Friday, November 3, 2006

When animals think

A Metafilter post draws attention to a smattering of new research into animal consciousness, including an update of a Stanford study. This is an issue that has obvious ethical implications in a time when the global food economy relies heavily on animal products of various kinds. Whether it is morally permissible to slaughter animals for our pleasure, when alternate foods with the requisite nutritional value exist, might be thought to hinge on just how these creatures experience their own death.

In an essay called "Consider the Lobster," from the book of the same name, David Foster Wallace fretted over the cruel (?) fate of the tasty crustaceans, who, after being tricked into capture by a clever enter-only trap (have you seen how this works?), are routinely killed by being dunked head first into boiling water. Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a polarizing figure in ethical philosophy for a multitude of reasons, is by far the most prominent voice for animal rights in the academic world, and possibly in society as a whole.

Another reason to care about animal consciousness even if we think we aren't interested: As the Stanford essay begins to suggest, one important way we define what it means to be a person, and what it takes to be endowed with certain rights, is to distinguish between us and the "lower" animals. Why is it acceptable to kill a monkey (or is it?) and not a person? It's a harder question to answer than it might appear. Is it our capacity to feel pleasure and pain, our ability to to plan for the future, to have dreams, to carry out complex reasoning? But what if monkeys have all that, or have enough of it to trump a person in a vegetative state, or even an infant?

These and other questions might gain some clarity soon, as our science improves. To see where we are now, there's also an episode of the PBS program Nature, on the same topic.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:20 PM

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