Philosophy for Animals

The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan, Chapter 1: Animal Awareness

Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights is a foundational work of animal rights philosophy and starts out with the primary question of animal ethics: are animals other than humans conscious, and what basis do we have for this?

This chapter was honestly pretty confusing but I’ll do my best to summarize the main points of it.

The Cartesian View of Animal Consciousness

Though most modern people would ascribe some level of consciousness—by which we mean ability to have thoughts— to animals, René Descartes, of “I think, therefore I am” fame, did not.

We can observe animal behavior and reactions to stimuli, but there are two ways in which their behavior can be viewed:

1. The Mechanistic Alternative

This view of animal behavior postulates that actions performed by animals are unconscious responses to stimuli

2. The Non-mechanistic Alternative

In contrast, this theory postulates that animals are consciously thinking about and doing things.

Descartes believed that the Mechanistic alternative was a better explanation for animal behavior, while the Non-Mechanistic alternative better explained humans. Regan outlines two arguments Descartes might use to justify attributing consciousness to humans only:

1. Claim: Humans have consciousness because they have immortal souls, unlike animals
   • Rebuttal: This is a non-sequiter because there is nothing to suggest that having an immortal soul is required to be conscious. We don’t even have to disprove religion to criticize that argument
2. Claim: Humans have consciousness because they can use language, unlike animals.
   • Rebuttal: Not only does this basis for consciousness have ambiguous implications when it comes to humans who cannot learn language due to mental limitations, or when it comes to the consciousness status of a newborn who has not yet learned a language, for example, it also begs the question by assuming at the outset that there is a connection between using language and being conscious.

Human Chauvinism

According to Regan, the clear problem with the Cartesian view is that it cannot actually justify attributing animal behavior to the Mechanistic alternative while carving out an exception that humans along are conscious.

Regan uses the term human chauvinism to describe the belief that only humans are conscious while denying consciousness to any other animals.

So could it be possible that no one is conscious, and everyone is just an automaton? We could try to explore that possibility, but as Regan points out it is not relevant to moral philosophy.:

“If human beings do not experience pleasure and pain, for example, or do not prefer some things over others, or cannot make decisions and act intentionally, or are incapable of understanding what is involved in treating others with respect, then there would be nothing for ethical theory to be a theory of.”

We predicate everything in ethics on the assumption that humans are conscious.

Darwin and Parsimony

The principle of parsimony: the simplest explanation is usually the best one.

We know thanks to Darwin that we evolved alongside non-human animals, sharing common ancestors with them. We know that we share many physiological similarities with other animals. We know that humans are conscious, and that this property evolved in us. Therefore, it is simplest to assume that it evolved in at least some other animals too.

The rest of the chapter takes a detour into a discussion of Descartes dualism, which I didn’t find it super relevant to summarize here, and ends with Regan setting out what he called the Cumulative Argument for animal consciousness, which summarized the points made throughout the chapter.