Book Review: Zoopolis

Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights by Sue Donaldson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I understand it, Donaldson and Kymlicka's Zoopolis is something of a must-read for those interested in understanding the contemporary political turn in animal ethics. In this post, I'll discuss the first half of Zoopolis, where Donaldson and Kymlicka explain the theory underlying their proposed way of incorporating animals within political communities.

Summary

The book begins by portraying the modern animal advocacy movement as more or less a failure. Although we can find moderate victories (such as California's Prop 2 and the subsequent Prop 12, which together banned animal products sourced from gestation crates, veal crates, and battery cages), these reforms are but a blip on the screen. Once we zoom out, we see a larger picture of increased harm and exploitation. Since 1960, wild animal populations have dropped by 1/3; since 1980, world meat production has tripled; and these trends are likely to continue.

According to Donaldson and Kymlicka (hereafter D&K), these failures can be attributed to the flawed moral frameworks used by animal advocates. The animal question is largely approached by one of three dominant frameworks: the welfarist approach, the ecological approach, and the basic rights approach. The welfarist and ecological approaches both assume a moral hierarchy. The former maintains that animals should be treated humanely, but only if this does not require substantial sacrifices on the part of humans; the latter maintains that the good of individual animals is subordinate to the good of ecosystems, largely because of the value these ecosystems provide for humans.

On the other hand, the basic rights approach gives animals full moral standing, ascribing universal negative rights, such as the right against killing. But for D&K, that is precisely the problem: the basic rights approach focuses only on universal negative rights. In doing so, it fails both intellectually and politically. As a matter of theory, the basic rights approach misses half of the moral picture, neglecting important questions about the particular positive obligations we owe to animals. As a matter of practice, this emphasis on universal negative rights alienates potential allies. Since universal negative rights are best respected by avoiding human-animal interactions altogether, the basic rights approach appears to demand an end to meaningful forms of interaction such as the guardianship of companion animals. On the other hand, since these rights are universal, the basic rights approach appears to demand that we interfere with nature to prevent predation. Thus, D&K maintain, modern animal rights theory (ART) must be revised for both intellectual and political reasons.

In chapter 2, D&K review the arguments for animal rights, drawing on figures such as Regan and Francione. They ground the existence of animal rights in the fact that animals possess selfhood: animals are different from rocks because there is someone home, as animals can experience the world from their own perspective. Interestingly, D&K think that selfhood should replace the notion of personhood. They make two points. First, a distinction between "mere" selfhood and personhood would be useless since it could not justify an anthropocentric conception of rights. Here, they appeal to the argument from species overlap: any attempt to include all and only humans within the realm of rights would inevitably fail because of variation within humans and animals. Second, they claim that this distinction would be unjustified on its own terms since it attempts to draw a hard line along a continuum of more or less advanced forms of agency. I'm not so convinced of this second claim since there really does appear to be a qualitative difference between typical human agency and typical nonhuman agency. Humans have a certain form of reflective self-consciousness that allows us to entertain normative questions--questions about what we ought to do and what we ought to believe. This is substantiated by our own first-person experience and the remarkable diversity in human lifestyles. Rejecting such a qualitative difference between "mere" selfhood and personhood would seem to contradict the view that only humans can be moral agents, and it is hard to see how such a revisionary picture of moral agency could be sustained. At any rate, this position does not seem to play any crucial role within D&K's overall theory.

In chapter 3, D&K argue for an expansion of ART to include positive obligations grounded in our particular relations with animals. The resulting picture is best illustrated by looking at humans. Although modern political theorists do typically ascribe universal negative rights to humans, they do not simply stop there. Instead, humans also have particular obligations owed to them based on the relations in which they stand to other individuals and institutions: one has a right to vote in one's home country, but not in a foreign country. Modern political theorists ground these differentiated rights in citizenship theory, a framework for understanding how different groups of individuals stand in relation to the state. These different relations are supposed to ground different rights.

But why should one accept this theory of rights? Doesn't it exhibit unjust partiality? D&K defend citizenship theory over a cosmopolitan alternative on both pragmatic and principled grounds. Pragmatically, this is already the world we live in, and robust political institutions would be hard to maintain without practices of partiality and attachment. Moreover, some would argue that preferential attachments are part of the good life: individuals must feel that they are part of some particular community, and they require a right to self-determination that can only exist when social environments are partitioned. This principled defense seems to be quite weak. Although I would agree that special relationships are essential to the good life, it is hard to see why the relevant level of attachment should be to one's nation rather than one’s race, ethnicity, world, galaxy, and so on. It seems likely that this focus on the state is merely a cultural product, not necessarily constitutive of the good life. Nonetheless, the pragmatic defense provides good reason to adopt citizenship theory.

But there is, of course, a seeming confusion in applying citizenship theory to animals. We think of citizens as those with a right to debate in town halls, vote in elections, and so on; yet animals can do none of these. Here D&K provide an enlightening analysis of the function of citizenship, perhaps my favorite part of the book. On their account, citizenship consists of at least three dimensions: rights of nationality, inclusion within popular sovereignty, and democratic political agency. All people must have a right to live somewhere, and citizenship affords them this right to nationality by granting them the ability to reside in and return to one's nation. Animals can clearly be called citizens in this sense since they too need a home, and humans have taken over much habitable land. In modern times, we think of the state as a republic in the sense of a res publica, a public affair. The state derives its legitimacy from the popular sovereignty of its citizens, those individuals for whose sake the state governs. Animals can be citizens in this sense, too, since political structures influence the lives of animals. Lastly, citizens are not only passive beneficiaries of political structures but also democratic political agents, playing an active role in political decision-making. As remarked above, one might think that animals surely cannot be citizens in this sense since they lack the requisite cognitive capacities. But this position relies on a uniform conception of political agency, failing to recognize that individuals can play an active role in many ways. For instance, the modern disability rights movement has pushed for disabled individuals to have a form of democratic political agency known as "assisted agency." This form of cooperation allows caretakers to infer preferences from disabled individuals, thus allowing these individuals to represent their own good. In short, D&K reject the notion that animals cannot be citizens, saying:

Many people assume that animals cannot be citizens because (a) citizenship is about the exercise of political agency; and (b) political agency requires cognitively sophisticated capacities for public reason and deliberation. Neither claim is correct, even for human beings. Citizenship is about more than political agency, and political agency takes forms other than public reason.

But even supposing that animals can be citizens as a conceptual matter, it does not straightforwardly follow that citizenship theory makes sense for animals. According to a common picture of human-animal relationships, there are only two categories: wild animals and domesticated animals. The former should be left alone, and the latter cannot be given justice since their very existence is unjust. D&K object that this picture is both descriptively and normatively flawed. Descriptively, it fails to recognize various groups of animals that cannot properly be called wild or domesticated: for instance, so-called "liminal animals" such as squirrels, raccoons, and geese. Furthermore, wild animals cannot simply be “left alone,” given the global effects of a state’s actions: for instance, through climate change. They also cannot have “no-go zones” built around them since wild animals migrate around and within human areas. Normatively, although domesticated animals might have been brought into being through an unjust process, that does not mean we should seek extinction, but rather that we must attend to the obligations due to them no. Likewise, wild animals should not simply be “left alone” since we have already fundamentally altered their habitats.

Once we recognize the common picture of human-animal relationships as fundamentally flawed, we see the need for citizenship theory to help us make sense of our relational and differentiated duties to particular groups of animals. Domesticated animals can be seen as more typical citizens; liminal animals can be seen as "denizens," and so on. Thus D&K have provided the foundations for a more comprehensive theory of animal rights.

Analysis

Donaldson and Kymlicka do a great job of outlining the history and philosophy behind the modern animal movement. Their criticisms are astute, and their explanation of citizenship theory as applied to animals is both novel and interesting. According to my knowledge, recent work in political theory regarding animals such as Alasdair Norcross' Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice are largely responses to the relational and differentiated rights approach advocated by D&K. Having not dived deeply into the literature yet myself, I have some initial reservations, both in theory and in practice. D&K want to apply citizenship theory not only in understanding the obligations we have to animals residing within political communities but also in understanding the obligations we have to wild animals. However, it seems unclear why the normative categories employed in citizenship theory apply to wild animals. A biome composed of wild animals is not some organized entity that can be compared to a foreign country. The life of a wild animal is as Hobbes envisioned the state of nature: nasty, brutish, and short. The wilderness seems more comparable to a failed state than a sovereign nation, in which case intervention seems more appropriate. I have some more reading to do on this debate since I know figures such as Oscar Horta have criticized D&K's account of wild animals. More pragmatically, it isn't clear that D&K's framework is likely to solve the impasse that the authors discuss in the beginning. It seems to me that a relational approach might even lead us to focus excessively on companion animals and liminal animals, all the while exploitative industries continue to harm more and more animals.

Despite these reservations, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the modern debate in animal ethics and political theory. I'm sure that I will return to this work, and perhaps some of my reservations will be defused by a more thorough understanding.