Descartes' Mistake

The biggest fight Descartes ever got into with his wife was when he nailed her dog to a board and started dissecting him while he was still conscious. I can just imagine the conversation. “Rene,” she says. “What ever are you thinking? He is howling and writhing in pain. How can you do such a thing?”
He puts down his scalpel for a moment and looks at her patiently.
“Also,” she says, “I’m rather fond of him. I do wish you’d ask before you nail my dogs to boards and dissect them.”
“Well,” he explains, “I thought you’d say no.”
“Well, you thought right.”
“But you see, my dear, you are a bit too sentimental. Dogs aren’t conscious. And I need to do this in the interest of science.”
“But Rene,” she says, “he is screaming in pain. Look at the fear in his eyes. He reacts the same way a human being would if you were doing that to them.”
“Really, my dear, you should try to see things more rationally. It is perfectly obvious that dogs aren’t conscious. They are just like machines. Every movement and sound they make is just like the motions of a clock.”
“Are you sure, Rene? How can you be so sure? It doesn’t seem obvious to me at all.”
“It is perfectly obvious. Because if dogs were conscious and could feel pain, it would be such a terrible thing for someone to come along and nail them to a board and slit them open with a knife that God would never allow it. But God does allow it. Therefore dogs aren’t conscious.”
“I don’t think I understand rationality,” she says.
“No, my dear, you don’t. That is for men of learning. Why don’t you go and make some tea?”

Descartes was sure that animals weren’t conscious because if they were, God wouldn’t allow humans to treat them as they do. And how did he know that God existed? Why, he had proved it, by reasoning that he would not be able to conceive of God if God did not exist.

To a lot of us, what Descartes did seems almost unbelievably monstrous. But his defense was that animals didn’t have minds and were not conscious. He believed that animal bodies were machines, and that humans were the only animals with minds and therefore consciousness. In fact he said very clearly that it would be such a terrible thing to do to a conscious being that he was sure God wouldn’t allow it. So if he had thought nonhuman animals were conscious, he would not have nailed a dog to a board and cut him open.

Most Nonhuman Animals Are Conscious

Scientists have come a little ways in the last 400 years. In 2012 the Cambridge Declaration on Animal Consciousness acknowledged that based on the scientific evidence, most nonhuman animals are conscious, including insects like bees, and that other mammals and birds experience similar states of consciousness to humans, with a similar ability to suffer and enjoy their lives.

That may sound a little weird to you. Scientists just figured this out in 2012? Doesn’t that seem to put them a little behind the curve from the rest of us? One biologist said that this has been so obvious for so long, even to scientists, that when he first read about the declaration he thought it was an article from The Onion.

What Does It Mean to Care About Animals?

Raise your hand if you would do what Descartes did. Now raise your hand if you just learned by way of the Cambridge Declaration that nonhuman animals are conscious.

Anyone?

OK, raise your hand if you’ve eaten a hamburger or chicken nuggets recently. Or if you’ve worn a jacket made out of an animal’s skin, or have a sofa upholstered with it.

Now keep your hand up if you think it’s okay to torture and kill another conscious creature for a trivial reason like entertainment, or say, to upholster your sofa with their skin, or because you like the taste of their body. Is it just me, or are these questions getting harder?

It’s not that we don’t care about animals. We clearly do, at least most of us. There are at least some laws against animal cruelty. And who wouldn’t help an injured bird if they saw her by the side of the road? Yet most of us eat birds who are bred to live lives full of suffering and then be killed. So we can eat them. Why does the suffering of the bird we don’t want to eat matter so much more to us than the suffering of the bird we do want to eat?

Is it because we can’t see what happens to her? Is it because we aren’t personally involved in abusing and killing her?
Is it lack of awareness? According to opinion polls, roughly 80% of people in the United States recognize that nonhuman animals have the same ability to feel pain and suffering as humans. Yet again and again there are court rulings in favor of farmers’ rights to treat animals cruelly if it is “necessary” in order to make a profit. As one judge sums it up: “An act which inflicts pain, even the great pain of mutilation, and which is cruel in the ordinary sense of the word” is permitted “whenever the purpose for which the act is done is to make the animal more serviceable for the use of man.”

According to one Gallup poll, an astounding 25% of people said they thought nonhuman animals should have the same rights as humans. Why, then, are most of those 25% of people still eating them?

Are Humans Benevolent or Evil?

In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott tells the following story:
“An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion, she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight.

“The next day he went to his parents and said that he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put in the girl’s IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, ‘How soon until I start to die?’” (p. 205)

One of the things that makes this story so touching is that it rings so true. We can all imagine a child like that. Many of us know people who are that way, even as adults. Most of us still have some of that in ourselves. So society’s terrible treatment of nonhuman animals can’t be explained by some baseness of human nature or inherent malevolence of human beings. Our everyday experiences tell us that most people are benevolent, even if only weakly so.

What is An Animal?

So what is going on? We know animals can suffer like humans do, and we think it matters. Most of us probably don’t know the kind of horrible treatment of farm animals the law allows, or realize that for economic reasons the animals raised for food can’t be treated much better if we are going to continue to mass produce (9 billion land animals a year in the U.S. alone) their bodies for food.

But we do know that we eat them. Why do we do it?

The explanation may be in our amazing ability to believe contradictory things at the same time. We know, when we are asked, that nonhuman animals suffer just like humans do. Yet we continue to be able to see them as not really beings worthy of moral consideration. Sometimes children are shocked when someone asks them if they eat animals. “No! Of course not!” they exclaim. Yet when you ask them if they are vegetarian, they say no. It turns out that many children don’t think of pigs and cows and chickens as animals. Only dogs and cats and hamsters and ferrets are animals.

Unfortunately, the Animal Welfare Act agrees. Farm animals were excluded from its coverage. Then, in 2002, that wasn’t good enough for some proponents of animal agriculture, and they succeeded in getting farm animals de-classified as animals. Farm animals are now explicitly excluded from the definition of “animal” in the Animal Welfare Act. All nine billion of them.

We love animals, especially eating them

A study in 2011 by a group of psychologists found that categorizing animals as food affected how people viewed the animals’ ability to suffer and also how worthy they were of moral concern.
“Most people love animals and love eating meat. One way of reducing this conflict is to deny that animals suffer and have moral rights. We suggest that the act of categorizing an animal as ‘food’ may diminish their perceived capacity to suffer, which in turn dampens our moral concern. Participants were asked to read about an animal in a distant nation and we manipulated whether the animal was categorized as food, whether it was killed, and human responsibility for its death. The results demonstrate that categorization as food – but not killing or human responsibility – was sufficient to reduce the animal’s perceived capacity to suffer, which in turn restricted moral concern. People may be able to love animals and love meat because animals categorized as food are seen as insensitive to pain and unworthy of moral consideration.”

This makes sense when we consider how cultures differ in which animal species they consider food and which they consider it disgusting and immoral to eat.

The animal food industry seems to have understood this for a long time, and taken it a step further by depicting animals not only as food, but as willing participants in this process, something that has been termed “suicide food” by some observers. There is more than one website devoted to this topic. The most well known one is the Suicide Food blog, where you can find depictions of pigs and chickens and lobsters cheerfully inviting you to eat them.
Why should we care about the suffering of animals?

Why Should We Care?

I have a friend who said, “I know animals suffer. I just don’t think it matters. I don’t think we should go out of our way to make them suffer, but I think it’s fine if they suffer as a result of us going about our business as humans.” This is an unusually honest and even callous attitude, and thankfully not many people share it. Opinion polls show that more than 90% of people think farm animals should be well treated.

But why should we care? How about for the same reason we care about humans: because they can suffer or enjoy their lives. Because their lives matter to them.

People sometimes argue that we shouldn’t care that much about nonhuman animals because they are stupid. Notice that the argument is simply this alleged stupidity alone, and does not account for the fact that intelligence has little to do with ability to suffer. There have been all kinds of attempts, even by well-meaning animal rights advocates, to prove that some animals are intelligent in the same ways humans are, to show that pigs and chickens are smarter than human toddlers. While this may be true, it’s really trying to solve the wrong problem. According to our laws and customs, and common sense, we don’t think intelligence is the measure of someone’s worth. We don’t think infants, the mentally handicapped, or senile people should be treated any worse than others. Even in the law, in which it is technically autonomy that matters, judges create “legal fictions” to protect the interests of humans who are not competent enough to be considered autonomous. So when we say, “Okay, maybe we should give the same moral consideration we give to humans to great apes and dolphins, maybe elephants and parrots, too; heck, maybe any animals that can pass the mirror test,” are we really being fair? We are holding them to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. Does that make any sense?

Descartes made a big mistake. He thought animals were not conscious. But we are making an even bigger mistake if we know they are conscious and pretend that it doesn’t matter. As Philip Low, one of the scientists behind the Cambridge Declaration on Animal Consciousness said shortly after going vegan, “We can no longer say we didn’t know.”