Ought-thoughts and animal minds

DANÓN, LAURA

Toronto

Congreso; Normative Animals; 2021

York University

Many philosophers think that human animals are the only normative creatures. In this paper I will not provide reasons against such a claim, but I will engage in a related task: delineating and comparing two deflationary accounts of what non-human animal normativity could consist in. One of them is based on Ginsborg?s notion of primitive normativity and the other on the idea that some creatures may have first-order robust ?ought thoughts?, composed by secondary representations, about how things should be or about one should act. Once I have sketched both models, I will focus on identifying some cognitive differences between creatures having primitive normativity and those having robust ought-thoughts and I will draw a few tentative remarks on the kind empirical evidence that would suggest that an animal has one or another of these two kinds of normativity.