Callicott's Critique of Animal Liberation vs. Land Ethics

Introduction

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, their theoretical and practical underpinnings 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 philosophers 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. By examining Callicott's essay in greater detail, the validity of his argument concerning the unnecessarily reductive nature of animal liberation becomes clear.

Leopold's Land Ethic as Exemplary Framework

Before covering Callicott's critique of the animal liberation movement in more detail, it is 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 enjoyed no moral standing, no rights, no respect, in sharp contrast to human persons whose rights and interests ideally must be fairly and equally considered if our actions are to be considered 'ethical' or 'moral'" (Callicott 1).

Leopold correctly identifies that the overall trajectory of society has been the expansion of rights and interests to wider and wider groups, and predicts that this expansion will eventually come to include plants and animals, such that humans become only one constituent part of a protected biosphere rather than dominant over it. In turn, humans may make ethical choices regarding 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 because Leopold's land ethic 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 on domesticated animals.

Callicott's Core Critique: Atomism and Moral Value

Callicott's most significant criticism of the animal liberation movement (and of 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" (Callicott 6). In the case of the animal liberation movement, this can be seen in its intense devotion to the ethical treatment of domesticated animals but overall indifference to the needs of wild animals or the larger biosphere.

This focus on domesticated animals at the expense of the broader biosphere ultimately demonstrates the unviable nature of animal liberation philosophy and practice, because "animal liberation, if pursued at the practical as well as the rhetorical level, would have ruinous consequences on plants, soils and waters," as well as the various forms of life that depend on these resources. Furthermore, the animal liberation movement contains a simplistic understanding of the food web, such that unsustainably sourced vegetarian foods are valued over meat taken in a reasonable, sustainable way from a single animal. Though nobly committed to lessening the suffering of animals, the movement is ultimately naive, unrealistic, and potentially damaging to the overall well-being of life on Earth.

Conclusion

By comparing the animal liberation movement with Aldo Leopold's notion of the "land ethic," Callicott demonstrates that far from reducing the suffering of animals or offering them genuine moral parity with humans, the animal liberation movement unnecessarily limits the dispersal of rights to those animals deemed worthy, thus reenacting the same form of discrimination practiced by moral humanists — albeit by expanding the category of "worthy" animals beyond mere humans to those most frequently domesticated for food.