May animal rights be defended by violent means – and if not, why not? Many argue that 'defensive violence' on behalf of animals is always counterproductive and activists should not engage in it. However, philosophers have dismissed this, arguing the only surefire way to avoid calling for violence is to endorse a blanket pacifism, in the sense of a moral prohibition of all violence irrespective of circumstances. But this would prohibit defensive violence even in the most extreme of circumstances, such as injuring a person to prevent them from setting fire to a facility containing 10,000 chickens, if there is no other means of stopping them.
NICO MULLER: May animal rights be defended by violent means – and if not, why not? These questions have received renewed attention in the recent philosophical literature that discusses animal rights militancy. In this debate, ‘animal rights militancy’ denotes the view that third parties have a pro-tanto moral permission and justification to defend animals against culpable violators of their rights by inflicting proportional, but potentially grave harms such as bodily injury, psychological trauma, and death.2
Discussions about defensive violence on behalf of animals are of obvious real-world relevance, but they can also make a helpful contribution to the political turn in animal ethics. First, they add to nonideal theory in political animal ethics, as they debate the moral and political permissibility of a certain type of activist intervention. Second, they explore the neglected darker side of the political turn. Philosophers have tended to focus on theorizing interspecies justice in political terms, e.g. by considering how animals fit into theories of democracy, representation, and citizenship. But then, interspecies injustice and resistance against it – violent and non-violent – call for treatment in political terms too.
On the face of it, the permissibility and justifiability of defensive violence seems to follow inevitably from the view, standard among animal rights proponents, that humans and animals have ‘rights’ in the same sense of the term. For, whenever the rights of humans are violated or threatened by culpable aggressors who cannot feasibly be stopped by non-violent means, most unprejudiced people would approve of the use of defensive violence. However, since countless people violate animal rights regularly, accepting animal rights militancy appears to be ‘giving the green light to a kind of civil war’. To those on the fence about whether animals have rights, this may amount to a reductio ad absurdum of the animal rights view, also called the ‘militancy objection’ against animal rights.
This raises the question: Can one endorse animal rights without approving defensive violence on behalf of animals? Philosophers – especially Hadley and Hereth – have discussed various responses on the part of the animal rights advocate. The only surefire way to avoid calling for violence, the discussion suggests, is to endorse a blanket pacifism in the sense of a moral prohibition of all violence irrespective of circumstances. But this view would prohibit defensive violence even in the most extreme of circumstances, e.g. injuring a person to prevent them from setting fire to a facility containing 10,000 chickens, if there is no other means of stopping them. So a blanket prohibition of violence intuitively prohibits too much, as previous contributions to the debate readily acknowledge.
In this debate, an argument that turns many actual animal rights activists away from violence has received only little attention: defensive violence on behalf of animals is counterproductive, so activists should not engage in it. Call this the ‘counterproductiveness argument’. Philosophers have dismissed it by arguing that its descriptive premise – that defensive violence is in fact counterproductive – is ad hoc and, in many cases, false. Even though certain instances of defensive violence may backfire, there is no general reason to think that it always would, the argument goes. Call this the ‘ad hoc objection’.
But one can refine the counterproductiveness argument by spelling out the specific contexts in which animal rights violence should be assumed to be counterproductive. We will argue that animal rights violence is counterproductive in contexts where it can be assumed to trigger self-reinforcing reactions on the part of the social systems of cooperation and competition that produce animal rights violations in the first place. We can see this happen in real-world and fictional examples, and we can understand why it happens from an evolutionary perspective on social systems. This argument against animal rights violence has the advantage of leaving open whether violence is permissible in contexts in which it would not trigger such a self-reinforcement response. Whether violence is permissible in such contexts then depends on additional moral considerations, but in cases such as the 10,000 chickens case imagined earlier, the conclusion that non-counterproductive violence is permissible and justifiable may match our intuitions. So, while the counterproductiveness argument largely supports the non-violence already practiced by most animal rights activists, it does not take it to pacifism’s extremes. It thus provides a welcome, ‘low cost’ defence against the militancy objection to animal rights.
In what follows, we will introduce the militancy objection and responses to it, articulate the counterproductiveness argument and the ad hoc objection to it, and respond to the ad hoc objection by taking an evolutionary perspective upon the societal context in which animal rights violence would have to occur. In the last parts of the article, we will discuss which kinds of defensive violence the argument does not condemn and address the worry that the counterproductiveness argument may go too far in prohibiting even non-violent tactics if they backfire. SOURCE…
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