Contested Moralities: Animals And Moral Value in the Dear/Symanski Debate

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/human dialectic. I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of Dear and Symanski’s comments on ‘animal rights’, followed in turn by discussions of moral value and value paradigms. I then introduce a value paradigm termed geocentrism as a geographical account of our moral relations to animals. Finally, I discuss the wider significance of this debate for geographical ethics, moral philosophy and social theory. The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic insight of the intentions of the Creator.... Now, it never seems to occur to these far-seeking teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? John Muir (1916) Anthropocentrism and predation, in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. In 1994 the Annals of the AAG featured a heated exchange between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski on the topic of postmodernism. Using a dispute over the culling of wild horses in Australia, Symanski sought to illustrate the baneful effect of postmodern relativism on truth, and this illustration became a flash-point in the subsequent exchange with Dear (Dear 1994; Symanski 1994, 1994). In the minds of many of my colleagues, the exchange produced more heat than light, and they found the discussion perplexing and pointless. While some were simply unfamiliar with the theoretical terrain of postmodernism, others did not see what postmodern contentions about truth had to do with the ecology of Australian wild horses. In effect they were asking: “What in the world could ecology and postmodernism possibly have to do with one another?” In point of fact, a