Human Interactions With Nonhuman Animals Should Be

Human interactions with nonhuman animals should be guided solely by the impact of these interactions with other human beings, and not upon any perceived impact upon nonhuman animals themselves. This argument is based largely upon Descartes' understanding of the essential difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Descartes' argues that the body is external to the mind, and that non-human animals do not possess the pure, thinking mind of humans. Thus, Descartes argues that nonhuman animals are simply machines, and that human treatment of animals should only be guided by the impact of such interaction upon other humans. In contrast, thinkers like Anthony Weston have argued that similarity of human and animal perception and experience means that human should treat animals as feeling beings. Similarly, Abram argues that the human connection with the natural world should govern our interaction with animals. Descartes' arguments for the uniqueness of human thought essentially counter both of these arguments.

The Arguments of Descartes and Abram

Descartes' arguments about the nature of the world and nonhuman animals rest strongly on his underlying philosophy that the body is external to the mind. Through this argument, he notes that all that we can ever truly know about the world comes from our own thoughts. As such, humans learn about the external universe through a priori knowledge within our mind (Palmer).

To Descartes, the world was divided into the pure, thinking mind that was possessed solely by humans and unthinking, mechanical matter that was possessed by animals, plants, minerals, and the human body. In Animals are Machines, Descartes notes, "there are (no humans) so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts, while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same." As a result of the human ability to think, Descartes argued that humans alone (and not animals) were able to feel the mechanical sensations of the body (Abram).

In contrast to humans, Descartes felt that "all other organisms, consisting solely of extended matter, are in truth nothing more than automations, incapable of actual experience, unable to feel pleasure or suffer pain" (Abram). In Animals are Machines, Descartes argues that the behaviors observed in animals can be easily explained to be automatic and mechanical in nature. Thus, animal behavior can be explained without ascribing thought and consciousness to animals. Given that the principle of parsimony dictates that the best answer is the simplest answer, Descartes asserts that nonhuman animals are simply machines made up an intricate assembly of individual parts.

In The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abram draws a fundamentally different picture of the human relationship to nonhuman animals, plants, and natural objects such as rivers and mountains. Abram argues that the development of human language created an abstract world that falsely caused a disconnection between humans and the natural world. Thus, Abram essentially argues that Descartes' dichotomy of mind and body (which are at the root of his belief that animals are purely mechanistic in nature) resulted from a great, and false, disconnect between humanity and the rest of nature. In contrast, Abram argues that the human mind and body stem from a larger connection with the natural world, and continue to depend on the reciprocal interaction with the larger natural world.

Treatment Nonhuman Animals

Descartes argument that animals are little more than intricate machines logically led to his conclusion that humans have little responsibility to nonhuman animals. To Descartes, humans would have no more responsibility to a cat or dog than they would have to a piece of machinery such as a dishwasher or car. Any responsibility that humans would have to animals or the natural world would rest only on how the treatment of animals or the natural world would impact other human beings.

Others, however, have persuasively argued that humans and animals are equal in perception and experience, thus leading to the conclusion that humans should relate to nonhuman animals on the basis that animals share many human feelings and perceptions. In Back to Earth: Tomorrow's Environmentalism, Anthony Weston argues that humans are essentially connected to, and part of, the larger word. He notes that humans must set aside our beliefs that we are superior to other forms of life, and that the human experience is central to the world. Weston argues that we must reconnect with the earth, and reconnect with greater nature through our senses. In essence, Weston argues strongly against Descartes' dichotomy between humans and the rest of the natural world. Weston's argument for connection with the larger world ultimately presupposes that animals and humans are equal in our experience and perceptions.

Descartes' argument that the uniqueness of human thought as the basis of a dichotomy between humans and animals is ultimately essential to countering this assumption. In Animals are Machines, Descartes notes persuasively that there is no clear evidence that supports thought in animals. Instead, the behaviors of animals can be easily explained away by pure mechanistic actions.

Similarly, Abrams argues that an understanding of human language as abstract, which Descartes thought to be clear evidence of human thought not shared by animals, is essentially a false understanding of human communication. Writes Abrams, "by overlooking the sensuous, evocative dimension of human discourse, and attending solely to the denotative and conventional aspect of verbal communication, we can hold ourselves apart from, and outside of, the rest of animate nature" (p. 79). Abrams argues that this is a false dichotomy, as human language is deeply denotative and linked to affective meaning and sensation, thus meaning that Descartes' dichotomy between human thought and animal thought was essentially false, and that human treatment of animals built on this false dichotomy was essentially erroneous.