Do Animals Feel Pain in a Morally Relevant Sense?
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Do Animals Feel Pain in a Morally Relevant Sense? Calum Miller 1 Received: 25 February 2020 / Revised: 28 July 2020 / Accepted: 1 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The thesis that animals feel a morally relevant kind of pain is an incredibly popular one, but explaining the evidence for this belief is surprisingly challenging. Michael Murray has defended neo-Cartesianism, the view that animals may lack the ability to feel pain in a morally relevant sense. In this paper, I present the reasons for doubting that animals feel morally relevant pain. I then respond to critics of Murray’s position, arguing that the evidence proposed more recently is still largely unpersuasive. I end by considering the implications for moral discourse and praxis. Keywords Pain . Qualia . Pain behaviour . Animal consciousness . Consciousness
1 Introduction It seems obvious to most people that animals feel pain. The almost unanimous response to scepticism – that dogs yelp when kicked – suggests that there is some very common-sense, universal intuition at stake here. But intuitions – especially ‘obvious’ ones – ought to be scrutinised. I hope to demonstrate that this particular intuition is surprisingly difficult to substantiate, and that those of us (myself included) who think that animals do feel morally relevant pain at least ought to have more humility about the quality of our evidence. At the very least, sceptics about animal pain should not be dismissed instantly. In this essay, I defend such sceptics – in particular, Michael Murray’s defence of neo-Cartesianism1 – from a variety of objections levelled against their position. My view is not that animals do not feel pain. It is that most of the reasons usually given for thinking that they do are not good ones. This presents a hitherto underappreciated epistemological puzzle for those of us who think that animals do feel pain.
1
Murray (2008).
* Calum Miller [email protected]
1
St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Philosophia
To help soften my reader up to my thesis, consider a thesis equally obvious to the animal pain thesis – that not all kinds of biological life feel pain. Most people do not think that bacteria or simple multicellular organisms are conscious. At the very least, it is unclear where pain, or any consciousness at all, kicks in, evolutionarily speaking.2 This fact is sufficient to demonstrate that the question of which organisms feel pain is a serious and rightly controversial one. Even if we are prepared to accept our intuitions that bacteria do not feel pain and that chimpanzees do, there remains an awful lot of work to be done in the middle ground.
2 Pain Behaviour Rather than claiming a trivial victory on the middle ground, however, I aim to demonstrate that even in the case of higher non-human animals, the arguments supporting the thesis that animals feel morally relevant pain turn out to be surprisingly weak or inconclusive. By far the most common and obvious of these supporting arguments is that animals exhibit “pain behaviour” – they
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