The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies by Lynn Turner & Undine Sellbach & Ron Broglio

Author:Lynn Turner & Undine Sellbach & Ron Broglio [Turner, Lynn & Sellbach, Undine & Broglio, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474418416
Google: MkxBvgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1474418414
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2018-03-23T01:10:49.065000+00:00

Identity, or How (Not) to ‘Overcome the Rulers through

Their Own Rules’

The identity approach to animal issues is one that dominates in analytic animal ethics and in animal law. The primary aim of this approach is to argue for continuity among human beings and animals at certain ethically and legally relevant levels, and then use arguments from analogy and principles of consistent reasoning to extend basic protections usually reserved for humans to animals based on those shared similarities. This strategy is constructed in view of contesting what identity theorists see as an unjust ‘speciesism’ – usually defined as an ‘irrational’ prejudice on behalf of the human species and against non-human animals – that pervades the current social order. Given its roots in philosophical circles, the historical narrative that is offered to explain our present circumstances tends to be conceptual and intellectual in nature. Speciesism is often traced back to origins in ancient Greek thought and early Christian tradition, both of which emphasise human exceptionalism and human rank over animals in the Great Chain of Being. It is also usually emphasised in these narratives that several canonical philosophical figures (Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant and so on) have actually played essential roles in elaborating and defending the dogmas of speciesism.16

Although there have been occasional pro-animal philosophers and other figures in this intellectual history, identity thinkers often locate the chief challenge to speciesism in the modern Darwinian challenge to human exceptionalism. In establishing fundamental continuity among human and animal life in the broader unfolding of evolutionary history, Darwin removes a key ideological support for speciesism. Claims about unique, species-wide human characteristics along with insuperable abysses between human beings and animals are replaced by a biological framework with more complex evolutionary stories that highlight shared anatomy, physiology and cognition, and that admit differences between human beings only in terms of degree. Once this basic human-animal continuity is established, then simple application of equal consideration for like beings requires that human beings and animals should receive similar ethical and legal standing in those cases where they are relevantly similar. Identity theorists thus see our current established order as deeply irrational, inasmuch as it relies on outmoded human-animal ontologies that posit sharp breaks at cognitive and behavioural levels and unjust conceptions of ethical consideration. In contemporary society, animals are routinely placed outside the ethical and legal community and subject to being killed with impunity in a wide variety of contexts, from factory farming to medical experimentation to hunting. Identity theorists argue that once we begin to see the utterly arbitrary, contingent and outmoded nature of dominant attitudes and practices regarding animals, we might – indeed, ought to – begin to think about how best to contest them.

Although the identity framework is sometimes characterised by critics as being extreme or radical, it is actually rather conservative in terms of its attitudes towards the general ethical and legal principles and rules of the dominant social order. Identity theorists do not usually mount any sort of broad challenge to common-sense

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