Anti-anthropocentric Humanism: On the Emergence of Personhood for Animals and Nature

In the early 1970s, Christopher Stone and Peter Singer influentially rejected the anthropocentrism of liberalism, contending that animals and nature deserved moral and legal consideration independent of humans. This article historicizes the emergence of nonhuman personhood by showing how they and other writers attempted to dismantle liberalism’s anthropocentrism at a dynamic time in humanist politics. Writers asserted nonhuman personhood as a continuation of 1960s liberation movements, employing the narrative of a “natural” extension of rights and equality from marginalized humans to nonhumans. This determinism, however, obscured nonhumans’ specific inability to make political claims. Drawing on the incipient 1970s human rights movement, writers circumvented this problem of political agency by emphasizing nonhumans’ capacity to suffer. Suffering allowed humans to see themselves in nonhumans and thus recognize their personhood. This turn to empathetic identification as the driver of historical change inaugurated an anti-anthropocentric humanism that extended personhood beyond humanity but reinscribed a more fundamental distinction between those able and those unable to make political claims. Drawing on both 1960s challenges to humanism and 1970s humanist preoccupation with suffering, anti-anthropocentric humanism preserved the very limitations of liberal politics into a new definition of personhood that effaced political agency from both personhood and history.