Educated Folly About Animal Minds and Animal Suffering

Abstract

In the 1600s physiologists were beginning to understand the functioning of the major organs of the body and the circulation of the blood. James Rachels tells us how these rapid and exciting advances were achieved by experimental procedures which subjected animals to excruciating tortures: Dogs, for example, would be restrained by nailing their paws to boards, and then would be cut open so that the working of their innards could be observed. This was long before the development ofanaesthetics, and the dogs' vocal cords would sometimes be cut so that their shrieks would not disturb the anatomists. 1 Many thought that nonhuman animals (hereafter simply 'animals') did not deserve any sympathy because traditional morality, grounded in Aristotle and Aquinas, made typically human rationality the criterion ofmoral standing. The capacity to experience pain was not sufficient to confer moral standing. But should one nevertheless have had doubts about animals' cries of agony and writhing in pain on the experimenters' boards, there was always Deseartes (1596-1650) to comfort one. He argued that animals only had bodies but no minds. They were machines without conscious mental states and incapable even of feeling pain. Humans, however, comprised two separate entities, not only a machine-like body but also an immaterial mind, and were therefore capable of thought and feeling. Today a Cartesian view of animals as feelingless automata might seem completely counter-intuitive or contrary to common sense. But why would we, who have much the same physiological evidence for animal pain as our seventeenth-century predecessors, bold more humane views? First, between about 1500 and 1800 an alternative, more humane, tradition to that of Aristotelian-Thomian rationality and the Cartesian machine model ofanimals emerged in England and parts ofwestern Europe among lay people and scientists alike. So it would be wrong to think that our modern sensibilities towards animals and the natural world had no historical roots in the very time that the tradition of typically human rationality and the machine model were at their height.2 Second, between Descartes and us came Darwin (1809-1882) wbo lowered humans from their pedestal of uniqueness and dignity and demonstrated