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'agency' too). It may enable us to build accounts of ethical practice not from
transcendental universalist positions but from within the practice of encounters.
This may also offer a way out of the 'contractarian' foundation of some normative
ethical frameworks (see Regan 1998), as Davis (1996:51) describes:
The decoupling of responsibility from reciprocity has been described as the
decisive act which distinguishes Levinas's ethical theory from virtually all
others. It would be a mistake for me to respect the Other because I expect
anything in return: my obligation and responsibility are not mirrored by the
Other's reciprocal responsibility towards me.
Levinas's concern for the irreducibility of the other, for 'an account of alterity which
does not reduce the Other to the Same', seems to offer some potential in addressing
the otherness of non-humans, for he is concerned 'to elaborate a philosophy of self
and Other in which both are preserved as independent and self-sufficient, but in
some sense in relation with one another' (Davis 1996:51).
There is a need to open up unquestioned yet always situated encounters, as well
as opening up the unevenness of encounters in terms of the weak and patchy
normative ethics which do pronounce on the treatment of animals. This inevitably
leads to a confrontation with the immense diversity of the world in terms of material
and imagined spaces and places, and the practices therein, and with the vastly
divergent ethics of encounter embedded within these. The treatment of animals in
one form of situation or space would be deemed unethical in another form of space,
say between intensive factory farm units and zoos. But, beyond this, many human—
non-human interactions are ethically invisible in the normative sense. The partial
codes which do exist do not reach to these places with any clarity or force, and this
is particularly so of 'other spaces' and the spaces of
individual
non-human others.
Thus, the prediscursive ethics of these encounters remain unexamined; yet, if they
were to be so, they might be acknowledged as deeply unethical by existing
normative codes and therefore a matter of great concern.
The ethical invisibility of non-humans in normative ethics
Normative ethics can usually be considered as being ageographical, in that they are
dealing in the realm of the generalised and the universal. This is particularly so for
the bulk of ethical deliberations which have focused on human and intra-human
relationships. Those ethical conceptualisations which take the individual as a basic
ethical unit, and which try to construct normative frameworks that are
universal,
have had no need of geography, for there is no need or possibility for any spatially
based exceptions or variations to these ideas. Proctor (1998) stresses this apparent
incompatibility of geographical and ethical theorisation, pointing out that on those
occasions where geography has come at normative ethics and even meta-ethics from
a 'grounded, contextualised, and often concrete perspective', this has been
problematic because such approaches do not fit in with the style of most
