The Cartesian Inversion

René Descartes argued in the seventeenth century that animals were automata—mechanisms made of flesh, devoid of consciousness, devoid of moral standing—and from this conclusion his followers derived the authorization to vivisect living animals without compunction, dismissing their cries as the squeaking of biological springs. Mary Midgley spent decades dismantling this authorization, arguing in Animals and Why They Matter (1983) and across her later work that the denial of animal consciousness was not a scientific finding but a philosophical prejudice sustained by the comfort of a clean conceptual boundary between the morally significant and the morally insignificant. What Midgley came to identify was the structural symmetry between Descartes’s error and its contemporary mirror: just as Descartes had denied consciousness to beings that have