Porous of Edge: Ethical Condition of Human and Animals Coexistence amid the Environmental Crisis
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Abstract
This article aims to present ethical conditions of coexistence between humans and animals amid the environmental crisis in the capitalist world. This paper focuses on the state of animals as human property, which human beings claim such status to justify the exploitation of animals. Ultimately, the effects of massive animal exploitation have led to the turbulence of the world today. Based on liberalism, environmentalists attempt to resolve the crisis by shifting the status of animals and nature from property to personhood with the concept of rights. However, this article proposes that the concept of animal rights fails to offer alternative and different ethical conditions of coexistence between humans and animals. In other words, animal rights cannot undermine dualism: culture and nature, human and non-human. In this way, animal rights are merely reinforcing the borderline between humans as persons and animals as property. This border allows animal exploitation to continue. This article suggests that the ethical condition by which an animal can change its state from property to person is to turn to ontology, the so-called ontological turn, where the boundary of beings is "porous," not rigid. Such porosity allows beings to transcend borders and form relationships in ways that do not separate the natural world from culture. In addition, the focus on boundary porosity helps us rethink other forms of human-animal coexistence and their co-interactions. Ultimately, this new relationship between humans and animals plays a vital role as a tool for facing environmental crises in different ways.
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