Abstract
This chapter argues that the systematic destruction of the more-than-human is not a betrayal of liberalism but follows from its fundamental assumptions. The character of the individual human subject who lies at the heart of liberalism’s ethical and political concerns structurally entails the foreclosure of the interests or conditions of flourishing of the more-than-human showing up as matters of justice. The chapter focuses on: the hierarchical dualisms embedded in liberalism that require that the more-than-human functions as means to (certain) human ends and be evacuated of all moral standing; the erasure of the ecological conditions within which all being and flourishing arise and are sustained; the erasure of the relationality that is the condition of the very autonomy liberalism holds sacrosanct; and the relegation of modes of being, philosophies and politics of peoples who do not accept these ontological and ethical commitments to ‘barbarism’. In the last part of the chapter, we consider the potential of transforming liberal institutions such as personhood and rights in ways that might achieve justice for the more-than-human.