by Mike O’Brien
Read below or listen here:
In this interview, Angie Pepper and Richard Healey discuss their arguments for adopting an abolitionist approach to animal rights, focusing on a recent article in which they argue that the political and social power we wield over animals kept as pets is illegitimate.
In their article (linked below), Angie and Rich argue that pets have three moral complaints against the relations of power to which they are subject. First, they argue that our power over pets disrespects their moral independence: the fact that non-human animals are not simply available to be used to serve the interests or projects of others. Second, our power over pets systematically sets back their interests in exercising control over their own body, actions, and environment. Third, in subjecting pets to asymmetric relations of power in which they are heavily dependent on humans for the satisfaction of their interests, we subject them to objectionable risks of harm. Angie and Rich argue that, taken together, these complaints support the claim that the power relations central to the institution of pet keeping are illegitimate. Therefore, they conclude, we have a strong moral reason to abolish this institution.
In the interview we discussed how their thinking has been developing since writing the article, political and philosophical challenges to abolitionism, and what more just relations with animals might look like. To read their arguments in more detail, and in their own words, see their recent paper “Pets, Power & Legitimacy” here:
https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/article/id/6219/
To read more of their work, see here:
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/angie-pepper/publications/
https://richardhealeyphilosophy.wordpress.com/publications/
START OF TRANSCRIPT
MO: Welcome… Perhaps we can start by you introducing yourselves; what you do, where you’re at, and what sort of themes your work concentrates on.
RH: Up to you…
AP: Hi, my name is Angie Pepper, I am a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Roehampton. I am principally interested in questions of what we owe to non-human animals, so I’m a moral and political philosopher, but I am primarily interested in questions of justice with regard to other animals. So, thinking about how we ought to treat them, what they are entitled to, thinking about the ways in which we might be wronging them… So I guess that kind of sums me up.
RH: I am Richard Healey, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and I’m interested in all the topics that Angie just described, and often we’re working together on those questions, at least recently. I also do some work on… so, my primary work at the moment here at Aarhus is focused on informed consent, and requirements for informed consent, and we’re interested in a bunch of difficult questions around the nature of what informed consent looks like, disclosure and understanding. I guess more broadly I’m interested in, well… most of moral and political philosophy (laughs)… so, those are the things I’m working on at the moment, but yeah, I have fairly broad interests.
MO: Great. So, most recently I read a paper of yours on Pets, Power and Legitimacy, and it pretty much has an abolitionist upshot, in the sense that there doesn’t seem to be any arrangement of pet-keeping that escapes your objections to it on the basis of impingements of freedom, of the tyrannical nature of that relationship. Have you had any more developments in your thinking on that, is that still your sort of settled position?
AP: Yes, so I think that what we would say is that we came to thinking about pets in particular by originally thinking about how other animals would have an interest in self-determination. So, this kind of… in a way, it’s like part of a longer journey in terms of our research. So, initially we had been thinking about whether other animals have an interest in self-determination and what that might mean for our interactions with them, particularly thinking about whether they could consent, so this is kind of tapped in to what Rich was saying about his broad research about interests with regard to consent. And there we were, in this kind of original piece of work, we suggested that other animals do have important interests in self-determination. They can’t consent, in the way that cognitively unimpaired adult humans can, but nonetheless wilful action is important for our relationships with them, it can make a difference to whether or not we are permitted to interact with them.
Now of course, most obviously, thinking about whether or not relationships with animals are essential or not, kind of comes up when you’re thinking about companion animals, thinking about pets. So we started thinking about the way other animals’ interests in self-determination might be impacted by the particular kinds of institutional relationship that we have with them. And at the time of writing that original stuff we weren’t really abolitionists. This has kind of emerged through our thinking about this interest in self-determination and thinking about power, and I think that… one thing I would say, and then I’ll let Rich add some things, one thing I would say is that I hadn’t really been thinking about abolition because it’s a very unpopular position in the animal ethics literature currently, and I guess that I just sort of assumed because a lot of people say that it’s indefensible and unattractive and strategically undesirable and all of those kinds of things, I didn’t really entertain it as a possibility. And through thinking about self-determination and animals’ interests in that, and thinking about pets and power and these institutional relations, we started thinking well, actually, there may be something to abolition. And so part of the ongoing project now is to sort of think about whether abolition can be rehabilitated as a serious view in the ethics of our relations with domesticated animals. [To Rich] Sorry, I said a lot…
RH: No, no, that is all good and right. Yeah, so I was only going to say, in terms of the forward-looking project, it’s true I think at least at some point… the hope is to think through more seriously what a defensible and persuasive abolitionism looks like, and indeed whether we might call it something else, for reasons both philosophical and strategic, perhaps. But nevertheless, to take some of the challenges that have been levelled against that kind of position, and to think in various ways about what the alternative looks like, given that, like Angie said, it’s kind of perceived as a non-starter in much of the contemporary discourse in animal rights. I guess I was gonna say as well, more immediately, something that we’ve been thinking about as an offshoot of that paper that you read, is how the popular idea that we can address some or perhaps all of the problems that we discussed there by extending a kind of political membership to non-human animals.
So, this is of course most famously associated with, and most influentially defended by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, who argue that we should extend citizenship status to domesticated animals, and whilst they by no means think that it’s a straightforward matter, it at least appears, especially in the earlier iterations of this I think, that this is a way of… as it suggests… solving some of the problems that we identify, and perhaps providing a basis for just, and by implication legitimate relations of power between humans and non-human animals, albeit in a very different form from what we have now. And so in a way, an obvious challenge to our view is “Why not think that that’s right? Why not think that we can radically reshape our relationship with domesticated animals by extending citizenship status to them, or political membership more broadly?”. And so in that paper that we’ve been working on, we think about exactly why it might be that membership status could have this role, and essentially end up arguing that we think that, at least in this context, it’s not clear that it can play this role. So there’s a lot there to be said about sort of interpreting why membership would be important and why, ultimately, we argue that it’s not in these ways, but that’s something that’s a kind of important challenge and something that we’ve been working on recently as a kind of development of the view, bit by bit.
MO: When you say make abolitionism more defensible, more sort of acceptable, palatable, are there particular objections you have in mind, particular avenues to re-framing it in a way that would have more traction, that would appear more feasible to its critics? I mean, it seems like… the appeal to it seems obvious; if something is just morally unacceptable, then it’s morally unacceptable, and should be abolished… do you change people’s minds, or is there a substantive re-framing of the goal?
RH: I mean… so I think there’s a couple of challenges that have to be addressed, maybe I’ll mention one and then Angie may mention more. So one, I guess, general challenge is that no matter what you think, we are in a situation where many billions of domesticated animals exist and will continue to exist in the near future, and so there’s a question about how you respond to that. Whatever your view, on the assumption that you think animals have important moral rights, you’re going to think that some serious stuff has to change about how we interact with them.
Now, the other question is how, and in what way. And, I guess you might think that without providing something like an alternative to the citizenship model, some story about what moves we should be making, socio-politically, institutionally, as well as individually, then we’re kind of left without a solution to the problem, right, we have this kind of theoretical claim that this is illegitimate, or that this is a moral problem, but it doesn’t actually offer a response to the problem that we really face, which is what do we do in the here and now in response to the existence of these animals, even if we were under more favourable political conditions, which of course we’re absolutely not. So I think part… I should add to that perhaps that this kind of challenge has a particular “umpf” or particular force because one of the reasons that a kind of abolition approach is typically taken to be unpalatable or problematic is because of what is at least regarded as being the implication, or in some views, the stated view that we would be seriously curtailing the reproductive interests or rights of these animals in order to bring about an end to relations of the kind we describe between humans and domesticated animals. And that’s taken to be a big moral problem in itself, so it’s placing a constraint on what the solution might look like.
So I think a part of what we have to do, and that we’ve been thinking about but still have some work to do, is thinking about sketching the alternative vision, as it were, of moving from here to there, and think about doing that in a way which takes seriously these kinds of reproductive interests and rights. I mean, we haven’t got very far but I think it’s important that, as part of beginning to think about that, that we actually think that this reproductive issue is often leveraged against abolitionist views as if it were decisive, but actually it’s a problem that all views face and doesn’t go away just because you, for example, extend membership, even with the best of intentions. This remains a very significant wrinkle, at least in all of the approaches that we’re aware of, but nevertheless it demands serious consideration. So that’s one set of issues that needs to be addressed in rehabilitating an abolitionist view that is defensible or acceptable.
AP: I mean, I think as well that there are problems coming from two different directions… So, there are some people who think that non-human animals don’t have the kind of interest in self-determination that Rich and I have been trying to defend, and so if you think that’s true then you might argue that, provided our relations are benign, insofar as we can satisfy animals’ interests then there really isn’t a problem, right, so we don’t need to abolish relations that obtain between us and other animals, provided that we treat them well, is the basic thought. So, part of the project is trying to make good on this idea that other animals have this interest in self-determination, which is traditionally not something that has been emphasized in abolitionist literature. So that’s one thought. And then on the other side, there are people who do think no, they do have this important interest in self-determination, but the relation that we have with other animals, domesticated animals, can be made right. So they can be reformed, and part of the motivation for this is that the animals themselves benefit from these relationships, right, so if you think about companionship in particular you might cast idealized versions of those relations as ones of mutual love and care and reciprocity, right, and it’s actually not right to think of them as constitutively problematic, there’s something there that’s salvageable, that’s morally good.
But also, that’s not only good for us, it’s good for the other animals involved. And in an argument that’s also in that camp, as Rich said, the history of domestication is such that many of these animals have been bred for successive generations, societies as we know them today have been constructed not just through or by humans but also by their interactions with other animals, and other animals have played an important role in the development of modern society. And so thinking about that, and the fact that we’ve lived with animals for a long time, you might argue that those animals have just as much of a right to be in, to continue to live within our communities as we do. So this is the kind of line that Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka advance in defence of this idea that we should extend citizenship to other animals. And so the abolitionists have to respond to this idea that there is some kind of injustice by exclusion, that they have a right to be here, to try to cast them out is problematic in itself, it’s an injustice to deny them membership. So there are a bunch of potential objections and reasons why people find abolition an unattractive position.
But I think what we’re trying to do in the paper that you read, and something that is part of the ongoing project, is to put power more central to the discussion, because at the moment there’s a lot of… the way in which power operates in these relations is often obscured, and there’s a kind of emphasis on the ideal and what might look like morally good relations between individuals, but not really much consideration of how individual animals’ abilities are constrained within those relationships and also the ways in which they’re subject to socially and politically organized power means that they have roles imposed upon them, which… yeah, all of that stuff is often not really spoken about, there’s very little attention paid to it, and I think that once you start thinking about that then abolition starts to look more plausible again for those seemingly benign practices.
MO: And “more plausible” in the sense that it’s the correct stance, not necessarily that it’s politically feasible.
AP: That’s right, yeah. So I think that, as I said, we didn’t start out abolitionists but it’s very hard, I think, to deny that’s where the logic of these arguments takes you, if you really believe that animals have rights, that they have an important interest in self-determination, it’s very hard to see how abolition isn’t the correct answer to the political situation that we face.
MO: Now, I’ve been familiar with your work since… 2010s anyway, when you were visiting at Université de Montréal, and I had sort of noticed this pattern of starting with a strong position and then retrenching to a, say, more defensible position, a position that better matches your considered take on it after that. Is this an experience you’re generally had, where you start off defending a stronger position, realize that it can’t be held, but you’re still trying to retain some of that position, you’re still trying to hold on to some of that, be it the extension of moral status or recognition rights? Because it is… For instance in the privacy rights stuff, there are clearly interests, which might give rise to claims, which might give rise to rights, but there’s this constant push and pull between the strength of one position and the strength of its critics. Has your experience with this stuff been one of, I don’t want to say retreat, but a consolidation to a more defensible position, and less a revolutionary change in stance?
AP: I actually think it’s the other way around. I think there’s a sense in which I’ve probably… not so much started with a more conservative view but at least the conclusions of the argument have become more radical over time. I mean, in the privacy case the upshot of the argument was that non-human animals have rights to privacy, and not just rights to privacy when they know that they’re being observed and would rather not be observed, but that we can violate their rights even when they don’t know they’re being observed, which is a pretty radical view and some would even argue that it’s radical in the human case. So my feeling is not that there’s been a retreat. It’s true that… so one thing to say is that… I don’t think retreat is quite the right way to think about it, but you often have to reconstruct and reconstruct and reconstruct arguments in response to objections, and so in the case of privacy the argument is that animals do have an interest in not being observed even when they don’t know it, and that takes some room to make that sort of argument, whereas I think in the beginning I just wanted to say that they had a certain kind of status which mean that watching them when they didn’t know it is a violation, which is a kind of mysterious claim because there’s nothing at the heart of that, it’s just something mysterious or magical about their status would make that true.
So, trying to develop an argument which shows what the interest might be was an important part of that project. And similarly here with the abolitionist case, there are lots of objections, and I think that one of the things that we’ve been trying to do is shift, as I said, the focus away, in the case of pet keeping, away from thinking about the interpersonal relationships that obtain between individual pets and their guardians, to think at the institutional level and thinking about the power relations. And it’s that shift in focus which then helps you to, in a way, reformulate what the abolitionist target is; the abolitionist target is not particular relations, it’s an institutional arrangement, it’s the relations of power. So, I guess… yeah, do you have anything to add to that? But that’s my sense, is that it’s not a retreat, it’s often a reformulation of the position to strengthen your view against all of the critics.
RH: I don’t know… No, I think… sorry, but it’s sort of interesting because it’s like… So, on the one hand I feel like with some of your papers, and maybe with some of my own, one starts often with a very, like… “I think this is the right view”
AP: Yeah…
RH: And then we get to the process which you just described in a way, which is “well, why?” and then “what’s the argument for that view, and how does that argument respond to possible objections or problems with it?”. And so in that way it may weaken, or constrain or conditionalize or whatever, the conclusion, or at least appear to make the conclusion less robust just in virtue of not being the declaration of what one feels that one starts with. But interestingly, I think you’re right, that if you think about the particular cases, or some of the particular cases like the privacy case, it got a bit more constrained in that way, but like you said, over the longer period of time, the overall, the big picture view has, through a similar process, become increasingly radical compared to… because, when you started thinking about these questions, and when I did maybe a bit later, in detail, we were probably quite attracted to the Donaldson and Kymlicka approach, or at least that seems like broadly the right way to think about these issues, and then there are questions about political representation, but as you begin to unpick those and think more and more about it over the years, and like you say, to think about possible interests in self-determination and agency, then we’ve kind of been led, slowly but surely, to this position. And still, though, the back and forth continues, but the overall direction of travel is… So, I’m not really sure what the point of any of that was, other than to say that I guess there is this push and pull that goes backwards and forwards, and it could have gone the other way more generally, but perhaps has gone this way, not that anyone thanks us for it… (laughs)… just yet.
MO: They’ll come around…
RH: Yeah, maybe…
MO: So, just for people who aren’t familiar with the literature, a lot of you work sort of stands in response or critique to the Donaldson and Kymlicka approach to inclusion. Do you want to sketch your understanding of their stance and what your issues with it are?
(RH and AP look at each other)
MO: Doesn’t have to be encyclopedic.
AP: You want to…
RH: You want me to…
AP: Yeah, go on, you do it…
RH: So, in very broad terms, I understand… So, I mean, their project begins from the fact that we’ve sort of failed to think about animals and their moral significance politically, and so we’ve failed to move beyond thinking about individual questions about, you know… I mean, they’re not just individual questions, but like whether you should eat meat or whatever, to broader institutional questions about how we should… what justice looks like if it takes the interests and moral rights of other animals seriously. And so they defend this kind of tripartite view which distinguishes between wild animals, liminal animals and domesticated animals, where roughly speaking domesticated animals are the animals that we lived in close social proximity with and engage in close social relations with in one way or another. So that includes pets but it also includes farmed animals, zoo animals in a way although that’s a bit complicated, any others…
AP: Research
RH: Yeah, animals used in research. And in the case of liminal animals, they are animals that live closely with us and they’re often dependent in certain ways on human communities, but they don’t stand in the same sorts of close social relations. So, for example, squirrels, foxes, badgers, mice, raccoons, many birds, right, they’re all kind of within the same geographical terrain as us and in certain ways depending on us, and perhaps in certain ways we depend upon them, but we don’t interact with them in the same kinds of close ways or deliberate ways as we do with domesticated animals. And then there are wild animals who are in a way more independent, they’re out there somewhere in the wilderness. Of course our actions have effects on them, and indeed as climate change makes increasingly clear they have very many significant impacts on them, but there’s no real geographical, of a kind at least, or social relations. And so they think that these different sorts of relations that we stand in with these three different groups should be… what’s the word I’m looking for…
AP: Well, they map onto different kinds of political…
RH: Yeah, they map onto different kinds of political status, which attach to different kinds of rights. So as we briefly said earlier, in the case of domesticated animals they should be classed as citizens, in the case of liminal animals they should be cast as, well… they kind of get the status of…
AP: Denizens…
RH: Denizens, that’s right. And in the case of wild animals, they are kind of seen as independent political communities who have rights to sovereignty and independence of an important kind. And so, if you focus on the case of domesticated animals now, which, while we’re interested in the other cases for sure, is the focus of most of what we’ve been thinking about recently… so of course that view requires almost immediately the abolition of many practices that we engage in with regard to non-human animals, so obviously factory farming but really basically all farming more or less, and research on non-human animals, will just have to be scrapped, because if you regard these individual animals as moral equals and equal citizens then clearly they will have rights that protect them against this kind of use.
So now the question emerges as to what else happens with those animals that exist and will continue to exist, and how we can relate to them, and what we’re required to do in relation to them, because of course you might think, or as people argued before them, that the only solution was to just abolish all of it, there was no way of saving any parts of the practices that we have in a way which respects their basic rights and would treat them as an equal citizen. So they argue that that’s not true, and that by including domesticated animals as equal members of the community, and representing their interests in political decision-making in various ways, and that’s kind of part of their ongoing work, to think about how we might do that, we can continue to live with them in relations of companionship and maybe mutual dependence of a certain kind, and even engage them in certain kinds of work, albeit under quite different conditions, where the thought would be that as full members of the community they might have certain responsibilities as members of the community, including responsibilities to contribute to the social good. Like all people, or like all citizens, that should be under conditions of fair exchange and with various protections in place, but nevertheless we could require of them that they contribute in certain ways. Does that give a sketch of the outlook?
AP: (Nods)
MO: That’s good.
RH: I guess the question then is, for us, thinking about whether what we can do in reforming our social and political institutions in regard to these animals would adequately respect their moral status and their important rights. And broadly we are skeptical or worried that we can’t do so, and primarily the reason for that is we think that the kind of inclusion we can give to these animals, politically speaking, isn’t robust enough to undercut or undermine the concerns that you might have about, that motivate why inclusion is so important in the first place, right. So just to give a relatively straightforward way of articulating this idea, because domesticated animals are not able to articulate for themselves, at least using human natural languages, their own interests, and communicate that to us, and make clear what their preferences would be, say between certain options that we might face when needing to make a decision, their interests will always be incorporated into a political decision in a very indirect way, which requires that we interpret them in response to their various behaviours, and perhaps situations that we set up to try to elicit their interests or their preferences. But this process is, we think, severely epistemically limited. It’s not to say that it’s of no value or no importance, indeed it might be of great importance here and now and on a continuing basis, but we don’t think it’s sufficient to meet this bar that would be required to show that we can really fundamentally reorganize things, to address this concern that ultimately we have a huge amount of power over them and they’re wholly dependent on us, and that gives rise to significant moral worries. Maybe you can elaborate…
AP: Yeah, so I think, just to add to that… so, Rich is right that the project for us is to think about whether the ideal zoopolitical vision that people like Donaldson and Kymlicka have… and they’ve been very influential, right, so it’s no longer just them that have this vision, there are lots of people who also share this vision… and so thinking about whether that’s right, is it possible to really have this kind of idealized situation, and is there something nonetheless that persists, that continues to be problematic about it, and I think that that’s really what we’re concerned with. And Rich is right that part of the concern is about the dependence on us to interpret other animals’ preferences and arguably one issue with that is we often have self-serving motivations when it comes to other animals’ interests.
But I think that the other which we also want to stress is that even when you construct mechanisms that enable other animals to participate directly within politics, right, you make their preferences directly shape policy in some way, for us the bigger problem is that there is a huge epistemic chasm between us and other animals in terms of our understanding of the political situation that we face. And by that, what I mean is that other animals with whom we share our societies, we don’t really share it in the same way, right, we live together, and we have social relations with these animals, but these animals don’t understand their rights, they don’t understand mechanisms of accountability, they don’t understand what it is to protest or mobilize, they don’t understand a whole host of acting as a political agent within the community. They don’t understand the political operation of the community. And so it’s that, that kind of epistemic chasm, which makes it difficult to see how these asymmetric relations of power that obtain between us and other animals, and that will continue to obtain even in the idealized world, can be legitimate, because there is always this power imbalance, and the extension of citizenship, the political inclusion doesn’t really do very much to undermine or undercut the asymmetry. It’s still there and it’s still a problem, basically.
MO: It’s almost as if humans were granted honourary citizenship on Jupiter, but we were never told and it doesn’t affect us in any way that we can perceive, a distinction without a difference.
AP: Yeah
RH: Yeah
MO: I mean, I also wonder if it’s an extension too far of the conceit that all humans are epistemically capable of understanding and exercising their political rights, which is just plainly not true, like huge chunks… just in the Canadian example, huge chunks of Canadian citizens have no understanding of the divisions of municipal, provincial and federal powers, and what their exercise of voting rights means. But for the system to work, we have to act as if all citizens are capable of exercising the enfranchisement that they are granted…maybe saying that if you’re going to do that, is it that much different to give it to animals who also don’t understand where they stand in the political scene, and don’t really understand what it would mean to exercise that franchise? At a certain point the tenuousness of it breaks…
RH: I think that… should I say something?
AP: Yeah
RH: I think that there’s two things to say about that concern or response. One is just to say that, in the kind of cases that you have in mind… well, rather, many humans, the majority I would say, without wanting to do the numbers, have a least a capacity to have that kind of awareness, even if that’s not a capacity that’s realized for them for various reasons, and often for reasons of injustice, but in any case it’s not that there’s any in-principle barrier to them understand the kind of electoral municipal mechanisms that you describe, it’s just that they haven’t come to learn those things. And so, I think that that kind of capacity constraint is in part what is motivating the concern. But I think that, even then, the capacity that we’re concerned with is much more general, by which I mean what we don’t think is necessary is a detailed understanding of the operating of the electoral system or bureaucracy, maybe it would be good to have those things, independently there are reasons to have them for a well-functioning political community, but the barrier or the capacity in question is more fundamental because it involves something like being able to recognize oneself as a member of a community that is governed by certain norms which one might have a view over and which one might contribute to, or criticize, or engage with, or indeed reject in a whole host of different ways. So even the person that you’re describing, I take it… I mean, I’m filling out your example a little bit in my mind, is someone who still understands that there are elections even though they don’t understand how they work, and who might not vote in elections because they think it’s all bullshit, and they might be right, but they have an understanding at least that this is how things are done or how things are claimed to be done around here, and that when they go to the supermarket, or were they to go to the supermarket and just take some goods off the shelf and walk out, then they would be subject to arrest because there are legal norms which prevent theft, then they would be able to get a lawyer, and so on and so forth.
And so, I guess that we think that once this is realized for different individuals in different ways, there is this very general understanding that we tend to have about what it is to live in this norm-governed community, which is partly social and partly legal, and sort of operationalized via politics, and that that is the epistemic barrier that we face with regards to domesticated animals. They don’t have that. Of course, this is an empirical question, we’re assuming that empirical claim and it could be contested, but assuming that’s true there is this really fundamental barrier to the entry of them into our politics. And importantly, I might say, this is something that we’ve thought about a little bit, vice versa, right? So, in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s recent work, drawing on people that have been writing before them in ethology and elsewhere, document the various kinds of interesting ways in which primarily wild animals seem to make decisions about what to do in situations in which a choice is required, when they live collectively. We’re kind of happy to accept that that is important and should be protected, but there would be a similar epistemic barrier in that direction, which is that if I joined the group in question I would have no understanding of what was going on because I’m in a fundamentally different mental outlook or ability to understand, there’s just a basic epistemic chasm is probably the best way to put it, such that I can’t really… you know, they might decide among them that I’m now a member of the herd, but I’m still on the outside as it were looking in, and unable to participate with them in the making of a decision about whether we should leave or whether we should stay. And so it’s not about claiming that we have a special ability that they lack, it’s a claim that we have a certain ability and that ability is crucial to how we do politics and there’s no getting around that, given that there’s this barrier around including them in a way which is meaningful and can address these concerns of legitimacy that we have.
AP: So, I think that, just coming back to the people who are disenfranchised in one way or another, I think that that’s one case where we can think that there’s a legitimacy gap, and that’s a case where we can think about what the solutions are, that the state could implement to try to close that gap in some way. And then we have the other case, with what you [Rich] were going to talk about, which is children, or people perhaps with cognitive impairments which make it difficult to understand the kind of mechanics that we’ve been talking about, and there you might say there’s a legitimacy gap but the cause is different, so then there’s a question about “is there a solution?”. And you might think there could be, there could be ways of closing the gap, and so you might ask the same question of other animals, what’s the solution here, is there a gap, what’s the solution. But one thing, I think, that we’re interested in, really, is taking a step back and thinking about the cause of that gap in the first place, right, so why is there a lack of legitimacy in these relationships. Well, one reason is because we are basically reproducing those relationships, right, we are creating them and causing them, and so it’s not a solution, right… and so the abolitionist solution is to think seriously about not starting those relationships in the first place, right? If we’ve got a problem, and there’s not an obvious fix given the epistemic stuff that we’ve been talking about, then it’s a gap that we’re kind of manufacturing through our actions, and so that’s, again, how this kind of abolitionist [view] starts to get itself on the table. Yeah?
RH: Yeah
MO: I just want to make sure I’ve got the few points that I want to be touching on… um… yeah, so this idea of the group sovereignty of wild animals, which is something that interests me a great deal because I’ve read a lot about sovereignty, and it’s sort of become a pulled-apart and troubled concept, and some of the literature I’ve read about animal sovereignty I think is subject to some of the same problems as the sort of utopian civic projects, extending status that they can’t really exercise. And there’s also questions of whether territorial sovereignty or a popular sovereignty that relies on some sort of territorial claim even makes sense for animals that don’t have borders and fences and political accords and things. So I’d like if you could just speak about where you’re at in your own thinking about wild animal sovereignty, and how it relates to these sorts of citizen/denizen questions.
AP: So, I think that the short answer is we’re not very far [laughs] in our thinking about that. So, I think… so, we’ve written a little about how liminality might be better for thinking about, or might be a better model for thinking about our relationship with animals who live amongst us. So, those animals who live within our urban environments, who we kind of encounter but we don’t know the details of their daily lives, we don’t seek to control them in the ways that we do domesticated animals, but nonetheless we might encounter them and we might in fact have a close encounter, if you think about people who feed birds and other animals in their garden. And so, very tentatively thinking about that… that being an appropriate form of close, relatively close relation with other animals. But we haven’t really thought a great deal, or at least we don’t have a kind of committed position to how we should think about power and legitimacy with regard to those animals or with regard to wild animals. Although, I think we’re not a troubled as troubled by the idea, or I’m not as troubled by the idea, I can’t speak for you [Rich], I’m not as troubled by the idea that wilderness animals might have rights to sovereignty, where that is basically a right to live as a group, unimpeded and not interfered with by human beings, like that doesn’t seem implausible to me, whether we call it sovereignty or something else that seems plausible. And then I think there are just questions about how we should think about the relationship between those animals and states, and the right of the state, if the state has such a right, to rule over those animals, like what that means, what that looks like and so on. Because it’s not like the legitimacy questions just go away for those animals, it’s just that they’re subject to state power in a different way and so it requires different considerations. Do you want to add some stuff about sovereignty?
RH: I think… I mean, you kind of gestured at this, perhaps my uncertain views that, as Mike suggested, it may be a mistake to conceptualize this in terms of sovereignty, precisely because this involves the attribution of collective rights, essentially, to collectivities of a certain kind. And, at least, I’m skeptical that a collectivity of the relevant kind exists, even if there are an important sense of collectives, sort of, intra-species, they don’t exist, I would think, inter-species in the way that’s suggested, but rather this might just be a reason for thinking that, ultimately, the way to think about relationships with wild animals becomes much more individualized, and ultimately wouldn’t really bother us as normative individualists, ultimately? No?
AP: No… [laughs] it’s not implausible, but I do think that, like, for some animals, where group membership and culture and the inter-generational transmission of knowledge is important, I don’t know whether the individual line will cut it…
[cross-talk]
RH: Fair enough… So it might be about where we draw the borders, and it might become… so it might be right to think that, like, certain groups have certain territorial claims, although two things will be true about it: one, that they will be much smaller scale than a typical state or political organizations, and…
AP: Why?
RH: Well, because I’m thinking about, like, you know… are beavers social?
AP: Yeah, but if you think about migrating species, they can cover quite vast territorial space, so that’s not… [laughs]
RH: Okay, so it’s complicated…
AP: I think the answer is we don’t know, but it’s…
RH: So, to one… I mean, sorry, you’re right, maybe space is not the right way to think about it, but… just to say that while I’m sort of sympathetic to the spirit of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s view here, which I think is one of independence, and one which sees significant reason to let them be independent, maybe the conceptualization of those relations is not quite as we would have it, which maybe goes, in a way, step-wise with our rejection of the citizenship kind of approach. So we’re kind of moving, in a way that we haven’t yet worked out, away from a certain view, a certain kind of liberal view which thinks about sovereign states that have citizens and are discrete political entities that have political relations with one another at the international level, even if that’s represented differently. So, we’re rejecting the citizenship stuff here, we might be rejecting the thing that the way to think about our relationship with these animals is via the state-to-state analogy.
Nevertheless, as Angie said, and as I think we’re increasingly aware, there’s no world in which what humans do doesn’t significantly impact the lives of all animals on the planet, you know, in greater or lesser extent, in different contexts, and so any account of moral and political justification requires an answer to how you incorporate the interests of animals into political decision-making. Even if you grant, for the sake of argument, that we’re right about domesticated animals, and that those are practices that we should wind down in one way or another, these questions will still remain important, and it does eventually raise the question of legitimacy once again, like what gives us the right to make these decisions through our institutions and then impose them upon animals, albeit in this more indirect way that has these effects on them, in the streets if they’re liminal animals, or in the wild if they’re wilderness animals. And I think that we think that there might be answers to those questions, but they are still really difficult questions that need answering, and that some of the reasons we have for skepticism in the domesticated animal case put pressure on some of the kind of answers you might try to give in that case, right? So there might be a problem of over-extension or something for some of the arguments that we want to make in that more local case, and about how they extend out. But I think it’s stuff that we do hope to think about.
AP: Yeah, we will get to it but it might take some time. Just a last thought on… what was I going to say… on the wild animal case…
RH: Beavers?
AP: No, it wasn’t beavers. It was about… oh, so I guess you think about the state’s relationship towards those animals as being one where the state and we do things that are indirectly harmful, but I think there are a lot of cases of direct decision-making which involve these animals around conservation, and around the control of behaviour that we don’t like or is bad for us in one way or another, and so actually it’s not that straightforward, so this question about… So, one thing I think Donaldson and Kymlicka do get right is that, however regrettable it is, we do live in a state system and so states do take de facto responsibility and authority over the animals that reside within their territories, and so I guess there’s just a bunch of questions there that is more challenging, that we need to think about, and isn’t just “oh, these are the things we do that might impact them”, we are in fact deliberately going to impact them.
MO: Yeah, I mean ultimately the solutions to any of these things are changing the ways that humans cause other humans to change their relationships to animals, I think, and sovereignty certainly comes to bear there, if, you know, one state wants another state to cause the animals under its jurisdiction to be treated differently. And that sort of raises a question that I saw in a blog article by an animal welfare researcher who, in his own wicket, does very very good work, but seemed to have trouble grappling with how do you, as a sort of good conscience liberal, condone coercing other people into not harming animals? And this is an issue that I see a lot, two things butting up against each other, what is the ordering of our intra-specific versus our inter-specific responsibilities, and seems to require, I don’t know, some weakening or some way around the inviolability of human prerogatives, to force people to stop killing animals for profit, or killing animals for fun, or whatever else it is… And I’m wondering if there’s a clear path to tackling that, because ultimately it is about other people, not that each person isn’t complicit in their own harms, but any political solution is going to be about humans making other humans act differently on behalf of animals, and the story that we tell about the status of animals that makes that legitimate might even be beside the point, practically speaking. It certainly gives it traction, if you say that there are animal publics with sovereignty rights, that might give you institutional traction because these concepts have legal weight, but the animals don’t know that we’re doing any of this, the animals are not privy to the conversation or the debate. So I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on political reforms that are necessary to make that a palatable path, a more robust… more robust state-driven agendas to force people to stop hurting animals in ways that are currently legally permitted and morally acceptable, or socially acceptable.
RH: So… no, but I do agree with you, and I am hugely interested in this question of… as you put it, maybe like the kind of almost liberal tension here, right? If you’re, on the one hand, committed to animals having significant moral rights, even if you don’t agree with Angie and I on stuff about pet-keeping or whatever, but nevertheless you agree that they have rights not to be severely harmed for trivial purposes, how that squares with the fact that we do that on a wide scale, and most people would think it was not something you could impose unilaterally, even if you had a magic button that circumvented democratic processes or legal institutions or whatever. I… I mean, I think, when we were talking about this recently, we… should I say that?
AP: I mean, if you…
RH: I mean, I think we basically think that, at the level of justification, there would be no good objection to just pushing the button, as it were. Of course, that’s not how the world works, and I do think that there is an interesting… this sort of circles back to some of what we were talking about earlier in terms of why did Donaldson and Kymlicka hold that abolitionism has been a strategic disaster. Well, I think it’s in part because they think there is no way of getting that view to have political traction, as a way of slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly building up a kind of picture and a movement that could actually institutionalize important changes and lead to, if not a utopia, then at least a significant improvement. So I think there are two issues… sorry, just to circle back now, I think there’s one interesting question about, that’s broadly a question in political philosophy about legitimacy and justification, and the combination of that with the importance of animal rights. And of course this has, in a way, been manifested in different moral problems over generations, but of course no-one thinks it’s okay to just impose it until we look back in history and then say “well, how could anyone have thought that that was okay?”, right? And we’re at another such inflection point, and I hope, although I’m not convinced, that we will in some hundreds of years look back and think “well, how could anyone think that was okay?”.
But of course now, most other people think it’s just fine, so what do you do about that? But there is this slightly more strategic but also theoretical question about if you’re committed to your even ideal theory being implementable in some even very derivative way, what view should you have or advocate in order to bring about traction or palatability or political change that moves us in an important direction. So, perhaps one thing I’ll say about that is I don’t know, but I think it’s an interesting open question whether, as it’s assumed by Donaldson and Kymlicka but [also] many others, that abolitionism is actually the bad way to go in that case, perhaps actually an appropriate articulation of the abolitionist view is the right way to go in order to get political traction. Now, of course this means challenging people’s very deeply held convictions that not only do they like to eat animals but they also like to hang out with them when they feel like it, but that might be what you need to do in order to really unpick the things that underpin this basically problematic assumption that we can use animals as we see fit. So, that of course is hugely speculative, but it would be interesting to think more about comparing that, as an approach to actual political discourse and change, to the kind of more reformist type of view that others tend to offer. I don’t know if you have any…
AP: Yeah, so I think that’s right. I mean, I also think that we need to revisit this question of whether there’s a problem with forcing people to do what’s right, because we don’t think that there’s a problem in other cases. So when we want to stop humans from harming other humans, we think that that’s okay. So I’m not… I think that there is just this widespread assumption that there would be something problematic with forcing humans to stop harming animals, but it’s not really clear why, given that we already have legislation that prevents us from doing what we want to humans, to animals, sorry, why an extension of that… what would be the problem there, like, what is really at issue. And I think that Rich is right, the point of theoretical justification is… it’s difficult to see what would be the problem, really, what the objection could be. And then in practice, I think it’s an interesting question about social movements and how change happens, either legislatively or politically, so I think there are things to be said there about what could be done, and thinking about the history of other movements, and thinking more strategically about that. But one thing I will say about abolition as well… so, the kind of abolitionism that we’ve been developing and defending deviates quite a bit from Gary Francione’s abolitionism, and he’s probably the most influential abolitionist in the animal rights literature and scholarship, but one thing that he says and has kind of stuck with me and I think has played a role in us thinking about this, is that often these problems, these conflicts that we perceive between us and the interests of other animals, are manufactured by us.
So, strategically I think that one thing we need to do is really make that clear to people, that it’s not just natural, it’s not just inevitable, whatever the tension or the conflict might be, whether we’re thinking about the spread of zoonotic diseases, or the behaviour of animals that we don’t like for various reasons, like all of this stuff is often a result of what we’re doing and the decisions that we’re making. And I think that part of the abolitionist position that we’re trying to develop and sort of put forward as an alternative really puts the responsibility back with humans, and says this is what we’re doing, the problems are coming about because of our decision to keep doing this thing, a simple solution to this is to just stop doing it, right. And that, in a way, seems more saleable than a proposal which says we’re going to have to have radical reform, costly reform in all of these ways, to make society more inclusive of some subset of animals that we decide to continue to live with. So, I don’t know, I agree with you [Rich] that abolitionism has got a bit of a bad reputation but it’s not clear that it can’t be made to be more attractive as something for people to take seriously and get behind, if you can make people see that many of the problems we need to deal with are ones that we’re creating. So I don’t know. No?
RH: No, I mean… yes and no.
AP & RH: [laugh]
AP: Okay
RH: It depends on the first step of getting people to recognize the problems…
AP: Yeah
RH: Or some problems as problems…
AP: Yeah
RH: And what’s the… so, one route is, like you sort of implicitly suggested, the self-serving, or prudential interest in avoiding zoonotic diseases of various kinds, which, fine, maybe that’s the way to go. And maybe you might think, well this would be unfair to ascribe to them, this view, but maybe you think again that is again why Donaldson and Kymlicka think that it’s a mistake, because… you know, most people, when we talk to them about the pets, our view on pets and legitimacy, just think we’re mad, and so maybe… I don’t know, I’m digging myself into a hole… I don’t know how you bring about change. (laughs)
AP: It’s a slow battle.
RH: It’s a slow battle, but it’s also an interesting question… I think it actually is one thing we’ve talked more increasingly about, some people have been doing this work already, it’s not something we’ve engaged with deeply, thinking about looking at other social and political movements historically, and of course it’s very hard to draw general lessons because there’s a lot of significant facts about context, but nevertheless it would be interesting to think about those things seriously because, you know… was it the piecemeal reformist position or was it the more hard-line, do-it-all-now position, or indeed some interaction of the two that really got us to a point in which certain ideas, certain claims were taken seriously. But yeah, that’s stuff that we still need to think about. Or, maybe, one day. [laughs]
MO: I think it’s also important to be conscious of not generalizing too much when we say that, like, as humans “we” condone this or “we” condone that, there’s vast variations, there’s vegans, there’s people who get rich off of slaughterhouse industries… So I think there’s a… not deliberate… I think sometimes deliberate in political messaging, but normally just habitual use of an all too inclusive and flattening “we” talk about the acceptability and the currency of practices that can be unduly discouraging, I think, for people who want to reform or push abolitionism, but “people still believe it’s okay to do this”, well not necessarily all… it’s not like an average moral temperature, there are peaks and valleys and there may be far more traction than would be suggested by the averaging of opinion. You don’t need everybody, you just need the people who will do the work.
AP: I think that’s right. But I also think that’s why thinking about, you know, the ways in which you get political change historically haven’t needed everybody, right, that’s not what you need, you just need the people in power to have a certain mandate to bring about change. And so, yeah, there’s a question… I mean, we were thinking, very unlikely, but if the Green Party in the UK came to power, what would they be able to do in terms of improving the plight of animals? They would have the power if they had a majority, but then there’s the question about whether they would do that. We were, as you suggested, thinking about the legitimacy question there, like would there be something wrong about them imposing those kinds of decisions, but… yeah, we don’t know.
MO: I think every farmer would park a tractor at the steps of parliament, like they do in France.
AP: Yeah, yeah, yeah
RH: Exactly, exactly, even if they were just elected…
MO: Which seems to be a strangely permitted use of force against democratic procedure, but I guess when farmers do it it’s okay.
RH: Exactly, that’s right. That’s because they wear jolly hats.
MO: Well, are there any other issues that you want to speak on, or half-formed ideas you’re working on that you’d like to share?
AP: So, I don’t think so… I mean, one thing I would say is that I am concerned about how… so, one of the things that I’ve been working on recently is the desire to keep animals as pets, so thinking about the nature of the desire. And the reason for thinking about this at all is because it seems to me that desire is at the heart of demand, and so if you want to do anything about bringing an end to the institution, then you need to stem demand, and try to find a way of talking about what we’re doing, like when we decide that we want to bring these animals into our homes, and thinking about why we want to do that seems important. And so, whilst I guess the pets case is just one subset, you might start to ask, take a similar kind of tack in the other areas… The pets case is the case that we think, is a kind of… we think it’s the hardest case for the abolitionists because most people think that in an idealized form those relationships are relationships of love and care, and I think that, yeah, focusing on that is important for showing that often love and care can kind of obscure things that are problematic. Which, you know, we have a whole history of feminist writing about, so it’s not like this is new, but… yes, thinking more about our desires in this context is important…
MO: It’s sort of analogous to the slave or indentured servant who’s taken into the family and treated like one of their own, and sort of “look how good this institution can be at its best”.
AP: Yes, so that’s completely right. I think that one other sort of avenue that we’re also thinking about is precisely the… not so much the analogy but thinking about what abolition meant in the context of slavery, and thinking about the difference between those who were calling for reform and those who were calling for immediate liberation. And the reason why this is important I think in the animal rights context is that no abolitionist says “release all of the animals tomorrow”, right, like everybody says that that would be… it would be a harmful thing to do because many animals wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves, and it makes the position seem unattractive and undesirable. But I guess that one thing that I’m sort of wondering about is whether we should just accept that, right, like maybe there’s more to that kind of immediate liberation, that maybe reform and incremental change in the long run just doesn’t do anything, right, it just leaves much of the stuff that’s problematic in place. And so yes, some animals might come to harm, but many animals come to harm every day, it’s not… So, yes, I guess that’s something else that I’m kind of musing about.
MO: I mean, thinking about the abolition of meat agriculture, you might just be… we might just find ourselves in a moral tragedy where we’ve genetically engineered animals that can’t live in the wild, and maybe there isn’t a happy end but there is a less morally bad end, and to the extent that it’s within our power it might be obligatory.
AP: Yeah
RH: That seems right
AP: And I think as well, again, one of the responses to immediate liberation is “oh, it would be chaos because we’ve got all of these animals”, but I think that that just, again, reinforces this point that yes, we are manufacturing these crises that we face, right, these are situations that we’re making and we need to take responsibility for that. And it doesn’t necessarily mean immediate liberation but, you know, I think there is a question there about why not…
RH: But it also doesn’t necessarily mean immediate liberation and then just standing there hands-off and letting whatever unfolds unfold-
AP: That’s right, that’s right.
RH: It might be that, like, immediate liberation with a whole bunch of things we try to put in place to facilitate that as best we can going well, but, again, I don’t know.
AP: Yeah. But just things to think about, because I don’t, I don’t know.
MO: I remember in the 80s and 90s there was a comic book… I’m not sure if they were villains, but they were an eco-terrorist group called “Humans Off Planet”, and that was basically the base of their platform, and I said “well, it would solve all the problems…”
AP & RH: [laugh]
AP: It’s true, the view hasn’t quite taken us there yet, but I guess we’ll see where… but who knows…
END OF TRANSCRIPT
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