Serrin Rutledge-Prior

Animals are unfortunately an afterthought in legal systems that have been developed to adjudicate the claims of humans and corporate entities. For those of us determined to extend the scope of justice to include animals, we must ask how to reshape our legal institutions to ensure that animal interests are considered alongside those of other, existing legal subjects. In this groundbreaking work, Serrin Rutledge-Prior departs from those who have proposed to extend legal personhood to animals, which in practice has proven to be exclusionary and inconsistently applied by the courts. Instead, Rutledge-Prior offers a new principle to ground legal inclusion based on a principle of multispecies legality that extends legal subjecthood to anyone – human or nonhuman – who possess interests.

Participants in the long-standing interest/will theory debate, long in disagreement over the function of rights, are united on this point: while the interest theory can accommodate animals, the will theory cannot. Recent scholarship in animal political theory agrees, accounting for animal rights via the interest theory alone. This article offers the first sustained challenge to this position by exploring two interpretations of the will theory. It concludes that only a more moderate interpretation of what it takes to be a competent decision-maker allows us to interpret the will theory in a way that both retains its distinctiveness and conforms to current, mainstream rights discourse. Through a discussion of how we might regard at least certain animals, in certain contexts, as being capable of giving or withholding their consent, the article argues that they should no longer be categorically held as outside the domain of will theory rights-holders.

A major puzzle in contemporary political theory is how to extend notions of justice to the environment. With environmental entities unable to communicate in ways that are traditionally recognised within the political sphere, their interests have largely been recognised instrumentally: only important as they contribute to human interests. In response to the multispecies justice project's call to reimagine our concepts of justice to include other-than-human beings and entities, we offer a novel reading of Edmund Burke's account of political representation that, we argue, can be applied to the environment. Burke claimed that interests are ‘unattached’ to any actual class or group, and that it is the duty of the representative to represent these unattached interests. Beyond providing an original application of Burke's work, the paper offers an alternative to the ‘allure’ of authoritarian environmentalism, an alternative which conservative thinkers may use as an entryway into debates on environmental justice.

Should animal advocates be allowed to publicly display graphic footage of how animals live (and die) in industrial animal use facilities? Cube of truth (‘cube’) demonstrations are a form of animal advocacy aimed at informing the public about the realities of animals’ experiences in places such as slaughterhouses, feedlots, and research facilities, by showing footage of mostly lawful practices within these workplaces. Activists engaging in cube-style protests have recently been targeted by law enforcement agencies in two Australian states on the basis that the footage on display was too offensive to be shown in public. In this paper, I argue that these justifications do not stand up to scrutiny. Using an original politics of sight analysis, this paper demonstrates how the democratic costs associated with targeting cube protests outweigh the costs to the public. Cube activists are engaging in public dialogue by drawing attention to sites of potential injustice, and are playing an important role in highlighting the agency of the animals involved in exploitative industries. I further make the case that, where such demonstrations fall foul of the law, they should be regarded as legitimate acts of civil disobedience.

The thesis of this paper is that certain nonhuman animals could be conceived of as capable of moral motivation and subsequent moral behavior, with the appropriate behavioral, psychological and cognitive evidence. I argue that a certain notion of morality—morality as the process of conscious, reasoned deliberation over explicit moral concepts—is excessively exclusionary, and that such a notion describes one mode of moral cognition, but not, as others have argued, morality's essence. Instead, morality and moral behaviors could be viewed as natural phenomena that arose as a means by which social species could better cohere and survive, and one that consists of a spectrum of behaviors. Ultimately, I argue that the aforementioned notion of moral cognition has unfairly worked to exclude (certain) nonhuman animals from the sphere of morality as beings capable of moral behavior, and that instead we should be looking at moral behavior as a function of what I call ‘moral responsiveness.'