Are Animals are Capable of Reasoning?

In his lectures about the way humans treat animals offered at Princeton University, John Coetzee chose to tell his audience a short fictional story about Elizabeth Costello, an aging female novelist. Costello is invited to give a lecture at Appleton College in any topic she wants, which turns out to be about animals. At first, using a story in a lecture seemed to be interesting, but a story about a novelist delivering a lecture should not be more interesting than Coetzee himself giving a lecture. Considering the controversy that usually results from a discussion about animals’ rights, it is also likely that Coetzee chose Costello to be the speaker instead of him because he wanted to detach himself from the discussion of such topic and be able to point out the weak points in Costello’s arguments. This observation is probable, but there is a remaining question: Why Costello? Coetzee must have some reasons to have his protagonist, an aging female novelist, give lectures about animals’ rights, a topic at which she is not an expert. By designing his protagonist to be an aging female novelist who has problem getting along with her son’s family and clarifying her thoughts, Coetzee placed Costello and animals in the same position where they were discriminated against by other people in order to underline the idea that animals might be able to reason but they cannot communicate with humans effectively.

As an aging female novelist, Costello becomes “the other” to the Appleton community, just like the way animals are considered ‘the other’ by humans. The first reason that separates Costello from the Appleton community is her age. As an aging woman, Costello does not belong to the same group as her audience, who are mostly college students...

... middle of paper ...

...tagonist from those around her and point out that humans do not pay much attention the animals’ issue. Seeing that Coetzee can support his idea not mainly with logical arguments but a fictional story should make us realize that humans, no matter to what extent we are proud of our ability to reason, can use something unreal to strengthen an argument. Thus, we should not believe in our superiority due to the confidence that reasonability is a human’s unique characteristic because we do not know if there are other ways of ‘reasoning’. It is possible that, if animals are capable of reasoning, they do it in somewhat the same way as Coetzee’s or Costello’s. The only reason that we ignore it is that we are too adhered to what we believe is real ‘reasoning’.

Works Cited

Coetzee, J. M., and Amy Gutmann. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Print.