In the last of a three-part series about animals, David discusses ideal ways that we should interact with animals if our intention is to cause minimal harm.
Contents:
- introduction
- 4 categories of matter
- what is life?
- consciousness
- interaction with animals
- difficult questions
- René Descartes
- Thomas Nagel
Links:
Taxonomic rank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank
Theory of Mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
I think, therefore I am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
What is it like to be a bat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Wild Animal Initiative
https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/
My email address:
david.tonner2010@gmail.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100083209401005
https://www.facebook.com/dtonner
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/reasoned_intuitions/
https://www.instagram.com/tonner_david/
In the last of a three-part series about animals, David discusses ideal ways that we should interact with animals if our intention is to cause minimal harm.
Contents:
- introduction
- 4 categories of matter
- what is life?
- consciousness
- interaction with animals
- difficult questions
- René Descartes
- Thomas Nagel
Links:
Taxonomic rank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank
Theory of Mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
I think, therefore I am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
What is it like to be a bat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Wild Animal Initiative
https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/
My email address:
david.tonner2010@gmail.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100083209401005
https://www.facebook.com/dtonner
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/reasoned_intuitions/
https://www.instagram.com/tonner_david/
HOW SHOULD WE INTERACT WITH ANIMALS?
Welcome to the Reasoned Intuitions podcast. My name is David Tonner, and I discuss personal ideas on moral issues in modern society and try to come up with improved ways of thinking and behaving, in the hopes of becoming a better person and causing the least amount of harm. As a disclaimer, I'd like to state that I am not an expert in either philosophy, psychology, or anything else, for that matter.
My opinions and positions are provisional and open to change with new information or an improved understanding of the issues I discuss. My intent is not to provide definitive rules or to tell anyone how they should live their life. I merely want to share my ideas and insights, in the hopes that they can be inspirational or in some way helpful.
I employ pragmatic ethics and try to reason from as broad and objective a perspective as possible. Some of my basic assumptions are that unchosen suffering is bad, and we should strive to minimize it. Joy is the most pleasurable sensation, and thus we should strive to maximize it. Empathy is universal, with some exceptions, and it should be the starting point of any good ethical system.
Welcome to another episode of Reasoned Intuitions. This is the last of a three-part series where I discuss animals and our relationship with them. In the first part, I talked about the ways humans exploit animals. In the second one, I focused on sport hunting. In this last part, I want to zoom back a little bit and talk about how I think we would interact with animals in an ideal scenario, if our wellbeing did not depend on them, and if we did not need to rely on animals as a resource.
For the sake of this conversation, I will categorize matter into four broad groups.
- There's inanimate matter, such as rocks, water, or oxygen.
- There are living organisms that are not sentient, meaning they cannot feel, as far as we know, such as plants and bacteria.
- Most sentient organisms, which refers to animals that can have experiences and feel pain, are the third group.
- And finally, humans.
The reason I place humans in a separate category, even though we are animals, and we have experiences, is that unlike all other animals, to the best of our knowledge, we possess an advanced level of consciousness that not only allows us to experience things through our senses, but also to understand what these experiences mean.
We also have something called Theory of Mind, which means that we are aware that other humans are conscious and feel similar things as we do. We have the ability to imagine things that do not exist, to plan for the future, and to remember past events in vivid detail, among many other qualities of consciousness that distinguish us from all other animals.
Why do I separate matter into these four categories? Because I think it's important that we guide our interactions with each type of entity based on particular qualities of its existence. Since inanimate things are neither alive nor conscious, we don't have to care how we treat them. We can play with them, move them from place to place, even destroy them, and things like rocks don't care one way or another. The only difference that arises from the way we interact with inanimate things is how this affects conscious beings.
More or less the same can be said about the way we interact with non-sentient living organisms. Even though they are alive, since they cannot feel, they also cannot care about how we treat them.
When it comes to animals, things change in a dramatic way, because while animals do not have a conscious interest in their own existence, they are able to suffer and experience joy, and according to the basic moral principles that I subscribe to, this factor is fundamental to how we should interact with animals.
Lastly, due to the level of consciousness that human beings possess, we must take extra care in the way we treat and interact with each other, because not only can humans feel pleasure and pain, we have internal experiences and are deeply affected by how others relate to us.
I'm going to spend some time discussing life, consciousness, and experience, before focusing on the one category that is most relevant to this episode: Sentient, non-human life.
Everyone understands what life is on an intuitive level, even though there is currently no clear and universally agreed-upon definition of this phenomenon, even among scientists. To simplify it into terms that make sense to me, and hopefully to you as well, life is a specific interaction of chemical and electrical activity…yes, I know, amino acids and proteins, blah, blah, blah…inherent to a particular accumulation of organic cells that possess a genome. A genome contains either DNA or RNA, and this is the code of life—a program, if you will—and its sole purpose appears to be to replicate itself. I apologize to any biologists or geneticists listening to this podcast, who are likely cringing at this simplistic and probably technically inaccurate definition of life. I should also point out that while viruses do possess either DNA or RNA, they are not typically considered to be living. Regardless, I think this elementary definition is sufficient for my purposes here.
Much of the matter that exists on Earth doesn't contain a genome, and thus it is not alive. I will come back to this point later on, when I attempt to explain consciousness.
Most living organisms on Earth are not conscious, meaning they have no phenomenal experience. In this context, when I say “phenomenal”, I don't mean fabulous or amazing, but rather I am referring to an experience mediated by the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
The tree of life is conventionally divided into three domains: archaea, bacteria, and eukaryota. We can state with a high degree of certainty that neither bacteria nor archaea—another type of microorganism—have conscious experiences. Eukaryotes are divided into the animal kingdom, fungi, and plants. Current scientific understanding holds that neither plants nor fungi are sentient, which only leaves animals, but even there, many branches of the animal kingdom are not believed to have conscious experiences, including sea sponges, various shellfish, worms, and arthropods, which includes insects.
This last group has recently received attention in the media, as some biologists believe insects could, in fact, be conscious, or at least experience pain. I don't have a strong position on that point at the moment, but as I'll explain later, until the evidence is stronger, I will assume that insects and other arthropods are not conscious.
So, to recap, we do not need to concern ourselves with how we treat inanimate matter like rocks or water, as well as non-conscious living things like flowers and trees, mushrooms, and some animals such as oysters, because they simply cannot care. We do, however, need to think about how we treat any living being that is able to feel. At the risk of repeating myself, I'll restate here that in my view, the guiding principle of morality should be the wellbeing of an organism, and we should strive to conduct ourselves appropriately around animals that can feel.
Let's look at the way humans interact with animals using a three-pronged approach:
Firstly, there is negative interference, and this includes most of what I discussed in the two previous episodes, such as killing or maiming; exploitation for resources, labour, and entertainment; and pet breeding. The reason I consider these to be negative interactions is because they cause unnecessary suffering or death to the animal.
Neutral interactions have no positive or negative effects on animals, and this is best achieved by not interacting with wildlife at all, apart from observation and careful study. In my opinion, this is currently the optimal scenario, or the ideal type of relationship we should have with most animals, unless it can't be avoided. To help guide us in this type of relationship, here are a couple of basic rules I came up with. Now, most of the time, my moral principles are of the consequentialist variety, but once in a while, I find rule-based ethics to be useful, and this is one of those cases.
1. Rule number one: if something is alive and not bothering you, meaning it is neither impeding your ability to perform basic functions or to progress in a course of action, leave it alone. This applies not only to animals we normally think of as conscious, such as mammals, birds, or fish, but also insects and spiders. The reason for this is that we currently do not know to what degree these annoying little critters experience life, so it is safer to err on the side of caution and not hurt or destroy them if there isn't a good reason to do so.
2. On the other hand, if the animal is in some way impeding your ability to thrive or outright harming you, like a bear looking for a tasty snack or a mosquito needing a sip of bloody nectar, then consider either removing yourself from its presence, shooing it away from you, or if all else fails, then destroy it, while taking care not to cause it unnecessary suffering.
Now, before you accuse me of being selfish and putting my needs before that of the animal, I will remind you that as I explained in the very first episode of my podcast, I am a speciesist, which means that I place the interests of humans before those of animals in situations where it is relevant and necessary to do so.
So far, I've mentioned negative and neutral interactions. There's also positive interaction, or interference. What do I mean by that? Apart from the odd time we all get the chance to save a wasp from drowning in a cup of tamarind sauce...what, just me? Well, anyway…most people are probably not aware of this, and I wasn't until quite recently, but there are currently small academic initiatives, mostly in the Western world, studying ways that humans can alleviate animal suffering in the wild.
As anyone who has ever watched a nature documentary knows, nature is often cruel and shows no mercy. This means that most animals who experience predation from other organisms often live lives of high stress, constant fear, and ultimately, a slow and painful death. There is a slowly growing group of people who study this, and who are trying to find ways that we could one day, through careful intervention, make the lives of wild animals less stressful, and perhaps even eliminate suffering altogether. No action or trials have yet taken place, to my knowledge, and the topic is so complex and multifaceted, that I'm not sure any progress will ever be made on that front. Personally, I haven't taken much interest in that area of study, as I'm not clear where I stand on the entire endeavor, but it's certainly something to think about from a moral perspective, and I'm glad there are people who dedicate their time, if not their entire careers, to this area of research.
Okay, let’s switch gears now and look at the topic from the opposite direction, by asking some difficult questions:
· When is it appropriate to exploit s sentient organism for human benefit?
Looking at the arc of human technological development, we see a near-total reliance on animals in the earliest stages, going back to the Stone Age, and this gradually decreases up to the present day. It is foreseeable that in the future, our reliance on animals will be eliminated completely, but at this present juncture, there are still areas where some level of exploitation cannot be avoided, including science, medicine, nutrition, and in certain parts of the world, labour and transportation, in order for humans to thrive. While I acknowledge this need, I think it is morally incumbent upon us to always do our utmost to minimize the amount of suffering and death that we cause, however.
· Is it ever permissible to exploit a sentient organism for human pleasure?
I'll restate here what I mentioned a little earlier: in my opinion, organisms that have no consciousness or experiences can be fully exploited without any practical or philosophical repercussions. Those that do have experiences and can suffer should not be exploited for our pleasure, certainly if it is clear that this type of exploitation causes them to have a negative experience.
· “Hey, don't you drive? What about walking? Aren't you a hypocrite, since just by moving around, you kill countless animals, including insects, rodents, and occasionally large mammals?” I hear someone call from the back.
Yes, you got me. I'm a hypocrite, and I hereby step down from my philosopher's pulpit. Or, wait…actually, I do acknowledge that I am a hypocrite, and yes, all life, including human life, causes some amount of death and suffering, simply by virtue of its existence. Does this invalidate the points I've made up to now? I don't think so. After all, what I'm saying is that we should strive to avoid interfering with animals and causing them unnecessary suffering as much as possible. This doesn't mean that suffering will never occur, and that it's possible to go through life without ever killing anything that has an interest in being alive.
As I said before, morality and being the best person you can be is never an all-or-nothing proposition. Rather, it's an attempt to place value on the experience of conscious beings and doing what you can to increase their joy and decrease their suffering.
As a final point, and as promised, I want to say a couple more things about consciousness. First, I'll start with a disclaimer that I don't really know what consciousness is, how it arises, or why it exists. I believe it to be an emergent property of the particular level of neurochemical complexity of some types of brains, but my theory is beside the point. All I can actually know is that I am conscious, you most likely are as well, and so are many other living beings, both human and non-human. As a matter of fact, my consciousness is the only thing I can claim to know for certain, and this is what the French philosopher René Descartes meant when in 1637, he wrote, “I think, therefore I am”. Everything else in the world, including everything I experience within my consciousness, could very well be a simulation or a figment of my imagination. What cannot be fake, however, is my fundamental experience of consciousness itself.
In 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel published an essay, titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In this essay, Nagel basically argued that an organism experiences a conscious mental state only if there is something that it is like to be that organism. What this means is that if it isn't like anything to be an object, such as a rock, a plant, or a bacterium, then that object isn't having an experience; it isn't conscious. To help clarify this idea, there's a thought experiment I read somewhere that goes something like this:
If you could transfer your consciousness from your mind, so the mind of a human being, into the mind, or the brain, of another animal—so in this case, if you transferred your consciousness into the brain of a mouse—in that moment, you would be experiencing what it is like to be that mouse.
In my case, I wouldn't feel like David, I would feel like a mouse. Not Mickey Mouse; a normal, naked, hairy, non-talking mouse that doesn't have a dog as a pet. Whatever that may be like, I don't know, but I would be conscious; I would be having an experience. However, if I attempted to transfer my consciousness into a rock—and we know that a rock is not conscious…by the way, I'm not talking about The Rock. I think he may, in fact, be conscious—I'm talking about the object…there would just be nothing; I wouldn't have any experience. It would be complete lights out for me, just as when I die, presumably—unless I can convince one of my vampire friends to bite me first—it will be lights out.
Now, just to clarify, I don't think it's actually possible to transfer my consciousness anywhere, since that would suggest that it is separate from the rest of my body, a position known as mind-body dualism and espoused by the aforementioned René Descartes, and if you don't press me too hard, I will proclaim myself to be a non-dualist.
Most of the time, on an intuitive level, it seems obvious to me that my consciousness must be separate from my body—that there must be a me inside, an ego, or a self—just like it seems intuitively obvious that I have the ability to choose my thoughts, words, and actions. If I stop and think about it, however, I realize that neither proposition makes logical sense.
Perhaps it's better that I go about life believing myself to have a self and to have free will, which is something I talked about in my Red Pill Blue Pill episode. Still, I think the thought exercise may be useful to help illustrate the idea that it feels like something to be conscious.
Well, that wraps up the third of my three-part series about animals. In total, I've now spent four episodes talking about animals, so I think I'll give the topic a rest. Some of you may be happy to hear that, while others might wish I had more to say about animals. Sorry to disappoint—go watch a nature documentary, or something.
Thank you again for listening. I would really appreciate it if you could leave me a rating or review wherever you listen to my podcast, share it with anyone you think might be interested, and as always, I'll be looking forward to your thoughts and prayers…I mean, thoughts and feedback.