On the tension between liberalism and animal rights

My friend and comrade Jonathan Birch has gifted me with another guest post. The first of his, which I also enjoyed, can be found here. I really appreciate his honest and frank look into the emotional and social stakes of his own work on animal rights. Without further ado over to Birch!

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Liberalism and animal rights sit uneasily together. Liberalism calls for mutual toleration between different ways of life. Among the deepest, most entrenched parts of many ways of life are practices involving the farming, killing and eating of animals. In calling for robust animal rights to be written into law, animal advocates are calling for many of these practices to be banned. If a ban is to mean anything, it must be enforced. If robust animal rights were to be enforced, many would face criminal convictions for continuing to live as they do now.

The tension is obvious and arises constantly, because many animal advocates also have liberal sympathies. The tension is also widely acknowledged. (For other discussions of it, see Basl and Schouten 2018 (OA); Berkey 2017 (paywall); Garner 2013 (book); Magaña 2023 (OA); Plunkett 2016 (OA); Read and Birch 2023 (OA); Schultz-Bergin 2017 (OA); Smith 2012 (book).) As someone drawn towards both views, I feel the tension acutely. It pains me a lot. How can it be resolved, avoided or at least reduced? Can it?

The anti-cruelty consensus

Here is what I see as the mainstream strategy: focus on the existing consensus against cruelty to animals and nudge that consensus forward gently, by small increments. People across society, regardless of their way of life, nowadays agree that cruelty to animals is inexcusable. Anti-cruelty organisations like the RSPCA are widely respected. Cruelty has no place in any reasonable way of life—it’s morally beyond the pale—and so a liberal state can act against it. We still see fierce disagreements about whether specific practices are cruel or not, but that’s unavoidable. The consensus against cruelty in general remains, and it’s a significant achievement of the last two hundred years—a form of moral progress. We can start from here and argue outwards to a broader category than intentional cruelty while keeping everyone on board. 

This is the strategy I pursued in The Edge of Sentience, where I argued that the duty to take appropriate precautions when creating risks of suffering is a further point of overlapping consensus that a liberal state can legitimately enforce. This category is broader than intentional cruelty. It also encompasses negligence and recklessness in cases where your action or inaction puts animals at risk of suffering and where you fail to take proportionate steps to address the risk.

This duty goes quite a long way, in my view. It allows a liberal state to legitimately ban industry practices that, when held up to the light, create unjustifiable risks of suffering. This includes gestation crates, battery cages and the use of super-fast-growing breeds of chicken with terrible health problems. It, moreover, allows a liberal state to act against negligent treatment of traditionally overlooked sentience candidates, such as crabs, lobsters and octopuses. 

Does it go all the way to enforceable rights? It does, but these rights must be of a very minimal kind. If the law properly enforces a duty to take appropriate precautions, then we can say that animals have a right not to be put at risk of suffering without such precautions being taken. Saskia Stucki and Eva Bernet Kempers have written about “simple rights” like this and how they can be incrementally strengthened over time. But such rights are very limited. “Proportionate” steps can only go so far. Go too far and the liberal credentials of the state will be eroded because some ways of life (e.g. those of some religions, or those of rural or fishing communities) will be repressed.

I’ve noticed that these arguments tend to produce a certain eye-rolling from radical animal rights theorists: congratulations on inching things forward so imperceptibly that no one even noticed their assumptions were being challenged! Great job! But I hope you realise that this route cannot possibly lead to the end of animal exploitation. For even if successful on its own terms it inevitably reaches a wall. If you get to a point where animals are still being exploited everywhere all the time, but in a way that causes them no gratuitous suffering—because all the suffering is for reasons acknowledged within at least one established way of life as good, important reasons—then a liberal state will not be able to do any more for them.

I take the criticism seriously. What, then, are the other ways of responding to the tension? 

Two are obvious. One is to drop any aspiration of ending animal exploitation—this is the easiest path, the path of most liberals. But there’s no way I can do that, because I see the aspiration as extremely important, no matter how far off it may seem now. 

The other is to drop any pretence of liberalism. We’d say: the animal rights project often sounds illiberal because it is illiberal. It is a project of forcing humanity to improve. People must alter entrenched aspects of their ways of life because they rest on animal exploitation. To end all that, we will ultimately need the full force of the law to be brought down on practices that are currently the norm. If that sounds a little draconian, so what? The world is full of vain, stupid, macho authoritarian projects; whereas here, at last, is an authoritarian project supported by strong moral arguments. 

But, speaking for myself, I’m even less able to take that path. I just don’t have an authoritarian cell in me.

So I’ve been searching for more sophisticated ways of resolving the tension. I know of two. One of them is quite prominent, the other one much less so, but I’d like to see it discussed more often.

The path of the multispecies polity

The much-discussed option aims to reconcile liberalism within animal rights by revising the scope of liberalism to include all sentient beings. This expanded liberalism is no longer about mutual toleration between different human ways of life, secured by just institutions that represent all human interests, but instead about peaceful coexistence as far as possible between all members of a multispecies polity, secured by just institutions that represent both human and non-human interests. These institutions might then create legitimacy for the use of state power to enforce the basic rights of all members of the polity. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis is the best-known defence of this path (though I also recommend Alisdair Cochrane’s Sentientist Politics).
    
I’m pleased that this path has been getting attention. It is a creative, thoughtful proposal for removing the animal rights/liberalism tension. But I also think the attention has brought to light serious problems. I fear the idea of the multispecies polity treats non-human animals as possessing a level of political agency they do not in fact have. 

Angie Pepper, a committed defender of animal rights who is also admirably realistic about the demands of political agency, has made this argument in depth. Other animals are not capable of participating in citizen-like ways in political processes and institutions. Even the most intelligent non-human animals are still not competent to elect representatives, run for office, hold property, respect legal and democratic norms, or hire legal representation. This isn’t underestimating them; it’s just estimating them accurately. The problem is even more stark when we think about less intelligent yet still plausibly sentient animals, such as shrimps.

Animals can, admittedly, have human wards who act on their behalf to the best of their ability. But then the proposal becomes one of empowering the wards, not one of genuinely empowering non-human citizens or their elected representatives. The wards would inevitably choose in accordance with their own values, so the outcome would be very sensitive to the choice of ward. 

If vets or animal welfare scientists were selected as the wards for non-human animals, we could expect a set of outcomes no more radical than the typical values of vets or animal welfare scientists. These outcomes might ultimately be more conservative than those of the mainstream path. 

By contrast, if animal advocates were selected as the wards, far more radical outcomes would result. But it would be hard to see that version of the proposal as a credible form of liberalism. It wouldn’t be a system that treats all political agents equally regardless of their substantive political views; it would be a system that elevates a subset of political agents with strong substantive positions—i.e. animal advocates—to positions of power on the grounds of their contested claim to special insight into the interests of non-humans.

Again, perhaps a “so what?” question arises. Liberalism is fading. The world is full of vain, stupid, macho buffoons ascending to a higher plane of authority on grounds of their contested claim to special insight into the interests of “the people”. Empowering animal advocates would be vastly more benign than what is in fact happening. But this is still a bubbling up of an authoritarian impulse, and I’m uneasy with it.

The path of nonviolent anarchism

There’s another option that from a purely intellectual point of view is the most interesting to me. It’s this: the point of calling for animal rights is not to get the state to coercively enforce those rights. The point is to start a process of reflection that leads to a more fundamental reshaping of human values, calling into question the idea of the state itself. For, once we see that animals have a claim to rights that a liberal state can never grant, we see the moral bankruptcy of the liberal state. And since the liberal state was always the version with the best shot at moral solvency, we thereby see the moral bankruptcy of the state, full stop. We thereby come to see the need for ways of life that don’t rely on states to enforce mutual toleration. In short, we lean not into authoritarianism but into anarchism.

I’ve been thinking about arguments like this for about twenty years. They scare me because they might be right. 

The basic line of thought is one I first came across in J. M. Coetzee’s writing. In Disgrace, a novel in which dogs appear constantly (including on the original cover), there is a messiah-like character called Lucy who advocates total nonviolence. She recognises that, in doing so, she has to relinquish any protection provided by the state. She aims

    “to start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.”

    “Like a dog.”

    “Yes, like a dog.”

If you put forward that view in the seminar room, the glib reply would come: sure, but let’s see if you still say that once you’re the victim of someone else’s violence. So Coetzee, in the novel, has Lucy explain her outlook after becoming a victim of someone else’s violence, sucking the air from the standard trite response and stopping the reader’s train of thought from following its usual track. Instead, the reader is forced onward into an uncomfortable reflection on the foundations of state power and on the way enforcing the rights of some always and inevitably leads to the crushing of others—if not human others, then non-human others. It forces reflection on the possibility of living differently without hiding the reality of what that would involve in our present circumstances. It would require a willingness to risk being crushed.

Coetzee lays out similar ideas more explicitly in Diary of a Bad Year, where his alter ego expounds a politics of “pessimistic anarchistic quietism”. That book lays on thick the same series of troubling thoughts that Disgrace tries to evoke indirectly. Coetzee’s anarchism is “pessimistic” because to opt out from the state’s protection, so as to adopt a totally nonviolent life, makes one immediately vulnerable to lethal violence from others—as vulnerable as a stray dog. And it is “quietist” because it seems dubious to advocate for a view that demands a level of sacrifice so extreme you’re unwilling to make it yourself, even when the moral arguments seem to favour it.

Coetzeean anarchism is not a violent form of anarchism. It’s much closer in spirit to the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy or the gram swaraj (“village self-rule”) of Gandhi, both acknowledged influences. Both Tolstoy and Gandhi, not incidentally, were vegetarians who saw the need for non-violence to extend to our relations with other animals.

How does this path relate to the multispecies polity? I see them as mirror images. The dream of the “zoopolis” overstates the political agency of animals in a well-meaning attempt to bring them within the moral basis of state legitimacy. Think here of Hobbes’ Leviathan frontispiece, made up of consenting citizens conferring legitimacy on the towering sovereign—the idea is that other animals must be in there too, for true legitimacy to be created. Coetzee’s anarchism is the position that, once we see that other animals can’t be in there, the edifice is exposed as a machine for dominating others without any tenable moral basis.

So, is the call for animal rights, at its heart, a call to “start at ground level”, with all that implies? No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights (enforced by state coercion), no dignity, an end to all institutions and practices founded on violence? 

Evidently the type of extreme sacrifice this calls for is not one I have made. You may have noticed that I don’t live outside the state’s protection like a stray dog. I’m content to leave that to fictional characters. And I agree that there is something questionable about advocating views so austere that we ourselves find them psychologically impossible to live by.
    
As on so many things, I’m uncertain and undecided. I’m probably going to keep chipping away with the mainstream strategy for the foreseeable future. It has the advantage of being a strategy I can both advocate and live by. But it is also very limiting, and I think it’s important that the space of alternative responses is properly explored.