Comments

1. 

   kilgore

   December 28, 2007 at 21:21

   Interesting article. But no mention on whether whales pass the mirror-test... I suppose it's logistically difficult to conduct that particular expt. Is there a catalogue somewhere of which animals pass/fail... I could use it as a basis for what I'm allowed to eat. (Though I guess that means I can only eat stupid animals... Pekingese steak anyone?) In C.S. Lewis' collected essays there's a very interesting piece on the morality of killing animals which makes a similar point on the need to get past our reflexive sentimentality. You mentioned bullfighting -- my reflexive sentimentality in this case is not that an animal is hurt, but that the people involved *enjoy* it. Same goes for fox-hunting... e.g. I'd feel no qualms about culling foxes for pest-control reasons, but get incredibly angry at the thought of a hunt. It feels somehow degrading. I'm not sure where this emotion comes from. Hopefully your full-article will be able to bring to clarity here as well. Thanks.
2. 

   John

   December 29, 2007 at 08:35

   Please check out this reference on cats in particular and the non-humans altogehter. 1. http://www.fearnomorezoo.org/literature/purr.php
3. 

   Alexander Fiske-Harrison

   December 29, 2007 at 11:46

   Re: can whales pass the mirror-test. Since bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) pass the mirror test there is a high probability another cetacean species does, but I am not sure how extensive the testing has been. Tursiops are generally regarded as the most intelligent cetacean. Re: killing, or causing the death of, animals for our pleasure. Until my essay comes out I will confine myself to remarking that those of us who continue to eat meat without any biological necessity - and certainly not in the quantities we do - are doing exactly this.
4. 

   Tim Knightley

   December 30, 2007 at 04:54

   Dear Sir: Without doubt, whatever about the strength of the arguments of philosophers trying to justify their own comportment and their own visits to bullfights and the like, approving an inhuman status quo, surely any argument about whales must first establish that humans on the planet do in fact occupy the moral and physical high ground in the evolutionary hierarchy to be able to impose a cull of such wonderful sentient beings - fellow beings - and as yet few philosophers have managed to establish such a superior state. Our cousins in Australia are to be congratulated on intervening to stop the barbarism or rather clinical lack of feeling of Japanese factory ships hunting humpbacks. Since when did the Japanese establish their moral superiority to legitimise the culling of whales? The building of the Burma railway during the Second World War by such fine specimens of humanity and even, pari passu, the corelative atomic bombing of the families of Nagasaki has demonstrated quite the obvious opposite about humans - are we sentient beings at all? If truth is inter-relational, then we are not empowered to cull such beings. No such culls are legitimated since our own culling of the children of Yiddish Judaism and the servants of the Christian God in the camps of Dachau. Cull - utter balderdash. Tim Knightley Tim Hoar
5. 

   CG

   December 31, 2007 at 14:04

   It does indeed seem that "our views of and dealings with animals" tend to be philosophically primitive. The mirror tests are though quite an insufficient starting point for examining animal consciousness. Not least since many animals, such as dogs, have a primary or deeper methods of recognition and identification other than visual. Though I'm not sure what it's like to be a bat, I'm confident that a dog's sophisticated and sensitive olfactory awareness provides many of the "colours" of its perceptual palette, and that a merely visual reflection is little more than a fleeting shadow. The mirror test is a measure of ability closely matching humans, not a statement of consciousness, and here Gallup's hypothesis is flawed. The main point you are examining though is an interesting and underexplored one. CG
6. 

   Alexander Fiske-Harrison

   December 31, 2007 at 16:19

   Whilst I agree with the abstract point that failing the mirror-test does not necessarily imply the absence of self-consciousness, and it can, in its sensory bias, lead to a "one-sided diet of examples", I think that it does generate illuminating data. In the case of dogs in particular, the behaviour I have witnessed of dogs placed in front of mirrors for the first time shows that their reflection has a great deal more perceptual gravity than a "fleeting shadow", and their failure to identify this percept with themselves is an enlightening failure in the above sense.
7. 

   R. G. Pierce

   January 5, 2008 at 15:33

   Dear Mr Fiske-Harrison, I fear that the task you have outlined is a logical impossibility. You require a truthfulness in people's ethics about other species and then you demand they abandon the one thing which could provide the objectivity to guarantee that thruthfulness, which is scientific method. It is only through agreed facts, verified by science, that we can come to an agreed and rational stance on a topic like whaling. Yours truly, Robert Pierce
8. 

   Alexander Fiske-Harrison

   January 8, 2008 at 14:52

   Even if your assertion were true, it would not be a logical impossibility but an empirical one - induction, as a matter of definition, does not deductively lead to truth. However, you do not seem to have taken on board that despite a healthy respect for science, I hold that it is simply impossible to come up with a full ethical view of a situation involving other species using only the rather impoverished menu of facts on offer from ethology, physiology, genetics etc. I think that great problems come from ignoring this as it leads people to use imaginary scenarios to generate their moral intuitions using the few dry facts they are given. This is why I advocate the more accurate, honest and incisive writing on this topic - a sort of 'moral journalism' if you like - of, for example, a Hemingway.
9. 

   Alexander Fiske-Harrison

   August 26, 2008 at 20:53

   It is worth mentioning that the bullfighting piece that led to this article appears in this months issue under the title 'A noble death'.
10. 

    Charlotte Dempsey

    April 11, 2009 at 01:17

    Mr Fiske-Harrison, I tried to follow your argument about bullfighting but I think you put it so much better here. There is a chain of living things, but where exactly are bulls on it? Maybe that's what you are trying to find out. Best of luck with your researches and with your rather silly argument with Jordi Casamitjana. I suspect he's playing you so he can either discredit you or force you to agree with him, but I think you know that. Perhaps that's why you keep discrediting him. If so, keep up the good work! CD
11. 

    Alexander Fiske-Harrison

    April 11, 2009 at 12:40

    It does seem to come across a great deal more clearly when it is not seen through the lens of such a contentious issue as bullfighting. I do find, though, that one simply can't accept the 'received wisdom'; be it the Anglo-Saxon stance against the horrors of the bullring or the Iberian stance for a noble cultural tradition. Hence my ongoing research (which can be found at www.alexanderfiskeharrison.co.uk).
12. 

    Alexander Fiske-Harrison

    April 14, 2009 at 10:58

    P.S. My time with the biologist and psychologist Professor Sue Savage Rumbaugh and the bonobos Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota at the Language Research Centre of Georgia State University, USA, is described here: http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/talking-with-apes/ (it includes my Financial Times 'Weekend' cover essay on them.)