Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

This view of the attribution of pre-linguistic awareness—as a courtesy extended potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language—has as a corollary that moral prohibitions against hurting babies and the better looking sorts of animals are not “ontologically grounded” in their possession of feeling. It is, if anything, the other way around. The moral prohibitions are expressions of a sense of community based on the imagined possibility of conversation, and the attribution of feelings is little more than a reminder of these prohibitions. This can be seen by noticing that nobody except philosophers of mind cares whether the raw feel of pain or redness is different for koalas than for us, but that we all care quite a bit about a koala when we see it writhing about. This fact does not mean that our or the koala’s pain “is nothing but its behavior”; it just means that writhing is more important to our ability to imagine the koala asking us for help than what is going on inside the koala. Pigs rate much higher than koalas on intelligence tests, but pigs don’t writhe in quite the right humanoid way, and the pig’s face is the wrong shape for the facial expressions which go with ordinary conversation. So we send pigs to slaughter with equanimity, but form societies for the protection of koalas. This is not “irrational,” any more than it is irrational to extend or deny civil rights to the moronic (or fetuses, or aboriginal tribes, or Martians). Rationality, when viewed as the fo...

November 16, 2020. Page 191. For the antinatalist.