Salkever, 'Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-salkever-animal

Richard Sorabji, <i>Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of
the Western Debate</i>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Pp. 267. $39.95. ISBN 0-8014-2948-X. 
  Reviewed by Stephen Salkever -- Bryn Mawr College

  Richard Sorabji's previous books in Greek philosophy include
several important studies of Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian
philosophy of science and metaphysics.  His work combines solid
and wide-ranging scholarship with clear philosophical argument,
and he has always been interested in connections between
scientific theory and ethical theory, particularly in his justly
praised <i>Necessity, Cause, and Blame: Perspectives on
Aristotle's Theory</i> (1980).  These virtues are on display in
the present volume as well, but there is an additional element
that gives the book a special interest, and makes it worth
reading for those who are not specialists in ancient philosophy. 
As Sorabji describes his project in the final chapter, "I began
my reading with only an historical interest in the large, and
largely uncharted, ancient debate on human and animal psychology. 
But I was led to appreciate that there was a real live moral
problem by the badness of the arguments for a major difference
between animals and man" (p. 216). For the specialist, Sorabji
gives a comprehensive and detailed map of philosophical views
from Pythagoras and Empedocles through Maimonides and Aquinas
concerning similarities and differences between human and
(nonhuman) animal perception and cognition, and of the
implications of these views for how we humans should think about
and act toward beasts.  Beyond this much-needed mapping, however,
Sorabji makes a persuasive case that present-day practical
worries about our relationship to animals--in questions ranging
from vegetarianism to the justice of animal experimentation to
the costs and benefits of species conservation--are poorly served
by present-day moral philosophy.  He suggests that a
consideration of the ancient and medieval debates concerning
where and how to draw the line between humans and animals can
open new and badly needed lines of theoretical reflection. 
Sorabji's last words on the subject are mild but serious, and
well-earned by his textual and philosophic analysis.  Concluding
that our thinking about the treatment of animals would be
considerably improved by a consideration of the ancient debates,
he says that "the implication of this is that, although we ought
to make major changes in our treatment of animals in the more
prosperous countries, many considerations, including our own
serious needs, have to be taken into account.  There is no simple
criterion for condemning what we presently do.  On the other
hand, I suspect that a more complex consideration will still find
a very great deal that is unjustifiable" (p. 219). 

  Much territory is covered in this short book, which is divided
into two parts, each a concise and careful sifting and
classification of philosophical views on the relationship between
sensation, belief, desire, and reason, with particular attention
to comparisons drawn between humans and other animals (Part 1),
and to ethical questions involving treatment of animals (Part 2). 
Sorabji's account is rich in detail and interpretation of texts,
but the outline of his narrative is strikingly clear.  Plato's
central innovation in philosophical psychology, on Sorabji's
reading, is to go beyond the traditional distinction between soul
and body by maintaining that the soul itself has parts which
sometimes conflict.  Within this vision of the complex soul,
Plato seeks to emphasize the importance of reason at the expense
of sensation or perception.  His magnification of the role of
reason might seem to increase the gap between humans and other
animals, but Plato's frequent reference to the migration of souls
across species lines reduces the psychic space between man and
beast.  Aristotle famously claims in the <i>Politics</i> that
humans are the only animal capable of <i>logos</i>[[1]] (though
he elsewhere attributes forms of reason and intelligence to
animals, for example in the first chapter of the
<i>Metaphysics</i>), but his psychological theory as a whole is
marked by a narrowing of the scope of reason relative to Plato,
and a corresponding increase in the cognitive content of the
power of perception (<i>aisthesis</i>), a capacity possessed by
all animals.  For Aristotle, many animals possess true memory
(though not the human power to remind ourselves deliberately of
previous perceptions), can learn, and perceive not only immediate
sensations but connections, relationships, and rudimentary
universals and action-orienting propositions: "Whether or not
Aristotle's lion perceives the ox as an ox, it certainly
perceives it as a meal" (p. 62). In addition to the power of
intentional perception, Aristotle's animals are capable of both
passion and voluntary motion, and so are not simply driven about
by impulses beyond their control.

  On Sorabji's account, the idea so familiar to us today that
animals are little more than inanimate machines, responding
mindlessly by innate impulse to environmental cues enters
philosophy with the Stoics.  Their simplified picture of animal
life serves to increase the distance between us and other
animals, and to make laughable claims that we owe animals justice
or any moral consideration at all.  This Stoic position, taken
over into Christian theorizing by Augustine, has dominated our
thinking ever since: "By and large, despite some opposing
tendencies, my impression is that the emphasis of Western
Christianity was on one half, the anti-animal half, of a much
more wide-ranging and vigorous ancient Greek debate.  And I think
this helps to explain why until very recently we, or at least I
myself, have been rather complacent about the treatment of
animals" (pp. 204-205).

  For Sorabji, the pro-animal side of the ancient debate, the
side arguing that the gap between human and animal psychology is
not so large, is best represented by various Aristotelians
(especially Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor as leader of the
Peripatos) and Platonists (especially Plutarch and Porphyry).  A
key figure in Sorabji's history of the fading away of this
alternative is Iamblichus, who turned Neoplatonism away from its
earlier assertions of a significant kinship between humans and
other animals, and so sets the stage for the nearly complete
triumph of the anti-animal view.  Sorabji recognizes that the
very same Stoic and Christian position that so severely
downgrades animals insists on the desirability of the community
of all human beings, a community that rejects any distinction
between masters and slaves, a subject on which Plato and
Aristotle are decidedly equivocal.  He thus raises but does not
sufficiently consider the question of whether the Stoic
denigration of animals was in some sense a necessary price to pay
for the concept of a universal human community.

  In his final chapter, Sorabji turns his attention to the two
most prominent philosophic critiques of our modern practices
toward animals, Peter Singer's <i>Animal Liberation</i> and Tom
Regan's <i>The Case For Animal Rights</i>.  While sympathetic to
their good intentions, he is scathingly critical of both, arguing
that each reduces complex issues to a single one-dimensional
decision rule, either utilitarianism for Singer or a notion of
the intrinsic rights of all "higher" animals for Regan, a
context-ignoring reduction that yields bizarre judgments about
how to act in particular situations.  (He is more favorably
disposed to recent treatments of the subject which are less
rule-oriented and more influenced by Greek philosophy,
particularly Mary Midgley's "admirable" <i>Animals and Why They
Matter</i>.)  Sorabji argues quite convincingly that Regan and
Singer, like the ancient Stoics, are too much driven by the
desire to eliminate all confusion and complexity and by the hope
that a properly constructed philosophy can solve all our problems
for us: "Moral theories may seek to make things manageable by
reducing all considerations to one.  Insofar as they do, this is
so much the worse for them" (p. 215).  

  There are three reservations worth mentioning.  Sorabji's
readings of Aristotle are always sharp and nuanced, but his
comments on Plato are marred by an unwillingness to consider that
dialogues may convey meaning differently from treatises: any
sentence spoken by Plato's Socrates seems to count for Sorabji as
a Platonic belief, and clashes between such statements of belief
are explained by chronology.  Second, the wisdom of considering
only texts traditionally classified as "philosophic" is
questionable.  Finally, it may be that Sorabji has unjustly
neglected the "pro-animal" elements within Christian
philosophizing.  But the virtues of this reader-friendly work far
outweigh any complaints.  Sorabji is very good about flagging
places where his own text interpretations are controversial; he
supplies an excellent index locorum; and there is an extremely
helpful bibliography organized by topic.  In the process of
supplying a fascinating historical narrative of an ancient
debate, Sorabji makes a compelling case against two powerful but
poorly supported dogmas of modern moral philosophy: the belief
that nonhuman animals have no mental life, and the belief that
the job of ethical theory is to supply simple and precise answers
to complex practical problems.  Aristotle would be pleased.

NOTE

1 Sorabji sees this claim as the distant ancestor of the view
associated with Noam Chomsky but first enunciated by the Stoics
that, while other animals can carry out rudimentary
communication, humans are the only syntax-using animal.  This
gives rise to his favorite example of an invalid practical
inference drawn from a plausible scientific proposition: "Under
pressure, the Stoics retreated to the position that at least they
don't have syntax.  The moral conclusion was meant to be 'They
don't have syntax, so we can eat them.' . . . It has become
crucial whether animals have syntax.  This, of course, is a
question of great scientific interest, but of no moral relevance
whatsoever" (p. 2).