The hyper rationalism of the likes of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, despite the legitimacy of their concerns produces a politics that is to steal from Arendt a politics that is "independent of the human condition." And I would add independent of the human and non-human condition - not to mention an awareness that we are earth and birth-bound creatures. Josephine Donovan elucidates these dilemmas in her "Animal Rights and Feminism", as she expertly contrasts the dilemmas of the cognitive, sentient, and ultimately Cartesian split from the flesh of the world. As she deploys Bordo's work on Descartes, she scrutinizes Enlightenment principles, which she finds alive and well in contemporary animal rights discourse to this day. The ameliorative function of ecofeminist critiques sweeps in to banish the Enlightenment and the day is saved under a compelling account of her cultural feminism.
Her work does the work of bringing being back into the discussion. As Mackinnon wrote in "Of Mice and Men", Why is being not enough? Why do you have to suffer? To elaborate,
" Predicating animal rights on the ability to suffer is less likely to fall into this trap, as it leads more directly to a strategy for all. Indeed, capacity to suffer may be closer to women’s bottom line than liberal legal approaches to women’s rights have yet reached. But women’s suffering, particularly in sexual forms, has not delivered us full human status by law. It has gotten us more suffering. That women feel, including pain, has been part of stigmatizing them, emotions in particular traditionally having been relegated to the lower, animal, bodily side of the mind-body split. What will it do for animals to show that they feel? Calculations of comparative suffering weighted by status rankings, combined with the inability to register suffering on the sufferer’s terms, have vitiated the contribution Bentham’s recognition might make. The ways women suffer as women have been denigrated and denied, and when recognized more often used to see us as damaged goods than as humans harmed. Fundamentally, why is just existing, being alive, not enough? Why do you have to hurt? Men as such never had to hurt or to suffer to have their existence validated and their harms be seen as real. It is because they are seen as valid and real to begin with that their suffering registers and they have rights against its harm.
Women have been animalized, animals feminized, often at the same time. If qualified entrance into the human race on male terms has done little for women— granted, we are not eaten, but then that is not our inequality problem— how much will being seen as humanlike, but not fully so, do for other animals? What law resists doing is taking anything they want away from those at the top of hierarchies. It resists effectively addressing the inequality’s material bottom line." (Mackinnon 271 in Sunstein and Nussbaum.)
The law exists addressing inequality's material bottom line. Thus, "The good intentions of the powerful, far from saving the powerless, doom them. Unless you change the structure of the power you exercise, that you mean well may not save those you love. Animal rights advocates take note" (Mackinnon 272). Thus, she calls for a materialist restructuring of the bottom line of power relations. Adjustments to the law as it currently stands may assist those elite few, but it will not in the end provide the fundamental changes necessary.
Being alive is enough. You are, we are, all are valid to begin with and this is ontologically grounded in our birth into and within this world. No being should suffer endless torment so a man can shave or greedily engorge his face with flesh. But there is more to this problem. Much more, and perhaps this is what I find compelling about the intersectionality Mackinnon introduces here. The material relations of production, which really have been a grounding point for the ascension of a certain type of torment, a new world torment, drive the analysis. The law exists not as a corrective measure to assist us in great times of need when no one else will. Sure, we are better off with rights than without. And that's that. Rights are here. However, I'm looking toward the intricate economies of America's food/poverty production system working in tandem with the society of the spectacle (replete with its culture industry of advertising - there is something peculiar about McDonald's being based here so near Chicago, and the advertisements co-funding the Chicago Bulls games....). This interlocking system divides, separates, identifies, and brands us - each against the other in a sort of Hobbesian nightmare of each against the other.
Except, in a liberal democratic republic, there is some dim assertion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just by being! The way these characteristics have been institutionally carved out is through a procedural solution. The legislation, execution and evaluation of said principles will ensure that, for each and every. Our procedural republic relies all too often on the legislation of fundamental change. And the separation of the we, which is always only people, into categories of work, ideology, favorite teams, ad nauseum - a spearing of commonality, of being that comes with the industrial and postindustrial political economy - has evacuated the Commons. It's insufficient and oversimplified to suggest capital has ruined community and eviscerated compassion and mercy. While a start, there is more to restructuring power than a pure attention to the material relations of power and mode of production.
Mackinnon, much like Hannah Arendt in this limited regard, has an appreciation for and healthy fear of the role of love in societal relations. While we may find the generative power of love (e.g. Love and Saint Augustine), there are the horrors it may produce - including its intimacy with pity (e.g. The Terror). But some revisiting of compassion, love, and the sensus communis - our common sense(s) is necessary to jolt us out of our collective sleep and awaken some awareness of the contradictory consciousness that haunts the very institutions we seek to represent the best in us. They are lying. And we are as well. We are as well.
Usually, doing the right thing is pretty easy to figure. Skinning a living fox to generate useless trophies of selfish consumption is not right. Perhaps doing the right thing, that is far more difficult - and everything within a system based on oppression of beings, human and nonhuman. Am I worth the task today of doing my best? What God would love me for running a slaughterhouse?
