Animal Rights Ecopolitics

In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also challenged the idea of man’s dominion with saying that man just “instantly imagines himself to be the sole owner of the universe.” (Second Discourse, 151) For Rousseau, man is not special than other animals. He does not even have peculiar to himself. Man’s skills are nourished from observing and imitating activities of other animals. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Discourses and other early political writings. V. Gourevitch, ed.& trans. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Two hundred years after the Declaration of Human Rights, ecological groups, nature and animal protection organisations and a growing number of individual people are proclaiming the fundamental rights of animals. Some of the great thinkers who preceded the French revolution, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, advocated the rights of animals to protection from pain and suffering. In 1775, in his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men”, Rousseau called for the animals to share in the “natural law” (basic rights), “for it is clear that they, lacking insight and freedom, cannot perceive this law; but, since they possess something of our nature through the sentiency with which they are endowed, one will conclude that they must also share in the natural right and that man is subject to some sort of obligations towards them.”

But notwithstanding this general “rationalist” approach, humanitarians such as Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Newton, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Schopenhauer…etc. claimed against cruelty and suggested ethical treatment and moral consideration towards animals. Animal baiting and torture became issues only accepted by the lower classes, while intellectuals and the high society began to devote moral consideration, time, and money to the animal cause. This environment promoted the writings of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1780) enabling the expansion of the animal welfare during the Victorian Era. The question for Bentham was not can they reason?, or, can they talk? but, can they suffer? His approach to the treatment of animals would be followed to its ultimate consequences, two centuries later, by the leader of the animal welfare ideology, Peter Singer, whose book Animal Liberation (l975) is considered the “bible” of the movement.