Political, not metaphysical: A difficulty for a freestanding conception of animal rights
Peter Niesen (University of Hamburg)
With Zoopolis, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka introduced the language of democratic inclusion to the field of animal politics. They turned the way we see domesticated animals on its head: not as beneficiaries of human goodwill, but as co-citizens of the democratic polity. Their recent book Animals and the Right to Politics radicalises this idea by arguing that domesticated animals should be considered active citizens, not passive clients of the state; Bürger, not Schutzgenossen, in Immanuel Kant’s 1793 terms. In their new book, the authors draw less on moral philosophy than on sociology, ethology and even on “realist” political thought to make a more political (but of course still philosophical) case. In my comment, I want to suggest an interpretation of the motive that led to this methodological change, sketch the difference between a strong and a weaker, representative version of political inclusion, and ask whether its reliance on a Bernard Williams-type conception of politics serves its purposes well. I conclude with a plea to kickstart animal politics through weak inclusion
The Natural Rights Premise
One way of reading their new book is that the authors, both in substance and in methodology, try to overcome a weakness in the Zoopolis argument that I want to label the natural rights premise. Natural rights are rights that creatures have by birth, in virtue of being a self or subject, independently of any relation, be it cooperative or conflictual, with other creatures. Polities are to recognise those rights and adapt to them, not to confer or shape them. They precede and constrain legitimate politics but reflect neither political standing nor social inclusion. They pre-empt the question of legitimate coercion quite apart from membership, since it is unclear whether their enforceability flows from moral self-evidence or from political implementation. Natural rights introduce an ambiguity into our understanding of political normativity, since they appear to precede and trump democratic law-making. In sum, they let us question whether democratic polities award rights or ratify pre-existing moral claims, and whether a morally free-standing alternative would not be more congenial to the project (Niesen forthcoming; for a critique, see Ladwig 2026).
Zoopolis reflected the ambiguous character of the natural rights premise by devoting an initial chapter to establishing animal rights as moral claims to inviolability (2011: 19-49), while in the same breath blaming the standard recourse to a priori inviolability rights in the animal rights literature for failing to generate political traction (2011: 5). At the same time, along with traditional animal rights theories, Zoopolis argued that non-human animals have universal basic rights that follow from their innate traits, and that these put constraints on the legitimacy of any coercive system. Building on this assumption, Donaldson and Kymlicka went on to introduce the innovation for which Zoopolis is justly famous, and on which the new book expands, of social and political rights for domesticated animals, residency rights for liminal animals, and sovereignty for wild interspecies animal populations. In Zoopolis’ constructive parts, they extended the liberal-democratic vocabularies of citizenship to human-animal relations, shaped the field of animal politics as we know it today, and inspired an entire generation of authors to follow suit. Although they argued that the bulk of the text should be plausible for those who reject animal rights theory and its commitment to inviolability, or integrity of life and limb, such as utilitarians, they still hoped to convince such readers of the political vision the book proposed (2011: 21).
Strong and Weak Inclusion
The new book builds not on entitlements based on selfhood, subjecthood, or personhood, but on animals’ claims to political inclusion. In this, the authors introduce two innovations. First, by defending animals’ “right to politics”, Donaldson and Kymlicka defend a distinctively strong version of the political inclusion thesis, one in which animals are themselves considered capable, interested and willing to engage in politics. The strong version goes beyond ascribing animals “agency, cooperation and participation in mixed human-animal settings” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 102), in demanding they “be recognised as political beings” (2025, 3). The authors adduce a wealth of evidence showing animals as social beings and as actors pursuing goals in ways that can be read as political, forming collectives and negotiating choices
The weaker version of the inclusion thesis does not lead to a directly democratic conception of politics. It contents itself with empowering animal representatives with speaking, agenda-setting and decision-making rights in law-making assemblies. In contrast to the strong version, it takes human-animal communication and interaction to be informative about animal preference and animal claims, but not in itself political (Cochrane 2018, Niesen forthcoming). The weak version agrees with the strong that “theories of political community, governance, democracy, or legitimate authority need to be reimagined to take account of the claims or standing of animals” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2025, 4), but is hesitant to adopt the full-blown interspecies republicanism the authors propose. Both the strong and the weak version defend the claim that animals are entitled to social and political rights from their ongoing cooperation (in work, care, and some animal products such as wool), but the expansive interpretation of human-animal interaction as political, as Rainer Bauböck has pointed out, stretches our conceptions of deliberation, law-governed behaviour, and formal law-making. The strong version re-imagines our everyday interactions with animals as political throughout, and sees joint or federal self-government emerge from it. The weak version prioritises representative inclusion in formal collective political decision-making as the key candidate practice for claiming political legitimacy in human-animal polities.
Natural or legal rights
The second innovation is that the authors appear to accept the challenge of developing a freestanding social-political argument for animals’ political membership, and political subjecthood. Since the publication of Zoopolis, two key articles had prepared this shift (Donaldson 2022, Kymlicka 2022). Shifting the mode of vindication of animal rights does not mean the authors are no longer committed to a comprehensive moral rights position, on the contrary. For instance, they dismiss out of hand the cooperative human-animal schemes that Jocelyn Porcher has designed for a reformed animal agriculture, since they will continue to involve the use and killing of animals. On the level of social and political rights, Porcher’s approach presents a similarly strong version of political inclusion, but it is incompatible with the natural rights premise in “disavow[ing] inviolable individual rights” and thereby “leav[ing] the door wide open to continued exploitation, domination, or killing” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2025: 269 fn).
However, in the new methodological chapter, the authors’ rejection of animal agriculture along with the “animal-use industry” is now presented as political, not metaphysical. They rely on the necessity of animal rights as “indispensable in creating the conditions for meaningful dialogue and relationship between subjects, and for advancing political struggles for emancipation and inclusion” (2025: 52). Not only will they not go over the arguments they used previously for awarding universal basic rights, but they formulate the animal rights position as a functional prerequisite rather than a constitutive element of their position. Along with this move, their use of the notion of “basic rights” changes its meaning, from a commitment to recognising natural rights to a commitment to the “legal protection of basic rights“, i.e. their stringent political and juridical implementation. Entrenched basic rights are a necessary condition for animal politics, the authors hold, since “[t]he field of animal law is replete with failed attempts to protect animals without securing rights.” (2025: 53) Basic rights, with reference to Saskia Stucki’s (2023) important work on positive constitutional rights, are now to be understood not as moral entitlements, but as binding legal norms. The enforceability of basic legal rights is ostensibly a posteriori, dependent on their embedding in a domestic democratic rule-of-law system, as well as in international law.
This shift importantly frees their account from a commitment to natural moral rights. Defenders of basic legal rights for animals could well be dissenters from inviolability claims, and vice versa. The new foundational claim is that animal rights, as stringent legal protections, are a necessary functional prerequisite for genuine political interaction, and the narratives of grassroots human-animal interaction envisaged by the strong version of political inclusion go some way to backing up this claim. Interacting in an ”animal agora” (Donaldson 2022) or in a “multispecies assembly” (Meijer 2025) would seem to involve a performative contradiction if it did not come with a commitment to respect one’s interlocutors’ inviolability. Consider the truism formulated in a similar context, that of animal labour, where it is clear that we don’t kill our co-workers (Delon 2021, 164). The point is not that our co-workers have innate rights that have to be stringently respected, although they might have, but that the normativity of the position is built into the practice (labour, co-working), if correctly understood (Guha-Majumdar (ed.) 2022). The argument of A Right to Politics similarly relies on inbuilt norms, norms that we understand once we get a practice right. If, in recognising a right to politics, it follows that we don’t kill our co-citizens, this expounds the norms of the practice or politics. It is not subject it to any practice-external assumption.
Politics as Unforced Cooperation
If inviolability is not defended as a moral rights claim, but as a functional precondition for legitimate political human-animal relations, it needs a new justification. The authors provide it by recourse to Bernard Williams’ work on political realism. This is not uncongenial since Williams set out to refute approaches in political theory based on moral normativity and create a freestanding account of the political realm, yet his own approach contains plenty of elements for normative theory to latch unto. Among other things, Williams-type realism demands that the “first political question” be resolved before any other questions of political legitimacy arise. In Williams, as in Hobbes, an answer to the first question demands creating conditions of security, to guarantee “order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation” (Williams 2005, 5, 3). Donaldson and Kymlicka give this an expansive interpretation, referring to the state of peace as the absence of violence and domination and as the pre-condition for unforced cooperation. Williams’ perspective in formulating the “first political question”, in contrast, is precisely the fact of coercion, in that “the power of coercion offered simply as the power of coercion cannot justify its own use” (2005, 5-6). Where Williams accentuates the coercive aspect of guaranteeing safety and security, the authors stress the bottom-up perspective of humans and animals developing non-coercive social relations together.
Does Williams’ conception of politics generate inviolability for animals, as a functional precondition of interacting with them politically? As a political ‘realist’, he might be wary of inferring it from politics as a practice. And in fact, Williams’ account of legitimation appears less conclusive for animal politics than the authors seem to assume. Williams argues that subjecting others takes two forms. In the one form, it assumes authority over those living under it and thereby generates a demand for justification. If politics acts with the presumption of authority, this entails that groups (in our case domesticated animals) may not be permanently disadvantaged, enslaved, etc. vis-à-vis their co-citizens. Williams rules out that permanently radically disadvantaged groups, as many domesticated animals clearly are in our societies, could stand in the requisite political relationship if those exercising coercion assume authority. Yet this is not a necessary assumption. His example is the Helot population in Greek city states, in his view a caste of rightless workers who had no claim on the polity, whose rulers and members assumed no authority over them. Although it is clear that humans coerce animals, in fact “govern animals” (Smith 2012), it is not yet clear whether humans accept that they are, in fact, subjecting them in the substantive sense of assuming authority over them.
Williams demands that in order to be legitimate, the institutional setup “make sense” to those under law. The authors quote Rossi and Sleat, two further protagonists of the realism-vs-moralism debate in Political Theory, arguing that political order be “somehow ‘acceptable’ to those subject to it and hence legitimate” (Rossi and Sleat 2014: 693), which the authors enlist for the animal perspective. It is not far-fetched to assume that Williams would also mobilise his “making sense”-constraint for a countervailing human perspective. Making sense, according to Williams, is “a category of historical understanding …, a hermeneutical category”, and relative to the development of a particular society. At the state of current societies, many people will hesitate to concede an acceptability constraint to animal perspectives. They will insist, along with Williams and other realists, that the question “With whom does the demand for justification arise?” be answered before they allow that they stand in a political relation in the relevant sense. Would they have a point?
The first political question: from pure coercion to authority
The problem to be resolved before the first political question can be formulated is which of the “radically disadvantaged are said to be subjects and the state claims authority over them” (Williams 2005, 6). Some authors argue that coercion can occur without assuming authority. Thomas Nagel describes the limiting case, where “pure coercion” comes without a claim to compliance on the part of the coerced party, as a case in which no claim of “political authority over a population” is involved. Nagel explains that outsiders may be “purely” coerced if they are not “subjects of regimes”. In other words, he believes coercion need not be justified, and a political authority perspective need not be adopted, in the application of laws or policies against those who are not subjected to them in the sense of claimed authority. He accepts that justified enforcement, even in cases of “colonial regimes or regimes of military occupation (such as those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II)”, is in itself normatively more demanding than “pure coercion” because it subjects those under its jurisdiction. From his perspective, the criterion separating “pure coercion” and coercive subjection is twofold. It depends on “providing and enforcing a system of law that those subject to it are expected to uphold as participants, and which is intended to serve their interests” (Nagel 2005, 129, fn. 14). There is room for disagreement on whether Nagel has picked out the salient normative features of authority, and whether it is the interests, perspectives, claims or standing of those subjected that are the relevant feature here. The point I want to make is that his criterion distinguishing contexts of pure coercion from contexts of subjection, assuming authority is not an observable, objective feature of the coercive relation, but a presupposition of the correct understanding of a practice and the mindset of the agents engaged in a coercive practice.
Donaldson and Kymlicka (2025, 104) argue that we should pose “the question of legitimacy from the perspective of self-governing animals themselves. … [T]his should inform the ways that humans interact politically with animals, and how to imagine various forms of legitimate shared politics” But this presupposes we can show that the state assumes authority over animals. The argument from animals’ capacity for political relations is of limited reach, and a reconstruction of what actually “makes sense” to current demoi may not deliver the desired result. In other words, the difficulty seems to be to make people admit they assume authority over animals, i.e. aspire to a practice of legitimate government from animals’ point of view.
One way of doing this would be to integrate animal representatives more firmly, and more decisively, into our political systems, since this would prove that animals can demand acceptability, and justification. As things stand, current institutions of commissioners and ombudspersons are located in the administrative, not the legislative branch, and animal claims are formulated from a position of consideration, not membership and political subjection. A political practice that included legislative participation of animal representatives might shift the perspective from pure to authoritative coercion. Weak political inclusion may thus be a precondition for strong inclusion to make sense.