Consciousness and its Place in a “Natural Hierarchy” Considerations Concerning the Role of Consciousness in Modern Philosophy and Ethics

The paper presents some considerations concerning the role of consciousness as a privileged state in nature which has implications for ethics. Especially in the modern talk about consciousness of human beings or animals since Thomas Nagel (1974) or Peter Singer (1975) we find discussions about the role of consciousness as an important irreducible and ‘higher’ phenomenon connected with a first person authority in epistemology and with special privileges in bioethics. In particular animal consciousness is often considered as a ‘lower’ state in a “natural hierarchy”. In bioethics consciousness has been combined with qualities like the ability for future options, subjectivity, sentience or pain and further more, these elements have been used as criteria to justify an extraordinary ‘moral status’ for instance in these of ‘higher’ beings like Great Apes (Cavalieri/Singer 1993) or for ‘higher’ conscious animals as “subjects of life” (Regan 1983, 2004) or having pain (Ryder 2001). On the other hand some analytical philosophers deny any ‘higher’ consciousness with respect to animals because of different theoretical reasons (Carruthers 2000, Davidson 2005). Nevertheless advocates and denyers of animal ‘consciousness’ both assume that the possession of consciousness justifies privileges in ethics. This is the background for modern ethicists and philosophers of human and animal mind to refer implicite or explicite to a concept of “natural hierarchy” expressed by terms of “higher/lower” etc. In short, they talk in hierarchical terms about relations between natural entities like plants, animals, and men (Perler, Wild 2005). This implies at first a theoretical question: What kind of epistemological or ontological justifications do allow to speak in terms of a “natural hierarchy”? The second more practical question is: If it is possible to talk in this way, is it justified for ethics? These and similar questions are discussed in the following paper from the perspective of modern and a Kantian epistemology. The first part reminds the great influence of two traditional metaphysical thinking patterns – the Aristotelian anima-order and the Cartesian machina-order on natural philosophy in general and its influence on modern neurocentric philosophy of mind (Ingensiep 1997, 2005). The second SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 44 (2/2007) pp. (301–317) H. W. Ingensiep, Consciousness and its Place in a “Natural Hierarchy” 302 part presents some epistemological and ontological problems and considerations in this field. The third part presents an example in modern ethics using an hierarchical order (P. Singer). The important main result is, that it is very difficult to justify consciousness at the top of a “natural hierarchy” of organisms.