ABSTRACT
One of the two jobs of a theory of political morality is to identify who the state’s ‘people’ are—that is, to whom the state’s agents’ role obligations are directed. This chapter demonstrates how contractarianism rises to that task. It takes as its case study one particular role obligation incumbent on the state’s agents, the obligation to bestow citizenship, asking whether sentient animals are among the objects of this obligation. In so doing the chapter takes up a longstanding objection to contractarianism in political philosophy, namely that it cannot say something sensible about how the state morally ought to treat the sentient animals within its borders. The chapter’s main conclusion, reached by way of a lengthy engagement with Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s argument for domesticated animal citizenship, is that there are no sentient animals that are owed citizenship. In addition, the chapter sets out a second argument for contractarianism (to complement the one laid out in Chapter 2). It does so by critiquing the work of political philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair Cochrane and Robert Garner and generalising to the conclusion that non-contractarian approaches to political morality have no way of offering a principled answer to the animal citizenship question.
