23 Facts About Sentientist Politics

1.

Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice is a 2018 book by the English political theorist Alasdair Cochrane, published by Oxford University Press.

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2.

Research for Sentientist Politics was funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, and work on international intervention on behalf of animals was conducted with Steve Cooke.

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3.

Sentientist Politics was published on 30 October 2018, with a launch event at the University of Sheffield.

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4.

Sentientist Politics was the subject of a symposium in the journal Politics and Animals, and praised by commentators for its readability, strength of argument, and ambition.

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5.

Consequently, though Sentientist Politics was not the first scholarly work extending cosmomopolitan theory to animals, it was the first monograph dedicated to doing so.

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6.

At the time, the working title for Sentientist Politics was Beastly Cosmopolitanism: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice.

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7.

Sentientist Politics was published on 30 October 2018 by Oxford University Press.

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8.

Sentientist Politics opens with the assumption that some animals are sentient and thus have moral value, and that this has political consequences.

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9.

Sentientist Politics acknowledges that some theorists will seek to go further than rejecting humanism, and argue that all living entities warrant political protection; nonetheless, he sees something "special" about sentience.

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10.

Sentientist Politics defends the claim that all sentient animals possess equal moral worth against the possibility that humans have greater worth than animals and the possibility that persons have greater worth than non-persons.

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11.

Sentientist Politics argues that existing and potential international law protects animals, while other sources of internationally recognised animal rights could be human-rights regimes.

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12.

Symposium on Sentientist Politics was published in the journal Politics and Animals in 2019, based on the comments made at the 2018 launch event.

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13.

Sentientist Politics's called the book's presentation of sentientist cosmopolitan democracy "deeply thought out, beautifully articulated, and carefully constructed in relation to the existing literature, [while] new, refreshing, innovative, and boundary breaking".

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14.

Sentientist Politics's argued that, for Cochrane, the realisation of cosmopolitan values is not a precondition of animals' rights being respected; it is simply a theory he chose.

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15.

Sentientist Politics suggested that Sentientist Politics might offer the political theory needed by advocates of intervention in nature to reduce wild-animal suffering, but questioned what relations with wild animals might look like in Cochrane's cosmopolitan sentientist democracy.

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16.

Sentientist Politics was reviewed by Tore Fougner, a scholar of international relations, for Global Policy, the political theorist Robert Garner for Perspectives on Politics; the philosopher Kyle Johannsen for the Journal of Moral Philosophy, the philosopher Federico Zuolo for Constellations, and the legal theorist John Adenitire for Jurisprudence.

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17.

Sentientist Politics endorsed Cochrane's call for animals to be taken seriously in political science, and suggested that Sentientist Politics could be important for both research and teaching in that area.

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18.

Adenitire, Sentientist Politics was "clear, succinct and, most of all, unapologetically ambitious".

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19.

Sentientist Politics argued that the book's value was not dependent on the merits of the particular claims Cochrane makes, but on revealing "the possibility of radically reimagining our political and legal order in a way that does not suffer from speciesism".

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20.

Sentientist Politics, Adenitire believed, stood apart from the work of Donaldson and Kymlicka or Robert Garner for lawyers for offering the foundations of what Adenitire termed Sentientist Constitutionalism: an area of enquiry aiming "to imagine, outline and defend what a liberal constitutional theory committed to the equal moral status of human and non-human animals would look like".

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21.

Johannsen argued that, despite first appearances, Sentientist Politics did leave considerable room for contextual considerations.

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22.

Sentientist Politics questioned whether it was plausible that communities refusing to intervene in nature be subject to coercive intervention.

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23.

Sentientist Politics, Cochrane was awarded the 2019 Susan Strange Best Book Prize by the British International Studies Association .

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