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We Are Not the Only Political Animals

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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-154790

EXCERPT: [...] There are overwhelming empirical data revealing, to anyone who is willing to look, complex social organization across the animal kingdom, including collective deliberation, division of labor, ritualized conflict resolution, and other forms of behavior that, when identified in human society, are deemed political without hesitation. We know that elephants plan elaborate raids on human settlements to recover the remains of their slaughtered loved ones. We know that in ant colonies the appearance of elaborate systems of task-allocation is related directly to the size of the colony: just as in human society, the more individual members of the society, the more we may expect to find social differentiation. Thanks to the primatologist Frans De Waal’s popular work, we are now slowly warming up to the idea that there is such a thing, at least, as “chimpanzee politics.”

These are just a few examples from recent science, and to some extent they build on what we have known all along but have preferred not to see. Aristotle himself reports accurately on elephant intelligence and social behavior in the “History of Animals”; in the “Georgics” Virgil gives a fairly solid account of the goings-on within beehives. Yet the combined force of ancient wisdom and recent science will still not do much to convince the skeptic, who interprets all empirical evidence of animal politics as pointing only to structures in the animal world that are homologous to what we see in human society, but that still do not share that magical je ne sais quoi that makes human society what it is. What we do as human beings when we deliberate, or love or cooperate, in this line of thinking, animals do only in an imitative or counterfeit way. They only “deliberate,” “love” or “cooperate” — in scare quotes.

But there is another way of understanding animals as political that even the most defiant human-exceptionalist cannot dispute: not as separated out into their own discrete political societies, each according to its kind, but rather as part of a single, global political formation that includes, notably but not exclusively, human beings. Some recent political philosophy, in fact, is starting to approach its subject from just such a trans-species perspective. In their groundbreaking 2011 book, “Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights,” Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue compellingly that animal rights theory has been limited to the extent that it has emphasized only negative rights of animals, a category that is conceived as universal and without any distinctions of moral significance within it. They argue instead that theorists would do well to focus on relational obligations that human beings come to have to animals that figure in different ways in human society. For them, nonhuman animals belong to the polis, too. [...]


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