Human-Nonhuman Animal Conflict and the Hopeless Aspiration of Sentient Equality

Frauke Albersmeier (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

The talk is online and free to the public. For information on how to attend, please see the SSEA website (below).

Thursday, February 13, 11AM EST. Please note that because of time zones, the time of the talk in your location may differ than what is listed as the event time above on this page and in the PhilEvents calendar.

Frauke Albersmeier, University of Münster: “Human-Nonhuman Animal Conflict and the Hopeless Aspiration of Sentient Equality”

Abstract: Conflicts between the vital interests of human and nonhuman animals remain an awkward issue for sentientists who claim that Sentient Equality – the prescription to consider and treat nonhuman animals as moral equals – is both a morally correct and in principle perfectly acceptable norm for human beings. In order to avoid impressions contrary to this claim, sentientists typically present existential conflicts between human and nonhuman animals as relatively rare occurrences and/ or gesture toward moral justifications for resolving such conflicts in favor of humans. However, the latter strategy is inconsistent with sentientism, while the former denies basic facts of interspecies coexistence. Both ways of engaging (or failing to engage) with the fact of pervasive human-nonhuman animal conflict introduce a speciesist bias into theorizing about interspecies justice. In this talk, I will argue that in a world of scarce resources, the application of sentientism to reality must lead to the inconvenient conclusion that the basic requirements of human civilization are incompatible with sentient equality. I argue that any problem with this result goes only to the actual acceptability of sentientism, not to its moral justification. I then show in what sense it might be justified to regard Sentient Equality as a “hopeless” aspiration (Estlund 2014), and how recasting theories of interspecies justice as non-ideal theories might help to remedy an inconsistency and speciesist flaw in sentientist thinking about what nonhuman animals are owed as a matter of justice.