Heidegger, the Law of Being, and Animal Protection Laws

• Published in: Ethics and the environment Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 61 - 82
• Main Author: Schalow, Frank
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Greenwich Indiana University Press 22.09.2015
• Subjects: Analysis; Animal care; Animal welfare; Animals; Cats; Concept of being; Environmental philosophy; Environmentalism; Ethics; Habitat conservation; Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976); Humans; Jurisdiction; Law; Laws, regulations and rules; Metaphysics; Methods; Morality; Nature; Philosophers; Wildlife conservation; Germany
• DOI: 10.2979/ethicsenviro.20.2.61
• ISSN: 1085-6633

For decades, Martin Heidegger's thinking has been appropriated as providing an ethical foundation either in support of positions of environmentalism or advocacy on behalf of animals. Yet, as is the case in many of these debates, the focus has been slanted toward the ethical or moral dimension, to the exclusion of considering whether the Heideggerian approach could also be transposed into the complementary arena of the law in order to open up a new avenue for discussing these topics. Precisely due to its non-anthropocentric focus on the one hand, and its divergence from the legalistic tradition of “rights-theory,” on the other, Heidegger's thinking might very well provide an entry point for addressing concerns raised by enacting “laws” to protect animals, albeit on an alternative footing, which circumvents the “legalistic” premise that animals are precluded rights (due to their lacking as a precondition the moral agency proper to human beings). In the following, I will argue that Heidegger's account of our capacity to dwell on the earth, to cultivate the diverse manifestations of Nature, and recover the deeper meaning of our embodiment, suggests an alternative grounding of law, the attuned response to which can suggest new “directives” to protect the livelihood of animals in the habitats they occupy in common with our own. As we will discover, to understand the law in this primordial sense requires disclosing its origin in the Greek notion of justice, and thereby resetting the “bounds” of jurisdiction within which such lawfulness can be extended to protect animals and provide a “measure” to counter balance the self-interested motives of human beings in our technological age.