Let’s suppose that you believe that a fish can’t feel pain and that I do believe that a fish can feel pain. If we both believe that our moral obligations to others depends on whether or not those others can experience pleasure and pain, then you will believe that you have no moral obligations to that fish. However, if we both believe of ourselves that we don’t want to do what’s bad for others, then since it is clearly bad for all fish to kill them, we both would have a reason not to kill a fish. In that case, what I would need to do, in order to convince you not to kill a fish, is show you how killing fish is bad for them. That seems easy enough to do – a fish can’t be a fish when it’s dead, so killing a fish would be quite bad for a fish as a fish.
Of course, you may think that as bad for a fish as it would be to kill it, there are other things in life that are good for others and that killing a fish provides enough of those goods for others that killing the fish would be something you’d still be willing to do. I’d argue that most of the time we overestimate the good for others that can come from killing fish and that most people don’t understand how bad it would be for a fish, as a fish, to be killed, but those are empirical matters and not moral ones.
As long as the ‘animal question’ is phrased in terms of morality, the question will remain unresolved.
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Please expand on these ideas a little more. Are you suggesting the main (intellectual) obstacle to people not harming animals is that they don’t know other animals are capable of being harmed? If so, that seems rather silly. No special research or instruction is necessary for people to understand that vertebrates can feel pain. They can see it with their eyes and often hear it with their ears.
I don’t see a need to rely on “moral rights” to defend animals, but we’d be wrong to chuck morality altogether. The question isn’t “Can animals be harmed/suffer?” but “Why should I do something to lessen their suffering?”. And that’s a moral question.
Hi Jonathan, thanks for your comments. I realize, because of your question, that my thoughts are not clearly expressed in this post. What I am trying to say is that if one believes, in agreement with such people as Peter Singer and Gary Francione, that what’s morally relevant with respect to whether we have obligations to others is the capacity of others to feel pain, then a person who judges that fish cannot feel pain will not believe that there can be any moral obligations to fish.Such a person, if they kill (or pay others to kill) fish will not believe that they are acting immorally. Since whether fish feel pain isn’t a question that can be answered by us, it’s not likely that there’s much that could be done to persuade that person to change their behavior. So, I propose a different approach.
I believe that most people believe of themselves that they aren’t the sort of person who will deliberately do what would be bad for others. Whether or not fish feel pain, it’s clearly bad for a fish to be killed. A fish cannot be a fish when it’s dead. In the same way, a tree cannot be a tree, as a tree, when it’s been cut down. Whether or not fish and trees experience anything at all, destroying them is bad for them. This seems rather obvious and something we can grasp without pondering the “inner lives” of fish. So, whatever a person’s beliefs about moral obligations may be, this is a reason for any person who doesn’t want to do what’s bad for others not to kill fish.
There will remain disagreement over how much weight will be given to “what’s bad for fish”, but there can’t be disagreement that people who believe of themselves that they don’t want to do what’s bad for others will count what’s bad for fish too. That’s better, it seems to than a “morality” that allows only for those who possess certain capacities to count.
Hi Tim, thanks for clarifying. Your approach seems logical and consistent but I suspect it has some strange implications regarding plant life and inanimate objects. More to the point, the question of whether or not fish feel pain is a question that can and has been answered by biologists, zoologists, etc. I see no reason to construct a new and unfamiliar moral schema in order to work around certain people’s ignorance of scientific evidence. My intuitive response to someone claiming that fish don’t feel pain is to show them that, in fact, they do.
Jonathan,
I’d be interested to hear what strange implications you suspect the approach I’m talking about would lead to. I see none.
As far as whether fish feel pain, the matter isn’t at all settled by science, despite what the authors and reviewers of some studies may claim. As I read the literature specific to fish and generally with respect to cognition in nonhuman animals, I find it unlikely that fish, insects and many other creatures have any meaningful experiences of themselves in the world.
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