From Common Humanity to Sentient Commonality: Pragmatic Sociology and the Moral Worth of Nonhuman Animals

This article critically examines French pragmatic sociology and how it can operate as an analytical framework for understanding human–animal relations. While pragmatic sociology specifically accounts for nonhuman elements, it grounds its approach in the notion of common humanity, which excludes nonhuman animals. After identifying this tension, the article contrasts common humanity to the critique animal rights theorizing has directed at such humanistic starting points. This alternative form of commonality, promoted by animal rights, is based on sentience. Instead of focusing on various nonhumans in general, commonality based on sentience focuses on the shared capacities between humans and nonhuman animals. Following this, the article examines how the boundaries of such sentient commonality are demarcated and how sentience could operate in situational justifications. The article concludes that pragmatic sociology holds the potential to work as a promising analytical framework for analyzing human–animal relations if it can account for this new form of commonality.