Are You an Animal?

Here’s a strange question: when you say “I,” what do you mean?

You probably mean you — the person reading these words right now. But here’s the thing: there’s also a living, breathing, warm-blooded organism sitting in your chair (or wherever you are). That organism is a biological animal, a member of the species Homo sapiens. It has a heart that beats, lungs that breathe, cells that divide. It was once a fetus, and someday it will die.

The question philosophers argue about is this: Are you that animal? Or are you something else — something that just uses the animal for a while?

If you think this is an obvious question with an obvious answer, you’re in good company. Most people, if you asked them, would say: “Of course I’m a human animal. What else would I be?” But for the last few centuries, a lot of philosophers have said exactly the opposite. They’ve argued that you and your body are two different things — that you are a person, and a person isn’t quite the same as an animal.

This debate is called the debate over animalism. Let’s explore what it means.

What Animalism Actually Says

Animalism is the view that you and I are, literally, animals. Not that we have animal bodies, and not that we’re like animals, but that we are animals — the same thing, all the way down.

This sounds simple, but it has some surprising consequences. If you are an animal, then:

You were once a fetus. (That animal started as a fetus.)
You could end up in a permanent vegetative state, unable to think or feel anything. (That animal might still be alive, even if the “person” part has vanished.)
You will die when that animal dies. There is no “you” floating free after death. When the organism stops living, you stop existing.
You are, in a deep sense, the same kind of thing as a dog or a whale. You’re a biological organism, nothing more and nothing less.

Animalists say: we shouldn’t be embarrassed by these consequences. They’re just the truth about what we are.

What Animalism Is Not

It helps to be clear about what animalism doesn’t say:

It doesn’t say that all animals are people. Your cat is an animal but not a person (at least not in the way philosophers use the word).
It doesn’t say that all people are animals. If aliens or robots or angels exist, they could be people without being animals. Animalism is just about us — human people.
It doesn’t say you “have a body that’s an animal,” as if you were one thing and your body another. That’s a different view called constitution (more on that later). Animalism says you are the animal.

What Keeps an Animal Going?

If you’re an animal, what does it take for you to keep existing from one moment to the next? What would destroy you?

Animalists mostly agree that what keeps a human animal going is life. As long as the biological processes continue — breathing, metabolism, blood circulation — the animal exists. Death is the end. A dead human body isn’t really a human animal anymore; it’s just a collection of parts that used to be organized as one.

But here’s where animalists disagree among themselves. Some say life is absolutely necessary — you can’t be a dead animal, any more than you can be a fake dog. Others say that what matters is having the right structure — the organization that makes life possible, even if life itself has stopped. If a human animal dies but its body retains the same organized structure, maybe it’s still the same animal, just dead. This is a real disagreement that hasn’t been settled.

The Lockean Revolution

To understand why animalism is even controversial, you have to go back to the 1600s and a philosopher named John Locke. (He was not the guy from Lost — he was a real English thinker who had an enormous influence on how we think about identity.)

Locke made a sharp distinction between two things that people had usually lumped together: a human animal (which he called a “man”) and a person.

A human animal, Locke said, is just a living organism with a certain structure. It persists as long as the life continues. A person, by contrast, is a thinking, self-aware being — something that can reflect on itself and recognize itself as the same thing over time. And a person persists as long as its consciousness continues, even if the body changes completely.

Locke invented a famous thought experiment to make this vivid. Imagine, he said, that the soul of a prince — carrying all of the prince’s memories and personality — entered and took over the body of a cobbler. Would the cobbler’s body now contain the prince? Locke said: obviously yes. Everyone sees that this person would be the prince, responsible for the prince’s actions, even though the body belonged to someone else.

The point is: person and animal can come apart. Your consciousness could leave your body and go somewhere else. And if that’s possible, then you are not identical to your animal body — you’re something that uses the body for a while.

The Thinking Animal Argument

Animalists think this is wrong. They have a simple, stubborn argument that goes like this:

There is a human animal sitting in your chair.
That human animal is thinking.
You are the thinking being sitting in your chair.
Therefore, you are that human animal.

Each step seems hard to deny. Is there really a human animal where you are? Yes — you can see it in the mirror. Does it think? Human animals have brains and nervous systems; seems obvious they can think. Are you the thinking being where you are? Well, who else would be? If you deny this, you end up saying there are two thinkers in your chair: the animal and you. But then which one owns your memories? Which one is responsible for your actions? It gets messy fast.

This argument doesn’t prove animalism once and for all, but it shifts the burden. If you think you’re not the animal, you have to explain how to avoid having two thinkers in one place.

How to Resist the Argument

Philosophers who reject animalism have come up with several ways to wriggle out.

One strategy is to say that the human animal doesn’t really think. Only people think, and animals aren’t people. This sounds crazy at first — of course animals can think! — but it’s actually a more sophisticated position than it seems. The idea is that thinking requires having psychological persistence conditions — the kind of continuity where your memories and personality determine whether you survive. Animals don’t have that kind of continuity (they survive as long as they’re alive, whether or not they remember anything). So, the argument goes, animals can’t be thinkers. Only thinkers are thinkers. Simple.

This view is defended by Sydney Shoemaker, who spent decades building a complex theory of how the mind works. He argues that mental properties — like thinking, feeling, remembering — can only belong to things that persist the way minds do. Since animals don’t persist that way, they can’t have mental properties at all.

Another strategy, developed by Lynne Rudder Baker, says there are two things in your chair, but they’re not separate beings in the normal sense. Instead, one constitutes the other — like a piece of marble constitutes a statue. The marble and the statue share the same space and the same atoms, but they’re not identical because they have different properties. The marble would survive being smashed; the statue wouldn’t. Similarly, the human animal and the person share the same body, but they’re not identical. The animal has mental properties only in a derivative way — it has them because the person has them.

The problem with this view is that it leads back to the “too many thinkers” problem. If the animal is right there, sharing your thoughts, then you have company in your head. Animalists find this deeply implausible.

The Ancestor Problem

Here’s another argument for animalism, this one drawing on science.

If you are not an animal, then your parents weren’t animals either (since you came from them). And their parents weren’t animals. And so on, back through your entire family tree. But this means none of your evolutionary ancestors were animals — which contradicts everything we know about biology and evolution. You can’t be descended from non-animals if you’re a human. That’s just not how evolution works.

So if you reject animalism, you seem to be rejecting evolutionary theory. That’s a steep price to pay.

Still Unsettled

Despite these arguments, animalism remains a minority view among philosophers. Most still think we’re something other than our animal bodies. But the debate is very much alive.

Some objections to animalism come from weird biological cases. For example, there is a rare condition called dicephalus where twins are conjoined in a very unusual way: they share one body but have two heads. Are they two people in one animal? If so, then you can’t simply say each person is an animal — because here you have two people and only one animal. Cases like this force animalists to get more precise about what they mean.

Other objections come from thought experiments. Imagine your brain is transplanted into a different body. You wake up in a new body, with all your memories. Animalism seems to say that you stay behind in your old body (since the animal stays where it is). But that feels wrong — it feels like you go with your brain. If that intuition is correct, then you’re not the whole animal; you’re just a part of it.

Animalists respond that our intuitions about weird cases aren’t reliable. And anyway, if you follow the brain-transplant intuition, you end up with other counterintuitive consequences — like there being two thinkers in your head right now (your animal and your brain). So you can’t use intuitions selectively.

Why It Matters

This might seem like a philosopher’s game — an amusing puzzle with no real stakes. But it has actual consequences.

If animalism is true, then each of us was once a non-thinking fetus and could become a non-thinking person in a vegetative state. This matters for debates about abortion and euthanasia. If you are essentially a person (a self-aware being), then a fetus that isn’t yet self-aware isn’t you. But if you are essentially an animal, then you existed as a fetus from the beginning.

More broadly, animalism puts humans back in the animal kingdom — not just biologically, but metaphysically. We aren’t special kinds of beings floating above nature. We are organisms, subject to the same laws of life and death as everything else. That’s a humbling thought, and it raises big questions about how we should treat other animals, and whether the sharp line we draw between humans and animals makes any sense.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Animalism	The view that each of us is literally an animal
Person	A thinking, self-aware being, capable of reflection and moral responsibility
Persistence conditions	The rules that determine whether something at one time is the same thing as something at another time
Psychological criterion	The view that you persist as long as your memories, personality, and consciousness continue
Constitution	The relationship where one object (like marble) makes up another object (like a statue) without being identical to it
Thinking animal argument	The argument that since there’s a thinking animal where you are, and you’re the thinking being there, you must be that animal

Key People

John Locke (1632–1704): An English philosopher who argued that persons and human animals are different things, governed by different rules of identity. His ideas still shape the debate today.
Eric Olson: A contemporary philosopher and leading defender of animalism. He argues that we are essentially organisms, not persons.
Sydney Shoemaker: A philosopher who argues that animals cannot think, because thinking requires a kind of persistence that animals don’t have.
Lynne Rudder Baker: A philosopher who defended the “constitution view,” arguing that persons are constituted by animals without being identical to them.

Things to Think About

If you woke up tomorrow in a different body but with all your memories, would you still be you? Or would you be someone else who just remembers your life?
Suppose you could be “uploaded” into a computer, and your body was destroyed. Would the upload be you, or just a copy? If it’s not you, why does it feel like it should be?
We treat animals and humans very differently. If animalism is true and we are literally animals, does that change how we should think about the ethics of eating meat, or keeping pets, or using animals in experiments?
When you think “I,” do you think of yourself as a mind, a body, or both? Where does that feeling come from?

Where This Shows Up

Medical ethics: If you are an animal, then a patient in a persistent vegetative state is still you, even if the person is gone. This affects decisions about life support.
Abortion debates: If you are essentially an animal, then you existed as a fetus. If you are essentially a person, you began later. This is a real point of disagreement.
Transhumanism: People who want to upload their minds into computers are assuming they are not their bodies. If animalism is true, that project is impossible.
Animal rights: If humans and animals are the same kind of thing (organisms), the moral line between us becomes harder to justify.