Comparing Descartes Limitrophy And Singer's

Derrida’s limitrophy and Singer’s principle of equal consideration contradicts Descartes’s bias that human reasoning and linguistic abilities are justifications for human superiority, or arrogance, over animals. To Descartes, the ability to express and share thoughts through declarative speech is a key factor that distinguishes humans from animals, as “[animals] could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others” (Descartes, 167). To emphasize the idea of language as a distinguishing factor, he writes how because animal are unable to speak, they lack thought and reasoning. This, however, shows Descartes’s biased interpretation of language, as he defines language through

Because Descartes’s argument of human language and reasoning are based on an anthropocentric perspective, it becomes liable to Singer’s accusations of speciesism. Under Derrida’s idea of limitrophy, the differences between humans and animals is limitless, as Descartes’s binary division between humans and animals not only misrepresents the “multiplicity of [animals],” but it also denied animals the power “to respond-to pretend, to lie, to cover its track or erase its own traces,” despite having some aptitude for signs and for communication (Derrida, 401). To Derrida, Descartes’s argument of speciesism, which is in favor of humanistic reasoning and linguistics, is due to his “lack” of perception, as human reasoning is derived from the matters of “technics,” and biases. (Derrida, 374). The usage of reasoning and language as justifications for human superiority over animals falls under the notion of speciesism, as it fundamentally distinguishes humans and animals based on biased interpretation. In “The Animal Therefore I Am,” Derrida emphasizes how “the right to the word, the name, the verb, the attribute, to a language of words . . . corrals a large number of living beings within a single concept: “the Animal”

. . or the aptitude for [reasoning],” but rather the capacity to suffer. To Derrida, not even “Descartes himself was [able] to claim that animals were insensitive to suffering,” (Derrida, 396). To Singer, the “capacity for suffering is vital [justification] that gives a being the right to equal consideration” (Singer, 4). To Singer, the capacity for suffering, and happiness, is a prerequisite for having interests and thus becomes “a condition that must be satisfied” before language and reasoning. Since “the claim of equality does not depend on intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of fact,” equality becomes a matter of morality, “not a simple assertion of fact” that Descartes uses to argue that human reasoning and language are justifications for human superiority over animals (Singer, 3). Furthermore, Singer emphasizes how “an imbecile may have no characteristics superior to those of a dog, but this does not make the imbecile a member of a “different species” as the dog is” in order to convey how differentiating humans and animals on the basis of intellectual “abilities, differing abilities to communicate effectively and differing capacities to experience pleasure and pain” is fundamentally impossible, as the