Citizenship

The unpublished 'Unruly Beasts: Animal Citizens and the Threat of Tyranny' by Donaldson and Kymlicka - highlighted in a recent post - states that

In Zoopolis, we argue that domesticated animals are entitled not only to protection of their basic negative rights such as life and liberty. They should be recognized as citizens in a mixed human-animal democratic polis sharing rights of membership, representation, and participation in a shared cooperative scheme. Our argument for a duty to extend citizenship to domesticated animals (hereafter DAs) rests on three claims:

• DAs are de facto members of our political communities – physically present, and subject to human governance;

• through the process of domestication, DAs have been made dependent on human care, foreclosing any (immediate) option of a more independent existence outside of human communities; and

• within our political communities DAs form a dominated and exploited sub-class whose interests are systematically ignored by the political order.

In short, DAs are members of our communities; we have benefitted from, and enforced, their membership while systematically exploiting them, and these facts generate a moral obligation to extend citizenship. Justice demands that domination and hierarchy be replaced by relations of citizenship, and its accompanying ethos of equality, participation, consent and cooperation. We also argue that domestication makes co-citizenship possible. Citizenship is a cooperative relationship, calling on capacities for trust, communication, and physical proximity. We may not be able to enter such relations with all animal species on the planet, but there is no doubt that we can do so with DAs. Domestication presupposes and enhances capacities for sociability across species lines (Clutton-Brock 2012). One need only imagine sharing the demos with spitting cobras, blue whales or Bengal tigers to highlight the contrast. With DAs we can form bonds, engage in cooperative activity, and share physical space – preconditions for meaningful citizenship relations. 

This is just a sketch of the argument for DA citizenship, but we hope the underlying normative logic is clear and perhaps even has some intuitive appeal. Nonetheless, our proposal for animal citizenship has faced two broad criticisms: some critics question whether citizenship would in fact be good for DAs; while others question whether animal citizenship would be good for democracy. 

In this paper, we focus on the second concern, but it is important to keep the first in mind as well. We‘ve proposed citizenship as an emancipatory project that affirms the rights and interests of DAs, but some critics worry that citizenship will prove to be yet another way in which we discipline vulnerable and compliant DAs to fit our categories and practices. Since citizenship is a norm-governed relationship, ascribing citizenship to DAs would justify policing their behaviour to make them fit for human society - manipulating, coercing, and diminishing animals by failing to respect their differences from us, and placing unacceptable limitations on their flourishing (Nurse and Ryland 2013; Palmer 2014). In short, citizenship would be bad for animals. 

We have responded to this objection elsewhere (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2014). Citizenship does indeed involve socializing DAs to participate in norms of good citizenship, including norms of civility and contribution, but whether this is oppressive depends on whether these norms are mutually created, enabling all members of society to flourish, or whether they mold or relegate some members into a caste group to serve others. The aim of a citizenship approach is precisely to ensure that social norms are responsive to the good of DAs as well as humans. This would require creating conditions for DAs to safely explore alternative forms of cooperation with humans (and with other DAs) in order to determine what forms of cooperation (if any) they wish to engage in with us. Under these circumstances, we argue, citizenship would indeed be good for animals. In this paper we address the reverse question of whether animal citizens would be bad for democracy. 

In her article 'Democracy, Despots and Wolves', Emma Planinc argues that animals are fundamentally "unruly", unable to regulate their behaviour according to shared norms. Their participation would weaken the norms of reciprocity, self-restraint and civility that make democratic self-rule possible. She worries that because animals are "formless", "unbridled", "anarchic", "insatiable", "savage", "ravenous", "wanton" and "amoral" in their exercise of freedom, including them in the polis would weaken the commitment to moderation and justice on which democracy depends. 

We address this argument below, but it‘s worth noting the relationship between this critique and the first one. The first worries that DAs can too easily be compelled (through coercion or manipulative training) to comply with even the most exploitative norms, and so are inevitably vulnerable to domination. The second worries that animals will be insufficiently compliant with human-created social norms, and are therefore disruptive to the demos. While the two critiques differ in their predictions about the extent of DA compliance with social norms, they share the assumption that these norms can only ever be external impositions on DAs. The horizon of possibilities is either (docile) compliance or (unruly) non-compliance with human-created norms. What both ignore is the possibility of DA agency – their capacity not only to be trustworthy partners in cooperative activities with humans, but also to help create, negotiate and shape social norms. As we will see, this is what makes justice possible in relations between humans and DAs, and what makes a zoopolis consistent with the flourishing of all citizens, human or animal. 

This paper is structured as follows. First, we draw upon a growing body of evidence which shows that DAs, far from being "formless" and "anarchic" in their exercise of freedom, display capacities for learning, reflexivity, practical reasoning, and norm responsiveness rooted in a range of moral sentiments and pro-social tendencies. So far as we know, animals do not entertain propositions about pro-social norms and moral sentiments, nor do they consciously assent to such propositions. But this leads to the second step of our argument, which draws upon a growing body of evidence that human moral agency is not primarily a matter of rational scrutiny of, and self-conscious assent to, propositions. Human moral agency is grounded in pre-reflective moral sentiments and pro-social impulses that we share with many animals; it is largely intuitive and spontaneous; and it is embodied and socially embedded behaviour, not (or not primarily) the activity of a disembodied mind. Indeed, the stability of democratic life depends on this fact. 

In short, humans are continuous with other animals in our moral natures as much as other dimensions of our being, as indeed one would expect given the processes of evolution. Once we recognize this continuity, we must abandon the stereotype of unruly beasts versus sovereign humans, and instead consider how citizens, of all stripes, can be supported in the exercise of citizenship agency in ways that allow us to flourish together. This will require rethinking the spaces and places of citizenship to more fully realize fundamental democratic values. 

The final section of the paper explores a concrete example to flesh out the abstract arguments – namely, debates about dogs in public parks. This provides a fruitful microcosm for exploring the possibilities of DA citizenship, illuminating the potential for cross-species social norms and civility, the responsible exercise of freedom, and the fostering of social participation and inclusion. As we will see, there are good reasons to think that including DAs, far from threatening civic norms and democratic practices, could in fact promote and revitalize them.

Kymlicka and Donaldson's 'Animals and the Frontiers of Citizenship' (HLA Hart Memorial Lecture, University of Oxford, 2013) notes that

Citizenship has been at the core of struggles by historically excluded groups for respect and inclusion. Can citizenship be extended even further to domesticated animals? We begin this paper by sketching an argument for why justice requires the extension of citizenship to domesticated animals, above and beyond compassionate care, stewardship, or universal basic rights. We then consider two objections to this argument. Some animal rights theorists worry that extending citizenship to domesticated animals, while it may sound progressive, would in fact be bad for animals, providing yet another basis for policing their behaviour to fit human needs and interests. Critics of animal rights, on the other hand, worry that the inclusion of "unruly" beasts would be bad for democracy, eroding its core values and principles. We attempt to show that both objections are misplaced, and that animal citizenship would both promote justice for animals and deepen fundamental democratic dispositions and values.

They begin -

 In our recent book Zoopolis, we made the case for a distinctly “political theory of animal rights” 

In this Lecture, we attempt to extend that argument, and to respond to some critics of it, by focusing specifically on the novel idea of “animal citizenship”. 

To begin, let us briefly situate our approach in the larger animal rights debate. One of our goals in the book was to get beyond the traditional animal rights debate that has focused almost exclusively on one issue – the intrinsic moral status of animals. Many readers will be familiar with this 40-year debate, but just to remind you:

• animal rights theorists have claimed that because animals possess sentience or consciousness and therefore have a subjective good, they have the sort of moral standing that justifies certain inviolable rights – to life and liberty, and in particular the right not to be used as a means to human well-being. 

• In response critics have argued that to be a possessor of such inviolable rights requires something more than sentience or a subjective good. It requires some alleged higher capacity, typically a cognitive capacity such as rationality or autonomy or moral reasoning. And therefore only humans can be the bearers of such rights and, moreover, by virtue of possessing these higher capacities, humans have the right to use other beings who lack these capacities. 

• Animal rights theorists in turn have responded that restricting inviolable rights to those with a certain degree of cognitive complexity is both theoretically arbitrary and at odds with our actual practices. Indeed the evolution of the theory and practice of human rights in the last 60 years has been to repudiate any limitation based on the rationality or autonomy of the beings involved. Inviolable rights are first and foremost for the protection of the weak and vulnerable, not some sort of prize awarded to the most rational or cognitively complex.

To lay our cards on the table, we endorse the strong animal rights view – sentience is sufficient to qualify for inviolable rights – but we have little new to say on that question. Our focus instead is to show how it leaves unaddressed questions of what sorts of relations we should have with animals. We inevitably and rightly will have different relations with different groups such as wild animals, domesticated animals, and liminal animals (wild animals living amongst us), and these differing relationships generate different moral obligations. 

For example, consider wild wolves and domesticated dogs. Since dogs are domesticated wolves, they share the same intrinsic moral status, but we have very different relations with them. Through domestication we have brought dogs into our society, bred them to become dependent on us, and incorporated them into our schemes of social cooperation. These facts are morally significant – they create obligations to dogs that are different from those to wolves, despite their common intrinsic moral status. 

Our project in Zoopolis is not simply to emphasize the moral significance of these relational obligations, but also to argue that we can make sense of these different relations through the concepts and categories of political theory. 

To simplify, we argue that we can usefully distinguish three broad patterns of such relations:

• domesticated animals should be viewed as members of a shared society with us, and hence as having rights of membership. In political theory membership rights are typically theorized in the language of citizenship. We can therefore illuminate our distinctive obligations to domesticated animals by considering political theories of citizenship.

• Wilderness animals should be seen as having rights to their own territory and autonomy on that territory. In political theory rights to territory and autonomy are typically theorized in the language of sovereignty. We can therefore illuminate our distinctive obligations to wilderness animals by considering political theories of sovereignty. 

• Liminal animals (e.g. “urban wildlife”) – the non-domesticated animals who live amongst us - should be seen as having rights of residency without participating in a shared cooperative scheme with us. In political theory, ideas of denizenship have been used to capture this status of residency without citizenship, and these ideas can help illuminate our distinctive obligations to liminal animals. 

This is obviously a very schematic summary, but for this Lecture we want to focus on the first category – the idea of co-citizenship for domesticated animals - and to respond to some concerns that have been raised about it. 

To render the issues more vivid we will consider a specific case – one that some of you may be familiar with. It's the story ofBill and Lou, two oxen who worked at Green Mountain College in Vermont as part of the college's sustainable agriculture program. Last year, after 10 years plowing the fields at the college Lou injured his leg on the job, and Bill rejected the idea of continuing to work by being yoked with a new ox. The college deliberated and decided to kill Bill and Lou and process them into hamburgers to serve in the college cafeteria. There was outrage at this decision. A nearby sanctuary offered to take the oxen so they could have a peaceful retirement at no cost to the College. The College said no. They rejected the offer because left alive, Bill and Lou would violate the goal of sustainable agriculture -- the oxen would continue to consume resources and emit greenhouse gasses while no longer balancing the scales as petroleum-free tractors. 

The controversy about his case is unsurprising – Bill and Lou were known to many people as individuals, making their treatment stand out against the general background of our violence towards domesticated animals (hereafter DAs). Many animal rights (hereafter AR) advocates argued, correctly, that Bill and Lou have rights to life and liberty that were violated by the decision to kill them. But this doesn't seem to fully capture all of the perversities of the college's reasoning. In any event, for many traditional AR advocates the problem actually started much earlier, since they believe that Bill and Lou should never have been used as workers on the College farm in the first place. For these AR advocates – sometimes called “abolitionists” – any use of animal labour is inherently oppressive and exploitative. 

So on the one side, we have the College which feels entitled to kill the oxen who are no longer fulfilling their functional role, viewing them as "dispensable as rusty farm implements" in John Sanbonmatsu's words. And on the other side, we have AR advocates who think all use of domesticated animals must be abolished. What both are missing, we believe, is the possibility that Bill and Lou could be members of a just cooperative scheme at Green Mountain College. Our citizenship model is intended to illuminate this possibility.  

We will pursue the argument in three steps. First we will briefly recapitulate our argument for why DAs such as Lou and Bill are owed the status of co-citizens. Then we will consider two important objections that have been raised to this idea, one from defenders of AR who worry that extending citizenship to DAs, while it may sound progressive, will turn out to be bad for animals, providing yet another basis for policing their behaviour to fit human needs and interests. The second objection is from critics of AR, who argue that the inclusion of DAs like Bill and Lou would be bad for democracy, harming or diminishing the overall quality of our democratic life, and eroding the values and principles that we cherish in democratic citizenship.