Un seuil entre deux mondes ? Les animaux et les êtres humains de Darwin à nos jours
(2022) Revue théologique de Louvain — Vol. 53, n° 4, p. 436-452 (2022)
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- (en) The distinction between humans and animals has been a subject of debate, in particular since the work of Darwin demonstrated that humans are related to all other organisms by common ancestry. Darwin’s own work finds itself in a kind of tension: while he attempts to preserve a special place for the moral faculties in distinguishing humans from animals, he spends the vast majority of his career arguing for the gradual acquisition of all physical and psychological characters. While the question of the evolution of morality remains murky even today, this may well be the result (at least in part) of a conceptual confusion: if “morality” is not a sufficiently well-defined concept, then empirical efforts to discover its extent among the animals are doomed to fail. I thus present here a series of efforts to decompose animal cognition and consciousness, making it easier to see the extent of continuity and discontinuity between humans and animals. While further empirical data is certainly required, it now seems likely that consciousness, as with our other evolved capabilities, is broadly continuous with other psychological features in animals, dissolving Darwin’s tension.
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Pence, C. (2022). Un seuil entre deux mondes ? Les animaux et les êtres humains de Darwin à nos jours. Revue théologique de Louvain, 53(4), 436-452. https://doi.org/10.2143/RTL.53.4.3291310 (Original work published 2022)