The lives of Animals – Coetzee
Animal ethics has been getting a lot of limelight recently. Philosophers have recently been tackling the issue of whether animals should be objects of our moral concern. The issue rightfully deserves the attention it is getting; if animals should be objects of our moral concern then our treatment of them must change. Philosophers also get bored of dealing with the same questions that have been getting asked for the past 2,500 years (roughly), so it is nice to spice things up.
Modern philosophical study has been concentrating on the study of consciousness. Consciousness is important to animal ethics because a creature needs a certain degree of consciousness in order to feel pain.
Pain is paramount when it comes to morality. If a being cannot feel pain then ethics serves no purpose. Ethics is founded on the fact that sentient beings prefer a happy state of affairs than a poor one. Fact: we want to be happy, and don’t want to suffer. This applies to everyone, sadomasochists derive pleasure from their habits, so do drug addicts.
If animals are sentient then they too prefer happiness over suffering. But, not all animals are sentient. Fact: Jellyfish do not feel pain, neither does fish. Fish lack the neocortex in the brain to feel pain. Fish react to external influences, but they feel no pain to ordinary events that would cause pain.
In his book Kinds of Minds Daniel Dennett (a philosopher; book was published in 1997) sets out to understand consciousness, not merely human consciousness, but other animal consciousness as well. Dennett draws the conclusion that in order for a being to be sentient it must be conscious. A being must have an ‘I’, or there must be an enduring self or subject in order to experience pain. Otherwise, there is no ‘I’ or enduring subject that experiences the pain. Without an enduring self what looks like pain is merely the organism’s nervous system reacting to outside, external, influences. Awkward positions while we sleep create pain and our nervous system acts accordingly by repositioning the limbs to a more comfortable position. However, ‘we’ do not experience this pain. We are asleep and in a lesser state of conscious awareness. The moral significance here is that if an animal has no enduring self, or is less consciously aware then we are, then there is no subject undergoing pain. In other words, if an animal is not conscious, then it is not sentient.
Dennett notes that sentience has not been properly defined and is an open concept. Sentience is the ability to perceive or feel things. But is there a distinction between sentience and sensitivity? Plants are sensitive, so are jelly fish. They react to the environment, but they are not conscious enough to be sentient. Moreover, Dennett notes that only creatures with minds care what happens to them. This obviously has moral significance. If a creature cares that you do not harm it, not in a Darwinian sense, but in a moral sense, then a moral bond can be created between you and the other creature. If it has no mind and does not care, then anything that happens to that organism is tolerable, it can be treated as an inanimate object.
Michael Pavan
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