Question Do chimpanzees really enjoy eating bananas?

Accepted:
March 12, 2006

Comments

Perhaps you mistyped the URL for the "Ask Chimpanzees" website?

Chimps do have brains very similar to ours, and it's likely that when they eat the food that they pursue, they are in states that are physiologically like ours when we eat what we enjoy. Plus their brain states play similar roles to our enjoyments: they lead the chimps to keep eating (and not to discard the food and look elsewhere), they reinforce the chimps' preference for the food item, and so on. I think most people familiar with chimps would say, obviously they enjoy bananas.

Ah, you say, so they have pleasure analogues when they eat bananas, but do they literally experience pleasure? And how could we ever answer this? What is pleasure--what constitutes feeling pleasure? Is it a physiological sort of state that requires having brains like ours? Maybe so--maybe what we're confronted with when we notice our pleasure is in fact some physiological state, and it's this that we call "pleasure". Or is pleasure a more abstract state that requires only structural and functional commonalities with human brains? Maybe so--maybe, for instance, our understanding of the role that pleasure plays in us serves to define "pleasure", so that to feel pleasure is to have a state playing that sort of role. There are other possibilities for how the concept of "pleasure" might have acquired a meaning in a way that sets a standard for what chimps, say, have to be like if they're to count as feeling pleasure. On some of these standards, chimps are enough like us to count; on others, not.

Are we even confident that our use and understanding of the word "pleasure" has established some one standard for what it would take for non-humans to count as literally "feeling pleasure"--or could it rather be a concept that, not having been designed to adjudicate such cases, meets them with only an uneasy shrug? Then it might be a refinement in use--a natural one, to be sure--to apply the term to chimps. Would that be troubling? It would if there were some good reason to be especially concerned about the question whether the word "pleasure", as we have traditionally used it, literally applies to chimps. But is there such a reason? Some philosophers would insist that there is: after all, the question of the literal applicability of the word "pleasure" as traditionally used is just a reformulation of the question whether the chimps experience pleasure. Still, we might wonder whether the particular boundary between confident verdicts and shrugs reflects a naturally important divide (say, between the chimps' states and our own), or whether it reflects only arbitrary historical pressures on the use of the term "pleasure" (for instance, not having the question whether to count animals as feeling "pleasure" assume any great importance). Maybe, then, it's not so interesting whether chimpanzees enjoy bananas.

Question Do chimpanzees really enjoy eating bananas? Accepted:March 12, 2006

Question Do chimpanzees really enjoy eating bananas?

Accepted:
March 12, 2006