I’ve been somewhat disappointed in reading this post. But as I know some folks I like are reading it, I feel the need to share a few thoughts as a legal scholar and theorist. Your post I think demonstrates some misunderstandings about the nature of law.
1. You seem to misunderstand contractarianism, by making it an argument for quietism, as well as the nature of law in a democracy. We don’t agree to many laws as a society; most extant laws are conditions that no one ever agrees on. They are traditions. Take property law — no one ever voted to make animals property. That’s an inherited concept. There is a difference between a law that is democratically enacted, and a vestige of the English common law. The same goes for trespass, a common law principle. Moreover, no contractarian worth her salt is going to claim you can never break an unjust law. Going back to Aquinas, there is broad agreement that sometimes breaking an unjust law is morally appropriate, or at least defensible.
2. No one could reasonably argue this tactic is universalizable. It is strategic — it is a non-universalizable tactic meant to create significant attention and pressure for change toward universalizable norms. And more — the argument that if they do it, everyone will, can be a dangerous slippery slope. It’s infeasible for everyone to do this: they have jobs. More important, I would very much caution against that kind of thinking. It has been used to justify atrocities in the past. Take slaveholders: they used that kind of argument to push back against slave rebellions—it would destroy the antebellum south, socially and economically. That is not an argument worth keeping. I am not defending the Ridglan approach, but I am cautioning against these types dismissals of what they are doing.
3. Historically, you seem to again misunderstand the nature of law. Slaves were considered property, and their rebellions certainly damaged their property status. They also moved the north toward abolitionism. Elements of the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the United States engaged in tactics that damaged property and yet ultimately won reforms. Property is a convention—it should not interfere with moral obligation and serious moral intervention.
I’ll just mention one thing about donors. Doing what is right sometimes risks making certain people unhappy. That’s why social movements shouldn’t rely on the whims of wealthy individuals. The right donors will see the right priorities for what they are. The priority should be supporting one another within a social movement.
Thanks for engaging with the post! You made a lot of different points, so I’ll do my best to separate them out and consider them one-by-one:
(1)
I’m not making an argument for quietism. Saying that we have an obligation to follow the law is compatible with having obligations (even extraordinarily strong ones) to use non-illegal means to combat injustice (e.g. by advocating for changes to laws).
It’s a genuinely interesting point that many of our laws are inherited traditions, rather than the direct product of the democratic process. However, I don’t think that’s a strong argument in this specific case. The US has had true universal suffrage for more than 60 years, and in that time Congress and state legislative bodies have passed many laws related to the treatment of animals and the criminality of trespassing. Under any reasonable interpretation of democratic legitimacy, a democratically-elected legislative body specifically dealing with an issue and choosing to pass laws that accept the underlying common law principles and add specific penalties, related rules etc., should confer it.
I don’t disagree that a reasonable contractualist would think that there are cases where it would be justified to break an unjust law. The core question is whether the required conditions hold in this case. Democratic legitimacy is one important part of that, since reasonable contractualists generally would give some weight to whether laws resulted from a just process. A point I didn’t make in the OP, but I think is relevant here, is that even if you disagree about the democratic legitimacy argument, I think the specific nature of the lawbreaking here falls outside many notions of justifiable civil disobedience. That’s because the Ridglan rescues involved breaking a law to achieve a non-symbolic end (rescuing the dogs), not merely symbolically challenging a law by breaking it.
(2)
I think you’re moving between a couple different notions of universalizability here. It’s true literally everyone breaking and entering in service of moral aims is a far-fetched idea. But it’s still coherent to ask whether a tactic would have positive or negative effects if commonly used across social movements. Democratic societies can and have experienced periods of widespread civil unrest.
I agree that a similar argument could have been deployed against rebellion by enslaved people, but I think the analogy is weak because of the specifics. Slave rebellions occurred in a society where the affected population was excluded from political participation, and the principles justifying them were self-limiting in the way I described in the OP. The current case is different: the affected parties (animals) can’t be enfranchised, but the human population that cares about animal welfare has full political participation, and the legal channels for advancing animal welfare are open and have produced incremental gains over recent decades (most notably the transition of nearly half of the US egg supply to cage free). The bar for lawbreaking is plausibly higher when those channels are more responsive than when they’re closed.
(3)
I think you’re being too quick to dismiss property as being something that can drive moral obligation. There are clearly many cases where we are obligated to not destroy or interfere with others’ property, as is obvious in cases where vulnerable groups’ property rights are infringed. The way I’d think about this is that obligations to protect property are stronger the more just a society’s system of property rights is. In a more just society, property destruction not only weakens otherwise-good norms, but is also more likely to be the result of a miscalculation: if the base rate of unjust property ownership is lower, then any given case of someone believing property destruction is justified is more likely to be wrong. So both the rule-following considerations and the act-utility considerations point toward higher property protection in more just societies.
(4)
I disagree that the priority should be supporting one another within a social movement; the priority should be trying to do the most good. Donor considerations reasonably impact that calculation, both because money is a necessary ingredient for advocacy and because donor preferences may reflect genuine moral views that are worth considering. But I do also agree that it can be worth trying to convince donors of an approach rather than just deferring to their preexisting preferences.
State laws are path dependent, and rely very often on common law principles and concepts uncritically applied. That does not equate to democratic legitimacy for every codified version of property and criminal law.
I think we have fundamentally incompatible views on the appropriate frame to apply to balancing questions—I am not at all a utilitarian, and I don’t think you should be either. But I’ll set that aside.
You again seem to conflate lawbreaking with immorality. Please don’t do that. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did the Ridglan rescuers. That doesn’t make what they did wrong. That’s a separate question. The symbolic/non-symbolic distinction is not one I find compelling.
You seem to see humans and animals as categorically different from a legal perspective. Humans care for animal welfare but animals have no voice. I fundamentally disagree — animals should have rights, including a right to a voice. That means they should have institutions that represent their interests. So there is no fundamental difference between the slave revolts and what people are trying to do here for animals in terms of voice, as their representatives. I suggest Zoopolis on this point.
Your articulation of the EA bias toward donors is particularly problematic. Successful social movements historically have not relied on extremely wealthy individuals for funding. Your concern to persuade donors is troubling. You should be worried about persuading people, not persuading donors. Lots of people are going to be needed to change social perspectives and institutions around animals. A social narrative that focuses on “earning to give” or major donors is likely to be unmoored from a durable movement.
I’ve been somewhat disappointed in reading this post. But as I know some folks I like are reading it, I feel the need to share a few thoughts as a legal scholar and theorist. Your post I think demonstrates some misunderstandings about the nature of law.
1. You seem to misunderstand contractarianism, by making it an argument for quietism, as well as the nature of law in a democracy. We don’t agree to many laws as a society; most extant laws are conditions that no one ever agrees on. They are traditions. Take property law — no one ever voted to make animals property. That’s an inherited concept. There is a difference between a law that is democratically enacted, and a vestige of the English common law. The same goes for trespass, a common law principle. Moreover, no contractarian worth her salt is going to claim you can never break an unjust law. Going back to Aquinas, there is broad agreement that sometimes breaking an unjust law is morally appropriate, or at least defensible.
2. No one could reasonably argue this tactic is universalizable. It is strategic — it is a non-universalizable tactic meant to create significant attention and pressure for change toward universalizable norms. And more — the argument that if they do it, everyone will, can be a dangerous slippery slope. It’s infeasible for everyone to do this: they have jobs. More important, I would very much caution against that kind of thinking. It has been used to justify atrocities in the past. Take slaveholders: they used that kind of argument to push back against slave rebellions—it would destroy the antebellum south, socially and economically. That is not an argument worth keeping. I am not defending the Ridglan approach, but I am cautioning against these types dismissals of what they are doing.
3. Historically, you seem to again misunderstand the nature of law. Slaves were considered property, and their rebellions certainly damaged their property status. They also moved the north toward abolitionism. Elements of the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the United States engaged in tactics that damaged property and yet ultimately won reforms. Property is a convention—it should not interfere with moral obligation and serious moral intervention.
I’ll just mention one thing about donors. Doing what is right sometimes risks making certain people unhappy. That’s why social movements shouldn’t rely on the whims of wealthy individuals. The right donors will see the right priorities for what they are. The priority should be supporting one another within a social movement.
Thanks for engaging with the post! You made a lot of different points, so I’ll do my best to separate them out and consider them one-by-one:
(1)
I’m not making an argument for quietism. Saying that we have an obligation to follow the law is compatible with having obligations (even extraordinarily strong ones) to use non-illegal means to combat injustice (e.g. by advocating for changes to laws).
It’s a genuinely interesting point that many of our laws are inherited traditions, rather than the direct product of the democratic process. However, I don’t think that’s a strong argument in this specific case. The US has had true universal suffrage for more than 60 years, and in that time Congress and state legislative bodies have passed many laws related to the treatment of animals and the criminality of trespassing. Under any reasonable interpretation of democratic legitimacy, a democratically-elected legislative body specifically dealing with an issue and choosing to pass laws that accept the underlying common law principles and add specific penalties, related rules etc., should confer it.
I don’t disagree that a reasonable contractualist would think that there are cases where it would be justified to break an unjust law. The core question is whether the required conditions hold in this case. Democratic legitimacy is one important part of that, since reasonable contractualists generally would give some weight to whether laws resulted from a just process. A point I didn’t make in the OP, but I think is relevant here, is that even if you disagree about the democratic legitimacy argument, I think the specific nature of the lawbreaking here falls outside many notions of justifiable civil disobedience. That’s because the Ridglan rescues involved breaking a law to achieve a non-symbolic end (rescuing the dogs), not merely symbolically challenging a law by breaking it.
(2)
I think you’re moving between a couple different notions of universalizability here. It’s true literally everyone breaking and entering in service of moral aims is a far-fetched idea. But it’s still coherent to ask whether a tactic would have positive or negative effects if commonly used across social movements. Democratic societies can and have experienced periods of widespread civil unrest.
I agree that a similar argument could have been deployed against rebellion by enslaved people, but I think the analogy is weak because of the specifics. Slave rebellions occurred in a society where the affected population was excluded from political participation, and the principles justifying them were self-limiting in the way I described in the OP. The current case is different: the affected parties (animals) can’t be enfranchised, but the human population that cares about animal welfare has full political participation, and the legal channels for advancing animal welfare are open and have produced incremental gains over recent decades (most notably the transition of nearly half of the US egg supply to cage free). The bar for lawbreaking is plausibly higher when those channels are more responsive than when they’re closed.
(3)
I think you’re being too quick to dismiss property as being something that can drive moral obligation. There are clearly many cases where we are obligated to not destroy or interfere with others’ property, as is obvious in cases where vulnerable groups’ property rights are infringed. The way I’d think about this is that obligations to protect property are stronger the more just a society’s system of property rights is. In a more just society, property destruction not only weakens otherwise-good norms, but is also more likely to be the result of a miscalculation: if the base rate of unjust property ownership is lower, then any given case of someone believing property destruction is justified is more likely to be wrong. So both the rule-following considerations and the act-utility considerations point toward higher property protection in more just societies.
(4)
I disagree that the priority should be supporting one another within a social movement; the priority should be trying to do the most good. Donor considerations reasonably impact that calculation, both because money is a necessary ingredient for advocacy and because donor preferences may reflect genuine moral views that are worth considering. But I do also agree that it can be worth trying to convince donors of an approach rather than just deferring to their preexisting preferences.
State laws are path dependent, and rely very often on common law principles and concepts uncritically applied. That does not equate to democratic legitimacy for every codified version of property and criminal law.
I think we have fundamentally incompatible views on the appropriate frame to apply to balancing questions—I am not at all a utilitarian, and I don’t think you should be either. But I’ll set that aside.
You again seem to conflate lawbreaking with immorality. Please don’t do that. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did the Ridglan rescuers. That doesn’t make what they did wrong. That’s a separate question. The symbolic/non-symbolic distinction is not one I find compelling.
You seem to see humans and animals as categorically different from a legal perspective. Humans care for animal welfare but animals have no voice. I fundamentally disagree — animals should have rights, including a right to a voice. That means they should have institutions that represent their interests. So there is no fundamental difference between the slave revolts and what people are trying to do here for animals in terms of voice, as their representatives. I suggest Zoopolis on this point.
Your articulation of the EA bias toward donors is particularly problematic. Successful social movements historically have not relied on extremely wealthy individuals for funding. Your concern to persuade donors is troubling. You should be worried about persuading people, not persuading donors. Lots of people are going to be needed to change social perspectives and institutions around animals. A social narrative that focuses on “earning to give” or major donors is likely to be unmoored from a durable movement.