What or Who Is an Animal? – Asking an Old Question in a New Way

Between May 15-16, at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, an international and interdisciplinary research project named “Contested Moral Framings: Human and Animal Life”, funded by AKTION, hosted a workshop titled “Toward an Understanding of Framing in Animal Ethics.”  The project investigates the framings of animals—how animal ethics texts themselves shape or attempt to shape our perceptions of animals, and what kinds of conceptual or narrative framings are employed, albeit only implicitly, in such texts.

The May workshop focused on developing a working definition of the term framing and sought to distinguish it from other terms that are often used interchangeably, including concepts, points of view, or representations. The hope was to clarify the extent to which the term framing is a valuable concept in animal ethics research and to ascertain whether it should be considered an umbrella term that subsumes various concepts. Another aim of the workshop was to understand how pervasive different framings of animals are in animal ethics and the ways in which they shape ordinary understandings of animals.

The orientation and focus of the workshop are part of an “unorthodox approach” to animal ethics. Orthodox approaches to animal ethics often involve drawing comparisons with humans and generally seek to provide guidance on how to treat animals. Unorthodox approaches regularly include the responses and critiques that followed the early period of animal ethics.

Animal ethics as a philosophical discipline has a relatively short history. Early pioneers – most notably Peter Singer and Tom Regan – gained momentum in the 1970s, advancing the revolutionary approach of moral individualism, showing that the way humans treat animals is based on a prejudice called speciesism, which systematically leads to the unjustified violation of the interests of sentient nonhuman animals. These pioneers were, however, quickly met with criticism, particularly from feminist and practice-oriented approaches, which argued that early animal ethicists distort our moral perception of humans and animals through abstract and narrowly rationalistic reasoning. As a result, contemporary animal ethics distinguishes between orthodox approaches of the early period and those who argue in their vein, and unorthodox responses or critiques that followed.

Therefore, unorthodox philosophical approaches, such as the one used in the workshop, tend to emphasize the “how” in questions such as “how do we perceive animals”? The question usually implies a perspective on animals that remains unexamined in itself—it does not reflect on the origins or conditions of that perspective.  The research group revisits key texts in animal ethics to track down these origins. To this purpose, this second workshop first focused on a working definition of framing to start working toward joint publications to represent the findings.

The event in May was the second workshop by the research group, several members of which are currently part of the Vienna Animal Studies group. “Contested Animal Framings” was founded in 2024 and is comprised of members from the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna (Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, Anna Rademann, Carlo Salzani, Erich Linder, Konstantin Deininger, Herwig Grimm), the University of Vienna (Tamara Janjuš), and the University of Pardubice (Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, Nina Collin, Lisa Hall, Niklas Forsberg). The first workshop was held in February 2025 at the University of Pardubice and participants discussed key texts from classical animal ethics which provided a solid basis for future discussions. A third workshop is scheduled for October 2025, again in Pardubice, and with the intent of examining the relationship between moral psychology and framing.

Enjoying something delicious at Bistro Deppat in Vienna