Title

The Republican Zoopolis Towards a New Legitimation Framework for Relational Animal Ethics

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2016

Description

In this article, we develop a republican framework for relational animal ethics, recently popularized in Donaldson and Kymlicka's Zoopolis. This republican framework departs from the focus on negative rights that dominate liberal animal rights theories, especially as concerns our relations to wild animals. Our proposed framework appeals to a republican standard of non-arbitrariness, or non-domination, for human interferences with such animals. This legitimation framework is more attentive to relations of care and of dependency between the species, which we contend fi ts the growing fi eld of relational animal ethics. At the same time, it requires rigorous criteria be met to legitimate relations as non-dominating. We apply this framework to the morality of the supplementary feeding of wildlife, using a case study of wild boars as fed by hunters. Weakening of the concept of domination to fi t the predicament of boars, we show how the republican framework can provide a principled justification for legitimate interference with a wild animal population.

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