Melanie Challenger in Talking Animals, Law & Philosophy

Please join us for our second event in this term's Talking Animals, Law & Philosophy series, organised by the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law. Melanie Challenger, Vice President of the RSPCA and Deputy Co-Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, will join us to present “Nature or the individual? Who or what to represent first in politics and law”. The event will take place on Tuesday 18 February, 5-6.30pm (UK time) on Zoom. This event is open to all and a recording will be made available on our website afterwards. Abstract: Nature or the individual? Who or what to represent first in politics and law. Today, it is widely accepted among scientists and non-scientists that many nonhuman animals are intelligent, sentient, communicative, and agentive. And yet there is no provision to represent their voices within human decision-making contexts. The need for more substantive representation will become ever more necessary as the interests of humans and nonhumans come into conflict, and in a changing world and environment. But how, when and why should we consider other species in our legal and political spheres? The commonest approaches today are in the Rights of Nature movements, which attempt to represent other beings in aggregate or to safeguard whole landscapes, and in projects like Animals in the Room, which regard the other animals in our midst as individuals capable of communicating their interests. Which approach, the collective or the individual, should we consider first?