18:00:32

EL ANIMAL 1

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

The question to ask should not be: Do we have something in common —reason, self-consciousness, a soul— with other animals? (With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitled to treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonouring their corpses). […] the heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject, the “another”, as we seen at once when we think of the object not as a bat(“Can I share the being of a bat?”) but as another human being. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have not such capacity, (…) and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.