Disappointing (further) evidence of philosophical illiteracy at NY Times

The underlying message of the editorial "Horton Sees an Image" in today's Times is a valuable one, namely that

We keep probing the animal world for signs of intelligence — as we define it — and we’re always surprised when we discover it. This suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with our assumptions. There is every reason to value other life-forms as much for their difference from us as for their similarity, and to act accordingly. That may be the only intelligence test worthy of the name.

Of course, the implications of valuing other life-forms for their difference -- and of the obligations to act accordingly -- would be quite wide-ranging; for one, it would seem difficult to justify eating such life-forms for pleasure, assuming that alternate sources of nutrition are available.

What struck me as someone paid to do philosophy, however, was the dismaying lack of sophistication in the Times's editors' discussion of what it is that an animal's "passing" the mirror test -- the test of an animal's ability to recognize itself in a reflected image -- reveals about that animal's mental life. Here's what the Times writes:

To the very short list of animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror — i.e., humans and apes and possibly dolphins — scientists have now added the Asian elephant, or at least three female Asian elephants in the Bronx Zoo. Faced with the presence of an enormous — and rugged — full-length mirror in their enclosure, the animals displayed clear signs of grasping that they themselves were the origin of the images in the glass. ... Such tests appear to mark a boundary between animals that display some form of consciousness and those that don’t.

A moment's reflection (pardon the pun!), however, should indicate that the Times's editors are plainly misguided with respect to what it is that the mirror test might measure. What the mirror test serves to indicate is not consciousness, but self-consciousness or self-awareness.

Consciousness, roughly, is qualitative awareness of something; if my dog, Julia, is spattered by drops of dew shaken down from the branches of a tree by a squirrel running overhead, it seems by her reaction that she is conscious of the cold wetness of the dew -- and of the scratching noises the squirrel makes as it scampers. As this example illustrates, there are creatures -- most obviously, perhaps, household pets like dogs or cats -- who are conscious -- that is, for whom there is a way their interactions with the world feel to them -- but not capable of passing the mirror test.

Actually, despite what the editors of the Times write in "Horton," it seems pretty plausible to me that consciousness is a good minimal criterion for the evaluation of the worth of natural phenomena. Indeed, it is presumably the fact that cows are conscious but wheat is not that contributes to the vegetarian's greater comfort in eating bread than she has in eating steak. The interesting question to which the Times's editors so inexpertly point is whether the having of self-consciousness is a useful criterion for demarcating further levels of the value of living beings.

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