2024/03/30 by Nico Dario Müller, Friderike Spang · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Animal rights #Argument (complex analysis) #Criminology #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Law #Law and economics #Medicine #Political Philosophy and Ethics #Political science #Sociology #War, Ethics, and Justification
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/japp.12729
openalex publication_date 2024/03/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
ABSTRACT Arguments against inflicting violence on people to defend animal rights have relied on the view that inflicting violence is always wrong. But these arguments end up prohibiting too much, as defensive violence should be permissible in certain extreme cases. We argue that considerations about the counterproductiveness of defensive violence are better at distinguishing permissible and impermissible instances of animal rights violence than a blanket rejection of violence. We respond to the objection that assuming violence to be counterproductive is ad hoc , discussing real‐world and fictional examples of animal rights violence. We argue that defensive violence on behalf of animals should almost always be assumed to be counterproductive because it threatens to trigger self‐reinforcing reactions on the part of the socio‐technical regimes that violate animal rights in the first place.