I don’t necessarily disagree, I stopped fishing because a worm writhing on a hook is gives me enough emotional discomfort. However the missing link is pain → suffering. We know that this is not automatic, and we do not know how to tell if something is capable of suffering. We sort of infer it, and it’s reasonable to assume that mammals are like that, after all, they can get PTSD and such. Some rather smart birds can get depressed, so it is another point toward them capable of suffering. I am much less sure that fish can suffer in the way we mean it. Do you know of any experiments that measure suffering rather than pain in fish?
Well, the depression thing seems like suffering. But pain is a type of suffering. Suffering I take is just negative mental states. But pain is a negative mental state.
Almost every sentence in your comment is a philosophically questionable claim:
But pain is a type of suffering.
I don’t think that this is true.
Suffering I take is just negative mental states.
I don’t think that this is true, either.
But pain is a negative mental state.
And this one might be true, might be false, depending on how it’s construed—but useless, even misleading, if not nailed down with sufficient precision and rigor.
In short, your argument rests on a tower of philosophical claims which are questionable at best, totally unjustified at worst.
Now, you may disagree with my evaluation (“questionable at best, totally unjustified at worst”), but the characterization (“your argument rests on a tower of philosophical claims”) is not seriously disputable. At the very least we can uncontroversially append “which are controversial” to that characterization. But that means that your argument, in order to be convincing or even to be taken seriously, must at the very least acknowledge the aforesaid fact.
I don’t necessarily disagree, I stopped fishing because a worm writhing on a hook is gives me enough emotional discomfort. However the missing link is pain → suffering. We know that this is not automatic, and we do not know how to tell if something is capable of suffering. We sort of infer it, and it’s reasonable to assume that mammals are like that, after all, they can get PTSD and such. Some rather smart birds can get depressed, so it is another point toward them capable of suffering. I am much less sure that fish can suffer in the way we mean it. Do you know of any experiments that measure suffering rather than pain in fish?
Well, the depression thing seems like suffering. But pain is a type of suffering. Suffering I take is just negative mental states. But pain is a negative mental state.
Almost every sentence in your comment is a philosophically questionable claim:
I don’t think that this is true.
I don’t think that this is true, either.
And this one might be true, might be false, depending on how it’s construed—but useless, even misleading, if not nailed down with sufficient precision and rigor.
In short, your argument rests on a tower of philosophical claims which are questionable at best, totally unjustified at worst.
Now, you may disagree with my evaluation (“questionable at best, totally unjustified at worst”), but the characterization (“your argument rests on a tower of philosophical claims”) is not seriously disputable. At the very least we can uncontroversially append “which are controversial” to that characterization. But that means that your argument, in order to be convincing or even to be taken seriously, must at the very least acknowledge the aforesaid fact.
What do you think suffering is if pain doesn’t count? I’m genuinely curious.
See the comments to this post.