Vol. 6 No. 2 (2025): Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic (continuous publication)
Special Dossier

Rights for and with animals: inviting animals into the conversation about their rights

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Anna Caramuru Pessoa Aubert
University of Münster
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Published 2025-12-26

Keywords

  • Phenomenology,
  • Care ethics,
  • Animal rights,
  • Personhood,
  • Agency

Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Caramuru Pessoa Aubert

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

AUBERT, Anna Caramuru Pessoa. Rights for and with animals: inviting animals into the conversation about their rights. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 6, n. 2, p. e60193, 2025. DOI: 10.53981/destrocos.v6i2.60193. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/60193. Acesso em: 16 jan. 2026.
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Abstract

Drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, care ethics, and philosophy of ethology, this interdisciplinary article depicts beyond-human animals not as more or less like typical adult human beings, but rather as embodied, vulnerable, communicative, and agentic subjects who perceive, make meaning, and act intentionally within their Umwelt. Moreover, it turns to the Interest Theory of Rights and to the Bundle Theory, arguing that legal personhood need not be based on moral personhood, that is, animals can be legal persons even if they are not moral ones. It employs, instead, a phenomenological posture and insights from care ethics to comprehend the ethical implications of the interspecies kinship, which is grounded in a shared and multi-layered vulnerability and embodied communication that takes place within the shared ‘flesh of the world’. It further maintains there is a human duty to acknowledge, listen, and respond to animals’ agency, proposing a phenomenological–ethological methodology for identifying and translating animals’ interests and preferences into legal claim-rights from their own standpoints.

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