What is suffering, anyway? It’s not just response to injury or danger. A tree secretes resin to seal the wound if you cut its trunk, but this doesn’t mean that it is suffering. A bacterium might swim away from a chemical or a temperature gradient it’s ill-equipped to survive; but this doesn’t mean that it is suffering. The existence of a self-protective or harm-avoiding response does not imply suffering.
My model of human suffering includes a term for contemplating the loss of possible futures. It is not just “Ouch! This painful situation hurts! I’d like to get out of it!” but “This is horrible! I’m going to die — or if I live, I’m going to be scarred or afflicted forever.” The dying soldier who knows she’ll never see home again; the abuse victim who can feel his will to resist slipping away; the genocide victim who sees not only her own life but her entire culture and all its creations and its wisdom being destroyed.
When we think about (nonhuman) animals, we tend to project human feelings onto organisms that are not capable of them. A pet snake cannot love you, and believing that it can do so is actively dangerous; it’s an erroneous mental model that leads to people getting killed. Similarly, no turkey ever had the course of thinking that Russell imagines in his famous example about inductive reasoning.
It may well be that humans who project human feelings onto nonhuman animals are also kinder to other humans. Looking into the eyes of a cow and imagining that it has propositional thoughts about its situation may mean that you are more empathetic towards humans who actually do have propositional thoughts. Or it may simply be an incorrect generalization from the fact that the cow has two big dark eyes and sets off our face detectors.
A tree secretes resin to seal the wound if you cut its trunk, but this doesn’t mean that it is suffering. A bacterium might swim away from a chemical or a temperature gradient it’s ill-equipped to survive; but this doesn’t mean that it is suffering. The existence of a self-protective or harm-avoiding response does not imply suffering.
To go even further, a spring returns to its equilibrium position when you pull on it and let go.
What is suffering, anyway? It’s not just response to injury or danger. A tree secretes resin to seal the wound if you cut its trunk, but this doesn’t mean that it is suffering. A bacterium might swim away from a chemical or a temperature gradient it’s ill-equipped to survive; but this doesn’t mean that it is suffering. The existence of a self-protective or harm-avoiding response does not imply suffering.
My model of human suffering includes a term for contemplating the loss of possible futures. It is not just “Ouch! This painful situation hurts! I’d like to get out of it!” but “This is horrible! I’m going to die — or if I live, I’m going to be scarred or afflicted forever.” The dying soldier who knows she’ll never see home again; the abuse victim who can feel his will to resist slipping away; the genocide victim who sees not only her own life but her entire culture and all its creations and its wisdom being destroyed.
When we think about (nonhuman) animals, we tend to project human feelings onto organisms that are not capable of them. A pet snake cannot love you, and believing that it can do so is actively dangerous; it’s an erroneous mental model that leads to people getting killed. Similarly, no turkey ever had the course of thinking that Russell imagines in his famous example about inductive reasoning.
It may well be that humans who project human feelings onto nonhuman animals are also kinder to other humans. Looking into the eyes of a cow and imagining that it has propositional thoughts about its situation may mean that you are more empathetic towards humans who actually do have propositional thoughts. Or it may simply be an incorrect generalization from the fact that the cow has two big dark eyes and sets off our face detectors.
I hope Luke or Yvain are going to write a post on it.
I hope Yvain does too.
To go even further, a spring returns to its equilibrium position when you pull on it and let go.