Review
of Mark Rowlands, Can Animals Be Persons?
Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0190846039. Hardcover, $29.95 U.S. 232
pages.
Seven
years after the provocative Can Animals
Be Moral?, Mark Rowlands comes back with another unorthodox position: many
animals are persons. In Can Animals Be
Persons? Rowlands does a great job showing that whether animals can be
persons is no more puzzling a question than whether humans are persons. What is
a person anyway? “What is a person?” is not the sort of question that can be
answered by simply appealing to a dictionary definition of the terms in
question. Nor can one appeal to common sense. While the book presents highly
sophisticated and dense argumentation, Rowlands manages to make the reader
comfortable and enjoy the ride. One thing that is evident is that Rowlands had
lots of fun writing this book. No doubt, Can
Animal Be Persons? advances our understanding of animal minds and gives new
life to the field of animal ethics. If this book does not make you see that
animals are persons, I do not know what will.
In
the first chapter, Rowlands begins by showing the ambiguities regarding the
notion of personhood. The first ambiguity has to do with the fact that the term
‘person’ has at least three senses: legal, moral, and metaphysical. As Rowlands
notes, legally speaking, corporations, organizations, and various objects are
recognized as persons. Yet, the law does not consider animals as persons. In
fact, the prevalent view among philosophers and scientists is that animals are
not persons. In the past, women, slaves, children, Native Americans, and others
were not regarded as persons. Nowadays, they are, and the debate has shifted toward
animals. Typically, the argument that excluded animals from being legal persons
can be expressed with the slogan, “no rights without responsibilities.”
However, many individuals, such as marginal cases (the senile, infants,
individuals with severe mental disabilities), are recognized as legal persons
despite their not being able to think about legal principles and without their
having legal responsibilities. It would seem a double standard, therefore, to
exclude animals forthright on the basis of the
no-rights-without-responsibilities argument.
Whether
animals can be moral persons is a question analogous to the legal question.
Namely, the argument against it is that to be a moral person, one must
understand morality, must be capable of making moral judgments, and have moral
responsibilities. Here Rowlands points out that many humans lack those
capabilities and yet we do not want to say that they are not moral persons. If
this is not good enough, you may take a copy of Can Animals Be Moral? And see for yourself how Rowlands defends
this thesis.
The
most challenging question, thus, is whether animals can be metaphysical
persons. By metaphysical person, Rowlands simply means an individual who has
intentionality, is self-conscious, has a language, has emotion, and many other
characteristics that are taken to describe a person. Rowlands’ strategy is to
try to identify certain mental characteristics that only persons possess and then
determine whether animals possess such characteristics by virtue of which they qualify
as persons in the metaphysical sense.
Drawing
from different philosophers, Rowlands comes up with four conditions that one
must satisfy to be a person:
1.
Being conscious.
2.
Being able to learn, solve problems, and reason.
3.
Being self conscious or self-aware.
4.
Being able to recognize other persons as such.
The
first condition is the easiest to satisfy. Rowlands points out that besides
being commonsensical that animals are conscious, there is an ever-growing body
of scientific evidence that such is the case. The second is not difficult to
satisfy either. For, many animals learn, reason, and solve problems. Rowlands
discusses the ways in which animals can engage in causal and logical reasoning
in chapter 5. Self-awareness is a tricky one, which is discussed in chapter 6.
The
fourth requirement is discussed in terms of having the capacity to communicate,
which many animals possess. Thus the question of whether animals can be persons
is broken down into four questions: (1) Can animals be conscious? (2) Can
animals engage in reasoning? (3) Can animals be self-aware, and (4) Can animals
recognize others as persons?
The
question of animal personhood, then, hinges on the (old) question of mind. The
assumption is that minds are hidden from us. Thus, if we want to determine
whether there are minds, the way that scientists and philosophers go about
figuring this out is in terms of an inferentialist approach. One can infer
other minds by using an analogical inference, that is, I have a mind, and since
others are like me in many respects, it follows that others have minds. This is
a non-starter for Rowlands, who suggests that an analogical inference is not a
very helpful method for determining other human minds, and by the same token it
must also be unhelpful for determining other animal minds. Another inference is
to the best explanation. According to this type of inference, I can
legitimately infer from the behavior of other humans that they have a mind.
However, even if this type of inference works for other human minds, then it
would have to work for other animal minds. The best explanation of animals’
behavior, language, and social life, is that they have a mind. Ultimately, Rowlands
argues that the inferentialist solution of the problem of human minds does not
work.
We
have, according to Rowlands, a direct experience of other human minds and a
complete certainty of this fact, and our empirical evidence of other human
minds is more certain than our inferences. The position that Rowlands endorses
with respect to other minds is a direct perception view, something he borrows
from Wittgenstein, who believed that “The human body is the best picture of the
human soul” (Philosophical Investigations,
Part II, p. 178). The direct perception view that Rowlands employs is a very
interesting one and has three steps. First he introduces a distinction between
seeing and seeing that; second is a
distinction between formal and functional descriptions of behavior; third he
argues that functional descriptions of behavior are disguised psychological
descriptions. These three steps combined lead to the conclusion that “we can
often see the mental states of animals” (p. 38).
Rowlands
illustrates the distinction between seeing and seeing that by giving an example of a tornado. Typically one might say
that he has seen a tornado. To be precise, it is not the tornado itself that is
being seen, but rather its effects, i.e., rotating objects, dirt, water, and so
on. Regarding behavior, it is not always possible to tell the nature of a behavior
simply by looking at it; nevertheless, the behavior is visible, just like a
tornado is visible. In other words, a behavior can be functionally described.
Functionalism
is a theory of mind that argues that the mind can be explained in terms of its
function regardless of the shape, form, or material composition of a being. (This
is the best I can do in a sentence. For more information see the article
“Functionalism,” Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/functism/.) Rowlands employs functionalism to explain the
behavior of animals, arguing that functional descriptions are none other than
“disguised mental or psychological descriptions” (p. 41). It is the way we take
the world to be that explains our behavior. In other words, the functional
descriptions of the behavior of animals are not psychologically neutral;
rather, they reveal cognitive attitudes of a being, in this case animals. Using
Rowlands’ example, when a dog performs a play bow to initiate play, we cannot
see that the dog is initiating play but
we can see the dog doing it – that is, we see psychological states of the dog.
As Rowlands puts it, then, “If we want any sort of illuminating science of
animal behavior, we should acknowledge that our primary access to the minds of
animals is not through inference but through perception” (p. 46). This,
Rowlands makes clear, is not a solution to other human or animal minds, but
rather dissolution.
Still
the skeptic may object that while humans are conscious, animals are not.
Rowlands explains that there are three strong arguments to establish the
existence of phenomenal consciousness in animals. One is an evolutionary
argument that considering the enormous evolutionary continuity between humans
and animals, it would be very unlikely that only humans were phenomenally
conscious. The second is that animals exhibit an acceptable behavioral index of
phenomenal consciousness. In other words, the behavior of animals clearly
indicates that they have mental contents. The third is that animals have the same
neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substances as humans required
for having conscious experience.
Rowlands
proffers some interesting arguments and illustrations to show that observing
the behavior makes it plain that “animals have beliefs, desires, and other
content-involving states” (p. 82). We know this because explanations of their
behaviors typically work. Rowlands here presents an argument to counter the
Davidson-Stich objection that mental contents are, as it were, anchored to us. Rowlands
shows that even though we may not know the specific contents of an animal’s
desires and beliefs, we can explain the behavior of an animal in terms of
beliefs and desires. The point is that we can explain the behavior of animals
using mental contents that they may not entertain as long as such contents are
related to the contents that they do entertain. To give Rowlands’ example, when
his son was only two years old, he would light up at the sight of a squirrel,
or squirrel activities, by uttering the word “squirrel!” However, at that age,
a child does not have an accurate notion of squirrels as warm-blooded mammals
that eat nuts, and so on. We have no precise idea of what a two-year-old child
believes about squirrels and seeing squirrel activities.
Nevertheless,
we can explain such a behavior by saying that the child believes that there is
a squirrel, up in the tree for example. Explaining the behavior of a child (or
an animal) by attributing a mental content that the child (or animal) cannot
have is legitimate, Rowland explains, as long as the explanation satisfies two
requirements: (1) the truth of the content used in the explanation guarantees
the truth of the content he entertains; and (2) the content used in the
explanation shares narrow content with the content that the child (or animal)
entertains.
Rowlands
continues whittling away the notion that only human beings are persons by
discussing the capacity of animals for causal and logical reasoning. He gives
many examples of animals that understand causal relations. It is interesting to
note that these animals are not only the good ole and oft-cited great apes.
Even smaller animals such as birds are capable of causal reasoning. Rowlands
mentions crows understanding that if they drop pebbles into a container with
water, the water rises as more pebbles are dropped into the container, and
understand that it is not the same for containers of sand or sawdust. Also,
birds and other animals are capable of creating and using tools. I can think of
beavers building a dams – beat that! Furthermore, he considers logical
reasoning. I do not think that these are distinct, though Rowlands presents
them as such. I don’t think they are because in order to reason causally, one,
by definition, reasons logically. Perhaps the distinction here should be
between inductive reasoning (A will lead or cause B) and deductive reasoning (B
necessarily follows from A). I found this chapter disappointing, not because
the chapter is bad or uninformative, but rather because, in my view, it is necessary
to give arguments to show that animals can reason logically and causally – they
clearly are. Now this does not mean, and Rowlands makes it clear, that animals
can be logicians. In other words, it is not necessary that animals understand
Aristotle, Venn Diagrams, the law of excluded middle, and other formal rules of
logic in order to reason logically. The fact is that they do and they show it.
So
far, Rowlands has shown that animals are conscious and engage in causal and
logical reasoning. In the remaining chapters he argues that animals are self-aware,
and that they recognize others as persons. The issue of self-awareness is
central to Rowlands’ overall argument. In fact he devotes five chapters to it.
The argument looks something like an extension of Locke’s conception of
personhood. Essentially Locke argues that a person is a thinking being that
considers itself the same being enduring in time and in different places. Following
this rationale, Rowlands makes a distinction between two forms of
self-awareness: one is intentional and the other non-intentional or, as
Rowlands labels it, pre-intentional
(p. 125). What’s the difference? In a nutshell, functional, adult human beings
possess intentional self-awareness. This form of self-awareness requires
metacognition, i.e., thinking about thinking or, “when I perceive, I am aware
of perceiving” (p. 117). Rowlands suggests that the intentional model of
self-awareness is phenomenologically implausible because, accordingly, whenever
I perceive, I would have to have a higher-order awareness that has as its object
my perceiving or thinking. (This, by the way, could lead to an infinite
regress.)
However,
this is not, in fact, the case. Most of the time, when I perceive I do not
perceive myself perceiving. As Rowlands puts it, “Most of the times I simply
get on with perceiving things or thinking things” (p. 117). This mode of
self-awareness, pre-intentional, Rowlands argues, is essential in the
possession of intentional self-awareness.
Chapter
9 is a very technical and dense discussion to the effect that being a person
requires mental unity. I cannot possibly do justice to such a sophisticated
argument. The conclusion, however, is that “the only version of self-awareness
that could confer unity on a mental life is pre-intentional self-awareness” (p.
175). It follows that many animals’ mental lives are unified. And if having a
unified mental life is essential to personhood, then many animals can be
persons. Pre-intentional awareness does not require metacognition, but involves
being aware of an object, episode or process as a certain thing or way. This requires that a subject could have
certain expectations or anticipation regarding how the appearance of change occurs
with respect to bodily and environmental contingencies. For example, if I see an
object as a book (Rowlands’ example),
it is because I understand that the appearance presented to me will change
depending on certain circumstances and contingencies, i.e., the book rotates or
falls off the desk, etc.
The
last two chapters are, respectively, about other-awareness and personhood, and
how it matters why animals are persons. Regarding awareness of others, Rowlands
relies on the principles developed in the previous chapters, which show that
one can be pre-intentionally aware. That is, since it is possible to be
pre-intentionally aware of oneself, then it is also possible to be
pre-intentionally aware of others. Other awareness is the fourth condition
necessary for personhood. It is the ability to recognize others as persons.
According to Rowlands, pre-intentional other-awareness is “the mirror image of
pre-intentional self-awareness” (p. 192). Many animals, according to Rowlands
have the basic capacity to distinguish things that have a mind and things that
don’t. Therefore, many animals are persons. In other words, animals are
individuals that possess consciousness, cognition, self-awareness,
other-awareness, and have a unified mental life – that is, the basic ingredients
of what makes up a person.
Rowlands
ends the book with a very short moral conclusion: it is time to open our eyes
and accept the fact that many animals are persons. Which ones? Well, that’s an
empirical question. Most animals, especially those that people normally eat,
are living creatures with whom one can communicate cognitively and emotionally
and find out about their needs and wishes. It is not hard to understand
animals’ body language. Rowlands conclusion reminds me a lot of the feminist-care
approach in animal ethics. (See Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams,
The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Columbia University Press, 2007). Josephine
Donovan, for example, suggests that humans should pay attention to the needs of
animals by connecting with them, by listening to them, and learning about their
opinions. This experience can make us realize that we have marginalized animals
and treated them as property and as food. Sometimes in philosophy we make
things more complicated than they have to be. The message that I get from
Rowlands is that the question of our relationship with animals is very simple:
pay attention to the way animals behave. They are persons. They deserve to be
treated as such.
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Carlo Alvaro, Ph.D., teaches philosophy at New York City Technical College and
is the author of Ethical Veganism, Virtue
Ethics, and the Great Soul (2019).
Copyright©2019
by Carlo Alvaro – All Rights Reserved
