SPECIESISM AS IDEOLOGY? SPECIES BIAS IN THOUGHT AND PRACTICE

Ideology has been conceptualized within a Marxian framework that challenges exploitation of humans by other humans. Thus, ideology is often understood as a veil that precludes the exploited from knowing, acknowledging, recognizing, and contesting the conditions of such exploitation. In this context, even if the oppression of non-human animals by humans has been acknowledged, ideology has seldom been conceptualized across the human-animal divide. Thus, it could be argued that there is a veil that prevents the recognition of oppression and violence toward non-human animals. We claim that such a veil can be conceived from the perspective of two distinct, but complementary, philosophical approaches: social epistemology and deconstruction. Social epistemology tackles social constructions and cultural scripts that impede our knowledge, understanding, and experience of non-human animal sentience, pain, and oppression. Deconstruction, in turn, sees speciesism mainly as based on logocentrism, namely, on a philosophical perspective that construes moral and political hierarchies based on the possession of reason and discourse. Together, social epistemology and deconstruction can help us identify and challenge speciesism as an ideology with consequences for how humans think and act toward other animals, as well as toward humans who are animalized.