In this section, I will attempt to show that cosmopolitanism in its current form manifests one important blind spot. The blind spot is cosmopolitanism’s omission of animals as individuals who matter morally and as individuals who must be accounted for in any legal or international institutions for ensuring justice. I argue that once we remedy it of its speciesist flaw, cosmopolitanism becomes a powerful vehicle for realising justice for wild animals around the world. I argue for a statist-cosmopolitan approach.
Unlike the statist approach critiqued by Onora O’Neil, I advance a broad statist position that does not single out the host state as the primary duty-bearer for wildlife rights but, rather, places the moral burden on foreign states as well to the extent that all are causally linked to making wild animals vulnerable. The burden of justice to wild animals is two-fold. It involves negative duties and emergent positive duties that are usually premised on the failure to discharge the negative duties.
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Like any moral perspective, cosmopolitanism comes with some nuances on both theoretical and practical levels. However, there is a set of fairly set of uncontroversial propositions that represents the core of cosmopolitanism. Thomas Pogge (2008: 175) accords us the first three propositions that are central to cosmopolitanism:
a) Moral individualism: “the ultimate units of [moral] concern are human beings, or persons.” (Pogge’s italics)
b) Moral universalism: “the status of ultimate unit of [moral] concern attaches to every living human being equally”.
c) Generality: “Persons are units of moral concern for everyone”.
Cosmopolitans hold that all humans matter equally morally and this, in turn, imposes obligations on moral agents everywhere. These core elements of cosmopolitanism are echoed by Erin Kelly (2004: 183) who defines cosmopolitanism as the view “that the fundamental unit of moral concern is the person, and that all persons matter morally. Cosmopolitanism is thus individualistic and universalistic; states or societies can have moral claims only derivatively."
Ironically, however, these foundations for cosmopolitanism are so uncontroversial that they are bound to be endorsed by virtually all major traditional moral theories. This has, understandably, led some to declare that “we are all cosmopolitans now” (Blake, 2013). Whether one’s criterion for moral considerability is capacity to experience pleasure and pain or possession of rational autonomy, the subjects of moral concern will straightforwardly include individuals outside one’s race, ethnicity, or nation.
To the three cosmopolitan claims, I will add one more that appears to me to be unproblematic but helps to set a picture of cosmopolitanism that does the work this chapter seeks to perform.
The fourth assumption of cosmopolitanism is that,
(d) political institutions, like states, have moral value only in so far as they respect people’s interests (Caney, 2005: 232).
A cosmopolitan moral world view is interventionist, at least in theory. The fourth proposition thus animates cosmopolitanism by defining the justification and limitation of the state in terms of its role of protecting or promoting people’s rights or interests. I think two conclusions can be made from this.
Firstly, the state has no intrinsic value over and above ensuring respect for human rights, some of which will be obviously conventional rights including rights to healthcare, education,
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housing, and transport. Secondly, states or any other political institutions have the liberty to ensure respect for human rights anywhere in the world. This conclusion aligns with the United Nation’s Responsibility to Protect, which states that if imperfect states fail to protect human rights, then the closer-to-ideal states are at least permitted “to disregard the non-interference norm usually attached to the institution of sovereignty and to interfere” (Karp, 2014: 46). To avoid arbitrary unilateral intervention, usually such intervention would require a UN resolution which any state on the UN Security Council could veto.
Notwithstanding its laudable moral expansionism, cosmopolitanism commits the fallacy of speciesism—which is to regard as having less or no moral standing members of species other than our own, Homo Sapiens, just for the simple reason that those individuals are not members of our species. If cosmopolitanism’s reason for breaking the tribal or national barriers is equal moral worth, it seems inconsistent to restrict moral cosmopolitanism to humanity.56
For many cosmopolitans, the international moral currency is human rights. But in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, I have argued that there is no defensible ground for human rights that is not simultaneously a ground for animal rights. I have argued that moral rights protect those interests that track elements of wellbeing, and wellbeing turns out to be interspecific. Thus, Victor Tadros is right in doubting “that we have any rights in virtue of our standing as human beings.
It is the properties that typical humans have that ground their rights rather than the fact that they are humans. Non-humans that have these properties have the same rights” (Tadros, 2015:
447). Non-intellectual elements of wellbeing cut across species and the adjective ‘human’ in
‘human rights’ is—at least in most cases—misguided at best, and speciesist at worst.
Cosmopolitanism can, however, easily remedy the speciesist blind spot. We can alter features (a) to (d) above by adding ‘animals’ to ‘persons’, ‘people’ or ‘human beings’. Alternatively, we could eliminate any reference to human beings and refer instead to all sentient individuals or all individual animals, since humans are animals too. This move has been anticipated by Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown: “Moral cosmopolitanism could be grounded in human reason, or some other characteristic universally shared among humans (and in some cases other kinds of beings) such as the capacity to experience pleasure and pain” (Kleingeld and Brown 2014: 11; emphasis added). This goes to show that there is nothing inherently conceptually
56 I think it is more accurate to say that moral theories such as utilitarianism, virtue theory, or cosmopolitanism do not exclude animals as such. Rather, it is moral philosophers who fail to acknowledge or include animals in their philosophising. Our psychology and personal interests sometimes hinder us from taking moral arguments to their logical conclusions.
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problematic with inclusion of wild animals in the cosmopolitan moral framework. Thus, a non-speciesist cosmopolitanism will take seriously the rights of wild animals anywhere on earth against wrongful harms by humans anywhere on earth as well as ensuring rectificatory actions even against what may be innocent inflictions of harm.
Victor Tadros has alluded to a cosmopolitan inclusion of wild animal with specific reference to the right to security. He says:
International interference is surely permitted, and perhaps required, in order to enforce duties owed by state officials to non-human animals, at least in the form of international condemnation and monetary sanctions. It is permissible for international organizations to condemn, and perhaps sanction, states that offer insufficient protection to non-human animals against being wronged by citizens of those states. As officials have positive duties to non-human animals to protect them against being harmed severely, non-human animals have a right to security (Tadros, 2015: 448).
Although I agree with the non-speciesist cosmopolitan spirit in Tadros’ statement, I disagree with his assumptions that reflect the narrow statist approach critiqued above as well as his views on the nature of duties of justice owed to wild animals. Tadros seems to assume that the host state has the primary responsibility of ensuring wildlife rights are respected.
It is particularly important to resist any generous ascription of positive moral rights for wild animals as doing so will create a runaway inflation of rights that will devalue rights as measures of justice. As Brad Hooker has rightly observed, proliferation of rights threatens “not only to debase the rhetorical power of the term [‘moral rights’] but also to blur conditions for appropriate application of the term” (Hooker, 2014: 170). To preserve the power of rights and their clear application for cases of justice or injustice, it is vital to block blank-cheque positive rights. In my view, justice only involves those cases in which the right-bearer’s vulnerability is explicable through some relevant actions or omissions of the putative obligor.
I have argued above that cosmopolitanism can conceptually accommodate the rights of animals.
I have also denied that positive rights trigger moral obligations erga omnes. Saladin Meckled-Garcia has pointed out that, “With no relevant agent identified, there are no strict obligations, no strict accountability, no real principles of social justice” (Meckled-Garcia, 2013: 112-113).
My contention is that relevant agents for wildlife justice can and must be identified on the basis of two kinds of moral rights. The first kind is negative rights against wrongful harm. A chimpanzee in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park has the same right against a Ugandan villager as it does against the British Prime Minister. Both humans have the potential to wrongfully harm the gorilla through their actions or omissions. The elephant in Zimbabwe’s
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Hwange National Park has a negative right against President Robert Mugabe as well as against an ivory crafts dealer in China.
Emergent positive moral rights are the other type of rights for identifying relevant agents for ensuring wildlife justice. These duties emanate from initial actions or omissions that harm wildlife whether these actions or omissions are wrongful or not.57 In other words, unlike negative duties, positive moral duties do not require that the initial harm is a failure to discharge an obligation. Nevertheless, it is an injustice not to make amends for the harm that was caused when one can make amends. Wild animals are sometimes owed compensatory duties by agents who did not violate their rights. In the next section, I will describe actions or omissions of agents that are tantamount to wrongful harms or complicit to wrongful harms against wild animals in a way that identifies agents across the world as responsible for ensuring justice for wild animals.