Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (review)

In their book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka raise and offer clear, original, and insightful answers to a number of important questions regarding the rights of nonhuman animals. Two main elements of their account will be of particular interest to readers of IJFAB. The first is the way they problematize dominant views in the animal rights literature about the moral rights of domestic animals by exposing these views’ dubious conclusions about the treatment of historically oppressed human groups. Second is their heavy reliance on a conception of relational political agency based, in part, on work done by feminist theorists who have argued that mentally disabled individuals must be understood as full citizens rather than as mere wards of human societies. While we find these contributions to the animal rights literature very promising, we raise two worries about Donaldson and Kymlicka’s conclusions that suggest a need to revise or modify their conception of relational political agency.

One of the most interesting features of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s view is their answer to a difficult question in animal rights theory: “what is to become of domesticated animals?” Nearly all proponents of animal rights endorse either abolitionism, the view that humans need to extricate themselves from all relationships with domesticated animals (77–78), or a threshold view, according to which it is acceptable to perpetuate the exploitation of domesticated animals as long as they are better off than they would have been had they never been brought into existence (89–94).

By drawing out the similarities between the historical oppression of domesticated animals and groups of humans, Donaldson and Kymlicka show that both of these alternatives are unacceptable for addressing injustices done to nonhuman animals. Both abolitionism and the threshold view would be monstrous if they were suggested as ways of repairing the historical oppression of women or African Americans, or for rectifying harms done to either neglected children or immigrant laborers from poorer nations (79–80, 93). Furthermore, they argue, since animals hold their rights on roughly the same grounds as human beings (the intrinsic worth of their subjective experience and selfhood), neither proposal can serve as a permissible way to approach injustices done to nonhuman animals. The only acceptable way to work toward the end of the oppression and exploitation of these groups, including nonhuman animals, is to induct them into the society in which they live and grant them the rights of full citizenship.

However, citizenship rights are generally thought to be contingent upon a certain level of cognitive capacity, including what Rawls calls “moral powers”: the capacity to have and communicate a subjective good, to comply with social norms, and to participate in the coauthoring of laws. While at first glance it might seem that nonhuman animals lack these moral powers, Donaldson and Kymlicka draw on feminist philosophical literature to develop an account that relies on the idea that relational political agency can allow us to attribute these powers to dependent humans (such as children and the mentally disabled) as well as to nonhuman animals.

For example, just as many humans need the assistance of others when trying to articulate their own subjective good, nonhuman animals might also need “the help of supportive social structures to participate in schemes of social cooperation” (107). Nonhuman animals can express their own subjective good in many nonverbal ways: by, for example, meowing by the fridge when their dinner is overdue, nuzzling when they want affection, and lashing out violently when they want to express their dislike of being touched in specific ways. They can thus be understood as capable of communicating a subjective good, even though this communication relies on some assistance and interpretation from their human companions. Compliance with social norms and participation in the political process are handled in similar ways, with Donaldson and Kymlicka arguing that relational agency can provide an avenue for animals to express these abilities as...