Editor's note, April 3, 10: 30 p.m.: Following publication, the editors were made aware that the piece below drew from arguments in a video found here without attribution. It should not have been published in this form without indicating the source; proper sourcing has been added below.
What are you thinking? What do you care about? What is so different about you and me? These are the sort of questions I often ask myself whenever looking at an animal. While it is most likely a hopeless task, I try to imagine what it would be like to fly, what it would be like to have gills, what it would be like to have eight legs and what it would be like to be owned by humans. I wonder whether being human really is better than being any other species. Maybe it turns out that dogs live happier lives than humans, even though they might understand less. Maybe the life of a migratory bird is more interesting—traveling to opposite ends of the Earth by simply flapping their limbs. However, what I wonder most is whether we are making a grave mistake in how we treat our animal kin.
While neuroscience has given us much insight into how the human mind and other minds work, it still has much work to do in understanding the extent of our differences. We have already found that many species (e.g. orcas) have emotional capacities that rival our own, making it indisputably wrong to detain these species and break up their families like we would a rock for an exhibit. We generally seem to treat animals with higher cognitive abilities in a more kindly manner, but this does not always hold true. For example, a pig is smarter than a dog, but we treat dogs more kindly by most standards. Therefore, at the bare minimum, we should consistently treat animals more kindly based on their cognitive abilities.
Yet, I fear that neuroscience has not developed enough to make these hard and fast judgments about which animals deserve to be treated more like humans. We have to ask the question: while some of these animals lack higher cognitive ability, what if they are not as different from us as we thought? What if the experience of being a pig is not so different than the experience of being a human? If this were true, we would be committing horrific acts on a massive scale. We just happened to draw the lucky card of being the mammal with the highest cognitive ability.
However, my fear runs even deeper than the discoveries to be made in neuroscience. What if it can’t be discovered what exactly it is like to be a pig? What if the nature of being a pig can only be understood in a subjective context? For example, I can’t know what it’s like to be you, let alone an organism of a completely different species. In this sense, our lens of the human experience is infinitesimally narrow in terms of the numerous ways of experiencing the world.
Of course, if this were true, we would be treating animals that are not so different from ourselves like inanimate objects and we would never be able to know about it. As a result, it would be conscientious and safe to treat our animal kin with more kindness rather than taking the risk of treating these organisms in ways that would make us cringe if humans were the victims.
If the above argument does not convince you that we should treat animals more kindly, wait just a minute. In order to justify treating animals differently than humans, you would have to say that creatures with higher cognitive abilities should be treated more conscientiously. While I would generally agree with this premise, it has gone much too far in how we implement it.
The difference in DNA between a chimpanzee and a human is about a one percent difference. Think of all the things that humans can do that chimps cannot. Think of all the things humans have created and discovered that chimps have not. This one percent difference makes us the most dominant species on the planet while the chimp is just another primate. Now, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson did, imagine an alien species with a one percent difference in DNA from us in the other direction, meaning that they are to us what we are to chimps. It is hard to imagine what such a species would be capable of. Maybe their toddlers would know quantum mechanics. Maybe they could calculate things only our computers can calculate. Maybe they can grasp scientific truths that we never could. Nonetheless, once we acknowledge that there may be such an alien species out there, our above premise that animals of higher cognitive abilities should be treated more kindly becomes troubling.
Would it be okay for this alien species to keep humans in cages? Would it be okay for them to eat humans for nutrition? Would it be okay for them to hunt humans for fun? By our own standards, it seems that all of these actions would be okay. We keep chimps and orcas in cages. We eat pigs for nutrition. We hunt all sorts of animals because it is “fun.” Yet, in doing so, we have condoned any alien species to come here and treat us as horribly as we treat our animal kin.
One could try to argue that there is a line of “consciousness” that humans have crossed which differentiates us from other animals, but I claim that such a hard and fast line may be an arbitrary distinction. We could be merely insects unintelligibly squirming compared to a super-intelligent alien species.
Quite frankly, if a highly intelligent alien species saw how we treated our cognitive subordinates, they would have every right to treat us the same. Is that how you would like to be treated?