Oct 01, · Do elephants feel joy, chimpanzees grief and depression, and dogs happiness and dejection? People disagree about the nature of emotions in nonhuman animal beings (hereafter animals), especially concerning the question of whether any animals other than humans can feel emotions ().Pythagoreans long ago believed that animals experience the same range of emotions Jul 01, · The utilitarian position on animals would condemn a large number of practices that involve the suffering and death of billions of animals, but there are cases in which some use of non-human animals, and perhaps even human animals, may be morally justified (Gruen ch. 4; Gilbert, Kaebnick, & Murray ) IELTS Writing Task 2 Sample Answer Essay: Protecting Wild Animals or Humans. the valid reasons to prioritise humanity do not outweigh the fact that animals more desperately require refuge. emotionally complex lives have a range of complicated emotions
Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals | TED Talk
Questions about animal consciousness — in particular, which animals have consciousness and what if anything that consciousness might be like do animals have emotions essay are both scientific and philosophical. They are scientific because answering them will require gathering information using scientific techniques — no amount of arm-chair pondering, conceptual analysis, logic, a priori theory-building, transcendental inference or introspection will tell us whether a platypus, an iguana, or a squid to take a few examples enjoy a life of subjective experience — at some point we'll have to learn something about the animals.
Just what sort s of science can bear do animals have emotions essay these questions is a live question, but at the least this will include investigations of the behavior and neurophysiology of a wide taxonomic range of animals, as well as the phylogenetic relationships among taxa.
But these questions are deeply philosophical as well, with epistemological, metaphysical, and phenomenological dimensions. Progress will therefore ultimately require interdisciplinary work by philosophers willing to engage with do animals have emotions essay empirical details of animal biology, do animals have emotions essay, as well as scientists who are sensitive to the philosophical complexities of the issue. First, if philosophy often begins with questions about the place of humans in nature, one way humans have attempted to locate themselves is by comparison and contrast with those things in nature most similar to themselves, i.
At least in the West, the traditional — and perhaps still intuitive to many people — way of thinking about consciousness is as primarily an innate endowment of humans, which other animals may or may not share in virtue of being sufficiently like us. Within the traditional Biblical cosmology, while all animals were said to have arisen through divine intentional creation, humans were the only ones created in the likeness of the deity, and thus enjoyed a special, privileged role in the intended workings of the cosmos — including, for example, access to an eternal afterlife not overpopulated with fleas, ants and snails.
See Lewis, Ch 9 for an in-depth treatment of the problem of animal consciousness in relation to Christian theology. However, within a modern biological worldview, while humans may be unique in certain perhaps quite important respects, we are only one species of animal among many — one tip of one branch of the phylogenetic tree of life, and enjoy no particular special status.
From an evolutionary perspective, consciousness is a trait that some animals have at least humans have it. Salient questions include: Is it a late evolved, narrowly distributed trait, or an older more broadly shared trait? And, did it evolve only once, or a number of times independently? In reality, rabbits are more closely related to humans than they are to bats Nishihara et al.
Of course, it is consistent with an evolutionary perspective that humans are the only conscious animals. This would imply that consciousness was acquired through a recent evolutionary event that occurred since the split of our ancestral lineage from that of our closest non-human relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos see section 6 for discussion of such hypotheses.
But such a view requires support; though perhaps intuitive to some, do animals have emotions essay, its choice as a default position is arbitrary. See article on do animals have emotions essay Moral Status of Animals. Many billions of animals are slaughtered every year for food, use in research, and other human purposes. Moreover, before their deaths, many — perhaps most — of these animals are subject to conditions of life that, if they are in fact experienced by the animals in anything like the way a human would experience them, amount to cruelty.
Arguments that non-human animals are not conscious therefore effectively double as apologetics for our treatment of animals. When the question of animal consciousness is under consideration, our guilt or innocence as a civilization for an enormous body of cruelty may hang in the balance. However, some philosophers have argued that consciousness per se does not matter for the treatment of animals, and therefore either that a even if animals are not conscious, they may deserve moral consideration, do animals have emotions essay, or b even if animals are conscious, they may not deserve moral consideration.
For more discussion of the ethical issues, see Singer []; Regan ; Rollin ; Varner; Steiner Third, while theories of consciousness are frequently developed without special regard to questions about animal consciousness, the plausibility of such theories has sometimes been assessed against the results of their application to animal consciousness and, similarly, to human infants.
This raises questions about the relative epistemic weight of theoretical considerations e, do animals have emotions essay. philosophical arguments for a given theory of consciousness against particular case judgments or intuitions about whether a given creature is conscious.
For example, Searle argues that our intuitive, commonsense attributions of intentional and emotional states to dogs carries more epistemic weight than philosophically motivated skeptical concerns. In contrast, do animals have emotions essay, Carruthers asserts that his own arguments that nonhuman animals even dogs lack consciousness are sufficiently weighty that we are morally obligated to eradicate or ignore our sympathetic feelings toward such creatures.
Should our theories of consciousness be constrained by our intuitive attributions of consciousness to animals or, e. Fourth, the problem of determining whether animals are conscious stretches the limits do animals have emotions essay knowledge and scientific methodology beyond the breaking point, according to some, do animals have emotions essay. The philosophical issues surrounding the interpretation of experiments to investigate perception, learning, categorization, memory, spatial cognition, numerosity, communication, language, social cognition, theory of mind, causal reasoning, and metacognition in animals are discussed in the entry on animal cognition.
Despite this work on cognition, the topic of consciousness per se in animals has remained controversial, even taboo, among many scientists, while other scientists from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds e. neuroscience, animal behavior, evolutionary biology have developed novel ways of do animals have emotions essay the subject see Boly et al. Many philosophers and scientists have either argued or assumed that consciousness is inherently private, and hence that one's own experience is unknowable to others.
While language may allow humans to cross this supposed gap by communicating their experience to others, this is allegedly not possible for other animals. Despite the controversy in philosophical and scientific circles, it remains a matter of common sense to most people that some animals do have conscious experiences.
Most people, if asked why they think familiar animals such as their pets are conscious, would point to similarities between the behavior of those animals and human behavior — for example, animals seem to visibly express pleasure and displeasure and a variety of emotions, their behavior seems to be motivated by seeking food, comfort, social contact, etc.
Similarity arguments for animal consciousness thus have roots in common sense observations. But they may also be bolstered by scientific investigations of behavior and the comparative study of brain anatomy and physiology, as well as considerations of evolutionary continuity between species.
Neurological similarities between humans and other animals have been do animals have emotions essay to suggest commonality of conscious experience; all mammals share the same basic brain anatomy, and much is shared with vertebrates more generally.
Even structurally different brains may be neurodynamically similar in ways that enable inferences about animal consciousness to be drawn Seth et al. As well as generic arguments about the connections among consciousness, neural activity, and behavior, a considerable amount of scientific research directed towards understanding particular conscious states uses animals as proxies for humans.
The reactions of many animals, particularly other mammals, to bodily events that humans would report as painful are easily and automatically recognized by most do animals have emotions essay as pain responses.
High-pitched vocalizations, fear responses, nursing of injuries, and learned avoidance are among the responses to noxious stimuli that are all part of the common mammalian heritage, and similar responses are also observable in organisms from a wide range of taxonomic groups see section 7. Much of the research that is of direct relevance to the treatment of human pain, including on the efficacy of analgesics and anesthetics, is conducted on rats and other animals, do animals have emotions essay.
The validity of this research depends on the similar mechanisms involved [ 1 ] and to many it seems arbitrary to deny that injured rats, who respond well to opiates for example, feel pain. Scientific demonstrations that members of other species, even of other phyla, are susceptible to the same visual illusions as we are e.
It is often argued that the use of animals to model neuropsychiatric disorders presupposes convergence of emotional and other conscious states and further refinements of those models do animals have emotions essay strengthen the argument for attributing such states to animals. Such similarity arguments are, of course, inherently limited in that it is always open to critics to exploit some dis analogy between animals and humans to argue that the similarities don't entail the conclusion that both are sentient.
Even when bolstered by evolutionary considerations of continuity between the species, the arguments are vulnerable, for the mere fact that humans have a trait does not entail that our closest relatives must have that trait too.
There is no inconsistency with evolutionary continuity to maintain that only humans have the capacity to learn to play chess. Likewise for consciousness. Perhaps a combination of behavioral, physiological and morphological similarities with evolutionary theory amounts to a stronger overall case [ 3 ].
However, a convincing argument will likely also require motivation in terms of a well developed theory of the structure and function of consciousness as a cognitive process — a route that many recent participants in the debate on animal consciousness have pursued see section 6. Nevertheless, several useful distinctions among different notions of consciousness have been made, and with the help of these distinctions it is do animals have emotions essay to gain some clarity on the important questions that remain about animal consciousness.
Two ordinary senses of consciousness which are not in dispute when applied to animals are the sense of consciousness involved when a creature is awake rather than asleep [ 4 ]or in a coma, do animals have emotions essay, and the sense of consciousness implicated in the basic ability of organisms to perceive and thereby respond to selected features of their environments, thus making them conscious or aware of those features.
Consciousness do animals have emotions essay both these senses is identifiable in organisms belonging to a wide variety of taxonomic groups see, e. A third, more technical notion of consciousness, access consciousness, has been introduced by Block to capture the sense in which mental representations may be poised for use in rational control of action or speech.
Block believes that many animals possess access consciousness speech is not a requirement. Indeed, do animals have emotions essay, some of the neurological evidence cited by Block in support of the global workspace is derived from monkeys.
But clearly an do animals have emotions essay such as Descartes, who, we will see, denied speech, language, and rationality to animals, would also deny access consciousness to them, do animals have emotions essay.
Those who follow Davidson in denying intentional states to animals would likely concur. There are two remaining senses of consciousness that cause more controversy when applied to animals: phenomenal consciousness and self-consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness refers to the qualitative, subjective, experiential, or phenomenological aspects of conscious experience, sometimes identified with qualia.
Nagel disputes our capacity to know, imagine, or describe in scientific objective terms what it is like to be a bat, but he assumes that there is something it is like. whether there is a subjective experience of life or being for them, a proprietary perspective that individuals have on their own perceptual, cognitive and emotive processes. Such theories will be discussed below, in sections 5 and 6. Self-consciousness refers to a subject's awareness of itself, but is also a notoriously ambiguous term — there are importantly distinct senses in which a subject can be self-aware see for example the SEP article on Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness.
These include: an awareness of one's body as a physical object, or as the medium of one's own perception and action i. bodily self-awareness ; awareness of one's own mental states i. mental or experiential self-awareness ; awareness of one-self as perceived by others, or as a member of a social group such as a family, team, do animals have emotions essay, or institution i. social self-awareness ; awareness of one-self as a persistent character in the narratives told by oneself and others i.
narrative self-awareness. This list is far do animals have emotions essay exhaustive, and further, each listed notion is subject to further disambiguation.
Hence, although on many theories self-consciousness is tightly related to phenomenal consciousness, proposals to this effect can vary greatly in their meaning and their implications for which animals might be conscious.
The remainder of this article deals primarily with the attribution of consciousness in its phenomenal sense to animals, although there will be some discussion of access consciousness, self-consciousness and theory of mind in animals, especially where these have been related theoretically to phenomenal consciousness — as, for instance, in Carruthers' a,b, do animals have emotions essay, argument that a particular sort of mental self-representation is required for phenomenal consciousness.
It would be anachronistic to read ideas about consciousness from today back into the ancient literature. Aristotle asserted that only humans had rational souls, while the locomotive souls shared by all animals, human and nonhuman, endowed animals with instincts suited to their successful reproduction and survival.
The argument about what is reasoning, and whether animals display it, remains with us 25 centuries later, as evidenced by the volume Rational Animals? The Great Chain of Being derived from early Christian interpretation of Aristotle's scale of nature Lovejoy provides another Aristotelian influence on the debate about animal minds. Two millennia after Aristotle, Descartes' mechanistic philosophy introduced the idea of a reflex to explain the behavior of nonhuman animals.
Although do animals have emotions essay conception of animals treated them as reflex-driven machines, with no intellectual capacities, it is important to recognize that he took mechanistic explanation to be perfectly adequate for explaining sensation and perception — aspects of animal behavior that are nowadays often associated with consciousness.
He drew the line only at rational thought and understanding. Given the Aristotelian division between instinct and reason and the Cartesian distinction between mechanical reflex and rational thought, it's tempting to map the one distinction onto the other. Nevertheless, it may be a mistake to assimilate the two. First, do animals have emotions essay, a number of authors before and after Darwin have believed that conscious experience can accompany instinctive and reflexive actions.
Second, the dependence of phenomenal consciousness on rational, self-reflective thought is a particularly strong and contentious claim although it has do animals have emotions essay defenders, discussed below. Although the roots of careful observation and experimentation of the natural world go back to ancient times, study of animal behavior remained do animals have emotions essay anecdotal until long after the scientific revolution.
Animals were, of course, widely used in pursuit of answers to anatomical, physiological, and embryological questions. Vivisection was carried out by such ancient luminaries as Galen and there was a resurgence of the practice in early modern times Bertoloni Meli Descartes himself practiced and advocated vivisection Descartes, Letter to Plempius, Feb 15and wrote in correspondence that the mechanical understanding of animals absolved people of any guilt for killing and eating animals.
Mechanists who followed him e. Malebranche used Descartes' denial of reason and a soul to animals as a rationale for their belief that animals were incapable of suffering or emotion, and did not deserve moral consideration — justifying vivisection and other brutal treatment see Olsonp.
The idea that animal behavior is purely reflexive may also have served to diminish interest in treating behavior as a target of careful study in its own right. A few glimmers of experimental approaches to animal behavior can be seen in the late 18th century e. By the mid 19th century Alfred Russel Wallace do animals have emotions essay arguing explicitly for an experimental approach to animal behavior, and Douglas Spalding's experiments on instinctual feeding do animals have emotions essay in chicks were seminal.
Still, the emergence of experimental approaches had very little to say about consciousness per do animals have emotions essay, though Spalding's work can be seen as a contribution to the discussion about instinct and reason. In the same vein of instinct vs.
Do Animals Have Feelings? - Earth Unplugged
, time: 4:30The Moral Status of Animals (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Jun 12, · Pigs are extremely interesting animals. They're able to solve challenging problems, they love to play, they display a wide range of emotions, and they have unique individual personalities Jul 01, · The utilitarian position on animals would condemn a large number of practices that involve the suffering and death of billions of animals, but there are cases in which some use of non-human animals, and perhaps even human animals, may be morally justified (Gruen ch. 4; Gilbert, Kaebnick, & Murray ) Aug 11, · It also still draws comparisons between the behaviour and emotions of humans and animals. The grudging compliment we pay a powerful man – ‘he’s an alpha male’ – is one hint of the genre. But we ought to be careful about what we believe. Theories of human nature have important consequences – what we think we are shapes how we act
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