The case for wild animals: the wilderness contract

PRESENTATION

Room A + online

The authors of Zoopolis see wild living animals as independent beings outside of human society and, hence, to be treated as a foreign country. That means that how they organize their society is their business alone, only in real big catastrophies should intervention and help be considered. On the other hand, several organizations and individuals, e.g., Oscar Horta Alvarez, consider it the duty of humans to intervene whenever there is suffering, without bounds, to minimize it. In that context, basic philosophical assumptions clash: on the one hand, seeing human domination of nonhumans as colonialism with the goal of freeing nonhuman animals so they can self-determine their life versus the view that the ethical goal is to reduce suffering and increase well-being globally, even if that means ignoring autonomy, defined as self-determination. But that is only one side of the debate. The other is the view on nature. The former position values human independent nature by itself, whereas the other sees that as an "idyllic" view that does not represent reality. In this talk, the case will be made for non-intervention. The view on nature by interventionalists will be seen as a civilizational bias, which assumes that technological mass society is the preferable way of life for all sentient beings. Rousseau argued that civilization necessitates a social contract, where every member submits to the rules, thereby loses freedom but gaining security. In analogy, life in the wild can be based on a wilderness contract, with absolute freedom without rules but without protection, through living in a rule-based society with a central monopoly on violence.