Non-human animals beyond anthropocentrism : some remarks about animals and environmental ethics

The paper is intended to provide comments on the problems that arise from the twofold relationship between animal liberation ethics and environmental ethics: the approach to animal liberation ethics from ecological perspective and to environmental ethics from the perspective of suffering and sentient non-human animals. I focus especially on the conflict between individualistic and holistic ethics; the different moral considerations of wild and domesticated animals (including cattle) offered by the earlier and latest versions of John Baird Callicott’s land ethic; and Tom Regan’s remarks on the different meanings of ‘interest’ (interest1 refers to the things that are in the interest of the subject, while interest2 refers to the things subjects take an interest in). I argue that non-anthropocentric moral consideration of non-human animals needs to handle all these three problems, and to adopt interest2 to overcome them and other cryptic forms of anthropocentrism. In addition, I make some concrete suggestions in the direction of avoiding moral distinctions between wild and domesticated animals, and of approaching the question of non-human animals in an environmental perspective. I suggest two different interpretations of ‘mixed’ human/domestic animals communities. On the one hand, they could be considered as transitional forms of coexistence, aimed to find new habitats for domesticated animals; on the other hand, ‘mixed’ communities could be considered as legal- and right-based tryouts of coexistence of human and non-human animals, not established on a cryptic anthropocentric proud.