Mgr. Julita Skotarska M.A.
Department of Philosophy and Religious studies, FF UK Praha
This paper focuses on an important development in the thinking of the moral status of the nonhuman between Peter Singer’s animal ethics and current accounts of posthuman care (Haraway, 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, DeFalco, 2023).
Singer’s Animal Liberation had a huge impact on the scholarly discussions concerning well-being of animals, most notably by putting sentient nonhuman animals on the philosophical map of moral considerability. In his proposal, animals ethically matter; we should care about them ethically, and this also implies certain ways we should care for them. However, Singer’s theory relies on animals’ similarity to humans, in particular on shared experience of suffering and pain. This constrains the range of human-nonhuman relationality and limits attentiveness to meaningful differences between them.
I will argue that the posthumanist accounts of care may offer a more fruitful ground for thinking the moral status of the nonhuman. In particular, I will engage with the concept of “nonmimetic caring” (Haraway, 2008), which does not reduce the significance of interspecies interactions by attempting to replicate interhuman relations and modes of being together. I will deploy it as a conceptual tool for “opening up care and kinship to include the range of more-than-human inter-dependencies and ontologies that produce and sustain life” (DeFalco, 2023:13-14). I will consider the potential of the notion of “nonmimetic caring” to enhance understanding of the demands of human-nonhuman cohabitation, as well as respond to current crises, such as a biodiversity loss. Finally, I will look at some of its challenges, especially for systematic philosophical analysis and normative ethics.
Keywords: nonhuman, care, animal ethics, posthumanism
References:
- DeFalco, A. (2023). Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Oxford University Press.
- Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.
- Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017), Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
- Singer, P. (2001). Animal Liberation. Ecco Press.