An Interview with Dr. Michael Allen
Dr. Michael Allen joined the Department of Philosophy and Humanities in 2006. He’s a prolific scholar, much sought after student thesis mentor, and earlier in the year he was awarded the College of Arts and Science Distinguished Research Award. We thought we should ask him some questions!
How did you first become interested in philosophy?
I knew nothing about philosophy when I first went to university. I thought I’d become a History or English major. However, I had to take intro to philosophy as part of the general ed requirement. That changed everything for me. I was hooked immediately. I used to be criticized by my History and English professors for writing papers that were ‘too philosophical.’ Philosophy provided me with a context in which I could explore questions of meaning and value I was already – if quite ineptly back then – trying to think through.
In some of your earlier work, you were particularly interested in civil disobedience and its role in global politics. Can you give us some examples of what philosophers mean by civil disobedience and why you think such acts are important for purposes of understanding specifically global affairs?
As you might expect, there’s a lot of disagreement among philosophers about what civil disobedience means and why or if it’s justified. But mostly this is an idea of breaking the law in order to remake it. Disobedients use illegal direct actions to disrupt the everyday life of the public with the purpose of communicating some injustice in law or policy. So, the idea is to get the attention of the public, motivate deliberation leading to change in law or policy through legal, democratic channels. Perhaps the most familiar example of civil disobedience in the US national context would be Black civil rights workers in the South violating racial segregation laws by sitting at ‘White’s only’ lunch counters. The purpose was to highlight the injustice of such laws by appealing to fellow American citizens (across racial lines) and facilitate democratic reform. This meant appealing to higher order constitutional principles concerning the equality of all national citizens.
In the context of global politics, civil disobedience becomes a much more complex affair. This also has to appear to higher order principles, but it entails a shift from the rights of national citizenship to human rights. So, for example, as a sovereign national state, Brazil became an ‘international civil disobedient’ by violating international patent law. The Brazilian people thus communicated to other peoples of the world an injustice in the international legal order, blocking the production of cheap, life-saving vaccines. Here the focus shifts from illegal direct action by national citizens addressing other citizens to national peoples addressing other national peoples with whom there are no ties of shared citizenship but rather a bond constructed by international law. Another example from the global context concerns multinational coalitional of global civil society actors, such as the environmental group Greenpeace. As transnational rather than international disobedients, Greenpeace gained notoriety by disrupting legal commercial whale hunting. In this instance, though, the appeal to higher order principle is not about human rights but rather a more controversial conception of interspecies justice.
Presumably, it’s more difficult to define civil disobedience, if we’re considering acts from the perspective of different legal systems. Did your work lead you to change how you think about the concept of civil disobedience?
Actually, I’m going to say no to that! If civil disobedience is about breaking the law to remake it, then it isn’t defined by the existing laws of this or that country. As I mentioned above, it has to be motivated and justified by some kind of higher order principle. But that’s what I find interesting about it. Often, it’s assumed – and I think falsely – that civil disobedience must be about the higher order principles of liberal democratic societies. One of the things I tried to argue is that the concept of civil disobedience can translate to the higher order principles of nondemocratic societies, which the political philosopher, John Rawls, called ‘decent hierarchical societies.’ That, however, is more on intriguing theoretical possibility as opposed to a reality of global practice.
As for changing my mind, I don’t think my mind was made up about anything much from the outset. One of the most fascinating cases I dealt with was that of undocumented migration as a mode of disobedience motivated and justified by appeal to the rights of refugees, often ignored by national states. That pointed me to ‘hybrid’ cases of disobedience in which one or more of the usual defining features in missing. Aside from participants in movements like ‘Undocumented and Unafraid,’ most undocumented migrants do not attempt to communicate their status to the wider national public, even when they believe they are victims of injustice. So, this was more like a principled mode of disobedience, absent the public communication clause found in most standard definitions of civil disobedience.
More recently, you’ve done a lot of interesting work on animal rights and animal welfare. What prompted this new line of research? Is it important to make a sharp distinction between animal rights and animal welfare?
I came to the question of animal ethics through an intriguing case of ‘hybrid’ disobedience. My subsequent long-term collaborator, Erica von Essen, originally contacted me concerning the case of illegal wolf hunting in Sweden. In protest of EU conservation laws protecting wolves, Swedish hunters had adopted a policy to ‘shoot, shovel, and shut up.’ So, again the phenomenon was one of principled disobedience (the hunters believing the conservation laws ‘unjust’), but absent the public communication clause. Erica and I also did some work on how the hunters appealed to the rights of traditional forms of rural lifestyles and community they believed were demeaned and under assault by urban, cosmopolitan EU elites in Brussels. The hunters did not communicate their sense of injustice because they did not believe they would be ‘heard’ by such elites or the modern urban public generally.
Otherwise, I’d have to say that most of the work I’ve done has not been about animals rights as conceived by moral philosophers such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan. I’ve mostly been concerned with how the appeal to animal rights has resulting in new forms of political dissent, as in the case of the hunters. To the extent I’ve engaged with the animal rights literature, this has been through the so called ‘political turn’ in animal ethics. Motivated by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, the political turn attempts to reinterpret the rights of animals not as universal moral rights but rather the political rights of various ‘auxiliaries’ of the polity. Just as ‘green card’ holders, for instance, do not possess the same rights of citizens but rather an important sub-set of legal rights, nonhuman animals should be seen as possessing important sub-sets of legal right depending on how they related to the political community. Are they related as domestic ‘pets’ or wild sovereigns sharing the same territory, and so on? With the political turn, rights are determined by relationships rather than universal moral standards.
Beyond this, much of the work I’ve done with Erica has concerned animal political agency. Animals clearly resist human oppression. So, can we talk about animals demonstrating agency as political resistors? As for the rights/welfare distinction, yes, this is important. The welfare view is that animals are ‘moral patients’ rather than agents; their welfare depending on human agency. Clearly, that’s not the view I’ve taken. My view is that the rights of animals are political and ‘relational,’ and that animals can demonstrate some important forms of political agency
Your most recent book examines various strategies that were employed by animal rights activists during the twentieth century. What do you consider to be some of the more important differences, in terms of distinct groups’ goals, methods and motivations?
Well, a lot of the differences in goals, methods, and motivation are explicable in terms of the rights/welfare distinction. On the one hand, if you see animals as the possessors of rights, this can motivate not only lobbying for changes in law but also disobedience (breaking into laboratories to ‘liberate’ the lab animals), sabotage (say, destruction to lab equipment) even intimidation (doxing scientists). Some of the latter actions have been characterized as ‘terrorist,’ and some animal right activists have been prosected under terrorism laws. That said, animal rights activists universally see themselves as ‘nonviolent,’ denying that property damage, for instance, is violence (‘you can’t hurt inanimate objects’). The intimidation and doxing cases are a lot tougher deal with, however. Erica and I have attempted to analyze these cases as forms of ‘ethical vigilantism’ (yes, this hurts but you had it coming!’).
On the other hand, if you see animal as moral patients owed consideration for their welfare, then this is likely to direct you away from radical illegal tactics and focus you more on legal forms of protest and accept compromises regarding how animals are treated under law. Anything that reduces the overall suffering of animals may be seen as an incremental improvement. So, it might be seen as such an improvement if cows receive better treatment prior to their being slaughtered. That is obviously quite unacceptable to most animal rights activists and so animal rights and welfare groups split apart in terms of goals and methods, sometimes even expressing considerable disdain for one another as ‘fanatics’ or ‘sell outs’ respectively.
Anything else you’d like to add about your philosophical work?
I suppose most of my work so far as been concerned with the relationships between disobedience and fidelity to law, and the relationship between political violence and a principled commitment to nonviolence as political methodology. I’ve recently turned to Gandhi’s voluminous writings on the relationships of violence and nonviolence, which are actually a lot more nuanced than one might expect. I’m currently developing a new book on Gandhi’s concept of a nonviolent Ramarajya, reinterpreting democracy through various levels of commitment to nonviolence.