The Other Animal: Levinas at the Juncture of 'Rights' and 'Welfare'

Abstract

There is a growing number of Levinasian scholars who are interested in examining if Levinas's ethics could also be applied to problems in animal ethics, discerning in what ways it could contribute to this discourse. This article aims to define how Levinas would lodge himself between the two popular movements in normative animal ethics: animal rights and animal welfare in view of defining the contribution of the Levinasian framework of ethics of otherness when applied to the nonhuman (nh) animal. I proceed in three parts: discuss three case problems in animal ethics and define how the animal rightists and welfarists would pose their ethical questions on them; criticize the difference of the value principles of rightists and welfarists from the point of view of Levinas's idea of otherness of the nh animal; and identify the uniqueness of Levinas's ethical stance and mark down what domains of research would support him. My conclusion is that Levinas would be ineffectual in answering directly the practical problems for conflictual situations in normative animal ethics, but he could point out the a priori meaning of ethics that should subtend normative animal ethics.