I can see the view that pain and suffering are necessary evils in order to live the way we want, and that the pain and suffering of animals is so much less in quality that it can’t compare to our even mild discomfort. Heck, I just ate a chicken.
But I’ve never really understood the absolute denial that, yes, when we torture something and it screams in pain, and then we do that on a mass scale, that’s maybe not the best of all possible things in the universe.
None of the arguments floated in order to legitimize it make much sense. Yes, animals in nature are horrible to each other. Yes, even the most developed have at best the most rudimentary of moral sense, and none other than us can abstract it into principles.
So what?
At what point does that have any actual relevance to the question of whether something is wrong, all other things aside? These are tactics of moral avoidance, not sincerity.
If a virus arose that permanently made any infected human toddlers lose their capacity for speech and abstract thought and empathy for each other, could we skewer and roast them? If not, why not? What is it, aside from lazy convention and in-groupishness, that somehow makes the species line important, when it does not, in fact, seem to denote much of anything relevant to moral capacity?
They are animals. They mean more to you on an emotional level than they do to me. All your hypothetical drama with toddlers is a perfect example of your desire to reduce this to an emotional matter with how you feel, of course, being the right way to feel.
The question seems to be where to draw the line in terms of treatment of lifeforms. In my ideal world, I’d like to avoid harming anything with a central nervous system, anything that has the capacity to feel pain. But I like eating meat and it’s not an ideal world, so I use another bar to judge the morality of treatment of lifeforms: if it has sentience, or seems to be approaching it, I think we should avoid harming it. So we should feel guilty for slaughtering humans to eat, and perhaps some guilt for apes/dolphins/etc. Cows? Fire up the grill.
So, you don’t think cows are sentient? How are you defining sentience?
As for the thought that animals don’t really feel pain, God just makes them look like they do…why does anesthesia work on animals? Wouldn’t they act as if they were still in pain if given a local anesthesia, since they don’t really feel pain anyway?
Is it inhumane? We tend to inject human emotion onto animals. I buy cage free food because I’m not sure but I have no way of knowing one way or another.
No. While we can debate the intelligence of animals, people of good will cannot deny animals have emotional lives on some level. For me the clearest argument in favor of this point is that emotion- and mood-altering drugs work on animals.
But of course a more extensive case can be made on our observations of animals over the centuries. Darwin pointed out animals nuzzle each other to show something like love. Few societies ascribe emotions to rocks or trees, but I guess all recognize that animals have emotions.
Mistreating animals seems to cause them distress. Now what we ought to do about that is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
When I see a cougar pacing in a zoo cage I have to believe the animal wants to roam. Chickens, however, are one notch above lettuce. I empathize with them from a human perspective but I’m not seeing the same need to travel the countryside. I’d like to think my food enjoys sunshine and the occasional worm but that’s my human perspective.
Which brings up the problem; what makes them this way? Cereal doesn’t feel pain, but animals do. It’s a bad comparison. In the past people felt this way about other classes of people, but that’s changed in the better parts of the world.
Is it intelligence? Does that mean it’d morally okay for the really smart to eat or enslave the dumb? Is it that dumb people are still same species that makes this wrong? If so why does that matter? Are bonobos deserving of more moral consideration because they’re a similar species?
It’s a question I’ve wondered about much.