Animals as Persons and Why It Matters

This book has been a protracted case in worst-case scenario philosophy. Assume the absolute worst about animals, and the most stringent conception of a person imaginable, and then argue that animals still qualify as persons. Some of the limitations of this strategy are identified. If animals are persons, it changes the way we think about our obligations to them. The principal change is from a treatment paradigm to a listening paradigm. In a treatment paradigm, the primary question is how we should treat them. This is an inadequate way of understanding our obligations to persons. For persons, prior to the question of how we should treat them is the necessity of listening to them: of learning to ask them the right questions and make ourselves capable of understanding their response.

The Ghost of Clever Hans

According to the problem of other animal minds, claims to know anything about the minds of animals suffer from serious problems of justification. These problems parallel the problem of other human minds. Inferentialist approaches argue that the justification lies in the appropriate form of inference. These approaches are inadequate for a variety of reasons. Direct perception approaches claim our access to the minds of animals is, in some cases, perceptual. A novel form of the direct perception account is defended. This is based on three ideas: (a) a distinction between seeing and seeing that, (b) a distinction between formal and functional descriptions of behavior, and (c) the idea that functional descriptions of behavior are (often) disguised psychological descriptions. If we wish to have any useful descriptions of animal behavior, we must accept that we can often see their mental states.

Beyond the Looking Glass

Standard ways of thinking about self-awareness in animals—the mirror test and the debate over metacognition—assume self-awareness must take an intentional form, where a bodily or psychological facet of an individual is taken as an intentional object of a mental act of that same individual. There are several reasons for supposing that this intentional model of self-awareness is inadequate. These include Wittgenstein’s analysis of the idea of knowing one is in pain, Shoemaker’s arguments that much self-awareness is immune to error through misidentification, and Perry’s argument for the non-eliminability of an indexical component of self-awareness. These cases show that, in self-awareness, what one is aware of is often not independent of the act of awareness, and this is something that cannot be accommodated by the intentional model.

Rational Animals

There are no good reasons for denying that animals are rational, and many good reasons for thinking that they are. Many animals have displayed impressive capacities for causal reasoning. And some animals have displayed the ability to engage in logical reasoning operations such as modus tollendo ponens. The common reasons that have been used to deny logical reasoning capacities to animals rest on a series of clear confusions concerning the nature of logical inference and what it is to engage in such inference. It is likely that many animals execute logical inferences in the way humans would if they had not developed external formal structures to scaffold the reasoning processes.

Self-Awareness and Persons

Since there are two forms of self-awareness, there is question concerning which is relevant, or most relevant, in the formation of the person. The relevance of self-awareness in the formation of the person consists in the role it plays in underwriting the unity of a mental life. Intentional self-awareness is incapable of doing this. Appeal to the apparatus of intentional act and object presupposes the unity of a mental life and, therefore, cannot explain it. Pre-intentional self-awareness is much more promising as a candidate for underwriting the unity of a mental life. The identity of the person is imprinted on the content of each mental act of which he is pre-intentionally aware. Thus, to whom the act belongs is part of the content of the mental act. This can explain the unity of a mental life.

Tracking Belief

Problems in attributing beliefs to animals stem from the fact that the contents (of beliefs and desires) used in such attribution are anchored to humans. This chapter spells out a de-anchoring strategy. The result of this is that it can be appropriate to explain the behavior of an animal using contents that only humans can entertain as long as our contents track theirs. That is: (a) the truth of a belief with our content guarantees the truth of their belief, and (b) our belief and theirs share narrow content. This is important not just in the case of animals. There are good reasons for thinking that tracking begins at home. There are no stable belief contents shared by different humans or even attaching to a single human through time. Content must be de-anchored in order to make sense of ourselves as well as other animals.

Consciousness in Animals

An animal is phenomenally conscious if there is something it is like to be that animal. There are excellent scientific reasons for thinking that many animals are phenomenally conscious. In humans, consciousness is strongly correlated with widespread, relatively fast, low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical region of the brain. When the brains of many animals are examined, precisely this sort of activity in these areas is found. The primary philosophical objection to the idea that animals are phenomenally conscious is based on the higher-order thought (HOT) model of consciousness, according to which mental state is conscious when, and only when, the individual who has it is conscious of it. The HOT account suffers from a number of fatal difficulties.

Other-Awareness

Other-awareness is the ability to recognize another as minded. This sort of ability is usually identified with mindreading: the ability to attribute mental states to another and use this attribution to predict and/or explain his or her behavior. It is unclear whether animals have mindreading abilities. However, even if they do not, there is another way of being aware of the mindedness of another. Just as there is a pre-intentional form of self-awareness, so too is there a pre-intentional form of other-awareness. In pre-intentional self-awareness, one is aware of oneself in virtue of being aware of something else in a certain way. In pre-intentional other-awareness, one is aware of the other in virtue of being aware of oneself in a certain way. Arguments are presented for the claim that many animals can be pre-intentionally other-aware.

In Different Times and Places

The idea of pre-intentional self-awareness is extended to incorporate awareness of one’s mental states or acts and of the “lived” body. The temporal parameters of pre-intentional self-awareness are also extended by way of a detailed consideration of episodic memory in animals. Whether animals are capable of such memory is controversial, due to our inability to determine whether they represent past episodes in the right way. Even if animals cannot episodically remember, they still have pre-intentional awareness of themselves through time. This pre-intentional awareness of the self through time consists in a sense of familiarity, which is explained in parallel with perception: in terms of a generated series of anticipations in which the person who remembers is implicated.

Pre-Intentional Awareness of Self

In pre-intentional self-awareness, a person is self-aware without making herself into an object of any intentional act. The idea of pre-intentional self-awareness is examined through a historical lens provided by Kant and Sartre. The idea is further developed analytically. A perceived object is always perceived as something. This occurs because a series of anticipations are generated in the perceiver. The perceiver is implicated in many of these anticipations. In perceiving an object, therefore, the perceiver is pre-intentionally self-aware. A de-intellectualized way of understanding pre-intentional self-awareness is identified and defended. Pre-intentional self-awareness attaches to the possession of conscious experiences. To the extent animals have conscious experiences, therefore, they will, thereby, be pre-intentionally self-aware. Pre-intentional self-awareness is likely to be widely distributed through the animal kingdom.