Brute Souls, Happy Beasts, and Evolution: The Historical Status of Animals (review)

Rod Preece is an animal advocate taking issue with the literature of animal advocacy: work in animal studies has, he claims, misrepresented the Western tradition. It has blamed Christianity for the notion that animals were created for human use, ignoring its concern with our stewardship of creation. A multi-faceted history of human–animal relations has been flattened into the ‘ideological myth’ of a Western arrogance that was ended only by the heroic intervention of Bentham in ethics and Darwin in science.

Preece amasses abundant evidence from the fifth century bc to the present to show that care for non-human animals, respect for their capacities, and opposition to ill-treating them have appeared in all periods. His rich and wide-ranging study shows that similar ideas have surfaced and resurfaced throughout history. Within this complexity is a roughly chronological story, with early chapters concentrating on the debate concerning animal souls, most relevant to the pre-scientific era, and later ones moving through the Renaissance view of the ‘happy beast,’ eighteenth-century precursors to evolutionary thought, and nineteenth-century anti-vivisection. Preece’s defence of classical thinking on animals goes beyond praise for long-recognized animal advocates such as Pythagoras: even Aristotle, generally condemned within animal studies for saying that animals were made for men, also wrote of animals as having souls and their own kind of wisdom. Likewise Preece defends Christian thinking, not just in the famous compassion of St Francis of Assissi or the heterodox notions of animal soul prevalent later among radical Protestants, but even in Augustine and Aquinas. Augustine denied animals a rational soul but acknowledged their capacities for feeling, and Aquinas advocated kindness to animals even if, mostly, for anthropocentric reasons. When it comes to the secular Enlightenment, so often blamed within animal studies for fostering indifference to animal being, Preece points out that the Cartesian notion of the animal as unfeeling machine was no more than a much-derided minority view.

Preece argues that Darwin’s theory of natural selection, so often seen as a watershed in our understanding of our animal nature, did not have revolutionary implications for human status: it is the idea of evolution, not its exact mechanism, that places humans in close kinship with other animals, and that idea was hinted at in antiquity and elaborated in the eighteenth century. Yet elsewhere, it appears that the idea of evolution is irrelevant anyway, since beliefs about our relations to other animals are not what governs our conduct towards them. Those who believed animals had no immortal souls could be as kind to them as those who did not, and evolutionists were often crueller than creationists. What is important, Preece considers, is not our philosophy about animals but our feeling for them.

Preece ends by advocating practical measures: legislation to curb our selfish use of animals, education to nurture our feelings for them. Proper consideration for other animals should be based not on abstract rights but on an appreciation of what is best for each individual species, to which end he advocates empirical study of different animals. Yet he pays little attention to the now copious literature of modern ethology dedicated to such study. In finding his own ethical solutions Preece relies on moral individualism: the significant advances he sees are in humanism, with its concern for the individual self, and Kant’s categorical imperative, which can be extended beyond the species barrier. The biocentric view within recent ecology, emphasizing the urgent need for an ethic of responsibility to the living environment as a whole, forms no part of his picture. His commitment to the idea of a spiritual essence to selfhood is at odds with more recent attempts to rethink sympathy for animals in material terms, such as Ralph Acampora’s advocacy of a compassion based in philosophy of body. But if Preece cannot solve all the philosophical problems of our relation to other animals, he has beautifully demonstrated the historical richness...