PHIL 664, Seminar in Applied Philosophy

Gary Varner, Associate Professor of Philosophy

Texas A&M University

Spring, 2005 – Syllabus finalized 1/19/05

Instructor

Gary Varner, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Office: 305A Bolton Hall
Phone: (979) 845-8499
Office hours: 12:00-3:30 Tuesdays and by appointment
Email: g-varner@philosophy.tamu.edu
Website: http://philosophy.tamu.edu/~gary/

Course focus

This installment of PHIL 664, Seminar in Applied Philosophy, will focus on what I call the autonoetic consciousness paradigm (ACP) in applied ethics and what scientific research could tell us about how to apply it.

“Autonoetic” refers to self-knowledge, and the term “autonoetic consciousness” is used by some psychologists (most notably Endel Tulving and associates) to refer to what philosophers call "phenomenal consciousness" of one's past, present, and future.

Proponents of the ACP endorse a moral hierarchy:

  1. Persons
  2. Near-persons
  3. Merely sentient animals

Accordingly to the ACP, persons deserve some form of special respect vis-à-vis both near-persons and merely sentient animals, but near-persons deserve some form of special respect vis-à-vis merely sentient animals.

Persons are individuals with a full-blown biographical sense of their own lives. Probably only human beings are persons in this sense, but some animals might be near-persons in the sense of having a less expansive form of autonoetic consciousness involving at least their non-immediate future and/or past. At the other extreme, some animals might be merely sentient, meaning that while they are conscious of pleasure and pain, they lack any robust sense of their own future or past – that is, they “live entirely in the present.”

In this course, we will study the philosophical questions of:

We will also study:

This is an area where applied ethicists have sometimes proceeded without knowledge of relevant empirical studies, and where scientists have sometimes made strong claims without placing them in the context of well-developed philosophical debates. The seminar will emphasize how empirical research and philosophical analysis are both critical to the resolution of animal welfare and animal rights issues.

On the philosophical side, our emphasis will be on the work of R.M. Hare, whose two-level or "Kantian" utilitarianism I find sheds considerable light on our thinking about ethics, despite its initial implausibiity on several scores.

Textbooks

I am ordering Hare's main work in normative ethics as the only "required" textbook:
  1. Hare, R.M. 1981. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point. New York: Oxford University Press.
I am also ordering the following as "supplementary" textbooks:
  1. DeGrazia, David. 1996. Taking Animals Seriously. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  2. Macphail, Euan. 1998. The Evolution of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.

  3. Varner, Gary. 1998. In Nature's Interests? Interests, Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Note that we will read only one of these in its entirety, the required text by Hare. We will read several chapters out of each of the supplementary texts, but the portions that we read from these books will also be made available on reserve at Evans Library or distributed directly to students.

Topics and readings

We will spend the first five or six weeks introducing Hare's two-level utilitarianism and its application to questions about animal welfare and animal rights.

  1. First meeting: Overview of animal welfare and animal rights philosophies and the autonoetic consciousness paradigm (ACP)
    1. Varner, In Nature's Interests? chapter five, "Can Animal Rights Activists be Environmentalists?"

    2. Varner, Gary. 2004. "Personhood, Memory, and Elephant Management." Forthcoming in Christin Wemmer and Catherine Christen, eds., Never Forgetting: Ethics and Elephant Management. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  2. Hare's two-level or "Kantian" utilitarianism
    1. Varner, in progress. "Hare on Prescriptivism."

    2. Hare, R.M. 1981. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point. New York: Oxford University Press.

    3. Clark, Andy. 1996. "Connectionism, Moral Cognition, and Collaborative Problem Solving." In Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark, eds., Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science, pp. 109-127. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    4. Darby, Derrick. 2003. "Unnatural Rights." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33:49-82.

    5. R.M. Hare. 1993. "Why I Am Only a Demi-Vegetarian." In R.M. Hare Essays on Bioethics, pp. 219-35. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hare is a sentientist (i.e., he believes that all and only organisms that are conscious of positive and/or negative affective states matter, morally speaking). So we will spend a week asking the question, "Which animals can feel pain?"

  1. Which animals are sentient?

    1. Varner, Gary. 1998. In Nature's Interests Interests? New York: Oxford University Press.
        (This week, we'll read just the end of chapter two: the section titled "Pain without Desires?" pp. 51-54.)

    2. DeGrazia, David. 1996. Taking Animals Seriously. New York: Cambridge University Press.
        (This week, we'll read chapter five: "Feelings.")

    3. Allen, Colin. 2004. "Animal Pain." Nous 38:617-43.

    4. And, maybe:

      1. Rose, James D. 2002. "The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes and the Question of Awareness and Pain." Reviews in Fisheries Science 10:1-38.

      2. Sneddon, Lynne U., Victoria A. Braithwaite, and Michael J. Gentle. 2003. "Do fish have nociceptors? Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 270:1115-21.

For the next couple of weeks, the focus will be more on what the "special respect" due persons and near-persons should amount to.

  1. Respecting persons and near-persons
    1. Varner, Gary. 1998. In Nature's Interests Interests? New York: Oxford University Press.
        (First, read the rest of chapter two: "Localizing Desire." Then read DeGrazia, chapter six.)

    2. DeGrazia, David. 1996. Taking Animals Seriously. New York: Cambridge University Press.
        (This week, we'll read chapter six: "Desires and Beliefs.")

    3. Varner, Gary. 1998. In Nature's Interests? New York: Oxford University Press.
        (Now read chapter four: "The Principle of Inclusiveness: Establishing Priorities Among Interests.")

    4. Donald VanDeVeer. 1979. "Two Factor Egalitarianism." Inquiry 22:55-79.

From here on, the focus is more on the question of what scientific research already tells us, could maybe tell us, or could never tell us about which animals are persons, near-persons, or merely sentient.

  1. Research on learning and planning (desires and ground projects)
    1. Grau, James W. 2002. "Learning and Memory Without a Brain." In Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, eds., The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, pp. 77-87. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    2. Allen, Colin, and Marc Bekoff. 1997. "Consciousness: Essential or Dispensable?" In Allen and Bekoff, Species of Mind, pp. 139-159. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    3. Harlow, Harry F. 1949. "The Formation of Learning Sets." Psychological Review 56:51-55.

    4. Zeldin, Robert K. and David S. Olton. 1986. "Rats Acquire Spatial Learning Sets." Journal of Experimental Psychology 12:412-19.

    5. Templeton, Jennifer J. 1998. "Learning from others' mistakes: a paradox revisited." Animal Behavior 55:79-85.

    6. Haith, Marshall M. 1997. "The Development of Future Thinking as Essential for the Emergence of Skill in Planning." In Sarah L. Friedman and Ellin Kofsky Scholnick eds., The Developmental Psychology of Planning, pp. 25-42. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    7. And maybe:

      1. Benson, Janette B. 1997. "The Development of Planning: It's About Time." In Sarah L. Friedman and Ellin Kofsky Scholnick eds., The Developmental Psychology of Planning, pp. 43-75. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

      2. Hulse, Donovan, Cynthia N. Read, and Timothy Schroeder. 2004. "The Impossibility of Conscious Desire." American Philosphical Quarterly 41:73-80.

Something really special happens because we humans have language. I think that the special thing is story telling, but some, including philosopher Peter Carruthers and psychologist Euan Macphail, think that language is necessary for phenomenal consciousness, period. This neo-Cartesian view is one that we need to consider, at least for one week.

  1. Language and neo-Cartesianism
    1. DeGrazia, David. 1996. Taking Animals Seriously. New York: Cambridge University Press.
        (This week, we'll read chapter seven: "Self-awareness, language, moral agency, and autonomy.")

    2. Euan Macphail. 1998. The Evolution of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
        (We will read chapters five, six, and eight: "Of Mice and Men," "Unconscious Minds," and "Minds and Machines.")

    3. Some related empirical research:

      1. Fouts, Roger S., Mary Lee A. Jensvold, and Deborah H. Fouts. "Chimpanzee Signing: Darwinian Realities and Cartesian Delusions." In Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, eds., The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, pp. 285-91. Cambridge: MIT Press.

      2. Herman, Louis M. 2002. “Exploring the Cognitive World of the Bottlenosed Dolphin.” In Mark Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghhardt, eds., The Cognitive Animal, pp. 275-83. Cambridge: MIT Press.

To be conscious of one's own past and future seems to require that one have a concept of self, and so it may be worth spending a week focusing on the classic paradigm for self-consciousness, Gordon Gallup's mirror self-recognition test. We'll read both Gallup's classic 1970 article and a series of studies of critters that people thought would or wouldn't pass the self-recognition test.

  1. Self-recognition
    1. Gallup, Gordon. 1970. "Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition." Science 167:86-87.

    2. Amsterdam, Beulah. 1972. "Mirror Self-Image Reactions Before Age Two." Developmental Psychobiology 5:297-305.

    3. Povinelli, Daniel J. 1989. "Failure to Find Self-Recognition in Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus) in Contrast to Their Use of Mirror Cues to Discover Hidden Food." Journal of Comparative Psychology 103:122-131.

    4. Pepperberg, Irene, Sean E. Garcia, Eric C. Jackson, and Sharon Marconi. 1995. "Mirror Use by African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus)." Journal of Comparative Psychology 109:182-195.

    5. Reiss, Diana and Lori Marino. 2001. "Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence." Procedings of the National Academy of Science 98:5937-5942.

    6. Gallup, Gordon, James R. Anderson, and Daniel J. Shillito. 2002. "The Mirror Test." In Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, eds., The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, pp. 325-333. Cambridge: MIT Press.

In the psychology literature, "autonoetic consciousness" is the concept most closely associated with what philosophers would describe as an individual having "phenomenal consciousness of its own past, present and future." A prominent memory theorist and researcher, Endel Tulving, is primarily responsible for popularizing the concept among psychologists (although putting it that way ignores the amount of criticism he has received, some of it approaching ridicule). So a crucial area of research for us to look at is Tulving et al.'s controlled studies of autonoetic memory, their speculations about future-oriented autonoetic consciousness, and why they think that animals don't have it.

  1. Autonoetic consciousness
    1. Clayton, N.S., D.P. Griffiths, N.J. Emery, and A. Dickinson. 2001. "Elements of episodic-like memory in animals." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 356:1483-91.

    2. Hampton, Robert R. and Bennett L. Schwartz. 2004. "Episodic memory in nonhumans: what, and where, is when?" Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14:1-6.

    3. Howe, Mark and Mary L. Courage. 1993. "On Resolving the Enigma of Infantile Amnesia." Psychological Bulletin 113:305-26.

    4. Howe, Mark L., Mary L. Courage, and Carole Peterson. 1994. "How Can I Remember When 'I' Wasn't There: Long-term Retention of Traumatic Experiences and Emergence of the Cognitive Self." Consciousness and Cognition 3:327-55.

    5. Perner, Josef and Ted Ruffman. 1995. "Episodic Memory and Autonoetic Consciousness: Developmental Evidence and a Theory of Childhood Amnesia." Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 59:516-548.

    6. Roberts, William A. "Are Animals Stuck in Time?" Psychological Bulletin 128:473-89.

    7. Tulving, Endel. 1985. "Memory and Consciousness." Canadian Psychology 26:1-12.

    8. Tulving, Endel and H.J. Markowitsch. 1994. "What do animal-models of memory model?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17:498-499.

    9. Tulving, Endel and Hans J. Markowitsch. 1998. "Episodic and Declarative Memory: Role of the Hippocampus." Hippocampus 8: 198-204.

    10. Tulving, Endel. 2002. "Episodic memory and common sense: how far apart?" In A.D. Baddeley, M. Conway, and J. Aggleton eds., Episodic Memory: New Directions in Research, pp. 269-288. New York: Oxford University Press.

    11. Tulving, Endel. 2002. "Chronesthesia: Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time." In Donald T. Stuss and Robert T. Knight, eds., Principles of Frontal Lobe Function, pp. 311-25. New York: Oxford University Press.

    12. Wheeler, Mark A., Donald T. Stuss, and Endel Tulving. 19 "Toward a Theory of Episodic Memory: The Frontal Lobes and Autonoetic Consciousness." Psychological Bulletin 121:331-54.

Another area of psychology and ethology that bears looking at in the context of this course is "theory of mind"/"mind-reading" research.

  1. Theory of mind

    1. Premack, D. and G. Woodruff. 1978. "Does the Chimpanzee have a Theory of Mind?" Behavioural and Brain Sciences 4:515-26.

    2. Premack, David. 1988. "Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? Revisited." In Richard Byrne and Andrew Whitten, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, pp. 160-79. New York: Oxford University Press.

    3. Povinelli, D. J. 1994. "Comparative Studies of Mental State Attribution: A Reply to Heyes." Animal Behaviour 48:239-41.

    4. Whiten, Andrew. 1997. "The Machiavellian Mindreader." In Andrew Whitten and Richard Byrne, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, pp. 144-173. New York: Oxford University Press.

Miscellaneous other related readings

  1. Singer on animals:

    1. Singer, Peter. 1993. Practical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
        (Chapters one through five establish his position on animals. Chapters six and seven extend his related reasoning to humans.)

    2. Singer, Peter. 1987. "Life's Uncertain Voyage." In P. Pettit, R. Sylvan, and J. Norman, eds., Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honor of J.J.C. Smart, pp. 154-72. New York: Oxford University Press.
        (This essay provides background and details related to the journey metaphor used on pp. 129-31 of Practical Ethics.)

  2. Background on contemporary philosophical theories of consciousness

    1. Gulick, "Consciousness": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

    2. Carruthers, Peter. "Higher Order Theories of consciousness": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/

    3. Lycan, William. "Representational Theories of Consciouesness": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-representational/

    4. Allen, Colin. "Animal Consciousness": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/

    5. Siewert. "Consciousness - Intentionality": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/

  3. Elliott Sober on evolution and consciousness:

    1. Sober, Elliott. 1998. "Morgan's Canon." In Denise Dellarosa Cummins and Colin Allen, eds., The Evolution of Mind, pp. 224-242. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 224-242.

    2. Sober, Elliott. 2000. "Evolution and the Problem of Other Minds." Journal of Philosophy 97:365-386.

  4. Naturalizing ethics:

    1. Cummins, Denise Dellarosa. 1998. "Social Norms and Other Minds: The Evolutionary Roots of Higher Cognition." In Denise Dellarosa Cummins and Colin Allen, eds., The Evolution of Mind, pp. 30-50. New York: Oxford University Press.

  5. Martin Bitterman's stuff on learning:

    1. Bitterman, Martin. 1965. "The Evolution of Intelligence." Scientific American 212:92-100.

    2. Bitterman, Martin. 1975. "The Comparative Analysis of Learning." Science 188:699-709.

  6. On boredom:

    1. Wemelsfelder, Françoise. 1990. "Boredom and Laboratory Animal Welfare." In Bernard Rollin, ed., The Experimental Animal in Biomedical Research, pp. 243-272. Boca Raton: CRC-Press.

    2. Wemelsfelder, Françoise. 1994. "Animal Boredom - A Model of Chronic Suffering in Captive Animals and Its Consequences For Environmental Enrichment." Humane Innovations and Alternatives 8. Available on-line from Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: http://www.psyeta.org/hia/vol8/wemelsfelder.html.

  7. On play:

    1. Allen, Colin, and Marc Bekoff. 1997. "Intentionality, Social Play, and Communication." In Allen and Bekoff, Species of Mind, pp. 87-113. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    2. Bekoff, Marc. "Playing with Play: What Can We Learn about Cognition, Negotiation, and Evolution?" In Denise Dellarosa Cummins and Colin Allen, eds., The Evolution of Mind, pp. 162-182. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 224-242.

Policies

Course requirements: Course grades will be based on a weighted average of participation in class discussions (25%), one or more presentations on assigned readings (25%), three short written criticisms of assigned readings handed in the afternoon before the session at which the reading are scheduled for discussion (10%), and a term paper (40%).

Services for Students with Disabilities: The Americans with Disabilities Act is a federal anti-discrimination statute that provides comprehensive civil rights protection for persons with disabilities. Among other things, this legislation requires that all students with disabilities be guaranteed a learning environment that provides for reasonable accommodation of their disabilities. Appropriate accommodations will be made for all students registered with Services for Students with Disabilities, which is located in Room 126 of the Koldus Building. Their phone number is 845-1637 and they have a web site: http://studentlife.tamu.edu/ssd.

Academic Integrity Statement: Students are reminded that The Aggie Honor Code states that "An Aggie does not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do." Details on Honor Council Rules and Procedures are available on the Council website http://www.tamu.edu/aggiehonor.