Welcome to the eleventh in a series of interviews with authors who write books about animal rights and related matters. Josh Milburn is a British philosopher and a lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals and the host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.
What attracts you to philosophy? How do you summarise your philosophical perspective? What do you seek to achieve as a philosopher?
These are tough starting questions because they force us to take a step away from animals. I encountered philosophy as a child. It intrigued me because it was a discipline concerned with getting to the bottom of questions – and I mean really getting to the bottom of them. And, relatedly, it was a discipline that genuinely encouraged interrogating received wisdom.
Some people, I accept, might doubt that philosophy can get to the bottom of anything. I don’t think it’s helpful to think of philosophy as a ‘subjective’ discipline, which is what some people imagine. Instead, I think of it as seeking answers to questions to which there are (or might be) correct answers. But these are answers that we can’t reach using standard scientific approaches. Philosophy is thus methodologically complex: It’s about developing and deploying the best tools to answer questions that are not amenable to empirical proof.
This is a bit abstract, so let me be more concrete. I’m interested in (among other things) ethics, which includes both ‘moral philosophy’ and ‘political philosophy’. To put it another way, I’m interested in working out how we should behave (including how we may behave, how we must behave, and so on), as individuals and as communities. I think it’s obvious that there are better and worse answers to these questions and better and worse ways to come to answers to these questions.
(Some people might disagree and instead embrace ethical nihilism or something like it. If that’s so, then our disagreement goes deep, but the tools of philosophy can still help. In this case, our disagreement is what we might call a metaethical disagreement. I’ll say no more about that here; my point is only that rejecting the value of moral and political philosophy isn’t the ‘checkmate’ that some people imagine. It’s simply the start of a different conversation.)
I thus see my work, in very general terms, as being about trying to find, and deploy, the best tools for thinking about how we should behave individually and collectively, especially in relation to other animals.
My approach typically involves taking existing ideas in moral and political philosophy and seeing where animals do, or could, fit in. This means both putting animals on a variety of different intellectual agendas and expanding the range of intellectual tools available to those trying to make the world a better place for animals.
In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully, I begin with liberal political philosophy and animal rights. I’m interested in asking what combining these philosophical traditions can tell us about the kind of food system that we should embrace.
Did philosophy lead you to animal rights? What is your philosophical understanding of animal rights? How do you personally and professionally put your animal rights commitment into practice?
I support animal rights because I am a philosopher. I encountered arguments against speciesism (roughly: the privileging of an individual’s interests because of that individual’s species) in the philosophy I read as a teenager. I found these arguments convincing. My commitment to animal rights (as opposed to non-rights-based approaches to animal ethics) came a little later, especially after I started reading work about political philosophy and animals.
I think some people assume that things were the other way around – that I was committed to animal rights, and then became a philosopher, so used my new-found academic platform (such as it is) to advocate for animal rights. I don’t see this as an accurate story about my life. I embrace animal rights because, in my judgement, this is where the most compelling arguments lead.
So, what do I think animal rights are? I see animal rights as a matter of justice: It’s not merely nice, or good, or virtuous of us to respect animals’ rights: We must. And if we opt not to, others may force us to do so. This is a big claim. Like all liberals, I am nervous about state overreach. So far as possible, I hold, we should leave each other to live our lives in peace. For the most part, we should collectively interfere with someone only when that someone’s actions impact others in rights-violating ways. Where I differ from some other liberals is that I include animals in the category of ‘others’ whose rights we must respect.
But I should say that justice is just one part of ethics. Ideas of animal rights don’t say everything that we need to say about our relationships with animals. For example, as I write this, I’m watching the birds I feed in my garden. I think there are interesting ethical questions to ask about the relationship I have with these birds, and what I do (and don’t!) owe them. I explore that in a chapter of my book Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals, published in 2022. But I don’t think we can say everything that it’s important to say about my relationship with these birds by thinking only about ‘rights’. This is obvious when we’re thinking about other people; we can’t answer every interesting question about my relationship with (say) my mother by thinking only about her rights and my rights. But I think some people (including critics of animal rights) forget this when it comes to animals. Rights are one set of tools for dealing with one set of problems. They aren’t the whole of ethics.
The other important thing to say about my conception of animal rights is that I hold that interests have a close relationship with rights. If something happening is contrary to my interests, then my life will be worse if it happens. So, for example, suffering is usually contrary to my interests; my life will be worse if I suffer. (Of course, sometimes suffering, although bad, is worth tolerating because it comes with something positive. Some medical treatment might cause me to suffer while saving my life.) There are at least two important consequences to thinking about rights in this way.
First, an interest-based approach gives us a good idea of which beings can have rights. Those with interests can have rights, but those without can’t. Lots of animals, but perhaps not all animals, have interests. On the other hand, from my understanding of the relevant debates, plants, rivers, and ecosystems don’t have interests. (Getting to the bottom of who is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ involves engaging with some questions that stretch beyond philosophy.)
Second, an interest-based approach shows us that the rights of animals might differ from the rights of humans. This is just the same as how human rights might differ. For example, I don’t have a right to an abortion, as facts about my biology mean that I don’t have any interest in access to abortions. Equally, if animals have very different interests from us, they might have very different rights.
As for the question of putting my commitments into practice… It would be egotistical (and inaccurate) of me to present myself as an ethical exemplar, or say ‘If only everyone lived like me, there would be no problems.’ I try to live by the values that I believe are best supported: I’m a vegan, I take steps to tread more lightly on the earth, and I try to encourage those around me towards more respectful lives. Without a doubt, I could do more, as I think many of us could. For example, I could be more involved in on-the-ground activism than I am, or I could donate more to effective charities than I do.
What about the ‘professional’ side of my commitment to animal rights? Well, obviously, I write about animals. But a dose of pessimism is appropriate, here: academic work typically reaches comparatively few readers. My podcasting reaches more people, but it’s still a drop in the ocean, and perhaps many of my listeners are already sympathetic to animal rights. Sometimes, academics (including, to be clear, academic philosophers writing about animals) have genuine policy impacts. I hope that my work will have this kind of impact in time, directly or indirectly. But, right now, I couldn’t point to (for example) any laws that governments have passed because of my work.
Realistically, I suspect the biggest impact I can have professionally is through teaching, introducing students to interesting and important philosophical issues around human/animal relationships, and teaching them to think through related questions in rigorous, informed ways. It would be naïve to think that doing this turns all my students into vegans. I know at least some of my students have turned vegan after I’ve introduced them to this work, but I think students and colleagues might be (rightly) uncomfortable if I said this was my aim all along. I want to teach people how to think. Not what to think. If that leads them to more animal-friendly lives, or at least sympathy for animal-friendly lives, all the better.
In your book, Food, Justice, and Animals, you write about what a 'state complying with its duty to protect animal rights would look like.' [p. 14] You call such a state zoopolis. How different would a zoopolis state be from today's society?
Some readers might realize that I’ve borrowed the word zoopolis from Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s 2011 book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. This book defined ‘the political turn in animal ethics’, which is the move from thinking about animals in the language of moral philosophy to thinking about animals in political philosophy. This book, and the wider literature on animals and political philosophy, has been very influential on my thinking.
I use zoopolis as a shorthand for a state in which the coercive power of the law protects animals’ rights. So, to offer (what I hope is) an obvious consequence, it would be a state without slaughterhouses. But I think there are lots of possible ways to structure a zoopolis. I think, for example, that an animal-rights-respecting state could in principle rely upon a range of different democratic processes, or a range of different economic systems. These are interesting questions that are worth exploring. But the aim of Food, Justice, and Animals, and we’ll get to this in a second, is to think through the food system of the zoopolis.
Even the most animal-friendly states today are a long, long way from a zoopolis. Animals receive only the most minimal protections under the law, if any. Democratic (and non-democratic) decision-making procedures consider animals’ interests in the most cursory ways, if at all. No state has outlawed killing animals for food. We have a long, long way to go.
You refer to veganism as a 'natural choice' but state later 'it might not be the only choice.' [p. 174] You explore the case of eating some animal-based foods that may be considered ethically acceptable (e.g., eggs from well-treated companion chickens.) Where should vegans draw the line between what is and isn't vegan?
I think there’s value in keeping the term vegan as a descriptive word for a lifestyle that removes, as far as possible, a reliance on animal products. (I focus on diet without wanting to say that veganism is only about diet.) I’ve encountered some people who try to define a vegan diet as something like ‘a diet that respects animal rights.’ But this can lead to oddities. For example, it could involve defining some plant products as ‘non-vegan’ (frequently in a very selective way) or defining some animal products as ‘vegan’. I’ve seen people say that palm oil is not vegan, and others say that roadkill is vegan. Similarly, some people try to tie veganism to their favoured political vision. So, I’ve seen people say that you can’t be a vegan if you’re not a Marxist.
My view is that we certainly should explore whether it’s ethical to produce/consume palm oil or collect/eat roadkill, and we certainly should explore the merits (and demerits) of Marxism. But we can do that without introducing confusion about the nature of veganism. Of course, this is a terminological dispute; little hinges on it.
What I explore in Food, Justice, and Animals is what the food system of the zoopolis – the animal-rights-respecting state – could, would, or should look like. If animals have rights, we might imagine that this rules out all animal products, and the food system of the zoopolis would have to be entirely plant-based. But there are at least a few reasons that this might be regrettable. For example, I think it’s an open question whether a food system containing animal-friendly animal products might be less harmful to animals than a food system that is plant-based but contains animal-unfriendly plant products. I also think that it’d be better if those people who value access to animal products could have access to rights-respecting animal products. (This is a point obvious to lots of liberals, but one that I’ve found some non-liberal animal activists find objectionable.)
Of course, all of what I’m saying here depends upon the idea that there are rights-respecting ways to produce animal-based foods. And that’s what I spend most of the book exploring. To repeat, I think of animal rights as a matter of justice, and so I hold that, in normal circumstances, it is wrong to kill animals, torture animals, and so on, just as it’s wrong to kill or torture humans. Animal farming as we know it is out. This includes the sort of hypothetical small-scale, ‘high-welfare’, regenerative (etc.) farming that vegans hear about endlessly from friends of friends. Even if small-scale farming is ‘better’ than intensive animal agriculture on some measure, it is unjust. It’s not the sort of thing that belongs in a rights-respecting society.
But might there be other ways we could produce animal-based foods? I think so.
First, we could create animal products using non-sentient animals – these are animals without interests, and thus, on my understanding, animals without rights. The natural next question is: What are these animals? Oysters and jellyfish seem like clear possibilities. But these are at least partially scientific questions, so I’d be stepping beyond my legitimate expertise if I started making definitive statements. (There are also interesting questions to ask about animals who may be sentient, but probably aren’t. This gets complicated, so I’ll not get into it here.)
Second, we could produce meat and other animal products with no, or minimal, animal involvement. Plant-based meat (milk, eggs…) and cultivated meat (milk, eggs…) offer us the chance to have animal products without food producers treating animals in ways that violate their rights. Realistically, I think these kinds of technologies are our best chance at producing most animal products in respectful ways.
Third – and this is the most speculative part of the book – we could imagine working with animals to produce certain products, like eggs. You mention the prospect of eating the eggs of backyard chickens, and this is something I’ve explored at length. I ask whether something like that could be ‘scaled up’ in the book. In answering this question, I borrow ideas from animal studies about ‘animal workers.’ It should, I hope, be obvious that a ‘farm’ on which genuine workers’ rights protect animals is very different from any that exists today.
There are lots of details to fill in, here, and lots of possible challenges to explore. A book provides ample space to dig into these issues. I can’t summarize every detail in the space of this interview.
What I’m doing in Food, Justice, and Animals is offering an alternative vision to the ‘obvious’ – vegan – one and motivating that alternative vision. Maybe some of my arguments go wrong. And, if they do, I welcome correction. But I encourage anyone inclined to think that I’m obviously wrong to spend some time with my arguments before dismissing my conclusions. That’s how we should engage with philosophy – or, at least, that’s how I aspire to engage with those who defend views I find surprising.
Your book explores animal ethics from the perspective of an ideal world. But we live in a non-ideal world that's far from being ideally vegan. What do you want readers, particularly vegans, of your book, Food, Justice, and Animals, to discover from reading it?
This is an important question. In the terminology of political philosophy, Food, Justice, and Animals is a work of ‘ideal theory’. Roughly speaking, ideal theory asks what a just society would look like. Non-ideal theory, on the other hand, asks how we can make our current society less unjust, and work towards a just society. Crucially, we can’t simply ‘read’ non-ideal theory off ideal theory; we need further reflection. I briefly explore this methodological issue towards the end of the book and reflect on questions about activism and diet today. That exploration reveals something important: it’s entirely possible that two readers might both agree with me about ideal theory but have very different visions of what this means for us here and now.
I offer a vision of a future for which we might collectively aim. I offer arguments (grounded in animal rights, liberal political theory, and other philosophical traditions) suggesting that this is a future for which we should collectively aim. But crucially, I don’t offer a roadmap to that future or an account of how we should behave as individuals here and now.
So, what should vegan readers take from the book? I’d like them to see the value of philosophical, and particularly political philosophical, approaches to animal rights and questions about food and eating. But crucially, I’d like them to start and finish the book with an open mind. Not every non-vegan position is an apology for animal abuse, and not everyone who values or (in some sense) supports non-vegan foods is an animal abuser. This doesn’t mean, of course, that killing animals just because we like the taste of meat (or milk, or eggs…) is fine. But it does mean that we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the possibility of non-vegan, but potentially animal-rights-respecting, sources of food – or, indeed, non-food products.
We've come a long way in our philosophical discussions about eating animals. My 1st book was Peter Singer's Animal Liberation --that changed my life. Then Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights. Now we have so many animal rights philosophers it makes my heart sing! TY for introducing us to these new thinkers!!