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There are varieties of sources from which objections have been raised against animalism. Some of the arguments to consider here are the transplant argument, the remnant person argument, and the duplication argument.
The Transplant Argument: As Matt Duncan pointed out, the setup to the transplant argument is drawn from Bernard Williams (1973) and Derek Parfit (p. 34): thus: ―My body is fatally diseased, as is your cerebrum. Since we have between us, only one good cerebrum and body, surgeons bring these together. My cerebrum is successfully transported into your cerebrum-less body.‖330 For Matt, ―a lot of people think that I survive in this case, but you don‘t, since only my cerebrum, with my mental characteristics, survives. However, animalism appears to imply the opposite— that you survive, but I don‘t, since, on animalism, we are animals, not cerebra. So it seems that animalism gets the case wrong, and thus, is false.‖331
This argument may have been drawn from Locke‘s person-animal distinction, especially his discussion and example of ‗Prince and Cobbler‘. The ‗body-transfer‘ objection tasks us to
―imagine how a person might be transferred from the animal body with which she happens to be associated and installed into an altogether different animal body. If possible (in some sense), then such scenarios would seem to suggest that we are not essentially animals and that our persistence conditions are not those of animals.‖332
Furthermore, another related worry for animalism is that ―if my cerebrum were transplanted into your skull, my practical concerns for my future self-concern over whether I will get sick, win the lottery, get tenure, etc. — would follow my cerebrum, not my animal body. Or so a lot of philosophers say. This spells trouble for animalism, which would seem to imply that my concern should be for my animal body, since that is what I am.‖333
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As a sort of a defence to the related worry for animalism expressed above, Jens Johansson‘s and David Shoemaker‘s remarks seem to exonerate the animalists‘ worry that what matters for our practical concerns for our future self concern is not identity but psychological continuity and also that there exist different self-related concerns that track various, conflicting things. The argument is aptly rendered thus:
Jens Johansson and David Shoemaker argue that any mismatch between animal identity and self-related concerns should not worry animalists, because identity is not what matters for these concerns. Johansson argues that psychological continuity, not identity, is what matters. Shoemaker argues that we have a wide array of self-related concerns that track various, conflicting things— some track psychological continuity, others track biological continuity— but in no case is identity what really matters.
Thus, according to Johansson and Shoemaker, animalists are off the hook when it comes to practical concerns.334
The imperative question is what is the difference between matters of identity and matters of psychological continuity? It may well be that identity is the general characteristic and feature that makes a person the same person while psychological continuity is just an approach to explicating identity of persons. If the latter is what is used in explaining the former, then how is practical concerns not an essential issue in the discussion of identity? This research will not dig deep into this as it is not the goal of this thesis.
The Remnant Person Argument is put thus:
Suppose my cerebrum is removed from my skull, and yet is maintained so as to support consciousness. It seems undeniable that, whether or not that cerebrum is me, it is a person (in the Lockean sense). Most animalists would deny that the cerebrum is me. So it seems they must say that a new person comes into being when my cerebrum is removed. But, according to Mark Johnston, who first introduced this argument, that is implausible, since you cannot cause a new person to come into being just by removing tissue that in no way suppresses mental activities.335
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As good as the remnant person argument against animalism may sound or seem, Eric T. Olson, Stephen Blatti and Rory Madden have come up with arguments in their essays to defend the claim of Johnston. For Olson, he lays out a range of potential animalist alternatives or options and through this, somewhat vilifies Johnston‘s argument, concluding that self-conscious human persons are one and the same as biological organisms of a certain kind. For Blatti, that there is a remnant person in Johnston‘s case is not true. For him, it is the whole human animal that thinks not cerebra. Hence, he objected and denied that the remnant cerebrum thinks and concluded that it is not a person. Rory Madden, ―in contrast, embraces the claim that a new person is created in Johnston‘s case. He says there is nothing in itself mysterious about the possibility of having created an entity by ―subtraction‖.‖336 In all, it should be noted that the ultimate goal of the remnant person argument is to keep track of a single person.
The Duplication Argument is in contrast to the remnant person argument in that it asks us to keep trail of the single person. The argument seeks to demonstrate that animalists miscount the number of people in play. Duncan highlighted this point, reflecting on Campbell and McMahan‘s description/example of dicephalus, which ―occurs when a human zygote divides incompletely, resulting in twins fused below the neck.‖337 According to Duncan, ―they tinker with the case, and ask us to imagine twins who share all of their organs except for their cerebra. Campbell and McMahan say that, in such a case, there would be two people, not one. But presumably, on animalism, there is just one person, since there is just one organism. Thus, they say that animalism gets the case wrong, and so is false.‖338
Campbell and McMahan‘s argument clearly is a demonstration and pointer to the fact that humans or persons cannot be fully equated to human animals. They criticize animalism— the
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view that each of us is identical to human organism as well as the assertion that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one‘s organism. However, be this as it may, Paul Snowdon, on the other hand, defended animalism against the above objection.
―He considers split-brain cases, where, again, it seems like there are two people but one organism. Snowdon argues that, in fact, there is just one subject of experience in these cases, and so no problem for animalism arises.‖339
However, the animalism theory of personal identity is the version of the somatic criterion of personal identity most strikingly articulated by Olson in recent times. The animalism theory is the view expressed by Olson, the most prominent advocate of the animalistic view of personal identity. His view of persistence conditions of person is expressed thus: ―what it takes for us to persist through time is what I have called biological continuity: one survives just in case one‘s purely animal functions— metabolism, the capacity to breathe and circulate one‘s blood and the like— continue. I would put biology in place of psychology, and one‘s biological life in place of one‘s mind, in determining what it takes for us to persist: a biological approach to personal identity.‖340
Explicating this argument further, Rory Madden expressed Olson‘s view thus: ―Olson‘s view in effect subtracts sensorimotor and other psychological capacities from the list of capacities for activity characteristic of human organisms, and holds that the remaining capacities—or perhaps some sufficient subset of them— are necessary and sufficient for one to persist, a position structurally similar to Lockean view that instead selects just the psychological capacities as necessary and sufficient for one to persist.‖341 This is somehow a categorical denial of the psychological view of personal identity as necessary and sufficient condition for the
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reidentification of the self or person. Madden further remakes that Olson‘s wholly non-psychological theory of animal persistence conditions flows coherently from an influential vision of the fundamental metaphysical nature of an organism.342 He supported this argument reflecting on Olson‘s submission thus:
Organisms differ from other material things by having lives. By a life I mean more or less what Locke meant (1975:330-331): a self-organizing biological event that maintains the organism‘s complex internal structure.
The materials that organisms are made up of are intrinsically unstable and must therefore be consistently repaired and renewed, or else the organism dies and its remains decay. An organism must constantly take in new particles, reconfigure and assimilate them into its living fabric, and expel those that are no longer useful to it. An organism‘s life enables it to persist and retain its characteristic structure despite constant material turnover. . . Organisms have parts: vast numbers of them. A thing is alive in the biological sense by virtue of a vastly complex array of bio-chemical processes, and the particles caught up in these processes are parts of the organism.343
From this description of organism‘s characteristics, we see that the fundamental constituent and persisting drive of the animal or organism is inherent or embedded in the organism‘s life.
Though its parts may experience changes— decay and rebirth; this process does not completely eliminate the possibility of persistence in organisms. Furthermore, so long as these characteristics are certain of human animal then they are defining or explanatory terms for articulating persistence in human animals though they are not completely exhaustible. They are— breathing, sleeping, snoring, pointing, listening, walking, running, jumping, tool-using, gossiping, planning, remembering, fantasizing, excreting, eating, mating, drooling, seeking shelter, filling ―humanoid‖ spatial receptacles, growing, ageing, fighting infection, ailing, dying, mourning, hunting, relaxing, visually attending, problem-solving, blocking light, resisting penetration, sweating, painting, singing, story-telling, fidgeting, digesting…344
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In a way, it has been argued that animalism could collapse into Lockean psychological continuity theory, if we are to accept the argument of cerebrum or brain in a vat, assuming the human animal to be a brain— a psychological entity. As a matter of fact, Parfit has argued this in a recent discussion that a human organism could persist in a remnant cerebrum condition:
If Animalists made this claim, their view would cease to be an alternative to Lockean views. On the Lockean Brain-Based Psychological Criterion, some future person would be me if this person would be uniquely psychologically continuous with me, because he would have enough of my brain. This criterion implies that, in Surveying Cerebrum, the conscious being would be the same person as me. When animalists entered this debate, their main claim was that such psychological criteria of identity are seriously mistaken, because we are human animals, so that our criterion of identity must be biological. If these Animalists now claimed that, in Surveying Cerebrum, the conscious rational being would be an animal, who would be me, these people would be claiming that the true criterion of identity for developed human animals is of this Lockean psychological kind.345
As I have proposed to argue in this thesis, there are in fact, going by the claim of the animalists, certain aspects of their argument inevitably dovetail into psychological criterion‘s argument. A human animal, certainly, is in possession of a brain and the seat of consciousness, indeed is the brain. It is not intuitive for the animalists to argue for human persistence on the ground of biological processes alone, which are aspects and a microscopic consideration of the totality that make up the human person as a whole organism.