WHY ANIMALS ARE SPIRITUAL BEINGS?

Resumo

This essay analyzes the different meanings of the notions of
the “soul” and the “spirit,” which were changing direction at the same
time that man has developed his intellectual capacity and his dominion
over nature. Next, it will be shown that using the notion of spirit,
while distinguishing characteristic of men in relation to other living
things, a speciesist ideology was being built and that this ideology lies
behind the ethics that excludes animals from the sphere of moral consideration.
Finally, we aim to demonstrate that although this way of
thinking of Greek philosophy still exerts a great influence in the Western
tradition, it presents a series of contradictions and inconsistencies
that point to its exhaustion as an ethical and epistemological model,
which announces the birth of a new ethic, divorced from this tradition
of the domination of nature by men, that priorize the subjective and
emotional instead of objective and scientific, thus indicating, among
other things, the recognize of the intrinsic value of animals, in a paradigm
based on compassion , sympathy, reciprocity and exchange.