Topics Philosophers

Question I acknowledge that Descartes "Founder of Modern Philosophy" and the "Father of Modern Mathematics," ranks as one of the most important and influential thinkers of modern times. Obviously very influential and smart right? Well.... If this guy was so bright, then why did he believe that non-human animals were not sentient and therefore could not suffer or feel pain? This belief led him to accept vivisection as ethical. If you squeeze the skin of a cat violently and pinch it, it will scream in agony. My question is, how could a person supposedly brilliant and also striving to prove the existence of god and the infinite essence known as the soul in human beings found in meditations on first philosophy have the misconception that non-human animals cannot suffer? When inflicting vivisection or violent harm, the truth is SCREAMING at you in the face! I am boggled. Can somebody please shed some light on this supposedly wonderful mind of Descartes?

Accepted:
May 9, 2006

Comments

I hope others will chime in on this one, but here is a partial answer. The problem that lies behind your question is na version of what is called the "problem of other minds." The truth, as you put it, is actually not "SCREAMING at you in the face." Even Descartes would not have denied that cats will struggle and make loud noises when you begin to cut them open. The screaming, as you put it, is something that happens when cats are vivisected. The question--on which you and Descartes differ--is whether that screaming should be understood as a decisive indicator of whether the cat actually feels pain.

Consider even another human being. You witness them suffering some injury, and they cry out. You assume they are feeling pain, and that is why they cry out, because when you injure yourself in the same or similar ways, you feel pain, and that is what makes you cry out. But if you think about it, the only pain--indeed, the only consciousness of any kind that you ever have or ever will experience is your own.

But are analogies of the sort you make with this other human being (she is like me, so when she cries out, it is for the same reason or reasons) really all that reliable? Do you like the taste of liver? If you do, what do you make of people who hate it? Are you male? If so, do you really think that the way females experience things is exactly the same as the way you do? And so on... Now, if such questions arise when it comes to other human beings, how much more complex do they become when you are trying to assess the conscious states of non-human animals, whose neurologies and other morphologies, and whose evolutionary histories are in many ways significantly like ours? A famous question, framed years ago in a famous article by Thomas Nagel, is: What is it like to be a bat? Honest answer: Haven't a clue! Well, then, what makes you so certain that you know what it is like to be a cat??? Is it simply inconceivable, or logically impossible, that a being (such as a cat) might not respond to stimuli in ways that look very similar to the ways we respond to them (in some cases, anyway--not when my cat and I contemplate the same dish of cat food, however!), but in the case of the cat, there is no intervening (or supervenient, or whatever it might be) instances of consciousness? That is what Descartes supposed--that cat screaming was just behavioral only, and not related to consciousness. Since consciousness appears not to be directly observable (except in first-person, as it were), your evidence against Descartes's view is not at all compelling.

Of course, I don't think he had any very good evidence that cats do not have consciousness, and I myself suppose they do (at least my two cats do...well, sort of). But I have tried to show why your case against Descartes is not as easily made as you seemed to suppose.