One day in the early morning, more than a decade ago, my dad had just woken up and was about to start the usual routine (showering, dressing, and the rest) before heading to work. Wearing only boxer shorts, he happened to glance out the window, and he spied something terrifying: a red-haired woman being chased by a twitchy, slavering man with a knife in his vile paw and a predatory glint in his narrowed eyes. Immediately, my dad ran out of the house, still clad only in his boxers, and, running and shouting at the man, scared him off. Thus ended the hunt, and thus was that poor woman saved from having her neck ripped open.
Nice essay, which resonates strongly with my own reflections.
To me it boils down to two fundamental questions:
1. Should we approach suffering from a utilitarian or a deontological angle?
2. While there is little doubt that suffering is generally bad, i.e. detrimental to a sufficiently sentient sufferer’s well being, it is also inevitable. What business then is it of us humans’ to try (and miserably fail) to make a significant reduction to the totality of all suffering of (sentient) organisms? (And isn't that actually a manifestation of human exceptionalism?)
1. I think it doesn’t take long before a utilitarian approach gets stuck. As you show, the question of how much animal suffering is acceptable to inflict in return for a reduction in human suffering is one unsolvable dilemma—and philosophy is rife with other, perhaps even more impossible challenges. So it then necessarily becomes a matter of rules. But here too it’s both essential to construct a coherent hierarchy of rules and impossible to do so. Stuck again!
Which neatly segues into 2:
2. There had already been a huge amount of cumulative suffering in the millions of centuries before the first humans arrived on the scene. What is the reason why humans now ought suddenly (in evolutionary terms it definitely is suddenly) to take an interest, nay, a *responsibility* for other creatures’ suffering? I haven’t yet found a plausible justification.
So where does that leave us? Short answer: I don’t know. We cannot begin to eliminate, or even significantly reduce suffering. The best we can do is not needlessly *add* to the suffering. But what is ‘needlessly’? Just like Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity, I cannot nail down wanton cruelty, but I know it when I see it. Pulling the legs of a (non-sentient?) fly would be a case, smashing a hedgehog that didn’t manage to run quickly enough to escape a car’s wheels would not, and neither would (humanely) slaughtering a rabbit for food. Other people’s mileage in this respect may vary.
My current conclusion: other than not causing suffering that our conscience would disapprove of, we should not seek to intervene, nor dictate what others should or should not do.
Great essay. I agree that there’s nothing fundamentally different in the human animal, and that any difference between us and other animals, whatever trait we consider, is a difference in degree and not in kind. But still, it seems to me that this view can mislead us into minimizing the magnitude of certain differences, particularly those related to our level of consciousness and self-awareness and, consequently, to our capacity for suffering.
A difference in degree may still be of “cosmic” proportions. As an analogy, some animals have demonstrated a basic understanding of numerical concepts, but calculus, for example, is so far beyond the comprehension of even the smartest animal as to be practically in a different realm.
Likewise, because of our much more “advanced” consciousness, I think the suffering of human beings is much greater than that of animals. Human suffering typically goes far beyond mere physical pain: we experience despair, anguish, anticipation of future suffering, awareness of previous suffering, etc. All this intensifies our suffering in a uniquely human way. At an extreme opposite to ours, we can imagine a very basic organism capable of feeling pain but unable to remember it from millisecond to millisecond, let alone to anticipate it in terror. I think it’s fair to say that such an organism would barely be capable of suffering. As to the animals that fall between the two extremes, I would place them closer to that organism than to us. Although perhaps some animals, such as chimps and bonobos, dolphins, and elephants, for example, should be placed closer to us. How close? Hard to know with certainty, of course, but I still very much doubt that even those animals are capable of the intensity of suffering that humans are subject to.
Nice essay, which resonates strongly with my own reflections.
To me it boils down to two fundamental questions:
1. Should we approach suffering from a utilitarian or a deontological angle?
2. While there is little doubt that suffering is generally bad, i.e. detrimental to a sufficiently sentient sufferer’s well being, it is also inevitable. What business then is it of us humans’ to try (and miserably fail) to make a significant reduction to the totality of all suffering of (sentient) organisms? (And isn't that actually a manifestation of human exceptionalism?)
1. I think it doesn’t take long before a utilitarian approach gets stuck. As you show, the question of how much animal suffering is acceptable to inflict in return for a reduction in human suffering is one unsolvable dilemma—and philosophy is rife with other, perhaps even more impossible challenges. So it then necessarily becomes a matter of rules. But here too it’s both essential to construct a coherent hierarchy of rules and impossible to do so. Stuck again!
Which neatly segues into 2:
2. There had already been a huge amount of cumulative suffering in the millions of centuries before the first humans arrived on the scene. What is the reason why humans now ought suddenly (in evolutionary terms it definitely is suddenly) to take an interest, nay, a *responsibility* for other creatures’ suffering? I haven’t yet found a plausible justification.
So where does that leave us? Short answer: I don’t know. We cannot begin to eliminate, or even significantly reduce suffering. The best we can do is not needlessly *add* to the suffering. But what is ‘needlessly’? Just like Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity, I cannot nail down wanton cruelty, but I know it when I see it. Pulling the legs of a (non-sentient?) fly would be a case, smashing a hedgehog that didn’t manage to run quickly enough to escape a car’s wheels would not, and neither would (humanely) slaughtering a rabbit for food. Other people’s mileage in this respect may vary.
My current conclusion: other than not causing suffering that our conscience would disapprove of, we should not seek to intervene, nor dictate what others should or should not do.
Great essay. I agree that there’s nothing fundamentally different in the human animal, and that any difference between us and other animals, whatever trait we consider, is a difference in degree and not in kind. But still, it seems to me that this view can mislead us into minimizing the magnitude of certain differences, particularly those related to our level of consciousness and self-awareness and, consequently, to our capacity for suffering.
A difference in degree may still be of “cosmic” proportions. As an analogy, some animals have demonstrated a basic understanding of numerical concepts, but calculus, for example, is so far beyond the comprehension of even the smartest animal as to be practically in a different realm.
Likewise, because of our much more “advanced” consciousness, I think the suffering of human beings is much greater than that of animals. Human suffering typically goes far beyond mere physical pain: we experience despair, anguish, anticipation of future suffering, awareness of previous suffering, etc. All this intensifies our suffering in a uniquely human way. At an extreme opposite to ours, we can imagine a very basic organism capable of feeling pain but unable to remember it from millisecond to millisecond, let alone to anticipate it in terror. I think it’s fair to say that such an organism would barely be capable of suffering. As to the animals that fall between the two extremes, I would place them closer to that organism than to us. Although perhaps some animals, such as chimps and bonobos, dolphins, and elephants, for example, should be placed closer to us. How close? Hard to know with certainty, of course, but I still very much doubt that even those animals are capable of the intensity of suffering that humans are subject to.