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Conclusions
The suggestion is that there are distinct and hidden geographies of ethical relations
between humans and non-humans. This geography of (un)ethical relations involves
the spaces and patterns by which we classify and act upon differing groups of animal
and other non-human others. Although individuals are generally ethically invisible,
the collective to which they are allocated will likely be in a distinct (un)ethical
relationship with human society, and thus the individual's ethical position will
differ from that of an individual in another group. Understandings of current human
—nature relations need to confront this issue. Not only does it show a complex rather
than simple terrain upon which we are trying to build, or to move away from, it also
demonstrates the deeply inconsistent and hypocritical relations that we currently
have with most non-human others.
There is a need to investigate these ignored geographies of the non-human world
and the fragmented unethical practices which abound there. It is only, as Lynn
(1998a) suggests, when these geographies are opened up that new ethical
developments can even be considered. Whatmore (1997:43) feels that constructing
new forms of ethical community will involve 'displacing the fixed and bounded
contours of ethical community', recognising instead the specific embodiment and
practice of ethical communities. This builds upon the recognition of 'an embodied
and practically engaged self…from what human beings do in the world…so as to
rediscover the totality of [his/her] practical bonds with others' (Kruks, in Whatmore
1997:43). Thus, there is embodiment and spatiality here which reflects the mistrust
of narrow, universal, abstractly conceived and applied objectivistic doctrines. This
spatiality may be the ground of neo-Aristotelian ethics (Thrift 1996:36), which is
'an active and practical form of ethics founded in an evaluative sensibility arising
from the concrete experience of specific situations'. Here the ethics of the encounter
are foregrounded, rather than lost. Understanding the spatiality of such encounters
and the unethical nature of their ethical content at present, the best of them and the
most horrible, has to play a part in this process. This returns us to an adapted
Levinasian ethics demanding 'some account of how, without universalisation, the
encounter with the Other can be at the foundation of a moral society' (Davis 1996:
52).
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Sarah Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne for comments on earlier
drafts of this chapter, and for the extremely detailed, thoughtful and encouraging
work of the two editors which has gone into the later drafts. All
remaining inadequacies rest with the author alone.
References
Agar, N. (1995) 'Valuing species and valuing individuals',
Environmental Ethics
17:397-415.
