PAOLA CAVALIERI. The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights. Trans. Catherine Woollard. Revised by Paola Cavalieri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 184 pp.

(forthcoming in International Studies in Philosophy)

Paola Cavalieri is familiar to many Anglo-American readers as co-editor of and contributor to the widely-discussed volume The Great Ape Project (co-edited with Peter Singer [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993]). This book, along with her editorial work on the international journal Etica & Animali, have helped to place Cavalieri’s name at the center of important academic debates on animal rights, especially in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy. With the publication of her most recent book, The Animal Question (first published in Italian as La Questione Animale in 1999), Cavalieri will most certainly establish herself as one of the premier international animal rights theorists writing today, alongside such figures as Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Steve Sapontzis, and David DeGrazia.

Although much of the terrain covered in The Animal Question will be familiar to those who have carefully studied the aforementioned authors, Cavalieri’s book does offer a novel approach to many of the central questions in animal ethics. To begin, rather than defending a particular moral theory and then extending it to include animals, Cavalieri offers a dialectical argument in which she starts out from the widely shared premises of human rights theory and then seeks to demonstrate that the attempt to limit human rights to members of the human species is logically incoherent. At first glance Cavalieri’s argument might seem to do little more than repeat the ethical and argumentative approach laid out by Tom Regan in his The Case for Animal Rights; but, in addition to Cavalieri’s dialectical approach (Regan offers something closer to a classical demonstrative argument), her notion of moral patiency is much broader than Regan’s “subject-of-a-life” criterion. She argues that the conditions for being a moral patient are best understood to reside in a very minimal conception of subjectivity, one shared by many human and nonhuman life forms: “subjectivity begins where consciousness begins. To be conscious means to have experiences and to care about those experiences” (38). Although Cavalieri’s criterion has the advantage of providing a more inclusive notion of community than Regan’s “subject of a life” (a criterion that can be attributed with reasonable certainty only to mentally normal mammals one year of age and older, thereby excluding a broad range of animals), it will no doubt pose serious problems at the other end of the continuum for both biocentric and ecocentric environmentalist philosophers who seek to extend moral considerability beyond subjectivity (Cavalieri offers her own arguments for why such an extension is rationally indefensible in Chapter 2 [32-37]).

With her expanded notion of subjectivity and moral patiency in place, Cavalieri proceeds in Chapters 3 and 4 to use this notion to critique speciesist philosophers in the Western tradition (viz., Descartes and Kant), and to demonstrate the limits and internal problems of current pro-animal ethical theories (found in such philosophers as Singer, Regan, and DeGrazia) with regard to the issues of animal welfare and killing. The main thread of her argument is resumed in the final chapter where Cavalieri argues for an extension of human rights (as theorized in the analytic tradition by such philosophers as Vlastos and Gewirth) to all subjects, regardless of species boundaries.

The chief merit of Cavalieri’s approach to animal rights, to my mind, is its radical egalitarianism. In Cavalieri, we find none of the inconsistencies and hierarchies that plague the perfectionist theories of Regan and Singer. Additionally, Cavalieri provides a sophisticated philosophical foundation for those who are seeking to transform our political and legal institutions with the aim of providing animals with better and more just treatment. For these reasons, and many others, Cavalieri’s The Animal Question will no doubt become standard reading for those who are interested in contemporary trends in animal rights theory and political practice.

Matthew Calarco

Sweet Briar College