This volume collects forty-nine original essays that provide opinionated introductions to a variety of philosophical topics concerning (nonhuman) animal minds. The essays are written by established or emerging leaders in the field, and yet are accessible to newcomers who have some experience with philosophical writing. As the volume provides a broad snapshot of the state of the art in the philosophy of animal minds, our expectation is that it will also serve as a useful reference work for more seasoned scholars.
While philosophers have been interested in animal minds since ancient times, interest in the topic has reemerged over the past forty or fifty years. Especially over the past couple of decades, the field has truly begun to flourish, with philosophers taking a special interest in animal mental representation, rationality, consciousness, metacognition, mindreading, perception, learning, communication, ethics, social cognition, and culture. This flourishing has been abetted by an explosion of fascinating empirical research in comparative psychology, cognitive ethology, and related disciplines, along with an increased tendency among philosophers to engage with empirical research.
Enlarging the focus of philosophy of mind to include not just humans, but animals, has several advantages. First, insofar as philosophers of mind are concerned to provide nonchauvinistic analyses of minds and mind-related properties, it is useful to consult a diversity of examples beyond the human case. While imagination can help in this regard, it is often difficult to determine from the armchair whether a putatively imagined mind or mind-related property is genuinely possible.
Second, animal minds can shed light on human minds by serving as a foil for comparison. If we’re interested in what makes humans special or unique, we can compare ourselves to other creatures that have minds and attend to the differences. Thinking about animal minds can thus enhance our understanding of our own natures.
Finally, animals are our neighbors. We share our planet – and sometimes even our homes – with animals. Many of us form relationships with animals. Even those of us who prefer human companions tend to find animals fascinating to observe. We all face ethical questions about whether to consume animals and how to treat them. We thus have strong reasons to try to understand animal minds on their own terms, independently of whether they shed light on the nature of minds in general or human minds in particular.
The essays in this volume have been separated into eight sections. While the essays within each section tend to have much in common, there are interesting points of contact across sections as well. In the remainder of this introduction, we’ll provide a brief summary of each contribution and highlight some of the larger themes that emerge.
The ability to represent the world is often considered a mark of the mental. But when does mental representation arise? Do sunflower buds represent the sun since they follow it throughout the day? What about simple animals, such as insects? Andrew Knoll and Georges Rey shed light on these foundational questions by investigating the navigational abilities of ants and bees, and draw lessons about the minimal requirements for mental representation.
In part because analytic philosophy was dominated by the study of language throughout most of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to view mental representation through a linguistic lens. But when we focus on animal cognition, the linguistic lens often seems to distort its target. Many philosophers have wanted to attribute nonlinguistic representations to animals. In their own ways, Christopher Gauker, Michael Rescorla, and Jacob Beck all investigate this option.
Gauker suggests that animal cognition could be subserved by imagistic representations. He reviews several studies of tool use in nonhuman primates, and argues that imagistic representations can explain their results. Rescorla examines a second type of representation that is commonly attributed to nonlinguistic animals – cognitive maps. He reviews the impressive navigational capacities of a range of animals, discusses when cognitive maps are appropriately attributed to explain those capacities, and investigates their representational properties. Beck summarizes research into analog magnitude representations of numerosity and duration, and argues that they are nonlinguistic. But since Beck is interested in whether animals have a language of thought, and evidence for the presence of nonlinguistic representations doesn’t amount to evidence for the absence of linguistic representations, Beck also critically reviews a more direct line of evidence – research into the logical abilities of animals.
Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack argue for a fundamental reorientation in the investigation of whether animals have episodic memories – conscious recollections of particular past events. Whereas most commentators take the main controversy to concern whether animals’ representations of particular past events are conscious, Hoerl and McCormack argue that it isn’t even clear that animals represent particular past events qua past events in the first place. Animals might have representations only of the present that they update in ways that are sensitive to the passing of time. Hoerl and McCormack close with two suggestions about how this issue can be empirically tested.
Mohan Matthen and Derek Brown focus on animal minds in order to illuminate the nature of color. Matthen argues that due to differences in their visual systems, humans and many animals perceive fundamentally different colors. As a result, there are many colors – indeed, many systems of colors – that humans never perceive. Brown accepts Matthen’s conclusion and argues that it puts pressure on color objectivism, which holds that colors are mind-independent properties. Brown contends that color objectivism struggles to explain how manipulating the colors of objects (e.g., by painting a wall) systematically influences both human and animal color perception.
What sorts of reasoning capacities do animals have and how does animal reasoning differ from human reasoning? These questions naturally bleed into two others. First, since the concept of reasoning is intimately tied to the concept of rationality, the question of whether animals can reason is closely connected to the question of whether animals are rational. Second, it is natural to suppose that “metacognition” – the capacity for higher-order cognition – is an especially important type of reasoning, and thus that the question of whether an organism is capable of metacognition is of fundamental significance. The chapters in this section address these questions about reasoning, rationality, and metacognition from a variety of perspectives.
Hans-Johann Glock notes that the question of whether animals have propositional attitudes such as beliefs is intimately connected to the questions of whether they exhibit rationality and engage in reasoning. He says yes to all three questions. Paying special attention to the well-known arguments of Donald Davidson, he contends that a priori arguments against animal belief, rationality, and reasoning are unsuccessful. He also presents two positive arguments designed to lend support to the affirmation of animal belief, rationality, and reasoning.
Elisabeth Camp and Eli Shupe, Matthew Boyle, José Luis Bermúdez, and Eric Saidel explore the issue of human uniqueness, but they focus on different properties that might ground this supposed uniqueness. Camp and Shupe concentrate on instrumental reasoning. For example, a high school student might decide to spend many hours studying calculus, not because she enjoys studying calculus or finds it valuable in itself, but because she wants to get into a good college and believes that doing well in her calculus class will help her achieve that end. Camp and Shupe argue that the ability to engage in instrumental reasoning marks an important type of cognitive flexibility, and so we should be interested in whether nonhumans can reason instrumentally. After clarifying what instrumental reasoning is, they review empirical evidence that some animals do, in fact, reason instrumentally.
Boyle develops and defends the Aristotelian idea that human minds differ not only in degree, but in kind, from animal minds because humans alone are rational. He interprets this to mean not that humans alone are intelligent, nor that humans alone are capable of instrumental reasoning, but that humans alone have the capacity to reflect on the reasons for their beliefs and actions, and to then revise their beliefs and actions in light of those reasons.
Bermúdez argues that humans are unique for a different reason. According to Bermúdez, an organism cannot think about a thought without linguistically representing that thought. Thus, the ability to think about one’s own propositional attitudes (metacognition) or another’s propositional attitudes (mindreading) requires a facility with language. Bermúdez concludes that nonlinguistic animals cannot think about thinking.
Saidel argues that many animals, including even chimpanzees, lack a concept of self. Like Boyle and Bermúdez, Saidel takes care to emphasize that he is not denying that animals have rich mental lives, including a variety of mental representations. But he argues that a careful examination of the extant empirical literature suggests that they do not have a self-concept.
Like Bermúdez and Saidel, Joëlle Proust asks if animals are capable of metacognition. She reviews experimental evidence suggesting that they are, but takes a deflationary interpretation of what metacognition is. According to Proust, metacognition in both animals and humans is grounded in affordance sensings, which are feeling-based evaluative attitudes. Thus, while metacognition isn’t uniquely human, that’s in part because – even in humans – it doesn’t require the sophisticated ability to think about one’s thoughts.
There is surely no greater philosophical puzzle than how to understand consciousness, or “what it’s like” to have an experience. The phrase “what it’s like” derives from Thomas Nagel’s famous discussion of bat consciousness. Nagel assumed that bats are conscious – that there’s “something it’s like” to be a bat. But he questioned how much we can know about what it’s like to be a bat, and in particular whether we can know what it’s like for a bat to experience echolocation. In his contribution, Sean Allen-Hermanson challenges this orthodoxy. He argues that there’s a fairly simple answer to what it’s like for a bat to experience echolocation: it’s like hearing. One consideration he takes to support this answer is that blind people who become expert echolocators report that their echolocatory phenomenology is auditory. Allen-Hermanson then considers why so many philosophers, from Nagel onwards, have overlooked the obviousness of this answer, and what that tells us about the fallibility of our judgments about phenomenology.
Whereas Allen-Hermanson is primarily concerned with the question of what animal consciousness is like, a related question is how we can tell if a given species is conscious at all. Like Nagel, Allen-Hermanson assumes that bats are conscious. But what justifies that assumption? How do we know which species are conscious? The remaining chapters on consciousness are primarily concerned with this question.
Since we know we are conscious, the natural way to evaluate whether other species are conscious is to compare them to us. Broadly speaking, there are two dimensions of possible comparison – behavioral and neural. Michael Tye’s contribution focuses on the first. He proposes that we should attribute pain to animals when they behave similarly to humans in contexts where we know that humans feel pain, and there are no defeaters. (As an example of a defeater, Tye cites a case in which we find that a being’s behavior is controlled by a silicon chip with a giant lookup table inscribed on it.) Tye then reviews evidence that teleost fish (i.e., fish with bony skeletons, such as trout) behave similarly to humans in contexts where humans feel pain, but that elasmobranchs (i.e., fish with cartilaginous skeletons, such as sharks) and insects do not. Tye concludes that teleost fish feel pain, but that elasmobranchs and insects do not.
Adam Shriver also takes up the question of whether animals feel pain, though he explicitly appeals to comparisons of neural mechanisms in addition to comparisons of behavior. Shriver reviews evidence that the affective dimension of pain – whether the subject finds it unpleasant – can be dissociated from the sensing of pain – roughly, its location, type, and intensity. For example, humans with damage to certain brain regions, or under the influence of certain drugs, report sensing pain, but not being bothered by it. Shriver then summarizes evidence for a similar dissociation in animals, and argues that for many purposes (especially ethical), it is the affective dimension that we should be interested in when we try to understand animal pain.
Jesse Prinz explicitly endorses comparing human and animal neural mechanisms to determine which species are conscious. He takes as his starting point the AIR theory of consciousness he has defended elsewhere, which holds that a representation is conscious just in case it’s at what he calls an “intermediate” level of sensory processing and is placed into working memory by attention. He then considers what the empirical literature has to say about whether various taxa – ranging from mammals to insects – have analogous neural mechanisms to those that are associated with attended, intermediate representations in humans. Although Prinz stresses that the current evidence is too limited to draw firm conclusions in many cases, he tentatively suggests that consciousness is surprisingly widespread, extending even to insects—though not, perhaps, to amphibians or reptiles.
Like Prinz, Rocco Gennaro begins with a general theory of consciousness that he finds attractive and then applies it to animals. Gennaro endorses higher-order thought (HOT) theory, which maintains that a mental state of a subject (e.g., your desire for cake) is conscious just in case the subject has a thought representing the mental state (e.g., you think: I want to eat cake). Appealing to the empirical literature on metacognition, Gennaro argues that animals can be conscious according to HOT since they have metacognition. (There are obvious links here to the discussions of metacognition in the previous section – particularly those of Bermúdez, Saidel, and Proust. For a criticism of HOT theory, see Tye’s chapter.)
Michael Trestman and Peter Godfrey-Smith take up the question of which species are conscious from an evolutionary perspective. Each is concerned to explain where in the evolutionary history of animals consciousness emerged. Trestman argues that phenomenological insights into the temporal dynamics of consciousness and considerations about the cognitive requirements for complex spatially situated behavior converge on the conclusion that consciousness emerged three times in animal evolution – in vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopods. Godfrey-Smith’s contribution is more tentative. He considers three broad possibilities for the origins of consciousness: increased information processing and integration; sensing and perceiving; and evaluative experiences, or feelings. Given each possibility, Godfrey-Smith speculates where in the tree of life consciousness might be expected to surface.
One of the most fecund areas of research for philosophers working on animal cognition is mindreading, or theory of mind. In particular, philosophers are interested in an empirical research program designed to investigate animal social cognition, especially whether animals understand that others have beliefs (mindreading belief) or that others have perceptions (mindreading perception). The chapters in this section largely focus on research that has been done with great apes and corvids.
The first three chapters examine a debate about how animals are able to predict behavior. There is a large body of evidence that animals are able to predict the behavior of conspecifics. The question that remains is how animals are able to do this. According to the behavior-reading hypothesis, animals predict what someone is going to do without understanding anything about the causal structure of the individual, but instead by associating observable cues with behaviors. In contrast, the mindreading hypothesis is that animals do indeed have the ability to infer the mental states of others, such as beliefs, desires, and sensory experiences such as perceptions. The behavior-reading hypothesis is non-mentalistic, in that it says a behavior-reader need not have any understanding of other minds, whereas the mindreading hypothesis is explicitly mentalistic.
Robert Lurz’s chapter focuses on the methodological question of whether we can ever distinguish between these two hypotheses, given what has come to be known as the “logical problem.” This problem is that the observable cues used in tests for mindreading are confounded with the mental states being investigated. Lurz argues that while none of the perceptual mindreading tests have avoided the logical problem, a slight modification of a recent experiment with corvids could decide the question.
Marta Halina’s chapter is a direct response to Lurz’s pessimism about the current state of research on perceptual mindreading. By engaging with the methodology of the experiments, and by considering work in philosophy of science on the nature of ascribing unobservable entities in explanation, Halina argues that the current state of the science should be taken as sufficient evidence that apes mindread perceptions.
Hayley Clatterbuck examines whether causal models will help decide between behavior-reading and mindreading hypotheses. In discussions of the relative simplicity of mindreading and behavior-reading hypotheses, it has been suggested that intervening mentalistic variables help to unify types of behaviors, and so examining relationships among different sorts of successes on tasks might decide between the two hypotheses. Clatterbuck argues that behavior-reading models can share this syntactic property with mindreading models. An appeal to the structure of causal models does not help solve the problem. Instead, we need to look at the semantic properties of the models in order to decide between them.
Three of the chapters (those by Kristin Andrews, Stephen Butterfill, and Sarah Vincent and Shaun Gallagher) move away from the debate between mindreading and behavior-reading by considering different cognitive mechanisms or practices that could be involved in both the human and nonhuman ability to predict and explain others’ behaviors. All three of these approaches take as given that great apes are mentalists of a sort, but they deny that this means that apes understand that others have beliefs.
Andrews examines a recent experiment which suggests, for the first time, that great apes can pass a false belief task, but she questions what this finding means. She suggests that apes may not be solving this task by attributing false beliefs, as we would be warranted in drawing this conclusion only if particular theories about the nature of belief are true. She notes that there are alternative mentalist explanations for how chimpanzees and humans might pass false belief tasks, and suggests we need to look for larger patterns of behavior before concluding that apes understand false belief.
Butterfill’s chapter introduces an alternative to behavior-reading and mindreading theories. His minimal mindreading theory states that understanding others involves tracking their mental states without representing those states as such, and he takes this option to be a viable explanation for the success of animals on “theory of mind” tasks. He defends this option against the behavior-reading alternative, in part by drawing a distinction between two forms of behavior-reading.
Vincent and Gallagher also introduce a different way of thinking about the question of whether apes have a theory of mind, by suggesting we should instead ask whether they are enactive perceivers of practical and social affordances. Vincent and Gallagher think that humans do not rely on a theory of mind either, but instead are able to perform the functions associated with mindreading beliefs, including predicting and explaining behavior, through a direct access to others’ minds that we gain from interacting with them. They advocate for different kinds of experiments that involve interactions between conspecifics in order to determine whether chimpanzees have human-like social cognition.
The focus of the five chapters on animal communication is H. P. Grice’s theory of meaning and whether it serves as a useful model for investigating intentional animal communication. Grice’s theory is discussed, and rejected, by almost all of the authors in this section. Grice’s theory takes communication to require that signalers and receivers understand the intentions of another. The cognitive requirements of this theory are related to the ability to mindread (attribute mental states to others). Because it is reasonable to doubt that animals and young children mindread, but perhaps not so reasonable to be skeptical of their ability to communicate, every chapter in this section offers an account of communication that does not require mindreading. The accounts discussed here are consistent with the view that animal communication is continuous with human language. Among animal cognition researchers, however, Gricean theories are quite popular. Theories that take intentionality to be required for communication, such as those of Michael Tomasello and Thom Scott-Philips, are also targets of criticism.
One of the puzzles that arise from Gricean theories has to do with how communication could have evolved given that intentionality is needed on both sides of the communicative interaction. In their chapter, Dorit Bar-On and Richard Moore work to dissolve this puzzle by examining the claim that there is an asymmetry in the pragmatics of animal communication. Animal calls do not appear to be sensitive to others’ goals or mental states, yet animals still appear to interpret these signals. That is, while production may not be intentional, reception appears to be. Bar-On and Moore challenge the idea that animals are intentional receivers but not producers, arguing that by the logic of the asymmetry argument, receivers do not interpret signalers as intentional communicators in any sense. If the asymmetry argument is sound, then receivers understand only natural meaning, e.g., that a dark sky means that it will likely rain. Bar-On and Moore go on to consider reasons for accepting the continuity of human language and animal communication systems.
In her single-authored chapter, Bar-On offers an alternative to Grice’s theory of meaning. According to her account, communication is a kind of social, intersubjective, world-directed, and open behavior that is biologically designed to express one’s mental states to communicative partners, who in turn are able to predict the behavior of the communicator and who can then act in response to the communicator’s expressed state. This theory of expressive communication is contrasted with views like Tomasello’s that take human language to be different in kind from animal signaling systems, and she examines how corvids and chimpanzees might count as expressive communicators.
Mitchell Green also challenges Gricean accounts of meaning and communication by focusing on the semantic content of signals. Green argues that all Gricean accounts (which he refers to as Intention-Based Semantic (IBS) accounts) share two problems: they explain meaning in terms of intention without showing how intention can be more basic than meaning, and they require sophisticated cognitive capacities. He takes these problems to be fatal for IBS accounts, and provides his own alternative theory of semantic meaning. Green’s Intention-Free Semantics (IFS) includes a category of meaning he calls organic meaning, which arises via a process of ritualization of signals. These signals acquire a predictable significance within a community. Green examines the signals of a number of taxa from the perspective of IFS to determine what kind of meaning might be present.
Ulrich Stegmann’s chapter continues the investigation of the content of signals by surveying explicit and implicit accounts of signal content in animal cognition, biology, and ethology, and compares these to theories of intentional semantic content. While theories of animal communication rely on appeal to information signaling, Stegmann worries that these accounts do not share a clear view about the nature of information. After critically examining Fred Dretske and Ruth Millikan’s non-inferential theories of meaning, Stegmann develops a related account, which he takes to be a promising way of understanding animal communication.
Christine Sievers, Markus Wild, and Thibaud Gruber point out that the popularity of Gricean theories has shaped the research focus, and that if we adopt different theories, we will need to seek different kinds of evidence. They advocate Millikan’s theory of meaning, and examine what findings might serve as empirical evidence of communicative abilities according to that theory. Flexibility of behavior is of particular importance.
While we might think of culture as something unique to humans, involving opera houses or temples or museums, among anthropologists and biologists culture is often understood in a broader sense (though they sometimes use the term “traditions” rather than “culture”). In the last fifteen years, animal cognition researchers have published reports arguing that there is culture in a number of different species, including nonhuman primates and cetaceans.
The very notion of culture is the topic of Grant Ramsey’s chapter. He investigates various definitions of culture, and identifies what he takes to be the essential ingredients of culture with the aim of providing a fuller picture of what constitutes cultural practices. Ramsey’s definition of culture takes it to consist of information transmitted between individuals or groups that creates a lasting change in behavioral practices.
Grant Goodrich endorses Ramsey’s definition and examines kinds of culture and the different cognitive capacities that are required for them. Goodrich argues that culture so defined is something that could be underpinned by either associative or cognitive mechanisms. (See Cameron Buckner’s and Mike Dacey’s chapters in the next section for different views about the distinction between associative and cognitive mechanisms.)
Rachael Brown continues the investigation of cognitive capacities involved in animal culture. In particular, she examines the relationship between social learning mechanisms and the development of traditions in animal societies. She argues that what appear to be complex cultural behaviors can be learned via simple forms of social learning. (Her discussion relates to Colin Allen’s chapter on associative learning mechanisms in the next section.) Brown concludes that cumulative culture, which some theorists take to be unique to humans, can be had by animals thanks to a relatively simple social learning mechanism. Furthermore, she argues that as with humans, animal cultures can have an impact on group genetic evolution. Hence, without appeal to culture, we will not be able to explain certain biological differences between populations.
Maria Botero looks at the development of social understanding in the chimpanzee. Joint attention is thought by some to be an important aspect of human cognition and required for cooperation, but the existence of joint attention in other animals is a matter of some debate among empirical researchers. Botero argues that the typical emphasis on the visual modality ignores the other ways in which individuals can jointly attend to something. She thinks that nonhuman primate social cognition is better understood via the modality of touch, given the amount of time mothers and infants spend in physical contact, and the limited interest they have in eye gaze.
Laura Schlingloff and Richard Moore also focus on chimpanzee social cognition. They investigate the claim that chimpanzees engage in normative behavior, and that their culture includes social norms. By appealing to empirical evidence from captive and field research, and appealing to Cristina Bicchieri’s account of social norms, Schlingloff and Moore conclude that chimpanzees do not fulfill the cognitively demanding requirements for social norms. Nonetheless, they suggest that apes may have a precursor to moral norms, which unlike conventional social norms, may be based on general empathic and prosocial capacities. While the current empirical work is suggestive, they think it is premature to draw conclusions about the existence of moral norms in chimpanzees.
While the other chapters in this section focus on social cognition in great apes and birds, the final chapter examines the possibility that coordination among individuals can result in the creation of a new mind that is constituted by the coordinators. Bryce Huebner examines this possibility by looking at the swarming behavior of desert locusts, the schooling behavior of golden shiner fish, and army ant foraging behavior. He suggests that these and other organisms act together with contextualized self-interest for the group as a unified cognitive system.
The chapters in this section cluster around three issues: What is association, and how does it differ from cognition? What makes one explanation of animal behavior simpler than another, and on what grounds, if any, are simpler explanations to be preferred? How is animal behavior best modeled, and how should those models be interpreted and applied?
Colin Allen’s chapter focuses on the nature of association. He is concerned that many philosophers believe that associative learning is a dead research program – indeed, one that has been dead since Chomsky famously critiqued Skinner over fifty years ago. But Allen argues that modern approaches to associative learning belie this assumption, and have much to offer philosophers. Allen focuses on two distinctions within associative learning theory: the distinction between delay conditioning and trace conditioning, which he suggests may have relevance to our understanding of conscious awareness; and the distinction between instrumental and operant conditioning, which may mark an important psychological boundary between various taxa. (There are interesting points of contact here to Godfrey-Smith’s contribution.)
Cameron Buckner and Mike Dacey are both motivated by a problem they find in comparative psychology. The problem is that of selecting between associative and cognitive models of animal behavior. On the standard assumption, associative models are simpler and are thus to be preferred. But this is problematic since it seems that, for any behavior, it is always possible to amend some associative model or other to explain it. So there is an ersatz conflict between associative and cognitive models.
Buckner and Dacey differ, however, in the solutions they recommend to address this problem. Buckner argues that the old association/cognition distinction should be replaced with a new one that is grounded in two distinct memory systems. Those who debate whether a given behavior is best explained by an associative or cognitive mechanism can thus be interpreted as fruitfully debating whether the behavior is best explained by one type of memory system or the other. Dacey, by contrast, argues that associative models do not describe a special type of process (an “associative” process). Rather, they are highly abstract, partial descriptions of causal relations between representations. So on Dacey’s view, associative models are compatible with processes that are typically thought of as cognitive (e.g., the application of a rule in an algorithm), but they differ from cognitive models in that they are pitched at a different level of abstraction.
Like Buckner and Dacey, Irina Mikhalevich is concerned with the conflict between putatively simple models, such as associative models, and putatively complex models. She argues that the widespread preference for simplicity has unjustifiably biased animal cognition researchers in favor of associative models, leading to a misapplication of resources. To combat this bias, she recommends that researchers make use of more quantitative cognitive models and that they reject simplicity as a criterion for deciding among models.
Simon Fitzpatrick also criticizes the way in which comparative psychologists have appealed to simplicity. He notes that such appeals often invoke Morgan’s Canon, which holds that animal behavior should be explained in terms of “lower” faculties rather than “higher” faculties whenever possible. He then distinguishes four different interpretations of Morgan’s Canon and argues that all of them should be rejected. Fitzpatrick recommends a principle he calls Evidentialism to replace Morgan’s Canon.
David Kaplan investigates a different type of model: model organisms. Scientists have used fruit flies to study genetics, squid to study action potentials, mice to study learning, and so on. Scientists frequently use the findings from these studies to draw inferences about other animals, including humans. Kaplan argues that these inferences can be extremely shaky, as the selection of a model organism is usually based on practical considerations, such as its easy availability as a research subject. Kaplan argues that researchers should pay closer attention to evolutionary history in selecting model organisms in order to ensure that the models are indeed representative of the taxa about which the researchers want to draw conclusions.
One question at the intersection of animal cognition and ethics is whether animals are moral patients. When we act, how should the impact of our actions on animals be taken into account? A second question is whether animals are moral agents. Are animals themselves capable of acting morally or immorally? The chapters in this section address both of these related questions.
Dale Jamieson argues that the backdrop for thinking about animals and ethics has been influenced recently by the view that animals have a type of moral agency. He then shows how this move to see animals as agents can help us to think differently about three important topics in animal ethics: suffering, captivity, and killing animals.
Mark Rowlands also addresses the issue of whether animals can participate in the moral sphere. Here he outlines his theory that some nonhuman animals are moral subjects, individuals who can be motivated to act for moral reasons. Moral subjects are not moral agents, who are responsible for their actions due to the ability to scrutinize their reasons and control their actions, but they are individuals who are motivated by their empathy for another, and whose behavior at least sometimes tracks moral facts. By carving out this middle ground between full moral agency (which Rowlands isn’t sure that even humans enjoy) and moral patients, Rowlands identifies another way in which individuals can be moral.
Andrew Fenton’s chapter considers the relationship between animal autonomy and the proper treatment of animals. He proposes that animals should be allowed the opportunity to consent to our treatment of them. In human research, we only use subjects who provide their consent to be a research subject. Fenton argues that the same should be true for other animals. He describes to what extent we can interpret animals’ behavior as consent or dissent, and how we can design experiments such that animal subjects can choose whether or not to participate.
Lori Gruen considers another aspect of moral practice, namely empathy. In her chapter, she discusses the different types of empathy, examining which may be had by animals, including rats and chimpanzees, and which may be relevant for morality. She describes the importance of what she calls entangled empathy – an experiential process requiring emotion and cognition that perceives our relationships with others in such a way that we are responsive to each other’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and sensitivities. Gruen notes that this sort of empathy has been largely ignored by researchers examining empathic abilities in other animals.
Alasdair Cochrane examines an oft-stated distinction between animal welfare and animal rights approaches in animal ethics. He argues that this distinction fails because the notion of rights on the animal rights approach overstates the rights that animals have. Cochrane argues that animal rights are tied to animal interests, and that most animals have no interest in not being used, owned, or exploited. Since they lack those interests, they also lack the equivalent rights. The rights that animals have will provide the very same benefits they get on the welfare approach to animal ethics, which are already tied to animal interests.
Bernard E. Rollin’s chapter examines the history of philosophers’ and scientists’ take on animal minds. In his analysis, the absence of thought and feeling in animals was never proved, even though it was widely accepted. The rejection of animal minds was due to the values inherent in our past scientific and philosophical cultures. He suggests that recent changes in the treatment of animals stem not from philosophical or scientific progress, but is rather a cultural change involving a change in values.