This book finds its origin in an honest concern for both liberal democracies and animals. As such, it brings together the progressive aim of improving the political and legal position of animals and the conservative aim of sustaining the basic stability of open societies. At first glance, combining these two goals seems a rather paradoxical endeavour. Improving the political and legal position of non-human animals seems to hint at leaving behind as much as possible of the political systems that the world has known thus far, deeply impregnated with anthropocentrism (human-centeredness) as they are and considering that they have facilitated large-scale, systematic abuse of animals for centuries. On the other hand, preserving the basic stability of the established institutions that form the prerequisite for well-functioning open societies seems to hint at precisely the opposite: leaving them untouched. Releasing a revolutionary beast on these ancient institutions seems to put all at risk.
This book argues, however, that there is nothing paradoxical in bringing together these seeming strangers. Rather, it argues that they must engage with one another. It is time to start thinking about the proper relationship between the open society and its animals. This book asserts that the basic institutions of liberal democracies are worth preserving because they are the best way to sustain open societies and the peace, freedom, and respect for individuality and autonomy that they have to offer. However, the book also subscribes to the famous belief of the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), that conservation sometimes requires reform, albeit prudent.1 The political-legal frameworks of liberal democracies around the world currently fail to reflect the fact that many non-human animals have interests which make them morally, politically, and legally relevant entities. This book claims that liberal democracies cannot continue to ignore the scientific findings and moral progress with regard to non-human animals without losing credibility . Ultimately, it will be argued, this negligence of important scientific and moral insights may not only cause credibility problems, but may even raise legitimacy concerns and lead liberal democracies to undermine their own core values. From the perspective of this book, opening the political-legal gates to non-human animals is not necessarily a risky endeavour, but refusing to do so and thus facing the challenges that the modern perception of animals poses to the institutions of the open society is.
Current liberal democratic institutions still reflect the ancient anthropocentric conjecture that politics and law have nothing to do with non-human animals. Non-human animals are not recognized as entities that have independent political and legal significance, and their interests are merely contingently pursued, that is: to the extent that humans see fit. This harmful underlying conjecture that animals have no independent role to play in politics and law goes as far back as documented history, and it is deeply rooted in Western cultures and philosophy. It was only a few centuries ago that some of history’s brightest minds initiated what could today be called the scientific and moral progression that finally began to nibble away at this ancient anthropocentric conjecture.
In 1789, philosopher and legal thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), in one famous footnote, called into question the validity of humankind’s traditional moral disqualification of other animals, and in the same pen stroke suggested an alternative ethical standard which we now know would gain great support. He initiated what could be called the interests revolution. More precisely, Bentham pointed out that there is not necessarily a relationship between having certain complex mental capacities (reason and speech) and being of moral significance. Instead, relevant to moral considerability is sentience, the capacity to have subjective experiences, such as joy and suffering.2 Bentham’s suggestion would eventually turn out to be the spark that ignited an intense debate on the moral significance of non-human animals two centuries later. This debate would eventually lead most people to accept that other sentient animals are morally significant too, because they also have interests, including, at minimum, an interest in not being made to suffer.3
Before this important moral insight could take hold and the common moral conception of sentient animals could drastically change, however, people’s minds first had to be made ripe to the ideas that humans are animals, and that other animals, as well as humans, could have interests of their own and were not, to paraphrase philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), mechanical bodies without a soul and feeling.4 This unenviable task befell evolutionary biologist Charles R. Darwin (1809–1882) and his scientific successors. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and it is no secret that this book shocked the highly religious society at that time and that Darwin was ridiculed.5 The reason, as concisely expressed in one of Darwin’s notebooks, was that “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe true [is] to consider him created from animals.”6
The controversy intensified when, in 1871, Darwin published his subsequent work, The Descent of Man, in which he not only explicitly stated that the human species must have evolved from other animals—from an aquatic wormlike organism, in fact—but also straightforwardly called into question the uniqueness of humans.7 The theory of evolution implies that humans are, from a biological perspective, no more special than other animals. Darwin illustrates this with regard to intelligence, which was commonly thought to be one of the unique capacities of humans that distinguished them from “the beasts”: “There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”8 Instead, Darwin claimed, the mental difference between man and the higher animals is “certainly one of degree and not of kind.”9 Just like other capacities, intelligence should not be viewed as a static given, but as a scale, a continuum. Each individual animal, humans included, can be pinned down somewhere on this scale, and there is no radical line that divides humans from all other animals. Darwin effectively challenged the idea of human categorical superiority, and essentially put “the beasts” in the same category as humans. Darwin’s important insight was the starting point of a scientific era in which one scientific discovery after the other would emphasize our similarities with other animals, instead of our distinctiveness from them. Most importantly, due to this scientific progress, it is now considered a scientific fact that many non-human animals are sentient and that they thus have intrinsic interests.10
Combined, these important moral and scientific insights fundamentally changed the common-sense view of non-human animals into what it is today. Whereas Darwin and his scientific successors began to nibble away at the distinctiveness of humans from other animals (and do not seem to be done with that anytime soon), Bentham and his moral successors paved a parallel road, arguing that even if there are important scientific differences between humans and other animals, these are not relevant when it comes to how animals are to be treated. Relevant to ethics is the already discovered similarity between humans and other sentient animals: they all have interests.
The central purpose of this book is to investigate whether the fundamental structures of liberal democracies should reflect the fact that many non-human animals are individuals with interests, and whether this is possible without undermining or destabilizing their institutions. The book argues that the insight that many non-human animals have interests is not only relevant to their moral status but also to their political and legal status. The modern insight that sentient animals have interests challenges the ancient anthropocentric conjecture that politics and law have nothing to do with non-human animals, a conjecture that is still embodied in the institutions of our open societies. The book argues that these institutions are in need of an update that aligns them with modern scientific and moral insights. This also explains the obvious wink that the title of this book gives to Karl Popper’s (1902–1994) famous The Open Society and Its Enemies . In that book, Popper straightforwardly defends the open society and stresses the importance of adjusting its institutions to new insights through piecemeal engineering.11 The current book is also about the open society, but it suggests that Popper’s open society was still closed to many of its most vulnerable members. It argues that the modern open society should have its institutions updated insofar as they still rely on the ancient anthropocentric conjecture for their justification, and that it should become more inclusive and open up to non-human animals. As such, the “enemies” of the enhanced type of open society envisioned in this book are not only Plato, Hegel, and Marx, as classically identified by Popper, but all philosophers who have, on arbitrary grounds, tried to preserve the fruits of the open society exclusively for humans.
In search of adequate reform, this book considers it imperative to respect certain typical liberal democratic features: liberal democracies typically enable popular control over governance by elections of a reasonable number of political competitors, they secure limitations on the exercise of power in accordance with prescriptions of the rule of law, they institutionalize the separation of powers and secure the independent position o...