Ethical Responsibility Towards Animals According to the Views of Descartes and Mulla Sadra

The ethical status of animals and the ethical responsibility towards them is an important issue in applied ethics. By equating animals with physical mechanisms, Descartes views them as pure bodies, making animals devoid of emotions such as pain, and mere resources which lack moral standing, and rendering humans free of ethical responsibility towards them. By contrast to this theory, Mulla Sadra provides an ethical responsibility towards animals and an appropriate basis for recognizing an original ethical status and position in favor of animals by identifying an animal self and its imaginal immateriality. This renders the individual to be ethically responsible for the abuse of animals in industrial detention centers, slaughterhouses and various laboratories, and to minimize the consequences of such abuses for animals, and consequently, for humans.