One Struggle for the Meaning of Animal Rights and Nature
The movement for the protection of nonhumans occupies an unusual arena of social justice movements. Unlike civil rights and certainly the LGBTQ+ equity movements, the movement for animal rights has shown little progress.
This article explores one struggle to reverse that failure, and two approaches: Existential, and consumerist.
Table of Contents
- The Failure of Animal Rights and Its Driver
- The Struggle Between Consumerist and Existential Animal Rights
- The Transcendence of Political Justice
- Resolving the Struggle at the True Intersection of Values
The Failure of Animal Rights and Its Driver
While veganism is a growing lifestyle choice, plant-based consumption is the norm for a miniscule percentage of the world’s population –which consumes billions of animals. Veganism also has little impact beyond animals used for food, including on those industries that torture tens of millions of animals a year in research, and the millions of companion animals worldwide subject to cruelty or neglect.
Humans replacing nonhumans is the fundamental issue in animal rights.
Nonhumans are either disappearing or being used in ways in which the vast majority suffer. And the base driver is not diet or education, but the mere procreation and proliferation of humans––who have so far failed miserably to coexist with other species.
Even what appear to be victories for nonhumans, like the restoration of certain wildlife populations, are now threatened by the population-driven climate crisis. The creation of humans is this: irrefutably the one behavior of interest to nonhumans. Nothing has a greater long-term impact on the climate crisis than a universal ethic of smaller families, once that ethic supersedes the pronatalism that drives our emissions and cements the anthropocentrism that poisons our relations with the nonhuman world. .
For those who have studied it, the seemingly organic f population growth in the 20th century was actually something politically insidious: elites using family structures to disempower the average person, drive inequity, and degrade democracy.
Can we bend the arc of growth? Family norms show more responsiveness to policy than diet, or companion and research animal relations, with fertility rates dropping precipitously over the past century. As will be discussed below, making that change involves simply replacing the self-contradictory conception of procreative autonomy with existential justice.
The graph above shows relative reductions in greenhouse gas emissions with a variety of individual actions, by far the most impactful being the decision to have smaller families. The impact is so profound that our climate policy must be considered inadequate if it fails to include reforms that promote family planning–reforms that have added societal benefits of promoting birth equity, parental readiness, and empowerment of future generations of youth. People are not numbers, and a universal ethic of smaller families should be embraced, first and foremost, because it promotes human and ecological well-being.
We can trade unsustainable family models for the things we truly value - like nature and equity. Shifting our focus to these values will allow for the flourishing of nonhuman populations and communities, which will in turn nurture the development of empathy among humans living amongst these more vibrant, fully realized nonhuman communities.
The Struggle Between Consumerist and Existential Animal Rights
Changes in family policy and planned family size outcomes, the sort dozens of groups focused on women's autonomy are now calling for as the most effective means of liberating nonhumans, tend to struggle against a currently dominant form of animal protection: Consumerism-based animal protection that focuses on changing the way people alive today consume nonhumans and their products.
Before exploring the struggle, it's worth noting that consumerism and market-based reforms are largely a reaction to the failure of animal law. If our collective or governmental systems cannot help animals, we are left with the market.
Animal Law as Misnomer and the Market Solution
For those who use the legal system to protect nonhumans, the concept of "animal law" is often seen as a misnomer, because the system is currently rooted in the anthropocentric devastation of nonhuman communities that does nothing to address the vast majority of institutionalized animal cruelty. As such, in practice, the system does more to protect human mistreatment of nonhumans than it does to protect nonhumans.
Legislatures will do little if anything to change their protection of institutional animal cruelty, something many animal advocates - who have had to resort to expensive direct democracy referendums for any success - are all too aware of. Many leaders in the market-based approach emerged from the campaigns for these referendums, wanting a better way.
This base dysfunctionality/exclusivity in our legal system (long recognized by other social movements, like Critical Race Theory) leaves reforms on the demand side and focusing on consumerism, more attractive than changing policies on the supply side. Without fundamental reform, the legal system just replicates inequities in the political system, leaving the vulnerable without recourse.
Taking animal law and rights seriously means beginning any animal bill of rights with the obligations surrounding who we should be for them, the initial “we” in the list of rights - the populations of persons who in quantity and civil quality would be capable of making the rights actually work.
We can't call something animal law if it does not orient from restoring the nonhuman world - their autonomy, and systems that don't do that may not even produce law at all - truly obligatory norms - because they do not use a baseline that accounts for how people meaningfully participate in those systems such that the rules the systems produce actually reflect the peoples' will. How does reconstituting legal systems ensure legitimacy, and help humans and nonhumans?
One example: Eliminating the wealth gap at birth between white children and children of color, via Fair Start federal tax reforms, restores the nonhuman world and is antiracist. Traditional “animal law” with its racist outcomes (including evading birth equity, in favor of historical disparities, despite the exponential benefit equity would also bring nonhumans) does none of this. Another: Traditional family law legal scholarship uses case and statutory law - or "positive law" to advance human welfare. But without a system of overriding rights that would mitigate the climate crisis, it’s failed to achieve its purpose and simply condemned future generations to suffer.
We can't call something animal law if it does not orient from restoring the nonhuman world - their autonomy, and systems that don't do that may not even produce law at all - truly obligatory norms - because they do not use a baseline that accounts for how people meaningfully participate in those systems such that the rules the systems produce reflect the peoples' will.
But this feature is now missing, and the lack of impact in "animal law" urges us to look towards other solutions.
The Philosophies Behind Consumerism
Consumerism as activism is steeped in social movements like Effective Altruism, or the preceding philosophies of Peter Singer, which do not promote the liberation of nonhumans as relatively autonomous communities left to flourish and evolve, but simply want to end nonhuman suffering. Singer, someone seen as having helped found the modern movement for animal liberation, was unable to bring himself to promote something as simple as a universal ethic of smaller human families in a recent lecture on the subject of population.
It's hard for animals to be liberated when they are extinct.
Singer’s work did little to stop the march of growth and the anthropocene, which are the fundamental - or existential - sources of nonhuman oppression. Their foundational motivation of minimizing suffering is a thinner morality than one based on autonomy and liberation as it characterized nonhumans as mere vessels for suffering, rather than as complete beings wanting full lives free from habitat destruction, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. That fuller view might have protected humans too, by demanding the preservation of nonhuman ecologies.
To the extent these thinner philosophies forestalled the climate-effective family reforms discussed below, these movements exacerbated the climate crisis. In fact, given the disparate impact of population growth on the climate crisis, the growth under which their altruism proceed will have done more to harm animals than altruists' work will do to benefit them.
A contrary approach moves upstream.
For anyone claiming to support nonhuman liberation, the first order question seems obvious: What are they doing to prevent humans from simply replacing nonhumans on Earth?
Various policies today are attempting to raise growth rates towards the higher variants.
This is how it works. People at the top benefit from making collective action - democracy - infeasible through family policies. It’s slow and subtle but it works.
A Backwards Taboo
The struggle between consumerism and existential justice is not an open conversation.
Recommended for You
Animal rights advocates who evade the existential question often reinforce a taboo by arguing that having children is somehow a matter personal or private to the parents. While bringing a human into the world is clearly interpersonal in nature, triggering core justice obligations to the children born and the communities impacted, the trope of "privacy" makes even discussing reforms uncomfortable. I've personally been in discussions with leaders in the animal rights movement that have to sidebar with me and whisper that they are proud to have adopted or chosen a small family.
Those who oppose family reforms as a means of helping animals often attack this approach as racist ecofascism. If we follow the money in these debates we find growth economists and their devotees using race as a decoy to avoid nonhuman autonomy, human equity, and the clear path by which smaller families ensure every child an ecosocial Fair Start in life, and the restoration of the nonhuman world.
The truth is that many funders who control social movements, and the animal rights movement in particular rely on population-driven economic systems, and many prefer to invest in the growing forms of plant-based consumption than challenge the underlying cause of animal suffering. Few if any of them question policies and other drivers that increase human fertility rates, and many push pronatal policies that urge women to have more kids as a means of spurring economic growth and maximizing returns on their investments. Even if more animals suffer and die on balance from growth, relative to the small percentage saved through dietary change, many "philanthropic" funders choose growth.
The reality of our political systems
Existential justice faces another hurdle.
Policies that would change family norms, collectively, require functional democratic political systems. Pronatal policies that fill democracies with people undermine those systems. Thanks in part to poor historic family planning, many seemingly democratic systems are completely dysfunctional and quickly degrading. Changing those systems, far more than increasing the market share of vegan products, is hard and slow.
Moreover, the climate crisis presents an existential risk to most nonhuman species that further jeopardizes nonhuman liberation. While restoring nonhuman populations and ecologies is possible, especially with significant changes in universal family planning policies, the process is more daunting than riding the growing wave of vegan consumption.
However, the idea of existential animal rights has some advantages that may elevate it in the years to come, mostly which involve the way existential justice simply aligns seemingly conflicting values.
The Transcendence of Political Justice
First and foremost, many want our democracies to function better than they are today, irrespective of markets. Whether we are other-regarding enough to protect nonhumans may say a lot about whether we are other-regarding enough to protect one another.
Making legal systems function by ensuring we are positioned to care about others is liberating for all creatures in ways that markets are not. Smaller populations in which more has been invested in each person empower democracy because they empower people to have an effective role in their political systems. Existential animal rights empower people in ways mass consumerism - voting in the shopping aisle - does not.
For many, veganism is about nonviolence–not just avoiding violence in our own behavior but helping to free social systems of it. And while economic systems of incentives appear consensual, their property rights and power inequities are all backed by the violence of the state with the ubiquitous presence of armed police, in contrast to systems fundamentally based on the consent, inclusion and relative self-determination of their subjects.
Where did this disparity originate?
One of the greatest threats to human freedom today involves the massive gap between rich and poor, placing the two sides in a power differential of master and servant–a mode in which a few determine the lives of many. There are ways to close that gap that would also restore ecocentric populations of humans and nonhumans, including ensuring the development of minimum levels of empathy in future generations.
That opportunity represents a chance for redistribution that could, because of the primary and overriding nature of the demands discussed below, quickly bend the growth arc towards justice - with or without governments. These equity movements could certainly target animal abuse industries as part of the Ponzi pyramid that have benefited from growth, and disproportionately harmed future generations, given their massive impact on the nonhuman environment.
These values - democracy, equity, and the natural ecologies they need in order to exist - place existential animal rights in the vein of larger social justice movements like the movement for racial equity in a way consumerism cannot. These values are also potentially explosive, if one accepts that family reforms act as the first and overriding peremptory norm, overriding the state-issued property rights market-based reform movements that many types of effective altruism rely upon.
Family planning for a just society requires actual planning, and ideally collective planning that ensures equality of opportunity for all children.
The Property Rights Override
How do you know whether something is a public cost or benefit, or whether a particular law is good or bad? One would need to begin with a group of relatively self-determining people capable of making these determinations. While theorists like John Rawls modeled such groups and their outcomes, our systems never physically prioritized self-determination - based on their birth conditions, equal opportunities in life, ecological conditions, etc. - of future children in creation ethics. But if human rights entail limiting the power humans have over one another, and unlimited right to have children makes no sense.
The worldview in which the value of individuals derives from their market costs and benefits –and not from their intrinsic value– reflects that failure. Making those shifts in value systems feasible - in time - is the key to qualitative optimal world populations, or the baseline to determine what is a cost and what is a benefit. This sort of thinking moves away from treating people as numbers, and towards focusing on the initial creation of power relations between persons - something the privacy model of family planning seeks to hide. Note how that would force us to see the world in terms of materiality, rather than the ethics of our relations. Why? Their formation - between human and human, human and nonhuman, is none of our business.
In other words, we CAN ensure political and legal systems that reflect our true values.
Establishing such truly self-determining groups of persons constitutes a primary obligation, preceding the property rights to the wealth at the top of the wealth pyramid - rights that block our using it to fund necessary family reforms. How could the system that assigns those property rights magically come to precede the systems of norms that create, develop and emancipate - as adults in democracies - the people who ought to be able to decide and allocate the former in the practice of democracy?
This overriding nature of the norms would mean family reformers could seize property to ensure children an ecosocial fair start in life - amid the restoration of the nonhuman world - as something that always sits as the genesis of justice and freedom.
Better family planning has specific and achievable metrics.
This truth places the struggle for existential animal rights in the family of other political or deontological movements for animals exemplified by groups like Direct Action Everywhere, which uses civil disobedience to practice a universal ethic of animal personhood, rather than relying on consumerism for reform. Justice should speak louder than consumerism and create better and more sustainable foundations for future societies.
Existential justice has another benefit. When rights movements of the past, like civil rights, focused on changing norms among a subset of the populace without changing the fundamental political structure, their impact was limited by subsequent regressions - legislatively and otherwise - because they did not target the operative concentrations of power. The ongoing attack on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is emblematic of this.
Finally, there is now evidence of a slow but perceptible recognition - given the disparate impact of family reforms not only in saving animals but in liberating women - now beginning among a growing coalition of advocacy groups calling for family reforms. This movement could balloon. Those in it are not calling for population policies - they are calling for people policies, ones that most determine the lives of the most people: those who will live in the future.
For all of these reasons, existential justice could displace consumerism.
It’s simply misleading to refer to any advocacy as a form of animal protection, welfare, law, rights, etc. when that advocacy does not include family reforms to restore the nonhuman world and ensure that future humans can live harmoniously with it, and not destroy it.
Arguably such a system, devoid of nonhuman liberation and the idea of nonpolity or a neutral position between humans, is not law at all.
Resolving the Struggle at the True Intersection of Values
Is there ground for resolution of the supply and demand sides of animal rights, the existential and consumerist approaches? In some ways the struggle is the same one we see between human rights and democracy, or the need to use antecedent objective "side constraints" on the dangerous subjective whims of majorities.
And the resolution is the same: We can use comprehensive forms of humane education that link educational outcomes to better family planning reforms. The goal is the same as between human rights and democracy - to improve the fundamental relations between people, or simply, to make moral truth popular. We can use these educational reforms to ensure that truth is not lost in the crowd, a crowd that today is primarily being created for commerce, and not democracy.
Family reforms empower people. Like guidelines for meetings that ensure everyone can speak rather than ignoring the needs of some, they should be embraced by democracies.
And in terms of reforming our legal system beyond education and more broadly, existential justice resolves the problem of "animal law as misnomer" by rebuilding legal systems from the ground up - using birth equity and the restoration of the nonhuman world as guidestars.
