Baa..

*Gulp*

REL 225: The Philosophy of Religion I n - C la ss P roj e c t: A n i m a l Suf f e ri n g & C og n i ti on

This week each of our authors has approached the question(s) of theodicy, experience, taboo, suffering and violence in particular ways. Last class we began to think about these issues by debating whether there are any natural human rights and what constitutes personhood and freewill. Todays class attempts to tie these issues together, in light of the philosophy of religion, through animal suffering and cognition. Namely, by challenging our conceptual categories of what it means to be humanand what it means to be an animalare we any closer to understanding the problem of theodicy, the nature of cruelty and whether our categories are even useful? For this project I am revealing to you a piece of what I am up to in my time away from school. I am part of a religious group that routinely sacrifices cute, cuddly (stuffed) animals. Yes, as it turns out, that article in the Wheaton Wire last week about how I saved an elderly dog from a kill shelter was just a ruse. In this group, I perform a series of rituals that impart onto the animal my moral transgressions or sins. By then killing the animal I please my god and I am absolved from my wrongdoings. Sometimes late at night, I wonder whether Asad, Bataille and/or Kornblith would like to join my group. I try to imagine what kind of responses or arguments they might offer in reply, particularly if they came to one of the sacrifices. This is where you come in We will divide into smaller groups (depending on which thinker you feel the most comfortable impersonating) with each group representing one of these thinkers. Together, consider what your character (Asad, Bataille or Kornblith) would say to me at as I whip out my knife and begin to show him the kind of sacrifices my religious group performs. Would he encourage me? Would he object? Why or why not? Based on what you have read from these authors, what kind of arguments might they make on either side? I will raise my knife over the animals head and your impersonation will commence. Offer an argument to meand to one anotherabout why I should or should not lop its head off. As a young academic I find these giants of philosophy to be highly influential to my thinking about all things religious. Depending on how they react and the arguments they make, perhaps in the end the animal can be spared I have provided some quotes from each of our authors/readings to help jog your memory.

Asad
humans are essentially no different from animals, or they are different by virtue of their unique capacity for cruelty (102) the story of modernity is in part a story of the progressive elimination of all morally shocking behavior (103) the pain of torture applied for instrumental purposes is easier to justify than the suffering inflected in the name of punishment (108) In warfare, sport, scientific experimentation, and the death penaltyas well as in the domain of sexual pleasureinflicting physical suffering is actively practiced and also legally condoned. The inflicting of pain on animals is a normal part of these societies, although there are statutes that prohibit unnecessary or unjustifiable pain and criminalize it as cruelty (113)

Bataille
A dead body cannot be called nothing at all, but that object, that corpse, is stamped straight off with the sign nothing at all There is no reason to look at a mans corpse otherwise than at an animals (57) we feel we are dealing with an indivisible complex, just as if man had once and for all realized how impossible it is for nature to exact from the beings that she brings forth their participation in the destructive and implacable frenzy that animates her. Nature demands their surrender; or rather she asks them to go crashing headlong to their own ruin Man tried? In fact men have never definitively said no to violence (62) We should not be frightened of violence in the same way if we did not know or at least obscurely sense that it could lead us to worse things. The statement: The taboo is there to be violated ought to make sense of the fact that the taboo on murder, universal though it may be, nowhere opposes war Animals, recognizing no taboos, have never progressed from the fights they take part in (64) We cannot say therefore that war and violence are in conflict. But war is organized violence. The transgression of the taboo is not animal violence. It is violence still, used by a creature capable of reason (putting his knowledge in the service of violence for the time being). (64) religion is the moving force behind the breaking of taboos. Now, religion is founded on feelings of terror and awe, indeed it can hardly be thought of without The recoil that inevitably follows the forward movement is constantly being presented as the essence of religion In universal religions like Christianity or Buddhism terror and nausea are a prelude to bursts of burning spiritual activity (69)

Kornblith
The investigators who routinely make use of intentional terminology in their descriptions of animal behavior are not wooly-minded pet owners eager to attribute the most sophisticated cognitive attributes on the basis of the slightest tweak of paw, hoof, or beak. Intentional vocabulary in the description of animal behavior is, instead, a standard feature of the serious scientific literature. (32) Once we recognize the existence of internally represented animal needs together with representations of features of the environment, we have the beginnings of a belief-desire psychology. The ravens distract the hawk because they are hungry Just as we explain human action by attributing beliefs and desires as causes of action, we explain the behavior of a wide variety of animals as the causal consequence of their beliefs and desires. The attribution of beliefs and desires to non-human animals is neither less explanatory nor less well motivated than it is in the case of humans (38) In looking at animal behavior literature over the last several decades, one sees a similar trend. First, there has been a steadily increasing recognition of the intellectual sophistication of non human animals. To put the point another way, from the perspective of current theorizing, work on animals in the past has systematically underestimated their cognitive abilities (45) What Brandoms example illustrates is that there are ways of cutting up the human environment that answer human interests and concerns, rather than biological ones, and our knowledge attributions may well be based on these various interest-relative classifications (66)