Being Animal: Beasts and Boundaries in Nature and Ethics by Anna L. Peterson (review)

The well-recognized separation of animal ethics and environmental philosophy is at the core of Peterson’s new book. The author offers a new theoretical perspective that regards animals, nature, and humanity, not as poles apart, but rather as relational beings. Humanity, she explains, is intrinsically connected to both nature and animals. For their part animals and nature are not opposed to one another, as may be seen in some contemporary philosophy, but are rather interconnected. The author offers an analysis of the philosophical positions within environmental and animal ethics, providing a brief but clear account of the contemporary debate on nature and animals.

As Peterson points out, our dichotomic way of thinking about life, where we are split between humans and animals, animals and the environment, nature and culture, and, finally, between domestic and free-ranging animals is an essential characteristic of Western thought, affecting both environmental and animal ethics alike. In both cases, as the author makes clear, a contradictory opposition between individuals and the whole is at work, as if they were two antagonists and not related realities.

On the one hand, she explains, environmental philosophy fails to look at individual animals and to recognize their intrinsic value: “Ecocentric interpretations of ecology and evolution almost always prioritize the well-being of wholes above the individuals” (p. 27). In so doing, ecocentric holism has led to an overvaluation of the dichotomy between domestic and free-ranging animals, where the latter is considered to be “natural” and “good,” whereas the former represents a sort of degraded creature that constitutes a threat to the well-being of the whole. Conversely, the fallacy of ecological holism is inverted within philosophical reflection on animals. Animal ethicists usually treat animals as isolated individuals whose ecological histories and contexts are irrelevant to their moral status. Animals are alien from the environment in which they live.

In contrast to the established dichotomic approach, the author develops a theoretical system disengaged from abstract philosophy, which is connected to real animals. She proposes a speculative method where emotional connections to individual animals and practical experience work together. That is, a relational approach to both nature and animals, where our relationship to others is a lens through which we may comprehend our position within the system. As the author points out, decentring the role of human beings (as she does) does not mean transcending our humanity. In any event, the values within the system will remain anthropogenic—human-created. However, decentring the role of humans provides an attempt to understand humanity in relation to other living beings.

Ironically, in her analysis Peterson deconstructs one of the few points on which environmental and animal ethicists agree upon: the possibility of the abolition of the domestication of animals, and—consequently—of humans. In fact, as she clearly explains, domesticity involves two subjects, the human and the animal. It does not only involve but also transforms both of them. Humanity, as we now understand it, is the result of a millennial relationship with animals. For this reason it makes no sense to consider domestic animals as “ethical problems,” she affirms. Hence,

the belief that contact, and thus moral contamination, can be avoided creates a false sense of isolation, as though it were truly possible to stop interacting with the non-human world. We live in nature, interact with it, and consume it continually. Rather than try to hide from these relationships, the task of ethics is to sort them out, evaluate them, and develop guidelines that can help people engage in them more responsibly.

(pp. 113–114)

The reaffirmation of the relational value of domestic animals as border creatures, able to connect nature and the human world, represents a pivotal argument in Peterson’s book. In opposition both to holism and abolitionism, the author understands domestic animals as living bridges that help humans to reconnect with their “natural...