Social Membership: Animal Law beyond the Property/Personhood Impasse
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While animal law has been subject to frequent reform in Canada and abroad, the basic legal foundations of animal oppression are largely unchanged. There are many reasons for this impasse, but part of the explanation is that legal reforms are caught in what we might call the property/personhood dilemma. In most legal systems, domesticated animals are defined as property, and so long as this remains true, reforms are likely to be marginal and ineffective. However, the main alternative—to shift animals from the category of property to personhood—is politically unfeasible, particularly for the domesticated animals who are most intensively exploited in our society. In this paper, I explore a third option for legal reform, which is to include domesticated animals into other legal categories such as “workers” or “members of the family” which carry with them social standing and social rights, even if not full legal personhood. Indeed, there is already some movement in this direction: the law is recognizing (some) animals as (rightsbearing) workers or family members, for at least some purposes, without having declared them to be persons. I call this the social recognition strategy, and argue that it has unexplored promise for advancing justice for animals, although it is not without its own dilemmas and limits. Meme si le droit des animaux a fait l’objet de reformes frequentes au Canada et a l’etranger, les fondements juridiques elementaires de l’oppression des animaux sont largement inchanges. De nombreuses raisons expliquent cette impasse, mais une partie de l’explication est que les reformes juridiques se heurtent a ce que l’on pourrait appeler le dilemme propriete–personnalite. Dans la plupart des systemes juridiques, les animaux domestiques sont definis comme etant des biens, et aussi longtemps que cela demeure, il est probable que les reformes soient marginales et inefficaces. Toutefois, la principale autre possibilite—accorder la personnalite aux animaux au lieu de les considerer comme des biens—est politiquement impossible, particulierement pour les animaux domestiques les plus intensivement exploites dans notre societe. Dans l’article, l’auteur explore une troisieme possibilite de reforme juridique : donner aux animaux domestiques un autre statut juridique, par exemple « travailleurs » ou « membres de la famille,» statuts qui comportent une position sociale et des droits sociaux, meme s’ils ne conferent pas la pleine personnalite juridique. On constate en effet qu’il existe deja un mouvement dans cette direction : la loi reconnait (certains) des animaux comme etant des travailleurs ou des membres de famille (jouissant de droits), au moins a certaines fins, sans avoir declare qu’ils sont des personnes. L’auteur appelle cela la strategie de reconnaissance sociale et avance que c’est un debut prometteur pour faire progresser la justice pour les animaux, quoique cette strategie comporte aussi ses dilemmes et ses limites.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it