Language as Gesture and Giggling Rats

Abstract

The use of language is frequently cited as a metric for moral consideration. This metric is typically a tool to exclude animal being from the realm of ethics or to promote human exceptionalism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims language is a gesture with varying degrees of complexity. Many animal beings use gesture to convey meaning complex and abstract enough to qualify as language according to Merleau-Ponty’s parameters. Rats, despite being thought of as vermin and of a lower order, are some of the beings that convey abstract and complex meaning through gesture. Rats play, work, socialize, communicate meaning, and even laugh. Rats, along with human and many other animal beings use language and should be usured into the realm of moral consideration with any and all language using beings. If not, some other metric for exclusion would have to be adopted.