EcoRes Forum

[G Dalla Casa]

I copy a mail also in the Coffee Shop, maybe for informatic trouble.

There are great evidence of intelligence in other sensing beings. Deep studies by Konrad Lorenz, now by Irene Pepperberg and many other scholars, on Primates, dolphins, birds, and also cephalopodes give a clear evidence that other animals think, have deep social life, suffer, love, have emotions, and so on.
There is an excellent article about thirty years of study by Irene Pepperberg on National Geographic issue dated march 2009. All books by Konrad Lorenz are a proof of this. Also Jane Goodall's studies on chimps are enlightening on this subject.
The most intelligent of bonobo chimps is surely much better than last of humans. But what is the problem? Only a strong mistaked cultural heritage of Western culture and some other ones. We ARE animals. We should be astonished if we don't find intelligence in other living beings.
All the best,
Guido
_________________
For the Earth!

[W Lee]

Hey Guido,

So I have some perhaps touchy questions about claims to animal intelligence (and I have read many of these studies): We draw these comparisons primarily on the basis of behavioral comparison where we are the standard by which intellect, cognition, etc. is measured. This still, then, makes us human beings the standard by which intelligence is accounted as value. We argue, for example, that because some animals--say primates--are "like" us in this regard they are owed moral consideration. But why? That is, why should such possible qualities--provided this behavioral comparison holds up--confer something like a right to moral consideration? Why not other criteria, say, the capacity for suffering? Why is "like us" the moral standard--especially for folks who insist (though I think often deeply self-deceptively) they're non-anthropocentric?

Second, these studies are deeply problematic with respect to what they purport to show. Lobsters appear to struggle when you put them in the boiling water--they seem to feel pain--and they do not. In fact, they don't have any of the cognitive apparatus to support this experience. My point is that behavioral evidence can be very shaky--but more importantly, perhaps--and this is my central question: Why do we persist in thinking that these comparisons are important? Surely the evidence of our interdependency with others species of creature and organism--at whatever scale--provides us sufficient impetus to act so as insure our collective survival (if this is still possible). So what do we seem to need "them" to be like "us"?

[J Bendik-Keymer]

I second Wendy's questions. David Schmidtz has a great article, "Are All Species Equal?" which I believe is reprinted in his recent collection Person, Polis, Planet (OUP 2008 or 2009). Dave argues that Singer is speciesist because he selects one capacity as the basis for value, whereas there are many capacities that (a) have value (are worthy of awe -more a Nussbaumian way of saying it) and (b) are incommensurable. The leopard runs really fast. The spider jumps really far. Ants can carry absurdly large mass relative to their mass. And so on.

Best,

Jeremy