Yeah, I meant what I said about chimps experiencing suffering. To the extent that consciousness and social identity are relevant, I believe chimps have those to a sufficient degree.
Maybe. Chimps and gorillas for sure have some consciousness. They can recognize themselves and they have social cognition. They can express frustration. I am not sure they can represent frustration.
Though arguing about whether that is required to call it suffering is haggling over the definition of a word. I don’t want to that. I want to defend the claim
The ability to suffer is determined in an anthropocentric way.
We may disagree on where to draw a line or how to assign weight to what we call suffering but the key point is not about the is but about the ought. And at least the ought is anthropocentric: Whether some structure in nature (‘suffering’) compels us to act in a certain way to it (‘minimize it’) is a social construct. It results from empathy and social expectations that are generalized.
Note that just saying this doesn’t make it less so. I do have empathy with chimps and other animals. I would do (some) things to reduce it. For sure if everybody around me agrees that reducing suffering is the right thing to do I would take that as strong evidence in its favor. I’m just aware of it.
PS. Thank you for continuing to discuss a controversial discussion.
Yeah, I meant what I said about chimps experiencing suffering. To the extent that consciousness and social identity are relevant, I believe chimps have those to a sufficient degree.
Maybe. Chimps and gorillas for sure have some consciousness. They can recognize themselves and they have social cognition. They can express frustration. I am not sure they can represent frustration.
https://wiki.c2.com/?LeibnizianDefinitionOfConsciousness
Though arguing about whether that is required to call it suffering is haggling over the definition of a word. I don’t want to that. I want to defend the claim
We may disagree on where to draw a line or how to assign weight to what we call suffering but the key point is not about the is but about the ought. And at least the ought is anthropocentric: Whether some structure in nature (‘suffering’) compels us to act in a certain way to it (‘minimize it’) is a social construct. It results from empathy and social expectations that are generalized.
Note that just saying this doesn’t make it less so. I do have empathy with chimps and other animals. I would do (some) things to reduce it. For sure if everybody around me agrees that reducing suffering is the right thing to do I would take that as strong evidence in its favor. I’m just aware of it.
PS. Thank you for continuing to discuss a controversial discussion.