S1E9: Liberty with Valéry Giroux
Claudia talks to Valéry Giroux about liberty and how it relates to animals and the law. Valéry unpacks some of the debates and tensions that arise when thinking about liberty, the different types of liberty there are and also how she envisions the law could better serve animals’ freedom by acknowledging them as persons with rights.
Valéry Giroux has an academic training in law and is a doctor in philosophy. She is one of the two coordinators of the Center for research in ethics (a Quebec interuniversity center), where she does research in animal ethics. She is also an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Law of University of Montreal, and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She regularly gives conferences and speaks in the media about animal rights, animal ethics and veganism. She is the author of the books Contre l'exploitation animale (L'Âge d'homme) and Le Véganisme (Puf, co-authored), both published in 2017. In the same collection as the latter, she just published another book, this one on antispeciesism.
Mentioned:
Animals Do Have an Interest in Liberty by Valéry Giroux
Contre l’exploitation animale. Un argument pour les droits fondamentaux de tous les êtres sensibles
Le Véganisme by Valéry Giroux
Les autres animaux en droit : de la reconnaissance de la sensibilité à l’octroi de la personnalité physique Valéry Giroux
L’Antispécisme by Valéry Giroux
The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generation by Joel Feinberg
Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism by James Rachels
Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics by L.W. Sumner
The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights by Paola Cavalieri
Zoopolis. A Political Theory of Animal Rights by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka
Animal Rights Without Liberation. Applied Ethics and Human Obligations and Sentientist Politics. A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice by Alsadair Cochrane
"[T]he shift from the condition of objects to that of subjects of legal rights does not appear as a point of arrival but rather as the initial access to the circle of possible beneficiaries of that “egalitarian plateau” from which contemporary political philosophy starts in order to determine any more specific individual rights....“[T]he normative force of the demands of the expanded theory entails a commitment not only to avoid participating in, but also to oppose, present discrimination. And this because the institutional denial of fundamental rights to beings that are entitled to them does not simply deprive the victims of the objects of their rights, but is a direct attack on those very rights themselves. In other words, such a denial subverts not merely what is right, but the very idea of justice" - Paola Cavalieri, The Animal Question.
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.