Animals are sentient; by this I mean they do subjectively experience pain, for example. However, animals do not suffer because they lack imagination: animals do not anticipate nor do they remember, therefore, if an animal is being harmed he does not have the necessary imaginative capacity to compare his current experience with an experience free from suffering. Without this comparison, the argument concludes, the animal doesn’t recognize suffering as suffering and therefore, by definition, he doesn’t suffer.

Peter Singer similarly reasons. Singer doesn’t deny an animals capacity to suffer – quite the contrary -, however, he concludes that humans possess an imagination, which give rise to thoughts about future aspirations and hopes. Singer believes that these hopes, for example, ought to be considered interests; interests that only (some) humans have.

The first version of this argument doesn’t follow logically. Sentience, the capacity to feel and perceive, is an evolutionary ‘means-end’ mechanism. Sentient beings physiologically and psychologically evolved to recognize experiences that are harmful to the ultimate biological end of all organisms, continued life. To experience what we conceptualize as pain, for example, when touching a hot surface, is an evolutionary call to remove my hand from the thing that is not advantageous to the end of continued life. Suffering, therefore, has less to do with a conscious reflection of the situation (although that is certainly involved in degrees) than with mere instinct.

Consider a human animal who awakes from a coma, in isolation, brain-damaged, absent of all memory, in agonizing pain due to a cut on his arm that has gone untreated and left to become infected. This individual is incapable of remembering a time free from pain and therefore the experience necessary to trigger the imaginative function is not available, nor is he in the presence of others who can assure him that his pain will soon end. Is this person suffering? The answer should be self-evident: Yes. Regardless of his intellectual capacity to make comparisons, for example, there is a biological component intrinsic to sentience – his body tells him “I’m damaged and I need help.” That is suffering. To admit sentience, then, while at the same time denying the capacity to suffer is terrible logic. One could alleviate this problem by denying the sentience of animals, however, the question begging nature of this premise overwhelms the argument itself.

To Singers point. Singer’s argument follows; however, I think he fails to consider the implications. If his assumption is correct and animals do not anticipate (which should be questionable for any person who has ever witnessed a dog’s enthusiasm over the impending arrival of his human), then what is actually a momentary experience of pain for the animal, in effect, turns out to be an entire existence defined by pain. While biology tells the dog that his paw has been damaged by the slammed door, he is incapable of remembering a time without the pain nor is he able to anticipate a future free from his throbbing paw. His entire existence, therefore, is suffering. This raises the question: Shouldn’t the dog, then, have an additional interest that ought to be considered in the ethical calculus that (most) humans, excluding, of course, our coma patient above, do not have? Singer doesn’t seem to acknowledge this interest, although it seemingly follows from the evolutionary function of sentience.

Crossposted @ That Vegan Girl

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Sections: Vegan Theory
Topics: pain, sentience, Theory, veg, Vegan