Palatkaamme edelliseen. Seuraava katkelma on jälleen Rachelsin kirjasta Created from Animals. Ilmaiseeko se ymmärtämisen tieteellistä kriteeriä vai erästä poliittista mielipidettä? Rachels, 130:
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) commonly called 'the father of modern philosophy', was the proponent of this view. Descartes held that the mind and the body are radically different types of entities. The mind is wholly immaterial in nature, whereas the body is simply a kind of machine. Humans, because they have minds as well as bodies, are capable of thought and feeling. But mere animals, Descartes said, have no minds. They are, therefore, nothing but machines, incapable of any sort of conscious state, including pain. 'My opinion', he wrote, 'is not so much cruel to animals as indulgent to men ... since it absolves them from the suspicion of crime when they eat or kill animals.' It was also indulgent to physiologists who no longer needed to be concerned about the 'suffering' of their animal subjects. It at least some laboratories, Descartes's view was adopted enthusiastically. Nicholas Fontaine wrote in his memoirs, published in 1738, about a visit to one such laboratory:
Miten Descartes käsitti tuon "koneen"? Ihminen oli myös "puoliksi" tuollainen kone. Jokin kello on sikäli huono vertaus tässä, koska se ei ole orgaaninen kone. Kellolla ei ole esim. tuntoaisia kuten "organismikoneella". Siitä, että D. kutsuu eläintä ja ihmisruumista koneeksi, ei voi päätellä, että se teknisen laitteen tavoin ei tuntisi kipua, koska D:n "koneruumis" on o r g a n i s m i hermoineen jne. Toisaalta esim. ihmisen ajatteleva substanssi ei tuntisi kipua. Se vain tarkkaillen toteaisi tai päättelisi jonkin esim. vaurion kehossaan (kuten natsilääkärit tarkkailivat objektiivisesti koeihmisiään). Minä käsittäisin tuon D:n ajattelevan tietoisuuden joksikin ymmärrykseksi tai vastaavaksi eikä aistimus- tai ärsyketietoisuudeksi.
Nuo Fontainen kuvailemat kokeidentekijät sekoittivat teknisen laitteen, jolla ei ole aistielimiä, orgaaniseen eliöön.
'A Brute to the Brutes?': Descartes' Treatment of Animals
http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/339/Descartes.pdf"Now from none of all this does it follow that when Descartes calls some- thing a 'mechanism' or machine'he is automatically ruling out the presence of sensations or feelings; Boyce Gibson's claim that Descartes 'uses the term [mechanism] explicitly to exclude feeling' is not supported by any evidence.(7 In fact it is important to notice that the human body is, for Descartes, a machine in exactly the same sense as the animal body: 'God made our body like a machine, and he wanted it to function like a universal instrument, which would always operate in the same way in accordance with its own laws'.(8 The phrase 'bete-machine' can thus be rather misleading, since the mechanical physiology Descartes has in mind operates equally in the case of homo sapiens."
"Descartes' assertion of proposition (3) (that animals do not think) need not commit him to denying any feeling or sensation to animals-for example a level of feeling or sensation that falls short of reflective mental awareness."
Positiivista evidenssiä siitä, että D. ei pitänyt eläimiä ilman tuntemuksia olevina mykkinä koneina:
"The strongest evidence, which those who credit Descartes with the monstrous thesis seem strangely blind to, comes from the famous letters already cited where Descartes denies speech to the animals. Writing to More, Descartes says that the sounds made by horses, dogs, etc., are not genuine language, but are ways of 'communicating to us ... their natural impulses of anger, fear, hunger and so on'.(25 Similarly, ..."
"If this were not enough, in the letter to More, Descartes specifically separates cogitatio (thought) from sensus (sensation), and states that he denies the former, but not the latter, to animals: 'I should like to stress that I am talking of thought, not of ... sensation; for ... I deny sensation to no animal, in so far as it depends on a bodily organ'.(27"
