Abstract
Currently an unprecedented number of individuals live in captivity. There has been an increase in attention to the harms of human bondage and confinement, and the harms of captivity for non-human animals is beginning to come into sharper view. Those who do focus on other animals in captivity have tended to focused on pain, suffering, and killing with much less attention to the potentially devastating effects of denying liberty. Incaceration does cause physical and psychological harm, but it also is a violation of autonomy. I argue that other animals have autonomy, they make choices within their species-typical behavioral repertoire and these choices are meaningful to them. Denying them the freedom to exercise their autonomy by keeping them incarcerated, under captive control, is thus ethically problematic.
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- 1.
See E. Klein and E. Soltas http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/13/wonkbook-11-facts-about-americas-prison-population/ and P. Wagner http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie.html.
- 2.
See, for example, J. Gordon, “Theorizing Contemporary Practices of Slavery” (forthcoming) and K. Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
- 3.
However, see L. Gruen, ed., The Ethics of Captivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 4.
J. Bryant et al., “Life behind Bars,” in Gruen, The Ethics of Captivity, 105–6.
- 5.
L. Gazzola, “Political Captivity,” in Gruen, The Ethics of Captivity, 123.
- 6.
A. Cochrane, “Do Animals Have an Interest in Liberty?,” Political Studies 57, no. 3 (2009): 669.
- 7.
It might be suggested that we are always acting according to some external influence and that there is no true self that genuinely acts according to her individually distinct desires. I agree with feminist theorists who argue that the self is intersubjective and that we are the organizers of our experiences, which are influenced by all sorts of social, embodied, and hypothetical urges as well as other “selves.” See D. Meyers, ed., Feminists Rethink the Self (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); and D. Meyers, Being Yourself (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
- 8.
I try to give it a bit more attention in “Dignity, Captivity, and an Ethics of Sight” in Gruen, The Ethics of Captivity, 231–47.
- 9.
S. Blackburn, “Review” of Dignity: Its History and Meaning, by Michael Rosen, Times Higher Education, March 29, 2012.
- 10.
A. Kolnai, “Dignity,” Philosophy 51 (1976): 251–71, 254.
- 11.
S. Cataldi, “Animals and the Concept of Dignity: Critical Reflections on a Circus Performance,” Ethics and the Environment 7, no. 2 (2002): 106.
- 12.
M. Nussbaum, “Beyond Compassion and Humanity: Justice for Nonhuman Animals,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. M. Nussbaum and C. Sunstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 305.
- 13.
Those animals who live with us undoubtedly pick up on our judgments of them, and I am not denying that our judgments affect their behavior and often their well-being. My point simply is that I am doubtful that they see ridicule as dignity-denying.
- 14.
A. Horowitz, “Disambiguating the ‘Guilty Look’: Salient Prompts to a Familiar Dog Behavior,” Behavioural Processes 81, no. 3 (2009): 447–52.
Bibliography
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Gruen, L. (2018). Incarceration, Liberty, and Dignity. In: Linzey, A., Linzey, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36671-9_10
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