The May/June issue of Philosophy Now is in the shops and up on the website, and will be of particular interest to any readers who have fur, sharp teeth, claws, or a tail.
I know that quoting myself is a bad habit, but rather than describe the new issue all over again I'm just going to link to my editorial from the issue instead. Here it is:
http://philosophynow.org/issue67/67lewis.htm
Issue 67 - Animals and Philosophy
The "I LOVE MY DOG" article by Kennan Ferguson of U. South Florida:
[quote]ARTICLE
Ferguson / I THEOR / June
POLITICAL n MY DOG
10.1177/0090591703260692 2004
Y
I n MY DOG
KENNAN FERGUSON
University of South Florida
Virtually all political theory and ethical systems presuppose the primacy of human beings.
Abstract human beings have rights, privileges, legal standing, and—it is said—claims to our
sympathy. Many political debates, therefore, center on questions of where these lines are to be
drawn. But many humans do not behave this way. People, for example, may expend far more love,
time, money, and energy on their pets’ well-being than on abstract humans. If the choice is
between an operation to save their dog’s life, or saving a human life through the United Nations,
for example, most will choose the former, even if put in such stark terms. This essay argues that
people’s love for their dogs transcends the human/animal barrier, that this love overturns
assumptions about the role of abstraction in our lives, and that such attunement can be under-
stood only via new formulations of the roles of ethics and philosophy.
Keywords: dogs; ethics; political philosophy; incommensurability; love
T he predicament: your dog’s life is in danger, and you have to decide
whether to spend a significant amount of money and time to remedy its mal-
ady. One alternative, among many, is to spend an equivalent amount to help,
even save, a number of human lives; the International Red Cross or a United
Nations relief fund could use that money to feed the starving or rescue disas-
ter victims. Will you, to put it most pointedly, choose the life (and comfort,
and even luxuriance) of your dog over that of human beings? Though one
alternative is clearly virtuous, and the other questionable, you—like most
North Americans facing this choice—will likely choose the latter. And the
choice you make, interestingly enough, calls into question the basic princi-
ples of ethics, political philosophy, and human primacy.
Confronted with this question, especially a generalized version as to what
the proper response should be, there seem to be two predicable answers. The
first is an aggrieved “Well, I have a dog, would do many things for him/her,
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am indebted to Carolyn Eichner, Verity Smith, Jane Bennett, Caroline
Winterer, Steven Johnston, and Stephen White for their felicitous comments and criticisms.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 3, June 2004 373-395
DOI: 10.1177/0090591703260692
© 2004 Sage Publications
373
374 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
and refuse to accept such a judgmental interpretation of those kind of
actions.” The second, oppositional response, “How can anyone value animal
life over human life? Such people have lost their moral bearings!” presumes
that to rehabilitate a dog in some way betrays humanity.
Neither of these responses is particularly interesting. It would be easy
enough to explore the defensive psychology of the first or attack the naive
humanism of the second. Yet neither explains the gap between the two views,
how one person can feel so strongly about an animal that another cares very
little about. Rather than attempting to definitively resolve this predicament,
which perhaps cannot be answered satisfactorily, this essay instead uses it to
ask particular questions about the presuppositions and causalities within
political theory.
This takes place in this essay in three different ways. The first of these
investigates how human/dog relationships and connections bridge profound
differences, examining how those are individually and historically consti-
tuted. The second calls into doubt the assumed compulsory force of logic
within political philosophy, especially the status of logical demands. The
third looks at different ways of investigating the intellectual and ideological
stakes, eventually arguing that fiction may be more attuned to the everyday
complexities of these relationships than other explanatory forms.
That an individual—say, an American citizen—might well prefer to
spend money on dog food or veterinarian bills than on helping refugees, vic-
tims of natural disasters, or the poor is problematic for political philosophy;
indeed, it can logically be extrapolated within most theoretical systems as not
only radical injustice but as a betrayal of humanity. The value in this relation-
ship escapes political theory. Virtually all democratic theories hold that
equivalence and formal equality, both of which are dependent on deep levels
of mutuality, are the necessary precondition of just political relationships.
This essay argues against the centrality of equivalence and formal equal-
ity, in part because any theory that insists on a rejection of some of the most
important of human affinities is bound to fail both empirically and ideologi-
cally, and in part because these connections provide ways in which humans
learn to care for and attend to the world around them. The failure of these the-
ories, I hold, is in their insistence on the commensurability of political actors,
the necessity of “being understood” across the multiplicitous edges of
worlds, and their exclusive privileging of logical formalism. On the contrary,
we can learn from those who love their pets that communication is not limited
to abstract thoughts or human speech, but can and does happen in startling
places and across surprising boundaries.
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 375
I. CANIS FAMILIARIS
William James describes the incommensurability and unintelligibility
between people and dogs at an everyday level, “we to the rapture of bones
under hedges, or smells of trees and lampposts, they to the delights of litera-
ture and art.”1 Humans and dogs live in fundamentally different worlds,
where the very methods of communication and connection are so disparate as
to be untranslatable. A human, in other words, is insensible to many if not
most of what is of interest to a dog, and vice versa; the two can communicate
only through the most rudimentary of language, and even that often seems
limited to command and obedience.
Yet, James argues, dogs and people can rely on, develop trust in, and even
love, one another. “[O]ur dogs and ourselves,” he writes, are connected “by a
tie more intimate than most ties in this world.”2 That people and dogs cannot
understand one another’s interests has little to do with their bond. Each fills
needs in the other, for caring, companionship, physical and emotional affec-
tion, fun: that is the basis for their allegiance. Certainly these needs play out
differently in each species and in particular contexts; certainly the needs of
food and protection and shelter are paramount, and yet the emotional attach-
ment is not reducible to those needs. Dog (and human) affinity continues
beyond the ability to meet those wants. A toothless guard dog often remains
part of a family.
Is proof really needed that what people feel for their dogs is actually love?
Of course, such a claim is impossible to prove to those who would deny such
a complex emotion is appropriately applied to pets. But let a list of various
behaviors, institutions, and items stand in for such a verification. Some are
familiar and others strange, some are common and some rare, some are
reported as outrages and others as paeans to humane behavior. Such a list
would include, among other evidence: pet cemeteries; people leaving prop-
erty to dogs and cats in their wills; canine health insurance; cultural and emo-
tional prohibitions against eating dog flesh; neighborhood flyers pleading for
the retrieval of lost pets; the history of dog portraiture; pet therapy, including
drug treatment; ceremoniously burying and memorializing dead dogs; books
and poems “written” by dogs; sleeping with dogs (literally, though bestiality
also belongs in this list); pet organ transplants; furniture designed for dogs;
attempts to replicate dead pets through cloning; the bestowing of names upon
animals; and popular depictions of dogs as central to children’s lives and
emotional maturity, such as Lassie or Where the Red Fern Grows.3 All these
practices, whether conventional or unorthodox, show the different (but often
central) loves that people have for dogs.
376 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
That a wide variety of people love dogs is obvious. This love transcends
class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, education, intelligence; it is limited
by almost none of the subterraneous fault lines that permeate U.S. society.4
People do not (usually) love dogs to the exclusion of all others, though some
instances—such as when a last will and testament renounces human off-
spring in favor of Rex—they come close. The love of dogs does not usually
replace love of others, but is often thought to encourage it. Marjorie Garber,
for example, argues that it is through love of dogs that we become fully
human.5
Yet such canine conceptions are historically recent. Historically, dogs
were commonly set up as models, not objects of human love: their fealty was
representative of the highest of human aspiration. The Fido/fidelity connec-
tion is an ancient one, reaching at least as far back as Argos in The Odyssey
(who is left uncared for while Ulysses is away and happily dies upon his
return). John Adams praised those who have “a Fondness for Dogs,” for such
feelings show “Evidence of an honest Mind and an Heart capable of Friend-
ship, Fidelity, and Strong Attachments being the Characteristicks of that Ani-
mal.”6 The faithfulness of dogs became the model for children’s poems and
books, wherein children were encouraged to reproduce the virtues that dogs
naturally possessed. Yet this did not translate to their desirability, except for
pragmatic reasons. Keeping them solely as pets was limited virtually exclu-
sively to the extremely wealthy, at least until the late nineteenth century.7 To
be able to keep an animal that was ultimately “useless” (in utilitarian terms)
was reserved only for those who wished to mimic the behaviors of the upper
classes.
But by the nineteenth century, dogs began to be seen within American and
European cultures in a different way, as virtuous actors rather than insensate
embodiments of abstract virtues. James Turner describes how the Victorians
intellectually shifted from merely teaching children to note the steadfastness
of dogs to making the claim that dogs were manifestly virtuous.8 As the Vic-
torian preference for emotion over abstract intellectualism emerged, animals
began to be conceived as morally superior to humans. A dog did not need to
remind itself to be loyal and courageous, as did a man; it merely responded
with its essential qualities. Moral actions became attributed to dogs: the ideal
canine is one with the human ideals of compassion, loyalty, and bravery. If
children could overcome their human susceptibilities, the Victorian romanti-
cism asserted, they could approach the glory of dogs. Dogs, it was argued,
“possess incontestably all the qualities of a sensible man,” whereas “man has
not in general the admirable qualities of the dog.”9
For the Victorians (and their pet-loving contemporary descendants), the
very goodness of dogs was seen as bred into them. The prolonged domestica-
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 377
tion of dogs as work companions, whether for mushing, hunting, or herding,
had eliminated their natural ferocity and given an inclination toward virtue. It
was a triumph of humanity: the brutal, wild nature of the wolf had been
remade into an inborn—one might even say “natural”—obeisance. At a time
when, thanks to Darwin, humans were increasingly seen as members of the
animal family, dogs embodied the best of human creation; to love them was
to love human mastery of animal nature.10
Thus, loving a dog began to be seen as an intrinsic good, such love thought
of as evidence of a caring, kind, humane soul. The emergence of the British
and U.S. associations for the protection of animals and the development of
the Audubon Society into a full-fledged political organization joined the
emergence of pet ownership for the middle class as examples of the proper
concern for the natural and the care of the dumb: such concern, it was
thought, elevated the humans who acted appropriately. People who care
about animals and nature, those who transcend their narrow self-interests in
the service of the beasts who cannot even speak, such people were under-
stood to be finer than those whose concerns are solely for themselves.
Much of this perspective remains in contemporary society, of course.
There is even a commonly understood correlation between the treatment of
pets and the treatment of other humans. For example, the skills and patience
required for the proper training of a dog is popularly thought to be partially
analogous to the skills and patience needed to raise a child. Caring for a dog is
commonly seen by young couples as a preparation for children; men walking
puppies are hoped to be (or themselves hope to be seen as) prime candidates
for fatherhood; people whose dogs are well behaved are assumed to also
properly discipline their children. Often, too, the companionship offered by a
dog is understood as a credible replacement for the departure of grown off-
spring. In all these cases, the dog functions as an ersatz human in the sense of
an object of caregiving: a repository for affection, guardianship, and love.
However, the love that people give to their dogs is not universally admired.
While there are few who deny that these emotions are experienced as “love,”
they are often denigrated as an inferior emotional imitation of true human
emotion. Even some of the great defenders of animals suspect that such affec-
tion can border on the pathological. Konrad Lorenz, for example, held that a
person “who, disappointed and embittered by human failings, denies his love
to mankind in order to transfer it to a dog or a cat, is definitely committing a
grave sin, social sodomy so to speak, which is as disgusting as the sexual
kind.”11
Even those whose antipathy does not run quite so deep as Lorenz’s may
still feel grave misgivings about allowing the love of pets a status equal to
“true” love. In response to those who would judge the love one feels for a dog
378 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
as a humanizing experience, Andrew Sullivan argues that such a relationship
“is an inferior one, because dogs offer unconditional fidelity . . . and thus
offer a much easier and less virtuous relationship than difficult humans.”12
That is, because of the unrestricted nature of a dog’s affection, it need not be
earned in the same way as a human being’s, and therefore lacks the arduous
(and therefore civicly superior?) negotiations that mark interhuman compas-
sion. Needless to say, Sullivan ignores whatever similarities this may have to
a parent-child relationship or to other relationships marked by unequal power
and/or sentiment differentials.
Even within less stringent criticism, a tenuous suspicion remains that the
emotional affinity between humans and dogs does not measure up to the stan-
dards of true love, that the term itself connotes an intensity of emotion that
might better be termed “affection,” “attachment,” or “fondness.” But the
emphatic term “love” is, I believe, unavoidable. The energy, attention, and
sacrifice that people give to their pets bespeaks a far stronger affiliation than
the other terms imply. In addition, that people themselves choose this term is
telling; not only is the iconic title of this essay familiar to all, but children and
adults alike usually overtly profess love when speaking of their dogs. Finally,
I can think of no other term that makes sense of the intensity of these relation-
ships. People who claim to love their children or spouses or parents are
trusted to best understand their own feelings; why deny this to other equally
felt claims? The emotion that people have for their dogs should be called by
no other name.
And so the love of dogs ends up in a tenuous spot in contemporary Ameri-
can society: known as vital to many human lives, sacralized for some, dis-
missed by others, cheered by the culture at large (witness the sales of Eliza-
beth Marshall Thomas’s The Hidden Life of Dogs13), roundly derided by the
culture at large (witness the standard filler newspaper article snickering at the
new dog-oriented store/trend/drug), while—above all—the affections for
these animals in our midst endures. Fully assessing what to make of humans’
love of dogs seems virtually impossible, but one thing is clear: dogs are
loved.
II. POLITICAL SUBJECTS
Rather than speaking of dogs specifically as pets (though the subject will
return), let us turn to the human side of the equation. Political philosophy, in
investigating the creation and legitimacy of power, must necessarily address
relationships between human beings. Political philosophers intend to ascer-
tain the moral and logical underpinnings of these kinds of problematic ques-
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 379
tions: what, actually, are the political connections that people owe to one
another, and what are the limits to these connections? So in this section I also
turn to two fields related to (some would argue “subsumed by”) political phi-
losophy: ethics and animal rights. The first restates the fact of human atten-
tion to dogs as a moral question: ought people treat dogs better than people?
The second asks a similar, but slightly different question: ought nonhumans
to have moral and legal standing? But, ultimately, the answers that these
approaches give is unsatisfactory, for the answer in both cases (though there
may well be one, or many) does not necessarily resolve anything.
Michael Oakeshott took the problematic nature of political thought seri-
ously, positing a fundamental rupture within its very essence. In his essay “A
Philosophy of Politics,” Oakeshott notes that political philosophy “must be a
reasoned and coherent body of concepts” that its very existence as philoso-
phy is dependent on its claims to logic and rationality.14 On the other hand, he
notes that political philosophy has another standard to meet: that of conform-
ing “to the so-called ’facts of political life,’” those empirical aspects of
human reality that are, after all, the object of its inquiry.15 For Oakeshott,
these two charges will often be in conflict, splitting political philosophy
against itself; when this happens, he argues, the responsibility of political
philosophy is ultimately to the latter. Unlike pure philosophy, which is not
bound by relevance or tangibility, any adequate theorizing about politics
must primarily be about the lived, human experiences of the political realm.
To follow Oakeshott here, then, in trying to understand the ethical and
political constitution of people, it is more important to attend to how they
behave than how they think they should behave (or, especially, how theorists
argue they should think and then behave).16 One of the implications to be
examined in this section is that such behaviors are not necessarily logically
integrated and causally ordered by the political actor. This is not to say that
they are necessarily oppositional: many people would not see support of their
pets as contrary to the safeguarding of human life. But their actual comport-
ment shows that they may often choose the former and disregard the latter.
Yet many, if not most, political theorists continue to treat the function of
philosophy as though a politico-ethical conscience carefully hierarchizes
ethical commitments, correlates those to possible behaviors, and then acts
appropriately. What becomes apparent from a range of them is the over-
whelming degree to which this logical causality is presupposed. From basic
economistic theories to complex ethical systems, this presumption underlies
virtually all conceptions of how logic, evaluation, politics, and ethics work
together.
Of course, human actions and attachments fail to follow these sorts of
logics. To return to the example of this essay, people are not unaware that the
380 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
time, money, and energy that they spend on their dogs could make life better,
or even possible, for human beings somewhere in the world. Nor is it the case
that they hold an abstract conception that dogs are more deserving of concern
and comfort than are humans, as though they only need the truth of morality
to be spelled out for them to behave in a properly principled manner. Even
with this knowledge, they commit time and resources to nonhuman animals,
overriding their supposed obligation to the human race. If indeed universal-
ized ethical commitments were the absolute determinants of human behav-
ior, such people would be committing grave errors of omission and would
readily change their behaviors once the proper ethical course was pointed out
to them.
Political theory, by Oakeshott’s standards, should be concerned with peo-
ple’s actual choices rather than those a philosopher thinks they ought to
make. And yet, for all the practical criticisms of ethical philosophy from a
political standpoint, most of these critics methodically, even painstakingly,
construct the same instrumentalist conceptions of reason and action. These
include, but are not limited to, liberalism (such as that of John Rawls), utili-
tarianism (as presented by Richard Brandt), and libertarianism (as pro-
pounded by Robert Nozick).17 In each of these cases, the construction of the
ethico-philosophical system is logically sound, more or less, and yet leads to
conclusions that, while analytically following from the premises asserted,
are profoundly antithetical to the everyday ethical standards of virtually all
people. Admittedly, it is intellectually interesting to conclude, as Rawls does,
that the principle of “desert” (e.g., whether people get the incomes they
deserve, or the punishments they deserve) should have no place in politics, or
to conclude with utilitarians that it is logical that “our duty to our own chil-
dren is not fundamentally different from our duty to all children,” but such
stances directly conflict with political and ethical life as understood by the
vast majority of people.18
In fact, political philosophies qua philosophies assume that the analytical
aspect of the “reasoned and coherent body of concepts,” in Oakeshott’s
words, are more important than the experiential disconnects between those
concepts; that syllogism trumps reality, as it were. Indeed, as Michael Smith
has convincingly shown, even if the people make certain moral judgments,
such judgments do not necessarily motivate people to act in accordance with
them.19 For example, even if one strongly believes that humans are more
important to protect than are dogs, one may not necessarily act that way. That
someone thinks (or even argues) for a certain behavior’s rightness has no
essential correlation with that person’s actions.
G. E. Moore, noting this distinction, argued that logic therefore has noth-
ing whatsoever to do with moral actions; for Moore, logic is best left solely as
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 381
an academic puzzle. In response, Mary Midgley has shown that Moore was
wrong, at least within everyday life: people can and do use rationality to
change their emotional states.20 But the fact that they can do so (and actually
sometimes do so) does not mean they must do so, nor even that they do so
often, and without such a normative directive each of the forms of political
philosophy noted above fails. Bernard Williams attacks the notion of ethical
behavior as categorical—that is, he does not think that philosophical consid-
erations can (or should) lead to the conclusive governance of behavior. The
fact that historical and societal conditions authorize certain ethical outlooks
above others provokes skepticism, admittedly, but it is “a skepticism that is
more about philosophy than it is about ethics.”21 If, as Williams holds, the
rationalistic standpoint of philosophy and the lived experiences of ethics are
not necessarily commensurate, then there appears to be an inherent problem
in the common and academic view that logic underlies ethical contention.
A brief reiteration of a certain aspect of a well-known animal rights debate
can highlight this problem. Peter Singer, among others, has pointed out that
the grounds for any specific claim to rights based on a specific attribute of
humanity are intrinsically problematic; there is no specific quality such as
intelligence, language, or self-awareness that is felt by all humans (including
newborns, those with mental impairments, and the terminally ill: what have
become known in animal rights discourse as “marginal cases”) and that is not
in some way exceeded by some animals.22 Since it thus follows that humanity
as a whole is not a privileged category, Singer concludes, humans owe some
degree of consideration to nonhuman animal existence. Some theorists who
disagree with Singer point out that such a position could justify the breeding
of humans with brain capacity adequate only for minimal bodily functioning;
under Singer’s view, they argue, there could be no ethical opposition to the
sale of the meat and organs resulting from this breeding. That we find repel-
lent the eating of human flesh, even from mentally defective humans, they
argue, logically compels us to privilege all forms of humanity over the non-
human.23
This is of course a highly simplified version of this debate, but it will suf-
fice here for my concerns. For I am less interested in which side has a legiti-
mate argument (both seem to) or the conclusions each draw (both seem dras-
tic and counterintuitive) than I am in examining the use of philosophical
deduction in each. The role of logic for either viewpoint, and a host of others
in this debate, is seen as the absolute condition upon which concrete public
and personal decisions must be made. Both sides understand epistemology as
fundamental to ethical behavior: you believe X, of course, and as Y follows
logically from X, you therefore must believe Y. Though you think you
believe Z, it is shown that Z is incompatible with Y, and therefore you do not,
382 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
cannot, truly believe Z. Plugged into these syllogisms are various claims
about animal rights, human morality, and infant justice, but the causal nature
of the logical argument is simply assumed.
Some in political philosophy have tried to avoid this dominance by dis-
placing or at least reapportioning the station of logic in human judgments and
evaluations. Jürgen Habermas, for example, dismisses the notion of humans
as discrete, unencumbered political and social beings; instead, he privileges
intersubjectivity in his theory of communicative action.24 In doing so, he
places human relations, not abstraction, as the central constituent of exis-
tence. The reasons he does this, and the criticisms of those reasons, are well
known. Most profoundly, Habermas humanizes ethics and politics by empha-
sizing the personal interactions that can make up communities, norms, and
standards. And yet this solution does not solve the ethical conundrum of this
essay any more than those who would formulate a transcendental ethics, for
his intersubjectivity is always and necessarily human; there can be no
intersubjectivity unless there is a basic recognition of the self in the other.
“Subjects,” he argues, “who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must
consider each other as identical [as subjects]; they must at all times subsume
themselves and the other under the same category.”25 Without the primacy of
the subject (that is, without the category of the human that supersedes all
other claims), intersubjectivity lacks the ability to stake a moral claim on peo-
ple. This arises, in part, from the dominance of universalism in his thought,
and that of his followers such as Seyla Benhabib.26 For by making all subjec-
tivity equally applicable to all humans, he and they must in turn profoundly
differentiate the human from the nonhuman.
Can any philosophies, then, help make sense of this question of dogs?
There are two twentieth-century strains of ethico-philosophical thought that
encourage an escape from these limitations.27 Not coincidentally, both of
these trajectories move away from analytic deduction and toward experien-
tial location.
The first, the loosely associated classification of “existentialism,” under-
stands the subject as grounded not in its self-identity but in the conditions of
its existence. For this approach, the relationships within life provide the ulti-
mate formulations and adjudications of meaning, truth, and ethics. In the
thought of Jaspers, for example, “the ‘thrown’ or irreducibly situated charac-
ter or our being-in-the-world and our being-with-others is the guarantee of,
rather than the obstacle to, our existential freedom.”28 Selves, always in rela-
tion to others, are created by (and themselves create) significance from acts
of care and consideration. Heidegger situates care at the center of his philoso-
phy. In Being and Time, he posits “care” as the “formal existential totality of
Dasien’s ontological structural whole.”29 Sartre, in emphasizing the ethical
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 383
implications of such an orientation, concludes that our own freedom is possi-
ble only with our struggle for widespread human freedoms.30 And Arendt
finds the very “condition” of humanity in its activities with the world: work,
labor, and action.31
The existentialist’s concept of existence, however, remains firmly wedded
to the human. For each of the above authors, the character of the world, how-
ever it situates and is in turn situated by human existence, is important exactly
insofar as it relates to human existence. Human relations, after all, are the
subject at hand. And to that point each privileges the interhuman interaction
over the “thingness” of the nonhuman.32 Martha Nussbaum, who goes even
further in recognizing the centrality of love in the constitution of identity in
connections, still must rely on the final word in the following quotation:
“Love is not a state or function of the solitary person, but a complex way of
being, feeling, and interacting with another person.”33 The existential focus
upon the located nature of being does allow for love’s central place in ethical
outlooks, but limits the recognition of being to other humans.
The second group of philosophers who have profoundly challenged the
limitations of universalist subjectivity—and those who have come closest to
the question at hand—have been feminist theorists, especially those from the
strain of feminism influenced by Carol Gilligan’s and Nel Noddings’s “ethic
of care.”34 Like existentialism, such philosophies begin from the epistemo-
logical assumption that the located nature of subjectivity is primary to human
existence, but add that such located natures are realized more completely (at
least in most instances in Western societies) within the experience of women
and girls, especially the giving and receiving of nurturance.35 Gilligan, for
example, contends that when people are identified primarily in terms of
“self-discovery and self recognition,” “the language of relationships is
drained of attachment, intimacy, and engagement.”36 When the concepts of
care and attachment are seen as fundamental, instead, humans become com-
munal creatures, reliant on trust and connection above autonomy and self-
interest.
Such an approach is not specifically antirationalist (at least not usually); in
large part, it is the opposition between reason and emotion that is being
critiqued.37 That reason excludes emotion, that its most ardent defenders see
emotional connection as threatening the very basis of rationality, has histori-
cally eliminated these emotional qualities from the ambit of philosophy.38
Instead of conceiving of analytic rigor and universalized moral rules as the
goal of philosophy and ethics, these critics argued, we need to discover and
discuss how “commitments occupy a deeper stratum of our moral psychol-
ogy than do moral obligations.”39 Nor is the ability and consideration of care
necessarily determined by gender. Joan Tronto explicitly decouples any
384 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
essential link, noting that even though the majority of caring values are asso-
ciated with “the feminine,” caring can include a wide, diverse range of prac-
tices.40
Yet, similar to Habermasian communicability and the varieties of existen-
tialism, humans remain the objects of virtually all renditions of care ethics:
family members provide the archetypal examples, followed closely by
friends and group members.41 Taking other, nonhuman forms of care into
account is rare.42 One exception is notable, both for taking pet relations into
ethical account and for its subtlety. Chris Cuomo and Lori Gruen overtly the-
orize human relations with “companion animals,” and parallel many of this
essay’s themes by arguing that friendship is often an essential component of
these relationships, and that moral and political traditions ignore and deny
the reality of those friendships.43 They argue that by attending to such rela-
tionships, feminists can see the similarities between oppressive gender
binary relationships and oppressive species binary relationships.44 Ulti-
mately, their goal is to overcome “moral distance” by recognizing the corre-
spondence between the animals we love and the animals we eat: that we can
“learn to see non-humans as beings that deserve our moral perceptions, . . .
shift from viewing them as background or mere food to seeing them as
enablers of our own abilities to bridge moral distance, to cross boundaries,
and to expand our moral orientation.”45
In other words, even those who are most interested in theorizing human/
animal relationships continue to seek logical lessons from those relation-
ships, and to apply those lessons in particularly normative, even obligatory,
ways. If we do indeed love our pets, to continue this example, we must stop
eating all animals, which are essentially similar to them.46 That is, we are
obligated to these experiential understandings and logically extrapolate them
to the larger world. Even when specifically about care of animals and the
environment, the implications of such outlooks is judged insofar as it fits a
generalizable necessary change. Certainly to do so is admirable, and no
doubt ethical. But what becomes of such an argument if its logic fails to com-
mand obeisance in human behavior, if people can and do love certain animals
and eat others simultaneously?
III. DOGS, ANIMALS, HUMANS
There seem to be two primary responses to the dilemma with which this
essay began, the insufficiency of which these specifically philosophical
approaches illuminate. The first (call it the “humanist” critique) is to excori-
ate the dog owner for misunderstanding how a personal allocation of
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 385
resources in favor of a dog’s health betrays responsibility to other human
beings. Choosing a dog’s veterinary care over human life, it is claimed,
equals failing to fulfill necessary political and ethical responsibilities. The
second (the “animal rights” critique) extrapolates from the responsibility felt
by the pet owner to a sense of responsibility to animals in general, or at least
to animals of comparable cognitive status. That one can recognize the worth
of a dog means that one must therefore also recognize the value of the ani-
mals constantly slaughtered for no higher purpose than culinary pleasure.
What both of these approaches share, as I have argued above, is the erro-
neous presumption that abstract categorical expressions of ethical responsi-
bility must predominate over personal and quotidian emotional existence.
Or, to put it more simply, that logic trumps love. When Singer or Regan
hypothesize conflicts between animal life and human life, even these militant
defenders of animals argue that, philosophically, human life must take prior-
ity; in this they agree with those who dismiss the possibility of animal
rights.47 And yet as our veterinary example shows, this is not necessarily the
case; people may well choose their pets’ lives over the lives of distant and
unfamiliar humans.
It may well be that, logically, those who eat meat should indeed have no
compunctions about eating dogs, even their own dogs. Of course, such an
argument will prove attractive only to those whose affinity for logic exceeds
their affinity for dogs. Those whose love of pets is genuine and fervent may
well recognize the logic of one (or more) of these arguments while continu-
ing to love their dogs, eating meat, and showing relative indifference to
abstract humans. How can we—as writers, as political theorists—make sense
of these logical disconnections? The final section of this essay attempts to
uncover how such love can coexist with humanity (and humane-ity); what is
it about love of animals, in other words, that can transcend both the rigors of
logic and the demands of the vast majority of political and ethical philoso-
phers?
One way to unpack this question is to note the attitudinal differences
toward dogs that are pets and dogs in general. The tenor of affection toward a
particular animal is far more intense than that for a generalized category of
animals. The particular connection between an owner and a pet can be so
intense that it overwhelms linguistic and spatial boundaries. The ethno-
graphers Arnold Arlike and Clinton Sanders, for example, have studied the
ways in which different sets of humans reinforce or break down the animal/
human divide.48 One set may reaffirm it (e.g., animal researchers) while oth-
ers see it in necessary but problematic ways (e.g., shelter workers). Arlike
and Sanders note how pet owners often transgress this division, for example,
when deciphering symptoms to veterinarians. This can be subtle, as in
386 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
explaining a pet’s moods (“She’s upset that we have a new baby”); blatant, as
when the pet owner dynamic is spoken for dyadically (“We aren’t feeling
well today”); or can even transpose speakership from the human to the dog
(“Oh Doctor, are you going to give me a shot?”).49
On the other hand, it would be misleading to assume the likelihood of sim-
ilar connection with distant or previously unknown animals. People virtually
never feel that dogs in general are equal to humans. There is an important and
popular endorsement of the distance between dogs generally and particular
pets. Many people support the efforts of animal shelters to decrease the num-
bers of feral dogs by euthanizing (viz., killing) them; few would support sim-
ilar treatment of homeless and impoverished humans.50 Not that they want
their particular pets killed, but they do regard a (random, unowned) dog’s life
as inferior to that of a (random, unconnected) human being.
Of course these conceptions are not totally separate; dogs-as-pets and
dogs-as-animals bleed into one another. For many, dogs have a semisacred
positioning below humans but above most other animals. Contemporary
reluctance to recognize dog flesh as meat exemplifies this. This ambiguous
stature has been in place for many years: witness Captain James Cook’s
reluctance to eat dog when it was offered to him by Tahitians (though, after
consuming it, he was gracious enough to allow that the taste of “South Sea
dog was next to an English Lamb”51). Thus the European prohibition against
dog eating in the eighteenth century was not a full-blown taboo, but merely
a common presumption. In the contemporary United States, however, this
status is most clearly seen when it is violated. When a Hmong immigrant
sacrifices a puppy to save his wife from evil spirits in Southern California,
he is arrested for felony charges of animal cruelty.52 Greyhounds may be
used for racing (and killed when they are no longer serviceable) but this prac-
tice is under increasing pressure, outlawed by populations untroubled by
horseracing.53
These examples point to a curious aspect of dog love: its particularity. To
outlaw their consumption or their racing is to treat dogs as a class different
from other animals. Clearly, a kind of generalization of the category “dog” as
different from, say, “pig” has occurred in American culture. But dogs are not
usually loved in general; in the veterinary example beginning this essay, it is
the specificity of a particular dog that is loved. And yet that specificity leads
to general implications that outstrip the specific example: dogs exist not only
as individual beings, but as a classificatory category. One does not need to
describe why one loves one’s dog; that it is one’s dog is enough.
Dogs’ specific relations to humans also complicates the political nature of
their social position. As pets, as owned animals, they are necessarily in a ser-
vile position within a household. A “natural” order of domination is always at
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 387
play in human/dog relationships. There is clearly an imbalance of power
inherent in pet ownership; that one party controls access to food, the timing
of exercise, and the propriety of play (both temporally and spatially) be-
speaks a clear domination. Indeed the language of control seems trouble-
some for many who want to exalt the relationship between people and pets,
resulting in their rhetorical reversal of ownership, their recourse to terminol-
ogy such as “companion animals” and “guardians,” and their understanding
of pets as mystic and transcendental.54
Many have been happy to connect the canine/human imbalance of power
with other, equally “natural,” human/human forms of authority. Racial and
gender analogies are less common than they used to be, fortunately, but there
are still plenty of commentators who draw similarly fatuous parallels: “the
dog clearly flourishes in a regime in which he is ‘dominated’—kept in order,
like children in school, which many psychologists as well as teachers and the
children themselves will explain they prefer: they want to be controlled.”55
Such a justificatory theory premises far too much about both children and
dogs. But without entering the territory of exculpation of dominance, we can
indeed note its presence in pet ownership.
Thus one way, albeit a dangerous one, to think about the role of domi-
nance in pet keeping is to recognize the possibility, variety, and validity of
love within and throughout severe imbalances of power. That such a concep-
tion of love is politically troublesome does not mean that it has no legitimacy
in humans’ lives (it clearly does) nor that those ethico-philosophical systems
that want to exclude such a relationship from the proper channels of mean-
ingful relationships are right to do so (they are not).
The questions as to whether or not the human domination of dogs is “natu-
ral” or“right” or “necessary” are not the ones that are so threatening for tradi-
tional philosophy; the language of ethics and political subjectivity is
designed for precisely these kinds of questions. What makes the humanist
and the animal rights approaches seem to be the only traditional answers to
the veterinary dilemma is the unwillingness for philosophy to recognize the
emotional connections between humans and their pets. That such strong con-
nections exist across the registers of powerful and vulnerable, human and
nonhuman, is troublesome not merely for the role of domination in these rela-
tionships, but for the ways in which they put the very idea of a privileged
human subjectivity into question.
Clearly the humanist position rejects the strength of these connections,
dismissing them as sentimental or even anthropomorphism. But what is sur-
prising, and indicative of the stakes involved in such a discussion, is that the
animal rights approach dismisses it as well. Peter Singer, for example, dis-
claims any interest in love. He goes so far as to state that he does not love ani-
388 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
mals, that his arguments for animal rights rest entirely upon reason, which is
“more universal and more compelling in its appeal.”56 Love for an animal, in
other words, is not reasonable in that it cannot command obeisance to its con-
clusions in the way that (he assumes) rationality does.
The idea that caring for an animal can so strongly affect humans (even
those humans who are philosophers) intrudes upon the primacy of reason,
and thus on humans as reasoning beings. The moment when Nietzsche
throws his arms about a horse being viciously beaten and starts to cry, it is
commonly believed, is the beginning of his descent into madness. Peter
Singer thinks he knows that logic, not love, compels people to act and to sac-
rifice. Deprived of its coercive force, logic would be something else, some-
thing less powerful, something that would not demand action. People may
recognize logical specifications and yet still make choices that slight those
specifications; this common practice has long been the bugbear of norma-
tively inclined philosophy.
Additionally, recognizing that animals may take preference over humans
at certain times also profoundly disturbs the centrality of mutuality in the pre-
sumed conceptions of political subjects. For the essential tenet of liberal poli-
tics (as well as virtually all antiliberal politics) is that of the primacy of the cit-
izen. Those marginal to the status of citizen provide the grounds of debate
over issues of equality, rights, and political participation, for example, past
questions about women and slaves and contemporary questions regarding
minors and the imprisoned. Yet these debates concern the boundaries between
the human and the citizen; how much more dramatic the debates over the
boundaries of the human?
If philosophy, even (or especially) ethical and political philosophy, pro-
vides little help in answering this question, then other types of writing may
prove more useful. However, the often spoony narratives of pet owners, those
who refuse to speak of their “ownership” of animals or who look to their pets
for spiritual guidance, are just as amblyopic as those who deny love of ani-
mals entirely.57 I turn, therefore, to the novel, specifically a novel that drama-
tizes the connective, even redemptive, powers of dog love.
When J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace begins, the protagonist, David
Lurie, is a university professor incapable of love; by its end he is an unem-
ployed volunteer at an animal shelter whose main responsibility is the dis-
posal of dogs’ bodies.58 In the pages between, he undergoes humiliation,
assault, incomprehension, and ultimately a kind of rebirth. Coetzee, a novel-
ist for whom human/animal relationships are central moral concerns, places
his protagonist in the metaphorical position of a dog in his world, a location
from which he can learn what it means to love.
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 389
Lurie sees himself as a clear-thinking, righteous, and self-contained
human, occasionally bewildered by his urges, it is true, but with a categorized
understanding of the order of the world and an articulate moral outlook. He
is, in other words, a fully rational being. Nor is he prone to transformation: in
the beginning pages of the novel, he is convinced that his personality is “not
going to change; he is too old for that,” his “temperament is fixed, set” (p. 2).
It is not until his world has ceased to make sense to him on his terms (at the
same time, not coincidentally, with the “rise of lawlessness” in post-Apart-
heid South Africa) that he begins to realize the tenuousness of his identity and
existence. Dismissed from his job for seducing an undergraduate, Lurie goes
to live with his estranged daughter Lucy in the provinces, where both of them
are attacked by unknown local men. Lucy is raped and impregnated. His
rationality has led him to a position where he no longer comprehends his
daughter, his neighbors, humanity, or himself, where his disgrace is com-
plete: “I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state
of being” (p. 172).
Coetzee repeatedly draws parallels between this disgrace and the lives of
dogs. Canines are not privileged here; Lurie and Lucy, his daughter, are
forced to recognize that their state of disgrace is not a redemption. Before
they are attacked, Lurie likens being controlled by desire to the situation of a
dog, a dog that “might have preferred being shot” (p. 90). By the novel’s end,
as Lucy puts it, they must learn to live with “nothing. No cards, no weapons,
no property, no rights, no dignity.” To which Lurie replies, “Like a dog”
(p. 205).
But Lurie becomes involved with exactly such animals, dogs in an animal
shelter where he volunteers to help put them to death. The dogs for which
Lurie ends up caring (in all the complexity of that term) are not exactly alive,
but neither are they dead. Within his life, the pragmatic purpose of dogs has
proven ineffective. The guard dogs that are meant to protect him and his
daughter have failed. Working at Animal Welfare, however, he discovers a
need to care for the dogs being killed; not to keep them from death, but to
make their last moments as pleasant as possible and to care for their bodies
beyond what is necessary. Rather than merely leaving the animals at the
dump, for example, Lurie incinerates the bodies himself. “He may not be
their savior,” Coetzee writes, “but he is prepared to take care of them once
they are unable, utterly unable, to take care of themselves” (p. 146).
And yet it is the particularity of the dogs that Lurie begins to notice, and
care for. He considers himself an antisentimentalist, and the novel is far from
a sentimental one, but this caretaking becomes central to his meaning, to his
identity. If he is to be saved, Coetzee implies, it is not through grand gestures
390 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
or even art; it is, instead, through the tending of others, nonhuman others.59
Emotionally, Coetzee has crossed what Ian Hacking calls the “species
boundary,” where he has become attuned to the possibilities of “sympathy
between some people and at least some animals.”60 By the end of the novel,
that is all that this choleric, superior, and self-centered protagonist has
learned, and yet it may be enough. “He has learned by now . . . to concentrate
all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has
difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (p. 219).
In Coetzee’s work, dogs are both the debasement and the expiation, at
least in this final possibility of love. But is it only the love of dogs that upends
the presumptions of human centrality? How far does our recognition extend?
What if, in other words, these attitudes are not limited to our affection for
dogs? Perhaps they extend to things that seems even more distant from
humans than do dogs, not merely those species with whom we share our
homes, but also those with which we share other things in common: attitudes,
appetites, even space. Might we, following Christopher Stone’s ground-
breaking legal work, even need to ask if trees and other natural objects should
have legal standing, if political recognition should transcend humans and
human constructs?61 That we give legal recognition to human abstractions
such as states and corporations shows that absolute individual humanity is
not a necessary prerequisite for political, legal, and ethical status, he argues.
So what prevents the recognition of other entities that can be equally
important, both to humans and in their own right?
Moreover, it is easy to doubt that such emotional connections are limited
to organic, living beings. Some theorists of animal rights have drawn critical
parallels with the human interest in cars: cars are certainly valued by their
owners, who may well value the qualities of some cars more than others.62 As
troubling as the line between our selves and our dogs, then, is that between
our selves and our things. Fanciful as it may seem, however, the idea of con-
stitutive and identity-related political theories about things is not beyond the
pale. Timothy Kaufman-Osbourne, for example, has investigated the ways in
which objects at specific historical/cultural times actively gender those who
“use” them.63 To see politics in the use of a tire iron or the wielding of an egg
beater in mid-twentieth-century American suburbia is essentially indispens-
able to feminist theories of power. Similarly, Jane Bennett explores the poli-
tics of what she calls “enchanted objects,” those material things in quotidian
life that literally embody promises of transformation and dynamism.64 Bruno
Latour has explicated the means by which even the things we care virtually
nothing about, such as a doorstop, are themselves part of our social beings;
they can even be said to have their own sociology through their literal trans-
formation of political geography and attachment.65 And all three of these the-
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 391
orists are indebted to Donna Haraway’s conception of the human body as
already a cyborgian organism.66
If, then, it is the very surroundings of humanity that make up humanity,
why pay any special attention to dogs at all? Why, in other words, not pay
equal attention to all things that envelop us as political actors? I do not doubt
that one could, though to do so would seem even more outrageous than to rec-
ognize dogs as such. But humans and many dogs continue to share one trait
between them that is central to this discussion, a diffuse, difficult-to compre-
hend thing, to be sure, but one that goes by a single name: love. It is love,
Coetzee’s protagonist recognizes, that allows him to overcome his distance
from a world around him that he no longer recognizes. And it is love that con-
vinces a pet owner that the pet should be cared for, even at great expense, even
at the expense of another human.
What, then, does attention to loving dogs provide political theory? Cer-
tainly this essay does more than merely plead that love needs to play a serious
role in political theory. Exploring the reality of these relationships brings up
three more interesting approaches. First, it brings into focus certain complex-
ities within political connections: the unacknowledged possibilities of ani-
mal/human relations, the unattributed importance of particularity in ethical
commitments, and the underappreciated effects of distance and proximity in
relations. Intersubjective relationships, even those of an ethico-political
nature, are not limited to those between humans, nor can the specificity of the
object of love (the importance of one actual dog, as opposed to another) be
ignored. Second, it encourages the uncommon recognition that the political
implications of imbalance and inequality, even incommensurability, are not
necessarily pernicious. The complex history and specificity of the role of
dogs within Anglo-American culture shows that compassion and community
can and do coexist with control and disparity. Finally, it can help overcome
the naive assumption that political and ethical philosophy’s relationship to
behavior should be normative, that excellence in logical composition has
direct compulsory results. People’s love of dogs does not necessitate them, or
anyone else, to stop eating other animals, to give dogs equal legal and civic
protections, or to place the suffering of distant, unknown humans above their
pet’s needs and pleasures. To treat reason as coercive is as absurd as treating it
as irrelevant.
These are not claims that the political overcoming of distance is impossi-
ble, even of the “moral distances” described by Cuomo and Gruen. Nor
should indifference be embraced, especially those cases that make thought-
less cruelty possible, allowing for banal evil through encouraging mecha-
nized obedience. Often we do care about those who are radically unlike us,
those whose spatial locations or ethnic affiliation or class status or racial
392 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
identification we see as remote and of little relation to “us,” whomever the
“us” may be. These claims instead point toward a recognition of the legiti-
macy—an embattled legitimacy, and rightly so, but a legitimacy nonethe-
less—of the kinds of love that attach humans to animals.
NOTES
1. William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” in Essays on Faith and Mor-
als (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1943), 260.
2. Ibid. James also draws a parallel here between the incommensurability of dogs and peo-
ple and the incommensurability of an “American traveler” and “African savages,” the latter of
whom, in his telling, do not understand the very basic nature of the written word.
3. Marjorie Garber’s book Dog Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) lists a few of
these and many, many other examples of people’s love of dogs.
4. The main exception being recent immigrants from countries where dogs are valued dif-
ferently, either as “filthy animals” or as tasty comestibles (first-generation Iraqi or Vietnamese
immigrants, for example, who rarely own dogs as pets). See James A. Serpell, In the Company of
Animals (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), v-vi.
5. Garber, Dog Love, 42. Unfortunately, why this is so she never explicitly articulates, other
than to say that they bring out extremes of emotion.
6. John Adams to James Warren, October 13, 1775, in Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly
a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743-1814, Volume 1
(Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917-25), 137; quoted in James Turner, Reckoning
with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980), 9.
7. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 84-85.
8. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 74-75.
9. George T. Angell, Our Dumb Animals, vol. 1 (1868-69), 37, quoted in Ritvo, The Animal
Estate, 75.
10. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 77.
11. Quoted in Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, trans. Paul Vincent (New York:
Verso, 1994), 172. This from the author of The Foundations of Ethnology: The Principle Ideas
and Discoveries in Animal Behavior.
12. Andrew Sullivan, “Dog and Man at Harvard,” New York Times Book Review, November
17, 1996, 11.
13. The hardback version spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1993) and can likely be said to have helped create an avalanche of dog-related
books.
14. Michael Oakeshott, “A Philosophy of Politics,” in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 119-37, at 122.
15. Ibid., 123.
16. In moral philosophy, this opposition between the practical and theoretical has its own spe-
cialized terminology: “the is-ought distinction,” or the conflict between “value and fact.” I will
avoid these specialized terminologies, primarily because they tend to delineate matters only at
the price of obfuscation.
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 393
17. Most overtly, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1971), and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Richard B.
Brandt, Facts, Values, and Norms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp.
123-63. Robert Nozick overtly lists them in The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993), in his footnote to p. 141.
18. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 103-4; James Rachels, Can Ethics Provide Answers? And
Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), ix.
19. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994).
20. Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (Sussex, UK: Har-
vester, 1981).
21. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 74.
22. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon, 1990); also for a more simplified
account, see his “All Animals are Equal,” in Applied Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 215-28.
23. See, for example, Daniel A. Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Mar-
ginal Cases (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
24. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon, 1984); idem, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans.
Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
25. Quoted in Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the
Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, 1988), 242.
26. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lec-
tures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), or Seyla Benhabib, Cri-
tique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986).
27. Actually, there are three, but the “ordinary language” philosophy movement is clearly
limited to meaning within human interlocution, and thus is of little relevance here.
28. Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 67.
29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San
Francisco: Harper, 1962), 237.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Maret (London: Methuen,
1948).
31. “Men,” she argues (meaning “humans”), “are conditioned beings because everything
they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9.
32. Exemplary here is Arendt’s discussion of love’s dependence on the public realm. See
ibid., 51-78.
33. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990),
274.
34. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982);
Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1984).
35. Other related political/psychological theories include “object relations theory” and
“maternal thinking.” See Melanie Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein (New York: Free Press,
1987), and Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (New York:
Ballantine, 1989).
394 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
36. Carol Gilligan, “Remapping the Moral Domain: New Images of the Self in Relationship,”
in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought,
edited by Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, David E. Wellbery, et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1986), 237-52, at 240.
37. For an extended discussion of the ethical and political implications of this, see the collec-
tion of essays edited by Mary Jeanne Larrabee, An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1993).
38. Noddings is most explicit in this account.
39. Stan van Hooft, Caring: An Essay in the Philosophy of Ethics (Niwot: University Press of
Colorado, 1995), 26.
[quote]ARTICLE
Ferguson / I THEOR / June
POLITICAL n MY DOG
10.1177/0090591703260692 2004
Y
I n MY DOG
KENNAN FERGUSON
University of South Florida
Virtually all political theory and ethical systems presuppose the primacy of human beings.
Abstract human beings have rights, privileges, legal standing, and—it is said—claims to our
sympathy. Many political debates, therefore, center on questions of where these lines are to be
drawn. But many humans do not behave this way. People, for example, may expend far more love,
time, money, and energy on their pets’ well-being than on abstract humans. If the choice is
between an operation to save their dog’s life, or saving a human life through the United Nations,
for example, most will choose the former, even if put in such stark terms. This essay argues that
people’s love for their dogs transcends the human/animal barrier, that this love overturns
assumptions about the role of abstraction in our lives, and that such attunement can be under-
stood only via new formulations of the roles of ethics and philosophy.
Keywords: dogs; ethics; political philosophy; incommensurability; love
T he predicament: your dog’s life is in danger, and you have to decide
whether to spend a significant amount of money and time to remedy its mal-
ady. One alternative, among many, is to spend an equivalent amount to help,
even save, a number of human lives; the International Red Cross or a United
Nations relief fund could use that money to feed the starving or rescue disas-
ter victims. Will you, to put it most pointedly, choose the life (and comfort,
and even luxuriance) of your dog over that of human beings? Though one
alternative is clearly virtuous, and the other questionable, you—like most
North Americans facing this choice—will likely choose the latter. And the
choice you make, interestingly enough, calls into question the basic princi-
ples of ethics, political philosophy, and human primacy.
Confronted with this question, especially a generalized version as to what
the proper response should be, there seem to be two predicable answers. The
first is an aggrieved “Well, I have a dog, would do many things for him/her,
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am indebted to Carolyn Eichner, Verity Smith, Jane Bennett, Caroline
Winterer, Steven Johnston, and Stephen White for their felicitous comments and criticisms.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 3, June 2004 373-395
DOI: 10.1177/0090591703260692
© 2004 Sage Publications
373
374 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
and refuse to accept such a judgmental interpretation of those kind of
actions.” The second, oppositional response, “How can anyone value animal
life over human life? Such people have lost their moral bearings!” presumes
that to rehabilitate a dog in some way betrays humanity.
Neither of these responses is particularly interesting. It would be easy
enough to explore the defensive psychology of the first or attack the naive
humanism of the second. Yet neither explains the gap between the two views,
how one person can feel so strongly about an animal that another cares very
little about. Rather than attempting to definitively resolve this predicament,
which perhaps cannot be answered satisfactorily, this essay instead uses it to
ask particular questions about the presuppositions and causalities within
political theory.
This takes place in this essay in three different ways. The first of these
investigates how human/dog relationships and connections bridge profound
differences, examining how those are individually and historically consti-
tuted. The second calls into doubt the assumed compulsory force of logic
within political philosophy, especially the status of logical demands. The
third looks at different ways of investigating the intellectual and ideological
stakes, eventually arguing that fiction may be more attuned to the everyday
complexities of these relationships than other explanatory forms.
That an individual—say, an American citizen—might well prefer to
spend money on dog food or veterinarian bills than on helping refugees, vic-
tims of natural disasters, or the poor is problematic for political philosophy;
indeed, it can logically be extrapolated within most theoretical systems as not
only radical injustice but as a betrayal of humanity. The value in this relation-
ship escapes political theory. Virtually all democratic theories hold that
equivalence and formal equality, both of which are dependent on deep levels
of mutuality, are the necessary precondition of just political relationships.
This essay argues against the centrality of equivalence and formal equal-
ity, in part because any theory that insists on a rejection of some of the most
important of human affinities is bound to fail both empirically and ideologi-
cally, and in part because these connections provide ways in which humans
learn to care for and attend to the world around them. The failure of these the-
ories, I hold, is in their insistence on the commensurability of political actors,
the necessity of “being understood” across the multiplicitous edges of
worlds, and their exclusive privileging of logical formalism. On the contrary,
we can learn from those who love their pets that communication is not limited
to abstract thoughts or human speech, but can and does happen in startling
places and across surprising boundaries.
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 375
I. CANIS FAMILIARIS
William James describes the incommensurability and unintelligibility
between people and dogs at an everyday level, “we to the rapture of bones
under hedges, or smells of trees and lampposts, they to the delights of litera-
ture and art.”1 Humans and dogs live in fundamentally different worlds,
where the very methods of communication and connection are so disparate as
to be untranslatable. A human, in other words, is insensible to many if not
most of what is of interest to a dog, and vice versa; the two can communicate
only through the most rudimentary of language, and even that often seems
limited to command and obedience.
Yet, James argues, dogs and people can rely on, develop trust in, and even
love, one another. “[O]ur dogs and ourselves,” he writes, are connected “by a
tie more intimate than most ties in this world.”2 That people and dogs cannot
understand one another’s interests has little to do with their bond. Each fills
needs in the other, for caring, companionship, physical and emotional affec-
tion, fun: that is the basis for their allegiance. Certainly these needs play out
differently in each species and in particular contexts; certainly the needs of
food and protection and shelter are paramount, and yet the emotional attach-
ment is not reducible to those needs. Dog (and human) affinity continues
beyond the ability to meet those wants. A toothless guard dog often remains
part of a family.
Is proof really needed that what people feel for their dogs is actually love?
Of course, such a claim is impossible to prove to those who would deny such
a complex emotion is appropriately applied to pets. But let a list of various
behaviors, institutions, and items stand in for such a verification. Some are
familiar and others strange, some are common and some rare, some are
reported as outrages and others as paeans to humane behavior. Such a list
would include, among other evidence: pet cemeteries; people leaving prop-
erty to dogs and cats in their wills; canine health insurance; cultural and emo-
tional prohibitions against eating dog flesh; neighborhood flyers pleading for
the retrieval of lost pets; the history of dog portraiture; pet therapy, including
drug treatment; ceremoniously burying and memorializing dead dogs; books
and poems “written” by dogs; sleeping with dogs (literally, though bestiality
also belongs in this list); pet organ transplants; furniture designed for dogs;
attempts to replicate dead pets through cloning; the bestowing of names upon
animals; and popular depictions of dogs as central to children’s lives and
emotional maturity, such as Lassie or Where the Red Fern Grows.3 All these
practices, whether conventional or unorthodox, show the different (but often
central) loves that people have for dogs.
376 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
That a wide variety of people love dogs is obvious. This love transcends
class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, education, intelligence; it is limited
by almost none of the subterraneous fault lines that permeate U.S. society.4
People do not (usually) love dogs to the exclusion of all others, though some
instances—such as when a last will and testament renounces human off-
spring in favor of Rex—they come close. The love of dogs does not usually
replace love of others, but is often thought to encourage it. Marjorie Garber,
for example, argues that it is through love of dogs that we become fully
human.5
Yet such canine conceptions are historically recent. Historically, dogs
were commonly set up as models, not objects of human love: their fealty was
representative of the highest of human aspiration. The Fido/fidelity connec-
tion is an ancient one, reaching at least as far back as Argos in The Odyssey
(who is left uncared for while Ulysses is away and happily dies upon his
return). John Adams praised those who have “a Fondness for Dogs,” for such
feelings show “Evidence of an honest Mind and an Heart capable of Friend-
ship, Fidelity, and Strong Attachments being the Characteristicks of that Ani-
mal.”6 The faithfulness of dogs became the model for children’s poems and
books, wherein children were encouraged to reproduce the virtues that dogs
naturally possessed. Yet this did not translate to their desirability, except for
pragmatic reasons. Keeping them solely as pets was limited virtually exclu-
sively to the extremely wealthy, at least until the late nineteenth century.7 To
be able to keep an animal that was ultimately “useless” (in utilitarian terms)
was reserved only for those who wished to mimic the behaviors of the upper
classes.
But by the nineteenth century, dogs began to be seen within American and
European cultures in a different way, as virtuous actors rather than insensate
embodiments of abstract virtues. James Turner describes how the Victorians
intellectually shifted from merely teaching children to note the steadfastness
of dogs to making the claim that dogs were manifestly virtuous.8 As the Vic-
torian preference for emotion over abstract intellectualism emerged, animals
began to be conceived as morally superior to humans. A dog did not need to
remind itself to be loyal and courageous, as did a man; it merely responded
with its essential qualities. Moral actions became attributed to dogs: the ideal
canine is one with the human ideals of compassion, loyalty, and bravery. If
children could overcome their human susceptibilities, the Victorian romanti-
cism asserted, they could approach the glory of dogs. Dogs, it was argued,
“possess incontestably all the qualities of a sensible man,” whereas “man has
not in general the admirable qualities of the dog.”9
For the Victorians (and their pet-loving contemporary descendants), the
very goodness of dogs was seen as bred into them. The prolonged domestica-
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 377
tion of dogs as work companions, whether for mushing, hunting, or herding,
had eliminated their natural ferocity and given an inclination toward virtue. It
was a triumph of humanity: the brutal, wild nature of the wolf had been
remade into an inborn—one might even say “natural”—obeisance. At a time
when, thanks to Darwin, humans were increasingly seen as members of the
animal family, dogs embodied the best of human creation; to love them was
to love human mastery of animal nature.10
Thus, loving a dog began to be seen as an intrinsic good, such love thought
of as evidence of a caring, kind, humane soul. The emergence of the British
and U.S. associations for the protection of animals and the development of
the Audubon Society into a full-fledged political organization joined the
emergence of pet ownership for the middle class as examples of the proper
concern for the natural and the care of the dumb: such concern, it was
thought, elevated the humans who acted appropriately. People who care
about animals and nature, those who transcend their narrow self-interests in
the service of the beasts who cannot even speak, such people were under-
stood to be finer than those whose concerns are solely for themselves.
Much of this perspective remains in contemporary society, of course.
There is even a commonly understood correlation between the treatment of
pets and the treatment of other humans. For example, the skills and patience
required for the proper training of a dog is popularly thought to be partially
analogous to the skills and patience needed to raise a child. Caring for a dog is
commonly seen by young couples as a preparation for children; men walking
puppies are hoped to be (or themselves hope to be seen as) prime candidates
for fatherhood; people whose dogs are well behaved are assumed to also
properly discipline their children. Often, too, the companionship offered by a
dog is understood as a credible replacement for the departure of grown off-
spring. In all these cases, the dog functions as an ersatz human in the sense of
an object of caregiving: a repository for affection, guardianship, and love.
However, the love that people give to their dogs is not universally admired.
While there are few who deny that these emotions are experienced as “love,”
they are often denigrated as an inferior emotional imitation of true human
emotion. Even some of the great defenders of animals suspect that such affec-
tion can border on the pathological. Konrad Lorenz, for example, held that a
person “who, disappointed and embittered by human failings, denies his love
to mankind in order to transfer it to a dog or a cat, is definitely committing a
grave sin, social sodomy so to speak, which is as disgusting as the sexual
kind.”11
Even those whose antipathy does not run quite so deep as Lorenz’s may
still feel grave misgivings about allowing the love of pets a status equal to
“true” love. In response to those who would judge the love one feels for a dog
378 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
as a humanizing experience, Andrew Sullivan argues that such a relationship
“is an inferior one, because dogs offer unconditional fidelity . . . and thus
offer a much easier and less virtuous relationship than difficult humans.”12
That is, because of the unrestricted nature of a dog’s affection, it need not be
earned in the same way as a human being’s, and therefore lacks the arduous
(and therefore civicly superior?) negotiations that mark interhuman compas-
sion. Needless to say, Sullivan ignores whatever similarities this may have to
a parent-child relationship or to other relationships marked by unequal power
and/or sentiment differentials.
Even within less stringent criticism, a tenuous suspicion remains that the
emotional affinity between humans and dogs does not measure up to the stan-
dards of true love, that the term itself connotes an intensity of emotion that
might better be termed “affection,” “attachment,” or “fondness.” But the
emphatic term “love” is, I believe, unavoidable. The energy, attention, and
sacrifice that people give to their pets bespeaks a far stronger affiliation than
the other terms imply. In addition, that people themselves choose this term is
telling; not only is the iconic title of this essay familiar to all, but children and
adults alike usually overtly profess love when speaking of their dogs. Finally,
I can think of no other term that makes sense of the intensity of these relation-
ships. People who claim to love their children or spouses or parents are
trusted to best understand their own feelings; why deny this to other equally
felt claims? The emotion that people have for their dogs should be called by
no other name.
And so the love of dogs ends up in a tenuous spot in contemporary Ameri-
can society: known as vital to many human lives, sacralized for some, dis-
missed by others, cheered by the culture at large (witness the sales of Eliza-
beth Marshall Thomas’s The Hidden Life of Dogs13), roundly derided by the
culture at large (witness the standard filler newspaper article snickering at the
new dog-oriented store/trend/drug), while—above all—the affections for
these animals in our midst endures. Fully assessing what to make of humans’
love of dogs seems virtually impossible, but one thing is clear: dogs are
loved.
II. POLITICAL SUBJECTS
Rather than speaking of dogs specifically as pets (though the subject will
return), let us turn to the human side of the equation. Political philosophy, in
investigating the creation and legitimacy of power, must necessarily address
relationships between human beings. Political philosophers intend to ascer-
tain the moral and logical underpinnings of these kinds of problematic ques-
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 379
tions: what, actually, are the political connections that people owe to one
another, and what are the limits to these connections? So in this section I also
turn to two fields related to (some would argue “subsumed by”) political phi-
losophy: ethics and animal rights. The first restates the fact of human atten-
tion to dogs as a moral question: ought people treat dogs better than people?
The second asks a similar, but slightly different question: ought nonhumans
to have moral and legal standing? But, ultimately, the answers that these
approaches give is unsatisfactory, for the answer in both cases (though there
may well be one, or many) does not necessarily resolve anything.
Michael Oakeshott took the problematic nature of political thought seri-
ously, positing a fundamental rupture within its very essence. In his essay “A
Philosophy of Politics,” Oakeshott notes that political philosophy “must be a
reasoned and coherent body of concepts” that its very existence as philoso-
phy is dependent on its claims to logic and rationality.14 On the other hand, he
notes that political philosophy has another standard to meet: that of conform-
ing “to the so-called ’facts of political life,’” those empirical aspects of
human reality that are, after all, the object of its inquiry.15 For Oakeshott,
these two charges will often be in conflict, splitting political philosophy
against itself; when this happens, he argues, the responsibility of political
philosophy is ultimately to the latter. Unlike pure philosophy, which is not
bound by relevance or tangibility, any adequate theorizing about politics
must primarily be about the lived, human experiences of the political realm.
To follow Oakeshott here, then, in trying to understand the ethical and
political constitution of people, it is more important to attend to how they
behave than how they think they should behave (or, especially, how theorists
argue they should think and then behave).16 One of the implications to be
examined in this section is that such behaviors are not necessarily logically
integrated and causally ordered by the political actor. This is not to say that
they are necessarily oppositional: many people would not see support of their
pets as contrary to the safeguarding of human life. But their actual comport-
ment shows that they may often choose the former and disregard the latter.
Yet many, if not most, political theorists continue to treat the function of
philosophy as though a politico-ethical conscience carefully hierarchizes
ethical commitments, correlates those to possible behaviors, and then acts
appropriately. What becomes apparent from a range of them is the over-
whelming degree to which this logical causality is presupposed. From basic
economistic theories to complex ethical systems, this presumption underlies
virtually all conceptions of how logic, evaluation, politics, and ethics work
together.
Of course, human actions and attachments fail to follow these sorts of
logics. To return to the example of this essay, people are not unaware that the
380 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
time, money, and energy that they spend on their dogs could make life better,
or even possible, for human beings somewhere in the world. Nor is it the case
that they hold an abstract conception that dogs are more deserving of concern
and comfort than are humans, as though they only need the truth of morality
to be spelled out for them to behave in a properly principled manner. Even
with this knowledge, they commit time and resources to nonhuman animals,
overriding their supposed obligation to the human race. If indeed universal-
ized ethical commitments were the absolute determinants of human behav-
ior, such people would be committing grave errors of omission and would
readily change their behaviors once the proper ethical course was pointed out
to them.
Political theory, by Oakeshott’s standards, should be concerned with peo-
ple’s actual choices rather than those a philosopher thinks they ought to
make. And yet, for all the practical criticisms of ethical philosophy from a
political standpoint, most of these critics methodically, even painstakingly,
construct the same instrumentalist conceptions of reason and action. These
include, but are not limited to, liberalism (such as that of John Rawls), utili-
tarianism (as presented by Richard Brandt), and libertarianism (as pro-
pounded by Robert Nozick).17 In each of these cases, the construction of the
ethico-philosophical system is logically sound, more or less, and yet leads to
conclusions that, while analytically following from the premises asserted,
are profoundly antithetical to the everyday ethical standards of virtually all
people. Admittedly, it is intellectually interesting to conclude, as Rawls does,
that the principle of “desert” (e.g., whether people get the incomes they
deserve, or the punishments they deserve) should have no place in politics, or
to conclude with utilitarians that it is logical that “our duty to our own chil-
dren is not fundamentally different from our duty to all children,” but such
stances directly conflict with political and ethical life as understood by the
vast majority of people.18
In fact, political philosophies qua philosophies assume that the analytical
aspect of the “reasoned and coherent body of concepts,” in Oakeshott’s
words, are more important than the experiential disconnects between those
concepts; that syllogism trumps reality, as it were. Indeed, as Michael Smith
has convincingly shown, even if the people make certain moral judgments,
such judgments do not necessarily motivate people to act in accordance with
them.19 For example, even if one strongly believes that humans are more
important to protect than are dogs, one may not necessarily act that way. That
someone thinks (or even argues) for a certain behavior’s rightness has no
essential correlation with that person’s actions.
G. E. Moore, noting this distinction, argued that logic therefore has noth-
ing whatsoever to do with moral actions; for Moore, logic is best left solely as
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 381
an academic puzzle. In response, Mary Midgley has shown that Moore was
wrong, at least within everyday life: people can and do use rationality to
change their emotional states.20 But the fact that they can do so (and actually
sometimes do so) does not mean they must do so, nor even that they do so
often, and without such a normative directive each of the forms of political
philosophy noted above fails. Bernard Williams attacks the notion of ethical
behavior as categorical—that is, he does not think that philosophical consid-
erations can (or should) lead to the conclusive governance of behavior. The
fact that historical and societal conditions authorize certain ethical outlooks
above others provokes skepticism, admittedly, but it is “a skepticism that is
more about philosophy than it is about ethics.”21 If, as Williams holds, the
rationalistic standpoint of philosophy and the lived experiences of ethics are
not necessarily commensurate, then there appears to be an inherent problem
in the common and academic view that logic underlies ethical contention.
A brief reiteration of a certain aspect of a well-known animal rights debate
can highlight this problem. Peter Singer, among others, has pointed out that
the grounds for any specific claim to rights based on a specific attribute of
humanity are intrinsically problematic; there is no specific quality such as
intelligence, language, or self-awareness that is felt by all humans (including
newborns, those with mental impairments, and the terminally ill: what have
become known in animal rights discourse as “marginal cases”) and that is not
in some way exceeded by some animals.22 Since it thus follows that humanity
as a whole is not a privileged category, Singer concludes, humans owe some
degree of consideration to nonhuman animal existence. Some theorists who
disagree with Singer point out that such a position could justify the breeding
of humans with brain capacity adequate only for minimal bodily functioning;
under Singer’s view, they argue, there could be no ethical opposition to the
sale of the meat and organs resulting from this breeding. That we find repel-
lent the eating of human flesh, even from mentally defective humans, they
argue, logically compels us to privilege all forms of humanity over the non-
human.23
This is of course a highly simplified version of this debate, but it will suf-
fice here for my concerns. For I am less interested in which side has a legiti-
mate argument (both seem to) or the conclusions each draw (both seem dras-
tic and counterintuitive) than I am in examining the use of philosophical
deduction in each. The role of logic for either viewpoint, and a host of others
in this debate, is seen as the absolute condition upon which concrete public
and personal decisions must be made. Both sides understand epistemology as
fundamental to ethical behavior: you believe X, of course, and as Y follows
logically from X, you therefore must believe Y. Though you think you
believe Z, it is shown that Z is incompatible with Y, and therefore you do not,
382 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
cannot, truly believe Z. Plugged into these syllogisms are various claims
about animal rights, human morality, and infant justice, but the causal nature
of the logical argument is simply assumed.
Some in political philosophy have tried to avoid this dominance by dis-
placing or at least reapportioning the station of logic in human judgments and
evaluations. Jürgen Habermas, for example, dismisses the notion of humans
as discrete, unencumbered political and social beings; instead, he privileges
intersubjectivity in his theory of communicative action.24 In doing so, he
places human relations, not abstraction, as the central constituent of exis-
tence. The reasons he does this, and the criticisms of those reasons, are well
known. Most profoundly, Habermas humanizes ethics and politics by empha-
sizing the personal interactions that can make up communities, norms, and
standards. And yet this solution does not solve the ethical conundrum of this
essay any more than those who would formulate a transcendental ethics, for
his intersubjectivity is always and necessarily human; there can be no
intersubjectivity unless there is a basic recognition of the self in the other.
“Subjects,” he argues, “who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must
consider each other as identical [as subjects]; they must at all times subsume
themselves and the other under the same category.”25 Without the primacy of
the subject (that is, without the category of the human that supersedes all
other claims), intersubjectivity lacks the ability to stake a moral claim on peo-
ple. This arises, in part, from the dominance of universalism in his thought,
and that of his followers such as Seyla Benhabib.26 For by making all subjec-
tivity equally applicable to all humans, he and they must in turn profoundly
differentiate the human from the nonhuman.
Can any philosophies, then, help make sense of this question of dogs?
There are two twentieth-century strains of ethico-philosophical thought that
encourage an escape from these limitations.27 Not coincidentally, both of
these trajectories move away from analytic deduction and toward experien-
tial location.
The first, the loosely associated classification of “existentialism,” under-
stands the subject as grounded not in its self-identity but in the conditions of
its existence. For this approach, the relationships within life provide the ulti-
mate formulations and adjudications of meaning, truth, and ethics. In the
thought of Jaspers, for example, “the ‘thrown’ or irreducibly situated charac-
ter or our being-in-the-world and our being-with-others is the guarantee of,
rather than the obstacle to, our existential freedom.”28 Selves, always in rela-
tion to others, are created by (and themselves create) significance from acts
of care and consideration. Heidegger situates care at the center of his philoso-
phy. In Being and Time, he posits “care” as the “formal existential totality of
Dasien’s ontological structural whole.”29 Sartre, in emphasizing the ethical
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 383
implications of such an orientation, concludes that our own freedom is possi-
ble only with our struggle for widespread human freedoms.30 And Arendt
finds the very “condition” of humanity in its activities with the world: work,
labor, and action.31
The existentialist’s concept of existence, however, remains firmly wedded
to the human. For each of the above authors, the character of the world, how-
ever it situates and is in turn situated by human existence, is important exactly
insofar as it relates to human existence. Human relations, after all, are the
subject at hand. And to that point each privileges the interhuman interaction
over the “thingness” of the nonhuman.32 Martha Nussbaum, who goes even
further in recognizing the centrality of love in the constitution of identity in
connections, still must rely on the final word in the following quotation:
“Love is not a state or function of the solitary person, but a complex way of
being, feeling, and interacting with another person.”33 The existential focus
upon the located nature of being does allow for love’s central place in ethical
outlooks, but limits the recognition of being to other humans.
The second group of philosophers who have profoundly challenged the
limitations of universalist subjectivity—and those who have come closest to
the question at hand—have been feminist theorists, especially those from the
strain of feminism influenced by Carol Gilligan’s and Nel Noddings’s “ethic
of care.”34 Like existentialism, such philosophies begin from the epistemo-
logical assumption that the located nature of subjectivity is primary to human
existence, but add that such located natures are realized more completely (at
least in most instances in Western societies) within the experience of women
and girls, especially the giving and receiving of nurturance.35 Gilligan, for
example, contends that when people are identified primarily in terms of
“self-discovery and self recognition,” “the language of relationships is
drained of attachment, intimacy, and engagement.”36 When the concepts of
care and attachment are seen as fundamental, instead, humans become com-
munal creatures, reliant on trust and connection above autonomy and self-
interest.
Such an approach is not specifically antirationalist (at least not usually); in
large part, it is the opposition between reason and emotion that is being
critiqued.37 That reason excludes emotion, that its most ardent defenders see
emotional connection as threatening the very basis of rationality, has histori-
cally eliminated these emotional qualities from the ambit of philosophy.38
Instead of conceiving of analytic rigor and universalized moral rules as the
goal of philosophy and ethics, these critics argued, we need to discover and
discuss how “commitments occupy a deeper stratum of our moral psychol-
ogy than do moral obligations.”39 Nor is the ability and consideration of care
necessarily determined by gender. Joan Tronto explicitly decouples any
384 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
essential link, noting that even though the majority of caring values are asso-
ciated with “the feminine,” caring can include a wide, diverse range of prac-
tices.40
Yet, similar to Habermasian communicability and the varieties of existen-
tialism, humans remain the objects of virtually all renditions of care ethics:
family members provide the archetypal examples, followed closely by
friends and group members.41 Taking other, nonhuman forms of care into
account is rare.42 One exception is notable, both for taking pet relations into
ethical account and for its subtlety. Chris Cuomo and Lori Gruen overtly the-
orize human relations with “companion animals,” and parallel many of this
essay’s themes by arguing that friendship is often an essential component of
these relationships, and that moral and political traditions ignore and deny
the reality of those friendships.43 They argue that by attending to such rela-
tionships, feminists can see the similarities between oppressive gender
binary relationships and oppressive species binary relationships.44 Ulti-
mately, their goal is to overcome “moral distance” by recognizing the corre-
spondence between the animals we love and the animals we eat: that we can
“learn to see non-humans as beings that deserve our moral perceptions, . . .
shift from viewing them as background or mere food to seeing them as
enablers of our own abilities to bridge moral distance, to cross boundaries,
and to expand our moral orientation.”45
In other words, even those who are most interested in theorizing human/
animal relationships continue to seek logical lessons from those relation-
ships, and to apply those lessons in particularly normative, even obligatory,
ways. If we do indeed love our pets, to continue this example, we must stop
eating all animals, which are essentially similar to them.46 That is, we are
obligated to these experiential understandings and logically extrapolate them
to the larger world. Even when specifically about care of animals and the
environment, the implications of such outlooks is judged insofar as it fits a
generalizable necessary change. Certainly to do so is admirable, and no
doubt ethical. But what becomes of such an argument if its logic fails to com-
mand obeisance in human behavior, if people can and do love certain animals
and eat others simultaneously?
III. DOGS, ANIMALS, HUMANS
There seem to be two primary responses to the dilemma with which this
essay began, the insufficiency of which these specifically philosophical
approaches illuminate. The first (call it the “humanist” critique) is to excori-
ate the dog owner for misunderstanding how a personal allocation of
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 385
resources in favor of a dog’s health betrays responsibility to other human
beings. Choosing a dog’s veterinary care over human life, it is claimed,
equals failing to fulfill necessary political and ethical responsibilities. The
second (the “animal rights” critique) extrapolates from the responsibility felt
by the pet owner to a sense of responsibility to animals in general, or at least
to animals of comparable cognitive status. That one can recognize the worth
of a dog means that one must therefore also recognize the value of the ani-
mals constantly slaughtered for no higher purpose than culinary pleasure.
What both of these approaches share, as I have argued above, is the erro-
neous presumption that abstract categorical expressions of ethical responsi-
bility must predominate over personal and quotidian emotional existence.
Or, to put it more simply, that logic trumps love. When Singer or Regan
hypothesize conflicts between animal life and human life, even these militant
defenders of animals argue that, philosophically, human life must take prior-
ity; in this they agree with those who dismiss the possibility of animal
rights.47 And yet as our veterinary example shows, this is not necessarily the
case; people may well choose their pets’ lives over the lives of distant and
unfamiliar humans.
It may well be that, logically, those who eat meat should indeed have no
compunctions about eating dogs, even their own dogs. Of course, such an
argument will prove attractive only to those whose affinity for logic exceeds
their affinity for dogs. Those whose love of pets is genuine and fervent may
well recognize the logic of one (or more) of these arguments while continu-
ing to love their dogs, eating meat, and showing relative indifference to
abstract humans. How can we—as writers, as political theorists—make sense
of these logical disconnections? The final section of this essay attempts to
uncover how such love can coexist with humanity (and humane-ity); what is
it about love of animals, in other words, that can transcend both the rigors of
logic and the demands of the vast majority of political and ethical philoso-
phers?
One way to unpack this question is to note the attitudinal differences
toward dogs that are pets and dogs in general. The tenor of affection toward a
particular animal is far more intense than that for a generalized category of
animals. The particular connection between an owner and a pet can be so
intense that it overwhelms linguistic and spatial boundaries. The ethno-
graphers Arnold Arlike and Clinton Sanders, for example, have studied the
ways in which different sets of humans reinforce or break down the animal/
human divide.48 One set may reaffirm it (e.g., animal researchers) while oth-
ers see it in necessary but problematic ways (e.g., shelter workers). Arlike
and Sanders note how pet owners often transgress this division, for example,
when deciphering symptoms to veterinarians. This can be subtle, as in
386 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
explaining a pet’s moods (“She’s upset that we have a new baby”); blatant, as
when the pet owner dynamic is spoken for dyadically (“We aren’t feeling
well today”); or can even transpose speakership from the human to the dog
(“Oh Doctor, are you going to give me a shot?”).49
On the other hand, it would be misleading to assume the likelihood of sim-
ilar connection with distant or previously unknown animals. People virtually
never feel that dogs in general are equal to humans. There is an important and
popular endorsement of the distance between dogs generally and particular
pets. Many people support the efforts of animal shelters to decrease the num-
bers of feral dogs by euthanizing (viz., killing) them; few would support sim-
ilar treatment of homeless and impoverished humans.50 Not that they want
their particular pets killed, but they do regard a (random, unowned) dog’s life
as inferior to that of a (random, unconnected) human being.
Of course these conceptions are not totally separate; dogs-as-pets and
dogs-as-animals bleed into one another. For many, dogs have a semisacred
positioning below humans but above most other animals. Contemporary
reluctance to recognize dog flesh as meat exemplifies this. This ambiguous
stature has been in place for many years: witness Captain James Cook’s
reluctance to eat dog when it was offered to him by Tahitians (though, after
consuming it, he was gracious enough to allow that the taste of “South Sea
dog was next to an English Lamb”51). Thus the European prohibition against
dog eating in the eighteenth century was not a full-blown taboo, but merely
a common presumption. In the contemporary United States, however, this
status is most clearly seen when it is violated. When a Hmong immigrant
sacrifices a puppy to save his wife from evil spirits in Southern California,
he is arrested for felony charges of animal cruelty.52 Greyhounds may be
used for racing (and killed when they are no longer serviceable) but this prac-
tice is under increasing pressure, outlawed by populations untroubled by
horseracing.53
These examples point to a curious aspect of dog love: its particularity. To
outlaw their consumption or their racing is to treat dogs as a class different
from other animals. Clearly, a kind of generalization of the category “dog” as
different from, say, “pig” has occurred in American culture. But dogs are not
usually loved in general; in the veterinary example beginning this essay, it is
the specificity of a particular dog that is loved. And yet that specificity leads
to general implications that outstrip the specific example: dogs exist not only
as individual beings, but as a classificatory category. One does not need to
describe why one loves one’s dog; that it is one’s dog is enough.
Dogs’ specific relations to humans also complicates the political nature of
their social position. As pets, as owned animals, they are necessarily in a ser-
vile position within a household. A “natural” order of domination is always at
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 387
play in human/dog relationships. There is clearly an imbalance of power
inherent in pet ownership; that one party controls access to food, the timing
of exercise, and the propriety of play (both temporally and spatially) be-
speaks a clear domination. Indeed the language of control seems trouble-
some for many who want to exalt the relationship between people and pets,
resulting in their rhetorical reversal of ownership, their recourse to terminol-
ogy such as “companion animals” and “guardians,” and their understanding
of pets as mystic and transcendental.54
Many have been happy to connect the canine/human imbalance of power
with other, equally “natural,” human/human forms of authority. Racial and
gender analogies are less common than they used to be, fortunately, but there
are still plenty of commentators who draw similarly fatuous parallels: “the
dog clearly flourishes in a regime in which he is ‘dominated’—kept in order,
like children in school, which many psychologists as well as teachers and the
children themselves will explain they prefer: they want to be controlled.”55
Such a justificatory theory premises far too much about both children and
dogs. But without entering the territory of exculpation of dominance, we can
indeed note its presence in pet ownership.
Thus one way, albeit a dangerous one, to think about the role of domi-
nance in pet keeping is to recognize the possibility, variety, and validity of
love within and throughout severe imbalances of power. That such a concep-
tion of love is politically troublesome does not mean that it has no legitimacy
in humans’ lives (it clearly does) nor that those ethico-philosophical systems
that want to exclude such a relationship from the proper channels of mean-
ingful relationships are right to do so (they are not).
The questions as to whether or not the human domination of dogs is “natu-
ral” or“right” or “necessary” are not the ones that are so threatening for tradi-
tional philosophy; the language of ethics and political subjectivity is
designed for precisely these kinds of questions. What makes the humanist
and the animal rights approaches seem to be the only traditional answers to
the veterinary dilemma is the unwillingness for philosophy to recognize the
emotional connections between humans and their pets. That such strong con-
nections exist across the registers of powerful and vulnerable, human and
nonhuman, is troublesome not merely for the role of domination in these rela-
tionships, but for the ways in which they put the very idea of a privileged
human subjectivity into question.
Clearly the humanist position rejects the strength of these connections,
dismissing them as sentimental or even anthropomorphism. But what is sur-
prising, and indicative of the stakes involved in such a discussion, is that the
animal rights approach dismisses it as well. Peter Singer, for example, dis-
claims any interest in love. He goes so far as to state that he does not love ani-
388 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
mals, that his arguments for animal rights rest entirely upon reason, which is
“more universal and more compelling in its appeal.”56 Love for an animal, in
other words, is not reasonable in that it cannot command obeisance to its con-
clusions in the way that (he assumes) rationality does.
The idea that caring for an animal can so strongly affect humans (even
those humans who are philosophers) intrudes upon the primacy of reason,
and thus on humans as reasoning beings. The moment when Nietzsche
throws his arms about a horse being viciously beaten and starts to cry, it is
commonly believed, is the beginning of his descent into madness. Peter
Singer thinks he knows that logic, not love, compels people to act and to sac-
rifice. Deprived of its coercive force, logic would be something else, some-
thing less powerful, something that would not demand action. People may
recognize logical specifications and yet still make choices that slight those
specifications; this common practice has long been the bugbear of norma-
tively inclined philosophy.
Additionally, recognizing that animals may take preference over humans
at certain times also profoundly disturbs the centrality of mutuality in the pre-
sumed conceptions of political subjects. For the essential tenet of liberal poli-
tics (as well as virtually all antiliberal politics) is that of the primacy of the cit-
izen. Those marginal to the status of citizen provide the grounds of debate
over issues of equality, rights, and political participation, for example, past
questions about women and slaves and contemporary questions regarding
minors and the imprisoned. Yet these debates concern the boundaries between
the human and the citizen; how much more dramatic the debates over the
boundaries of the human?
If philosophy, even (or especially) ethical and political philosophy, pro-
vides little help in answering this question, then other types of writing may
prove more useful. However, the often spoony narratives of pet owners, those
who refuse to speak of their “ownership” of animals or who look to their pets
for spiritual guidance, are just as amblyopic as those who deny love of ani-
mals entirely.57 I turn, therefore, to the novel, specifically a novel that drama-
tizes the connective, even redemptive, powers of dog love.
When J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace begins, the protagonist, David
Lurie, is a university professor incapable of love; by its end he is an unem-
ployed volunteer at an animal shelter whose main responsibility is the dis-
posal of dogs’ bodies.58 In the pages between, he undergoes humiliation,
assault, incomprehension, and ultimately a kind of rebirth. Coetzee, a novel-
ist for whom human/animal relationships are central moral concerns, places
his protagonist in the metaphorical position of a dog in his world, a location
from which he can learn what it means to love.
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 389
Lurie sees himself as a clear-thinking, righteous, and self-contained
human, occasionally bewildered by his urges, it is true, but with a categorized
understanding of the order of the world and an articulate moral outlook. He
is, in other words, a fully rational being. Nor is he prone to transformation: in
the beginning pages of the novel, he is convinced that his personality is “not
going to change; he is too old for that,” his “temperament is fixed, set” (p. 2).
It is not until his world has ceased to make sense to him on his terms (at the
same time, not coincidentally, with the “rise of lawlessness” in post-Apart-
heid South Africa) that he begins to realize the tenuousness of his identity and
existence. Dismissed from his job for seducing an undergraduate, Lurie goes
to live with his estranged daughter Lucy in the provinces, where both of them
are attacked by unknown local men. Lucy is raped and impregnated. His
rationality has led him to a position where he no longer comprehends his
daughter, his neighbors, humanity, or himself, where his disgrace is com-
plete: “I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state
of being” (p. 172).
Coetzee repeatedly draws parallels between this disgrace and the lives of
dogs. Canines are not privileged here; Lurie and Lucy, his daughter, are
forced to recognize that their state of disgrace is not a redemption. Before
they are attacked, Lurie likens being controlled by desire to the situation of a
dog, a dog that “might have preferred being shot” (p. 90). By the novel’s end,
as Lucy puts it, they must learn to live with “nothing. No cards, no weapons,
no property, no rights, no dignity.” To which Lurie replies, “Like a dog”
(p. 205).
But Lurie becomes involved with exactly such animals, dogs in an animal
shelter where he volunteers to help put them to death. The dogs for which
Lurie ends up caring (in all the complexity of that term) are not exactly alive,
but neither are they dead. Within his life, the pragmatic purpose of dogs has
proven ineffective. The guard dogs that are meant to protect him and his
daughter have failed. Working at Animal Welfare, however, he discovers a
need to care for the dogs being killed; not to keep them from death, but to
make their last moments as pleasant as possible and to care for their bodies
beyond what is necessary. Rather than merely leaving the animals at the
dump, for example, Lurie incinerates the bodies himself. “He may not be
their savior,” Coetzee writes, “but he is prepared to take care of them once
they are unable, utterly unable, to take care of themselves” (p. 146).
And yet it is the particularity of the dogs that Lurie begins to notice, and
care for. He considers himself an antisentimentalist, and the novel is far from
a sentimental one, but this caretaking becomes central to his meaning, to his
identity. If he is to be saved, Coetzee implies, it is not through grand gestures
390 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
or even art; it is, instead, through the tending of others, nonhuman others.59
Emotionally, Coetzee has crossed what Ian Hacking calls the “species
boundary,” where he has become attuned to the possibilities of “sympathy
between some people and at least some animals.”60 By the end of the novel,
that is all that this choleric, superior, and self-centered protagonist has
learned, and yet it may be enough. “He has learned by now . . . to concentrate
all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has
difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (p. 219).
In Coetzee’s work, dogs are both the debasement and the expiation, at
least in this final possibility of love. But is it only the love of dogs that upends
the presumptions of human centrality? How far does our recognition extend?
What if, in other words, these attitudes are not limited to our affection for
dogs? Perhaps they extend to things that seems even more distant from
humans than do dogs, not merely those species with whom we share our
homes, but also those with which we share other things in common: attitudes,
appetites, even space. Might we, following Christopher Stone’s ground-
breaking legal work, even need to ask if trees and other natural objects should
have legal standing, if political recognition should transcend humans and
human constructs?61 That we give legal recognition to human abstractions
such as states and corporations shows that absolute individual humanity is
not a necessary prerequisite for political, legal, and ethical status, he argues.
So what prevents the recognition of other entities that can be equally
important, both to humans and in their own right?
Moreover, it is easy to doubt that such emotional connections are limited
to organic, living beings. Some theorists of animal rights have drawn critical
parallels with the human interest in cars: cars are certainly valued by their
owners, who may well value the qualities of some cars more than others.62 As
troubling as the line between our selves and our dogs, then, is that between
our selves and our things. Fanciful as it may seem, however, the idea of con-
stitutive and identity-related political theories about things is not beyond the
pale. Timothy Kaufman-Osbourne, for example, has investigated the ways in
which objects at specific historical/cultural times actively gender those who
“use” them.63 To see politics in the use of a tire iron or the wielding of an egg
beater in mid-twentieth-century American suburbia is essentially indispens-
able to feminist theories of power. Similarly, Jane Bennett explores the poli-
tics of what she calls “enchanted objects,” those material things in quotidian
life that literally embody promises of transformation and dynamism.64 Bruno
Latour has explicated the means by which even the things we care virtually
nothing about, such as a doorstop, are themselves part of our social beings;
they can even be said to have their own sociology through their literal trans-
formation of political geography and attachment.65 And all three of these the-
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 391
orists are indebted to Donna Haraway’s conception of the human body as
already a cyborgian organism.66
If, then, it is the very surroundings of humanity that make up humanity,
why pay any special attention to dogs at all? Why, in other words, not pay
equal attention to all things that envelop us as political actors? I do not doubt
that one could, though to do so would seem even more outrageous than to rec-
ognize dogs as such. But humans and many dogs continue to share one trait
between them that is central to this discussion, a diffuse, difficult-to compre-
hend thing, to be sure, but one that goes by a single name: love. It is love,
Coetzee’s protagonist recognizes, that allows him to overcome his distance
from a world around him that he no longer recognizes. And it is love that con-
vinces a pet owner that the pet should be cared for, even at great expense, even
at the expense of another human.
What, then, does attention to loving dogs provide political theory? Cer-
tainly this essay does more than merely plead that love needs to play a serious
role in political theory. Exploring the reality of these relationships brings up
three more interesting approaches. First, it brings into focus certain complex-
ities within political connections: the unacknowledged possibilities of ani-
mal/human relations, the unattributed importance of particularity in ethical
commitments, and the underappreciated effects of distance and proximity in
relations. Intersubjective relationships, even those of an ethico-political
nature, are not limited to those between humans, nor can the specificity of the
object of love (the importance of one actual dog, as opposed to another) be
ignored. Second, it encourages the uncommon recognition that the political
implications of imbalance and inequality, even incommensurability, are not
necessarily pernicious. The complex history and specificity of the role of
dogs within Anglo-American culture shows that compassion and community
can and do coexist with control and disparity. Finally, it can help overcome
the naive assumption that political and ethical philosophy’s relationship to
behavior should be normative, that excellence in logical composition has
direct compulsory results. People’s love of dogs does not necessitate them, or
anyone else, to stop eating other animals, to give dogs equal legal and civic
protections, or to place the suffering of distant, unknown humans above their
pet’s needs and pleasures. To treat reason as coercive is as absurd as treating it
as irrelevant.
These are not claims that the political overcoming of distance is impossi-
ble, even of the “moral distances” described by Cuomo and Gruen. Nor
should indifference be embraced, especially those cases that make thought-
less cruelty possible, allowing for banal evil through encouraging mecha-
nized obedience. Often we do care about those who are radically unlike us,
those whose spatial locations or ethnic affiliation or class status or racial
392 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
identification we see as remote and of little relation to “us,” whomever the
“us” may be. These claims instead point toward a recognition of the legiti-
macy—an embattled legitimacy, and rightly so, but a legitimacy nonethe-
less—of the kinds of love that attach humans to animals.
NOTES
1. William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” in Essays on Faith and Mor-
als (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1943), 260.
2. Ibid. James also draws a parallel here between the incommensurability of dogs and peo-
ple and the incommensurability of an “American traveler” and “African savages,” the latter of
whom, in his telling, do not understand the very basic nature of the written word.
3. Marjorie Garber’s book Dog Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) lists a few of
these and many, many other examples of people’s love of dogs.
4. The main exception being recent immigrants from countries where dogs are valued dif-
ferently, either as “filthy animals” or as tasty comestibles (first-generation Iraqi or Vietnamese
immigrants, for example, who rarely own dogs as pets). See James A. Serpell, In the Company of
Animals (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), v-vi.
5. Garber, Dog Love, 42. Unfortunately, why this is so she never explicitly articulates, other
than to say that they bring out extremes of emotion.
6. John Adams to James Warren, October 13, 1775, in Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly
a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743-1814, Volume 1
(Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917-25), 137; quoted in James Turner, Reckoning
with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980), 9.
7. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 84-85.
8. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 74-75.
9. George T. Angell, Our Dumb Animals, vol. 1 (1868-69), 37, quoted in Ritvo, The Animal
Estate, 75.
10. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 77.
11. Quoted in Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, trans. Paul Vincent (New York:
Verso, 1994), 172. This from the author of The Foundations of Ethnology: The Principle Ideas
and Discoveries in Animal Behavior.
12. Andrew Sullivan, “Dog and Man at Harvard,” New York Times Book Review, November
17, 1996, 11.
13. The hardback version spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1993) and can likely be said to have helped create an avalanche of dog-related
books.
14. Michael Oakeshott, “A Philosophy of Politics,” in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 119-37, at 122.
15. Ibid., 123.
16. In moral philosophy, this opposition between the practical and theoretical has its own spe-
cialized terminology: “the is-ought distinction,” or the conflict between “value and fact.” I will
avoid these specialized terminologies, primarily because they tend to delineate matters only at
the price of obfuscation.
Ferguson / I n MY DOG 393
17. Most overtly, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1971), and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Richard B.
Brandt, Facts, Values, and Norms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp.
123-63. Robert Nozick overtly lists them in The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993), in his footnote to p. 141.
18. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 103-4; James Rachels, Can Ethics Provide Answers? And
Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), ix.
19. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994).
20. Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (Sussex, UK: Har-
vester, 1981).
21. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 74.
22. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon, 1990); also for a more simplified
account, see his “All Animals are Equal,” in Applied Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 215-28.
23. See, for example, Daniel A. Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Mar-
ginal Cases (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
24. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon, 1984); idem, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans.
Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
25. Quoted in Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the
Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, 1988), 242.
26. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lec-
tures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), or Seyla Benhabib, Cri-
tique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986).
27. Actually, there are three, but the “ordinary language” philosophy movement is clearly
limited to meaning within human interlocution, and thus is of little relevance here.
28. Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 67.
29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San
Francisco: Harper, 1962), 237.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Maret (London: Methuen,
1948).
31. “Men,” she argues (meaning “humans”), “are conditioned beings because everything
they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9.
32. Exemplary here is Arendt’s discussion of love’s dependence on the public realm. See
ibid., 51-78.
33. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990),
274.
34. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982);
Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1984).
35. Other related political/psychological theories include “object relations theory” and
“maternal thinking.” See Melanie Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein (New York: Free Press,
1987), and Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (New York:
Ballantine, 1989).
394 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004
36. Carol Gilligan, “Remapping the Moral Domain: New Images of the Self in Relationship,”
in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought,
edited by Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, David E. Wellbery, et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1986), 237-52, at 240.
37. For an extended discussion of the ethical and political implications of this, see the collec-
tion of essays edited by Mary Jeanne Larrabee, An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1993).
38. Noddings is most explicit in this account.
39. Stan van Hooft, Caring: An Essay in the Philosophy of Ethics (Niwot: University Press of
Colorado, 1995), 26.