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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2025
Martha C. Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice was a ground-breaking work of political philosophy, and had particular influence in the field of animal ethics.1 By arguing that animals ought to be considered recipients of justice, and not just of moral concern, her book helped to launch the so-called ‘political turn in animal ethics’. The political turn accepts familiar claims in animal ethics about the moral status of animals, but extends them in at least two ways.2 First, the political turn does not just see our obligations towards animals as a matter of personal morality but claims that we also have duties of justice that demand enforcement by—and transformation of—our collective institutions. Second, the political turn asks us not only to change our collective institutions, but to also reframe our understanding of the communities that they are designed to serve. We must recognize—and formally acknowledge—that our communities are ‘multispecies’ and comprised of nonhuman animal members.
1 Nussbaum, Martha C., Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
2 See Cochrane, Alasdair, Garner, Robert, and O’Sullivan, Siobhan, “Animal Ethics and the Political,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21 (2018): 266–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Milligan, Tony, “The Political Turn in Animal Rights,” Politics and Animals 1 (2015): 6–15 Google Scholar; Ahlhaus, Svenja and Niesen, Peter, “What is Animal Politics? Outline of a New Research Agenda,” Historical Social Research 40 (2015): 7–31 Google Scholar.
3 Cochrane, Alasdair, Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Interspecies Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 38–42 Google Scholar.
4 Donaldson, Sue and Kymlicka, Will, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; see also Smith, Kimberly, Governing Animals: Animal Welfare and the Liberal State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Cochrane, Sentientist Politics, chapter 5; Alasdair Cochrane, Should Animals have Political Rights? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 84–85.
6 Garner, Robert, “Animals and Democratic Theory: Beyond an Anthropocentric Account,” Contemporary Political Theory 16 (2017): 459–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vink, Janneke, The Open Society and its Animals (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pablo Magana, “Nonhuman Animals and the All Affected Interests Principle,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (forthcoming); and Ioan-Radu Motoarca, “Animals’ Voting Rights,” Analysis (forthcoming).
7 Peter Niesen, “Which ‘All-Subjected’-Principle for Animals?”, paper presented at “Talking, Animals, Law and Philosophy,” Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, December 1, 2022.
8 Donaldson, Sue, “Animal Agora: Animal Citizens and the Democratic Challenge,” Social Theory and Practice 46 (2020): 709–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis; Meijer, Eva, When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 2019)Google Scholar; Driessen, Clemens, “Animal Deliberation,” in Political Animals and Animal Politics, ed. Wissenburg, Marcel and Schlosberg, David (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 90–104 Google Scholar.
10 Cochrane, Sentientist Politics, 40–41; Angie Pepper, “Political Agency in Humans and Other Animals,” Contemporary Political Theory 20 (2021): 296–317; Hinchcliffe, Christopher, “Animals and the Limits of Citizenship: Zoopolis and the Concept of Citizenship,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (2015): 302–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Donaldson, “Animal Agora,” 725.
12 Cochrane, Sentientist Politics, chapter 3; and Vink, The Open Society, chapter 4.