Solidarity Between Human and Non-Human Animals: Representing Animal Voices in Policy Deliberations

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the bridging potential of "interspecies" solidarity between the often incommensurable ethics of care and justice. Indeed, we show that the Environmental Communication literature emphasizes feelings of care and compassion as vectors of responsibility taking for animals. But we also show that a growing field of Political AnimalRights suggest that such responsibility taking should instead be grounded in universalizable terms of justice. Our argument is that a dual conception of solidarity can bridge this divide: On the one hand, solidarity as a pre-political relation with animals and, on the other hand, as a political practice based on open public deliberation of universalizable claims to justice; that is, claims to justice advanced by human proxy representatives of vulnerable non-humans. Such a dual conception can both challenge and validate NGOs' claims to "speak on behalf of animals" in policy following the Aarhus Convention, indeed underwriting the Convention by insights from internatural communication in solidarity as relation, and by subjecting it to rational scrutiny in mini-publics in solidary as practice.KEYWORDS: Solidarity, internatural communication, discourse ethics, proxy representation, mini-publics Pre-production version of manuscript published in Journal of Environmental Communication http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10. 1080/17524032.2016.1269820 2 Solidarity between Human and Non-Human Animals: Representing Animal Voices in Policy DeliberationsWhile perhaps equally important in defining our relationships to vulnerable others, the concepts of care and justice are often presented as in profound tension with one another (Noddings, 1984;Gilligan, 1987;Okin, 1989). On the one hand, it is thought that such relationships must be based on feelings of care and empathetic understanding of the needs andinterests of the vulnerable who cannot, for one reason or another, rationally formulate or articulate their own good (Goodin, 1986;Donovan, 1996;Fineman, 2008). On the other hand, it is thought that our relationship and responsibility-taking for vulnerable others must be based on universalizable claims to justice; claims that gain validity through rational argumentative defenses against skeptical challenges concerning what the vulnerable need and what they are properly owed (Regan, 1995;Garner, 2012). Indeed, the rational universalizability of claims to rights and justice proves essential to the task of giving public justification to policy decisions concerning vulnerable members of the shared political community (Goodin, 1996). Here, the tension between the concepts of care and justice derives from a difference in emphasis regarding the basis of moral responsibility (Buchanan, 2013). This is the difference between developing feelings of being responsible for vulnerable others and defending before a universal audience of all those who are purportedly placed under an obligation that they should to take responsibility.Such a tension between care and justice is by no mean limited ...

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