Framing the Animal: Epistemological, Methodological and Conceptual Perspectives on Animal Ethics
Doba řešení: 2025–2026
Členové vědeckého týmu:
Vedoucí týmu: doc. Anders Niklas Forsberg, Ph.D.
Badatelé: Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, Ph.D.
PhD studující: Nina Collin, Olena Kushyna, Irem Güven (only 2025)
Popis projektu:
Pouze v angličtině.
The aim of the proposed research cooperation is to jointly investigate the various ways in which moral problems are framed, with a focus on questions regarding non-human animals. With the growth of factory farming, extensive use of animals in experimenting and product-testing, in clothing and entertainment – all this leading to humans and the animals they use to account for of 96% mammal biomass on Earth – the question of how humans ought to relate to non-human animals is increasingly urgent. However, despite the many critical writings that have emerged, thinking about animals is frequently hampered by what philosopher Jacques Derrida called the ‘immense disavowal’ of non-human animals in Western thought, a lack of proper attention and acknowledgment that has led not only to current practices of mass suffering and exploitation, but to inadequate philosophical thinking as well. This disavowal, together with the habit of applying already established, at times dated and problematic ethical frameworks when addressing practical questions such as the one concerning animals, has led to conservative philosophical approaches that have not been able to fully do justice to the radical and unexpected questions that other animals may otherwise confront us with. Voice have been raised to ‘question the orthodoxy’ in animal ethics, notably with an influential volume and special issue, with the Wittgensteinian tradition being the most consistently vocal in disrupting accepted approaches. However, the conversation about how to think about and with animals, as opposed to what to do to them, has only just started. To address the issue, it is imperative to question the ways in which the moral problems surrounding animals are framed. This includes paying close attention to a) what kinds of questions are being asked and why and b) what are the ethical, existential, and methodological assumptions that drive the way we approach those questions.
In relation to a): too often, the question regarding animals is ‘What can we do to them?’. This is very different from asking ‘How do we live together?’; yet most of the traditional work in animal ethics starts from the first question, even when it concludes that our rights to use animals are limited. Asking why we ask the questions that we ask is a fundamental step in getting the right answers.
In relation to b): methodological issues in animal ethics also directly and fundamentally determine the answers we reach, yet much of applied ethics takes the method to be a separate issue. Specifically, we are interested in what fundamental assumptions about value (e.g. about the value of life, of animal life, of human life, of human standing) and about philosophy (e.g. that it must be impartial, that it is possible to start from ‘a view from nowhere’, etc.) go unquestioned when we begin to do animal ethics. These also include what counts as a moral problem and what does not. These methods and assumptions frame every question we ask, yet they are insidious precisely because they are hidden. Framings determine how problems are addressed, what conceptual and philosophical tools are used and why, the selection and relative importance of the aspects of the problems considered, and hence how problems are resolved. Therefore, it is imperative to bring the central moral framings to light, in order not only to examine their conceptual and moral value, but also to trace how certain conclusions that appear inevitable are only so because a specific framing was silently adopted.
