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Bestialitatis and the New Ethics on “Human” Animals

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This article discusses how the legal systems in several Western countries, with a special focus on Italy, address our present day animal rights movement and how these legal systems can faithfully reflect the movement’s values as well as promote them in a manner that will ultimately change the rights themselves and their cultural context: this is an extremely interesting issue for the semiotic study of the “humanization of animals”. Therefore, I will summarize several semiotic arguments using the model of the four ontologies by Philippe Descola and the concept of prospectivism by Eduardo Viveiros De Castro. I expect several important changes will come about thanks to the ties between philosophical animal rights discourse and legal discourse and I also believe that the two most interesting issues will be animal labor and reproduction. I will concentrate on the debate over zoophilia laws in Denmark, Germany and Italy in order to propose a way to understand the threshold which separates humans and animals in our naturalistic ontology. Nowadays, “becoming animals” and “becoming humans” seem to be two central and open-ended semiotic processes: legal rights and animal rights philosophy help bring several issues into focus such as animal subjectivity and informed consent.

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Notes

  1. See [20].

  2. See [24].

  3. The three expressions “discursive translation” and “discursive organization” taken from [11], and a “series of significations” taken from [31]—with a clear reference to Deleuze—are inter-defined. A discursive translation is that process which may quickly lead to, for example, a ban on the production of fur coats in Italian law. If this does occur, it will be because of the transfer of some requests from the discursive organization of ethical–political animal rights activism to the discursive organization of law. Referring to discursive organizations means referring to their paradigmatic existence; but a translation can only take place on a syntagmatic level when comparing two discursive organizations as a series of significations.

  4. See [35], on conscientious objection in the case of abortion, and [14], for the semiotic framework for bioethical issues.

  5. ZETA-VEREIN, Zoophiles Engagement fur Toleranz und Klarung, https://www.zeta-verein.de/en/zoophilia/worldmap-zoophilia/.

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  1. IULM University, Milan, Italy

    Giuditta Bassano

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  1. Giuditta Bassano
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Bassano, G. Bestialitatis and the New Ethics on “Human” Animals. Int J Semiot Law 31, 659–675 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9549-x

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