If you could greatly help her at small cost, you should do so.
This needs to be quantified to determine whether or not I agree. In most cases I imagine (and a few I’ve experienced), I would (and did) kill the animal to end it’s suffering and to prevent harm to others if the animal might be subject to death throes or other violent reactions to their fear and pain.
In other cases I imagine, I’d walk away or drive on, without a second thought. Neither the benefit nor the costs are simple, linear, measurable things.
Her suffering is bad.
I don’t have an operational definition of “bad”. I prefer less suffering, all else equal. All else is never equal—I don’t know what alternatives and what suffering (or reduced joy) any given remediation would require, and only really try to estimate them when faced with a specific case.
For the aggregate case, I don’t buy into a simple or linear aggregation of suffering (or of joy or of net value of distinct parts of the universe). I care about myself perhaps two dozen orders of magnitude more than the ant I killed in my kitchen this morning. And I care about a lot of things with a non-additive function—somewhere in the realm of logarithmic. I care about the quarter-million remaining gorillas, but I care about a marginal gorilla much less than 1/250K of that caring.
Agree with Dagon here, when omnizoid say’s “Its obvious that you should” they are calling on the rules of their own morality. Its similar with “Her suffering is bad”, that’s a direct moral judgment. Both statements fall apart when you consider that someone may have different moral rules than you.
For example, in NZ we have an issue with deer destroying our native bush which in turn hurts our native birds. Deer are considered an invasive species and are actively eradicated. In the case when you are actively in the presence of a hurting deer empathy drives you to help, suffering is not pleasant to witness. However I suspect that many NZ’s would condemn every deer in NZ to a painful death, as long as they didn’t have to witness it, in order to save our trees and birdlife.
This needs to be quantified to determine whether or not I agree. In most cases I imagine (and a few I’ve experienced), I would (and did) kill the animal to end it’s suffering and to prevent harm to others if the animal might be subject to death throes or other violent reactions to their fear and pain.
In other cases I imagine, I’d walk away or drive on, without a second thought. Neither the benefit nor the costs are simple, linear, measurable things.
I don’t have an operational definition of “bad”. I prefer less suffering, all else equal. All else is never equal—I don’t know what alternatives and what suffering (or reduced joy) any given remediation would require, and only really try to estimate them when faced with a specific case.
For the aggregate case, I don’t buy into a simple or linear aggregation of suffering (or of joy or of net value of distinct parts of the universe). I care about myself perhaps two dozen orders of magnitude more than the ant I killed in my kitchen this morning. And I care about a lot of things with a non-additive function—somewhere in the realm of logarithmic. I care about the quarter-million remaining gorillas, but I care about a marginal gorilla much less than 1/250K of that caring.
Agree with Dagon here, when omnizoid say’s “Its obvious that you should” they are calling on the rules of their own morality. Its similar with “Her suffering is bad”, that’s a direct moral judgment. Both statements fall apart when you consider that someone may have different moral rules than you.
For example, in NZ we have an issue with deer destroying our native bush which in turn hurts our native birds. Deer are considered an invasive species and are actively eradicated. In the case when you are actively in the presence of a hurting deer empathy drives you to help, suffering is not pleasant to witness. However I suspect that many NZ’s would condemn every deer in NZ to a painful death, as long as they didn’t have to witness it, in order to save our trees and birdlife.