SSRN PAPER: Samuel MOYN, "Animals and Slaves: A Legal Analogy between Domination and Reform" (forthcoming in Anne PETERS (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law (Oxford: OUP))

 (image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

The analogy between animals and slaves is rooted deep in the Western tradition. This chapter argues that the parallel between animals and slaves has been static neither in its content nor its consequences to date. Originally it revolved around domesticated non-human agricultural labouring animals and their enslaved human counterparts. Over millennia, not only did it evolve away from the imaginative centrality of agriculture and therefore domesticated service (human or non-human). Its ethical and political implications underwent a grand reversal in modern times. A little more than two hundred years ago, the analogy began to allow for a common if dissident project of reducing physical cruelty, and eventually for an abolitionist politics that aimed for a more thoroughgoing emancipation from hierarchy.

Read the full paper on SSRN.