Critical Animal Studies by McCance Dawne

Author:McCance, Dawne [McCance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438445366
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Ethics of Care

Carol Adams elaborates her more recent critique of rights theory in favor of a feminist “ethics of care” in the above-mentioned anthology she edited with Josephine Donovan, The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics. The book—a sequel to the 1996 collection edited by Donovan and Adams, Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals—includes many of the chapters that appeared in the 1996 volume along with chapters that respond to it, and/or outline “new theoretical developments” (1) in the feminist animal care approach. The book provides a good overview of the features that set the feminist care tradition apart, features that we will briefly consider here—some suggestive of a movement beyond the tenets of humanism, some retaining humanist concepts, albeit differently, feminist care theorists maintain.

For example, a dual, but not dualist, account of sexual difference is evident in feminist ethics of care theory, a theory that, according to Donovan and Adams in their Introduction to the 2007 book, traces its origins to Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice. Gilligan's book, they explain, “identifies a women's ‘conception of morality’ that is ‘concerned with the activity of care … responsibility and relationships,’ as opposed to a man's ‘conception of morality as fairness,’ which is more concerned with ‘rights and rules’ ” (Donovan and Adams Feminist, 1–2). Tom Regan comes under attack here. Donovan argues that his rights theory “privileges those with complex awareness over those without,” and “depends on a notion of complex consciousness that is not far removed from rational thought, thus, in effect, reinvoking the rationality criterion” of the Cartesian-Kantian tradition (62). Stemming from natural rights theory, Regan's animal ethics privileges rationalism and individualism, and Donovan notes, it excludes “sentiment” from “ ‘serious’ intellectual inquiry” (62).

Rejecting rights, and “abstract, rule-based principles,” the feminist care tradition favors a “situational, contextual ethics” (2). Still, this is not the “situation ethics” advocated by Peter Singer, whose approach also faces significant critique in the 2007 Donovan-Adams volume. Writing in that volume, Deborah Slicer refers to the “Singer-Regan approach,” which she characterizes as essentialist and based on a self-centric moral standard of sameness: “Singer and Regan extend the moral community to include animals on the basis of sameness. They do not acknowledge, much less celebrate, differences between humans and other animals” (109). They rely on “general, prescriptive principles” that are largely indifferent to context, oversimplifying, and presented as if they were the only options available to ethics today (111–113). And not the least, in line with the “masculinist contempt for our emotions,” both fail to account for love, friendship, feelings—a variety of affective responses—as appropriate and necessary to animal ethics (113–114).

In the 2007 Donovan and Adams volume, addressing what she calls “the war on compassion,” Carol Adams traces human indifference to animal suffering to the “ability to objectify feelings, so they are placed outside the political realm” (33). In the feminist care tradition, on the contrary, compassion is theorized as inescapably political. Attention is the key word here, Donovan

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.