Abortion: an animalist note

Gómez Pereira, Spanish doctor and humanist, developed in the pages of his Antoniana Margarita (1554) a paradoxical thesis. First, he assures us that animals are merely soulless automatons, made of flesh, blood, and bones, incapable of reasoning before acting, and who behave like a magnet and iron, following inevitable physical laws. But then he takes a turn and tells us that if animals could feel, "we would have to admit that men act in an inhuman, violent, and cruel manner. For what is more atrocious than beasts of burden carrying considerable weight on long journeys?" And what should we say about the spectacle of bullfighting, where the cattle seem to beg "for freedom with pleading lowing"? Only if animals cannot feel can we sleep morally sound.

The first part of this discourse will be inherited by Descartes, and the second, by Jeremy Bentham.

In Introduction to the principles of morality and legislation (1780) Bentham is blunt: the question is not whether animals can reason. Nor whether they can speak. The question is: can they suffer? In this way, the human perspective on animals changes. If, since Aristotle, rationality separated humans and animals, sensitivity unites them. If we understand ourselves as rational beings, we do not see reasoning in animals; but if we understand ourselves as sentient beings, we cannot ignore the suffering of an animal.

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Today, Bentham's criterion has triumphed. We no longer debate its foundation, but rather how to apply it.

This criterion condemns the Cartesian thesis of the animal-machine to irrelevance and places a sentient animal in contrast to a human being capable of interpreting with his own flesh the pain of living flesh capable of trembling. If for Descartes, what dehumanizes us is intellectual weakness, for Bentham it is emotional insensitivity.

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If we were to focus exclusively on rational capacity, we would have to conclude, according to Bentham, that an adult horse or dog is more rational than a child of one day, one week, or even one month. Consistent with this thesis, Peter Singer, a renowned animal rights advocate, wrote in Practical Ethics (1979) that "human infants are neither rational nor self-aware beings. If a fetus does not have the same right to life as a person, it seems that a newborn does not either. An infant places less value on its own life than a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee places on theirs." However, it should be noted that Singer is using the argument from reason, not from passion. It is as if he were saying: if man is the animal that speaks, then a pig, a cat, or a chimpanzee is more human than an unreasoning human.

In recent decades, two important cultural shifts have taken place: the animal (animal turn) and the emotional (emotional turn). The result is that today animal rights activists consider Bentham the founder of a new sentimental relationship between living beings that has provided the essential attitude for modifying laws regarding animal welfare. Obviously, if the English philosopher has found among us sensitive recipients of his message, it is because political reason has opened its doors wide to the romantic sensibility of Rousseau's character.

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We feel, says Rousseau, before we are capable of reasoning. Before we have ideas, we have feelings; therefore, sensitivity would be the foundation of the human. The sensitive man is the natural man, capable of following the immediate movements of his heart, and for whom nature speaks not with the voice of mathematics, but with that of feeling.

Man, seen from the perspective of his capacity to suffer, is just another animal, without any ontological privilege. This is where the Speech on inequality by Rousseau (1755) and the Introduction to the principles of morality and legislation of Bentham (1780). Let us recall the latter's words: "Animals, whose interests have been forgotten by the insensitivity of ancient jurists, have been degraded to the rank of things."

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To be insensitive would be the unforgivable sin of rationalism. Thus, only a sensitive person can be capable of accepting what he shares in common with animals. This is the challenge Bentham throws at us: perhaps the day will come when the rest of the animal creation will acquire the rights that only a tyrannical hand could have wrested from them.

And so, why does Singer abandon Bentham's criterion when comparing the baby to the pig? He would know. What I believe is that if we take the capacity for suffering seriously, we must establish with the utmost scientific rigor at what point the human fetus is capable of feeling pain, because in this case too, the question is not "Can they reason?" but "Can they suffer?"