Workshop on Animal Agency and Cognition

    Activity: Talk or presentation for an academic audienceInvited talk for an academic audience

    Description

    Angie Pepper & Rich Healey: “When Assent is Not Enough – Animal Agency and Just Interspecies Relations”
    Abstract: We have argued that animals sometimes have rights to self-determination: rights that will be recognised as normatively authoritative within certain domains of action. We further argued that an animal assents to an activity or interaction when they wilfully affirm it. When this is so, their assent can enable permissible interactions consistent with their rights to self-determination. It was our (ambitious) contention that this account of assent “makes the project of interspecies justice possible” and “paves the way for the realisation of just interspecies relations.” In this talk, we examine and problematize the transformative potential of our account. In particular, we suggest that valid animal assent depends on animals being (i) competent decision-makers, and (ii) informed about the options available to them. Though we think these two requirements can be successfully satisfied in one-off interactions, we doubt that animals can assent to the human institutions, practices, and roles in which they find themselves. Consequently, we will argue that though assent can make some interpersonal human-nonhuman interactions permissible, it cannot legitimise the general practice of keeping animals as companions or the use of animal labour to satisfy human ends.

    Estimated audience numbers (if applicable)

    40
    Period27 Apr 2022
    Held atGroupe de recherche en éthique environnementale et animale (GRÉEA) and Centre européen d’enseignement et de recherche en éthique (CEERÉ)
    Degree of RecognitionInternational

    Keywords

    • Animal agency
    • animal cognition
    • animal rights
    • animal labour
    • companionship
    • human-animal relationships