In a recent lecture at the Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions, Donovan Schaefer, Departmental Lecturer in Science and Religion at University of Oxford, used affect theory to explore the invisibility of pain in humans and nonhuman animals. Professor Schaefer presented a compelling framework for understanding how the pain of nonhuman animals should not be overlooked.
The word religion derives from the Latin word religiō which means to tie or bind. Scholars of religion, just like scholars of law, are interested in the bonds that hold society together. Nonhuman animals are usually regarded as excluded from that bond. As Professor Schaefer argued, many of the ties that bind us aren’t legal or logical, but rather affective. Nonhuman animals, like humans, inhabit pre-linguistic experiential worlds that are shaped by deep registers of affect.
There is a wide variety of suffering that the law generally speaking doesn’t take into consideration, such as that inflicted by the practice of solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system. And much like human solitary confinement, the confinement of the animals used in industrial agriculture and other animal industries produces extreme psychological torment.
“By graduating beyond the notion that animals are automata, by giving them back richness, by giving them worlds, we also open a new avenue to understanding animal pain—not to mention the many forms of human pain we cause and sweep out of sight,” said Professor Schaefer. “By numbing ourselves to the vital necessity of all the fascinations, desires, sensations, affects, and hopes that make up our lifeworlds, we become insensate to the regimes of pain that arise through the amputation of bodies from the worlds that sustain them.” We must therefore consider the ethical implications of the confinement of all beings. Depriving living beings of access to their lifeworlds does more than infringe upon their rights to bodily liberty and bodily integrity.
This lecture was organized by the Animals, Law, and Religion (ALR) Project in the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, and was co-sponsored by the Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religion. It was moderated by Harvard Divinity School Professor Kimberly Patton. The ALR is an inter-disciplinary and comparative project that works at the intersection of religious laws and practices and animal welfare and rights. The project focuses on both the academic study of how religious laws and practices deal with animals and on the practical implications of such laws and practices in communities around the world.
Natalie K. Prosin is the Project Manager of the Animals, Law, and Religion Project in the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School.