Abstract
In his chapter, Tony Milligan notes how the open rescue of nonhuman animals, as practised in Australia by Animal Liberation Victoria, Animal Liberation New South Wales, and by members of a variety of activist networks in Europe and North America, has been compared (by such activists) to Gandhian satyagraha. The latter, Milligan clarifies, may be understood, loosely, as a struggle that is based upon the power of truth and/or spirituality and non-violence. Milligan then argues for the relevance of such comparisons, on the grounds that our best undestanding of dissent need not be constrained by descriptive monism. Animal advocates, Milligan contends, need a rich conceptual repertoire and multiple (sometimes more secular, sometimes more spiritualized) ways of describing one and the same set of events.
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Notes
- 1.
As indications of the presence of these concepts in the West, ‘Satya’ was the name of a well-known US vegetarian and animal rights magazine which ceased publication in 2007 but reappeared as a special edition in 2016. ‘Ahimsa’ is an even more familiar term in UK and US animal rights circles. It is, for example, the name of the London-based newsletter of the Young Indian Vegetarians; and the official magazine of the American Vegan Society, American Vegan, carries the subtitle ‘ahimsa lights the way’.
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- 3.
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- 5.
Parekh (1989) suggests that the ambiguity came to be resolved over time, with the notion of agraha receding into the background, and this sounds right and fits well with Gandhi’s growing sense that truth could compel through the agency of satyagrahis.
- 6.
Gandhi (1996) p.80 brings the two together, so Gandhi avoided a sense of strict duality, but generally the terms were applied to different sorts of acts.
- 7.
There is, conveniently, a strong correlate of this in the Western liberal discourse, a commitment to treating repeated accusations of hypocrisy with caution, as characteristic of an illiberally hostile mindset, and to identifying cruelty as the worst that humans are capable of. The classic discussion of these matters is in the opening chapters of Skhlar (1984).
- 8.
The most obscure of these contexts is that of Gandhi’s writing on panchayats. For satyagraha as a potential form of police control in the context of his idea of panchayati raj, see ‘My Idea of Village Swaraj’, Harijan, 26/7/1942. For an account of the panchayat system in his writings, see Milligan (2016), chapter 8.
- 9.
The term is known widely enough in India for Prakash Jha’s 2013 film Satyagraha to use it as the film’s title. The term ‘satyagraha’ is known in Brazil because of a major anti-corruption operation that took place there between 2004 and 2008, ‘Operação Satiagraha’. Thanks go to Gabriel Garmendia for pointing out the currency of the term in Brazil.
- 10.
Milligan (2014), p.288 considers Gandhi’s attitude towards the open texture of concepts in Gandhi’s commentary on the Gita and his readiness to extend and modify their sense.
- 11.
Rawls (1999), Rowlands (2009), and Bedau (1961) give a sense of what happens to the concept of civil disobedience when it is modelled too closely upon some current form of dissent, such as the civil rights movement (in Bedau’s case) or the protests over the Vietnam War (in Rawls’ case). Rowlands rescues Rawls from some of his more unfortunate formulations, but it is by no means obvious that what we are left with is really Rawls.
- 12.
Milligan (2013), pp.118–120 describes the beginnings of Open Rescue in Australia and of its dissemination overseas.
- 13.
The concept of ‘direct action’ originates within the early twentieth-century anarcho-syndicalist movement. For a brief overview of its development, see Carter (2005), pp.6–7.
- 14.
For a politicization of love in the concept of the debate over animal citizenship, see Milligan (2015) which is non-committal about whether citizenship is the right concept but argues that one of the classic Aristotelian barriers to citizenship can be removed, i.e. requirement that we regard others as potential recipients of love by some member of our political community.
- 15.
For the affective turn, see Aaltola (2015).
- 16.
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference, University of Zurich, June 2013; and at the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT) workshop on animals and political theory in September 2014. Thanks go to Steve Cooke, Gabriel Garmendia, John Hadley, and Andrew Woodhall for improving comments.
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Milligan, T. (2017). Gandhian Satyagraha and Open Animal Rescue. In: Woodhall, A., Garmendia da Trindade, G. (eds) Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54549-3_10
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