Gary L. Francione

Francione at a conference at the Universidad de la Rioja , Spain 2010

Gary Lawrence Francione (born May 29, 1954 ) is an American law professor and author.

He excelled primarily with contributions to the discussion about animal rights and was the first to include this topic in the regular curriculum of a US law school. His work essentially focuses on the theses that

1. remove the status of non-human animals as property of others. He regards veganism as a minimum moral requirement, behind which no effort to achieve that should fall short.
2. There is a sharp distinction between animal rights and animal welfare approaches: All larger organizations that campaign “for animals” are ambiguous or inconsistent in this distinction. In particular, he criticizes an animal welfare approach for the fact that, regardless of the type of use by non-human animals, their use is problematic in itself. By trying to regulate "animal exploitation" one solidifies the paradigm of using non-human animals as a means to human ends. You create unnecessary reason to falsely positively assess animal welfare concessions from the animal-using industry and their products, which ultimately benefits the efficiency of the animal industry.
3. For a justification of animal rights, Francione considers only the criterion of sentience to be relevant, which, as he argues, goes hand in hand with self-confidence and an interest in one's own life. He rejects Peter Singer's approach , according to which interest in one's own life is linked to cognitive properties that go beyond the ability to feel.

academic career

Francione received his BA in Philosophy from the University of Rochester and qualified for a Phi Beta Kappa Fellowship which enabled him to study abroad in the UK. He graduated from the University of Virginia with an MA in Philosophy and a JD , and initially served as editor of the Virginia Law Review .

In the following years he assisted Judges Albert Tate, Jr. ( 5th Cir. ) And Sandra Day O'Connor ( USSC ). He was a partner in the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore and worked as a consultant to Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Lowenstein Sandler before receiving a professorship in law from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 . In 1987 a tenure track at the same institution followed. He has been part of the faculty at Rutgers University since 1989 . He has held several visiting professorships in the United States, Canada and Europe, including at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid .

Francione and Prof. Anna Charlton founded the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic in 1990 , which they ran until it closed in 2000. It is the first university in the United States to include animal rights and law in an academic curriculum . Francione and Charlton continue to give lectures and seminars on human and animal rights at Rutgers University after the closure (as of 2010).

Francione takes an active part in the public debate about ways out of the climate crisis ; he signed in October 2018 an open letter to the British government a failure in climate protection is accused of the Extinction rebellion - one for civil disobedience calling on the climate issue grassroots movement - is supported and a decarbonisation of the economy is required.

Legal Welfarism

One approach of his theory is that from the classical animal protection position - that you can not "unnecessary" non-human animals suffering could cause - a practical animal right could be derived requirement: The targeted animal welfare balancing of interests, according to the specific conditions as "unnecessary" and Certain treatments are classified as "humane" is not possible due to the inequality of the parties through the status of non-human animals as property. In order to weigh up interests, both parties to the conflict must be able to refer to equivalent legal interests. Since non-human animals have no (basic) rights, while animal users can invoke the basic right to property, such a weighing only comes about if the harm inflicted does not result in any economic benefit.

For the animal welfare position, he coined the term Legal Welfarism in "Animals, Property, and the Law" . This is unsuitable for recognizing an inherent value of animals, i.e. a value that is decoupled from their purpose as property, for example for guarding an object or for the production of food. One just asks within this paradigm what level of suffering is acceptable in order to achieve the respective utility of a practice:

“We only ask whether the pain and suffering that arise in the production of animal foods exceed a level that is considered acceptable within animal use. If it is customary for farmers to castrate or brand farm animals, (...) we nevertheless consider them necessary because we assume that a farmer would not senselessly torture any animal from whose use he or she profits. "

- G. L Francione: Reflections on Animals, Property, and the Law and Rain Without Thunder . In: Law & Contemp. Probs. . 70, 2007, p.9 .

The level of avoidance of suffering that can be assumed by animal welfare legislation therefore hardly goes beyond the level that a rationally acting owner would be willing to guarantee on his own in order to use such an animal in an economically efficient manner. Animal protection legislation requires owners to attribute a higher value to their animals than would be necessary for their purpose as property. In a constitutional framework with a status of property as in the western world and especially in the USA, such an approach could not fundamentally contribute anything emancipatory.

Criticism of the "animal rights movement"

Francione is considered a critic of the so-called animal rights movement , for which he is sometimes sharply attacked. He highlights fundamental misunderstandings of the theory of animal rights in practically all organizations that advocate animal rights according to their self-image. He attributes this on the one hand to the fact that the long-term demands of some organizations do not correspond to animal rights.

He goes on to believe, however, that the remaining organizations, which on the one hand openly recognize that animals must be given basic rights and that many practices, regardless of their specific form, are to be abolished, see these organizations at the same time as animal welfare measures as a legitimate and effective means of achieving their nominally abolitionist goals .

New Welfarism

For this latter phenomenon he coined the term “ New Welfarism ”, which can be roughly translated as “ New Animal Protection ”. His criticism of New Welfarism is based on both an ethical position and the view that animal welfare demands have proven to be practically toothless.

In RWT he developed 5 criteria for characterizing the New Welfarist position:

1. The New Welfarists reject an animal ethic that sees nonhuman animals as mere means to human ends: in some way their position as a long-term goal includes the abolition of the property status of nonhuman animals and the establishment of basic subjective rights .
2. They believe that this long-term goal cannot be translated directly into political practice.
3. From (2), New Welfarists deduce that almost every animal protection demand is ethically justifiable, even if it does not question or confirm the property status of non-human animals. Animal welfare measures are animal rights measures.
4. They consider animal use regulations to be justified and necessary and believe that animal welfare legislation would bring about animal rights in a causal manner in the long term.
5. They reject allegations of moral inconsistency that the regulation of animal use and its abolition are contradicting each other.

Francione sees the theoretical origins of New Welfarism in the writings of Peter Singer . Singer et alii would add considerable confusion and confusion of positions by using the term “animal rights”. Singer himself explicitly rejects a concept of fundamental rights. Leading animal activists such as Henry Spira and Ingrid Newkirk refer to Singer and shape (et) their activities according to his maxims. On the other hand, both reject Tom Regan's position, which is considered a classic deontological counter-draft to Peter Singer's animal rights position.

Francione zu Singer critically notes that the practical criterion of distinguishing between exploiters and those who liberate animals according to whether they show “compassion” for non-human animals is too weak to maintain a dividing line. This would make it practically indistinguishable between exploiters and emancipators. He regards the fact that animal welfare reforms have led to abolitionism (see point 4) as practically refuted. In a constructive argument, he rejects the fact that there can be no efficient practice for an abolitionist theory (point 2). (see the section own approach )

Single issue campaigns

He raises a further point of criticism against single-issue campaigns ( SICs ). These are campaigns that promote (ovo-lacto) vegetarianism or are directed against a highlighted aspect of animal use, such as keeping wild animals in circuses or fur , without making it clear that animal use in itself and in all areas is morally unacceptable . He justifies his criticism by saying that the emphasis is at least implicitly saying that the emphasized aspect is ethically distinguishable from other forms of animal use. Furthermore, shifting goals and ambiguities would create the false impression that the animal rights movement had a secret agenda. SICs are also exploited by animal organizations for their economic benefit by "selling" supposed solutions to individual problems and taking donations from people who want to help animals, but not using these funds for campaigns that question the use of animals . ${\displaystyle \to }$

He rejects the comparative counter-argument that campaigns against child abuse, for example, do not say that rape against adults can be justified on the grounds that the problems in the animal rights context have a differentiated sociological structure: the general discussion tenor in the animal rights context is as opposed to, say, sexual ones Abuse, not an abolitionist one and focusing on sub-topics would therefore have the corresponding effects.

"If [e.g. Child abuse], [e.g. B. rape] and [e.g. B. Torture] are all seen as morally undesirable, then the decision to work on remedying does not convey the message that and are morally acceptable. ${\displaystyle X}$ ${\displaystyle Y}$ ${\displaystyle Z}$ ${\displaystyle X}$ ${\displaystyle Y}$ ${\displaystyle Z}$

When it comes to animals, the analysis is different. Most people think that eating meat, milk, and all other animal products, as clothing or otherwise, is as natural as drinking water and breathing air. When we highlight one form of animal exploitation, we inevitably distinguish it morally from other forms of animal exploitation. "

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annotation

In sociology , the term single issue often has a different meaning and means a focus on a socially emancipatory aspect that is isolated from other topics: for example, the focus on the abolition of animal exploitation without criticizing other forms of discrimination. A classification of Francione's approaches under this single issue term is not known. An examination of his approach in the light of his own single issue criticism can be found in.

Own approach

Animal Rights Synthesis

He first introduces a formal “ requirement of equal treatment” as a necessary prerequisite for any theory of justice , which he formulates as follows: Pay equal attention to the same (kind) interests . He characterizes the commandment as formal because its content is neutral: whether, for example, torture or the death penalty is rejected or not, cannot be deduced from it. But if you have a position on it, you have to give comparable and relevant reasons for all beings with an interest (s) in their life or their physical and mental integrity, with which one legitimizes or rejects a measure.

He regards the fact that non-human animals are to be considered morally as subjects beyond the status of inanimate beings as largely accepted and gives no metaethical justification for this.

He then introduces a concept of fundamental rights based on the proposal by Henry Shue . Therefore has a right if and property, basic or fundamental right to be when "to gain any attempt by another law would be self-defeating and nonsensical by giving up this fundamental right because he took another law, the foundation."

From these three statements (equal treatment, subject characteristics of nonhumans and the concept of fundamental rights), Francione deduces that the right not to be the property of others is a fundamental right of non-human animals: any right to which the being that is property could invoke would trumped by the interests of the owners. But if the beings were of the same kind in the sense that they have interests in a legal asset, trumpeting would contradict the principle of equal treatment and consequently the property status itself contradicted the principle of equal treatment. So it makes sense to reject the paradigm of the property status of animals in order to resolve this contradiction .

He concludes all of this with the proviso that the principle of equal treatment is applicable to non-human animals, i.e. that there are no relevant reasons that might legitimize animal interests being trumped by interests of the owners. To what extent this reduction is permissible, he discusses on the basis of a number of counter-arguments:

He then first considers two "simple" justification structures to which one can withdraw if the principle of equal treatment were not applicable:

1. Mechanicism : If beings have no interests, the principle of equal treatment is not applicable. However, the mechanism would also be in obvious contradiction to the fact that non-human animals should be taken into account beyond the status of inanimate beings.
2. Evangelicalism or some other dogmatics : If God, for example in the Christian sense, had given people the " dominion " over nonhumans, this would be in direct contradiction to the fact that one should treat human beings and nonhumans equally and that both should not be the property of others should exist. However, one accepts the existence of God as a moral authority. There are also contradicting statements about this in the Bible. It is also unclear whether and, if so, how one can justify generally accepted ethical principles such as freedom from slavery for people in this way, since they are presented in the Bible as morally unobjectionable.

Finally, if he looks at the meta-argument , a specific property or a set of properties that distinguish people from non-people, the principle of equal treatment is inapplicable. He argues that on the one hand it is empirically uncertain at best that there are properties that all humans but not animals have: the results of cognitive ethology would suggest the opposite. On the other hand, if you choose a trait that all non-human animals do not have, there will always be people who do not have them either. Their position in a theory of justice would then not be compatible with the concept of universal and egalitarian human rights. In his view, Darwin's theory and more modern evolution theories assume that a distinction between species can never be of a qualitative nature, but only of a degree. The demarcation between those who have fundamental rights and those who do not have fundamental rights, which is of a qualitative nature, cannot therefore be justified on the basis of a species boundary. (This justification structure is known as the argument of human borderline cases .)

Position on the practice of an animal rights movement

Francione's vision of an animal rights movement is essentially a decentralized enlightenment project with a focus on veganism as a minimum ethical requirement in the sense of a renunciation of any use of non-human animals as a mere means for human purposes.

In contrast to most organizations, he considers it wrong to focus on the condemnation of the exploiting institutions, because their existence is to be understood as a reaction to the unbroken demand for (cheap) animal products. Any campaign that does not attack this demand in the long term could at most result in an exchange of the exploiting actors.

In RWT (Chapter 7) he discusses efforts to eliminate the property status of non-human animals through gradual changes in the practice of exploitation and formulates necessary criteria for the compatibility of such an approach with an abolitionist approach. He emphasizes that these criteria represent at best the beginning of a debate and are in many cases imprecise and generally not sufficient to abolish the status of non-human animals as human property. The criteria are:

1. A legislative proposal must contain a prohibition, as opposed to a regulation.
2. The ban must affect a substantial part of institutional animal exploitation.
3. The prohibition must protect an interest of the non-human animals themselves and must not result from the interests of the exploiting.
4. The interests to be protected must not be weighed against the interests of the exploiters.
5. What has been incriminated by the project must not, or at least not easily, be replaceable by another animal-exploiting practice.

In his view, all efforts to bring about gradual changes in animal exploitation must be accompanied by the unequivocal demand for the complete abolition of the property status of animals.

Publications

Books

The abbreviation used for the citation is in square brackets.

• G. L Francione, A. E Charlton: Vivisection and dissection in the classroom: A guide to conscientious objection . American Anti-Vivisection Society, 1992.
• G. L Francione: Animals, property, and the law . Temple University Press, 1995, ISBN 1-56639-284-5 . [AP&L]
• G. L Francione: Rain without thunder: The ideology of the animal rights movement . Temple University Press, 1996, ISBN 1-56639-461-9 . [RWT]
• G. L Francione: Introduction to animal rights: your child or the dog? . Temple Univ Pr, 2000, ISBN 1-56639-692-1 . [I2AR]
• G. L Francione: Animals as persons: essays on the abolition of animal exploitation . Columbia University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-231-13950-2 . [AP]
• G. L Francione: The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation? . Columbia University Press, 2010.
• GL Francione, AE Charlton, SK Woodcock (Edt): Eat Like You Care: An Examination of the Morality of Eating Animals . Exempla Press, 2013.

Essays, Papers & Multimedia

• Various essays and blog posts , including some podcasts . Some of these publications are unofficially translated into German and can be found here
• Webcast of a paper presented at the Duke University School of Law Animal Law Conference , April 7, 2006
  • This was accompanied by the following publication: G. L Francione: Reflections on Animals, Property, and the Law and Rain Without Thunder . In: Law & Contemp. Probs. . 70, 2007, p. 9.

literature

• Margaret Puskar-Pasewicz: Gary L. Francione . In: Cultural encyclopedia of vegetarianism . Greenwood, Santa Barbara, CA 2010, ISBN 978-0-313-37556-9 , pp. 111-112.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Presentation on the faculty's website.
2. ↑ Alison Green et al. a .: Facts about our ecological crisis are incontrovertible. We must take action. The Guardian, October 26, 2018.
3. ↑ According to Hilpisch in .
4. ^ As the main distinguishing feature between Singer's position and an animal rights position, Francione names Singer's comments in the second edition of Animal Liberation . Singer states that most animals that are used to produce so-called food have in principle “no wishes that affect the future” or “intellectual existence in a temporal continuum.” That is the significant factor when evaluating forms of animal husbandry Pain or suffering causes irrelevant, but decisive, if one wants to evaluate forms of production in which "free-range animals that have lived a pleasant existence in social groups that meet their natural needs, are then killed quickly and pain-free". According to Francione, Singer's only philosophical basis for the rejection of (most forms of) animal exploitation is not an argument of justice, but an empirical evaluation of the consequences of an action that might affect others differently. Both Tom Regan , as a deontological animal rights activist, and RG Frey, as someone who rejects both Singer and Regan's position, note that Singer ignores the existential interests of the people involved in livestock farming, for example for work to make a living, which are not readily apparent can reject as irrelevant. Singer's rejection of animal factories is much more controversial in his ethics than Singer portrays. According to RWT p. 50 f.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Commentary # 16: Responding to Questions: Single-Issue Campaigns and MDA Opposition to the Abolitionist Approach March 26, 2010 on abolitionistapproach.com
   • RWT p. 191 ff.
   In the podcast he also refers to a chapter in the 2010 pamphlet with Robert Garner .
6. ^ Gary L. Francione: A Short Note on Abolitionist Veganism as a Single Issue Campaign . April 17, 2010. Retrieved August 15, 2010.
7. ↑ This rendering follows I2AR Chapters 4 & 5.
8. ↑ I2AR S. 82-85
9. ↑ I2AR pp. 85-92
10. ↑ Original: [a right is basic if] "any attempt to enjoy any other right by sacrificing the basic right would be quite literally self-defeating, cutting the ground from beneath itself." From Henry Shue: Basic rights: subsistence, affluence, and US foreign policy . Princeton University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-691-02929-0 . Francione notes the relationship with Tom Regan's Declaration of Fundamental Rights. He says that fundamental rights are “rights that do not allow voluntariness for those who are supposed to observe them, and that are not institutionally conditioned.” In addition, these rights are equally important for individuals who are similar in their relevant aspects. Francione thinks that both concepts lead normatively to the same demands. However, Regan rejects that this is based solely on a principle of equal treatment - which Peter Singer also uses; some would say "because Singer uses it" - inferred.
11. ↑ I2AR S. 92-98
12. ↑ I2AR S. 98-102
13. ↑ I2AR p. 102
14. ↑ I2AR S. 105-106
15. ↑ I2AR S. 106-111
16. ↑ In I2AR, pp. 114–115 , he primarily refers to the work of Donald Griffin , Antonio Damasio , Mark Bekoff and Carolyn Ristau .
17. ^ Gary L. Francione: A "Very New Approach" or Just More New Welfarism? . In: Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach . 9 April 2008. Accessed June 14, 2010.
    To be construed as a response to a statement by Balluch what Balluch the here said.