wyckoff’s interest model against the case of a Cincinnati coalition’s efforts to reform the local food chain. This article argues that the coalition’s program of choice is a welfare reform and that the interest model must evaluate the program as a moral improvement. This article concludes that if the interest model is the most appropriate political theory of animal rights, pragmatic abolitionism is philosophically more appropriate than radical abolitionism.

Mental-Threshold Egalitarianism

Mental-threshold egalitarianism, well-known examples of which include Jeff McMahan’s two-tiered account of the wrongness of killing and Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights, divides morally considerable beings into equals and unequals on the basis of their individual mental capacities. In this paper, I argue that the line that separates equals from unequals is unavoidably arbitrary and implausibly associates an insignificant difference in empirical reality with a momentous difference in moral status. In response to these objections, McMahan has proposed the introduction of an intermediate moral status. I argue that this move ultimately fails to address the problem. I conclude that, if we are not prepared to give up moral equality, our full and equal moral status must be grounded in a binary property that is not a threshold property. I tentatively suggest that the capacity for phenomenal consciousness is such a property, and a plausible candidate.

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

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.

How to Ground Animal Rights on African Values: Reply to Horsthemke

Abstract I seek to advance plausible replies to the several criticisms Kai Horsthemke (2015) makes of “African modal relationalism,” his label for my theory of animal rights with a sub-Saharan pedigree. Central to this view is the claim that, roughly, a being has a greater moral status the more it is in principle capable of relating communally with characteristic human beings. Horsthemke maintains that this view is anthropocentric and speciesist, is poorly motivated relative to his egalitarian-individualist approach, and does not have the implications that I contend. I aim to rebut these and related criticisms, contending that African modal relationalism is in fact a promising way to philosophically ground animal rights.

Animal Citizenship, Phenomenology, and Ontology: Some reflections on Donaldson’s & Kymlicka’s Zoopolis

This paper is a dialogue with Sue Donaldson’s and Will Kymlicka’s book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. My thesis is that, despite the authors’ reticence, considerations in first philosophy regarding humans and nonhumans are relevant to their goal of building a more comprehensive animal rights philosophy. What is more, I believe that first philosophy actually can be of help for their proposal, specifically in the form of phenomenology and phenomenological ontology. For this purpose, I first summarize the basic outline of Zoopolis’s position and indicate some questions that arise from a strictly internal consideration of its theses. And secondly, I introduce some aspects in which phenomenological research would be relevant, along with some particular and provisional analyses carried out from the standpoint of a phenomenologically-based ontology. Especially, there is a theme that stands out: the intersubjective realms between humans and nonhumans.

La creciente importancia de los debates antiespecistas en la teoría política contemporánea: del bienestarismo al abolicionismo

The profiles of human beings’ ethical behavior towards non-human animals have gained increasing public relevance in the media over the past decades. Issues related to animal abuse, industrial exploitation of edible species or the terms of the private relationship with pets seem to be, more than ever before, at the centre of public debates. This new situation leads us to reflect around the newly established relationships with nonhuman animals; issues that have remained marginal and worthy of few references in contemporary political theory until very recently. This research note discusses the classic and latest theories on the debates over animal rights theories, highlighting some elements such as: what is meant by speciesism and antispeciesism; to what extent may rights be granted to non-human animals; and above all, which are the positions and debates within the animal movement, mainly between advocates of welfarist protectionism for nonhumans and supporters of an abolitionist approach to property.

An Anti-Commodification Defense of Veganism

We develop an anti-commodification defense of ethical veganism which holds that common defenses of ethical veganism can benefit from treating the commodification of non-human animals as a serious, distinct moral wrong. Drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Anderson’s account of commodification, we develop an account of commodification that identifies most uses of animals in developed countries as forms of problematic commodification. We then show that this position can make significant contributions to both welfarist defenses of ethical veganism and animal rights theories.

Should the Lion Eat Straw Like the Ox? Animal Ethics and the Predation Problem

Stephen Clark’s article The Rights of Wild Things from 1979 was the starting point for the consideration in the animal ethics literature of the so-called ‘predation problem’. Clark examines the response of David George Ritchie to Henry Stephens Salt, the first writer who has argued explicitly in favor of animal rights. Ritchie attempts to demonstrate—via reductio ad absurdum—that animals cannot have rights, because granting them rights would oblige us to protect prey animals against predators that wrongly violate their rights. This article navigates the reader through the debate sparked off by Clarke’s article, with as final destination what I consider to be the best way to deal with the predation problem. I will successively discuss arguments against the predation reductio from Singer’s utilitarian approach, Regan’s deontological approach, Nussbaum’s capability approach, and Donadson and Kymlicka’s political theory of animal rights.

The Republican Zoopolis: Towards a New Legitimation Framework for Relational Animal Ethics

In this article, we develop a republican framework for relational animal ethics, recently popularized in Donaldson and Kymlicka's Zoopolis. This republican framework departs from the focus on negative rights that dominate liberal animal rights theories, especially as concerns our relations to wild animals. Our proposed framework appeals to a republican standard of non-arbitrariness, or non-domination, for human interferences with such animals. This legitimation framework is more attentive to relations of care and of dependency between the species, which we contend fits the growing field of relational animal ethics. At the same time, it requires rigorous criteria be met to legitimate relations as non-dominating. We apply this framework to the morality of the supplementary feeding of wildlife, using a case study of wild boars as fed by hunters. Weakening of the concept of domination to fit the predicament of boars, we show how the republican framework can provide a principled justification for legitimate interference with a wild animal population.

Sobre o olhar antropocêntrico: o ser humano e o jardim zoológico

This paper intends to question the primacy of human beings and their domination over nature based on a critique of the obsolescence of zoos as reinforcers of boundaries between humans and animals. The analysis was conducted of the anthropocentric assumption and of the nature of zoos as places of forced marginalization and animal confinement. In order to achieve the established goals, the historical, deductive and explanatory method is applied. Books, papers and journals have been used as bibliographical sources. Tom Regan’s Theory of Animal Rights and Sonia T. Felipe’s Animal Ethics have been adopted to demonstrate the most adequate “solution” for these and so many other cases of animal exploration: empty cages and animal freedom.

Do animals need citizenship?

An ambitious proposal by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka seeks to break out of an impasse that animal-rights advocacy seems to have reached. They divide the animal kingdom into three categories and distribute rights accordingly. Domesticated animals are to be treated as citizens enjoying the same rights and duties as human citizens (adjusting for relative differences in ability, just as we do for children and the severely cognitively handicapped). Wild animal species are to be treated as sovereign nations having rights to their territories. Liminal animals are to be treated as resident aliens. This article is a critique of this "Citizenship Theory" of animal rights. One theme of the critique questions whether citizenship and sovereignty are in fact doing the normative work that Citizenship Theory represents them as doing. Another theme questions whether rights of citizenship and sovereignty can be of use to the animals Citizenship Theory would bestow them on. The overarching theme is skeptical of the assumed framework of sovereignty and territorial rights. If what animals can better benefit from are cosmopolitan rights, then the more promising development of animal rights theory lies in that direction.

Right to Place: A Political Theory of Animal Rights in Harmony with Environmental and Ecological Principles

The focus of this paper is on the “right to place” as a political theory of wild animal rights. Out of the debate between terrestrial cosmopolitans inspired by Kant and Arendt and rooted cosmopolitan animal right theorists, the right to place emerges from the fold of rooted cosmopolitanism in tandem with environmental and ecological principles. Contrary to terrestrial cosmopolitans—who favour extending citizenship rights to wild animals and advocate at the same time large-scale humanitarian interventions and unrestricted geographical mobility—I argue that the well-being of wild animals is best served by the right to place theory on account of its sovereignty model. The right to place theory advocates human non-interference in wildlife communities, opposing even humanitarian interventions, which carry the risk of unintended consequences. The right to place theory, with its emphasis on territorial sovereignty, bases its opposition to unrestricted geographical mobility on two considerations: (a) the non-generalist nature of many species and (b) the potential for abuse via human encroachment. In a broader context, the advantage of the right to place theory lies in its implicit environmental demands: human population control and sustainable lifestyles.

In Defence of Extinctionism

In Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka dismiss the abolitionist, or extinctionist approach in animal rights theory as insufficient in its theoretical foundation and disproportional regarding the means it promotes to prevent domesticated animals from suffering abuse by humans. Among the consequences of their counterproposal—granting domesticated animals citizenship—is an increased pressure to justify any interference with domesticated animals’ reproductive activities. This paper attempts to give such justification with reference to domesticated animals’ specific state of vulnerability, but also takes into account the interest of the mixed society to prevent overly demanding obligations. Even while recognizing existing domesticated animals as citizens, humans might be unable to fully meet their obligation to protect the most dependent of them, and therefore might be justified in conditionally subscribing to “extinctionism” and limiting these animals’ reproduction to the point of their ultimate extinction. Therefore, rather than upholding a strict opposition between extinctionism in any form and a political framework for animal rights, out of reasonable concern for the well-being of domesticated animals in the societies they have been placed in, a qualified extinctionist approach should be incorporated into the political framework developed in Zoopolis.

Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought

In this paper, I argue that animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions in North America are possible because of and through the erasure of Indigenous bodies and the emptying of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion. That is, we cannot address animal oppression or talk about animal liberation without naming and subsequently dismantling settler colonialism and white supremacy as political machinations that require the simultaneous exploitation and/or erasure of animal and Indigenous bodies. I begin by re-framing animality as a politics of space to suggest that animal bodies are made intelligible in the settler imagination on stolen, colonized, and re-settled Indigenous lands. Thinking through Andrea Smith’s logics of white supremacy, I then re-center anthropocentrism as a racialized and speciesist site of settler coloniality to re-orient decolonial thought toward animality. To critique the ways in which Indigenous bodies and epistemologies are at stake in neoliberal re-figurings of animals as settler citizens, I reject the colonial politics of recognition developed in Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s recent monograph, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press 2011) because it militarizes settler-colonial infrastructures of subjecthood and governmentality. I then propose a decolonized animal ethic that finds legitimacy in Indigenous cosmologies to argue that decolonization can only be reified through a totalizing disruption of those power apparatuses (i.e., settler colonialism, anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and neoliberal pluralism) that lend the settler state sovereignty, normalcy, and futurity insofar as animality is a settler-colonial particularity.

Critical Inquiry into the Arguments of Animal Cloning by the Theory of Animal Rights

Critical Inquiry into the Arguments of Animal Cloning by the Theory of Animal Rights

Adventures in Moral Consistency: How to Develop an Abortion Ethic through an Animal Rights Framework

The question of whether there is a connection between the moral discussions regarding animal rights and abortion has been the subject of on-going debate in both the academic literature and general public discourse. Singer (2011) accuses self-proclaimed “pro-life” advocates of hypocrisy for regularly dining on the flesh of animals while claiming to promote “life.” He enjoins anti-abortionists to give the fetus the same moral standing as they would a nonhuman animal at a similar level of “rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, and so on” (Singer 2011, 136). Theologians like Scully (2013, 2013*) and Camosy (2013) acknowledge this demand for moral consistency and, as a result, have come to embrace and advocate for an animal liberation ethic in light of the principles of non-violence and respect for life which support their conservative, anti-abortion ethic. In this same spirit, Black (2003) defends what he refers to as a homological view: a view that draws attention to the commonalities between the right to life and animal rights movements. While some ethicists and theologians have come to agree that a pro-life ethic demands an animal liberation ethic, others, such as Blackwood (1993), Noonan (1981), Murti (1995, 2006), Hill (1998), and Dinshah (1982) encourage animal liberationists to acknowledge that the principles which govern the animal rights movement have implications for the moral issue of abortion and that it is inconsistent for animal liberationists to promote an ethic for animals while failing to recognize the inherent value of fetuses. 2 The underlying assumption, then, is that a theory of animal rights seems to be at odds with a permissive abortion ethic (Hill 1998; Jenni 1994; and Kao 2005). Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2015) 18:145–164 DOI 10.1007/s10677-014-9515-y

Die Theorie multikultureller Bürgerrechte eröffnet auch eine spannende Perspektive auf die Frage der Tierrechte

Abstract In this interview, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka reply to some questions and objections to their book Zoopolis (Oxford 2011). A distinctive feature of their approach is the idea that domesticated animals should be seen as cocitizens of our political community. Donaldson and Kymlicka discuss how this view of animal citizenship relates to issues regarding the right to vote, the right to political representation, and rights to residence and membership. The authors also explore how their political account of animal rights theory relates to theories of multiculturalism as well as conflicts between individual and group rights. Addressing these issues, they argue, requires attending to the agency of animals themselves, and not just treating them as passive moral patients.