stems from the belief that attitudes about the world and those who populate it are distorted in devastating ways by ideologies and concomitant material practices that don’t aptly capture the value of human lives and relationships, or the value of the lives and relationships of other animals. These distortions permeate standard views in animal ethics, just as they structure many philosophical discussions of social justice. The resulting ideological traps – which appear, at best, as tolerance of, and, at worst, support for, disrespect, commodification, mass violence, and death – must be revealed and challenged if we are to arrive at ethical interventions capable of informing liberating political action. Writing together about the tragic state of the world, during a global pandemic, with a shared recognition of problems at the heart of our current crisis, and a shared desire to acknowledge the dire conditions we all differentially face, has proven to be sustaining. Of course, one cannot change the world alone, but thinking and finding words together is one way of practicing the change we want to see.
Acknowledgments
In writing this book, we drew on a variety of sources – from academia, from news outlets, from activists, and from colleagues and friends. Many different animals and their human defenders have provided us with great inspiration. We are particularly thankful for the work of the people providing sanctuary for all sorts of animals, including VINE Sanctuary in Vermont; Foster Parrots/New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary in Rhode Island; and primate sanctuaries around the world, including those developed in Borneo and Sumatra for endangered orangutans. Not only do sanctuaries tend to the wellbeing of displaced and rescued animals, but they provide models for radical multispecies care. We want to thank Jo-Anne MacArthur and the We Animals Media team, Anna Boarini of VINE Sanctuary, and Peter Godfrey-Smith for permission to use their brilliant photographs. We owe thanks for support to the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, All Souls College, Oxford, the New School, and Wesleyan University. The Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy provided two opportunities for us to work together prior to the pandemic, and we are grateful for their support as well as for their work facilitating collaborations.
We are enormously grateful to friends and colleagues who directly and indirectly contributed to our thinking, including Elan Abrell, Carol Adams, Allison Argo, Jay Bernstein, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Chris Cuomo, Remy Debes, Cora Diamond, Ann Ferguson, Matthew Garrett, Sally Haslanger, Dale Jamieson, Axelle Karera, Claire Jean Kim, pattrice jones, Justin Marceau, Stephen Mulhall, Timothy Pachirat, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Christopher Schlottmann, Amia Srinivasan, Dinesh Wadiwel, and Margot Weiss.
Elan Abrell, Carol Adams, Jay Bernstein, Cora Diamond, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Stephen Mulhall, and Dinesh Wadiwel provided detailed comments on full drafts of the manuscript, as did anonymous readers for Polity, and we are indebted to all of our readers for their astute and gracious engagements with the book. We took all of their comments seriously. Mark Rowlands, who reviewed our proposal for the press, as well as anonymous referees, provided encouraging feedback early on. We presented part of this work at the inaugural meeting of the Harvard–Yale Animal Ethics Faculty Seminar. We thank Lisa Moses for convening the seminar and the participants for thoughtful comments.
Pascal Porcheron has been a wonderful editor, and we are also thankful to Polity’s Stephanie Homer and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer for their gracious assistance as well as to Sarah Dancy for her tactful copy-editing. We greatly appreciate Aaron Neber’s thoughtfulness in creating an index. We also want to express our gratitude to Gretchen Crary at February Media for her incredible patience, flexibility, and resourcefulness in helping get the word out about this project that means so much to us.
Our families, human and non, have been so patient and accommodating as we wrote. Big thanks to Eli, Louise, Nathaniel, Shepard, Taz, and Zinnia. Our gratitude to them is beyond measure.
Prologue
Human–animal relations are in a crisis of catastrophic proportions. Today it is undeniable that the human use and destruction of animals and their habitats, including practices that result in mass animal deaths, have existential implications not only for nonhuman animals but also for human beings and the planet. This book is written for those who are committed to bringing the crisis clearly into view, with an eye toward envisioning new forms of life that will allow us to build better, life-sustaining relations and act to create a less violent, more caring future.
The academic discipline of animal ethics, which is now roughly 50 years old, has been a key site for discussing ethical interventions into the crisis. We acknowledge the role standard formulations of animal ethics have played in heightening awareness of the predicaments that nonhuman animals confront. These standard views have been informative both in academic contexts and in the larger animal protection movement. But our discussion here has a significant critical dimension.
One prominent strand of animal ethics is preoccupied with animal suffering – suffering that occurs in slaughterhouses, laboratories, and other sites of animal confinement, as well as the suffering that animals experience in the wild. Another prominent strand counters this focus on eliminating suffering, urging that we instead emphasize respect for the rights and dignity of animals. While these strands of animal ethics certainly contribute to increased recognition of nonhuman animals’ plights, much of this work obscures, and sometimes even promotes, elements of the crisis we want to resist. The following pages illuminate various ways in which conceptual tools employed within these ethical projects are ill-suited for achieving the goals of genuine liberation.
If we are to address crucial ethical questions about improving our relationships with animals and the existence of all those who live precariously in late capitalism, we need to rethink grounding assumptions of animal ethics as it is currently pursued. Many violent practices are embedded in larger institutions that not only harm animals but serve to disproportionately burden and often subjugate socially vulnerable groups of human beings. Yet the discipline of animal ethics has, to a significant extent, grown up in isolation from traditions of critical social thought that are dedicated to uncovering oppressive structures that impact humans and the more-than-human world. Dominant trends in animal ethics emphasize individual action and overlook damaging social structures and mechanisms of state power, resulting in prescriptions that can serve to sustain these structures and institutions, reproducing the very wrongs they aim to rectify.
Recent attention to political issues that bear on human–animal relations is promising. But even attempts to establish new systems of political rights for animals run the risk of being counterproductive if they don’t identify and contest human superiority over animals – human supremacism – that organizes existing political systems. The need for more fundamental interventions into these destructive systems is a theme of some longstanding social and political traditions, including the tradition of ecofeminism.
Ecofeminism, as a theoretical frame and political project, is – like animal ethics – roughly 50 years old. Its assessment of practices that harm and wrong animals is grounded in a multifaceted critique of capitalist modernity. This includes intellectual histories, reaching back to the early modern period, that describe how getting the world in view comes to be understood as requiring dispassionate abstraction. The emergence of this conception of thought coincides both with new forms of devastation of the natural world and with new forms of exploitation of people – primarily women and members of racialized and colonized groups – who do the work of social reproduction. The resulting historical vision, combined with analyses of early capitalist societies, shows how growth and progress are taken to require treating living and nonliving nature as free resources and denying the value of women’s and racialized and colonized peoples’ care and reproductive labor. This framework enables us to see practices that destroy nature, animals, and marginalized human groups as structurally interrelated, and we are invited to recognize that, in addition to being thus tied together, hierarchical oppositions
