DOMINIONISM
a) human beings are superior to
animals/nature, are above nature, and they only possess minds, souls,
individuality and capacity for self-reflection and self-identity;
b) animals/nature need to be subdued,
ruled, colonized, and tamed so as to make human life more meaningful, productive and comfortable, and c) This is justified by scientific,
religious, moral, and cultural views of the world.
The Great Chain of Being
• Europeans imagined Nature as a full range of different beings ranked hierarchically on a chain that descended from the immortal
Gods of high, down through animals, plants, stones, dust at the bottom. (Plato)
• They envision as a ladder which had God at the top and European Christians on the
highest rung, a position that granted them a divine mandate as God’s overseers and stewards to rule over the rest of the ladder below.
• The idea that (European) man occupied a position comparable to God’s position in the universe became a central idea in the
• Philosophers like Liebniz and John Locke believed in the existence of
creatures who were man and part-animal. Carolus Linnaeus called them ‘homo ferus’.
• These are “men who have fallen below the condition of animality itself; every man’s face is turned against them, and in general, they can be slain with
impunity” (Hayden White).
The Line*
• The doctrine of Dominionism drew an uncontested, “fixed, immutable,”“well-marked, and unpassable” line that separated humans from animals.
• These division allowed (European) men to project onto animals the qualities that they did not like about themselves. They attributed to animals the traits they hated the most, and the impulses that they
feared the most, in themselves.
• Animals would be as things, not persons, placed outside the moral community of men.
Animalizing Human Groups
• The human-animal divide provided a
standard by which to judge other people,
particularly subordinated groups at
home and people in other continents.
• Anyone who was accused of possessing
such animal qualities was considered
sub-human and, therefore, it helped to
legitimize the abuse and exploitation of
humans thought to be animal like.
ARISTOTLE
– “Plants exists for the sake of
animals, and brute beasts for the
sake of man—domestic animals for
his use and food, wild ones for food
and other accessories of life, such
as clothing and various tools.”
– “Since nature makes nothing
purposeless or in vain, it is
CICERO
St. Augustine
• Animals lack the ‘power of reason’ and therefore humans are superior to animals. Augustine argues that only humans are subject to salvation and all other earthy creatures were created to serve us in our quest for salvation (“to serve us in our weakness”).
• The dominion over animals makes it
permissible for humans to kill animals as they see fit. Because they lack rationality and “by the most just ordinance of their Creator, both their life and their death are subject to our needs.”
Thomas Aquinas
• Thomas Aquinas holds a moral theory in which human beings have no moral
obligation to animals; only to other human beings.
• Animals have no moral standing,
therefore animal abuse is not inherently objectionable. Mistreating animals is not wrong in and of itself; it may be wrong because of its impact on human beings. • He argues that the “less perfect is
“There is no sin in using a thing
for the purpose for which it is…In
the order of nature, the imperfect
is for the sake of the perfect, the
irrational is to serve the rational.
Man, as a rational animal, is
permitted to use things below him
in this order of nature for his
proper needs.”
“Hence it is not wrong for man to
make use of them, either by
Immanuel Kant
• Kant argues that we do not have
duties to animals because animals
are not rational moral agents. That
is, they are not beings capable of
choosing between right and wrong,
have ideals, goals, and life projects.
FRANCIS BACON
• “Man…may be regarded as
the centre of the world,
insomuch that if man were
taken away from the world, the
rest would seem to be all
astray, without aim or
purpose.”
• “I am come in very truth
leading to you Nature with all
her children to bind her to your
service and make her your
RENE DESCARTES
• Humanity was superior to nature
and apart from it. Men were
superior because they were
rational.
• He declared that “animals were
machines or automata, like clocks,
capable of complex behavior, but
wholly incapable of speech,
reasoning, or, in some
interpretations, even sensation.”
• He claimed that the cries, howls,
Africans as Animal-like
Beings
THE DREADED COMPARISON*
The Theft of Bodies
• Body Marks: 19th century science sought to find in the body and in the sexual behavior of non-white women the marks of their inferior character, morality, and position in society.
• Body and Animals: Comparative biologists searched for differences in the body of indigenous women as a whole and in specific body parts for signs indicating their similarity to animals (“animality”) and their distance from the superior white women.
To lay the ground, the justification, for the “theft of
• European explorers and conquerors described the people they encountered in Africa as “rude and beastlike.” They spoke so confoundedly and chatteringly like apes” said an Englishman traveling in Mozambique.
• Encountering the Hottentots, the colonialists described them as an “ill-looking, stinking, nasty people” who went about in “herds” like their animals and “their words are sounded rather like that of Apes, then Men…I doubt many of them have no better predecessors than Monkeys.”
• Rev. John Ovington, who sailed to Africa in 1696, concluded that “if there is any medium between a Rational animal and a Beast, the Hotantot lays fairest claim to the Species.”
• Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a pioneer in the science of comparative anatomy who was hailed in France as the Aristotle of his age, described Africans as “the most degraded human races, whose form
• Paul Broca (1824-80), a French
pathologists, anthropologist, and pioneer in neurosurgery, measured human skulls to support the thesis that brain size was
related to intelligence. He argued that the “brains and hence the intelligence of well-established white men were greater than those of women, poor people, and the non-European “lower races.”
• In an article published in the American
Journal of Anatomy in 1906, Robert Bennett Bean, a Virginia doctor, concluded that
“blacks were intermediate between man and the orangutan.”
• In 1893 The Southern Christian
Advocate, printed an article by the Hon. B.O. Flower—”Burning of Negroes in the South”—in which he criticized a recent lynching, while at the same time showing little sympathy for the victim.
“If we weighed this crime from the
standpoint of that higher justice, it would be seen that this poor brute was at best only a few degrees removed from the gorilla or the lion in his native Africa. Some of his ancestors probably belonged to the most brutal and degraded tribes of the dark
• In slave societies, the same practices used to control animals were used to deal with men thought to be beastlike.
• Black slaves were chained, castrated, whipped and mutilated in order to
control them.
• American blacks—free as well as slave— were legally in the same category as domestic animals. (Steven Wise)
• Both slaves and animals suffer from restricted freedom, loss of social
relations, and the loss of a loved one. Both suffered and were terrified by being hunted, tormented or injured. Both have been objectified, treated as property.
OPPRESSION & LANGUAGE*
• The stereotypes of blacks
rest upon stereotypes of
animals. Black, brute,
beastly, Ape, wild are all
synonyms.
A “good slave”
is a docile dog;
a “bad slave” is
ferocious black
beast.
Slaves and Masters
• The standards for slaves
are the same as those use
by the master to evaluate
chattel.
• Passivity,
loss
of
independence,
suppressing one’s desires
and surrender under the
will of the master are the
traits of a good slave.
Destruction of Social Relations
• Slavery consisted in the
The Unbearable Journey
• During transportation,
slaves were treated like
cattle, caged in a boat
with poor ventilation, no
space to move, absence
of sanitation, medical
care, and lack of food.
• Only 14 out of 40 million
blacks Africans survived
the ordeal of capture and
transportation through the
“Middle Passage,” to
HUNTING
• Hunting as the ability to have absolute power over the life of someone else.
• The hunter transforms a living being into a thing, a deadly corpse.
• Hunting of wild animals makes full references to the hunting of blacks in the past and
symbolically in the present.
• Runaway slaves were hunted down in much the same manner as animals are hunted today. The use of names like ‘Buck,’ ‘Coons’ and the like are
reminders of a the metaphor of the game.
• Hunting of runaway slaves was also sanctioned by social
VIVISECTION
• At least 30 million animals die in the hands of scientists every year in our labs. They die testing product safety, toxicity, drugs, learned helplessness, and other experiments.
IN DEFENSE OF SLAVERY
• Slavery, as well as animal
domestication, is justified in
similar ways as a state that is
natural and as a practice that
promotes the welfare of the
victim.
• The master desires their victims
to be transformed from free
SECRECY: HIDING THE TRUTH
• Secrecy serves to conceal the details of the horror experienced by the victims.
• Segregation blinds people’s
understanding, make people unaccountable to these horrors, and protects those who benefit from it.
PROFITS OVER ALL
• To a large extent, the
heightened institutionalization of oppression of blacks and animals can be attributed to the profit motive. Therefore, the fear of losing profits is the chief obstacle to reform.
Blacks and animals are not seen as living, autonomous, thinking, and feeling beings but as things, means to enhance profits.
Their existence is denied by
ANIMAL CRUELTY & THE
SUBJUGATION OF WOMEN
“In patriarchy, nature, animals and women are
objectified, hunted, invaded, colonized, owned,
consumed and forced to yield and to produce (or not).
This violation of the integrity of wild, spontaneous Being
is rape…”
“As with women as a class, nature and animals have
been kept in a state of inferiority and powerlessness in
order to enable men as a class to believe and act upon
their ‘cultural’ superiority/dominance.”
Meat & Patriarchy
• People with power eat meat. Meat eating reinforces hierarchies of class, race, and gender.
• Meat is a symbol of male dominance. Meat is construed as masculine food and meat eating a male activity. Vegetables and other non-meat foods as viewed as women’s food.
• Meat eating is seen as promoting
strength and masculinity. Meat-eating males are hearty, strong, rough and ready, able , virile males. No-meat
eating males are perceived as soft, weak, unreliable, feminized, ‘sissy,’ ‘fruit’ males. • Meat is associated with strength,
The Absent Referent
• Woman and animal suffering and
abuse is made invisible
in meat
eating societies.
•
Animals
are absent from the act
of eating meat because they
have
been transformed into food
.
• Animals and women are made
absent through
language that
renames their experiences of
The Cycle of Oppression
•
Objectification
: permits an oppressor to view
another being as an object, a thing and thus
receive an object-like treatment.
•
Fragmentation
: the brutal dismemberment of
a animal or person by cutting out its body and
thus deny her the wholeness of being.
Fragmentation transform an alive being into a
thing.
•
Consumption
: viewing the object of desire as
Animal Cruelty and the
Holocaust*
“In relation to them [animals], all
people are Nazis; for the
animals it is an eternal
Treblinka”
• The word Holocaust (literary: ‘burning of the
ANIMAL ABUSE & THE HOLOCAUST
• Research also shows the common roots of Nazi genocide and society’s enslavement and slaughter of
animals.
• How the Nazis perceived and treated animals directly relates to how they treated Jews and other groups they considered biologically inferior.
• The designation of Jews as animals was what led to their being treated— and slaughtered—like animals. Once treated like animals, it made their
• By blurring the boundaries
between animals and human
beings, many Nazi practices
made the killing of people seem
like the slaughtering of animals.
(Boria Sax)
• The Nazis forced those who were
about to kill to get completely
undressed and huddle together,
nakedness suggesting animal
identity. Crowding was also a
mechanism to make Jews look
like an animal herd. This sort of
dehumanization made the victims
easier to shoot or gas. (Boria
• German philosopher Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831) maintained that Jews
could not be assimilated to German
culture because materialism and greed
motivated them to follow an “animal
existence.”
• German crown prince William II
(1859-1941) praised the bloody pogrom
against Russian Jews, and when
Jewish refugees from Russia entered
Germany, he said, “Throw the pigs out!”
• German composer Richard Wagner
• Nazi propaganda constantly described
Jews as “parasites, vermin, beast of prey.”
• Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi propaganda
minister, described the Jews he saw as “no
longer human beings. They are animals.”
• Heinrich Himmler, leader of the infamous
SS, regarded the Jews as “spiritually and
mentally much lower than any animal.” He
favorite way of calling Jews was “Jew-pig,”
“Jewish swine.”
• Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who
experimented on Jews and gypsies, treated
Jews as “laboratory animals” since they
• Hitler used similar bacteriological
language when calling the Jews as
bacilli, as “germ carriers” who
contaminate art and culture, infiltrate
the economy, undermine authority, and
poison the racial health of others.
• Hitler described the Jews as “the spider
that slowly sucks the people’s blood, a
band of rats that fight each other until
they draw blood, the parasite of the
body of other peoples, the eternal
leech.”
The American
• There is evidence of a profoundly troubled connection between animal exploitation in the United States and Hitler’s final solution.
• The practices of the modern, industrialized American institution of the slaughterhouse served as a model for the slaughter of human beings during the Nazi Holocaust.
• When visiting Auschwitz, Judy Chicago described the four crematoria looked like “giant processing plants—except that
• Both slaughterhouses and concentration camps were organized as factories that produced not conventional goods but death. (Boria Sax)
• Cruelty towards animals in
slaughterhouses is a means of avoiding potentially distressing identification with the victims. “Detachment and unnecessary
brutality seem to be a universal component of intense animal husbandry, presumably because they help to distance the farmer from the mass suffering and slaughter for which he is either directly or indirectly responsible.” (James Serpel)
• The slaughter of animals is also
Commonalities
• Streamlining the Process: speed and
efficiency were essential for the success of the killing process. Speed was important to
minimize panic or resistance. It paralyzed the victims and diminishes the chance that
perpetrators will recognize the moral dimensions of their acts.
• Chute/Funnel/Tube: the tunnel of death represents a symbol of passage from life to death, leaving behind any moral obligation to the victim.
• Processing the Sick, Weak, and Injured: people in these conditions may interfere with the smooth running of the killing centers. So they (‘downers’) are taken to be killed in
•
Killing the Young
: separating the
children from their parents and
murdering them as fast as possible
id a common practice in killing
centers. Since killing children takes
a bigger toll on the perpetrators, the
killing is done fast and in very cruel
manner, often having low status
people do it. The killing of children
represents the fear of a future
revenge.
•
Humane Killing
: humane slaughter
• By blurring the boundaries between animals and human beings, many Nazi practices made the killing of people seem like the slaughtering of animals. (Boria Sax)
• The Nazis forced those who were about to kill to get completely undressed and huddle together, nakedness suggesting animal identity. Crowding was also a mechanism to make Jews look like an animal herd. This sort of dehumanization made the victims easier to shoot or gas. (Boria Sax)
• The behavior of Nazi soldiers resembled much the behavior of workers in
slaughterhouses, detaching themselves psychologically and killing in a
Key Questions
– Whether an ethical relationship ought to exist between humans and animals, and, if it ought to, what that relationship entail?
– Are animals the sort of creatures that can have “moral status”? Do animals, at least some of them, qualify for “personhood”?
– What have historically been the standard grounds for excluding animal from the scope of moral concern?
– What are the potential consequences for humans if animals become objects of moral concerns?
– How the relationship between humans and
Peter Singer
• The interests of every being affected by an action are to be taken into account and given the same weight as the interests of any other being.
• Animals should be taken into consideration when making decisions that affects them.
• The principle of equality does not depend on what they are like or on what abilities they may possess.
• The capacity of suffering as the vital
characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration. The capacity for
suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all. If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for
refusing to take that suffering into consideration.
“The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may
acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already
discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a
tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reason equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable
line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison to a more
rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were
otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”
•
Definition
: is a prejudice or
attitude of bias in favor of the
interests of members of our own
species and against those of
members of other species.
• The majority of humans are
speciesists for they take an active
part in, acquiesce in, and allow
their taxes to pay for practices that
require the sacrifice of the most
important interests of members of
other species in order to promote
the most trivial interests of our own
species.
Tom Regan
• Abolitionist: Tom Regan calls for the
abolition of the use of animals in science, the total destruction of commercial animal
agriculture, and the total elimination of
commercial and sport hunting and trapping. • Animals are not Things: What’s wrong with
the treatment of animals is a system that views animals as our resources, here for us —to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money.
• Animals have inherent value. Inherent value is not only a value to humans but it belongs equally to all subjects of life, and have equal right to be treated with
Rights Theory
•
Principle of Inherent Value
: All beings who
are the experiencing subjects of life have an
inherent value, regardless of the individual
characteristics or traits of a being (sex, race,
birthplace, religion, or whether they are
humans or animals). That is, they do not
exist as resources for others but as ends
in-themselves.
•
Principle of Respect
: Every being has the
right to be treated with respect, to be treated
in a way that does not reduce them to the
status of things, of a resource. An
Cultural Feminism
• From the cultural feminist point of view, “the domination of nature, rooted in
post-medieval, Western, male psychology, is the underlying cause of the mistreatment of animals as well as the exploitation of women and the environment.”
• New World View: a call to recreate a world view that is more community, relational,
emotionally bonded with nature, ecologically responsive, seeing nature as an alive,
diverse, organic whole. To see, accept, and respect the environment. To blur lines that separate us from each other and from
nature.
• Ethics of Care: to develop an ethics of care and protection, an ethic of humility, connection, and responsibility, that is, to ground an ethic in “an emotional and spiritual conversation with non—human animal forms.”
• Non-Violence: “we should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we
•
Animals as Persons
: animals
should be treated as persons
meaning that we must treat them in
the same way that we treat
humans.
• It does not mean that animals are
human or that we will always
choose the interests of animals over
humans or that we must accord
animals the same rights as humans.
•
Goal
: we need to abolish and not
THREE APPROCHES
•
Human-centric
Approach:
•
Welfare Approach:
