Dignity, Captivity, and an Ethics of Sight

Gruen, Lori

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977994.003.0015

Cited by 43 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…This is less clear. While there are compelling accounts of how we routinely violate the dignity of animals (Cataldi 2002;Gruen 2014;Humphreys 2016;Loder 2016), they tend to focus on specific contexts of public/visible degradation (such as circuses and zoos), 19 rather than the often invisible structures of exploitation on farms or labs that are the heart of animal oppression in our society. While some defenders of animal rights argue that dignity can operate as the general grounding for animal rights (Bilchitz 2009), others argue that it is not a helpful register for grounding basic animal rights (Zuolo 2016), if only because dignity talk is saturated with the idea that dignity involves not being treated as an animal.…”

Section: Locating Species Hierarchy In the Hr Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human rights without human supremacism

Kymlicka

2018

Can. J. of Philosophy

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Early defenders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights invoked species hierarchy: human beings are owed rights because of our discontinuity with and superiority to animals. Subsequent defenders avoided species supremacism, appealing instead to conditions of embodied subjectivity and corporeal vulnerability we share with animals. In the past decade, however, supremacism has returned in work of the new ‘dignitarians’ who argue that human rights are grounded in dignity, and that human dignity requires according humans a higher status than animals. Against the dignitarians, I argue that defending human rights on the backs of animals is philosophically suspect and politically self-defeating.

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Section: Locating Species Hierarchy In the Hr Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human rights without human supremacism

Kymlicka

2018

Can. J. of Philosophy

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“…Members of a society can infer from the fact that the system of animal agriculture is legal in that society that 38 Cf. Piazza et al (2015); Gruen (2014).…”

Section: The Social Effects Of Animal Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consequentialism and Nonhuman Animals

John

Sebo

2020

The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism

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Consequentialism is thought to be in significant conflict with animal rights theory because it does not regard activities such as confinement, killing, and exploitation as in principle morally wrong. Proponents of the “Logic of the Larder” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly pro-exploitation stance, permitting us to eat farmed animals with positive well-being to ensure future such animals exist. Proponents of the “Logic of the Logger” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly anti-conservationist stance, permitting us to exterminate wild animals with negative well-being to ensure future such animals do not exist. We argue that this conflict is overstated. Once we have properly accounted for indirect effects, such as the role that our policies play in shaping moral attitudes and behavior and the importance of accepting policies that are robust against deviation, we can see that consequentialism may converge with animal rights theory significantly, even if not entirely.

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“…Writing on prison and zoo tourism, Kelly Struthers Montford points out that “the human/animal dualism is deployed to establish certain humans and animals as subjects of objectification and therefore viewable captives” (2016:78). Indeed, the act of looking is embedded with uneven hierarchies of power, and the reality of being inescapably looked at or surveilled as captive beings (both human and animal) erodes a fundamental sense of dignity (Gruen :240). On their own experience of being incarcerated, Bryant et al.…”

Section: Colonial Encounters In the Meeting Of The South And The Westmentioning

confidence: 99%

Placing Angola: Racialisation, Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary's Angola Rodeo

Gillespie

2018

Antipode

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The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallises violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects. Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanisation inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this paper works to interrogate and disrupt the human–animal binary through which processes of dehumanisation are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the paper centres empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialisation and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the paper suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and instead, takes a de‐anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice.

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Dignity, Captivity, and an Ethics of Sight

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

Human rights without human supremacism

Human rights without human supremacism

Consequentialism and Nonhuman Animals

Placing Angola: Racialisation, Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary's Angola Rodeo

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