Aristotle and animals

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The idea that all living beings are classified in the form of a hierarchy on the top of which there are humans is widely widespread and often unconsciously accepted. Whilst nowadays it is blatant that we cannot harm war prisoners, black people or mentally handicapped persons; that women, homosexual people and countries colonised in the past have equal rights with their former masters or oppressors, animals are still considered as inferior beings. These lines extracted from a Shakespeare's play perfectly illustrate something seen as obvious : animals exist for us, humans, they are only tools we can freely use for our own desires. Nobody (except for animal liberation activists) really finds astonish that we kill animals to eat, to make clothes, luxury bags and that we keep animals in jails to exhibit them in zoos, that we torture them in laboratories to test a new shampoo or a new medicine before they could be available on market, that people go hunting for fun, shooting animals as an entertainment, that in Spain bulls are killed in arena during corridas (what Romans did with gladiators). Violence upon animals is a very widespread practise. Until very recently, we did not examine our attitude towards them. In the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth, some laws forbidding public cruelty towards pets have been promulgated. But these laws which regulate our attitude towards animals are based on the relations we have with them, on their resemblances with us and the affection they inspire us. Some people treat also their pets as well as a human person (in New York and Las Vegas one can let her dog in luxurious hotels being washed and well fed) and in the same time a lot of animals are detained in awful conditions waiting for being eaten or tortured in laboratories. Likewise a famous car brand did not hesitate to use baboons for testing the resistance of a car to a crash against a wall. This use of animals is a very old practice which was already justified in Greek Antiquity by Aristotle. According to him, Nature is indeed a hierarchy in which ?(p)lants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beats for the sake of man... Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.? Is this idea of a natural hierarchy right ? The purpose of this paper is to answer no to this question and to show how this conception of nature led to the current situation in which men have no mercy on animals, use and maltreat them without wondering any questions. The Aristotelian conception of nature will first be outlined and then it will be explained why rather than seeing animals as inferior as us we have to treat them with an equal moral consideration ...

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[...] Justify your answer. “Queen : I will try the forces of these on such creatures as we count not worth the hanging, but not human . Cornelius : Your Highness, shall from this practise but make hard our heart ( Shakespeare, Cymbeline ) The idea that all living beings are classified in the form of a hierarchy on the top of which there are humans is widely widespread and often unconsciously accepted. Whilst nowadays it is blatant that we cannot harm war prisoners, black people or mentally handicapped persons; that women, homosexual people and countries colonised in the past have equal rights with their former masters or oppressors, animals are still considered as inferior beings. [...]

[...] All is done to gain time and money by producing as much as possible. Accordingly, farms have considerably increased in size and the evil has been terribly accentuated. instance, beef cattle feedlots now typically have fifty thousand to one hundred thousand animals incarcerated in poorly drained dirt yards with neither shade nor shelter” . This reminds us of living conditions of people in nazi camps : they slept in dirty dormitories on wood beds, ate bad food, worked hard while threatening to be punished. [...]

[...] And if we are not so shocked as we are when we consider nazism, the reason is, again, speciesism. Therefore, if we agree with the idea that Nature, or God, or anything else allows us to master animals, the result is a banality of evil which treats animals as nothing but meat or tools, or flesh. And this is the case nowadays. The Aristotelian conception of nature contains thus many flows and each of them contributed in part to the current situation. [...]

[...] But we do not mind doing the same for animals. A last point, maybe the worst, was how people imprisoned in the camps were dehumanised. They were nobody, simply called by a number, dressed with the same uniforms. Concerning animals,” the cruellest fallout from the industrialisation of agriculture is the treatment of farm animals, now coldly referred as “production units”. For example, “most gourmet, milk- fed veal comes from calves raised in almost complete isolation for sixteen weeks. They live in narrow crates where they can neither walk, turn around, nor comfortably lie down. [...]

[...] Thirdly, this thrall state is good for animals. It is in their interest to be submissive to humans. Why ? Because to Aristotle the Good for a being is to find his own place in the Whole and to fulfil it. Since animals are nothing but desiring bodies, they are looking for a soul that they could follow as well as man who has to strengthen his soul and to master his instincts. In a certain way, man has to lend his soul to animal and animal his body to man. [...]