Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice is a 2018 book by the English political theorist Alasdair Cochrane, published by Oxford University Press. In the book, Cochrane outlines and defends his political theory of "sentientist cosmopolitan democracy". The approach is sentientist in that it recognises all sentient animals as bearers of rights; cosmopolitan in that it extends cosmopolitan political theory to include animals, rejecting the importance of state borders and endorsing impartiality; and democratic in that it aims to include animals in systems of representative and cosmopolitan democracy. It was the first book to extend cosmopolitan theory to animals, and was a contribution to the "political turn" in animal ethics – animal ethics informed by political philosophy.
Sentientist Politics was inspired by Cochrane's hope to take discussions of animal rights beyond questions about how animals may be treated to how politics would have to change if animal rights were recognised. For him, the only previous substantial exploration of this question was in Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's Zoopolis, of which Cochrane had earlier published a cosmopolitan critique. Research for Sentientist Politics was funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, and work on international intervention on behalf of animals was conducted with Steve Cooke. Sentientist Politics was published on 30 October 2018, with a launch event at the University of Sheffield.
For the book, Cochrane was awarded the 2019 Susan Strange Best Book Prize by the British International Studies Association. Sentientist Politics was the subject of a symposium in the journal Politics and Animals, and praised by commentators for its readability, strength of argument, and ambition. It provoked questions about methodology in animal-rights scholarship, aid to wild animals, and the possibility of sentientist constitutionalism.
Development
Background Alasdair Cochrane's 2010 book An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and his 2012 book Animal Rights Without Liberation became important texts in the "political turn" in animal ethics, a field of enquiry that explores the normative dimensions of human-animal relationships from the perspective of political philosophy, establishing Cochrane as a leading scholar in the area. The former work, a textbook, was one of the first books to explore the place of animals in political philosophy. In the latter, Cochrane defended the interest-based rights approach, according to which some animals have rights on the basis of their strong interests, and these rights must be protected as a matter of justice. Sentient animals, Cochrane argued, often have rights not to be made to suffer or to be killed, but they generally lack an interest in (and thus a right to) freedom.
Another important work in the political turn in animal ethics was Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's 2011 book Zoopolis. In Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka defended a vision of animal rights in which domesticated animals are conceived as citizens in mixed human/animal communities, wild animals are conceived as sovereign over their own spaces, and "liminal" animals, who are neither wild nor domesticated, are offered the rights of "denizenship". In 2013, Cochrane published a paper in response to Donaldson and Kymlicka in which he forwarded a cosmopolitan case against the "group-differentiated" rights of Zoopolis, which he called "Cosmozoopolis". Further work on international dimensions of animal rights included a 2013 symposium in the journal Global Policy. This concerned protecting animals across borders, and was edited by Cochrane.
Writing Cochrane was inspired to write Sentientist Politics by the question of what animal rights would mean for politics. Thus, he wanted to take discussions of animal rights beyond debates about what they entail in terms of (for example) eating and experimenting on animals – the kind of work that he and others had done previously. Human rights, Cochrane said, are understood to justify, constrain, and shape politics, and animal rights should too. It is this thought with which Cochrane begins the book, which is an attempt to explore what that would mean. While work like this had been done before, it had, he argued, only really been addressed at length in Zoopolis. The biggest departure of his approach in Sentientist Politics from that of Zoopolis is that his approach, unlike Donaldson and Kymlicka's, is grounded in cosmopolitanism. Thus, unlike Donaldson and Kymlicka, Cochrane places little importance on where an animal lives, pre-existing human relationships to the animals, and state borders. Though Cochrane sees cosmopolitanism and animal rights as natural bedfellows, few theorists of animal rights had considered obligations to animals across borders, and very few cosmopolitan theorists had considered what their approach means for human/animal relationships. Consequently, though Sentientist Politics was not the first scholarly work extending cosmomopolitan theory to animals, it was the first monograph dedicated to doing so.
The initial research and writing for Sentientist Politics was supported by a 2014 research fellowship Cochrane was awarded by the Leverhulme Trust. At the time, the working title for Sentientist Politics was Beastly Cosmopolitanism: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice. Research on the issue of intervention on behalf of animals was conducted with the philosopher Steve Cooke. As well as discussion in Sentientist Politics, this resulted in a co-authored paper in the Journal of Global Ethics.
In 2016, the year in which Cochrane's paper with Cooke was published, Cochrane discussed the manuscript that would become Sentientist Politics on an episode of Siobhan O'Sullivan's Knowing Animals podcast. Cochrane said that he was "writing a book on global justice and animal rights". In this book, he said, he would address "what we owe to animals across borders" and "what we owe to animals internationally", exploring "what a system of global governance or international relations would look like ... if it were built around not human rights ... but if it were actually built around sentient rights". Ideas from the book were also presented at conferences and other events at the University of Birmingham, the University of Edinburgh, Newcastle University, the University of Leeds, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Fribourg prior to publication.
Release Sentientist Politics was published on 30 October 2018 by Oxford University Press. It was made available in hardback and ebook formats, as well as on Oxford Scholarship Online. The University of Sheffield, where Cochrane is a senior lecturer, hosted a launch event for the book. In addition to a presentation by Cochrane, the event featured comments from O'Sullivan and the philosopher Josh Milburn. These various contributions were later published as part of a symposium on Sentientist Politics in the journal Politics and Animals.
Synopsis
Sentientist Politics opens with the assumption that some animals are sentient and thus have moral value, and that this has political consequences. It aims to argue that sentient animals (human and nonhuman) have equal moral worth, and this grounds a duty to create a "sentientist cosmopolitan democracy". In the introduction, Cochrane positions the book as a contribution to the political turn in animal ethics that is novel for its cosmpolitanism. On the other hand, it is distinct from existing cosmopolitan theory for its rejection of the moral import of species membership. He acknowledges that some theorists will seek to go further than rejecting humanism, and argue that all living (or even non-living) entities warrant political protection; nonetheless, he sees something "special" about sentience. The book is utopian and ideal in its aspirations.
The second chapter addresses the moral worth of sentient animals and what this means for politics. Cochrane argues that, because they possess interests, sentient animals possess moral worth. He defends the claim that all sentient animals (human and otherwise) possess equal moral worth (and equal consideration of interests) against the possibility that humans have greater worth than animals and the possibility that persons have greater worth than non-persons. Rejecting Peter Singer's utilitarianism, Cochrane instead defends an account of animal rights based on the claim that sentient animals possess interests sufficiently strong to ground duties in others; they have, he said in Animal Rights Without Liberation, prima-facie rights not to be killed and not to be made to suffer. These moral rights, however, are not recognised in political or legal practice. Thus, Cochrane calls for a shift from "human rights" to "sentient rights". Sentient rights and sentient equality, he argues, justify the existence of political institutions: moral agents possess a "duty to create and support a political order" aiming to "show equal consideration to sentient creatures" and to "protect their basic rights". These political institutions can achieve what would be impossible for individuals; can provide security; and can determine what equal consideration means in practice.
Chapter 3 asks what such political institutions would look like. Cochrane argues for a sentientist democracy, one with the participation of animal representatives, who can serve as trustees of political communities' nonhuman members. Animals cannot be protected, it is argued, through legal means – even a Bill of Sentient Rights – alone; instead, determinate interpretations of human duties to animals, accountability of rulers to animals, and the self-determination of political communities call for the democratic inclusion of animals. Though animals themselves cannot serve as legislators, they can, Cochrane argues, be represented on legislative bodies. Drawing on ideas from green democratic theory, Cochrane argues that animal representatives could be selected by dedicated deliberative assemblies made up of humans selected by lottery. On the question of which animals are entitled to representation, against both Kimberly Smith and Donaldson and Kymlicka, Cochrane argues that all sentient animals (including wild animals) are entitled to representation. All, he argues, should be considered members of particular societies, sharing as they do a membership in a "community of fate" with humans. Conflicting animal interests can come together into a single understanding of the public good, but such a good cannot be predetermined; it must be worked out in practice.
In chapter 4, Cochrane develops the sentientist democracy of the third chapter into a sentientist cosmopolitan democracy. Statist systems (including the existing Westphalian system), he argues, will fail to adequately protect animals because of coordination problems, an inability to deal with transnational impacts of national policies, and the risk of partiality in favour of states' own members. Cochrane instead turns to the all-affected interests principle as a means to determine who constitutes the people entitled to a say on particular matters. However, he rejects the possibility of a world state, which is perhaps the all-affected interests principle's natural conclusion. Not only is this impractical, Cochrane argues, but it could serve to undermine the equal consideration of interests itself. Cochrane instead advocates cosmopolitan democracy, which draws boundaries to approximate who will be affected by fixing a series of overlapping political units, from the local to the transnational. Cochrane closes the chapter by responding to three objections to cosmopolitan democracy: the fact that equal consideration under cosmopolitan democracy is imperfect; the challenge of determining boundaries; and that it is unfeasible.