Abstract
In his chapter, Gary Comstock introduces the notion of far-persons. Following Gary Varner, Comstock distinguishes near-persons, animals with a “robust autonoetic consciousness” but lacking an adult human’s “biographical sense of self”, from the merely sentient, those animals living “entirely in the present”. Comstock notes the possibility of a third class. Far-persons, he argues, lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a distance that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what Comstock calls lyrical experience: brief and potentially intense, pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, Comstock says metaphorically, the present hour. Comstock concludes by discussing the moral status of far-persons.
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Notes
- 1.
Over- and under-interpreting the data are only two of the most visible pitfalls. Science itself can be misleading if we naively assume that it will tell us all we need to know. As Tom Nagel famously observed, reductive physicalist accounts of, say, bat consciousness may explain and predict bat behavior but they may not be of any help whatsoever with our question, that is, what is a bat’s internal subjective experience like (Nagel, 1974)? That said, science is critical for our task, in which we must triangulate three sources of information: systematic accounts of animal anatomical structures and neurological processes, neutral observations of animal behavior, and imaginative renditions of how it may feel to be the animal in question (cf. Akins, 1993). This is the project I pursue here, however sketchily.
- 2.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, US slaughterhouses killed 38,399,000 hogs in 2015. Of other mammals, cattle were the species killed in the greatest numbers, at 9,350,000. http://www.humanesociety.org/news/resources/research/stats_slaughter_totals.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
- 3.
ILS rules are the rules we ought to adopt to govern our everyday behavior. The ILS system differs from what Varner, following R. M. Hare, calls the critical level, the set of rules and principles we adopt when we have the time and resources actually to try to maximize the good. When thinking critically, we may realize that, in extremely rare situations, achieving the overall good might require us to violate rights. The details of two-level utilitarianism are beyond the scope of our focus here, but I note that the utilitarian rules needed to protect persons have, as Varner puts it, “a deontological flavor.”
- 4.
I depart here from the way Varner uses this term. He uses “non-persons” to describe any individual who is not a person. I use it, instead, to refer more narrowly to that set of sentient individuals that lack consciousness altogether and, therefore, any traits of far-persons.
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Comstock, G. (2017). Far-Persons. In: Woodhall, A., Garmendia da Trindade, G. (eds) Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54549-3_3
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