All in the (Human) Family? Species Aristocratism in the Return of Human Dignity

Telling Stories of the (Human) Family

The use of the expression “the story of human dignity” may seem to suggest that human dignity is just a story, pure fiction; a fantasy at odds with reality. How can anyone entertain such an idea in the face of slavery, genocide, human trafficking, and discrimination based on race, gender or sexual orientation, to name just a few of the things that move us to invoke “dignity” in order to condemn them? But perhaps the story of human dignity is more complex than this. What if the notion of human dignity, either as inherited from tradition or as reconfigured by contemporary reflection, is not only the solution to undignified treatment? What if the story of human dignity can also be part of the problem?

In order to address these questions, I will make a brief detour through the work of Rorty and then turn to the late work by Derrida. Rorty makes two moves that are important for my argument: (a) he links human rights with story-telling; (b) he suggests that philosophy and story-telling are co-implicated. In his essay “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” Rorty famously defends a turn towards sentimental education as the best way to foster what he calls, following Eduardo Rabossi, a human rights culture. ⁸ Restating his anti-foundationalist position, Rorty suggests that metaphysical arguments of the kind Plato and Immanuel Kant gave about the inherent value of human beings simply fail to hit the mark. According to Rorty, cruelty and violence over others is not curbed by rationalist justifications of our universal moral worth, but by stories that help us see that those who are often objects of cruelty and violence also count as one of “us.” By “us” Rorty here means, and this is important for my purposes, human beings rather than mere animals. ⁹

Rorty’s assertion that our moral landscape can be shaped by the stories we tell can be productively linked to the argument he presents in “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida.” ¹⁰ In that essay, Rorty suggests that instead of thinking of philosophy as a science, concerned with the accurate representation of the object, we should think of it as a series or reinterpretations of reinterpretations of reinterpretations. Thus, from Rorty’s perspective, philosophy can be seen more as a literary genre, as a romance with characters such as “Father Parmenides,” “honest old Uncle Kant,” and “bad brother Derrida,” and less as a scientific trans-historical quest for objective truth: philosophy and literature are indistinguishable. ¹¹

Taken together, these essays by Rorty seem to suggest, on the one hand, that story-telling (presumably novels and short stories, but also other fictional and non-fictional narratives) can be productively used to enlarge the universe of “us humans” worthy of moral consideration and, on the other, that many of the stories we have been telling about ourselves in the “philosophical genre” may hinder such moral expansion. Whereas Rorty is more consistently drawn to the first idea, I believe that the late work by Derrida is more emphatically drawn to the second one. In other words, Derrida often refers to the history of Western philosophy itself as a kind of meta-narrative; as a type of auto-biography of the notion of “human being.” ¹² The difference between Rorty and Derrida seems subtle but it is important: whereas Rorty believes that story-telling can be productively used in our post-metaphysical world to expand our conception of those who count as human, Derrida alerts us to the violence that the use of such humanizing stories can exercise over our own animality, and over non-human animals.

Expanding our moral universe means for Rorty telling stories where more human beings (blacks, women, children) count as fully human. Derrida, however, suggests that stories told, and now re-told, in and by the philosophical tradition present us with a human being that neglects and disavows the animal that he or she is. In other words, Derrida would like to question the story we have been telling about the human family because such story is structurally complicit with processes of de-animalization in ways that Rorty’s post-foundational, humanizing sentimental education is ill-equipped to grasp, and may be bound to reproduce.

With all this in mind, I return now to recent iterations of the story of human dignity. What is surprising about this literature is that, in it, the story iterates itself candidly, as if critical animal studies never took place. Thus, philosophers of law like Jeremy Waldron, political theorists like Jürgen Habermas, George Kateb, and Anne Phillips, political philosophers like Michael Rosen, theologians like Gilbert Meilaender, and critical theorists like Eric Santner, among others, all contribute to the contemporary vitality of the story of human dignity. Their accounts of human dignity often differ, even radically. But they share the common feature of a higher human status construed in contradistinction with non-human animals, and human being’s own animality.

Human Dignity Returns

The story of human dignity as it is most commonly told or assumed features Cicero, the Roman politician, orator, and political theorist, and Pico della Mirandola, the Italian Renaissance thinker, as the founding fathers. Cicero’s influence in the canon of political theory cannot be overstated and, as we shall see, it extends well beyond the republican tradition. Cicero argues in Of Duties that “it is a part of every inquiry about duty always to keep in view how greatly the nature of a man surpasses domestic animals and other beasts. They perceive nothing except pleasure. . . . A man’s mind, however, is nourished by learning and reasoning; he is always enquiring or acting, he is led by a delight in seeing and hearing.” In another passage, Cicero reasserts human superiority by claiming that “reason and speech . . . reconcile men to one another, through teaching, learning, communicating, debating and making judgments. . . . It is this that most distances us from the nature of other animals.” ¹³

Della Mirandola, in turn, is mobilized as the paradigmatic Renaissance champion of human dignity, even if he has been perceptively dubbed as “too idiosyncratic a thinker to be anyone’s ancestor.” ¹⁴ As Pico famously argued in his oration later called “On the Dignity of Man,” God assigned the human beings no fixed place in the Great Chain of Being, and therefore gave them freedom to decide their own fate. In contrast with the bounded nature of non-human animals, the uncertain ontological position of humanity is, according to Pico and his contemporary readers, what makes human beings all the more praiseworthy. Pico suggests that “man is the most fortunate of beings and therefore worthy of all admiration . . . a condition to be envied not only by beasts but even by the stars and the intelligences dwelling beyond this world.” ¹⁵ Rather unsurprisingly, the fact that della Mirandola qualifies this unbounded creature as an admirable chameleon, alluding to the human capacity for self-creation and change, is commonly played down in this literature as a mere rhetorical figure. ¹⁶

Following in the wake of Cicero and della Mirandola, contemporary thinkers like Habermas and Waldron (both quote Cicero, Waldron refers to Pico) also agree on investing in the notion of human dignity. Habermas considers human dignity to be not merely an empty conceptual place-holder but the “moral source” from which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Grundgesetz of the German Federal Republic extract their meaning. Habermas and Waldron acknowledge that the concept of dignity proceeds from “hierarchically ordered traditional societies” and is therefore status dependent—as in nobility, trade guilds, or professions, or the corporate spirits of universities. ¹⁷ This acknowledgment notwithstanding, Habermas and Waldron are optimistic about the possibility of universalizing the notion of dignitas to each and every human being, independently of their position in life, through the resource of rights.

But Waldron’s take on human dignity is even more challenging because he not only acknowledges the pathos of rank, elevation, and distinction that is associated with dignity; he embraces it. Waldron wants to redistribute dignity in contemporary democracies through the realm of law, as he puts it: “Dignity seems at home in law: law is its natural habitat.” ¹⁸ But at the same time he does not deny dignity’s aristocratic undertones: “A good account of human dignity will . . . generate an account of it as noble bearing and an account of the importance of the ban on humiliating and degrading treatment.” In his words again, his objective is to offer “an account of dignity as a high-ranking status, comparable to a rank of nobility—only a rank assigned now to every human person, equally without discrimination: dignity as the nobility of the common man.” ¹⁹ Thus, Waldron’s project can be thought as the redistribution of the deference and respect that used to be commanded only by a few nobles, to each and every member of our post-monarchical societies. Aristocracy for all is Waldron’s political agenda.

Neither Habermas nor Waldron, however, speculate about the possibility that mobilizing a notion of human dignity conceived aristocratically, as an elevated rank, even if it is universalized and individualized as they claim, could generate new forms of aristocratism with perhaps undesirable consequences. One of Waldron’s respondents to his Tanner Lectures, the literary theorist Wai Chee Dimock, seems to point to this when she argues, first, that Waldron’s take on human dignity, understood as nobility and high-standing, leads him to emphasize self-possession; self-control; self-regard and self-esteem (not all, obviously, traits of dignity, though surely traits we do associate with nobility); and second, and consequently, that the elevation that the concept of human dignity operates “might not be sustainable for most of us, that its price is exorbitant, bringing harm both to ourselves and often to others.” ²⁰ In her reading of Melville’s Moby Dick, Dimock alerts us of the catastrophic consequences that ensue when Captain Ahab feels his dignity challenged by a rogue white whale. As we shall see, Melville’s crew of fishermen will perform a similar work of critique in Bonnie Honig’s response to Santner’s Tanner Lectures—where the human office is under scrutiny.

Rosen’s work is a good complement to Waldron’s insofar as Rosen, like Dimock, attends to the potentially harmful aspects of human dignity. Whereas Waldron’s argument is made to emphasize the dignitarian effect (deference, honor, respect) that follows from thinking dignity as rank, Rosen is more attentive to the pitfalls of dignity; to its comic reverse or undoing. Rosen is also sensitive to undesirable consequences of the link between dignity and law presented by Waldron. According to Rosen, the notion of human dignity can put severe pressure on personal freedom, understood as the possibility of engaging in certain consensual transactions. In Rosen’s instructive discussion of dwarf tossing and female prostitution, the scope of actions that people can freely engage in—that is, to be thrown at parties in exchange for money, to have sexual intercourse in exchange for money—can be said to undermine their dignity, and therefore, from Waldron’s perspective, a reasonable claim can be made about prohibiting such actions. In a humorous vein, Rosen indicates that human behavior in clubs and bars at night may most probably fall short of our dignity and asks, “is being undignified always a bad thing?” ²¹

Despite their differences, in the end Rosen meets Waldron when it comes to mobilizing the trope of animality in the story of human dignity. Rosen refers to the founding fathers of human dignity, Cicero and della Mirandola, and adds a sustained, and exciting, discussion of Immanuel Kant—a third founding father. But at the end of the book, Rosen returns to a Ciceronian perspective, whereby the harm that dignity comes to redress is degradation, and the latter is in turn understood as falling into an animal, or animalistic, condition. In his review of Rosen’s book, Waldron highlights in particular the following paragraph by Rosen:

Human dignity is expressed by behavior that marks the distinction between human beings and animals—for example, in upright gate, through the wearing of clothes, in eating subject to a code of table manners. . . . As Schiller recognized, respect for humanity requires us to mark the value of human beings even (or, indeed, especially) when the gross material facts of our animal existence are inescapable. ²²

The passage reveals yet another iteration of the story of human dignity in Rosen’s (and Waldron’s) arguments. With its emphasis on upright gate and similar markers of “humanity,” the story instructs us to value stature and high standing as characteristically human. Thus, the vindication of a dignifying upright gait may desensitize us to the circumstances of those unable to reach such posture, as most non-human animals, children, and people in old age or with various types of physical and/or cognitive disabilities, among others. ²³ Moreover, at an allegorical level, Rosen and Waldron instruct us to perceive hunchbacks like Quasimodo, or the bent backs Walter Benjamin sees in Kafka’s characters, both as animalistic and reviling simply because they fall short of the upright posture; or, on the contrary, to see noble bearing in figures like Captain Ahab who would risk an entire crew to walk tall after being disrespected by a sea mammal. In sum, affirming human stature despite the “gross material facts of our animal existence” may in fact cultivate a cruel and oppressive disposition.

Unlike Rosen, Eric Santner embraces the creaturely dimension of human life. Although Santner’s work is not commonly referenced in debates on human dignity and human rights, there is much to learn from his approach to the creaturely condition of what he calls the “human office”—a vocabulary close to Cicero’s De Officiis (Of Duties). Santner studies not only the entitlements of the human office but also the extra pressures that the human investiture might bring with it. ²⁴ According to Santner, the transition from monarchical to democratic legitimacy can be read simply as a displacement of the royal excess, the two bodies of the king identified by Ernst Kantorowicz, into each and every new bearer of the sovereign body. But whereas Santner may appear to join Waldron in suggesting that our post-monarchical societies harbor the promise of aristocracy for all, in fact Santner puts emphasis on the pressures and insecurities in the democratization of the kingly fleshy excess; to the fact that the dignitas of the human office can become “unbearable.” Santner sees potential in Melville’s Bartleby’s famous response “I prefer not to” when it comes to refusing the extra pressures of the human investiture. ²⁵

But Santner’s nuanced account of the tensions intrinsic to the human office is not free from the de-animalizing gestures characteristic of the story of human dignity. Bonnie Honig notes this in her response to Santner’s Tanner Lectures, also discussing Melville’s Moby Dick—here the exchange resembles Dimock’s critique of Waldron. Honig opposes to Santner’s Bartlebian refusal of the fleshy excess of the human investiture the centrality of animal (whale) flesh in fleeting moments of democratic agency in Melville’s novel—that is, the scene where the crew of fishermen squeeze together spermaceti from the head of a sperm whale. ²⁶ Honig’s insight helps us see that Santner oscillates between invoking the creaturely proximity of human and animal, and claiming the absolute distinctiveness of human life and experience.

Thus, on the one hand, Santner reads Kafka, Martin Heidegger, Agamben, W. G. Sebald, and Melville as pointing to the “uncanny proximity between human and animal.” ²⁷ Santner seems to suggest that assessing this proximity tells us something about the elusive contours of the political, in Santner’s words: “the emergence of the political generates a uniquely human form of animality or creatureliness” (emphasis in the original). ²⁸ On the other hand, Santner approves Freud’s discussion of human sexuality and the distinction between instinct and drive. According to Santner, Freud’s great insight is to suggest that “human sexuality, precisely the dimension of human life where we seem to be utterly reduced to animality, is actually the point at which our difference is in some ways more radical.” ²⁹

It is not difficult to see why Santner wants to avoid a radical flattening of the difference between humans and animals as mere sentient beings—or the position he dubs as “vitalist naturalism.” ³⁰ This equalization would undermine the complex co-implication of humanity and animality construed by Santner in the notion of creatureliness. And yet, the problem is that this co-implication is always decided upon in favor of the specific dimension of human existence. In other words, animality is invoked as something the human can approach in uncanny ways but these ways of uncanny proximity remain always-already specifically human. To put it in terms of Derrida: creaturely life is always-already a form of life “proper to man.” Santner’s de-animalizaing gesture can be seen at work in his tendency to characterize the specific dimension of human existence as a push towards theology: “By creaturely I do not simply mean nature or living things or sentient beings . . . but rather a dimension specific to human existence, albeit one that seems to push thinking in the direction of theology” (emphasis added). ³¹

The perspective of the Christian theologian Gilbert Meilaender comes close to Santner’s de-animalizing gesture. ³² Like most supporters of human dignity, Meilaender takes as a starting point of his investigation the locus classicus of the great chain of being, where humans are neither the lower nor the higher creature on earth. Neither a beast nor a God, human being’s peculiar and open ended nature places him or her in an in-between space that is higher than animals, and lower than angels. This in-between status, Meilaender suggests, should lead us to appreciate humanity in its complexity, with the limitations and weaknesses of a creature short of angelic existence but with the power and capacities of a creature that surpasses mere animal existence by means of reflection—by “the ability to produce representations of objects not immediately present and reflect upon them.” ³³ But reflection alone does not capture, for Meilaender, the specific modality of human existence and its dignity. Even if reflection distinguishes humans from other forms of organic life, Meilaender adds an element that removes humanity even further from mere organicity: “Thinking about human dignity, about our needy openness to the world around and beyond us, reminds us that our humanity cannot adequately be described apart from the relation to God, and this . . . must eventually press us to think not only about our shared human dignity but also about the dignity of each person.” ³⁴

Interestingly, Meilaender introduces the relationship between human beings and God as something that adds to human being’s distinctiveness. Meilaender seems to believe that the notion of human dignity as it stands remains too species-specific, and fails to grasp those elements that further elevate human status from the mere fact of belonging to the human species. The status of being merely human can make room for fungibility and interchangeability, Meilaender contends, and therefore a principle of individuation is required to vouchsafe the integrity of each individual human existence. To avoid conflating each individual human existence to the life of the human species, Meilaender makes a distinction between what he calls human dignity and personal dignity. In his words, “We need the language of human dignity to talk about matters that involve the integrity and flourishing of the human species, and we need the language of personal dignity to express respect for persons regarded as equal and non-interchangeable individuals.” ³⁵

In the course of exploring the distinction between human and person, Meilaender comments on a discussion between Leon Kass, the expert on bioethics, and Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist, regarding proper human eating. Pinker, Meilaender tells us, takes issue with Kass’s assertion that eating in public, including licking an ice-cream cone, can be described as a “catlike activity” that falls short of human dignity. ³⁶ Meilaender expands on the context of Kass’s assertion and defends his position arguing that “Kass’s discussion of licking ice-cream cones is part of an extensive examination of eating as a human activity—an activity of those who are both body and soul, who, though animals, are oriented toward the divine.” ³⁷ Meilaender continues making a distinction between eating as a mere act of nourishment, which he assimilates to animal-like eating, and “truly human eating in friendly community . . . ritual sanctification of the meal, pointing toward the transcendent.” ³⁸

Unlike Meilaender and Santner, George Kateb is interested in a purely secular understanding of the human stature. However, much like Waldron and Habermas, he is attracted to the idea of human dignity as a moral source for a universal conception of human rights. Kateb describes human distinctiveness in the following terms, “the core idea of human dignity is that on earth, humanity is the greatest type of beings,” and adds “all individuals are equal; no other species is equal to humanity. These are the two basic propositions that make up the concept of human dignity.” ³⁹ Nevertheless, Kateb is aware that investing in the human in this way may result in species arrogance.

In Kateb’s terms “(w)hen I say that human species is the highest species, that its stature depends on its unique characteristics, and that these unique characteristics show that it is partially discontinuous with nature, am I adopting the traditional elitist view? . . . I have no species snobbery, or try not to. Human stature must be affirmed in vanquishing snobbery towards animals through magnanimity.” ⁴⁰ Thus, I shall call Kateb’s take on human dignity “reflexive” since he includes the proviso that human dignity only realizes its stature by becoming a “steward of nature,” that is to say, by taking care of that which is not human for its own sake. Kateb’s reflexive approach acknowledges the potential snobbery that may derive from an unqualified investment on human dignity and relies on magnanimity to curb human arrogance.

Accordingly, Kateb suggests that human dignity is better realized in caring for the non-human “provided we do so for the sake of what is not ourselves.” Kateb proceeds by arguing that “only humanity can perform the three indispensable functions: keep the record of nature, understand nature, and appreciate it. The human species, alone among species on earth, can perform these services to nature on earth and beyond.” ⁴¹ Of course this is key because of the human power to destroy and degrade nature to which magnanimity is now called to limit or perhaps educate. But if we take into account the uses of magnanimity, what they seem to convey is precisely an aristocratic pathos of nobility and rank: we call Alfonso V, King of Aragon, and Dom Pedro, the Second Emperor of Brazil, “the magnanimous.” OED also veers in this direction, showing that magnanimity implies generosity or forgiveness towards a rival or less powerful person. Hence, magnanimity presupposes a hierarchy between the magnanimous person, the one who extends magnanimity, and the one who receives it. From my perspective, Kateb introduces the notion of magnanimity to curb or alleviate species aristocratism, but in fact the notion carries the traces of a history of manners where noblesse oblige: (human) privilege comes with responsibilities.

Unlike Kateb, Anne Phillips proposes to sever the link between human dignity and human rights to go “straight to equality instead.” ⁴² Phillips questions the more common reading of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that takes the notion of inherent dignity as the foundation for human rights. According to Phillips, by taking dignity as inherent the emphasis is displaced from rights themselves to dignity as their foundation. Phillips suggests that mobilizing the vocabulary of a higher rank is problematic, to say the least, in relation to an egalitarian understanding of human rights. Phillips realizes that Kateb’s take on human dignity “makes our entitlement to equal respect depend on hierarchical claims about us being better, or more valuable, than other species” and suggests that “there is something troubling about this repeated emphasis on our high value and superiority.” ⁴³

Phillips seeks to address this problem and, unlike Kateb and Waldron, does not want to frame her egalitarianism in terms of aristocracy for all, precisely because she sees a potential species bias emplotted in the democratization of dignity—Phillips comes close to my argument on species aristocratism here. This is why she resists the temptation of simply extending dignity and rights to non-human creatures on the grounds that they share certain human characteristics: critiquing species aristocratism is not tantamount to embracing a species egalitarianism modelled upon redistribution, to all creatures, of all too human traits.

However, although Phillips engages with several posthumanist writers and furthers a critique of anthropocentrism, she also worries “about what gets lost in this.” Her arresting critique of metaphysical notions of humanity notwithstanding, Phillips does not attend to the position of critical animal studies and remains attached to a notion of the human as a site for equality as claim, not as ground; in her words, “the status of human is something we claim and enact rather than something we uncover.” ⁴⁴ In many ways, Phillips’s position ultimately resembles Rorty’s exhortation to claiming the human status in more inclusive, rather than exclusionary, ways, and this leads us back to Rortian narratives of humanization, and to our critique of them.

Redistributing (Human) Dignity and Its Discontents: On Animal Rights Theory

Despite their differences, several thinkers discussed above (Waldron, Habermas, Santner, Kateb, and even Rorty) conceptualize political modernity as a narrative of progressive inclusive humanization where dignitas is redistributed from a few nobles to every citizen in a polity. The idea of aristocracy for all has become intuitive in our self-understanding of contemporary democracy, but it still begs the question of who is included in the “all.” In the vocabulary of political theory this is a recurrent, and well-known, question: who is part of the demos?

Animal rights theory (ART) has remained at a distance from such question. Mostly framed from the perspective of moral philosophy, ART dedicated efforts at presenting non-human animals as subjects of inviolable basic rights. In order to do so, theorists like Tom Regan construe animals as meaningful subjects of rights that partake in certain human characteristics, such as psychological identity over time, memory, preferences, interests, etc., constituting what he calls a subject-of-a-life. ⁴⁵ But whereas ART argues that non-human animals have rights, it never dares to suggest that animals are co-citizens in a polity. Should the idea of aristocracy for all now include non-human animals as citizens?

In their challenging book, Donaldson and Kymlicka (D&K) want to rethink our demos in light of what they call “the animal question.” ⁴⁶ Like Regan, the authors argue that the human rights revolution is incomplete and should not be stopped at the boundaries of the human. Unlike Regan, however, D&K explore the consequences of thinking non-human animals not solely as subjects of rights, but as citizens in and of a political community now reconfigured as a zoopolis. Their objective is to “offer a new framework . . . that takes ‘the animal question’ as a central issue for how we theorize the nature of our political community, and its ideas of citizenship, justice, and human rights.” ⁴⁷ In order to offer such framework, D&K challenge the idea that only human beings have dignity; take issue with the “flat moral landscape” ⁴⁸ characteristic of ART’s prior approaches, and draw on feminist theory and disability studies to rethink citizenship through relationality and dependence.

D&K work by analogy and find that different versions of human citizenship are malleable enough to be meaningfully extended to non-human animals. For example, the authors argue that domestic animals (pets and farm animals) can be thought as citizens in the same way that children and people with disabilities are citizens. They conceptualize the status of wild animals, in turn, as sovereign communities resembling indigenous populations that “confront the challenges of life in the wild, successfully tending to their needs and minimizing risks;” ⁴⁹ and discuss liminal animals, animals that live close to humans often overlapping with human spaces but who are not wild (squirrels, raccoons, deer, coyotes) as denizens, regarding them in many ways as similar to opt-out citizens; undocumented immigrants; seasonal workers, among others.

D&K’s discussion of domestic animals is exemplary of the way the story of human dignity is being re-told in ART. According to the authors, we should recognize “the competences of domesticated animals for agency, cooperation, and participation in mixed human-animal settings” and that “humans and domesticated animals already form a mixed community that belongs to all its members.” ⁵⁰ Hence, D&K argue that the fact that domestic animals depend upon human beings for their basic needs should not be equated to a lack of dignity. In their words: “if we don’t view dependency as intrinsically undignified, we will see the dog as a capable individual who knows what he wants and how to communicate in order to get it.” ⁵¹

In many ways, D&K’s extension of dignity to domestic animals could serve as a corrective to the species aristocratism characteristic of human dignity literature. Whereas theorists of human dignity circumscribe dignitas within the human species, D&K perform a further redistribution of such dignitas towards allegedly “compliant, and servile” ⁵² non-human animals. Thus, from the perspective opened by their idea of zoopolis, now also dependent domestic dogs can be seen as possessing dignity. Taking this redistribution into account, but also the general scope of their argument, it would be difficult to argue that D&K are speciesist: they openly question human privilege, and do not accept the idea that only human beings are subjects of rights and bearers of dignity to be respected. D&K go even further, it could be argued, by granting non-human animals the status of citizens in a polity and therefore questioning not only the moral but also the political dimension of species privilege. From the perspective of species aristocratism, however, we may still have reasons for caution.

Although D&K radicalize the project of aristocracy for all by lifting the animal up from a merely dependent and servile position, they may be doing so at the cost of the animal itself. In other words, if the literature on human dignity de-animalizes the human being, I contend that ART de-animalizes the animal. What do I mean by this? Ruth Abbey seems to have hinted at the problem of de-animalization in ART. In her insightful review of D&K’s book, Abbey argues that despite the fact that D&K’s ambition is to “continue to strip the last vestiges of human chauvinism form our moral theories” ⁵³ their project can be seen precisely as the realization of such chauvinism. Abbey asks: “is applying to animals political concepts developed for human relationships the conquest or the apex of [human] chauvinism?” ⁵⁴

As it is well-known, chauvinism implies regarding our nation, class or group as superior to all others; it denotes hierarchy and close mindedness. Abbey seems to be suggesting that, paradoxically, by granting citizenship (and even sovereign!) status to non-human animals we may be hastily projecting highly contestable and contested notions (even among humans) in order to protect ourselves from difference and alterity—that is, from the impact animal forms of life may have on the way humans conceptualize the political, if only we could let ourselves be affected by them. If, as Abbey suggests, conceiving animals as citizens can be read as the assimilation of the other to the same; as an assimilationist project that sutures and domesticates differences instead of pluralizing them, then the project of zoopolis misses the opportunity of re-thinking (instead of merely extending) traditional concepts such as citizenship and sovereignty ⁵⁵ in light of the animal question. Paradoxically, the hierarchy Abbey sees at work in DK’s assimilationist position can be conceived as a “reflexive” species aristocratism performed in the name of a non-speciesist theoretical approach.