© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156916410X509959 Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010) 267–280 brill.nl/rp Research in Phenomenology Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness Kelly Oliver Vanderbilt University Abstract he concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals—and other people—as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of dif- ference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our depen- dence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals. Keywords animal rights, ethics of difference, Derrida, Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty In recent philosophy, the dominant discourse on animals has centered on animal rights and animal welfare. Analytic philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan have led the conversation with calls for animal liberation and for considering animals’ interests. he Great Ape Project grew out of these con- cerns; and now several countries have adopted laws that go beyond outlawing cruelty to animals and toward animal liberation. he Great Ape Project has had some success in arguing that great apes are unique among animals in that they are our closest animal relatives and possess many of our defining charac- teristics and, therefore, should have special treatment among animals and equal treatment to people at least in terms of freedom and right to life. Asked about the exclusionary vision of he Great Ape Project, Jacques Derrida responded, “to want absolutely to grant, not to animals but to a certain category of animals, rights equivalent to human rights would be a disastrous