ABSTRACT
Alice Crary works across a number of literatures—from moral philosophy, including animal ethics, to post-humanism, critical race theory, post-colonial theory, feminist theory, social philosophy, and liberal political theory—in discussing how the dehumanization of human beings and the hatred of animals are intertwined. Her guiding claim is that productive efforts to combat the subjugation of human groups need to challenge normative hierarchies that give animals lower moral standing. The chapter opens by mentioning some of the many—historical and current—patterns of belief and practice in which groups of humans are subjugated by means of invidious comparisons to animals. Critics of “animalizing ideologies” frequently insist, in a manner that reinscribes the ideologies' debasement of animals, that the targeted humans are superior to animals. This is unsurprising given the millennia-long history of conceiving human dignity as a matter of placement above the condition of animals. Nonetheless, the move ought to seem objectionable to activists and scholars who protest the animalization of human groups, not out of concern for animals, but solely because they believe in human moral equality. If left in place, images of animals as lesser beings saddle us with normative hierarchies that encourage further ideologies targeting vulnerable humans. So, Crary claims, preoccupation with the humans harmed by dehumanization through animalization ought to prompt us to inquire into the possibility of an account of animal moral standing that is consistent with—human—egalitarianism.
