¶ … Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair
In his essay "Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair," J. Baird Callicott discusses the animal liberation movement in relation to Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" as a means of demonstrating that although the two strains of thought appear at first glance to share more than a passing similarity, when considered more closely, the theoretical and practical underpinnings of animal liberation and environmental ethics are so fundamentally different that the two may ultimately be considered contradictory. These contradictions result in the "triangular affair" the title refers to, because Callicott determines that the animal liberation movement is not only locked in a conflict with conservative philosophizers maintaining a fundamental break between humans and animals, but also with environmental ethicists who propose a much broader scope for the application of ethics to realms beyond human interaction. Hopefully by examining Callicott's essay in greater detail, the validity of his argument concerning the unnecessarily reductive nature of animal liberation will become clear.
Before covering Callicott's critique of the animal liberation movement in more detail, it will be useful to briefly discuss Aldo Leopold's "land ethic," because it serves as the "exemplary type" to which subsequent formulations of environmental ethics may be compared and analyzed (Callicott 1). In short, Leopold's theory notes that "animals and plants, soils and waters […] traditionally not enjoyed no moral standing, no rights, no respect, in sharp contrast to human persons whose rights...
Leopold correctly determines that the overall trajectory of society has been the expansion rights and interests to wider and wider groups, and predicts that eventual this expansion will eventually come to include plants and animals such that humans become only one constituent part of the protected biosphere, rather than dominant over it. In turn, humans may make ethical choices in regards to their place within nature without pretending that the socially constructed notion of legal rights would be useful or widely applicable to the natural world. This is important to understand because Leopold's work constitutes Callicott's "exemplary type," and helps to demonstrate how the theoretical and practical desires of the animal liberation movement fall far short of this ideal, instead unnecessarily focusing the application of rights only to domesticated animals.
Callicott's biggest criticism of the animal liberation movement (and moral humanism) is that it is "atomistic or distributive in [its] theory of moral value," meaning that like traditional moral humanism, which positions humans as fundamentally superior to animals, the animal liberation movement "has consistently located moral value in individuals and set out certain metaphysical reasons for including some individuals and excluding others," which in the case of the animal liberation movement can be seen in its extreme devotion to the ethical treatment of domesticated animals but overall indifference to the needs of wild animals…
