Species-being for whom? The five faces of interspecies oppression
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Species-being for whom? The five faces of interspecies oppression Mathieu Dubeau Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle 98195, USA. [email protected]
Abstract There is now an awakening to and recognition of the emotionally complex lives of some non-human animals. While their forms of consciousness may vary, some are indeed conscious and deserve political consideration. What that political consideration ought to be is the central topic of this article. First, I argue that interspecies justice must be understood in terms of the relationships that foster individual flourishing of all concerned. The obstacles to such flourishing are the five faces of oppression famously identified by Iris Marion Young: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. By extending Young’s concept of the social group to intra- and interspecies groups, we become more attuned to differences between and among species. Theorizing the existence of interspecies groups brings forward new avenues to explore oppression and simultaneously theorize its opposite – interspecies justice. Second, I argue that a positive theory of interspecies flourishing (for human and non-human alike) can be developed on the basis of Marx’s materialist philosophy and reclamation of species-being. Though Marx uses humanist language throughout the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, attention to his methodological commitments reveals that some non-human animals can no longer be excluded from the capability of flourishing and species-being. Some non-human animals are conscious, act purposefully, and labor creatively and must be included in our circle of moral and political concern. Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00363-7 Keywords: Marxism; human-animal studies; species-being; oppression; theories of justice
Three hundred years ago non-human animals were routinely vivisected (many still are), and arguments that animals were organic machines that felt neither pain nor pleasure, and thus should not receive any moral, much less political, consideration were commonplace. Much has changed in our understanding of non-human animals in the last few decades – the proposition that some animals think and feel is no longer immediately repudiated. We are now awakening, daily, to our messy tangle 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Dubeau
in the web of life. We now know that many non-human animals live complex emotional lives that are, at times, similar to, but oftentimes, different from our human experiences (Bekoff and Pierce, 2009; De Waal, 2016; Safina, 2016). If our flourishing is intertwined, dependent, and symbiotically constituted with other living beings, then politics ought to value these relationships as significant and necessary for the pursuit of flourishing. Not surprisingly, updating social and political structures to reflect these changes has been slow. While forms of consciousness may vary, some
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