Naturalistic Conceptions of Human and Animal Rights: From Human Exceptionalism to Transspecies Universalism

Stucki, Saskia

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-19201-2_2

Saskia Stucki²

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Law ((BRIEFSLAW))

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Abstract

This chapter investigates whether the extension of human rights to animals can be placed on a sound conceptual footing. Can (nonhuman) animals have human rights? The starting point of this inquiry is the ‘traditional’ or ‘orthodox’ understanding of human rights, which is the naturalistic conception. This much can be said already: considering the contested nature and philosophical foundations of human rights, there cannot be a simple, let alone single, answer to the animal question.

Human rights in the real world are proving far less attached to their Enlightenment baggage than are the intellectuals who guard its theory. MacKinnon (2000), p. 711.

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This chapter investigates whether the extension of human rights to animals can be placed on a sound conceptual footing. Can (nonhuman) animals have human rights? The starting point of this inquiry is the ‘traditional’^{Footnote 1} or ‘orthodox’^{Footnote 2} understanding of human rights, which is the naturalistic conception.^{Footnote 3} This much can be said already: considering the contested nature and philosophical foundations of human rights, there cannot be a simple, let alone single, answer to the animal question.

2.1 Setting the Stage for the ‘Theater of Human Law’

Tercer Juzgado de Garantías de Mendoza 3 November 2016, Expte Nro P-72.254/15 (noting that animals are currently ‘involuntary actors in the theater of human law’, and that extending to them fundamental rights is ‘the best act of inclusion’ we can do).

Human rights are most commonly understood as inherent and universal fundamental rights that every human being has simply in virtue of being human.^{Footnote 4} This is called the naturalistic conception, because—like the idea of natural rights—it derives human rights from human nature and justifies them with reference to some essential feature of humanity.^{Footnote 5} Virtually all naturalistic conceptions operate under the (oftentimes implicit and seemingly self-evident) assumption that ʻbeing humanʼ is both a necessary and sufficient condition for having human rights.^{Footnote 6} That is, human rights are naturally thought of as rights that belong to all and only humans because they are human.^{Footnote 7}

From the outset, human rights is a firmly humanist (human-centred, i.e., anthropocentric)^{Footnote 8} project whose foundational-justificational nexus to humanity appears both radically inclusive as regards all humans (qua being human) and, simultaneously, exclusive as regards all other animals (qua being nonhuman).^{Footnote 9} Notwithstanding this prima facie ‘exclusive nature’ of human rights,^{Footnote 10} the question remains whether a necessary conceptual rather than a merely conventional^{Footnote 11} or even arbitrary link exists between human rights and humanity. As we will see, the degree and (inherent or incidental) nature of exclusivity infused into human rights largely depends on the underlying conception of human nature that informs any given naturalistic theory.

2.2 Who Is the ‘Human’ of Human Rights?

To further explore the nexus between human rights and human nature, we need to inquire into the operative understanding of ‘being human’ (simply in virtue of which human rights are had).^{Footnote 12} As James Griffin has noted, ‘there is little agreement about the relevant sense of “human”’,^{Footnote 13} and accordingly, naturalistic accounts tend to gesture towards different manifestations of ‘the human’. Two distinctions are to be made in particular: first, between biological and essentialist understandings of ‘being human’ and second, between exceptionalist and non-exceptionalist conceptions of humanness.

2.2.1 The ‘Biological Human’ and the ‘Essential Human’

William Edmundson points out that the phrase ‘human rights’ is ambiguous and can be understood to mean ‘those rights belonging to human beings as such’ or ‘those rights paradigmatically attributed to human beings in virtue of their possessing important characteristics and capacities’.^{Footnote 14} This ambiguity translates to a distinction between a direct, purely biological and an indirect, essentialist or placeholder sense of ‘being human’.

In the first sense, ‘being human’ simply refers to the biological fact of being born a human. Biological humanness is typically relied upon for practical—and especially legal—purposes, as it offers a clear-cut criterion for operationalizing the normative imperative that ‘all members of the species Homo sapiens’ must be human rights-holders.^{Footnote 15} This finds paradigmatic expression in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes the equal and inalienable rights of ‘all members of the human family’. While the biological human may conveniently serve as the embodied locus of human rights, it does not provide an adequate basis for the philosophical purposes of justifying human rights. Justificatory theories are tasked with clarifying the complex relationship between human rights and human nature. As Jack Donnelly puts it, ‘How does being human give one rights?’^{Footnote 16} The biologistic determination merely asserts that all humans have human rights, but does not proffer (or even purport to offer) a philosophical justification of human rights and reasons as to why (all and only) humans have them.^{Footnote 17} Moreover, it is today widely accepted that purely biological facts—such as ‘race’, sex, or species membership—are normatively irrelevant and cannot per se justify differential treatment.^{Footnote 18} To avoid the well-established charge of (unqualified) speciesism,^{Footnote 19} justificatory theories will thus typically attempt to adhere to some form of species neutrality requirement, according to which an ‘adequate account of right-holding should provide a criterion that does not in principle exclude any being simply on the basis of their species’.^{Footnote 20}

Rather than relying on a purely biological sense of being human, most naturalistic accounts refer to something else: the essential human.^{Footnote 21} For essentialist naturalistic theories, ‘being human’ serves as a convenient, albeit not quite accurate and somewhat misleading shorthand for some other essential quality that is possessed by all (and/or only) humans and is normatively relevant for grounding human rights.^{Footnote 22} Human rights, so justified, are thus actually ‘human qua X’ rights, with X signifying some essential human (and human rights-relevant) property.^{Footnote 23} However, if ‘being human’ is merely a placeholder for a rights-grounding essential human feature, this begs the question: which aspect of human nature is it that grounds human rights?

2.2.2 The ‘Exceptional Human’ and the ‘Typical Human’

In identifying a rights-grounding essential human feature, naturalistic theories may either reference what might be called the ‘exceptional human’ or the ‘typical human’. That is, they may rely on a particular aspect of either unique or ordinary human nature. Generally speaking, and drawing on dehumanization psychology,^{Footnote 24} there are two distinct conceptions of human nature that differ in terms of their investment in the idea of human exceptionalism.^{Footnote 25} We may call them the exceptionalist and non-exceptionalist conceptions of human nature. The exceptionalist conception describes a special human nature; it defines uniquely human properties that are believed to separate humans from animals. Nick Haslam calls this the ‘comparative sense of humanness’, as it determines human nature relative to (a definitionally distinct) animal nature.^{Footnote 26} The second, non-exceptionalist conception captures human nature simpliciter; it defines typically human characteristics that are central to humans, regardless of whether these features are shared with other animals or not. This non-comparative sense of humanness is thus irrelative to animal nature and also indifferent to human exceptionality.

Accordingly, depending on the underlying conception of human nature, there is an important distinction to be made among essentialist naturalistic theories (in which ‘human’ serves as a placeholder for some essential truth about human nature): between exceptionalist conceptions of human rights (identifying some essential metaphysical or rationalist truth about extraordinary human nature) and non-exceptionalist conceptions (identifying some essential materialist or anthropological truth about ordinary human nature).^{Footnote 27} Exceptionalist conceptions ground human rights in unique human nature and justify human rights with reference to some special human property, typically relating to the rational nature of humans. By contrast, non-exceptionalist conceptions ground human rights in typical human nature and justify human rights with reference to some empirical (and more profane) aspect of the conditio humana, such as basic needs, interests, capabilities, or vulnerability.

In the following sections, I will more closely examine these two families of naturalistic theories with regard to their exclusive or potentially inclusive implications for animals. As may already be intuited, the exclusivity or inclusivity of human rights varies greatly between these two strands of naturalistic theories, and is ultimately predetermined by the underlying conception of (unique or typical) human nature.

2.3 Exceptionalist Conceptions of Human Rights and the Decline of Old Humanism

2.3.1 Overview

The first, more senior family of essentialist naturalistic theories grounds human rights in a rationalist notion of unique human nature. Exceptionalist conceptions are based on a rationalist-humanist view that emphasizes human specialness, and subscribe to an abstract image of ‘the human’ as animal rationale whose capacity for reason sets her (or rather, him^{Footnote 28}) apart from animals.^{Footnote 29} Paradigmatically, Margaret MacDonald states that ‘Reason is the great leveller or elevator’ and that it is by having the natural quality of being rational that ‘men resemble each other and differ from the brutes.’^{Footnote 30} The justifications advanced for human rights revolve around a cluster of interrelated, rationality- and autonomy-based concepts, such as personhood,^{Footnote 31} the capacity for moral agency (i.e., the ‘capacity to act in light of moral reasons’),^{Footnote 32} or human dignity. What these justificatory approaches have in common is that they typically single out some variant of the rational nature of humans as the essential feature which grounds human rights of all (and only) human beings.^{Footnote 33}

For example, Alan Gewirth bases human rights on ‘the necessary conditions of human action’, and holds that they pertain equally to ‘all humans who have the minimal degree of rationality needed for action.’^{Footnote 34} James Griffin notes that ‘Human life is different from the life of other animals’ in that humans are agents with a conception of, and the mental abilities to pursue, a good life.^{Footnote 35} On his account, human rights are protections of ‘our normative agency’ or of an ‘essential feature of personhood’,^{Footnote 36} and grounded in two basic human interests: autonomy and liberty.^{Footnote 37} Carl Wellman also starts from the observation that ‘Normal adult human beings differ from all the other beings known to us in a way that commands our respect’, and that there ‘is something about human nature … that confers upon human beings a very special moral status.’ On this basis, he identifies ‘practical reason’ and ‘the capacity for moral action of any normal adult human being’ as a necessary condition for the possession of human rights.^{Footnote 38}

2.3.2 Programmatic Exclusivity

Exceptionalist conceptions of human rights are reflective and expressive of traditional, anthropocentric humanism^{Footnote 39}—what has been variously called ‘human supremacism’,^{Footnote 40} ʻhuman chauvinismʼ,^{Footnote 41} ‘species-narcissism’,^{Footnote 42} ‘human racism’^{Footnote 43} or, more generally, ‘speciesism’ and ‘anthropocentrism’.^{Footnote 44} Old humanism is underpinned by a ʻbelief in human exceptionalityʼ^{Footnote 45} and thus foundationally invested in the idea of human exceptionalism—the ‘ideological belief system of human supremacy’ that considers humans fundamentally distinct from and superior to animals.^{Footnote 46} Exceptionalist accounts inherit old humanism’s commitment to human exceptionalism, and—whether explicitly or implicitly—inscribe the exclusion of animals into the conceptual fabric of human rights. This is because they rest on an image of (unique) human nature that is precisely constructed in contradistinction to animals as the antithetical other, where animals serve only as ‘markers and evidence of human distinctiveness and elevation.’^{Footnote 47} Given this built-in demarcation from animals, exceptionalist conceptions of human rights demarcate a nearly impenetrable zone of exclusivity around humans.^{Footnote 48}

Even so, there exists a certain grey area at the margins of human rights so conceived. Many exceptionalist accounts (especially of the strictly rationalist variant) are facially non-speciesist, in that they advance capacity- rather than species-based justifications of human rights.^{Footnote 49} For example, Matthew Liao considers it a virtue of his account ‘that it allows virtually all human beings to be rightholders without being speciesist’. This is because it ‘allows non-human entities such as aliens, possibly Great Apes … to be rightholders, if these entities have the physical (usually genetic) basis for moral agency.’^{Footnote 50} Similarly, James Griffin makes room for the (hypothetical) possibility of other-than-human creatures having the high intelligence necessary for moral agency: ʻIf so, we should have to consider how human rights would have to be adapted to fit them.ʼ^{Footnote 51} Suchlike theoretical concessions to species-neutrality gesture towards a certain (albeit low) degree of permeability that could possibly allow for some highly intelligent animals (such as great apes or whales)^{Footnote 52} to break through the programmatic exclusivity of human rights. In reality, however, these rationality-based justifications of human rights set such a high and anthropocentric bar that, de facto, only (but likely not all) humans as real-world entities will qualify as right-holders.^{Footnote 53}

2.3.3 Problems of Exceptionalist Accounts

Exclusive accounts of human rights that rely on human exceptionalism in the form of agency, rationality, or dignity are vulnerable to a range of well-known problems and objections.

2.3.3.1 Strictly Rationalist Accounts and the Problem of Marginal Cases

First of all, rationalist justifications of human rights face the obvious problem that not all humans are rational agents (so-called ‘marginal cases’). Lack of rationality and agency is an inevitable part of the human condition, with infants not possessing such capacities yet, people with severe dementia not anymore, and some mentally severely impaired humans never possessing them at all. Human rights exceptionalism thus collides with empirical reality, which is populated by people who do not conform to the ‘exaggerated caricature’ of the human as ‘rational, self-directing, wholly autonomous individual possessing moral agency’.^{Footnote 54}

The problem here is that the ‘human’ in human rights serves as a placeholder for an essential feature that likely only, but certainly not all human beings actually possess. Rationalist accounts thus run the risk of being under-inclusive, since strictly speaking, many humans (along with animals) would not qualify to have human rights.^{Footnote 55} As Henry McCloskey has so bluntly put it, ‘even if the theory of natural law could be established … infants, lunatics and idiots are not subject to it as rational agents any more than is an intelligent dog or ape.’^{Footnote 56} Indeed, some rationalist theorists bring this ‘undesirable consequence’^{Footnote 57} to its logical conclusion, by asserting that not all humans are human right-holders.^{Footnote 58} For example, James Griffin concludes that it seems best ‘to reserve the term “human rights” for normative agents’ and that ‘human rights should not be extended to infants, to patients in an irreversible coma or with advanced dementia, or to the severely mentally defective’.^{Footnote 59} Likewise, Carl Wellman submits that ‘one can and should accept the conclusion that only human beings defined not as members of a biological species but in the morally relevant sense as persons with the normal human capacities for moral action could possess any moral human right.’^{Footnote 60}

While the exclusion of human and animal non-agents alike may be philosophically consistent under a strictly rationalist conception, human rights are then really not human (qua human) rights, but rather, (partly human qua) agent or person rights.^{Footnote 61} This ‘elitist outlook’^{Footnote 62} is hardly the best explanation of the modern human rights paradigm. Not only is it widely considered morally reprehensible, as it undercuts the protective reach of human rights to some of society’s most vulnerable, non-paradigmatic members such as children, the elderly, or mentally disabled people.^{Footnote 63} Strictly rationalist accounts are also at odds with our ordinary and codified understanding of universal human rights as rights that every human being has irrespective of her individual particularities, including physical or mental (dis)abilities.^{Footnote 64} The disconnect between rationalist justifications of human rights and contemporary human rights law is particularly apparent with regard to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities^{Footnote 65} or the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (which stresses not children’s potentiality for agency but their vulnerability^{Footnote 66}).^{Footnote 67}

2.3.3.2 Generically Rationalist Accounts and the Problem of (Qualified) Speciesism

If lack of rationality is not accepted as a reason for pre-, post-, or never-rational humans not to have human rights, how can human rights be denied to animals on those very grounds? At this juncture, rationalist accounts run into the problem of (in)consistency, as has been abundantly pointed out by the argument from marginal cases or species overlap.^{Footnote 68} The logic of the argument goes as follows: to the extent that the cognitive abilities of some human and nonhuman animals are the same or similar, the principle of equal treatment^{Footnote 69} requires either excluding, together with animals, such humans that do not meet the rationality criterion, or (if the latter are included) to equally waive the rationality-prerequisite for animals with comparable cognitive constitutions.^{Footnote 70}

Faced with this ‘unpalatable dilemma’,^{Footnote 71} defenders of exceptionalist human rights (of all and only humans) frequently put forward that, whether actually present in an individual or not, the capacity for agency or rationality constitutes a generic feature of humans. According to this line of argument, what matters is that human beings normally or potentially possess the capacity for rationality, and belonging to the kind of beings that typically have the human rights-relevant properties is sufficient for having human rights.^{Footnote 72} I will not reiterate the many meticulous objections formulated against this sort of argument from kinds,^{Footnote 73} potentiality,^{Footnote 74} or species normality.^{Footnote 75} Suffice it to say that the conflation of membership in the human species and possession of a ʻstatus-conferring intrinsic propertyʼ^{Footnote 76} reintroduces, through the backdoor, biological humanness as a morally relevant fact and is thus vulnerable to the charge of (qualified) speciesism.^{Footnote 77} By infusing rational agency into the generic nature of human beings, all humans are fictionally attributed—and treated as if they possessed—the human rights-grounding quality, simply in virtue of belonging to a species that typically has it.^{Footnote 78} This shift from a capacity- to a group-based foundation of human rights runs counter to the notion of moral individualism, which rejects the idea of treating humans—or animals—not as individuals but rather as specimens of their kind or group.^{Footnote 79} Indeed, most human rights scholars would agree that ‘it is precisely the fact that people are being judged on the basis of their kind rather than their individual merits that make racism and sexism so objectionable.’^{Footnote 80}

The bottom line of these critiques is that there does not seem to be an empirically verifiable feature or capacity that all and only humans actually possess and that is relevant for grounding human rights.^{Footnote 81} In the end, biological humanness re-emerges and remains as the only hard, all-or-nothing natural attribute that works to include all humans while simultaneously excluding all animals. Exclusive human rights can thus ultimately be operationalized only by resorting to speciesism, that is, by claiming that membership in the human species is either directly morally significant or indirectly morally significant in that it establishes the (real or fictional) possession of the human rights-relevant feature or capacity.

2.3.3.3 Neo-Dignitarian Accounts and the Retreat into Autopoietic Insulation

Some exceptionalist theorists—sometimes referred to as ‘new dignitarians’^{Footnote 82}—refrain from relying on empirical claims about human nature, and instead invoke an unapologetically transcendent notion of human dignity as the foundation of human rights.^{Footnote 83} For example, Catherine Dupré states that human rights protection ‘rests on the assumption that, as human beings, we are born with the unique quality of dignity that distinguishes us from other beings (primarily animals), justifying and explaining the special protection of our rights’.^{Footnote 84} Whereas dignity has long served as a basis for human rights,^{Footnote 85} the recent revival of (neo-)dignitarian justifications may be explained as a counter-reaction to the corrosive critiques levelled against—and as a way of circumventing the pitfalls of—other exceptionalist accounts whose rationalist justifications falter once empirical evidence is introduced into abstract human nature.^{Footnote 86} As both Raffael Fasel and Will Kymlicka have astutely noted, neo-dignitarians precisely reclaim dignity as a metaphysical vehicle for reinforcing and insulating the idea of human exceptionalism against such empirical interferences.^{Footnote 87}

Indeed, new dignitarians are quite outspoken about their reliance on human dignity as a means of preserving special human rank. For example, Thomas Williams submits that in a disenchanted world where the natural sciences ‘tend ever more to emphasize the continuity between man and other creatures’, human dignity ‘provides a sure confirmation that man is not mistaken when he sees himself as radically distinct from and superior to the rest of the created world.’^{Footnote 88} For George Kateb, talk of human dignity is directed against deflationary ‘naturalist reductions’ that ‘picture humanity as just another animal species among other animal species’ and ‘unnecessarily tarnish human dignity by taking away commendable uniqueness from it.’ According to Kateb, the ‘core idea of human dignity is that on earth, humanity is the greatest type of being … and that every member deserves to be treated in a manner consonant with the high worth of the species.’^{Footnote 89} Richard Cupp, one of the most ardent critics of animal rights, writes that it ‘is not alarmist to note that inventing new rights for animals would make us view humans as less special and unique’ and warns against ‘the relaxation of human dignity protections’ as a dangerous corollary of animal rights.^{Footnote 90}

While it is clear that this particular narrative of human dignity cultivates a form of ‘species aristocratism’^{Footnote 91} and seeks to ‘re-inscribe species hierarchy at the heart of [human rights] theory’,^{Footnote 92} it is far from clear what exactly human dignity is, why all and only humans have it, what is so special about it,^{Footnote 93} and, one might ask, what about animal dignity?^{Footnote 94} Resort to the question-begging concept of dignity tends to give rise to more problems than it solves.^{Footnote 95} Dignity is generally ‘an extremely indeterminate and historically complex concept’, and often serves as a placeholder for other rationality-based properties which are believed to be unique in humans.^{Footnote 96} Insofar as dignity is referenced in this way, dignitarian accounts will run into the same problems as the rationalist accounts discussed above, and seem to switch one conception of exceptional human nature that struggles to be grounded in empirical reality for another.^{Footnote 97} To the extent, however, that human dignity is not used as a placeholder but invoked as an independent foundational value, it appears to function as a mystic and self-referential ‘Tû-Tû’^{Footnote 98} concept that escapes the possibility of verification or falsification, because it is simply posited as an axiom.^{Footnote 99} While the axiomatic invocation of dignity may, as intended, immunize the dignitarian account against the sort of empirical and philosophical scrutiny it sets out to evade, this retreat into autopoietic insulation is precisely what removes it from the realm of dialectical reasoning. At this point, dignitarian accounts fail to meet the justificatory burden of human rights philosophy. Instead of offering a proper justification of human rights, they simply reassert an unshakable belief in human exceptionalism, essentially ‘making human rights a matter of faith rather than of reason.’^{Footnote 100} This, then, is really just ‘speciesism in nicer terms’,^{Footnote 101} dressed up in a dignified guise. As such, neo-dignitarian human rights may very well be the last bastion—or the dying gasp—of old humanism and the ideology of human exceptionalism it seeks to conserve.

2.3.4 Against Human Rights Exceptionalism

Exceptionalist conceptions seek to ground exclusive human rights in unique human nature—a justificatory strategy that is bound to fail. Philosophers for many centuries have tried to spell out ‘what all and only the featherless bipeds have in common, thereby explaining what is essential to being human.’^{Footnote 102} This ongoing search for the ‘anthropological difference’—those significant features that are unique to humans and set them apart from all animals—appears increasingly futile.^{Footnote 103} Darwinian naturalism and the past decades of scientific advances and bioethical debate have incrementally worked to debunk the idea of human exceptionalism, as its empirical and metaphysical assumptions are ‘increasingly and evidently anachronistic’.^{Footnote 104} Although human exceptionalism has become an outdated and free-floating ideology sans empirical foundation,^{Footnote 105} it remains very much alive in philosophical and legal thinking. Yet, attempts by theorists to sustain, defend, or rehabilitate human exceptionalism do seem to involve ‘increasingly contorted intellectual gymnastics’.^{Footnote 106} This is also true of human rights philosophy.^{Footnote 107} As has become clear, the claim that all and only human beings have human rights is ‘in fact surprisingly difficult to defend’,^{Footnote 108} and attempts at doing so ultimately lead to either conceding that not all humans are right-holders or adopting a speciesist position.^{Footnote 109} While strictly rationalist justifications of human rights may be logically consistent, they risk undermining the equal rights of all humans, because they rely on a highly gradualized cognitive capacity that not all humans possess. Generically rationalist and dignitarian justifications circumvent this problem by relying on exceptionalist fictions or axioms that ultimately amount to ‘nothing more than the bald assertion of speciesism.’^{Footnote 110} Staunch defenders of exceptionalist human rights will, however, hardly be dissuaded by the prospect of being labelled ‘speciesists’. Indeed, some authors have moved to simply embrace (the practical necessity of) speciesism for grounding human rights, and rely on biological humanness as an axiomatic precondition that defies the need for further philosophical justification.^{Footnote 111} In the end, what it comes down to is a kind of ‘decisionism’^{Footnote 112}—a deliberate decision to uphold human exceptionalism despite the preponderance of empirical and philosophical arguments against it.^{Footnote 113} This mindset is best expressed by Alan Dershowitz, who admits that ‘we have made the somewhat arbitrary decision to single out our own species—every single member of it—for different and better treatment. Does this subject us to the charge of speciesism? Of course it does, and we cannot justify it except by the fact that in the world in which we live, humans make the rules’.^{Footnote 114}

While we may have arrived at a discursive deadlock as regards the critique or defence of human exceptionalism,^{Footnote 115} there is another, human rights-internal reason that should incline us to think that exceptionalist theories cannot retain their explanatory monopoly over human rights. Exceptionalist accounts are typically bound up with rationalist reductions of human nature, and single out one highly abstract feature (e.g. personhood, agency, autonomy) as the foundation of all human rights. This rationalist-foundational monism^{Footnote 116} has generally been criticized as too restrictive, because it does not only risk being under-inclusive as regards the class of human rights-holders, but also as regards the aspects of human nature that fall within the protective mandate of human rights.^{Footnote 117} The rationalist-monist mode of grounding human rights ‘restricts the human rights-generative interests to those in freedom or normative agency’, while ignoring other obvious sources of human protective needs, such as the capacity to feel pain and suffer.^{Footnote 118} As John Tasioulas illustrates, many core human rights, such as the right not to be tortured, protect human interests that are not necessarily or primarily reducible to a rationality-related value, but are more plausibly explained as protecting a ‘plurality of human interests’, among them the interest in avoiding ‘excruciating pain’.^{Footnote 119} Agency is certainly an important factor in the configuration of many human rights, but surely not the only important aspect of human nature deserving of human rights protection. For this reason, if we ground human rights in human nature, it seems best to adopt a position of foundational pluralism.^{Footnote 120} This allows for a range of essential human features (among them rationality-based as well as more primal or corporeal interests) to play a justifying role in different human rights.^{Footnote 121} Such a pluralistic or ‘explanatorily promiscuous’^{Footnote 122} foundation promises to more realistically reflect the complex and heterogeneous nature of humans, rather than committing human rights to one particular ‘radical nature’.^{Footnote 123} It is further able to accommodate humans not only as extraordinary rational beings, but also as ordinary bodily and emotional beings ‘who, unlike the abstractions of moral philosophy, hurt, feel pain and suffer’.^{Footnote 124}

As the next section will argue, non-exceptionalist naturalistic theories offer such a pluralistic, and more plausible, human rights paradigm—one that is able to justify universal human rights of all (but perhaps not only) humans on more diverse grounds that are not premised on questionable rationalist assumptions about special human nature.

2.4 Non-Exceptionalist Conceptions of Human Rights and the Rise of New Humanism

2.4.1 Overview

The second, more junior family of essentialist naturalistic theories grounds human rights in a non-exceptionalist conception of typical human nature. Non-exceptionalist accounts rest on a more realistic and profane image of humans as physically, socially, and politically vulnerable beings that possess basic interests, needs, and capabilities which human rights are supposed to protect and foster. This shift ‘from transcendental rationalism to a sensate, suffering, sentimental human body’ marks a clear departure from old humanism.^{Footnote 125} Indeed, many critical—especially feminist, disability, and vulnerability—scholars are vocal about replacing the traditional, abstract, disembodied rational agent as human right-holder with embodied ‘real-life subjects’ reflective of the ‘lived realities of human subjects.’^{Footnote 126} The justifications advanced for human rights typically centre on simple human features or capacities that are commonly shared by all humans (and, incidentally, by many other animals).^{Footnote 127}

For example, human rights are often seen as protecting a plurality of especially important, fundamental human interests.^{Footnote 128} Others frame human rights as grounded in basic needs,^{Footnote 129} the fundamental conditions for a minimally good life,^{Footnote 130} or basic human capabilities.^{Footnote 131} Still others identify embodied vulnerability—the ‘universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition’^{Footnote 132}—as basis for universal human rights.^{Footnote 133} Anna Grear calls to mind that it was the ‘embodied nature of the human suffering that gave international human rights law its founding impulse’,^{Footnote 134} and submits that ‘the protection of embodied beings’ and ‘the prevention of the suffering of the embodied human being’ is at the heart of the human rights system.^{Footnote 135}

2.4.2 Incidental Exclusivity and Inherent Transspecies Inclusivity

While there is a broad diversity of non-exceptionalist naturalistic accounts, what these approaches have in common is that they do not conceptualize human nature in contradistinction to animals, but rather, identify core aspects of human existence regardless of whether such features are shared with other animals or not.^{Footnote 136} In fact, this family of naturalistic theories tends to be quite cognizant of the animal nature of humans^{Footnote 137} and of the evolutionary continuities between human and nonhuman animals. Even so, most of these human rights accounts are framed in humanist terms and are anthropocentric in that they, like old humanists, ‘focus almost exclusively on the human species’^{Footnote 138} while being indifferent or inattentive to other animals. Unlike old humanism, however, this kind of new humanism^{Footnote 139} is not invested in the idea of human exceptionalism, and justifies human rights in a way that is merely inclusive of all humans without simultaneously encoding the demarcation from and exclusion of animals.^{Footnote 140} As a consequence, non-exceptionalist accounts remain conceptually agnostic about, or simply oblivious to, the incidental exclusion or potential inclusion of animals into the ambit of human rights protection.^{Footnote 141} It is this agnosticism towards the animal question that renders non-exceptionalist conceptions of human rights both incidentally (as opposed to necessarily) exclusive yet inherently (albeit perhaps accidently) inclusive of animals. Because the ‘human’ in human rights here serves as a placeholder for an essential human feature that all but not only humans share, non-exceptionalist accounts are over-inclusive or overshooting in that they lay the ground for potential animal rights along with grounding human rights.^{Footnote 142} Indeed, given the natural commonalities between humans and animals as regards possession of the human rights-grounding features (be they fundamental interests, basic needs, well-being, capabilities, or vulnerability), the standard justifications advanced for human rights quite readily extend to justifications of animal rights.^{Footnote 143}

Take, for example, the interest-based approach, which grounds human rights in fundamental human interests. Some of these interests, such as those requiring complex cognitive abilities or those concerning particular human institutions like marriage or religion, will presumably be purely human interests. Other, more basic and ubiquitous interests (deriving from humans’ animal rather than rational nature)^{Footnote 144} are however widely shared by other sentient animals, such as the interest in avoiding pain, suffering, injuries and death, or in having food, shelter, and an adequate family and social life.^{Footnote 145} On a species-neutral reading, the interest-based account^{Footnote 146} of human rights can thus be seen as grounding corresponding animal rights, based on shared fundamental interests.^{Footnote 147} This holds true even of overtly anthropocentric conceptions such as the ‘two-level pluralist account’ formulated by John Tasioulas, which grounds human rights in ‘both moral (equal human dignity) and prudential (universal human interests) considerations’.^{Footnote 148} While Tasioulas does not dispense with the unequivocally humanist notion of human dignity, his account is open to a species-neutral reformulation, as dignity here serves the conceptual function of marking moral status (i.e. having intrinsic or ultimate value), which is but a general interest-theoretical requirement for right-holding that animals can meet in virtue of their own dignity or inherent value.^{Footnote 149}

Along similar lines, if basic needs and capabilities, embodied vulnerability or the ‘ubiquity of human misery and suffering’^{Footnote 150} are viewed as important grounds for human rights, it cannot go unnoticed that animals possess some of these human rights-generative features and might therefore also belong in the human rights-protective scheme. For example, Martha Nussbaum submits that the capabilities approach—even though initially developed with humans in mind—can be extended to other sentient animals.^{Footnote 151} According to her reformulation, basic animal rights should be determined based on a species-specific list of capabilities that affords all animals ʻa shot at flourishing in their own wayʼ.^{Footnote 152} The innate extensibility of human rights is perhaps clearest once we refocus on humans as vulnerable subjects whose embodiment ‘carries with it the ever-present possibility of harm, injury, and misfortune’.^{Footnote 153} Animals—unlike corporations^{Footnote 154}—naturally share some of these fundamental vulnerabilities with humans.^{Footnote 155} Hence, if the embodied vulnerability of humans gives rise to universal human rights, and other animals are kindred vulnerable subjects, the vulnerability approach can be seen as co-justifying animal rights.^{Footnote 156}

All of this goes to show that with any given non-exceptionalist naturalistic account, the argument for transspecies inclusivity follows the same syllogistic logic: if animals have similar natural constitutions as human rights-holders, that is, to the extent that animals possess the rights-grounding natural qualities, a human right can be extended to a corresponding animal right.^{Footnote 157}

2.4.3 Human Rights Universalism Unbound

The decline of old humanism and the rise of new humanism is paralleled by a shift from an exclusive to an inclusive human rights paradigm. Non-exceptionalist conceptions of human rights drop the ‘Herculean task’ of finding a unique natural feature that (all and) only humans possess, and instead settle for more typical features that all (but not only) humans share.^{Footnote 158} In doing so, non-exceptionalist accounts put forward a more plausible reading of universality that signals simple inclusivity rather than exclusivity—one that takes ‘being human’ to be a sufficient but not necessarily a necessary condition for having human rights.^{Footnote 159} It is precisely due to its agnosticism or openness towards the nonhuman that new humanism has furnished a paradigm of radical, uncontainable inclusivity whose overshooting potential contains the seeds for extending universal human rights beyond the human species.^{Footnote 160} This potential for transspecies universality is inherent and derives from the very justificatory logic of non-exceptionalist human rights.^{Footnote 161} On a justificatory level, then, many human rights are—or could very well be—animal rights.^{Footnote 162} In fact, all of this suggests that in a conceptual sense, human rights are not and may ‘have never been only or wholly human.’^{Footnote 163}

Notwithstanding this inherent potential for transspecies inclusivity, it must be acknowledged that even the more expansive and inclusive human rights paradigm offered by new humanism remains ultimately humanist, albeit reflective of a humanism light or an ‘inclusive humanism’.^{Footnote 164} While non-exceptionalist accounts provide plenty of conceptual space for integrating animals into the human rights framework, this process is somewhat predicated on the ‘human-likeness’ of animals. The operative logic is that human rights can be extended to animals because, and to the extent that, animals are like humans with regard to the relevant rights-grounding feature, and thus relies heavily on the natural similarities and ‘empathetic proximity’ between humans and animals.^{Footnote 165} This assimilationist or sameness approach, with its modified criterion of ‘being human-like’ (instead of ‘being human’), has attracted the criticism of engaging in a ‘human-like chauvinism’ (instead of ‘human chauvinism’) that reinforces anthropocentric values.^{Footnote 166} Echoing second wave feminist critiques, Catharine MacKinnon asks us: ‘Why should animals have to measure up to humans’ standards for humanity before their existence counts?’^{Footnote 167} This criticism seems particularly pertinent with regard to certain practical attempts to extend autonomy-based human rights to animals,^{Footnote 168} which tend to focus on cognitively human-like animals such as great apes (hominids)—humans’ next of kin.^{Footnote 169} Presumably, on a rationalist approach, only the most humanoid animals—as quasi-humans, ‘adoptive humans’,^{Footnote 170} or ‘honorary humans’^{Footnote 171}—would be allowed entry into the exclusive club of human(oid) rights.^{Footnote 172}

However, the ‘largely cognition-based case for hominid rights’ is somewhat different from ‘the largely sentience-based case’ for general animal rights.^{Footnote 173} The fact that animals are sentient beings is not relevant merely because they are like humans in this respect. Rather, there are good reasons to think that sentience is a natural quality that has intrinsic moral and rights-generative significance.^{Footnote 174} For example, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka submit that ‘Being an “I”—a being who experiences—represents a particular kind of vulnerability, calling for a particular form of protection … in the form of inviolable rights.’^{Footnote 175} Non-exceptionalist conceptions that take into account the manifold needs, interests, and vulnerabilities arising from the animal nature of humans as sentient beings thus seem better equipped to also accommodate the specific interests, needs, and vulnerabilities of animals as sentient beings.^{Footnote 176}

In the end, although human rights are originally anthropocentric and may retain a certain degree of anthropocentrism even under new humanism, the inclusion of animals can be argued in a conceptually consistent and normatively meaningful manner. Yet, as Kelly Oliver stresses, ‘although rights may be better than no rights, they also do not go far enough in addressing the structural and ideological issues that made them necessary in the first place.’^{Footnote 177} To appreciate the historical and social conditions that create a practical need for animal rights, we need a political perspective beyond human rights naturalism.

Notes

1.
Raz (2010), p. 323.
2.
Beitz (2004), p. 196; van Duffel (2013), p. 32.
3.
On the naturalistic conception of human rights, see generally Beitz (2009), p. 48ff.
4.
See, paradigmatically, Gewirth (1982b), p. 41 (‘We may assume, as true by definition, that human rights are rights that all persons have simply insofar as they are humanʼ); Griffin (2001), p. 2 (‘A human right is one that a person has, not in virtue of any special status or relation to others, but simply in virtue of being human’); for an analysis of the commonplace formula ʻsimply in virtue of being humanʼ, see Fasel (2018); Gardner (2008).
5.
See Pollmann (2014), p. 121; Raz (2010), p. 323 (noting that naturalistic theories generally rely ‘on no contingent fact except laws of nature, the nature of humanity and that the right-holder is a human being’); the naturalistic conception is often described as a ‘modernized, secularized form of natural rights’ (Cruft et al. (2015), p. 2). See e.g. Tasioulas (2012a), p. 26 (noting ‘strong continuities between human rights and the traditional idea of natural rights’); Nickel (2007), p. 12 (human rights as ‘the recycling and updating of old ideas within a new, transnational context’).
6.
See Pollmann (2014), p. 126 (noting the self-evident and central presupposition that ‘one has to belong to the human species to be a bearer of human rights’).
7.
See e.g. Edmundson (2012), p. 154 (ʻHuman rights, one would think, are rights possessed by all (and only) humans, who possess these rights simply in virtue of their humanityʼ); van Duffel (2013), p. 49 (noting that ‘Intuitions regarding human rights … are that all and only human beings have human rights’); Beauchamp (2011), p. 205 (ʻThe natural reading of “human rights” is rights for humans onlyʼ); a notable exception is Feinberg (1973), p. 85, who defines human rights as ‘generically moral rights of a fundamentally important kind held equally by all human beings, unconditionally and unalterably’ while emphasizing that this definition ‘includes the phrase “all human beings” but does not say “only human beings,” so that a human right held by animals is not excluded by definition’.
8.
If humanism is the ‘philosophy of which man is the center and sanction’ (Lamont (1997), p. 12), it is anthropocentric by definition; on the ʻphilosophical speciesismʼ and anthropocentrism permeating the discourse of human rights, see generally Gearty (2009, 2010); Naffine (2012), p. 68; Grear (2011), p. 24ff.
9.
See Cavalieri (2001), p. 70; Corbey (2013), pp. 67–69 (noting that humanist ‘discourse on human rights … proclaimed a new, more inclusive demarcation of morally respectable beings by a continuing exclusion of others’).
10.
Cochrane (2013), p. 655.
11.
cf. Stone (1972), p. 453 (noting that ‘We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless “things” to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of some status quo’).
12.
Paradigmatically Tasioulas (2012b), p. 37 (ʻhuman rights are rights possessed by all human beings (however properly characterized)ʼ (emphasis added)).
13.
Griffin (2001), p. 2.
14.
Edmundson (2012), p. 154.
15.
Donnelly (2013), p. 10; Nino (1991), p. 35 (noting that for ʻpractical purposes we need a concept of human being defined in biological terms’ that provides a hard, ‘all-or-nothing’ criterion for determining human rights-holders).
16.
Donnelly (2013), p. 13.
17.
See Bilchitz (2009), p. 52f (noting that this kind of biologistic ‘reasoning is wholly unpersuasive’, as it ‘involves simple assertion without justifying why the category of homo sapiens is sufficient to determine worth and the type of treatment human beings are to be accorded’).
18.
See e.g. Nino (1991), p. 35 (noting that ‘it is difficult to see how a purely biological fact … could be morally relevant. That would be similar to the racist standpoint’); Liao (2012), p. 276 (noting that ‘membership in the class of human beings is more like membership in a racial group in being a purely biological relation’); Bilchitz (2009), p. 53 (arguing that speciesism is an unjustifiable prejudice akin to racism and sexism).
19.
‘Speciesism … is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.’ Singer (1995), p. 6.
20.
Cruft et al. (2015), p. 9; Liao (2010), p. 162 (noting that justifications of human rights should ‘meet the Species Neutrality Requirement so as to not be speciesist’).
21.
Naturalistic accounts of human rights are typically essentialist, in that they operate under an essentialist mode of reasoning which assumes that ‘the human’ has a true and essential nature, a metaphysical essence, that determines what it essentially means to be human. See Naffine (2012), p. 69f.
22.
Paradigmatically Griffin (2008), p. 34f (‘“Human” cannot … mean simply being a member of the species Homo sapiens. … by the word “human” in the phrase “human rights” we should mean, roughly, a functioning human agent’); see also Miller (2015), p. 234 (noting that ‘it is somewhat misleading to say that being human is the ground of human rights … The ground of human rights is rather the feature, universally possessed by human beings, that justifies these rights’).
23.
The universalist formula that ‘all humans have human rights’ is thus the conclusion of an enthymeme (the unstated major premise is that human rights are grounded in X; the unstated minor premise is that all humans have X; the stated conclusion is that all humans have human rights); according to Pollmann (2014), p. 127, this kind of reasoning is bound to be circular, because the conclusion is already presupposed in the premises. That is, X in premise 1 is determined in a manner that is predetermined by premise 2, in order to reach the desired conclusion—the conclusion thus shaping the major premise from the outset.
24.
The psychological study of dehumanization is relevant in this context, because all phenomena of dehumanization minimally involve the ‘denial of humanness’, and therefore require a clear understanding of ‘what constitutes humanness’. See Haslam (2014), p. 35f.
25.
On these two distinct senses of humanness, see generally Haslam (2006).
26.
Haslam (2006), p. 256.
27.
See also Pollmann (2014), p. 123f (distinguishing among naturalistic theories between metaphysical/theological, rationalist/transcendental, and materialistic/anthropological accounts).
28.
As critical scholars point out, ‘the “man” of human rights is literally a Western white middle-class man who … has stamped his image on law and human rights and has become the measure of all things and people.’ Douzinas (2000), p. 165.
29.
See Naffine (2012), p. 83; Murphy (2011), p. 575 (noting that ʻstrains of religious, secular, existential, and Marxist humanism have tended to circumscribe the category of the human with reference to the themes of reason, autonomy, judgment, and freedomʼ); Schulz & Raman (2020), p. 149 (noting that traditional naturalistic theories hold that ‘not only are humans higher in importance than animals but that animals lack the qualities, such as reason or inherent dignity, that would make them eligible for rights in the first place’).
30.
MacDonald (1984), p. 25; similarly, Maritain (2011), p. 66, 100 (stating that the human person ‘is an animal gifted with reason’ and that ‘Man is an animal … but unlike other animals … He exists not merely physically; there is in him a richer and nobler existence; he has spiritual superexistence through knowledge’).
31.
The legal and philosophical concept of personhood is ambiguous and elusive. Grounding human rights in personhood may thus further complicate, rather than resolve, the matter of finding a coherent justificatory basis for human rights. See Ohlin (2005), pp. 248f (arguing that ‘Personhood is a placeholder for deeper concepts that ground our moral intuitions about human rights. Consequently, human rights arguments are obscured by their reliance on the concept of the person.’ He further notes that ‘if the concept of the person is deployed as a mere placeholder for a conclusion, it cannot simultaneously serve as a reason for granting rights, on pain of circularity.’ Ibid., p. 218).
32.
Liao (2010), p. 164.
33.
See Cochrane (2013), p. 660 (noting that it is commonly held that human rights ‘identify and protect something special and unique about humanity’); Tasioulas (2012a), p. 13 (noting that ‘Our capacity to choose and pursue a conception of the good life is the relevant dimension along which the human rights tradition regards humanity as set apart from non-human animals’).
34.
Gewirth (1982a), p. 5, 8 (emphasis added).
35.
Griffin (2008), p. 32f.
36.
Griffin (2010), p. 345f (emphasis added).
37.
Griffin (2012), p. 10 (‘The two basic human interests grounding human rights … are the two constituents of normative agency: autonomy and liberty’).
38.
Wellman (2011), p. 21f (emphasis added).
39.
According to Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014), p. 5, the dominant tradition of humanism since the Enlightenment can be characterized as anthropocentric humanism ‘due to its ideological commitment to conceptualizing human being over and against animal being’.
40.
Kymlicka (2018); Patterson (2002), p. 3ff (‘human supremacy’).
41.
Routley and Routley (1979); Cavalieri (2001), p. 70.
42.
Benton (1988), p. 7.
43.
Eckersley (1998), p. 169 (understood as ‘systematic prejudice against nonhuman species’).
44.
Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014), p. 4 (defining anthropocentrism as ‘a belief system, an ideology of human supremacy that advocates privileging humans’ and ‘functions to maintain the centrality and priority of human existence’).
45.
Pietrzykowski (2017), p. 49.
46.
Costello and Hodson (2014), p. 177f; Gruen (2011), p. 4ff (human uniqueness and human superiority as distinctive claims of human exceptionalism); Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014), p. 5f (identifying human exceptionalism as a key premise of anthropocentric humanism).
47.
Rossello (2016), p. 752 (calling this ‘inclusive exclusion’, whereby animals are simultaneously included in the construal of a special human identity and excluded from the higher normative status so construed); MacKinnon (2005), p. 266 (calling this ‘definition-by-distinction’); Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014), p. 7 (noting that anthropocentric humanism is engaged in a ‘boundary project of delimiting “the human” from “the animal” … in which what is essential to and valuable about humanity is defined by what all animal others lack’); see generally Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), p. 203f (‘Throughout European history the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction to the animal. The latter’s lack of reason is the proof of human dignity. So insistently and unanimously has this antithesis been recited … that few other ideas are so fundamental to Western anthropology’).
48.
On the exclusivity of old humanist—or Aristocratic—human rights accounts, see also Fasel (2019b), p. 94f.
49.
For example, for an application of Gewirth’s agency account to animal agents, see Jowitt (2020).
50.
Liao (2012), p. 265, 272.
51.
Griffin (2008), p. 32.
52.
See e.g. D’Amato and Chopra (1991), p. 21, 27 (making a ‘minimal caseʼ for extending the single most fundamental human right—the right to life—to whales, notably because whales are a species ‘that scientists speculate has higher than human intelligenceʼ).
53.
cf. Frey (1988), p. 199 (noting that using ‘human-centred criteria’ for determining normative status might be considered ‘indirect speciesist’); Fjellstrom (2002), p. 70 (noting that reliance on ‘human-centred validational tools’ is speciesist to the extent that ‘they are construed to yield arguments that assure ethical precedence for humans’).
54.
Quinn and Arstein-Kerslake (2012), p. 37; see also Douzinas (2000), p. 237 (noting that the ‘legal subject is the caricature of the real person, a cartoon-like figure which, as all caricature, exaggerates certain features and characteristics and totally misses others’); Fineman (2008), p. 19 (noting that rationalist law is ‘built upon myths of autonomy and independence and thus fails to reflect the vulnerable as well as dependent nature of the human condition’).
55.
See Tasioulas (2012a), p. 14 (noting that rationalist accounts suffer from an acute problem: ‘the potential exclusion from the protection of human rights of all human beings who are not agentsʼ); on the problem of underinclusiveness, see Fasel (2018), p. 474f.
56.
McCloskey (1965), p. 124.
57.
Nino (1991), p. 36 (noting that a rationalist grounding of human rights has the ‘undesirable consequence’ that, because ‘the properties in question are not of an “all-or-nothing” but of a gradual kind … human beings would be entitled to rights of different degrees according to their rationality’).
58.
See van Duffel (2013), p. 48 (noting that faced with the ‘obvious objection that not all human beings are agents … some theorists have simply bitten the bullet and maintained that not all human beings, only agents, have rights’).
59.
Griffin (2008), p. 94f (further stating that ‘We should see children as acquiring rights in stages—the stages in which they acquire agency’).
60.
Wellman (2011), p. 22.
61.
See Cruft et al. (2015), p. 12 (noting that ‘Instead of justifying the existence of rights that all human beings possess qua human being, they justify something different: rights that all persons possess qua personsʼ); Buchanan (2011), p. 213f (‘If “humanity” refers to personhood … then we might decide that what we have called human rights would be more accurately called persons’ rights.’).
62.
Nino (1991), p. 36.
63.
See Cochrane (2013), p. 660f; Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011), p. 23.
64.
See Masferrer and García-Sánchez (2016), p. 5 (noting that ‘The legal system aims to ensure respect for the basic rights of individuals, not because they are intelligent or particularly skilled or talented, but just because of their human condition’); Dupré (2015), p. 22 (noting that human rights law aims to include ‘all human beings within its protective scope, regardless of the degree of self-awareness of their humanity or their ability to take rational decisions affecting their life or death’).
65.
See e.g. Quinn and Arstein-Kerslake (2012), p. 38ff.
66.
As pointed out by Griffin (2008), p. 85.
67.
See also Kymlicka (2018), p. 778; even with regard to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—despite its rationalistic overtone—the ʻmajority of the drafters had come to see the phrase “endowed with reason and conscience” as problematic … The drafters had good reasons for not wanting to make the possession of reason and conscience a prerequisite for having inalienable rightsʼ. Morsink (1999), p. 299.
68.
On the argument from marginal cases, see e.g. Gruen (2011), p. 64ff; Bilchitz (2009), p. 56ff; Tanner (2009); Dombrowski (1997); on the argument from species overlap, see Horta (2014); Wills (2020).
69.
See e.g. Rachels (1990), p. 182 (the principle of equality ‘implies that the interests of non-humans should receive the same consideration as the comparable interests of humans’).
70.
See e.g. Singer (2009), p. 574 (noting that ‘attempts to draw a moral line on the basis of cognitive ability … will require either that we exclude some humans – for example, those who are profoundly mentally retarded – or that we include some nonhuman animals – those whose levels of cognitive ability are equal or superior to the lowest level found in human beings’); Kymlicka (2018), p. 779 (highlighting that this ‘is a structural problem for supremacist theories. Given the continuities between humans and animals in their interests, capacities and subjectivities, there simply is no way to justify throwing animals under the bus without simultaneously throwing some humans under the bus (or at least dramatically increasing the risks that they will be thrown under the bus)’).
71.
Nino (1991), p. 36.
72.
See Liao (2010), p. 161f (with further references).
73.
See e.g. Nobis (2004); McMahan (2005), p. 358 (rightly noting that the kind-argument is generally only embraced when deployed to level up humans, but not consistently applied if it would require levelling down human individuals).
74.
See e.g. Feinberg and Baum Levenbook (1993), p. 205ff (succinctly noting, by way of a reductio ad absurdum, that ‘everything is potentially everything else’, and that it is a logical error to ‘deduce actual rights from merely potential (but not yet actual) qualification for those rights’); Rothhaar (2014); Tooley (2009), p. 35ff; Perrett (2000).
75.
See generally McMahan (2002).
76.
The specific property which is relevant for having moral status in general and human rights in particular. See McMahan (2005), p. 355.
77.
Qualified speciesism means that species membership is counterfactually correlated with morally significant characteristics. See Rachels (1990), p. 184ff; LaFollette and Shanks (1996), p. 42f.
78.
See McMahan (2005), p. 355f; McCloskey (1965), p. 123 (noting that ‘The general tendency has been to maintain that free agents and potential free agents have rights, with idiots, and all born from human parents being treated as potentially free agents, although many are obviously not such’).
79.
On moral individualism, see Rachels (1990), p. 173ff (‘The basic idea is that how an individual may be treated is determined, not by considering his group membership, but by considering his own particular characteristics’); McMahan (2005), p. 357 (noting that it is foundational to moral individualism that ʻonly intrinsic properties can be status-conferringʼ); May (2014); Cavalieri (2001), p. 76.
80.
Tanner (2006), p. 56f.
81.
See Cruft et al. (2015), p. 9 (noting that ‘there does not seem to be a relevant empirical attribute that would apply to all and only human beings’); Fasel (2018), p. 477 (noting that ‘there are likely no rights-grounding features that all and only human beings possess’).
82.
See Kymlicka (2018), p. 768 (noting that new dignitarians ‘make two core claims: (1) that protection of, or respect for, human dignity is the basis of human rights; and (2) that a core component of human dignity is our radical difference from, and superiority over, animals’); Fasel (2019a) (arguing that this ‘new dignitarianism’ is in fact old).
83.
See e.g. Waldron (2015); Kateb (2011).
84.
Dupré (2015), p. 28.
85.
See Fellmeth (2016), p. 51 (noting that ‘One of the most often invoked bases for human rights is the concept of intrinsic human dignity’); dignity is prominently listed as a basis for human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights preamble (‘recognition of the inherent dignity … of all members of the human family’) and article 1 (‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’); see also McCrudden (2008) (noting that the UDHR was ‘pivotal in popularizing the use of “dignity” or “human dignity” in human rights discourse’).
86.
cf. Douzinas (2000), p. 96 (noting that ‘Once the slightest empirical or historical material is introduced into abstract human nature … human nature with its equality and dignity retreats rapidly’).
87.
See Fasel (2019a), p. 532 (noting that ‘“new dignitarians” are united in their enlisting of the concept of human dignity for the purpose of countering what they perceive to be threats to the special moral and legal status of humanity’); Kymlicka (2018), p. 768ff (noting that for new dignitarians, dignity serves as ‘the vehicle for supremacist theories’).
88.
Williams (2005), p. 207.
89.
Kateb (2011), p. 3f, 128.
90.
Cupp (2009), p. 77.
91.
See Rossello (2016); on human rights aristocracy, see Fasel (2019b), p. 79ff.
92.
Kymlicka (2018), p. 768.
93.
See e.g. Etinson (2020), p. 354 (noting that the idea of a special human dignity ‘is a wonderful piece of self-flattery’ but that ‘Dignity can be shared across species’).
94.
See e.g. Loder (2016); indeed, some legal orders have moved to recognize the dignity, or intrinsic value, of nonhuman animals. See, e.g., Swiss Federal Constitution article 120(2) (‘dignity of living beings’) and Swiss Animal Welfare Act article 1 (‘protect the dignity … of animals’). On this, see further Bolliger (2016); Bernet Kempers (2020).
95.
See Fasel (2018), p. 481 (aptly noting that ‘invoking human dignity as a ground for human rights simply seems to protract the issue of finding a morally relevant ground for the possession of human rights. Human dignity may be the ground for human rights, but what, then, is the ground for human dignity?’); Singer (2009), p. 573 (noting that talk of special human dignity ‘is really just a piece of rhetoric unless it is given some support. What is it about human beings that gives them moral worth and dignity?’).
96.
See Besson (2018), p. 34f; Valentini (2017), p. 863 (noting that the conceptual link between human rights and dignity is ‘uninformative at best and counter-productive at worst’ in that it pushes human rights ‘into deep metaphysical waters’. This is because the notion of dignity is opaque and ‘often just a placeholder for whichever human attribute grounds human rights, with different philosophical traditions disagreeing on the relevant attribute’); but see Habermas (2010), p. 466 (arguing that the concept of human dignity is not merely ʻa classificatory expression, an empty placeholder, as it were, that lumps a multiplicity of different phenomena togetherʼ).
97.
See also Fasel (2018), p. 480ff.
98.
See Ross (1957); on dignity as a tû-tû concept, see Pietrzykowski (2021), p. 72.
99.
See Liao (2010), p. 161 (noting that dignity is not ‘an attribute that one can empirically identify and assess’).
100.
Besson (2018), p. 23.
101.
Singer (2009), p. 573.
102.
Rorty (1993), p. 114; Abbey (2017), p. 3 (noting the ‘time-honored Western preoccupation with what distinguishes humans from animals’); Schulz and Raman (2020), p. 29f.
103.
See Glock (2012), p. 109 (further noting that ‘there is nothing special about being special. Every biological species differs from all the others, i.e. has unique features’).
104.
Pietrzykowski (2018), p. 40; Gearty (2009), p. 181 (noting a ‘collapse of intellectual confidence in the specialness of the human’ and ‘decline in arguments for human uniqueness’); Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014), p. 7 (noting how modern science leads us to conclude ‘just how untenable human exceptionalism and the human-animal dichotomy is’); Rorty (1993), p. 120 (noting that ‘Darwin argued most of the intellectuals out of the view that human beings contain a special added ingredient’); Miah (2008), p. 82 (noting that in the wake of Darwinian biology the ‘barriers between animals and humans have now begun to collapse’); Taylor (2010), p. 233 (noting that ‘scientific findings and philosophical debate are rendering human exceptionalism increasingly untenable intellectually’).
105.
See Taylor (2010), p. 234 (noting that the ‘doctrine of human exceptionalism expresses an objectively outmoded world-view’).
106.
Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011), p. 29.
107.
See e.g. Fellmeth (2016), p. 53 (‘Although so far no philosopher … has formulated a compelling case against animal rights, there is widespread opposition among many philosophers to animal rights as a concept. … after more than four decades of sustained and intense effort, the numerous opponents of animal rights have been able to offer no especially persuasive reason that humans should have all the intrinsic rights and animals should have none’); Goodkin (1987), p. 284f (noting that ‘theorists have been unable to identify the “unique” worth and dignity of humans in a way which logically accords natural rights to humans but not to animalsʼ).
108.
Liao (2010), p. 160.
109.
See Fasel (2018), p. 474 (noting that such attempts ‘have all encountered a similar problem: either only but not all human beings possess the relevant features, or all but not only human beings possess these features’).
110.
Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011), p. 29.
111.
For example, Pollmann (2014), p. 127f, seems to suggest that, because all naturalistic accounts are bound to succumb to circular reasoning, we should simply embrace the argumentative circle of the human rights syllogism and posit from the outset that species membership is necessary and sufficient for having human rights (i.e. all and only humans have human rights by definition, not in virtue of some essential quality ‘X’); for a principled moral defense of speciesism, see generally Cohen (2001), p. 62ff.
112.
On decisionism and its critique, see Kymlicka (2018), p. 780; Rossello (2017); Fasel (2019b), p. 114ff.
113.
See also Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014), p. 6 (noting a ‘dogmatic, irrational adherence to human exceptionalism despite the empirical evidence of a continuum and multitude of species capabilities’); Taylor (2010), p. 234 (noting that ‘Human exceptionalism is not a statement of fact, but an assertion of domination’).
114.
Dershowitz (2004), p. 198 (emphasis added).
115.
See Taylor (2010), p. 234 (noting that ‘What we have here are different paradigms – incompatible understandings of reality – and there is no common language to bridge the gap’).
116.
Exceptionalist accounts are monist to the extent that they identify one basic value that grounds human rights. On the distinction between monist and pluralist human rights accounts, see e.g. Griffin (2012), p. 10f; Fasel (2018), p. 472f.
117.
See generally Cruft et al. (2015), p. 12; Gilabert (2015), p. 204 (noting that the focus is ‘not on the urgent interests that all (or most) humans have, but on the subset of them that only humans have. We will then be unable to refer to obviously important interests such as avoiding pain when justifying human rights. This is too restrictive’).
118.
Tasioulas (2015), p. 63; see also Gilabert (2015), p. 203.
119.
See Tasioulas (2012a), p. 13.
120.
See e.g. Waldron (2015), p. 120 (encouraging us to ‘think pluralistically about rights’ because ‘human nature is multi-faceted’); Tasioulas (2015), p. 51 (advocating a ‘flexible, many-faceted approach to the grounding of human rights, whereby more than one interest, or combination of interests, grounds the existence of any given right’); Besson (2018), p. 31f (noting that ‘pluralistic approaches to the justification of human rights are more promising’); Nickel (2007), p. 53 (advocating a ‘pluralistic justificatory framework’).
121.
See Tasioulas (2012a), p. 26 (adopting a pluralistic view means that ‘At the level of foundations, a plurality of values plays a role in grounding human rightsʼ); it is generally questionable whether it makes sense to pinpoint one single foundation of all human rights. See e.g. Douzinas (2000), p. 4 (submitting that ‘there can be no general theory of human rights’) and Waldron (2015), p. 120 (noting that ‘it is not necessary for there to be a single theory of humanity’).
122.
Winston (2007), p. 297 (submitting that ‘most human rights receive their justifications from a variety of sources’ and that the ‘human rights canon as a whole … is justified holistically by … multiple anchors as well as multiple interdependencies’).
123.
Chartier (2010), p. 45f (noting that the ‘conceptual price of denying that animals have moral rights seems to be commitment to the view that rights are grounded in radical natures that may entirely lack empirical manifestation’).
124.
Douzinas (2000), p. 239.
125.
See Golder (2016), p. 689f (further noting that this ‘reworking of the foundations of human rights thus departs from the disembodied Kantian subject’ and introduces ‘the wounded, sensate, suffering body of humanity beseeching protection’); on the ‘new humanistic discourse’ that grounds human rights in corporeal vulnerability, needs, or capabilities, see Murphy (2011).
126.
Fineman (2008), p. 10, 12 (submitting that ‘the “vulnerable subject” must replace the autonomous and independent subject asserted in the liberal tradition. Far more representative of actual lived experience and the human condition, the vulnerable subject should be at the center of our political and theoretical endeavors.’ Ibid., p. 2); Grear (2007), p. 522 (noting that ‘The unitary subject of law in liberal legal theory builds on … an abstract, socially de-contextualised, hyper-rational, wilful individual systematically stripped of particularities, complexities and materiality.’).
127.
See Fasel (2018), p. 476 (noting that accounts which advance a ‘broad human rights grounding’ will typically ‘propose simple features or less demanding interpretations of more complex features’).
128.
See e.g. Tasioulas (2015), p. 51, 70 (human rights ‘are grounded in the universal interests of their holders’, and there is an open-ended plurality of human rights-relevant interests); Besson (2018), p. 25 (noting that human rights ‘protect fundamental human interests that all human beings have’); Edmundson (2012), p. 158 (noting that human rights ‘recognize extraordinarily special, basic interests’).
129.
See e.g. Renzo (2015); Brock (2005), p. 65f.
130.
See e.g. Liao (2015); Buchanan (2006), p. 153 (human rights as safeguarding the minimal benchmark of a ‘decent or minimally good lifeʼ); Hare (1973), p. 140 (noting that human rights set and protect a normative standard for what we deem a minimally acceptable level of human existence. This standard is historically contingent ‘as our conception of what is minimally acceptable changes and standards rise’).
131.
See e.g. Nussbaum (2007), p. 21f (understanding human rights as ‘entitlements to capabilities’ that serve as a ‘benchmark for a minimally decent human life’); Sen (2005); Vizard et al. (2011).
132.
Fineman (2008), p. 8.
133.
See e.g. Grear (2007), p. 541 (noting that the ‘true basis of a universal, is the ontological given of our embodiment with its inherent vulnerability’); Cole (2016), p. 261 (vulnerability as ‘shared, constitutive and connective feature of our existence that encompasses not merely susceptibility to harm but also receptivity to positive forms of intersubjectivity’); Turner (2006); Andorno (2016); Peroni and Timmer (2013); Marcos (2016).
134.
Grear (2007), p. 521, 539.
135.
Grear (2006), p. 195 (she points out that ‘there is an inescapable emphasis on embodiment and the prevention of the suffering of the embodied human being. The right to life, to immunity from torture, to immunity from slavery, and a host of other rights in the lexicon of international human rights law … focus on the protection of embodied beings. Such rights, in fact, make no conceptual sense without presupposing a vulnerable living body. … this theme of embodiment is so central that it can be argued that it provides a kind of over-arching interpretive context’).
136.
See e.g. Gilabert (2015), p. 203f (noting that ‘when we identify important human interests, we look for normatively relevant general features of human beings without regard as to whether some of these features are also held by other beings, for example non-human animals’. He further notes that the ‘relevant contrast when shaping our ideas of … human rights is not between humans and other species, but between what belongs to all humans and what belongs to some by reference to special features such as race, class, and nationality.’ Ibid., p. 206).
137.
cf. Ladwig (2014).
138.
Naffine (2012), p. 69.
139.
On new humanism, see Murphy (2011); Blau and Moncada (2009).
140.
See also Kymlicka (2018), p. 768 (noting that such accounts defend human rights ‘in a way that does not rest on species hierarchy’ and that is not ‘essentially tied to the assertion of superiority over animals’).
141.
See also Kymlicka (2018), p. 766f; in a similar vein, Vink (2020), p. 16 (noting an attitude of ‘cavalier agnosticism’ among political theorists who ‘have simply never considered the option of involving non-humans’ or who regard ‘animals as trivial, not worthy of serious attention, or irrelevant to political theory’).
142.
On this overinclusiveness, see Fasel (2018), p. 474 et passim.
143.
See Kymlicka (2018), p. 770 (noting that virtually all of these concepts ‘which we standardly use to discuss and defend human rights – interests, needs, well-being, capabilities, flourishing, vulnerability, subjectivity, care, justice – lead naturally to the recognition of animal rights, since animals are continuous with humans in all of these respects’).
144.
See Korsgaard (2011), p. 108 (highlighting that ‘the self for whom things can be naturally good or bad is not merely your rational self. It is also, or rather it is, your animal self’).
145.
See e.g. Beauchamp (2011), p. 205 (noting that ‘humans and many nonhumans share various interests that merit protection by rights. Some basic rights of humans and members of other species derive from conditions of vulnerability and potential harm’).
146.
It is worth highlighting that the interest theory of rights (from which the interest-based conception of human rights derives) is generally accepting and inclusive of animals as (potential or actual) right-holders. See Stucki (2020), p. 542ff; Kurki (2019), pp. 62–65; Kramer (2001).
147.
That is, if a particular human right to X protects a fundamental interest X, and some animals (along with all humans) have a comparable interest in X, it would plausibly follow that the right to X is not just a human but also a potential animal right. See Fellmeth (2016), p. 53 (‘Similar interests justify similar treatment … If animals have an interest in living and being free from torture no different from that of human beings, then a strong case can be made … for giving them corresponding rights’); Edmundson (2012), p. 158 (noting that ‘talk of human rights serves the recognitional function of singling out extraordinarily important interests. Once it appears that some such particularly important interest is shared by nonhuman creatures – such as the interest in not being made to suffer gratuitous pain – it in no way derogates from the recognitional point to attribute the right to the nonhuman creature as well’); Beauchamp (2011), p. 205 (‘to assume that all basic rights are for humans only is presumptive and prejudicial. Rights that are basic protect fundamental interests. Some interests – for example, in not being in pain, not suffering, having freedom of movement, having basic needs met, and the like – are not interests of humans only’); Bilchitz (2010), p. 277f (arguing that human rights should be ‘inclusive of every individual with the fundamental interests necessary to be capable of benefiting from a particular right and needing its protection’).
148.
Tasioulas (2015), p. 70. On his account, human dignity serves as the missing link between universal human interests and universal human rights, as it makes those interests normatively relevant. He describes this as ‘a form of the interest-based theory which regards the interests in question as generative of human rights in crucial part because they are the interests of human beings who possess equal moral status: human dignity and universal human interests are equally fundamental grounds of human rights, characteristically bound together in their operation.’ Ibid., p. 53f.
149.
The interest theory generally regards only those as right-holders whose interests are of ‘ultimate value’ (Raz (1986), p. 166, 177ff), i.e., who have ‘moral status’ (Kramer (2001), p. 33ff); Tasioulas (2015), p. 55, concedes this point when noting that ‘the value of human dignity is one way, albeit not the only way, of satisfying this general condition for rights-bearing capacity’; on animals satisfying the moral status or inherent value criterion for rights-holding, see generally Stucki (2020), p. 542f.
150.
Turner (2006), p. 34.
151.
For an application of the capabilities approach to animal rights, see Nussbaum (2005), p. 305ff (showing that the capabilities approach ‘can be extended to provide a more adequate basis for animal entitlements’); Nussbaum (2011); Schinkel (2008).
152.
Nussbaum (2018), p. 11.
153.
Fineman (2008), p. 9.
154.
See Isiksel (2016), p. 332ff; Grear (2007), p. 542 (noting that ‘corporations as disembodied jural entities do not share the foundational qualification for identification as a human rights beneficiary: embodied vulnerability’).
155.
See Satz (2013), p. 176 (noting that ‘Human and nonhuman animals share universal vulnerability to suffering with respect to certain basic capabilities’); Cole (2016), p. 263 (noting that ‘Vulnerability is a condition of life, both human and nonhuman’); Grear (2013), p. 50 (vulnerability as ‘fundamental, trans-species ontic commonality – a form of shared quintessential affectability as a condition or quality of creaturely existence itself’).
156.
See e.g. Turner (2006), p. 37f (noting that ‘Giving rights to animals may not undermine the vulnerability argument, because animal rights are not unlike the rights enjoyed by other agents … who cannot directly and actively enforce their own rights’); Satz (2013), p. 176 (noting that animals are vulnerable to severe deprivations of their basic needs as well as ‘uniquely vulnerable to exploitation’); Eisen (2018), p. 941 ff.
157.
See e.g. Goodkin (1987), p. 276; Beaudry (2016), p. 12.
158.
See Fasel (2018), p. 477 (succinctly noting that ‘If identifying rights-grounding features that all and only human beings possess is such a Herculean task, we are well advised to drop the criterion that only human beings must possess these features. It may be sufficient … to ground human rights in those features that all (but not only) human beings possess’).
159.
See e.g. Buchanan (2011), p. 213f (noting that ‘a plausible understanding of the claim that human rights are rights we have by virtue of our humanity does not imply that the concept of human rights is applicable only to human beings’); Gardner (2008), p. 5 (asking whether we are too restrictive ‘by insisting that humanity be both a necessary and a sufficient condition of the possession of a human right? Wouldn’t sufficiency suffice?’).
160.
See also Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011), p. 24 (noting that the ‘universalizing impulse of human rights is to extend basic protections across boundaries of physical, mental, and cultural difference, so why should this impulse stop at the boundary of the human species?’).
161.
This point was notably made by Cavalieri (2001), p. 139. Cavalieri contends that ‘on the basis of the very doctrine that establishes them, human rights are not human.’ She continues to elaborate that ‘the will to secure equal fundamental rights to all human beings, including the non-paradigmatic ones, has implied that the characteristics appealed to in order to justify the ascription of such rights … lie at a cognitive-emotive level accessible to a large number of nonhuman animals.’ She concludes that ‘not only is there nothing in the doctrine of human rights to motivate the reference to our species … but it is the same justificatory argument underlying it that drives us toward the attribution of human rights to members of species other than our own.’
162.
See e.g. Gilabert (2015), p. 205 (‘Surely there are animal rights that partly overlap with human rights’).
163.
Hunt (2011), p. 226 (further noting that ‘there is nothing but the anthropomorphic disfiguration of ideology to prevent us from affirming that nonhuman entities are subjects of rights.’ Ibid, p. 242).
164.
Pietrzykowski (2018), p. 102ff (arguing that ‘what seems necessary is not rejecting juridical humanism as such, but rather eliminating its present exclusive, or exceptionalist, thread’).
165.
See Redgwell (1996), p. 77; Tribe (1974), p. 1343.
166.
See Sapontzis (1993), p. 271; for a critique of sameness, similarity, or assimilationist approaches, see generally Bryant (2007); Deckha (2012) (calling for ‘respect for embodied difference rather than partial samenessʼ, ibid., p. 234); Nussbaum (2018), p. 3ff (questioning the ʻSo Like Usʼ approach); Beaudry (2016), p. 12ff; Jenkins and Stanescu (2014), p. 76 (submitting that ‘Anthropocentric privilege defines the criteria for inclusion in the moral community through the glorification of human-centric capacities’).
167.
MacKinnon (2005), p. 267 (‘That women are like men and animals are like people is thought to establish their existential equality, hence their right to rights … the issue is, is this the right question? … It is not that women and animals do not have these qualities. It is why animals should have to be like people to be let alone by them, to be free of the predations and exploitations and atrocities people inflict on them, or to be protected from them. Animals don’t exist for humans any more than women exist for men’); see also Offor (2020).
168.
The most prominent example here is the ‘practical autonomy’ approach developed by Wise (2002) and strategically litigated in courts by the Nonhuman Rights Project. On the Nonhuman Rights Project, see e.g. Wise (2010); Fernandez (2018).
169.
For strategic purposes, some animal rights practitioners direct their focus on great apes, because these nonhuman hominids naturally show close genetic, morphological, cognitive, and emotional similarities with human hominids and are thus believed to be the most plausible (the most human-like) candidates for nonhuman human rights – or ʻhominid rightsʼ. On such hominid rights, see Taylor (2001) (claiming that ʻHominid rights are more likely to win acceptance if they are seen as applying only to beings like usʼ, ibid., p. 39 [emphasis added]); Andrews et al. (2018).
170.
Deckha (2012), p. 233 (noting that ‘the humanist paradigm does not shift’).
171.
Fox (2004), p. 480.
172.
See also MacKinnon (2005), p. 325 (noting that on this ‘like us’ model animal rights ‘are poised to develop first for a tiny elite’); Donaldson and Kymlicka (2007), p. 194 (noting that this strategy ‘does not disrupt the human-animal hierarchy’).
173.
Taylor (2001), p. 41.
174.
See e.g. Nussbaum (2018), p. 14 (noting that ‘sentience is an important boundary in the world of nature, a baseline requirement of ethical considerability … Pain is the great evil’); Singer (1995), p. 8f (proposing that ‘the limit of sentience (using the terms as a convenient if not strictly accurate shorthand for the capacity to suffer and/or experience enjoyment) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others’); Singer (2011), p. 123 (further noting that ‘the boundary of sentience … is not a morally arbitrary boundary in the way that the boundaries of race or species are arbitrary’); see also Peters (2021), p. 502ff.
175.
Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011), p. 33.
176.
See also MacKinnon (2005), p. 325 (noting that ‘Predicating animal rights on the ability to suffer is less likely to fall into this trap, as it leads more directly to a strategy for all’).
177.
Oliver (2008), p. 218.

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Stucki, S. (2023). Naturalistic Conceptions of Human and Animal Rights: From Human Exceptionalism to Transspecies Universalism. In: One Rights: Human and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene. SpringerBriefs in Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19201-2_2

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