Abstract
In his chapter, Guy Scotton notes how the “political turn” has concentrated on various forward-looking aspects of the moral, political, and legal standing of nonhuman animals, and has had little to say about the symbolic, narrative, and affective dimensions of interspecies justice. As such, Scotton develops a framework of interspecies evils and atrocities in order to begin a conversation between interspecies ethics and the literature on the politics of memory and reconciliation. Scotton asks what might it mean for societies to be sorry, and to take historical responsibility, for vast and still expanding systems of exploitation and dispossession of nonhuman animals, and then proposes that the tasks of moral repair highlight new opportunities, as well as new limitations and asymmetries, for the project of just interspecies community.
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Notes
- 1.
Elsewhere, Scarre offers, without elaboration, that “hunting animals purely for sport plausibly counts as evil under my working definition” (2012, p.75n.2).
- 2.
In an essay responding to Glover’s book, Nussbaum (2010) evokes interspecies comparisons, though her purpose is not to highlight nonhuman animal suffering per se; rather, she explores “two important silences” in Glover’s book, one being the affinities between the emotional lives of humans and nonhumans, the other being “the human denial of kinship with the animal, and the misogyny that is all too often a concomitant of that denial” (2010, p.206). The issue of “suffering in the factory food industry” is invoked in a subsidiary way to illustrate compassion ( Ibid , p.209).
- 3.
I use “interspecies evils” and “interspecies atrocities” throughout to mean “human evils towards other species” and “human atrocities towards other species”.
- 4.
Often, nonhuman models for human psychology are discussed by reference to experiments that in and of themselves constitute interspecies atrocities—a point which troubles Baron-Cohen in his treatment of “the science of evil”: “In Chapter 1 I was clearly condemning of the Nazi experiments that tested how long a person could tolerate freezing water, yet here I seem to be willing to justify Harlow’s and Hinde’s monkey experiments. I suspect I am guilty of a double standard when it comes to human versus animal research” (2011, p.203n.v).
- 5.
For representative criticisms of these comparisons from non-animal rights perspectives, see Costelloe (2003) and MacDonald (2006). Kim (2011) defends PETA’s exhibits on the “moral” grounds that they contribute to the “destabilization” of historically particular dualities and hierarchies, but criticises them for their “political” hazards in alienating the mainstream media and for hindering intersections with other anti-oppression causes, concluding that coalition-building should take prominence.
- 6.
Despite being a “high-temperature and high-profile phenomenon”, the concept of moral horror has received little philosophical attention (Wilson & Wilson, 2003, p.321). Wilson and Wilson’s paper raises apt concerns about the resemblance of horror to disgust and the tendency to aversion and its corresponding affiliation with discourses of purity and contamination. However, I disagree with their assessment of moral horror as a form of taboo which occludes rational reflection, a sort of psychological allergic reaction which in our moral reasoning “we should strive to get rid of” ( Ibid , p.327). Horror is not simply an aversive reaction—a moral sneeze—and, in the particularity of our own experience of horror, we may in fact become more receptive to the particular suffering of victims of evil, and to the specific “ordinary goodness” of the lives which evil so definitively ruptures (Ruddick, 2003, p.218).
- 7.
Interest in the more-than-human consequences of warfare is growing in environmental history and the emerging sub-discipline of warfare ecology. However, as Bankoff remarks, nonhuman animals “rarely appear directly in these narratives but are generally regarded as an undifferentiated part of an abstract environment or, at best, as elements of a threatened ecosystem” (2010, p.205).
- 8.
Card notes Gary Francione’s formulation of this argument in passing (2010, p.118), in one of her only direct references to the animal ethics literature.
- 9.
As my interest here is in secular accounts of evil, I leave aside the prospect of divine judgement and punishment. Also, I assume that the animal rights movement will continue to be overwhelmingly non-violent.
- 10.
Discussing the model of communal decision-making practised at VINE Sanctuary, in which humans deliberate in a large barn in the presence of the sanctuary’s nonhuman residents, Donaldson and Kymlicka suggest that nonhuman animals “cannot articulate their views in discussion, but they are a presence, a reminder, and a check, on human deliberation” (2015, p.67).
- 11.
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Scotton, G. (2017). Interspecies Atrocities and the Politics of Memory. In: Woodhall, A., Garmendia da Trindade, G. (eds) Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54549-3_13
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