Why is it wrong for animals to suffer?

Great Debates
1

In this thread:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=143663

it was brought up that some of us hold cruelty to animals to be wrong. How do we define the ‘rights’ of animals, and are they applied to all animals? Why or why not?

My view: There are people, and there is everything else. If a person owns something, they may do what they like with it. Thus a person may inflict horrible torture on a lamb or calf, because it is their damn lamb or calf.
What do you all think?

2

Oh man, I think you are sooooo going to get flamed by a two or three posters for this…

3

Bob, if you’re a social-contract sort of ethicist, then you’re right: there’s no more reason to protect animals than there is, say, to protect infants. For social contract folks, you oughtta be able to raise your own children as a food supply, as long as you kill them before they become able to harm other people.

If you’re a religious ethicist, then the “humans and everything else” is based on faith, not reason; there’s certainly no arguing the position with you.

If, however, you’re a rights-based ethicist, whence do you think rights come? Why do humans have any rights at all?

I gotta know where you’re coming from before I can answer your question. Of course, if you want an agonizingly thorough answer to the question, check out The Case for Animal Rights, by Tom Reagan.

Daniel

4

For me, rights come out of enlightened self-interest. Denying any people of their rights is a bad move, from my perspective, because it sets a precedent that may well come around and bite me in the butt. Babies are people, so killing them deprives them of their rights. This could bite me in, say, a geritocracy, where toddlers, then prepubescents, then us teenagers were deemed inhuman. Well, we teenagers are mostly inhuman, but that’s another thread. Hence, I would fight for the rights of newborns.

hijack: A fetus should have the right to live, provided it can do so without intruding on the rights of the mother. The mother is under no obligation to provide protection or umbilical support, and should be able to withdraw said at any time. Hence, I’m pro-choice. Please, let’s stick to forest-fire intensity flames rather than stellar-fusion ones, and let abortion out of this thread, unless it is directly related to the issues at hand, shall we?

…Bob?

5

You may dispute its validity all you want to, robertligouri, but the basic thesis underlying the cultural taboo against cruelty to animals is that we should not cause needless suffering. The biblical admonition giving mankind “dominion” over the earth and all that it contains is often interpreted to mean that “dominion” is “stewardship,” not “ownership.” Many moral codes that arise from non-biblical traditions similarly hold that human beings do not “own” other life forms. Some hold that we are all co-equal partners in sharing the world around us; others hold that we are subject to being reincarnated as other forms of life.

Also, there seems to be at least some level of understanding that the activities and behaviors that give a person joy and pleasure* are indicative of that person’s moral probity, and to a certain extent, how safe other people are when they are exposed to that person.

In short, your view that a person “owns” a lamb or calf, utterly and completely, and may therefore deliberately cause needless suffering to the lamb or calf is not universally held, and, in my opinion, is simplistic and sorely lacking in validity.

*[sub]I realize the OP did not cite any motivations, including getting joy and pleasure on the person torturing the lamb or calf, but I interpreted the fact that the subject was cruelty to animals ( and the phrase “whatever they like”) as implying the infliction of unnecessary suffering for the emotional gratification of the torturer. If anyone wishes to demonstrate that I have erected a strawman, feel free to go to work, and I will accept such instruction as is appropriate.[/sub]

6

Sorry, Robert. Bob is just nice and short. I’ll try to use a longer name in the future.

I don’t understand, however, what bad precedent you’d set by torturing an infant to death (in your worldview, that is – in my world, it’s plenty bad). You’re not an infant, and you’re not gonna ever be an infant. And infants can’t hurt anyone.

You rely, based on enlightened self-interest, on folks not hurting you because then you could hurt them. Babies can’t enter into a social contract like this: they’re qualitatively different from you in this respect.

I think this is the central flaw of “enlightened self-interest” ideologies: they offer no protection to babies or to the congenitally helpless. Further, under an enlightened self-interest ideology, there’s nothing immoral about committing the perfect murder: as long as no one finds out about the murder, you’ve not done anything to hurt your own interests. In fact, you can torture someone to death, as long as you do it without anyone finding out about it.

It’s possible to be consistent as a rational egotist, but I think that doing so means letting people abuse their children as long as they kill the children before they can threaten anyone else, and means accepting that perfect murders don’t impinge on ethics.

If you adopt these positions, then it’s consistent to say that there’s nothing wrong with causing animals to suffer.

The Case for Animal Rights has an in-depth critique of rational egotism; what I’m saying here is based in part on arguments from that book.

Daniel

7

Your world view is that of the bully: “I can, so I can”. You assume that because we have the capability of manipulating and destroying other life forms, that it gives us the * right * to, and if you have the ethics of a bully, then we do.

My point of view was expressed flawlessly by someone else:

"* We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, we greatly err. For the animals shall not be measure by man. In a world older and more complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth * " -Henry Beston

Nothing more to say, really.

8

There are no absolutes. In some cultures it is (or was) acceptable to torture people. Generally humankind is moving away from that because most people understand the basic idea of “do not do unto others what you would not like them do unto you”. We sympathise and understand other do not enjoy being hurt so we enact laws which make it illegal to do it. Still some people get pleasure from inflicting pain and will break the law to do so or will do it in legal ways, even under color of authority, if they can. But the law still represents the most common values on the topic.

Same thing with animals. People here feel it is wrong and our laws reflect that but in other times and cultures it was very different. I can tell you in China today they have no concept against cruelty to animals and animals are considered property to be used and abused at one’s will. The moon bears, with a catheter inserted in their gall bladder, are a terrible example:
http://www.animalsasia.org/beInformed/campaigns/caeh001.html
http://www.awionline.org/pubs/Quarterly/winter2001/500bears.htm
http://www.ifaw.org/page.asp?unitid=8

I have seen much animal abuse and torture in China and always been sickened. The Chinese look at me amused and just think westerners are wimpy. I remember a young woman tending a table with some objects for sale in a market. She was bored to death with nothing to do and passing the time torturing a small dog while onlookers laughed amused. I told my friend I was sickened and that such thing would never be allowed in a western country but her response is that it was the woman’s dog to do as she pleased. Not in western countries it ain’t.

9

Inflicting needless pain on animals is typical behaviour of sociopaths; although I think it would be quite unsound to argue that preventing this would stop people devloping sociopathic behaviour…

10

Well, Danny boy*, it’s not an argument of “If we hurt them, they can hurt us back” as much as it is “If we hurt them, we may move on to hurt others, such as me.”
Re the perfect murder analogy: Could you give an example of a ‘bad’ perfect murder? Almost every hypothetical situation I think up would either have potential repurcussions, or be ‘worth it’ (a personal vendetta that is worth jail time, etc.) A psycho/sociopath would have no incentive not to kill people if the threat of jail time/guilt carried no weight, true. On the other hand, psycho/sociopaths are more or less amoral by definition.

*Bob is fine. It just made me read up the thread to see who Bob was.

And Stoid: Tell me, what has rights, and what does not? Do plants have the right not to suffer? Self-organizing crystalline systems? Memes?
At any rate, my view is, “I can, and it helps me more than it hurts me, so I do, and others be danmed, insofar as I am not hurting myself by alienating myself from said others.”

Would I ever work in a veal/beef plant? No. Liebermen to the contrary, killing things on a computer does not inure you to real world suffering.
Should people who own veal/beef plants treat animals humanely?
Obviously, yes. You can’t sell quality veal to people too outraged to eat it.
Do we (The people without the deed to the plants) have the right to stop inhumane practices by force? I’m with the Chinese on this. If ownership of an animal is possible, then I see no reason why a person should not have the legal right to beat an animal to death for fun. Conversly, we have the right, and many feel they have the responsibility, to identify the animal-beaters, and treat them as we see fit.

Upon re-reading this post, I realized that my position was “Creulty to animals is immoral, because people don’t like it.” Congrats, people, you won.

11

I’d like to think that you won, as well.

12

Here’s an interesting aside: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/11/13/blum/index.html.

It’s a book review about a book on research psychologist’s Harry Harlow’s life. (You know, the guy who did those experiments giving baby monkeys “wire mothers”–you may have seen the tape in a psych 101 class) In general, I believe that it is wrong for animals to suffer. But, in this particular case, I agree with Harlow’s quote: “If my work will point this out and save only one million human children, I really can’t get overly concerned about 10 monkeys.”

13

It hardly seems to need mentioning, but finding this egregiously ill-advised wording TWICE in the thread, I can’t simply let it pass.

It is not wrong for animals to suffer. Animals suffer every day. So do humans. To suffer is not in itself to transgress a moral boundary.

It is wrong for a person deliberately to cause needless suffering.

In an animal OR another person.

14

Anybody read the NY Times magazine this week? A very interesting article on this very issue.

In that article, the author makes a distinction between pain and suffering. When I get home tonight I’ll pull it out and give a better synopsis (or if anyone else has it handy, feel free), but basically, the author felt that if an animal is allowed to live its “animal-ness,” then it does not suffer, even if it is killed for food/whatever. An animal that is not allowed to live doing what it wants/is genetically programed to do suffers. This is an argument for free-range animal raising, and that sort of thing.

15

I’ll argue that, Eonwe. Some animals’ version of animal-ness includes being domesticated/slaughtered for food, just as it includes being run down by wolves or trapped by spiders. Just because we use knives and guns instead of webs and fangs doesn’t mean that it’s not the same basic thing.

To rephrase, it is natural to lock baby animals in dark cages and feed them liquid diets, because we (well, some of us) do this, and we are natural. It just isn’t very nice for the animal.

16

As Eonwe mentioned, there is a difference between pain and suffering, and I would say that humans and animals feel pain every day. It’s only with an human consciousness that pain is sometimes but not always considered suffering. So I would say that only humans can suffer. This is not to say that I would endorse torturing animals, or that someone’s joy over doing so outweighs the destruction of the act, but I’m not sure there’s a moral compenent there.

I know that there are also humans who can’t comprehend that they are suffering, but I would have to lump all humans together when saying inflicting pain on humans is causing suffering and is immoral.

17

Well robertliguori, I think I might not have made my point quite clear.

Domestication and ultimate death at the hands of people does jive with that philosophy. As you say, death comes to us all. In fact, many species (again, according the the Times article) would probably cease to exist if we stopped eating them.

However, if the animal isn’t able to do its thing, if you will, it often shows symptoms of what you’d call depression in humans. In animals it’s called ‘responding to stress.’ Examples include hens who rub themselves bloody on their cages. Aparently about 1/10 of all egg-laying hens exhibit this behavior. Here’s a snippit from the article about pigs:

It’s things like this that are wrong in the moral sense. Why should something that is obviously suffering be acceptable in other species?

However, things that do not qualify as suffering include being slaughtered for food. Afterall, the animal does not know what is going to happen. It does not sit for days agonizing about its untimely demise. It just goes on living until it gets offed. It does not anticipate its death. And that’s the point of the “let the animal express its animal-ness” argument. The animal will not suffer if it’s allowed to do what comes naturally to it.

18

There’s a typo in your first sentence, right? You meant to say, “If we hurt them, they may move on to hurt others, such as me,” right? Cuz otherwise my head hurts, and I need an explanation. I’ll wait to address this point until you elaborate.

As for the perfect murder: imagine that I have an ailing, unconscious relative staying at my house. I know that my local DA is an idiot. I stand to inherit money from said relative. So I put a pillow over my relative’s head and smother her.

Chances are excellent that I succeed in killing my relative, that no one will find out, and that I’ll benefit from this tidy little murder. I believe that an “enlightened self-interest” philosophy sees no wrong in what I’ve done.

Do you consider me to have done something wrong?

What if I went on an expedition with an acquaintance into the Sahara Desert; once there, I tortured the acquaintance to death and ate his flesh, and then returned to civilization claiming that he’d gotten angry at me and left my company soon after the expedition began? Have I done anything wrong?

The details of the hypothetical don’t really matter: what matters is that enlightened self-interest philosophy, from which you seem to be working, finds no fault in committing perfect murders or in torturing to death one’s own children. These two acts are far beyond the pale of most people’s sense of ethics, and a lot of people consider the philosophy to be therefore lacking.

Daniel

19

Eonwe, I get that living conditions for most livestock are horrible. But an animal can no more ‘do its thing’ if it is eaten by wolves then if it is slaughtered for meat. I would argue that butchering an animal humanely is more moral than a random fate in the wild.

DW: Not a typo. I am a member of a large, powerful group of ‘us’
(The U.S.) If the U.S. decided to outlaw homosexuality, I would fight this, not because I fear that the homosexual population of the U.S. could ‘win’, but because ‘we’ would have a precedent for turning on, say, computer nerds.

Re your two scenarios: I see no good reason to kill in either one mentioned, and several reasons not to. Questions of evidence aside, most people would feel guilt at killing someone, and extreme guilt at killing them for no reason. Killing someone just because isn’t good enough to justify the always present* repurcussions.
Re killing the kids: Sure it’s immoral. Either society will come after you (because it’s illegal), or you are enabling a society which may well make the torturing of you legal next. Exact same principle.
*Again, psycopaths and sociopaths don’t feel guilt. Again, Ps and Ss are amoral.

20

To listen to some people whine over politics, you’d think it already was legal to torture people. :slight_smile:

Seriously, I see nothing wrong with torturing animals other than it makes me quite uncomfortable to watch it or hear about it. Except sea life and insects… no trigger on my empathometer there.