Alasdair Cochrane

The overall aim of Raffael Fasel’s excellent book More Equal than Others is to promote the ‘Species Membership Approach’ (SMA) as the way to award and protect ‘fundamental rights’ (the basic legal rights of individuals that are vital for securing their well-being). It is contrasted with the so-called ‘Meritocratic Approach’ (MA) that assigns rights based on individual characteristics, leaving those without said characteristics excluded from rights. And it is contrasted with the ‘Aristocratic Approach’ (AA) that assigns equal rights to all within a specified group, which traditionally has only been humans. The SMA offers a different way forward by keeping the egalitarian nature of the AA, whereby all humans are recognised as having equal rights. But, the SMA departs from the AA by recognising, akin to the MA, that humans are not the only group who can merit fundamental rights. Rather than assigning rights based on individual characteristics like the MA, the SMA instead extends them on the basis of species membership. This is a provocative and important new approach to our thinking on fundamental rights and it has numerous virtues. Nonetheless, while Fasel is right that some deference to groups is inevitable when assigning rights, it is crucial that we think carefully about the groups which count as relevant. And it is here where I believe Fasel’s argumentation goes astray. I maintain in this paper that sentience—both as an individual characteristic and a relevant grouping—is the proper basis for assigning fundamental legal rights. It further argues that Fasel’s own dismissal of sentience, a position with which he engages at some length, is flawed. In the first section of the paper, I briefly outline my own ‘sentient rights’ approach, and explain how it tackles the problems that Fasel identifies with alternative approaches for awarding fundamental legal rights. In the next two sections, I then confront and rebut the two objections that Fasel makes of this approach: that it inevitably leads to humans losing out to animals when their interests clash; and second, that it cannot award rights of equal value to individuals on the basis that sentience is scalar (comes in degrees). The fourth and final substantive section claims that the SMA’s prioritisation of pragmatism over moral relevance in the award of legal rights is flawed and may in fact stall progressive changes for non-human animals.

‘Solidarity’ is a key concept in political movements and usually bears on matters of labour, health and social justice. As such, it is essential in the reproduction and transformation of communities that support their members and protect their interests. It is sometimes overlooked that interspecies solidarity already pertains with a number of domesticated animals, and that people are willing to carry substantial emotional, financial and social burdens to benefit them. There has been even more reluctance to acknowledge wild animals as fellow members of our political communities with whom we might stand in solidarity. The purpose of this paper is to propose that solidaristic relations with certain wild animals are not only possible, but also already exist in some contexts. It explores three different understandings of solidarity, and in probing to what extent they can be applied to wild animals, it identifies some important different roles they can play in ‘animal politics’, and shows how they can help us reconceive our communities in less anthropocentric terms.

Laws against hate speech protect members of certain human groups. However, they do not offer protection to nonhuman animals. Using racist hate speech as our primary example, we explore the discrepancy between the legal response to hate speech targeting human groups and what might be called anti-animal or speciesist hate speech. We explore two sets of possible defences of this legal discrepancy drawn from the philosophical literature on hate speech—non-consequentialist and harm-based—and find both wanting. We thus conclude that, absent a compelling alternative argument, there is no in-principle reason to support the censure of racist hate speech but not the censure of speciesist hate speech.

Prevailing political and ethical approaches that have been used to both critique and propose alternatives to the existing food system are lacking. Although food security, food sovereignty, food justice, and food democracy all offer something important to our reflection on the global food system, none is adequate as an alternative to the status quo. This article analyses each in order to identify the prerequisites for such an alternative approach to food governance. These include a focus on goods like nutrition and health, equitable distribution, supporting livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and social justice. However, other goods, like the interests of non-human animals, are not presently represented. Moreover, incorporating all of these goods is incredibly demanding, and some are in tension. This raises the question of how each can be appropriately accommodated and balanced. The article proposes that this ought to be done through deliberative democratic processes that incorporate the interests of all relevant parties at the local, national, regional, and global levels. In other words, the article calls for adeliberativeapproach to thedemocratisationof food. It also proposes that one promising potential for incorporating the interests of all affected parties and addressing power imbalances lies in organising the scope and remit of deliberation aroundfood type.

Some of the most important contributions to animal ethics over the past decade or so have come from political, as opposed to moral, philosophers. As such, some have argued that there been a ‘political turn’ in the field. If there has been such a turn, it needs to be shown that there is something which unites these contributions, and which sets them apart from previous work. We find that some of the features which have been claimed to be shared commitments of the turn are contested by key theorists working in the field. We also find that the originality of the turn can be exaggerated, with many of their ideas found in more traditional animal ethics. Nonetheless, we identify one unifying and distinctive feature of these contributions: the focus on justice; and specifically, the exploration of how political institutions, structures and processes might be transformed so as to secure justice for both human and nonhuman animals.

This paper explores the international implications of liberal theories which extend justice to sentient animals. In particular, it asks whether they imply that coercive military intervention in a state by external agents to prevent, halt or minimise violations of basic animal rights (‘humane intervention’) can be justified. In so doing, it employs Simon Caney's theory of humanitarian intervention and applies it to non-human animals. It argues that while humane intervention can be justified in principle using Caney's assumptions, justifying any particular intervention on behalf of animals is much more difficult – and in present circumstances impossible. If these claims are correct, a number of important conclusions follow. First, all states lack legitimacy because of the horrors that they inflict upon animals. As a result of this, all states are prima facie liable to intervention by external agents. To remedy this situation, all states have the responsibility to massively transform their relationship with non-human animals, and to build international institutions to oversee the proper protection of their most basic rights.