Paper short abstract:

The inclusion of the posthuman paradigm with One Health approaches presents challenges: what constitutes the ethics of health in a more-than-human environment? Compassion has been discussed as a possible candidate: my talk extends a posthuman discussion of compassion as a trans-special rhetoric.

Paper long abstract:

The inclusion of the posthuman paradigm with One Health approaches presents fundamental philosophical challenges: what constitutes the ethics of health in a more-than-human environment? (Melani & Blue 2020, Freise and Nuyts 2017). Contemporary times have seen an explosion in the discourse regarding more-than-human stakeholders, very often with expanding notions of legal rights and protections. How to make sense of other agents, and other stakeholders, in an entwined existence on planet earth? Compassion has been mentioned by several scholars (e.g. Wolfe 2010, Acampora 2006, Arnould-Bloomfield 2015, Chew 2014) as a possible candidate for navigating such issues. Yet, problematically, the scholarship thus far approaches compassion via a Western philosophical sense, discussing it solely as a product of humans. Rather, as I discuss, we can bring in both indigenous views and emerging data from ethology to show how compassion is not limited to humans: it seems instead an essential part of much of life on earth, including (but not limited to) human and other-than-human linkages and folk groups (e.g. Haraway 2003). As in the tale of the Lion and the Mouse (ATU 156), the rhetoric of compassion allows a truly posthuman approach towards navigating inter-special ethics, as well as allowing us to understand some of the unique folk groups, including interspecial folk groups, that can arise via this powerfully motivating force.