Liberalism & The Case of Fox Hunting

Animals, Race, and Multiculturalism is an anthology comprised of pieces by philosophers, political scientists, and the like who explore the tensions that exist between commitments to animal liberation and multiculturalism. Let us stipulate animal liberation as a social movement with a view to securing substantial legal protections for nonhuman animals consistent with interests they have. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is a phenomenon characteristic of modern liberal democracies. Particularly, it requires that members of a predominant culture respect the sacrosanct practices and rituals of minority groups. This requirement may be cached out in terms of special group rights.

The essay that will be of interest for this blog post will be Tony Milligan’s “Group Privilege and Political Division: The Problem of Fox Hunting in the UK.” In it, he explores the extent to which fox hunting might be understood as a cultural practice that ought to be respected. He notes that those who engage in the practice are often elites who have access to resources that enable them to buy and maintain thoroughbreds, packs of hounds, and the like (p. 14). Unlike other cultural practices which demand multiculturalist concern like Santerìa animal sacrifice, fox hunting is not affiliated with some historically oppressed group that is deserving of special group rights. Also, over 80% of people in the UK are opposed to fox hunting, though their concern seems to lie mostly in the aesthetics of the practice itself rather than principled reason for opposing it, seeing as how the percentage of people who are vegan in the UK remains in the single digits.

The first distinction may give us good reason against other kinds of practices to permit outlawing fox hunting. The second distinction, on the other hand, may give us reasons against the prohibition of fox hunting. Milligan ultimately argues that we have good reason to uphold such a ban, provided that the motivations of animal liberation are informed in large part by a liberal commitment to anti-cruelty. Rather than seeking the ends of perfect animal liberation, we ought to seize on injustices committed against animals that everyone can recognize and rally against. Such injustices are those that are evidently cruel to a vast swathe of the population.

Milligan says that it is consistent to uphold a ban on fox hunting while not focusing one’s attention on prohibiting religious exemptions for shechita for this reason. Cruelty is perceived in the former practice whereas it is not in the latter, and for that reason it is prudent to capitalize on the perception of cruelty such that piecemeal reform (toward the ideal of animal liberation) is instantiated.

On its face, this seems endlessly arbitrary. People incidentally find fox hunting reprehensible when the reasons for which they find it reprehensible are probably the very same reasons that would incline them toward favoring the dissolution industrialized commercial agriculture. But Milligan addresses this concern in a manner that I find deeply compelling:

“Because animal rights advocates are, in most cases, ordinary agents, they are motivated in the regular way that others who have been socialized within liberal democracies are motivated. As a result, they tend to become and remain advocates of a rights position not because of universalist deliberation, or the extension of some manner of general ethical theory, but because of the manifest instances of cruelty towards animals that we encounter. A danger then is that animal rights advocates who downgrade appeals to cruelty will lapse into what normative ethicists refer to as ‘moral schizophrenia’ where motivations and justifications fall apart.”

So that people can understand the cruelty present in every act that animal liberationists are so concerned with, they must be free to perceive cruelty selectively first. In allowing this selective perception of cruelty without lambasting them for ideological inconsistencies, somewhat-sympathetic citizens develop motivations for selectively condemning one cruel practice which in turn provides them with the infrastructure from which to beget justifications for condemning other related acts of cruelty. And this is important, because people have to have the right justifications and motivations for protecting animals lest those protections find themselves bereft of genuine other-regard, and troublingly unsustainable as policy measures.

Though it seems odd to single out fox hunters for adhering to their cultural norms, we have good reason to do so. Even though these reasons ultimately come down to the inherent worth of all sentient beings be they human or fox (or hound or horse), what requires these reasons to be made known is an appropriate cultural context. We are now of a time where fox hunting is clearly seen as the kind of practice which subjects unwilling animals to unnecessary suffering. Much of this has to do with the fact that fox hunters are not members of a socially salient cultural group that has been historically oppressed. Perhaps this is also owed in part to the fact that foxes are not animals we consume for food, and they appeal to our sympathies. Regardless, this has given us (rather, the Brits) the means by which to outlaw the practice.

Similarly, the United States has outlawed certain acts against animals on the grounds that they are cruel. Does this law arbitrarily treat certain animals rather than others as worthy of legal concern? Yes. Does industrialized commercial animal agriculture still exist in the U.S.? Yes. But these facts don’t change how admirable it is that we live in a world that is a little less cruel today than it was before.