Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Animals, Humans, and Nature: A Critical Feminist Eco-Socialist Analysis

Ethics and the Environment, 5(2):285-322 Copyright © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. ISSN: 1085-6633 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Animals, Humans, and Nature: A Critical Feminist vai piumwood Eco-Socialist Analysis Is this what it's like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled? Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling—not held aloft on a cloud in me air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land. —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I have suffered With those that I saw suffer! —Miranda, The Tempest THE NEED FOR BETTER INTEGRATION I discuss in this article ways a critical feminist-socialist ecology might begin to re-envisage the projects of animal ethics and defense in a form both more integrated and more effective as a liberatory theory and political movement than the present offerings of animalist theories. Mainstream (mainly male and abstract ) animal ethics theory has many substantial achievements to its credit. It has effectively contested the dominant human-centered assumption that ethics, mind, and communicative capacity are confined to the human sphere, and begun to drive mainstream philosophy towards a revision of Cartesian human/nature dualism.1 Some ecofeminist and eco-socialist theorists especially have developed a powerful critique of human/animal dualisms and their role in rendering food practices as well as scienDirect all correspondence to: VaI Plumwood, Research Institute for Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; E-mail: vplumwood@braidwood.net.au 285 286 ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000 tifie practices sites for both human and gender domination. (Adams 1990, 1994; Benton 1993; Birke 1994, 1995; Noske 1989). Ecofeminists have theorized in substantial terms the basis for kinship and solidarity with animals and some of the linkages between the forms of oppression common to women and animals, contributing to our understanding of the animals wing of human supremacism and anthropocentrism (Adams and Donovan 1995; Gaard 1993; Luke 1995). However, closer up, there are significant failures as well as pleasing successes. The leading strategy stressed is vegetarianism, and the leading forms of vegetarian theory, including the feminist ones, have been far less successful in dealing with their own biases of ethnicity, gender, and class, and at evolving theory that successfully integrates nonhuman justice concerns with those of human justice movements. The established animal theories have evolved a longstanding conflict with ecological theory that is the subject of a slowly simmering debate across the journals. Although there have been some important philosophical attempts at reconciliation, overall, fundamental conflicts and differences between animalism and ecology seem to be entrenched and growing within the current set of theoretical frameworks. The responsibility for this situation (which may not be entirely negative, provided the present impasse is temporary) lies on both sides.2 Much abstract ecological theory and practice continues to affirm bonds to forms of scientific and hunting ethics that treat animals (but not, or not yet, humans) in abstract, mass general terms as replaceable members of species and populations, to ignore, discount, or oppose individual life and justice perspectives for nonhumans, and to identify humanity closely with a glorified predatory ecological role which is only too readily given the lineaments of mastery and managerialism. Not to be outdone in distancing from "the other side," recent animal rights and vegan/vegetarian theory has come to stress individual life perspectives to the exclusion of all other ways to view animal (and human) lives. Neo-Cartesian animalist theorists aver fervently and often that animals, and only animals, count ethically, signaling the repetition of the Cartesian gesture of moral dualism and the ethical exclusion of "non-conscious" life forms that marks the approach of minimal departure from the rationalist foundations of liberal-humanism (see Plumwood 1999). Other radical animals theorists have been at work devising vanguardist, universalist, and alienated forms that are increasingly incompatible with human liberation...