An argument that animals don't really suffer

Voted up for giving us an argument to chew on that's both important and terrible :-)

The punchline is, of course, "and therefore God exists." Craig is trying to solve theodicy here - he's trying to show that animal suffering doesn't exist, therefore doesn't count as God allowing evil.

The obvious Google search turns up a string of refutations of Craig's argument and, indeed, his bogus neuroscience. This one and this one go over a pile of the obvious errors. PZ Myers, who, as well as being an obnoxious atheist sceptic, just happens to be a professor of developmental biology, gets stuck into both Craig's bad science and his odious ethics. (For the philosophy, Myers also points out that Craig has just made an argument in favour of freedom of abortion. Philosotroll notes that Craig's argument rejects dualism: "Does God then have a prefrontal cortex?")

Also, the mirror test is interesting.

In general, if William Lane Craig publicly says the sky is blue, he's going to follow it with "and therefore God exists."

Related: the Discovery Institute (the organisation formed to push Intelligent Design; Craig is a Fellow of the DI) has started a newsletter called The Human Exceptionalist. DI and Craig both have a religious requirement of humans being a different kind to any other animal, despite the ever-increasing mountains of data on ways in which this just isn't the case. "Human exceptionalism" is apparently the new marketing slogan. Like "theistic evolution", it's creationism with a funny hat on.

I don't feel like getting into a debate about preferences. But this comes up so often that I want to state my preferences for what its worth.

I would deem it extremely tasteless if someone was going to eat a raven, parrot, orca or octopus if they could as well survive by eating other lower animals. There are other examples of animals that show a lot of signs of characteristics that we normally only associated with being human. I would further deem it extremely tasteless if someone was going to torture animals just for fun, animals that can feel pain but might not be aware of it in the same sense that humans are. And if people argue in favor of those acts by claiming that I am biased and that my preferences depend on anthropomorphizing those animals, then I can only say that I believe that they are overcompensating and that I won't revisit my preferences until they can show me that a raven or parrot is no more affected by torture than Microsoft Word.

This is about preferences, about what we want. That's why I signal mine. And if you share those preferences but fool yourself into believing that they don't apply to animals because that's "biased", then you might be confused about what it means to be rational. Maybe some animals feel pain but are not aware of it and others don't even feel pain but just act like they do. So what? What if your preferences are about the signaling of pain rather than some mysterious ethical property called "pain"? You still won't enjoy watching animated cartoon animals being tortured even though they obviously don't feel pain.

The question should be, how much fun does that person have torturing that animal, how much do I care about how much fun that person has, how much do I care about the possible disutility of the animal and how much does it bother me, how much disutility do I gain because of it happening at all? If the answer has negative utility then the person should (should according to you) fucking stop torturing that animal or fucking die.

This has nothing to do with some mysterious concept called ethics, its just about preferences and expected utility calculations.

Craig responds to some criticism on his argument here. Craig agrees the question is theologically neutral, and then defends the existence of God through the standard Moral Argument, by appealing to the fact that atheists do not have a basis for moral obligations to animals (including humans), which is, of course, false.

I think that should clear up some of the misconceptions about what Craig thinks his argument is really doing -- it's not proving God directly, but rather answering an objection to Christianity based in the Problem of Evil, and responding with the Moral Argument.

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That being said, I'd like to mention something else: there was something in his second response that really interested me. Craig says:

I’ve been surprised by the emotional reactions I’ve received to last week’s Question! It almost seems as if some atheists would actually prefer that animals experience terrible suffering than have to give up the objection to theism based on the problem of animal pain!

To me, this seems to suggest that if whether or not animals actually suffer is dependent upon our personal beliefs about the issue -- if we give up the objection to theism, then animals won't have to suffer! I was wondering if anyone else saw this same belief creates reality approach.

Which is oddly contrasted by this other quote:

but what we find comfortable can’t be allowed to be a ring in the nose of science pulling it in the direction we prefer.

When a bee is stuck flying against the window desperately trying to get free, I help it.
When a spider is in some place where I know it will starve to death or get crushed, I put it outside.
When an injured bird needs some time to pull itself together and avoid being eaten by the cat, I'll spend hours babying it.

As a human, I feel empathy for other beings, and I project a conscious sentient being on them. Even though I know that there is no such conscious being, it still gets constructed and empathized with, whether I like it or not. Faced with this, I have a choice:

1. Act on my feelings of empathy, thereby practicing the habit of doing the right thing, and using a bit of time.

2. Put on my murder face and ignore the imaginary suffering, thereby practicing moral indifference, to save a bit of time.

From a purely instrumental perspective, I think choosing #1 is a good idea. Practicing morality seems much better than practicing indifference, even if the practice situation is imaginary.

That's how I like to think about animal suffering.

Citation needed for most claims, but the core distinction between avoidance, pain, and awareness of pain works. Systems that have negative reinforcement pathways exist even if not all invertebrates are examples. David Gerard points out that neurological similarities make animals almost certainly aware of their pain, but there can be (we could create) exceptions.

But why on Earth would we care about awareness of pain rather than just plain pain?

Years after that, I was in a similar situation and eventually asked a friend why my body kept acting like it was in pain. She responded that my body was in fact in pain, and that the reason I didn’t understand my own reactions was the dissociation that goes with severe chronic pain. And that nobody who wasn’t in pain would ask that question.

Amanda Baggs, The Summer Thing

Craig's argument implies that if we partially relieved Amanda's pain, if would be bad, because she'd be aware of her pain. That doesn't sound right.

Is that argument related to saying that animals are p-zombies?

It isn't saying that animals have no qualia, but I think it's saying that some types of qualia matter more than others, and that animals can behave like people in terms of reacting to and avoiding pain, but the behavior means something very different from what it would if a person were doing it.

It's been asserted here that "the core distinction between avoidance, pain, and awareness of pain works" or that "there is such a thing as bodily pain we're not conciously aware of". This, I think, blurs and confuses the most important distinction there is in the world - namely the one between what is a conscious/mental state and what is not. Talk of "sub-conscious/non-conscious mental states" confuses things too: If it's not conscious, then it's not a mental state. It might cause one or be caused by one, but it isn't a mental state.

Regarding the concept of "being aware of being in pain": I can understand it as referring to a second-order mental state, a thought with the content that there is an unpleasant mental state going on (pain). But in that sense, it often happens that I am not (second-order) aware of my stream of consciousness because "I" am totally immersed in it, so to speak. But the absence of second-order mental states does not change the fact that first-order mental states exist and that it feels like something (and feels good or bad) to be in them (or rather: to be them). The claim that "no creature was ever aware of being in pain" suggests that for most non-human animals, it doesn't feel like anything to be in pain and that, therefore, such pain-states are ethically insignificant. As I said, I reject the notion of "pain that doesn't consciously feel like anything" as confused: If it doesn't feel like anything, it's not a mental state and it can't be pain. And there is no reason for believing that first-order (possibly painful and thus ethically significant) mental states require second-order awareness. At the very least, we should give non-human animals the benefit of the doubt and assign a significant probability to their brain states being mental and possibly painful and thus ethically significant.

Last but not least, there is also an argument (advanced e.g. by Dawkins) to the effect that pain intensity and frequency might even be greater in less intelligent creatures: "Isn't it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn't it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement? At very least, I conclude that we have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do, and we should in any case give them the benefit of the doubt."

Stating right at the beginning that the argument comes from Craig was probably a bad idea. Maybe others didn't have this problem, but I immediately disagreed with the argument's conclusion and rigor after reading who its author was.

It's hard both to document your sources and avoid framing effects, but maybe you could have put the author's name at the end?

I think the argument is both true in some ways, and flawed. I agree that it takes a man (or perhaps the higher apes) to form the thought "I am in pain", and that most mammals don't bother with this type of reflexive thinking.

The flaw in the argument is that the "I am in pain" thought isn't the painful bit.

An argument that animals don't really suffer

A No True Scottsman argument that animals don't 'really' suffer. I reject the nomenclature used to the extent that anyone attempts to apply it when considering this conclusion.

I'd probably identify three levels (or, at least, mark three areas on a continuum) but for different reasons. There's the class of organisms so far removed from us that analogies are difficult to make even if they do exhibit reactions to noxious stimuli (single cell organisms, worms, insects, etc). Then there's the continuum of animals from, say, simple vertebrates to mammals to primates, where their form of life is increasingly similar to our own, and it becomes much easier to identify when they're in pain. However, all such pain-identifications are attenuated and the final class is language-using beings such as ourselves, who can exhibit a far more nuanced range of suffering because of our developed linguistic skill. I think for most people the cut off point will be somewhere along the continuum of the second class and is somewhat arbitrary.

I do think when trying to identify the range of application of a psychological concept like pain it has to be relative to the concept originator (human beings). Pain is not simply a mental state or a behaviour, it's part of a complex conceptual network, partly constituted by behaviour, sensations, etc, but dependent on the antecedent applicability of a range of other concepts. Pain applied to animals is always in an attenuated sense. The more distant these animals in their lifestyles compared to our own, the less applicable the concept, since we have to find home for an entire nexus of concepts relating to pain in order to apply the concept of pain. It's an isomorphism. You can fill in gaps, ignore dissimilarities, etc, but eventually there's enough distance that you just can't fit one to the other at all.

Let's take his argument in the quote true as given (I don't know the relevant neuroscience here either). So we'll assume that all non-human animals only have level 1 or 2 awareness of pain. Now you need to figure out which sort of pain it is that you value preventing - level 1, 2, or 3 (presumably if you value preventing 1, you value preventing 2 and 3 as well). If you only value preventing level 3 pain, then eat away. If level 2, then don't eat vertebrates. If level 1, don't eat any organism that reacts to negative stimuli (all organisms?). This is ultimately a values question.

Note that if preventing animals from feeling some sort of pain is the only reason you're a vegetarian, then consider whether you would eat animals who were killed in a non-pain inducing way (in any/all of the three senses). If you don't think eating the animals is ok in that situation, then think about what your true rejection of eating animals is.

And this second neural pathway is apparently a very late evolutionary development which only emerges in the higher primates, including man.

Only in primates? Not in any other animals, including ones capable of passing the mirror test? Given the amount of convergence that's apparent in the intelligence of humans and, say, elephants, I'm pretty skeptical of this.

Why doesn't he consider what he calls Level 2 pain and suffering? It seems to me that it's the very definition of pain.

Animal behavior (including that of insects) changes in reaction to pain, and not just while they're feeling it. They can be trained. They can remember pain, and act to avoid it in the future. In whatever sense they have knowledge, they know to avoid that. Pain is an awareness that you don't want to do something anymore, not an awareness of that awareness.

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I would agree with the basic idea that there are three levels of pain, and also that only great apes are aware that they are in pain.

In fact humans may be in pain, but not be aware of it. I recently had a moderately serious accident, and cut my thumb deeply ( the tip of the bone was sliced off, to give you an idea ). I then probably cycled home ( I don't remember that well due to concussion, of which I was completely unaware ), and was quite unaware that I was in pain. I did know that I had cut my thumb. You might argue that I wasn't even in pain, that's debatable.

I would also cite the example of young babies - they have very little self-awareness (I don't recall the age at which it develops, but it is I think after birth), but can you assert they do not suffer when experiencing pain?

Regardless, the big jump here is going from "animals (other than great apes) not being aware that they are in pain" to the title of your post which is "An argument that animals don't really suffer". Why is suffering related to awareness of being in pain? Isn't it enough just to be in pain?

'"Empirical studies conducted by social psychologist Daniel Batson have demonstrated that empathic concern is felt when one adopts the perspective of another person in need. His work emphasizes the different emotions evoked when imagining another situation from a self-perspective or imagining from another perspective.[17] The former is often associated with personal distress (i.e., feelings of discomfort and anxiety), whereas the latter leads to empathic concern."

Perhaps people just rationalise their feelings till it's conceptualised and construed into a socially acceptable ethical positions - even if that means a 'rationally'' defendable one.