Buddhism, Non-Human Animals, and Selfhood

I argue that there is no necessary conceptual reason against attributing the same kind of selfhood to non-human animals as is ascribed to human beings, because we can meaningfully ascribe selfhood to non-human animals if we draw upon the Buddhist deflationary account of selfhood. I begin by outlining our intuitive concept of selfhood as is ascribed to human beings. Then I provide a Buddhist argument against ascribing this intuitive concept to human beings to suggest that we should consider alternative accounts of selfhood. To this end, I briefly describe the Buddhist deflationary account of selfhood—on which being a 'self' consists in being a 'person,' which is a conventional functional, folk psychological concept, unlike our intuitive concept of self. Using the Buddhist view, I give a tentative operational definition of selfhood. Finally, I provide empirical evidence that suggests that members of some non-human species may satisfy this definition and thus be selves in the same sense in which human beings are.