Identity, Difference, Indistinction

The past few decades have given rise to a wide variety of approaches to theoretical and practical discourse concerning animals. In this paper, I focus on three important but rather distinct approaches that have emerged in this period, all of which would have us fundamentally reconsider the ontological, ethical, and political issues surrounding animal life and the human/animal distinction. I seek to take critical account of two of these chief discourses (which I approach under the rubrics of identity and difference) while also aiming to give some additional form and content to an emerging third approach (which I label indistinction). My aim in what follows is neither to eliminate the first two approaches in favor of the third, nor is it to establish a dialectic in which the first two approaches are subsumed in a third, higher form. Rather, I examine all three of these modes of thought and practice with an eye toward their transformative potential for struggles for justice involving animal life and human-animal relations, underscoring their respective promises and limits while at the same time suggesting the need for increased attention to those discourses and practices examined under the rubric of indistinction.

1. Identity

The most widely discussed approach of the views under consideration here is what I will call the identity-based approach. Philosophers and theorists influenced by this approach seek to establish a relevantly similar moral identity between human beings and animals most often through a rigorous application of Darwinian ontology on the one hand and normative impartiality on the other. The first move is characterized by an unflinching insistence on enduring what Freud called the biological trauma suffered by human narcissism, which is to say, the shock that follows full recognition and acceptance of the Darwinian account of the biological and natural account of the human species and its fundamental relatedness to other animal species.¹ The second move is simply the consequence of taking the Darwinian ontological standpoint seriously in the normative domain. Inasmuch as the principle of impartiality requires the rational moral agent to extend equal moral consideration to all beings who have interests—irrespective of their physical or emotional distance from the agent, and irrespective of any lack of shared characteristics that are morally irrelevant (say differences in cognitive ability, race, or gender)—the rational moral agent has to disavow the species barrier as a persuasive reason for not extending full moral consideration to nonhuman animals. Species differences only mark differences in degree rather than kind when we look at the interests of individuals in certain nonhuman animal species.

This general theoretical approach of combining a naturalistic ontology with normative impartiality gets fleshed out differently depending upon the normative framework under consideration. In the case of consequentialist accounts of animal liberation, such as one finds in Peter Singer’s work (1990), emphasis is placed upon the shared sentience and shared capacity for having preferences that we find among humans and animals. In the deontological approach of philosophers such as Tom Regan (1983), the focus is placed on the shared subjectivity of animals and humans and the manner in which having such subjectivity entails being granted inherent, noninstrumental value. Variations on this logic of establishing a relevantly similar moral identity between humans and animals can be found in the writings of animal ethicists working in nearly every major ethical tradition in analytic normative theory, including social contract theory, virtue ethics and its variants, and classical and neo-Kantianism.

There is considerable merit to this identity-based discourse and theoretical approach. First, and foremost to its credit, it has directly and indirectly inspired a variety of new practices and forms of resistance aimed at granting basic ethical respect to nonhuman animals. By emphasizing the basic moral identity and equality of human beings and animals, this approach challenges the ethical dogmatic slumber of the status quo and calls for a fundamental rethinking of a whole host of human activities that impact animals in negative and harmful ways. Much as the Marxist critique of capitalism exposes the hidden abode of social production behind the commodity, these approaches to thinking about...