My first real motivation to defend the rights of animals came in the late 1990's, when I read a small book detailing the suffering and cruelty underwent by cows and chickens in a slaughterhouse. The description made a lasting negative impression on me, and I hope that one day, the concealed and horrible torture that has taken place in slaughterhouses, together with hunting for sport, will become a distant memory.

On any controversial issue, there are three positions you can take: proponent, opponent, or skeptic. A proponent makes a statement and may attempt to justify it, an opponent denies the statement, and a skeptic withholds his or her judgment about the truth or falsity of the statement altogether, but may invalidate arguments in favor of either position. In this essay, I will be playing the role of a skeptic, not proving that animals are conscious, but refuting arguments that they are unconscious, and then I will examine some issues raised by the controversy in our culture.

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Argument #1: The simple fact that some animals eat others in order to survive justifies animal slaughter.

Objection: The conclusion does not follow. Moral arguments in favor of the permissibility of certain actions cannot be made by reference to the fact that such actions have been, or need to be, performed by other animals. The mere fact that "the lion does it" in no way morally justifies animal slaughter. Further, only some animals must eat others in order to live. We call such animals obligate carnivores. We are not obligate carnivores. Unlike them, we have the ability to survive without eating meat.

Another argument could be made in similar vein: People who have disabling conditions leaving them unable to work must survive on government-taxed disability funds. Without these funds or a similar demand of labor, many of them would die. Does this justify the acquiring of the funds by people who are not disabled?

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Argument #2: If there are trillions of animals on Earth and only six billion humans, and further, if humans are the most linguistically and technologically advanced animals on the planet, then, on self-reflection, the high likelihood that other animals are unconscious follows from the realization that one is a member of this small, advanced species rather than one of the trillions of other animals one could be, by inference to the best explanation.

Objection: A formidable argument, but I must point out two facts from the start. First of all, it does not disprove animal consciousness, and second, in calculating the expected utility or suffering for certain actions, we must multiply the severity of the consequences, added to benefits, with the likelihood of their happening (e.g., a conscious animal's being tortured), add it to the expected utility of the other possibility (of the animal's unconsciousness and painless slaughter), and then compare it to the expected utility of other actions (e.g., leaving the animals alone altogether, just in case they are conscious). The severity of the pain experienced by a conscious animal in a slaughterhouse, when multiplied by the probability that animals are conscious, even if that probability is low, may still result in a figure for expected suffering that is frighteningly large.

Now, onto the argument itself. It seems to me that there are other, competing explanations for why we find ourselves to be human. One of them is that we are just lucky. Another is that human awareness is the kind of awareness that we have a greater ability to notice and reflect on, though it does not negate the reality and emotional intensity of other forms of awareness in which this ability is not as highly present, such as dream sleep. How do you prove that the unconsciousness of animals that don't build factories or drive cars (let alone need them) is a better explanation?

On the subject of dream sleep, studies show that our frontal lobes are less active while dreaming. They are comparatively larger in us than in any other animal. It may be that animals with differently-organized brains live their waking lives in something similar to our dream-consciousness.

Again, in any argument that purported to prove that animals were probably unconscious, we would still need to consider the counterweight of the severity of torture in slaughtering them if they were conscious.

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Argument #3: Animals are unconscious because they do not have the capacity to use language.

Objection: This and other dissimilarity arguments make unjustified leaps of logic from some property of an animal it does not share with us to its 'unconsciousness.' How do you know that consciousness requires language? Some autistic children can't speak or use language at all. Are they unconscious? You can't infer that consciousness requires language any more than you can infer that it requires being rich or living in India. We just don't know.

Granted, it is more difficult to remember events in our lives before we could speak, but if this is used as an argument against animal consciousness, then dreams again furnish an objection: they are easily forgotten, and yet we are not necessarily unconscious while we have them.

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Argument #4: In the Book of Genesis, God gives us dominion over all the animals. Therefore, animal slaughter is justified.

Objection: Appeal to authority. There is great controversy over whether Christian ethics are to be preferred over those of any other religion, and even whether a god exists. Objections to Christianity are found in many books on agnosticism and atheism, such as The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and in my essay, Christianity as a Tool of Oppression Against the Romantically Unsuccessful, in which I discuss a theory of Christianity as a tempting lie to dominate and control the lower classes. Near the end of the essay, I discuss the possibility of intellectual autonomy in the face of the Christian God, even if that God threatened to send us to Hell.

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That concludes my objections to the arguments given. Nowhere have I chosen to argue that animals are conscious, though they certainly might be, and perhaps are. I have simply shown that it's harder than you think, if not impossible, to disprove it. To understand the possibility of animal consciousness, notice that they are similar to us in many ways. They look around at their immediate environment and navigate the world. They appear to have at least some exercise of freedom and decision in the world. They eat food, mate, and run from predators. They seek pleasure and avoid pain. They show interest in us, in some ways communicate with us, and are even affectionate with us.

If animals might be conscious, then why haven't we stopped eating meat? I think there may be a number of factors at play here, some of them even based on fallacies. Due in part to its nutritional content, some find the taste of meat very pleasing, as a taste. There has also been a temptation to glory in becoming large, muscular, and athletic, especially for athletes themselves, in doing all that is necessary to become 'the champions' or optimally developed beings.

I understand that meat tastes good -- I used to eat lots of it -- and yet there are plenty of foods out there, as well as several alternatives to the path of the meat-eater for the athlete. We could begin animal-friendly sports leagues, control our destinies through genetic enhancement, and invent more sports and competitive games in which the condition sought is more than brute strength. As I show in The Weaknesses of Competition for Individual Strength and the Evolutionary Value of Small Size, it is a common fallacy to attempt to infer from Darwin's theory that the strong must trump the weak in the game of survival. Really, what matters is that we all stay alive, and no bully need come and alter the ruleset against people born with smaller bodies.

You may worry that if you stop hunting, you'll feel that you've admitted that animals have rights and that you must never hunt again. Or you may feel guilty about all your past killing. If you stop eating meat, you might feel that you will need to go all the way and avoid using any animal products at all. I understand these pressures and have experienced them myself. If you have the courage to make small steps forward, you will be praised by animal lovers everywhere and might even make the world a happier place.


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