"Animalization" - Aleksy Tarasenko-Struc (Seton Hall University)
Philosophical Quarterly, online first
In his autobiography, Malcolm X reflects on a disconcerting—and revealing—incident from his youth. X had been sent, at age 13, to a detention home in Michigan. The couple who managed the home, the Swerlins, took a liking to the young Malcolm, but treated him in a way that he later came to see as dehumanizing. Here’s how he describes the incident:
[The Swerlins] would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary. They would even talk about me, or about ‘n—s’, as though I wasn’t there, as though I wouldn’t understand what the word meant. … What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned upon them that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. (X and Haley 1966: 26–7)
It’s tempting to interpret X as protesting that he is being objectified—treated or regarded as a mindless object. But that’s not what he says, strictly speaking. What he protests is that the Swerlins treat him not as a person but as an animal, indeed as a pet. He is, we might say, complaining about being animalized—not, at least on the surface, about being objectified. And treating people as (nonhuman) animals is plausibly different from treating them as objects, not least because animals are not morally on a par with objects and so call for different forms of treatment. In other words, X’s anecdote and many others like it suggest that animalization might be a specific category of wrongdoing in itself. And if so, we need a theory of what it is and how it works.
At this point, though, you might wonder: can people really be treated as animals, in a sense that matters for moral protest and social criticism?
There are two objections to the very idea that animalization is even possible, and they look pretty damning. One is the humanization objection: people who supposedly treat others as animals—to, say, degrade and humiliate them—seem to also, at the same time, recognize and even care about their victims’ humanity. So, how could they possibly count as treating their victims as animals?
The second objection—what I call the inferiorization objection—is perhaps even more worrying. To treat a person as an animal is supposed to be a way of mistreating her, of treating her badly. But then talk of animalization seems to assume that it’s permissible to treat animals badly, which (falsely) presupposes, in turn, that animals have no or anyway low moral status. If so, then the very idea of animalization just reflects our own dubious views of the value of animals. In that case, we would be better off throwing the idea in the dustbin of other obsolete moral concepts.
In a recent(ish) paper, ‘Animalization’, published online in Philosophical Quarterly, I try to rescue the concept of animalization from these challenges, by sketching the basis for a theory of this overlooked yet important phenomenon. On my ‘fittingness-first’ view of animalization, to treat or regard a person as an animal is to relate to her as it is fitting to treat or regard animals, given their nature and value. More concretely, behavior and attitudes are animalizing when they embody a kind of disregard for a person’s characteristically human capacities—such as her capacity for autonomous agency, thought, and experience—that shadows the relations that it’s fitting for us to have with animals. In fleshing out this theory, I turn to a surprising source for insight: Kantian theories of objectification familiar from feminist philosophy, particularly the theories of Martha Nussbaum and Rae Langton. Inspired by their views, I characterize two primary modes of animalization: autonomy-denial (treating someone as lacking human autonomy) and subjectivity-denial (treating someone as bereft of human subjectivity). I show how these categories can illuminate many morally objectionable attitudes and practices, from forced sterilization to the ideological beliefs associated with colonialism and antiblack racism.
I won’t spend too much time on the details of the argument. Just to put my cards on the table: I think that the humanization objection and inferiorization objection don’t threaten the legitimacy of the concept of animalization. We can think of answering these objections as the ‘easy problem of animalization’. But there’s another, trickier challenge raised by my appropriation of Kantian theories of objectification, and it deserves to be called the ‘hard problem of animalization’.
The problem is that objects, animals, and even children lack the kind of autonomy and subjectivity characteristic of mature human beings. So, when you treat me in a way that disregards my autonomy, are you treating me as an object, an animal, or a child? How, in other words, does animalizing autonomy-denial or subjectivity-denial differ from its objectifying and infantilizing counterparts? To be viable, a theory of animalization needs to address this challenge, which I call the indeterminacy problem. Otherwise, the concept of animalization no longer picks out a distinctive form of wrongdoing, but just collapses into that of objectification or infantilization; as a result, we get conceptual inflation, and a less useful critical vocabulary.
Much of the paper is devoted to solving the indeterminacy problem. Doing so requires gaining clarity on how, exactly, human beings differ from animals in respects that make it appropriate to treat them differently. So, we need answers to such questions as: are animals autonomous? If so, are they autonomous in the same way in which people are, including children? If not, in what ways do the differences morally matter? One surprising benefit of tackling the indeterminacy problem is that, in the process, we learn quite a bit about not only what it is to treat people as animals but also what it is to treat people as objects or as children. That is, theorizing about animalization can shed light on the nature of objectification and infantilization as well. In doing so, developing a theory of animalization can give us a much more fine-grained account of the dehumanizing aspects of various morally objectionable attitudes and practices. Or so I argue.
In the interest of brevity (and so as not to divulge any spoilers!), here’s a link to the paper.