Helsinki Animal Law Seminar | May 7

Employing a phenomenological mode of thinking inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, along with insights from care ethics, this presentation explores how phenomenology and ecofeminism can contribute to the animal rights debate. First, animals will be depicted as embodied, intentional, meaning-making subjects who construct their own Umwelten. Second, interspecies empathy and communication will be explored as bridges connecting overlapping Umwelten within the interworld, leading to intersubjective duties of moral attentiveness. This approach allows the descriptive field of phenomenology to gain a normative contour, addressing key questions in animal rights, such as: (i) who are the ‘animals’ in ‘animal rights’? (ii) how can legal rights account for animals’ standpoints and embodied agency? (iii) what would interspecies relationships and shared territories look like in a post-anthropocentric society? (iv) how can empathy and moral attentiveness bridge struggles in human, animal, and environmental rights? (v) how could conservation and education foster compassion through phenomenological ethology? Rather than providing definitive answers, this presentation proposes a mode of thinking that provides tools for considering alternative, more inclusive ways of encountering animals that honor their subjectivity and our interconnectedness within the flesh of the world.