The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.
I had tremendous difficulty navigating to read this. For whatever reason I could only visit page 1 and 10, so I wasn’t able to form any assessment of the article you posted.
So it is without that background or knowing exactly where you stand that I offer:
The lack of a commonly understood mechanism that can be used to communicate about pain with a lobster doesn’t mean that lobsters are incapable of feeling pain any more than it means that humans are incapable of feeling pain because we can’t talk to lobsters about it.
This applies to any other creature.
The lack of a common language doesn’t hold water as an argument that experiences can’t be shared.
It may be that you and I agree with this, or not, but it is difficult without having read the article.
It's a pretty well known essay--you should be able to find out in PDF format pretty easily by googling. It's very much on the non-lobster-eating side and touches on both physiological and philosophical arguments.
Peter Singer, mentioned in the article has a great (and influential) book published in 1979 called Practical Ethics, if you’re interested in this topic you should definitely check that out.
Also here’s a thought: unnecessary harming of an entity is bad for its effect on you, ie one should refrain from killing an insect even if it did not feel pain. Same holds for a nice rock formation.
I did when I was a kid. Used to spend hours torturing insects. And I did think they probably felt pain in some way. I ended up well-adjusted, but kids are little psychopaths. These days I escort bugs out of the house if they are being bothersome, and otherwise just let them be their bad ol’ self.
This is tough to read but I feel sympathetic about the honest way you shared this.
I have heard this from others too. One of my most traumatic memories from childhood was seeing someone do something to one of my favorite kinds of animals that I will spare readers here the horror of imagining. It haunts me to this day. That colors my perspective.
Children have incomplete brain formation. I’m not sure it’s an excuse, but it’s context to understand. On the flip side, a parent would need to be helicoptering to an absurd extent to detect a child messing with something as small as most common insects (at least in most US places).
Apparently, cruelty toward animals is a predictor for becoming a serial killer. That may be correlation not causality, but it would probably be wise to steer children away from such activity.
Side note: the author also notes a very unusual consideration of electricity as consisting of a living force, that should therefore not be used needlessly.
What stops us from abusing each other as humans is not mainly compassion, but rather the threat of reciprocal violence, and our interdependence on each other for the basics of life. In other words: killing is bad for you and it’s bad for business. Causing pain follows roughly the same logic.
Morality surrounding suffering depends on personal feeling and has no basis in practical life except inasmuch as one might calculate that an interest group will act on such a feeling. For instance: I can be recruited to save a dog from suffering, but not to save a spider. It’s not reason that drives me here, but feelings alone. My rational parts understand that my existence is predicated on non-rational equipment. I am not ashamed of this, and neither should you be.
No one lives except by occupying space and resources, and refraining from actions (such as killing yourself to feed hungry worms) that would otherwise create pleasure and ease suffering of some other creature. Life under finite resources is inherently tragic.
The coming of oxygen to the atmosphere of Earth was a disaster for anerobic bacteria! We’re not going to repeal oxygen!
As I age, I find that I want to avoid gratuitous harm of animals— even pests. I am less cruel than I used to be. But I have no justification for changing, and have no argument to make about it.
I think ultimately the goal of such questions is assessing qualia for different beings, but I think sentience is a low bar for this assessment. The underlying assumption is that if something feels pain, then it must have an inner mental state, or consciousness.
But many organisms demonstrate behaviors which are reactive to stimuli, and can be called sentient, but those organisms don’t necessarily possess cognitive abilities which demonstrate self-consciousness. I disagree that sentience should ever have been included as determinant of consciousness, and only demonstrating self-consciousness defines an inner mental state that is more than just a sum of chemical reactivity. So, I don’t think insects have any awareness other than impulses driven by genetic programming.
That said, insects of all types, including mosquitoes, sustain ecosystems through their existence, which are vital for food chains and so on. I don’t think insect control should be put off necessarily because insects feel pain (because they don’t feel pain in the way that a self-aware animal does), but because overdoing insect control can ruin ecosystems which people need to live.
I used to never harm insects until I found ticks and mosquitos on my dog...So now I kill ticks and mosquitos.
I like spiders though. I have had one living in my bathroom window for about six months now. It seems to be eating other spiders that try to crawl in based on the contents of its web. I consider this rent payment and allow it to stay.
I have a similar spider story, for the past nine years a rather large spider (for the UK) had been living under the bookcase by my front door. I have left it alone, but do hoover up the graveyard of consumed insects every couple of months. I caught it a few months ago when I had new carpet laid, released it back to its spot once the bookcase was back in place :D
I remember having a spider outside my window with an orange body and green legs. It made a web all summer, and then laid a big egg, which hatched, and a hundred baby spiders came out and ate it.
I kill flies, mosquitoes, ticks and other insects that are dangerous to me.
I borderline do not care about the ones that I do not like because they gross me out but I am not actively killing them.
I protect many that I am not otherwise fond of, like spiders. I let them live their life in my apartment hoping that they will maybe pay me back by eating mosquitoes.
I think I do not care about 99% of animals (but I will protect them when needed), hate 0.5% and like 0.5%
I've had to relax my rule to never needlessly harm insects, and never do it just because it's the easiest way to get rid of them. For example, a single ant gets scooped up and thrown outside, but a line that found food is getting killed and their pheromone trail bleached.
I occasionally kill mosquitos, but I don't think they deserve it. They (and the diseases they carry) are just doing their part as ecosystems' hedge against monoculture.
I used to feel the same way but watching a flock of birds spend 30 minutes picking at every wriggling thing they see crawling in the dirt changed my perspective.
I'm a bird watcher, I go out a fair amount so I've seen a lot of predation, not just of insects but other birds and mammals. I still don't want to do needless harm to any animals, even insects. I'll still take out roaches, fire ants, flour moths, and other invasive/pest insects, but I actually feel some remorse when I kill the moths and others since I believe they do suffer by my hand even if I don't have another choice I'd make.
For me it's various forms of fruit flies. That they come into my office and just fly at my face or in my food randomly... well, i hope they suffer lol.
I'm plagued by fruit flies but I can't say I've ever wished them harm. Which is weird because they're incredibly annoying. I think something has to be annoying me "on purpose" for that. And sure, I might swat at them or whatever, but that's just to make them go away.
Looks like the mantis was partially paralyzed by a hornet sting to me. The article noted that insects engage in nociception with examples, that specific mantis wasn't in that case, but that's certainly not a thing you can generalize from a single Youtube video.
Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses this topic at length in his recent-ish book Metazoa and uses observations of insects and other invertebrates to argue, compellingly in my opinion, that sentience and cognitive abilities are not intrinsically linked, but rather depend on the specific organism's evolutionary/reproductive strategies.
Most insects do not exhibit the classic signs of pain responses (the new findings discussed in this New Yorker article, notwithstanding). For example insects generally don't groom or guard an amputated limb. This puzzling (lack of) response can be explained as being aligned with their reproductive strategy: they reach breeding age quickly and die soon after. Thus, it's better not to waste energy avoiding limb loss for a future that won't happen.
Despite this lack of sentience, insects can be quite intelligent and learn complex cues and behaviors. Other invertebrates that look superficially like insects, prawns for example, have quite different life cycles and lifespans and often do exhibit signs of pain / sentience.
Basically pain/sentience emerge when there is a reason for the organism to protect the body from damage, and does not evolve (or is subsequently lost!) when there are more important short term goals. One wonders, for example, whether salmon experience pain when they fling their bodies up rivers, over and onto rocks, damaging them horribly in the process: all for purposes of spawning.
I don't feel any compunction about killing mosquitoes, but I prefer one good hit with a heavy object and its over. I'd consider it unethical to torture one by dismembering it while it's alive, for example, and I'm not a fan of using poisons.
It's a bit unfair to blame mosquitoes (who are also only a small portion of insects). As far as I'm aware, the diseases hitch a ride in mosquitoes, not harming them typically. The mosquitoes aren't trying to pass it on; it gets them no benefit (in fact it would arguably be detrimental; fewer humans to feed on because they died means less food).
Mosquitos are only one type of countless types of insects, most of which are harmless or even beneficial to humans.
In any case if you are going to have such a war-like attitude, it's the humans that deserve to be destroyed by the animals, not the other way around. We are the ones fucking up the planet.
And we kill almost 100 billion animals a year for food, and who knows how many others from other human activities.
Humans are animals, very successful ones. The only reason other animals are kept in check, is because they eat their food source until there's too little left to sustain them.
Goats will eat everything bare, locusts destroy everything, beetles ruin forests, beavers dam rivers changing ecosystems so much, it can be seen from space.
Every single lifeform on this planet expands, grows, multiplies without restraint. Animals don't csre one wit about conservation, or balance, or restraint. They never consider such things, ever, beyond filling their belly.
You act as if other animals are somehow noble, yet it is only humans that take deep, strong thought and care about the environment.
Well we agree then, but farm animals have run off cliffs, in a hysteria, to escape deer flies. I'm sure they'd want to exterminate such pests, all of them given a chance.
Ironic to use animals horded together near cliffs for human consumption and as an example of insect cruelty towards mammals, and furthermore imply this as some kind of common event.
Pain only makes sense if an animal can learn. It is a teaching mechanism to modify future behavior. A very simple creature may act purely automatically, not even instinct but raw dna-programmed responses. Pain makes little sense there as there is no learning to be done. I doubt bacteria feel pain.
It sounds weaselish but it depends on what you count as pain. If you count 'response to injury stimulus' then it just needs to be a productive action in response to the injury. Plants feel pain by that definition. Bizarrely plants can be anesthetized which freezes autonomic responses like rotating to face sunlight or opening of flowers. For an example of a useful injury response without learning: something like 'invest energy in upping the poison production if something bites my leaves' would be a useful response with no learning involved.
Of course under that definition you could call alarms that go off when a window is busted a form of pain for the building. Which I suppose highlights just how loose our definitions really are. I'm no pain semantics expert but I expect rightfully or wrongly our definitions of pain are animal neurology centered.
Evidence suggests bacteria can learn. I'm not suggesting you should feel bad about taking an antibiotic but cellular life is more complex than many people imagine.
Wouldn't modifying current behavior be sufficient to justify the existence of pain? The mechanism can be a useful adaptation even if a single organism cannot learn. Maybe the default state of bacteria is pain and they can only relieve it temporarily. The ones that survive to multiply are the ones best adapted to relieving pain.
The entire purpose of experiencing externally induced pain is to cause a reaction before the threshold of permanent damage is reached. Given our imprecise biological systems, that threshold needs to be crossed with a safe margin of error. It stands to reason that reactions to avoid threats to the the continuation of life are valid, regardless of the presence of nociceptors.
Internal pain (headaches, etc.) may require some manner of cognition to associate behaviors with the result, assuming they have a cause other than flawed biology.
Breaking it down - what we think of as pain perception is not one thing but several, as you'd expect for one of the major functions in a ninety-giganeuron brain.
There's something not much more than a low-level reflex response - "Ouch" - and most animals have that.
There's wound-grooming behaviour, which is mostly linked to capacity to heal, and shows up in perception as the longer-lasting (minutes to days/weeks) pain from an injury. A lot of animals with exoskeletons have very limited healing capacity, so there's no point in attempting to heal. This is thought to be why, for example, a severely and probably fatally damaged ant will just keep on trucking, whereas even the simplest mammals and reptiles will attempt to rest and heal.
Then there's awareness of mortality. Simply, an animal that doesn't know it's alive can't connect pain to the concept of death. To what extent this exists across the animal kingdom is one of the great unknowns.
And then finally there's placing a value on one's life (and so negative value on harm to it), and the way in which we humans understand that is intimately bound up with concepts like love, grief, friendship, family and so on - these likely exist for animals that care for their young.
Those are traits mostly limited to higher vertebrates, and it's not entirely clear to what extent birds and mammals have a common ancestor with that capability (therefore some commonality in "experience") or whether that's convergent evolution. It's pretty clear that it exists across all mammals, but has independently developed to much higher levels in the most intelligent ones (cetaceans, elephants, apes), despite these groups being very far apart on the mammal tree of life, having diverged almost at the origin of placental mammals (which makes more sense when you consider what a placenta is for).
So what the pain experience is "like" for a hive-society animal like Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants), where caste roles are biologically determined, is impossible to say, if indeed there is any experience there. The skin (or exoskeleton) they have in the game is so different to ours that it's hard to reason about it.
Just to add to this. Pain is further associated with the fear-terror-excitement response axis, which can be thought of as the ability to anticipate and remember pain/loss and ramp metabolism in response. Fight-or-flight basically.
This is more developed in mammals and birds, warm-blooded animals can turn their metabolism up and down at will as part of their survival strategy. All vertebrates have it to some extent, but e.g. quadrupeds can run faster, most birds can only choose to fly or not at all.
My take-away is that we should be more concerned about how we treat animals that are very clearly capable of a wide range of emotions, and which humanity currently treats extremely poorly - pigs and cattle especially.
All life is due respect and consideration. Of course, a human life gets the maximum consideration, and an insect life much less. Plant life even less, but some.
Capability to feel pain doesn’t have anything to do with this, in my mind.
Consider the lobster
reply