Sue Donaldson

Make It So: Envisioning a Zoopolitical Revolution

Much contemporary animal rights theory operates within a liberal rights framework which is prone to a kind of legalism—mistaking rights on paper for genuine transformation. This charge has been made of the theory developed in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis, which extends not only liberal ideas of basic rights to animals but also liberal conceptions of citizenship. For critics, incorporating animals into a liberal democratic state is impossible, irrelevant, or hollow, and justice for animals can only be achieved through some “anti-system” alternative to the capitalist liberal nation-state. In this chapter, Donaldson and Kymlicka explore how Zoopolis could be achieved—how incremental advocacy and reform within liberal democratic states could lead toward interspecies justice.

Comment: Between Wild and Domesticated: Rethinking Categories and Boundaries in Response to Animal Agency

As the chapters is this section illustrate, we have to rethink our old categories of wild and domesticated animals. New relationships of mutual impact and hybrid management have been made necessary by relentless human expansion, anthropogenic climate change, and other ecological impacts. The animals involved in these new relations do not fit into the old dichotomy of independent wild animals untouched by humans on the one hand, or dependent domesticated animals under control of humans on the other hand. We need new ideas to help us understand the distinctive ethical challenges of these new relationships, with their mix of freedom and restriction, of independence and dependence, of self-willed agency and external control. The chapter authors of this section draw upon key concepts of animal ethics —care , flourishing, interests, intrinsic and instrumental value, capabilities, welfare, friendship—to negotiate human-animal entanglements. While broadly agreeing with their insights, we argue that their ethical approaches need to be integrated into a broader theory of interspecies justice which explicitly addresses issues of authority, responsibility and self-determination. The fact that humans inevitably affect and interact with ever more animals does not alter the fact that animals’ lives are still theirs to lead, and that human management and intervention is legitimate only insofar as it respects animals as intentional agents. Our theorizing should begin by asking what kinds of lives animals want to live, what kinds of relationships, if any, they want to have with us, and whether our interactions with them bolster or inhibit their ability to lead such lives. We illustrate what such animal agency may mean using the case of the feral horses of Assateague Island.

Die Theorie multikultureller Bürgerrechte eröffnet auch eine spannende Perspektive auf die Frage der Tierrechte

Abstract In this interview, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka reply to some questions and objections to their book Zoopolis (Oxford 2011). A distinctive feature of their approach is the idea that domesticated animals should be seen as cocitizens of our political community. Donaldson and Kymlicka discuss how this view of animal citizenship relates to issues regarding the right to vote, the right to political representation, and rights to residence and membership. The authors also explore how their political account of animal rights theory relates to theories of multiculturalism as well as conflicts between individual and group rights. Addressing these issues, they argue, requires attending to the agency of animals themselves, and not just treating them as passive moral patients.