Talking Animals, Law and Philosophy: 'The Unhappy Marriage of Animality and Cognitive Disability' (Change of location)

Speaker: Alice Crary (Professor of Philosophy, The New School)

Please note the change of location due to industrial action

What are we to make of the horrific history of the use of animal comparisons in rhetoric urging the marginalization, abuse, and killing of cognitively disabled human beings? Are there appropriate responses to this history that equip us to insist on the equal moral value of the lives of cognitively disabled human beings without simply re-inscribing the denigration of animals in our moral and political discourse? Is it possible to combine an image of animals as in themselves morally significant beings with a commitment to human moral equality? This paper offers an affirmative answer to this last question, and it proceeds by commenting on a conversation that took place at a 2008 conference, in the Philosophy Department of New York State’s Stony Brook University, on challenges that the lives of cognitively disabled human beings pose to generally held philosophical beliefs. The most intense public debates at the event were about what some of the speakers saw as the rebuke cognitive disability represents to the classic idea of human equality. The central debate was an exchange between the Stony Brook conference’s most vocal critic of the idea of equal human dignity—Peter Singer—and its most vocal defender—Eva Feder Kittay. A key issue at stake between Singer and Kittay was the appropriate role of animal comparisons in thinking about the lives of human beings with cognitive disabilities, and this paper addresses this issue by arbitrating the Singer-Kittay dispute. Although more critical of Singer than of Kittay, the paper ultimately departs from both thinkers in combining a call for extreme caution in the use of animal comparisons with a defense of a claim about human moral equality that is consistent with the acknowledgment of important forms of moral fellowship between human beings—whatever the level or nature of their cognitive endowments—and non-human animals.

For further information, please contact Raffael Fasel (rnf22@cam.ac.uk).