On Veganism and Animal Rights

I am probably not the only person who has noticed that there are a greater than normal amount of critical articles about vegans and animal rights floating around on social media sites lately. Even among vegans and animal rights people, these articles seem to get more clicks and more comments (again, on the highly particular set of people in my social networks) than essays that try to set out a positive program of social/animal justice.

In any case, as it turns out, there are vegans and animal rights activists who harbour attitudes that are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, ableist, and/or classist. This does not surprise me, given that we live in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society.

Before get to what I want to say, there's part of this debate or critique that seems counter-productive, because there are some people who are fighting about who has x,y or z biases or prejudices, when the best critical work focuses, in ways that are necessarily self-reflexive, on systems and institutions and how they produce individuals--in some way here, with more necessary caveats that I assume I need not list, I mean "produce us as us, whoever that may be"--with prejudices and privileges. 

All this to say, here's what I think: the case for animal rights entails a commitment to human rights. If that sounds too liberal or Kantian, I don't mind saying that the case for animal emancipation entails human emancipation. That's much closer to what I believe. But, if you've come to animal rights and you don't see how the two are connected, and that articulating the two together requires formulating demands for animal rights through dialogue with those who struggle as historically marginalized peoples, and that this will make the process of formulating demands and principles both messy but concrete, then you're an asshole.

But if you're not vegan and you care about animal rights, it turns out that I think that the case for human rights and commitment to the struggles of historically marginalized peoples also, somewhere down the line, entails a commitment to animal rights, and more specifically, direct duties to animals. 

So if you are committed to human rights or human emancipation (and what I'm about to say counts even more if you're one of those people who has been revelling in the that-will-show-those-santimonious-vegans schadenfreude), and you've read your Aristotle, and you know that in defining what makes us human rather than animal, 

the dominant trends in our culture have never been toward respect for the species as a whole but rather for what is considered to be quintessentially human--and this privilege and subject position have always been available only to a small subset of the human species (Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals, p. 26),

and that this has made you conscious of how the so-called anthropological criteria for so-called species inclusion is at best politically fraught, tendentious, and contingent, and you don't see how this applies to animal rights, then you're an asshole, too.

Anti-Humanism and Public Ethics Program

Something that Matt and I will be participating in next week:

Thursday, March 12^th

Morning 

09:30 – 10:00            Registration / Coffee

10:00 – 10:05            Welcome, by Chantal Beauvais, Rector of Saint Paul University

10:05 – 11:05            Marc De Kesel (Saint Paul University):

Between Sade and Labre: Modernity’s Impossible Humanism

                                    Respondent: Andrew Pump (University of Ottawa)

11:05 – 11:15            Coffee Break

11:15 – 12:15            Hélène Tessier (Saint Paul University):

Humanisme et Démocratie: le rationalisme esthétique de Thomas Mann 

Respondent: Anna Djintcharadze (Dominican University College)

12:15 – 13:30             Lunch

Afternoon

13:30 – 14:30             Jean-Pierre Couture (University of Ottawa):

Le posthumanisme de Peter Sloterdijk: du berger génétique à l’athlète anthropotechnique

                                    Respondent: Marc De Kesel (Saint Paul University)

14:30 – 15:30            Mark Salter (University of Ottawa):

Global Ethics: Sovereignty and New Materialism

                                    Respondent: Michael Hijazi (Saint Paul University)

15:30 – 15:45            Coffee Break  

15:45 – 16:45            Devin Z. Shaw, (University of Ottawa and Carleton University):

Curmudgeonly Humanism: From Sartre to Vonnegut

                                    Respondent: Matthew R. McLennan (Saint Paul University)

18.00                           Conference Dinner       

Friday, March 13^th

Morning

10:00 – 11:00            Christopher Sauder (Dominican University College):

De l’existence à la logique : le système hégélien et les origines de l’antihumanisme français

                                    Respondent: Joshua Lalonde (University of Ottawa)

11:00 – 11:15            Coffee Break

11:15 – 12:15            Deniz Guvenc (Carleton University):

Locating Anti-Humanism within Contemporary Anarchism

                                    Respondent: Martin Samson (Saint Paul University)

12:15 – 13:15            Erica Harris (McGill University):

Ethics of Transgression: The Perverse Human Condition and Anti-pornography Legislation

                                    Respondent: Iva Apostolova (Dominican University College)

13:15 – 14:00            Lunch

Afternoon

14:00 – 15:00             Geraldine Finn (Carleton University):

Of all Things Man is the Measure: It is no longer, but it is still a Science of Man

            Respondent: Naomi Goldenberg (University of Ottawa)

15:00 – 15:15              Coffee Break

15:15 – 16:15             Matthew R. McLennan (Saint Paul University):

Medical Humanism: Putting the Ghost into Language

            Respondent: Monique Lanoix (Saint Paul University)

16:15 –16:30               Closing Remarks by Sophie Cloutier (Director of Public Ethics, Saint Paul University)

16:30 – 17:00              Closing Discussion

 

2014: Writing in Review

A bulk of my writing on the blog in 2014 was dedicated to recounting or posting matters related to my next book, Egalitarian Moments. This reflected that most of time that involved writing in general--especially once we subtract writing slides and notes for the two courses that I had to prepare last fall ("Ethics and Social Issues" and "Topics in European Philosophy")--was dedicated to the book as well. I wrote almost all of Part II and the conclusion to the book last year. As a consequence, I rarely found the time to jot down other stray or incomplete thoughts on the blog. I also neglected to mention a few things that I wrote in 2013 that were published in 2014:

• Two entries for The Meillassoux Dictionary, edited by Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis. Those entries are for Descartes and Fichte.
• A chapter for The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew C. Altman. To be more specific, the chapter, "The 'Keystone' of the System: Schelling's Philosophy of Art," is a concise account of what I've argued are the three fundamental features of Schelling's philosophy of art, as elaborated in Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art.

I also began two projects that will occupy parts of 2015:

• A talk at Saint Paul University here in Ottawa where I will be defending something called "curmudgeonly humanism." That term seems to be the only way I could figure out to describe the work of Kurt Vonnegut, so it shouldn't then be a surprise that the talk is about Vonnegut and Sartre. Concerning the latter, I've adopted the term humanism to oppose to a set of assumptions about political agency made by the New Atheists and the field of 'political theology.' (A belated Google search reveals that the term "curmudgeonly humanism" has been kicking around the internet--13 hits--but no one claims it as a developed philosophical position). It looks like this discussion might form the basis of my next book.
• A paper about Schelling, anthropocentrism, and speciesism, for a book on German idealism edited by Joseph Carew. More details on this project will be forthcoming.
• This isn't exactly a project, but I've also decided to write at least one scholarly book review in 2015 as well.