Does a cow bleed if I prick its skin? Does a bear roar in agony if I shoot its kneecaps? Does a giraffe make weird noises when I tie its neck in a knot? Surely the answer to these questions is yes, but the answer comes at a social cost. If animals feel pain, wouldn’t it be unethical to hunt or kill them? Without being able to kill these “pain feelers”, we may never get to eat a juicy steak again! I, however, challenge this moral dilemma and believe that it’s morally acceptable to tie a giraffe’s neck into a knot (only if that giraffe pisses you off).
I propose that animals, although they feel pain, do not experience pain the same way that an adult human would. Lets first examine what kind of “mental gear” is necessary to experience pain. Humans are equipped with a complex brain in which a consciousness (or what appears to be one) emerges. This is our prerequisite “mental gear” necessary for us to experience pain differently. Imagine that I break your big toe using a sledgehammer. Initially, there will be a surge pain that propagates throughout your body. The pain does not stop there – emotional suffering may follow. This suffering could last for months or even years. You may even interpret the pain as something positive. Lets say it was part of your initiation for a lucrative fraternity you always wanted to be a part of. Then the pain could mean a bonding experience. The point is, because of our “mental gear” or highly developed consciousness, our experience of pain is fascinatingly unique.
Other creatures do not have the mental gear to experience this unique experience of pain. A cow, for example, can never interpret pain the same way as humans do. They do not even experience time the same way humans do and cannot mentally recall what happened. This recollection of a past event is not equivalent to a response of classical conditioning. If I punch a cow in the utter every time it goes in the barn, then the cow will not go to the barn anymore. This “decision” to not enter the barn, is not a conscious one, it is a mechanical one – just as a rock is attracted to the ground when dropped. The cow can never interpret the pain of a punch as anything else; the mental gear is simply not sufficient enough to grant it that ability.
Why is inflicting pain on another human so morally wrong? Because our mental gear allows us to experience pain in such a way I described above. What if our experience of pain was much simpler? What if we couldn’t remember the pain right after it happened? We couldn’t think about how the person inflicting the pain betrayed our trust? Or if pain could not affect us or our family’s emotions? Then will inflicting pain still be morally wrong? Animals have this sort of simple mental gear, so does that make it just to inflict pain on animals?
You may have caught my fallacy – I assumed that animals have simpler mental gear. You may be saying, “We can never truly know what it feels like to be an animal, and thus cannot know if they feel pain the same way we do.” I would have to contest to this proclamation. I once had simpler mental gear, when I was 8 days old. My mental gear was greater than a goldfish, but definitely smaller than a human adult. The range of complexity of my mental gear could be more or less equivalent to that of a cow.
When I was just 8 days old, I underwent a circumcision and with no anesthetics. I experienced what is seemingly a great amount pain. To this day, I have absolutely no memory of what happened, and couldn’t care less to what sort of mutilation I experienced. Could it be that cows, of equivalent mental gear, experience pain the same way I did when I was 8 days old? Inflicting pain on a cow is as emotionally harmless to the cow as my circumcision when I was 8 days old.
Side note: This does not mean that inflicting pain on an 8-day-old child is justified, because that child has the potential to grow more complex mental gear. Also, it is not necessarily morally correct to kill an animal because of possible extinction or harmful tampering of the ecosystem.
My conclusion: don’t feel bad for eating a hamburger, because the cow doesn’t.
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3 comments:
No cigar, friend. By this line of reasoning it would be OK to barbeque brain-dead patients. No possible harm can come from that, yet I'll bet that strikes you as wrong. Try to discover why.
The Skinneresque determinism you argue from has been obsolete for decades. Go spend time with abused pets and then try to tell me that they don't have a full range of emotions.
The only self-honest reason to eat meat: animals are tasty and we have the thumbs. It's as simple as that.
We actually do kill brain-dead patients: euthanasia.
Skinner determinism is pretty obsolete, but I would argue that some creatures are more deterministic (in the Skinnerian sense) than others. For example, you can analyze an ant’s behaviors out of context; you wouldn’t need a placebo group in other words. For humans, however, you cannot take their behaviors out of context. This phenomenon is the product of differences in the level of consciousness between an ant and a human.
With your last point I am assuming that you mean to say, “We evolved that way so it makes it right!”
Evolution doesn’t have a purpose, and just because we evolved the way we did, does not make it ethically right. I would say that our ethics and morals derived from evolution, but the two don’t have to be congruent.
Actually, the euthanasia of brain-dead patients isn't performed in all cases, precisely because of the fact that we are unsure of the awareness, suffering, and viability of those we deem "brain dead." The fact that, very rarely, those clinically pronounced "brain dead" re-emerge to semi-consciousness or full consciousness (even if only for a brief period) only complicates the matter.
That aside, since humans don't have the cognitive ability of a grown adult at 8 days of age, would it then be reasonable to kill or maim (or to excuse those who kill or maim) newborns? After all, the presumption is that the newborns can't experience or process pain as an adult would, ergo their pain is not as meaningful or "wrong."
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