The Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals

The Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals Grace Clement Recently, a number of feminists concerned with the welfare of nonhuman animals have challenged the prevailing approaches to animal defense theory. A collection of essays, Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, challenges the "rights" or "justice" approaches usually taken by animal defense theories, most notably those of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, and argues in favor of an ethic of care for our relations to nonhuman animals. This work arises out of feminist discussions over the past fifteen years of the "feminine" ethic of care and its relationship to the "masculine" ethic of justice. Those writing in Beyond Animal Rights have extended this discussion by recognizing that the care-justice debate is important not only for relationships among humans but for human relationships to nonhumans as well. For what has been called the ethic of justice in this discussion is in fact the rationalistic and individualistic approach to morality that has long been taken to be the moral point of view in the Western tradition. According to its critics, this moral point of view has resulted in our culture's subordination and devaluation not only of women, but of nonhuman animals and nature as well. If this is the case, then Singer's and Regan's extensions of the ethic of justice to include nonhuman animals, however well-intentioned, are doomed to failure because they are part of a larger paradigm contrary to these goals. In this essay, I will examine the claim that an ethic of care is preferable to an ethic of justice for our relationships with nonhuman animals. To limit my discussion, I will focus on our obligations to animals, even though there are obviously important questions about our obligations to nonanimal members of the biotic community, and I will focus on the morality of eating animals, even though this is only one of many important moral questions about our treatment of nonhuman animals. While I regard the care proposal as promising, I will argue that the distinction between domestic and wild animals raises an important problem for it: while the ethic of care seems to fit our interactions with domestic animals well, it is at best unclear how it might guide our interactions with wild animals. I will consider three different alternative moral approaches to wild animals: a holistic environmentalist approach, an individualistic justice approach, and a justice approach in interaction with and influenced by a care approach. By drawing on the lessons of the recent care/justice debate regarding human-to-human relations, I will show that the third of these alternatives works best. Because I do not regard care and justice as dichotomous, I see this not as a rejection of the thesis of Beyond Animal Rights but as a sympathetic extension of it. The "Introduction" to Beyond Animal Rights provides four reasons for thinking that an ethic of care is more appropriate for our relationships to nonhuman animals than an ethic