The Political Turn as the Political Turns
Or humans and why they matter
This is something of a follow-up to my Unter Menschen-post as I did it again: I spent time, in person, among more other humans than I usually meet in six months in the space of just about two weeks. I have been to seven cities in Germany and Austria and spent a lot of time in about three times as many trains and, despite best intentions, two planes.1 I talked a lot. I also listened a lot, deliberately or inadvertently.
Though I had many wonderful chances to be with many bright, creative, inquiring, conversationally skilled, careful and generous dry-nosed primates of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, the cultural background to these conversations, which mostly were about other animals and the more-than-human, is changing. For one, war efforts are omnipresent — debates about the reintroduction of conscription are made palpable by military personnel in trains and posters advertising the opportunity to combine one’s dreams of life fulfilment with doing good for the country by joining the military as anything from a data scientist to a dog handler to a triangle player (you nearly got me there). If that wasn’t enough, right wing extremist politics and parties dominate the political scene, and I am always so glad to see valid and constitutional efforts to do something about those rather than just anticipating the results of next elections before the political process has taken place. Yet, this process feels dominated by voices I am not used to hearing loudly on a train. Did these four well-fed, well-dressed, comfortably seated elderly ladies really just spend a whole hour complaining? About there being “no German-German-couples at all, at all!”, “kids in class being all dark, I mean dark-dark” and “my daughter’s daughter’s eyes went all brown, too; such a wonderful blue at the start, wouldn’t last; but what can a mother do?”. Next stop: Berchtesgaden. ‘Nuff said.
All of which brings me to a point I increasingly feel I want to make: “There is a way in which thinkers in the animal ethics and politics sphere are ignoring the elephant in the room: humans.”
I have said it before: animal ethics is philosophically almost boring. I know of no moral philosopher who disagrees with what I call a minimal position:
Sentient animals are to be protected for their own sake, insofar as their lives and wellbeing impose limits on human intentions to act. No pain, suffering or harms may be inflicted on these animals without reasonable cause.
Sure, many philosophers, myself included, want to say a lot more. But this much we got right. What we are not getting right is what follows from it, practically, politically.
Some time shortly after the turn of the millennium, thinkers with a background in political theory started to weigh in on animal ethics debates and said, in much more elaborate and inspiring ways: “Look, this is boring and futile. Let’s start thinking about what we positively owe other animals as members of our political communities.” Most notably, Zoopolis was published by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka in 2011, and their ‘realistic utopianism’ — anchored in a commitment to human rights and multicultural democracies — was met with a lot of excitement. So much so that people like Toni Milligan, Alasdair Cochrane et al. and many others started talking of a “political turn” in animal ethics. Philosophers concerned with animal lives and wellbeing could stop arguing with friends, family and colleagues over choices in personal transformation and address structural issues.
Indeed, there was a time when it seemed that reforming political institutions — say to represent other animals’ interests in parliament — and abolishing unjust institutions by the force of politics and the law — say to outlaw any and all practices that violate the minimal position — was just the logical next step in a history of moral progress. A history of which democracy is also a crucial part: Humans have seen the light and are turning their societies into democracies. As they are abolishing all forms of social injustice, they will also look after, recognise, liberate or otherwise politically enfranchise the other animals mixed up in their communities. We have come a long way, but here we are, doing the job after all.
That now looks a bit like an illusion. All of it, but especially the first part. The core political assumption on which the political turn was based — that democratic theory based on human rights is largely accepted as an adequate normative reconstruction of our political reality — turns out to come under pressure. I am not saying democracy is not a good idea. I am saying that not enough democratic citizens think or act as if it is a good idea.2 And this comes against the backdrop of a history in which not all and not even the majority of human communities have been democratic. We have very little practice being good democratic citizens.
What is more, the ethical minimal position on other animals has never been unequivocally translated into animal rights. This is at the root of a lot of misunderstanding between people working on animal protection, liberation and/or welfare, and between them and the public.
If you combine this lack of democratic experience and maturity with the ideas and demands of the political turn in animal ethics, it is easy to see why the latter are not met with more enthusiasm in practice.
I remember having just discovered Midgley and, just after that, the American pragmatists when I came across Zoopolis, in a bookshop in Halifax. I had taken a transatlantic flight to give a talk on why Philipp Kitcher’s The Ethical Project was incomplete if it only stressed the human. That omission struck me as particularly surprising since here was a thinker much influenced by Darwin and his very own book cover featured other animals. I remember a kind but respectfully disagreeing dinner conversation. He lamented the lack of realism in people “like” me, who dreamt of a “peaceable kingdom” in nature. “It is just not there!”
When I browsed a bookshop the next day, my eyes were naturally drawn to the dog on another book cover, peering into a stylish oven together with a woman: Zoopolis. I flicked through the book and was surprised that you could just posit your normative assumptions like that. I bought the book, but I didn’t fully buy the assumptions, which is why I always stayed at the outskirts of the zoopolis debates, which blossomed into a productive niche within animal ethics. Instead, I kept researching the very notion of ‘community’ (a core concept in pragmatism) and the multitude of normative communities humans and other animals build (a plurality Midgley would stress).
Pragmatic thinkers have a harder time gathering support for their project of figuring things out on the ground. It’s messy. But the current turn of things provides us with even more reasons to not treat animal issues as a philosophical niche topic in a branch of applied ethics that is relevant to perhaps vets and dog owners just as medical ethics is relevant to doctors and certain patients. And that insulates itself from debates where consensus is not yet reached as it is in the case of the minimal position.
People may feel that our political cultures are experiencing a serious turn of events — and they are — but that doesn’t make democracy and an adequate concern for other animals as members of our communities a frivolous enterprise. Below is a quote I shared in Göttingen, in which Midgley too suggests that thinking about other animals is not just for “animal lovers” (whatever that means) or once we have sorted all “real” problems — war, xenophobia, poverty — and can turn to “moral luxury” topics. In her paper “The Concept of Beastliness”, Midgley says:
The fact that some people are silly about animals cannot stop the topic being a serious one. Animals are not just one of the things with which people amuse themselves, like chewing-gum and water-skis, they are the group to which people belong. We are not just rather like animals; we are animals. Our difference from our relatives may be striking, but the comparison has always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves. It will matter if, as I believe, the gap comes in a slightly different place from where tradition puts it, as well as being rather narrower. The traditional view has certainly distorted argument in ethics, and may have caused mistakes about the possibilities open to humanity.
It is important to stress both issues at stake here: the ethical distortion and the pragmatic-metaphysical limitations. We are not turning ourselves into the best possible specimens of human beings if we are missing the other animals in the picture.
This is me for today. Get in touch if you would like to continue the conversation in person. I increasingly feel a little lost, like a political animal whose habitat is being destroyed and free movement and … um … reproduction of ideas is complicated. See you.
Night trains are getting somewhere! More on that and the curious incident of the human on a night train in a future post.
I would also argue that not all other animals are naturally and equally inclined to become good democrats, which complicates the multiculturalist approach to animal politics, but that is a different matter.