I wonder how it would be received if we applied the same reasoning to humans and animals.
Humans might (and in fact do) undergo a lot of suffering. If we could identify people who are likely to suffer high amounts of suffering, then should we put in sentience throttling so that they don’t feel it? Seems very Brave New World.
How about with animals? If we could somehow breed chickens that are identical to current ones except that they don’t feel pain or suffering, would that make factory farming ethical? Here the answer might be yes, though I’m not sure the animal rights crowd would agree.
If we could identify people who are likely to suffer high amounts of suffering, then should we put in sentience throttling so that they don’t feel it?
For a long time I thought that even mild painkillers like paracetamol made me feel dull-witted and slow, which was reason for me not to use them. When I had an accident and was prescribed ibuprofen against the pain I refused to take it on the same grounds. I’ve changed my mind on this now though, and I feel that I caused needless suffering to myself in the past. It’s fine to take painkillers and maybe feel a bit slower if it has such an effect on my subjective experience of pain.
The same could be applied here. I think forcefeeding people ibuprofen is immoral and wrong, but giving them the choice of taking it when they have pain is good. So too for sentience throttling. If I could choose to take a sentience throttling pill for during tedious monotonous work, I might be up for that, and I would probably wish that option to be available for others. (There is also a parallel to sleeping pills, or maybe sleeping pills are actually literally sentience throttling pills)
A counterpoint would be that diminishing human sentience, even just temporarily, is immoral in and of itself. I don’t have an answer to that charge, other than that I feel we already do this to the extend that painkillers and sleeping pills can already be called sentience throttlers, and I myself at least don’t think anymore that those are problematic.
I wonder how it would be received if we applied the same reasoning to humans and animals.
Humans might (and in fact do) undergo a lot of suffering. If we could identify people who are likely to suffer high amounts of suffering, then should we put in sentience throttling so that they don’t feel it? Seems very Brave New World.
How about with animals? If we could somehow breed chickens that are identical to current ones except that they don’t feel pain or suffering, would that make factory farming ethical? Here the answer might be yes, though I’m not sure the animal rights crowd would agree.
Note that you can have pain without suffering and vice versa.
The OP was talking about suffering but it wasn’t clear to me whether pain was included or not.
For a long time I thought that even mild painkillers like paracetamol made me feel dull-witted and slow, which was reason for me not to use them. When I had an accident and was prescribed ibuprofen against the pain I refused to take it on the same grounds. I’ve changed my mind on this now though, and I feel that I caused needless suffering to myself in the past. It’s fine to take painkillers and maybe feel a bit slower if it has such an effect on my subjective experience of pain.
The same could be applied here. I think forcefeeding people ibuprofen is immoral and wrong, but giving them the choice of taking it when they have pain is good. So too for sentience throttling. If I could choose to take a sentience throttling pill for during tedious monotonous work, I might be up for that, and I would probably wish that option to be available for others. (There is also a parallel to sleeping pills, or maybe sleeping pills are actually literally sentience throttling pills)
A counterpoint would be that diminishing human sentience, even just temporarily, is immoral in and of itself. I don’t have an answer to that charge, other than that I feel we already do this to the extend that painkillers and sleeping pills can already be called sentience throttlers, and I myself at least don’t think anymore that those are problematic.