Minoan “Fresco of the Dolphins” on the island of Knossos.
“It is important for all of us to try hard to understand what scientists have been discovering. Animals have long been seen as mere property, as ‘brute beasts.’ Now a revolution in knowledge is revealing the enormous richness and cognitive complexity of animal lives, which prominently include intricate social groups, emotional responses, and even cultural learning. We share this fragile planet with other sentient animals, whose efforts to live and flourish are thwarted in countless ways by human negligence and obtuseness. This gives us a collective responsibility to do something to make our ubiquitous domination more benign, less brutal—perhaps even more just.
But to think clearly about our responsibility, we need to understand these animals as accurately as we can: what they are striving for, what capacities and responses they have as they try to flourish. Knowledge will help us to think better about the ethical questions before us and, especially, to develop a good theoretical orientation toward animal lives, which can direct law and policy well, rather than, as in the past, crudely and obtusely.” — Martha C. Nussbaum, “What We Owe Our Fellow Animals,” New York Review of Books, March 10, 2022: 34-36
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Do animals experience pain? Some philosophers have argued that they in fact do not!
Sometimes philosophers lack what we might call common sense (which, admittedly, is today increasingly uncommon), or they are too clever for their own good, or they simply reason poorly. Being a non-philosopher, I confess to occasionally enjoying pointing out the folly or blind-spots or inexcusable ignorance among (at least some) professional philosophers. Today I will provide you with one example along these lines, involving two different philosophers who happen to share the same first name: Peter, i.e., Peter Harrison and Peter Carruthers. I was familiar with the work of Carruthers but just learned of a similar conclusion made by Harrison. I came across their arguments (which strike me as bizarre to the point of implausibility) in the field of “animal ethics” in Gary Steiner’s “marvelously clear and accessible book” (Gary I. Francione—two more shared first names), Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship (Columbia University Press, 2008). Both philosophers have argued that nonhuman animals cannot experience pain, although their specific reasons and thus arguments differ, with Harrison relying on ideas derived from Descartes (hence ‘only beings with rational minds [involving beliefs and knowledge] can experience pain’). I will concentrate on the short argument made by Carruthers.
For our purposes, I more or less endorse the views of Steiner which I will enumerate before proceeding to Carruthers’ argument.
(i) We should not draw “a sharp distinction between human beings and non-human animals, Evolutionary continuity and physiological similarity make any such distinction naïve at best.”
(ii) We should also avoid two extremes: (a) First, that animals are capable of employing conceptual abstraction and [what philosophers term] propositional attitudes, which translates into an ability to form “complex intentions.” (b) The other “extreme” view is that animal cognition is simply about “information processing.” These extremes have canalized into two very different conclusions in the form of “animal cognition as a strict either-or:” either animals possess the full apparatus of intentionality or they lack all states of subjective awareness.
I agree with Steiner what we need is a “theory of animal minds that dispenses with appeals to formal intentionality while seeking to acknowledge the richness and sophistication of the inner lives of animals.” The first clause amounts to denying our fellow non-human creatures “the conceptual and predicative abilities that make possible complex thought, self-reflective awareness, and moral agency” (cf. the arguments made by Mark Rowlands for animals to be conceived as ‘moral subjects’ rather than moral agents). Steiner argues (relying in part on arguments made by Ruth Millikan) that animals have perceptual representations that are related to their goals through means of complex associations, which for Millikan means that animals “are confined in their perceptual environment in a way that human beings are not.” Unlike Millikan, however, the representations Steiner attributes to animals cannot take predicative form, being entirely perceptual rather than intentional in nature (we will not attempt her to explain precisely what that means and entails).
Back to Carruthers: While Professor Carruthers argues that “many animals—at least mammals,” have beliefs and desires and perceptual or sensual consciousness or awareness, this sort of immediate awareness is different from having “conscious mental states and experiences,” which are “two different matters.” A concise summary is provided by Steiner:
“Although animals can be conscious in the sense of being ‘aware of the world around them and of the states of their own bodies,’ they do not have conscious experiences, inasmuch as animals are incapable of being conscious that they are in the states that they are in. How animals can have beliefs and desires without being able to be conscious that … Carruthers never explains. He simply advances the view that animals have immediate states of awareness, but that these states do not count as conscious experience since animals cannot think about them. This leads Carruthers to the same conclusion as Harrison, namely, that animals cannot experience pain. [!!!] For pain to be conscious, it must be available to conscious thinking [what is usually termed ‘higher-order’ or ‘second-order’ thinking or reflection or ‘meta-cognition’]. But ‘if animals are incapable of thinking about their own acts of thinking, their pains must all be non-conscious ones.’ And because ‘there is nothing that it is like to be the subject of non-conscious pain,’ animal pain does not merit our sympathy.”
Recommended Reading
- Bekoff, Marc. The Emotional Lives of Animals. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007.
- Bekoff, Marc, Colin Allen and Gordon M. Burghardt, eds. The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
- Clark, Stephen R.L. Animals and Their Moral Standing. New York: Routledge, 1997.
- DeGrazia, David. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- de Waal, Frans. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016.
- de Waal, Frans. Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020.
- Francione, Gary L. Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
- Francione, Gary L. Why Veganism Matters: The Moral Value of Animals. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
- Gruen, Lori, ed. Critical Terms for Animal Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
- Jamieson, Dale. Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2002.
- Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. New York: Ballantine/Random House, 2003.
- Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff and Susan McCarthy. When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. New York: Delacorte Press, 1995.
- Midgley, Mary. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983.
- Nussbaum, Martha C. Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. New York: Simon & Schuster: forthcoming, late 2022.
- Pluhar, Eveyln B. Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
- Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2004.
- Rowlands, Mark. Can Animals Be Moral? New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Rowlands, Mark. Can Animals Be Persons? New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Safina, Carl. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2015.
- Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2nd ed., 1990.
- Singer, Peter, ed. In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
- Steiner, Gary. Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
- Sunstein, Cass R. and Martha Nussbaum, eds. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Taylor, Angus. Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate. Ontario: Broadview Press, 3rd ed., 2009.
- White, Thomas I. In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
- Wise, Steven M. Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002.
See too these bibliographies:
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