English Department Faculty Salon: "What's Left of Animal Liberation?" with Prof. Alastair Hunt

When the Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1975, he was sporting a mustache that made him look like something of a lefty. In fact, most advocates of animal rights tend to talk as if the cause of animals belongs on the political left. Despite Singer’s mustache, however, progressives the world over generally want nothing to do with animal rights. Animal advocates—and animals themselves—remain the “orphans of the left.” In this talk, Prof. Alastair Hunt thinks critically about both the animal rights’ movement’s claim to be on the left and the left’s rejection of it as something alien. There are good reasons to be skeptical of radical animal advocacy’s left bona fides. It lacks a critique of capitalism, and its recognition of animals as subjects of justice contradicts the left’s traditional humanism. At the same time, the left’s rejection of animal liberation seems overhasty. An animal rights critique of capitalism is not hard to imagine, and the pursuit of justice for animals is an iteration of the left’s own proud tradition of seeking justice for those who are not even seen as capable of bearing justice claims. An anticapitalist struggle by, with, and for animals, Hunt concludes, can and should be welcomed as a constitutive part of a left aware that the claims of human beings do not exhaust the horizons of justice. Indeed, welcoming animal liberation to the left may just be necessary for renewing both the animal movement and the broader left as effective political forces that can actually win. What’s left of animal liberation? In our dark times, everything.