Ideology and Social Cognition: The Challenge of Theorizing ‘Speciesism’

ABSTRACT

In this essay I explore whether Sally Haslanger’s model of ideology can handle ‘speciesism’ (assuming, for the sake of argument, that some version of the animal rights position is correct). The first section emphasizes how dramatically our conceptions of social justice and injustice would have to change even if only the ‘reformist’ view (we can use nonhuman animals for our purposes but must treat them humanely) is right, let alone the ‘revolutionary’ view (we cannot use nonhuman animals at all). The failure to discuss speciesism in standard accounts of ‘ideology’ would then itself be revealed to be deeply ideological. The second section examines how some of the key concepts Haslanger uses—mindshaping, hybridity, hidden transcripts—would have to be modified for an ideology of this kind. Finally, in the third section, I consider what possibilities there might be for liberatory change, especially given that (unlike the case for subordinated human groups) nonhuman animal group interests cannot be mobilized for revolutionary transformation

KEYWORDS:

• speciesism
• animal rights
• animal oppression
• human animal ideology

Acknowledgments

This essay has greatly benefited from the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of Jennifer McKitrick, Mari Mikkola, and Natalie Stoljar

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Self-defense against predators would presumably be morally permissible even for animal rights theorists, though they might raise questions about when and where we are entitled to go into the terrain where we are likely to encounter them. What about circumstances where because of natural disaster or generally inhospitable environments or the lack of the requisite technological knowledge, primitive humans do not have viable nutritional alternatives to nonhuman animal protein or clothing alternatives to nonhuman animal fur or any of the other numerous resources nonhuman animals have (unwillingly) supplied for our survival and cultural development over the millennia? I set aside all these interesting ought-implies-can questions, since all I need for the moral issue to appear on the agenda is the achievement of a threshold, whether epochally or locally, when such substitution has in fact become possible, and is socially refused.

2 One would, of course, have to make exceptions for those nonhuman animals accorded a special status in particular societies (‘sacred cows,’ literally), and also to differentiate the kinds of attitudes of some indigenous peoples to the animals they hunt, involving certain kinds of rituals and respect, from the mass killings of modern Western factory farming. Note also that even in Western societies one can find vegetarian communities, though not coextensive with society as such.