So unless a better, contradictory principle is discovered I think that we can conclude that the following claim is probably true: DVF: It is prima facie wrong to deprive a human being of a valuable future by killig them. I have claimed that W is supported by an argument from analogy with humans and because of (15): an animal’s death is typically bad for the animal. Furthermore, imagine a severely depressed person who currently desires to die and has no other long term desires. An amateur philosopher sharing his thoughts. A car then sped past and struck the other dog, killing it. We could have obligations that concerned animals, such as an obligation not to damage our neighbour’s cow, but that obligation was owed to our neighbour as the owner of the cow, not to the cow. (6) claims that the wrongness of killing is based on the fact that killing frustrating an individuals desire to continue living. However, if we accept that mammals and birds feel pain and this capacity likely evolved to regulate behaviour and enhance survival, it seems implausible that these animals would not also have evolved the capacity for having pleasurable mental states and desires as well. But what would make this principle true? We do enjoy many goods that animals cannot, such as complex loving relationships or certain kinds of intellectual experience, and these contribute to the badness of our deaths. It would be analogous to saying that a being with eyes does not have an interest in continuing to see or is not harmed by being made blind. Persons do seem to have a strong inherent value, and many things we do may be wrong because of how they fail to respect each other as autonomous persons. but, Can they suffer?’. He argued that we could no more morally justify ignoring the suffering of animals based on their species than we could ignore the suffering of slaves based on their skin colour. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. However, seeing as we do not need to eat animal products to live a healthy life and most people living in Western Industrialized countries have easy access to other sources of food, this seems like an inadequate justification. However, if a person also accepts W, this would render the happy farm situation unethical, because now killing the animal would be wrong. ( Log Out / Thus, lying is generally accepted to be prima facie wrong, as most people think it is wrong to lie unless you have a good reason to do so (e.g. By calling something prima facie wrong I mean that it is wrong unless some reason can be given to show otherwise. Thus, I conclude that animals have valuable experiences and engage in valuable activities (i.e activities that they have a strong desire to engage in or that cause pleasurable feelings). I presented the outline of this argument, and did not rigorously justify each step, so it is open to criticism. A compelling example of this belief is found in the case of dogs and cats, animals particularly valued in Western culture. It is partly because my dog’s death would be bad for her that I worry over her dying and take steps to avoid it. Thankfully W is not just some unnecessary add on but has practical consequences for the choices we make in purchasing and consuming animal products. What I want to emphasize is that all these cases seem intuitively permissible, but this intuitive permissibility can be backed up with a justification. These are the animals whose treatment is most relevant to our decision making, as they are the main species used in animal agriculture. Let me consider the case of my own dog. But this is absurd-it is clearly in my dog’s interests to experience some short term suffering in order to continue living a largely good, valuable life. Thus, if I choose the second option she will die but will experience no pain or suffering. But Bentham did not advocate that we stop using animals as resources in the manner he had advocated abolition in the case of human slavery. What affect do you think this information would have upon me? I think this thought experiment shows that my challenger is wrong. Doing so harms the animal, and so seems prima facie wrong. This is a reasonable argument, though I would reject it because I think the harm done to the animal by ending it’s life would outweigh the very trivial gustatory pleasures we enjoy from eating meat. As I states before, this is because (15) provides independent justification for W. What do I mean by (15)? (7) can also explain why some cases of killing a human may be permissible when that individual lacks a valuable future. Half of all chickens bred by the laying industry are killed soon after birth because they are males who are unable to produce eggs. Thus they would lack a desire to continue to live, and therefore (5) would not apply to them. Anna E. Charlton is adjunct professor of law at Rutgers University and the co-founder of the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic. Some may disagree with these assumptions, and think that either animals warrant no moral consideration or that any duties we have to them are indirect, being of the same kind as our duties involving televisions and cars. Discussions of the impact psychological unity makes to the badness of animal death can be found in David DeGrazia’s “Sentient Nonpersons and the Disvalue of Death”. And I would agree with this. Mammals and birds seem to have desires and are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain (for arguments supporting the attribution of desires and pleasure to animals see David DeGrazia “Taking Animals Seriously” and Jonathan Balcombe’s “Animal Pleasure and It’s Moral Significance”). In the fourth section, I will consider the practical implications my conclusion has for an individual’s dietary choices. ( Log Out / The reason it is wrong to deprive humans of a valuable future is because doing so harms the person: it prevents them from enjoying future good experiences and activities. Seeing as children, the mentally disabled and our severely depressed individual discussed above all have valuable futures, (7) would imply that it is wrong to kill them. Why is it typically wrong to kill human beings? By way of contrast, we have no duties to objects such as cars or televisions, though we may have duties regarding them if someone owns these objects as in this case we would have a duty not to damage or take them without permission. In the third section, I will examine whether this account of the wrongness of killing can be applied to animals and will conclude that it can. However, the chocolate will soon cause her death and she will suffer during the period as she dies. Doing so harms the animal, and so seems prima facie wrong. Animals are forced to live in small wire cages until it’s time to be killed. If anyone accepted these two beliefs together, then they would be led to very counter-intuitive conclusions. I offered some reasons against this and expressed my belief that this line of argument fails, but my argument needs to be shored up. However, what I want to emphasize is that I am not arguing that it is always wrong to kill animals. In fact, W does not in itself imply that eating an animal is wrong. W is not the same as (1) as it only asserts that it is prima facie wrong to kill an animal, not wrong in all circumstances. Consider a situation in which we raised an animal on a farm, gave it a nice happy life, and then killed it painlessly and without warning one day in order to butcher it for meat. Thus, there must be a reason other than (5) for why killing this individual is wrong, so (5) cannot provide a complete explanation of H. The fourth explanation claims that killing a person is wrong because it deprives them of a valuable future. So, in summary, I will be arguing for the claim that it is prima facie wrong to kill animals. Effects of Hunting. The problem is making them suffer. Commitment to W would thus make a difference: we should continue to boycott the dairy and egg industry until it stops implementing practices that lead to huge numbers of animal deaths. The harm of death is unlike many paradigmatic cases of harm such as experiencing pain or distress. I originally planned on addressing it in this post, but realized that this would divert too much from the same argument, so in Section 4 I simply assumed the problem had been solved. Suppose my dog has some kind of disease that is causing her a minimum amount of pain at the moment, such as ingesting a lethal dose of chocolate. Therefore, to say that a sentient being is not harmed by death denies that the being has the very interest that sentience serves to perpetuate. This individual will recover from their depression in a week but is currently without long term desires that would be frustrated by their death. According to Bentham, animals live in the present and are not aware of what they lose when we take their lives. However, (5) fails to explain H as not all human beings referred to by H are persons. If we are committed to W, then even without causing significant amounts of suffering and pain these industries will still involve significant wrongdoing. Thus I will turn to examining them. The goal of this chapter is to challenge this … A tendency to harm animals suggests that we may also tend to act cruelly towards humans too, which is morally unacceptable in Kantian Ethics. And once you abandon mammalian pests, why not cows and pigs? However, I think it would be implausible to think that all of my concern or grief is self directed. Our desire to live seems to be partly a result of some innate disposition, but also a result of our judgement that continuing to live is a good thing. This seems inconsistent with our belief that, in most cases, killing an individual is equally wrong. They tell me that she had a happy life and wanted for nothing. The benign carnivore could try to claim that killing the animal is in this case justified, as we are raising the animal to feed ourselves. I would say there are two reasons, one theoretical and one practical. It is an indisputable fact that animals have sentience and complex nervous systems. Given that animals are property, and we generally protect animal interests only to the extent that it is cost-effective, it is a fantasy to think that ‘humane’ treatment is an attainable standard in any case. Thus W coheres well with a widely held, intuitive belief: that an animal’s death is typically bad for the animal. As animal’s have a valuable future and we deprive them of this future by killing them, it seems reasonable that DVF would also apply to animals in some form. Most important among these was (15): an animal’s death is typically bad for the animal. Now that I have concluded that it is wrong to deprive humans of a valuable future, I will consider whether this is also true of animals. Finally, I will consider some potential problems with the arguments I presented and draw my conclusions. Furthermore, seeing as humans enjoy eating meat this seems to be a net benefit to everyone overall. Do humans have a right to life because they are persons or because they have an interest in continuing to live? This strengthens the case for W, especially since the badness of an animal’s death is what explains W. W gains further indirect support by other beliefs that cohere with (15). By human being, I mean any human from when they are born until the time of their natural death. I may still grieve at her death, but since she was not deprived of a long valuable future by a premature death this grief would be minimal. This concern and regret is not a result of concern for the wellbeing of the car, for it has no wellbeing, but rather concern for how the stealing of my car would negatively impact upon me. They may argue that I am mistaken in identifying the source of my motives and feelings, and in fact the sorrow is only directed at my own loss, not the dog’s. I believe it is. The theoretical reason is that it is of great intellectual value to discover justified moral principles, and seeing as I think I have established at least the strong plausibility of W, this is reason enough for it to matter. For example, racism and sexism may be wrong not just because of their immediate negative impact on the victims but because of how they dehumanize a person and fail to treat them as a unique, autonomous being. We all agree that pain is bad, and part of the reason it is bad is simply due to it’s inherent qualities. If someone inflicts suffering on a dog or cat, they are excoriated. If we accept that it is bad for an animal to experience pain and suffering but not bad for them to die then this implies that it would be better for my dog to be euthanized, and worse for her to suffer for a short period before recovering. I think H is a strong intuitive belief that most people hold, and thus I will assume it for this essay. I’m simply highlighting it may be wrong to assume that animals analyse and contemplate death in the same way humans do. "Animals have moral status, and animal suffering matters because it's a harm to something that counts morally. Humans who have a particular form of amnesia might be unable to recall memories or engage in ideation about the future, but that does not mean that they are not self-aware in each moment, or that the cessation of that awareness would not be a harm. Think also of how many animals are social beings, engaging in pleasant interactions with members of their own or other species. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Since we have caused it no pain or suffering, what we have done does not seem wrong if the above principle is the only one we accept. The last of my assumptions regards humans, not animals. I do in fact believe that if we accept W, some other intuitive principles lead us to the conclusion that we ought not to consume animal products, but I will not address those in detail in this post. Four possible explanations are: (4) Killing a human violates their universal right to life, (5) Killing a human being fails to respect them as a person, (6) Killing a human being frustrates their desire to live, (7) Killing a human being deprives them of a valuable future. There are many ways this gap can be closed, which I will not go into in this post. I do not think that a being needs a conception of the future to possess a future, and I think that it is reasonable to think mammals and birds have a future in the sense of their mind being psychologically continuous over time. I also have not discussed how to bridge the gap that exists between accepting that the treatment of animal’s in agriculture is wrong and believing that you should no longer consume animal products. But I believe comparison to the reasons we think a human’s death is bad gives support to this belief: the premature death of animals and humans is bad because both are deprived of valuable futures by their death. This principle is further supported by it’s coherence with other beliefs we hold. This premise alone could have been used to argue for W, but I chose to set out an indirect argument to better show the similarities between considerations at play in killing humans and killing animals. I think we can be confident that most mammals and birds would have valuable futures, so it would be wrong to kill them. Harming animals for its own sake reflects badly upon our own character. If I have a tooth ache or a head ache, I may find it difficult to enjoy reading a book or watching a movie. In addition, the combination of these claims may together explain why we have a right to life, as asserted in (1). However, animals also experience good mental states and take an interest in many activities. It is wrong because ending an animal’s life harms the animal by depriving it of all of the goods it would have enjoyed if it had continued to live. Thus, consideration of why pain is bad seems to provide additional support for (15) and thus W. If we accept this account of the badness of pain but reject (15) and W, we would need to provide some explanation of why the extrinsic badness differs in the two cases. As such, both the egg and dairy industries involve a lot of killing, even though they do not produce meat. These are individuals, real or hypothetical, who accept our arguments about the wrongness of causing pain and suffering and accept that because the modern agricultural industry causes pain and suffering we should not consume it’s products. Many different explanations have been offered over time, and the options I will discuss are in no way exhaustive. Before the 19th century, animals were mostly regarded as things. Animal cruelty is an act not derived from the categorical imperative but from base desires; we are ignoring our rationality. If the good contained in a future outweighs the bad, then I will say that the individual has a valuable future or future of value. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have.’ Bentham maintained that we actually do animals a favour by killing them, as long as we do so in a relatively painless manner: ‘The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature … [W]e should be the worse for their living, and they are never the worse for being dead.’ In other words, the cow does not care that we kill and eat her; she cares only about how we treat and kill her, and her only interest is not to suffer. In contrast, killing a normal adult human is wrong because it fails to respect them as a person, it frustrates their desire to live and deprives them of a valuable future. Bentham maintained that the fact that animals were cognitively different from humans – that they had different sorts of minds – did not mean that their suffering did not matter morally. Even if animals live in the ‘eternal present’ that Bentham and Singer think they inhabit, that does not mean that they are not self-aware or that they do not have an interest in continued existence. nor, Can they talk? More needs to be said to fully refute the benign carnivores position, but I leave that for another time. Visiting this person, I find out that they took care of my dog for ten more years before she died peacefully in her sleep. This could all be consistent with what the challenger claims, for perhaps my sorrow is simply due to my realization that my dog’s death means I will not longer be able to enjoy owning the dog and spending time with her. This reduced psychological unity should be taken into account, and would discount the net good we would say an animal is deprived of when it dies. And once you proverbially throw bugs under the bus, why not other pests like mice and rats? We are creating emotional pain and suffering for the animals. These animals are often scared and show disturbing … Because I did not consider all of the explanations for H or all of the criticisms that have been put forth against (7), my indirect argument for W is weakened somewhat. If we saw killing an animal – however painlessly – as raising a moral issue, perhaps that might lead us to start thinking more on whether animal use is morally justifiable. Putting aside these issues, my argument for W based on appeal to DVF also faces problems. To examine these arguemnts, I would recommend reading Robert Nozick on moral constraints, David DeGrazia “Taking Animals Seriously” and Tom Regan “The Case for Animal Rights”. Seeing as frustrating people’s desires is typically wrong, and fails to respect their autonomy, this seems to provide an initially plausible account of why killing is wrong. Animals in traps will chew their paws or limbs off and thereby inflict excruciating suffering on themselves in order to continue to live. Killing an animal harms the animal. In my account, the possession of a future should be understood in a psychological sense, with a being possessing a future if it has some kind of psychological continuity over time so that it makes sense to identify experiences occurring at different times as belonging to the subject. When one reaches a certain step in spiritual evolution, it is only natural to gain sensitivity to hurting other beings. For example, it is wrong to be cruel to an animal and this is primarily because of the suffering this causes the victim, rather than it’s effects on the perpetrator or society as a whole.
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