In this essay I address a little-known chapter in the lengthy history of crimes against animals. My focus is not crimes committed by humans against animals, as such, but a practical outcome of the seemingly bizarre belief that animals are capable of committing crimes against humans.2 I refer here to the medieval practice whereby animals were prosecuted and punished for their misdeeds, aspects of which readers are likely to have encountered in the work of the historian Robert Darnton.

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations. In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach, we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails (...) a harm that cannot be fully explained in terms of hedonistic welfare. We explore the implications of this idea for the assessment of current practices involving animals. (shrink)

Nonhuman animals are the most prominent alterity with which humans have engaged in interaction and in comparative self-definition. The reference point of nonhuman alterity is central both to the development of humanism and of posthumanism. In the complex and nonlinear interfaces with nonhumans, humans are extensively hybridized in a process that defines their very humanity. Understanding humans as open and interactive animals rather than as closed and autarchic entities is indispensable to the dismantling of humanism and the development of posthuman (...) thought. Nonhuman and human animals host and are hosted by one another in dynamic and emergent relations. (shrink)

Speciesism is a concept that was derived to name forms of discrimination and oppression against nonhuman animals that could be compared to racism and sexism. The concept was formulated in strong terms by Richard Ryder, Peter Singer, and Tom Regan that made it a powerful tool for social and political movements. The discourse on speciesism has been amplified and changed by a set of newer writings in the last few decades that take a more ethological, critical theory, and deconstructive bent. (...) This paper outlines some of the conditions for an antispeciesism based on posthumanism. As humanism itself is the most virulent form of speciesism, no robust antispeciesism can be developed without continued challenge to humanism. (shrink)