Taking Animal Perspectives into Account in Animal Ethics

Abstract Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in nonhuman animal agency in different fields. In biology and ethology, new studies about animal languages, cultures, cognition and emotion are published weekly. In the broad field of animal studies, the symbolic and ontological human-animal distinction is challenged and other animals are presented as actors. These studies challenge existing approaches to animal ethics. Animals are no longer creatures to simply think about: they have their own perspectives on life, and humans can in some instances communicate with them about that. Animal ethics long determined individual moral rights and duties on the basis of nonhuman animal capacities, but this often measures them to human standards and does not take into account that nonhuman animals are a heterogeneous group in terms of capabilities as well as social relations to humans. The questions of whether animals have agency, and how we should morally evaluate their agency, are especially urgent because we live in an age in which humans dominate the lives of large numbers of other animals. The Anthropocene has shaped the knowledge and technology for humans to realize that animals have more agency than has been assumed, but ironically it is also an epoch where animal agency is increasingly curtailed. This leads to new conflicts and problems of justice. How should animal ethics deal with the new knowledge and challenges generated in the Anthropocene? In this chapter we defend a relational approach to animal ethics, viewing other animals as subjects capable of co-shaping relations.