Just Like an Animal

Abstract

In ethics, comparisons between animals and cognitively disabled humans are sometimes taken to motivate animal rights. The arguments tend to suggest that because there are no morally significant differences between humans with some cognitive disabilities and animals, it is inconsistent to award a special moral status to the former but not the latter. This argument for moral patienthood simply groups cognitively disabled people with animals, and while one might want to defend obligations toward animals, such arguments come at the cost of regarding disabled people as persons. Todd Lekan uses William James’s work to suggest that there are morally significant reasons to question this grouping. Lekan emphasizes the salience James gives identity-forming relationships in accounting for moral significance. First, disabled persons and cognitively “typical” individuals form many different intersubjective relationships that are not reducible or perfectly analogous to human–animal relationships. Second, Lekan directs attention to intrasubjective, self-to-self, relationships between one’s “abled/independent” self and one’s “disabled/dependent” self. Attending to these kinds of relationships allows a response to the argument from marginal cases. More pointedly, it discloses various forms of marginalization. For instance, people who regard themselves as cognitively “normal” and thus independent might be disregarding their own dependence, reifying barriers between themselves and cognitively disabled people.