User:Animalian/Sandbox

"The Case for Animal Rights" Book Analysis

The following represents a preliminary account of the book presently in review, The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan. I shall contribute greatly to this article in the upcoming weeks to present a robust account of all the arguments therein, condensing 400 pages into a document of several. I will also determine whether there exists a more appropriate placement for the preceding, to remove this from the main body of this article. That article now commences:

Tom Regan, following the footsteps of Peter Singer, adds to the literature in defense of animal rights, promoting a more so deontological, rather than strictly utilitarian account. [edit]Chapter 1: Animal Awareness

In the first chapter, Regan refutes the Cartesian view of animal consciousness, proceeding dialectically from complete denial of animal consciousness toward a basic acknowledgement of such consciousness, embodied in his "cumulative argument for animal consciousness".

1.1 Descartes's Denial

Descartes is infamous for regarding animals as "thoughless brutes", living machines incapable of thought, and therefore devoid of any and all consciousness. However, Descartes did acknowledge that animals were aware of some things, denying only the conscious capacity for thoughts about such awareness. Though a muddy account, Descartes does offer the following hierarchy of sense-perception, the basest, merely stimulus-response, the intermediate, CNS (central nervous system) processing, and the third, awareness of things beyond the self, i.e., beyond the immediate processing of external stimuli to thoughts about the stimuli themselves. But since Descartes denies that animals possess a mind, he inadvertently denigrates animals to the lowest order of sense-perception, that of stimulus-response.