Rethinking Animal Ethics Through Mutual Understanding: Towards an Education of Radical Responsibility

Abstract

Animals are the closest human link to nature, which makes animal ethics key to a responsible education in the 21st century. They provide a lens for recalibrating our understanding of society and social relationships as well as societal relationships to animals and nature. A capacity that we already have in relation to animals but reject is at the heart of this role: our capacity for mutual understanding. Hence, we argue for an animal-ethics education that reconfigures the animal ethics of old in response to the insights of our current historical situation and that takes seriously our understanding with animals. What emerges from this is a stance of radical responsibility that challenges an anthropocentric responsibility and human preoccupation with a responsibility of leading, dictating and establishing facts. Recognizing our capacity for mutual understanding across species-boundaries is key to this radical, non-anthropocentric responsibility.