There is nothing inconsistent about valuing the pain of some animals, but not of others. That said, I find the view hard to believe. When I reflect on why I think pain is bad, it seems clear that my belief is grounded in the phenomenology of pain itself, rather than in any biological or cognitive property of the organism undergoing the painful experience.
Pain is bad because it feels bad. That’s why I think pain should be alleviated irrespective of the species in which it occurs.
Truthfully, I’m not even sure I believe pain is bad in the relevant sense. It’s certainly something I’d prefer to avoid under most circumstances, but when I think about it in detail there always ends up being a “because” in there: because it monopolizes attention, because in sufficient quantity it can thoroughly screw up your motivational and emotional machinery, because it’s often attached to particular actions in a way that limits my ability to do things. It doesn’t feel like a root-level aversion to my reasoning self: when I’ve torn a ligament and can’t flex my foot in a certain way without intense stabbing agony, I’m much more annoyed by the things it prevents me from doing than by the pain it gives me, and indeed I remember the former much better than the latter.
I haven’t thought this through rigorously, but if I had to take a stab at it right now I’d say that pain is bad in roughly the same way that pleasure is good: in other words, it works reasonably well as a rough experiential pointer to the things I actually want to avoid, and it does place certain constraints on the kind of life I’d want to live, but I’d expect trying to ground an entire moral system in it to give me some pretty insane results once I started looking at corner cases.
There is nothing inconsistent about valuing the pain of some animals, but not of others. That said, I find the view hard to believe. When I reflect on why I think pain is bad, it seems clear that my belief is grounded in the phenomenology of pain itself, rather than in any biological or cognitive property of the organism undergoing the painful experience.
Pain is bad because it feels bad. That’s why I think pain should be alleviated irrespective of the species in which it occurs.
I don’t share these intuitions. Pain is bad if it happens to something I care about. I don’t care about fish.
I don’t care about fish either. I care about pain. It just so happens that fish can experience pain.
Truthfully, I’m not even sure I believe pain is bad in the relevant sense. It’s certainly something I’d prefer to avoid under most circumstances, but when I think about it in detail there always ends up being a “because” in there: because it monopolizes attention, because in sufficient quantity it can thoroughly screw up your motivational and emotional machinery, because it’s often attached to particular actions in a way that limits my ability to do things. It doesn’t feel like a root-level aversion to my reasoning self: when I’ve torn a ligament and can’t flex my foot in a certain way without intense stabbing agony, I’m much more annoyed by the things it prevents me from doing than by the pain it gives me, and indeed I remember the former much better than the latter.
I haven’t thought this through rigorously, but if I had to take a stab at it right now I’d say that pain is bad in roughly the same way that pleasure is good: in other words, it works reasonably well as a rough experiential pointer to the things I actually want to avoid, and it does place certain constraints on the kind of life I’d want to live, but I’d expect trying to ground an entire moral system in it to give me some pretty insane results once I started looking at corner cases.