page_title: Alasdair Cochrane
section_title: Liberty thesis
hierarchical_section_title: Alasdair Cochrane / Research / Liberty thesis
caption_attribution_description: English: Political theorist Robert Garner at the MANCEPT Workshops, 2013, at the University of Manchester. Professor Garner spoke on ideal versus non-ideal theory in animal liberation ethics. He was aware that I was taking the picture, and for what it would be used.
context_page_description: Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently a senior lecturer in political theory in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation. His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Cochrane is a Sentientist. Sentientism is a naturalistic worldview that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.
  Cochrane's work forms part of the political turn in animal ethics—that is, the emergence of academic literature exploring the normative aspects of human/nonhuman animal relationships from a political perspective.
context_section_description: Cochrane's "liberty thesis" is that nonhuman animals—with the possible exception of some great apes and cetaceans—do not have an intrinsic interest in freedom. Nonetheless, Cochrane claims, nonhuman animals may often have an extrinsic interest in freedom. This is because restricting a nonhuman animal's freedom may result in its suffering, and, regardless of their interest in freedom, sentient animals possess an interest in not suffering. Schmidt summarises Cochrane's argument as the following:
  P1: To have a moral right to freedom, one needs to have a sufficient intrinsic interest in freedom.
  
  P2: To have a sufficient and intrinsic interest in freedom implies that freedom by itself contributes to a person's wellbeing.
  
  P3: Only in case of autonomous persons does freedom contribute by itself to their wellbeing (because only for autonomous persons does unfreedom undermine the ability to 'frame and pursue
  their own conception of the good').
  
  P4: Non-human animals are not autonomous persons.
  
  C1: Therefore, freedom does not by itself contribute to the wellbeing of non-human animals.
  
  C2: Therefore, non-human animals do not have an intrinsic interest in freedom.
  
  C3: Therefore, non-human animals do not have a moral right to freedom.
  Though Cochrane argues that nonhuman animals are not the victim of an injustice simply because they are owned, he claims that ownership of an animal must be understood as not entailing absolute control over said animal. He conceptualises owned animals as "individual sentient creatures with interests of their own". In understanding owned animals in this way, he challenges alternative accounts that frame owned animals variously as living artifacts, slaves, co-citizens or beings who have strategically situated themselves alongside humans. In Animal Rights Without Liberation, Cochrane argues that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with using or owning animals, and so, as long as their interests are respected, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with using them, for example, in scientific tests, or for agricultural purposes. Ahlhaus and Niesen characterise the book as a whole as a critique of Singer's Animal Liberation, saying that the former explores the latter's "undeclared premise that liberation is what animals want or need".
  Schmidt criticises Cochrane's liberty thesis on the grounds that nonhuman animals may have a non-specific instrumental interest in freedom, meaning that although freedom is not intrinsically valuable for these animals, it may be that they can achieve other things that are intrinsically valuable only through possessing freedom. Thus, Cochrane's thesis underestimates the value that freedom could have for nonhuman animals. Hadley criticises Cochrane's non-pragmatic approach, arguing that Cochrane, as an animal advocate, is wrong to deny that nonhuman animals possess an "intrinsic" interest in freedom. Hadley links freedom to the value of nonhuman animals, arguing that the latter can be undermined by arguing against the former. Garner criticises Cochrane's thesis on the grounds that Cochrane has, Garner claims, underestimated the weight of the argument from marginal cases. To the extent that Cochrane's argument works for nonhuman animals, Garner suggests, it will also work for many humans, leading to counter-intuitive consequences. Garner ties autonomy not merely to liberty, but also life, which means that Cochrane's argument would imply that some humans have less of an interest in life than others. Nonetheless, Garner argues that Cochrane's liberty thesis is not destructive of animal rights, and that animal rights positions can still make claims of significance without endorsing the claim that nonhuman animal use is, in itself, problematic. Indeed, merely a right against suffering, Garner suggests, could go a long way towards achieving the abolitionist goal of the end of animal industry. All three authors praise Cochrane for drawing attention to the previously under-examined issue.
  The abolitionist theorist Jason Wyckoff draws attention to Cochrane's argument that nonhuman anim
caption: Robert Garner (pictured) criticises Cochrane for underestimating the force of the argument from marginal cases in his claims about liberty, but nonetheless suggests that an account of animal rights without a right to freedom could make significant progress for nonhuman animals.
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