Considering Killability: Experiments in Unsettling Life and Death

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2015

Evolutionary Psychology

is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Vermont and a prolific author on topics in nature. He is best known for his research and writings on insect and bird behavior. His most recent book is advertised as a naturalistic perspective on animal death, and it delivers on this promise by surveying the many fascinating ways that living things have evolved to benefit from the death that surrounds them. Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death moves quickly through engaging anecdotes on scavenging, mating, burial, and conservation with an inquisitive, almost childlike joy. The book offers a collection of essays on animal behavior in the presence of death but does not represent a concerted effort to understand the role of death in an ecosystem, the evolution of death, or even a working definition of death. Heinrich does, however, provide firm foundations for discussion of these and other theoretical issues.

Journal of Animal Ethics, 2015

Given the fact that much of animal ethics is concerned with the death of nonhuman animals, it is curious that there is not a large body of literature written about the topic of animal death itself.

Historically, a substantial amount of philosophical discourse, particularly in the Western tradition, has centered on attempts to articulate a framework of defining features that would capture the presumably distinct nature of human animals. This has led to the human ontological fabric becoming significantly defined by the human/nonhuman animal binary. Suicide has long been considered an exclusively human capacity, yet more systematic considerations of the phenomenon, such as the one provided by Peña-Guzmán, call this assumption into question. In my commentary I briefly touch on complicated grief and the ensuing helplessness that may lead to suicide, and narrate a personal experience of a possible porcine suicide attempt. Commentary The invitation to contribute a commentary to Peña-Guzmán's article instigated a conversation, vividly colored with epistemic humility, with friends who were visiting that day and are interested in the nonhuman animal world on a personal level and to some extent academically. It also reminded me of my only personal encounter with a possible suicide attempt, of which more later. Peña-Guzmán argues convincingly for the possibility of suicide in nonhuman animals and its ethical implications. His article is at the same time a welcome reminder that 'we can do justice to the miracle of the [elephant] trunk without pretending that nobody else has a nose' (Midgley 1979/2002, p. 198). The human cognitive apparatus and our extensive tool use capacities are certainly remarkable attributes and enable methods of self-annihilation that are not accessible to other animals. Nevertheless, ultimately it is the failure of this apparatus to accommodate, or integrate, to use Siegel's (2011) useful concept, the underlying negativistic feelings into a force promoting self-conservation that precipitates conservation-withdrawal behaviors and

Parallax 18:2 (Summer 2012), 102-106

While unicellular microbes such as phytoplankton (marine algae) have long been considered immortal unless eaten by predators, recent research suggests that under specific conditions entire populations of phytoplankton actively kill themselves; their assumed atemporality is being revised as marine ecologists recognize phytoplankton's important role in the global carbon cycle. Drawing on empirical research into programmed cell death in marine microbes, this article explores how, in their study of microbial death, scientists change not only our understanding of microbial temporality, but also reconstruct the relationship between life and death, biological individuality and assumptions about a natural teleology associated with bounded biological systems and genetic programmes. Reading this research together with a Derridean deconstruction of the limit between human and other animals with respect to death, this article explores how the deconstruction of individuality from within biology may suggest alternatives to our anthropocentric notion of time and embodiment. one must . . . inscribe death in the concept of life. (Jacques Derrida) posthumanism is confronted with the necessity of creating a nonanthropocentric ontology of life-death. (Matthew Calarco)

Animal Sentience , 2018

Peña-Guzmán (2017) argues that empirical evidence and evolutionary theory compel us to treat the phenomenon of suicide as continuous in the animal kingdom. He defends a " continuist " account in which suicide is a multiply-realizable phenomenon characterized by self-injurious and self-annihilative behaviors. This view is problematic for several reasons. First, it appears to mischaracterize the Darwinian view that mind is continuous in nature. Second, by focusing only on surface-level features of behavior, it groups causally and etiologically disparate phenomena under a single conceptual umbrella, thereby reducing the account's explanatory power. Third, it obscures existing analyses of suicide in biomedical ethics and animal welfare literatures. A more promising naturalistic approach might seek a theoretical understanding of the social/ecological circumstances that drive humans and perhaps other animals to self-destruction. Peña-Guzmán (2017) argues that the empirical evidence of sophisticated animal cognition and Darwinian evolutionary theory compels us to treat the phenomenon of suicide as continuous in the animal kingdom – one that may be found even among invertebrates. After making a compelling case that some animals may have the mental wherewithal to make an informed decision about ending their own lives, Peña-Guzmán proposes a " continuist " view, which avoids any reference to mental states and instead defines suicide in exclusively behavioral terms. Suicide, he maintains, is a multiply-realizable phenomenon characterized by self-injurious and self-annihilative behaviors, admitting of many different proximate psychological causes and evolutionary-developmental histories. He writes: At one end of this spectrum, we find some of the most sophisticated acts of self-annihilation of cognitively complex animals, humans included; at the other end, we find more basic forms of self-injury and self-destruction, such as the self-sting of the scorpion. The continuist view thus classifies both the fully-informed and rational decision of a terminally ill patient to take her own life and the self-sting of a scorpion as " suicide, " albeit produced by different psychological states and evolutionary and developmental histories in each case. Peña

Journal of the Kafka Society of America , 2006

Science as Culture, 2019

Stem cell basic science has sparked a lot of attention because of its use of cells coming from ‘destroyed’ embryos. An ethnographic study conducted in two developmental biology laboratories located in India and France demonstrates that lab professionals do not see the use of these cells as controversial. What appears to be a major topic of reflection is the killing of mice. A hierarchy of deaths is delineated when biologists evoke the kind of lives at play in their science. A comparison between narrations of cell experimentations and mice sacrifices enriches a biological approach to the living through genetics, which is nonetheless performed in daily scientific practices. Laboratory workers enact other perceptions that point at being alive or having a life. They acknowledge, with personal convictions or expressions of intense affects, lives that are said to be embodied and experienced, while being hierarchised for the sake of science and dying patients. Laboratory workers’ narratives of a hierarchy of deaths provide them with arguments to engage with discussions happening outside of their workplace about the handling of living materials in experimental settings.