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Simone Weil & Animal Suffering

Michela Dianetti & Chiara Li Mandri say non-human beings don’t need to be persons for us to care about them. Simone Weil offers another way.

In New Zealand, the Whanganui River is now a legal person with legal rights. In Argentina, a court recognised the orangutan Sandra as a ‘non-human person’. Campaigns are underway to extend similar recognition to whales, through the ‘I’m a person too’ movement launched at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice; to dolphins, such as the Bottlenose population near South Korea’s Jeju Island; and even to whole ecosystems. The logic is simple: if these entities are designated as persons in the eyes of the law, then their rights will be guaranteed by the law.

Simone Weil by Darren McAndrew

When environmentalists push to give rivers, whales, or forests legal personhood, the idea sounds both strange and promising. But when such legal recognitions take place, often things can get complicated. For example, four years ago, the Magpie River in Quebec was recognised as a legal person, with nine rights, including the right to be free from pollution and the right to flow. Despite this, a hydroelectric company still retains 80% of its water use until 2039, since gaining personhood does not automatically override laws already in place. The new rights exist within the previously established norms of a Western legal system with competing interests and a long tradition of human bias. So while the Magpie River has greater standing than before, this does not mean that it is safe from over-exploitation.

Acknowledging the good faith of these efforts, however, we ask: is treating entities in the non-human realm as legal persons the only way for us to care about them and respond to worsening ecological destruction?

The ‘ethics of attention’ developed by French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) offers another path. For Weil, the root of our moral responsibility towards other humans lies not in their agency or their individuality, but in vulnerability. To recognise the value and dignity of other people requires acknowledging the shared vulnerability we all experience. Weil called this a matter of attention: to truly see others as they are, in their independence from us, in their unique needs, and their finitude, without folding them into our own comforting narratives.

Take pigeons, for example. You might notice them approaching you while you sit in the sun, and immediately think of them as annoying animals invading your space, carriers of diseases, or thieves trying to snatch your dinner. In this way, they become little more than an outlet for your annoyance – something to blame as you move through a stressful day. Yet pigeons were once also used as companions, racers, and messengers, before humans abandoned them in favour of faster technologies. They still turn to us though, associating humans with food. To become aware of the needs of another in this sort of way is, for Weil, what allows a sense of obligation to emerge naturally. But if we applied Weil’s ethics of attention to the natural world, what would happen?

Consider our current condition: around the globe, habitats are being degraded, species are vanishing, and ecological systems are being pushed to their limits. Yet by narrowly framing environmental protection through imposing legal personhood, we risk cultivating a narrow and selective concern where only certain things – often the most charismatic animals or culturally significant landscapes – are granted recognition. A whale may easily be celebrated as a ‘non-human person’; but what of mosses, bogs, or insects, whose lives are no less entangled with ours? Moreover, the goal of granting personhood to non-human beings, adopted as a singular response to exploitation, risks reinforcing the very worldview that has brought us to ecological devastation in the first place – anthropocentrism, or the idea that only beings sufficiently like us are worthy of moral concern.

Weil’s approach, by contrast, resists this hierarchy of human significance, visibility or affection. For her, it is not beauty, usefulness, or symbolic weight to humanity that matters morally. Vulnerability itself creates the claim to moral consideration. The legal path of personhood, moreover, is inherently piecemeal. It proceeds entity by entity, and is negotiated differently across different countries and contexts, often involving long, drawn-out legal struggles. While such efforts open an important space for new forms of recognition, they also reveal the limitations of a rights-based framework for ecological protection, including that rights must be codified, debated, and defended in ways that can stall or fragment action. Moral obligations, on the other hand, generate a more immediate and holistic response: and for Weil they begin not with arguments over who or what qualifies, but with the type of attention they demand in the here and now.

Moving beyond personhood and rights, then, Weil invites us to recover the language of obligation. Not just obligations to individual beings who resemble us, nor to abstract categories of ‘rights holders’, but, extending her thought further, to all beings who are vulnerable, where this means subject to, and suffering, harm. Witnessing the vulnerability of a particular bog, bird, or river also engages us emotionally and thus also motivates the moral call to action. It requires that we acknowledge the possibility of a destruction of what is irreplaceable, or whose loss would otherwise impoverish our world as a whole.

As humanity confronts the accelerating climate crisis and the destruction of habitats worldwide, it’s worth asking whether granting ‘personhood’ to our landscapes and species is the best path forward. The crises we face are not only a matter of failing policies or weak enforcement, they’re also the result of a crisis of imagination and perception – the consequences of a perspective that treats non-human beings as resources, invisible unless useful. To respond well, we may need more than alternative political and moral frameworks. We may also need a different way of paying attention.

Michela Dianetti is a postdoctoral researcher in Philosophy at the University of Galway, funded by Research Ireland.

Chiara Li Mandri is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Palermo, and a visiting researcher at the University of Galway.