Descartes thought animals were just like us, except lacking consciousness. He called them “automata”: machines that could not think, feel or act independently. Hobbes disagreed, claiming that animals were actually thinking beings and that they had free will. In his book Leviathan, he wrote that animals were not merely machines, but were “machines made after the image of men”. Descartes saw animals as being different from humans because they lacked reason and conscience. Even though they were just machines, he claimed that humans were superior to animals because they had a soul, while animals did not.
In the nineteenth century, Darwin’s theory of natural selection changed everything as it reinstated Hobbes’s ideas of animals and humans both being mechanical to this universe. Humans were no longer superior to other animals, but simply another species. We were not special at all, and we were simply another species of animal, albeit some of the best adapted to survive. But what does it mean to say that we are no better than an animal and that we share many similarities with other creatures? Does this put an end to our ability to treat animals differently from ourselves, and to justify harming them? Simply put, should humans and animals have the same rights?
