Читать книгу Animal Crisis - Alice Crary - Страница 6

In the Spring of 2018, we were invited to write an essay reviewing the field of animal ethics. We were both in Princeton at the time, and we met at various cafés and lunch places, trying to find space at little tables for both of our computers. We also met at each other’s houses, navigating dogs and children, to make lists and draft strategies. Very quickly we realized it felt more meaningful to devote ourselves to a short, urgent plea to radically rethink animal ethics, both as it is understood in the field of philosophy and as it is taken up and developed within social protest movements. We had each written books and articles urging such a reconsideration in our distinctive ways, and we thought a collaboration would enliven our longstanding commitments to critically interrogate structures that enable the destruction of animals, marginalized humans, and the planet. These commitments were, we found, deepened and, in helpful and illuminating ways, reshaped by our co-writing process.

It is difficult on one’s own to write against the grain of received views. Having companionship in the face of intellectual and institutional resistance, as well as global environmental catastrophe, proved to be more than a personal benefit to us, it was also a scholarly and political one. One of the central concerns we each have, and is pivotal in the pages that follow, stems from the belief that attitudes about the world and those who populate it are distorted in devastating ways by ideologies and concomitant material practices that don’t aptly capture the value of human lives and relationships, or the value of the lives and relationships of other animals. These distortions permeate standard views in animal ethics, just as they structure many philosophical discussions of social justice. The resulting ideological traps – which appear, at best, as tolerance of, and, at worst, support for, disrespect, commodification, mass violence, and death – must be revealed and challenged if we are to arrive at ethical interventions capable of informing liberating political action. Writing together about the tragic state of the world, during a global pandemic, with a shared recognition of problems at the heart of our current crisis, and a shared desire to acknowledge the dire conditions we all differentially face, has proven to be sustaining. Of course, one cannot change the world alone, but thinking and finding words together is one way of practicing the change we want to see.