A very interesting piece by my friend Justin E. H. Smith on our shared history with animals and how it has changed over time.

… Our adult humanity consists in cutting off ties of community with animals, ceasing, as Lévi-Strauss put it, to think with them. When on occasion adults begin again to think about animals, if not with them, it is to assess whether animals deserve the status of rights-bearers. Animal rights, should there be such things, are now thought to flow from neurophysiological features and behavioral aptitudes: recognizing oneself in the mirror, running through mazes, stacking blocks to reach a banana.

But what is forgotten here is that the animals are being tested for re-admission to a community from which they were previously expelled, and not because they were judged to lack the minimum requirements for the granting of rights. They were expelled because they are hairy brutes, and we learned to be ashamed of thinking of them as our kin. This shame only increased when Darwin confirmed our kinship, thus telling us something Paleolithic hunters already knew full well. Morality doubled up its effort to preserve a distinction that seemed to be slipping away. Since the 19th century, science has colluded with morality, always allowing some trivial marker of human uniqueness or other to function as a token for entry into the privileged moral universe of human beings. “They don’t have syntax, so we can eat them,” is how Richard Sorabji brilliantly reduces this collusion to absurdity.

And is there a better video to pair this with than Frans de Waal’s lecture on what science tells us about our shared morality with animals?

Finally, “What sort of thoughts can animals have? Tim Crane discusses the intriguing issue of what apes and monkeys are capable of thinking about in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.” (Via 3QD)