In summary, I consider this fourth alternative to be the best prima facie explanation of H. This is because unlike (4)-(6) it provides a non-arbitrary account of the wrongness of death, it applies to all typical cases referred to in H (especially children, the mentally disabled and the severely depressed), it coheres with a plausible explanation of why death is bad and it explains our attitudes towards euthanasia and continuing to live. So, in summary, I will be arguing for the claim that it is prima facie wrong to kill animals. I reasoned to this conclusion from considerations of why it is wrong to kill humans, wherein I claimed that the wrongness in this case is partly explained by the harm done to a human by ending their life. Firstly, I wish to clarify what exactly I will be arguing for. Furthermore, (7) coheres well with an intuitive explanation of the badness of death, and most of us probably believe that death is typically bad for us. (6) could even be more broadly construed as claiming that killing frustrates any long term desires we possess in addition to our desire not to die. ouP uncorrected Proof revIses, t , neWgen acprof-9780199396078.indd 137 7/2/2015 9:30:30 PM This shows that we should not reject (15), but rather accept that an animal’s death is bad for the animal. So if we take animal interests seriously, we really cannot avoid thinking about the morality of use totally apart from considerations of treatment. I am also including the mentally disabled and mentally individuals in this principle, though I will exclude people suffering from a coma or who are in a vegetative state. Animals would still be aware of themselves in each instant of time and have an interest in perpetuating that awareness; they would have an interest in getting to the next second of consciousness. I believe this is generally how pet owners reason when they decide to euthanize their pets: they conclude that the animal no longer has a good life or valuable future, and thus it is the right to end their life. According to Bentham, animals live in the present and are not aware of what they lose when we take their lives. If (5) is the only explanation for why killing people is wrong, then it would seem that it is not wrong to kill this person. The killing of animals is animal euthanasia (for pain relief), animal sacrifice (for a deity), animal slaughter (for food), hunting (for food, for sport, for fur and other animal products, etc. It is wrong because ending an animal’s life harms the animal by depriving it of all of the goods it would have enjoyed if it had continued to live. But seeing as the harm of death was grounded in the individual being deprived of a valuable future, it would seem that the harm of death is a function of how valuable the future is. Let's Ask PETA. But this is absurd-it is clearly in my dog’s interests to experience some short term suffering in order to continue living a largely good, valuable life. Thus animals can have experiences that are good or bad for them, and will often engage in activities that cause them pleasure or that they have a strong desire to perform. Think about the experiment done with monkeys where if one monkey ate food, the other monkey would get an electric shock. And that is precisely what most of us believe today. Furthermore, seeing as humans enjoy eating meat this seems to be a net benefit to everyone overall. Discussions of the impact psychological unity makes to the badness of animal death can be found in David DeGrazia’s “Sentient Nonpersons and the Disvalue of Death”. killing animals for just sports and fun and poaching is totally unacceptable but killing them for source of food may not be that wrong. This means that the person accepts that pain and suffering is bad for an animal, they just reject that a painless death could also be bad. But how can we make sense of this using the deprivational account of death. The final belief that W coheres well with concerns our reasons for thinking pain and suffering are bad. When posed with the question why hunting is bad for the environment, many people talk about how killing animals is wrong. I’m simply highlighting it may be wrong to assume that animals analyse and contemplate death in the same way humans do. I would still feel sorrow that I had missed out on time with my dog, but I would be overjoyed to find out that her life had not been cut short and in fact she had lived out a complete, good life. If we kill and eat them, ‘we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. Most cognitive ethologists and philosophers agree that animals have no concept of the future and cannot imagine themselves existing into the future. W is also not asserting (2). I assume that animals warrant moral consideration i.e they ought to be taken into account in our moral decision making and so are unlike inanimate objects such as rocks or sticks. (5), (6) and (7) all seem to provide intuitive accounts of why killing is wrong in certain cases, though they all have their flaws. Thus, consideration of what we judge to be better or worse for animals provides further support for (15), which in turn supports W. Another point of support is how W coheres well with our beliefs about when it is acceptable to euthanize an animal. So unless a better, contradictory principle is discovered I think that we can conclude that the following claim is probably true: DVF: It is prima facie wrong to deprive a human being of a valuable future by killig them. I may still grieve at her death, but since she was not deprived of a long valuable future by a premature death this grief would be minimal. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. We all agree that pain is bad, and part of the reason it is bad is simply due to it’s inherent qualities. She is not currently suffering any pain or suffering and actually enjoyed eating the chocolate. I am excluding unborn humans in this principle because whether it is wrong to end their lives is more controversial, and is not central to this essay. Sentient beings, by virtue of their being sentient, have an interest in remaining alive; that is, they prefer, want or desire to remain alive. The problem is making them suffer. So such a “happy farms” would be an acceptable means of meat production. Thus, if I choose the second option she will die but will experience no pain or suffering. I will also lay out some background information and assumptions that I will draw upon. Credit: Daniel Garcia. I also think they tend to be stronger than the arguments for W, as the empirical facts and ethical principles underlying them (that animals can suffer and that modern agricultural practices cause large amounts of suffering) are much more firmly grounded than those I will draw upon to justify W. For these kind of arguments, I encourage you to look into the work of Peter Singer in “Animal Liberation” or a previous post of mine giving a short argument for ethical veganism on those grounds. (5) claims that human beings are persons in the psychological sense, and it is wrong to kill them because doing so fails to respect their autonomy and the inherent value of their personhood. For example, neonates and the severely mentally disabled may lack the capacity to conceive of their own death or the future to any significant degree. Suppose someone rejects (15) i.e they believe that an animal’s death is not typically bad for the animal. In order to keep cows lactating they must become pregnant once per year, leading to large numbers of calves being born each year. W claims that it is prima facie wrong to kill an animal. If not, it would not harden us. Before moving on to the main argument, I will lay out some of my general assumptions for this essay. its the path nature has chosen for us to feed on meat. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. However, the benign carnivore also argues that there are situations in which raising and killing an animal for food would be acceptable. I think these two assumptions are fairly widely shared, as I think most people think it is wrong to treat animals in certain ways and it is wrong because of what it does to the animal. Consider the egg and dairy industry. Suppose I return home tomorrow and am confronted by a Ranger who tells me that they believe that dog ran out onto the road and was killed. This reduced psychological unity should be taken into account, and would discount the net good we would say an animal is deprived of when it dies. Thus they would lack a desire to continue to live, and therefore (5) would not apply to them. However, suppose that twenty years down the track I found out that my dog was not in fact killed on that day. This principle would be true even if another, more unitary explanation is given of why killing human beings are wrong. If we believed our future was not a valuable one, such as in the cases of terminally ill patients discussed above, we may no longer desire to live and may form the rational desire to die. Doing so harms the animal, and so seems prima facie wrong. It may be objected that we cannot know that these animals enjoy these behaviours or have desires which are fulfilled by these activities. This is probably very obvious, but I still want to emphasize that someone can consistently believe that we ought not to eat animal products yet also believe that there is nothing wrong with killing an animal per se. In this post I have argued for W, the claim that it is prima facie wrong to kill animals. The problem is that it simply asserts a right to life, but provides no explanation of why humans possess this right. It is an indisputable fact that animals have sentience and complex nervous systems. In my account, the possession of a future should be understood in a psychological sense, with a being possessing a future if it has some kind of psychological continuity over time so that it makes sense to identify experiences occurring at different times as belonging to the subject. As a result, we may conclude that the animal’s death in this case would actually be good for the animal, as it would free it from it’s pain. For example, racism and sexism may be wrong not just because of their immediate negative impact on the victims but because of how they dehumanize a person and fail to treat them as a unique, autonomous being. This information would leave me distraught, and I would probably grieve for many months. Commitment to W would thus make a difference: we should continue to boycott the dairy and egg industry until it stops implementing practices that lead to huge numbers of animal deaths. Thus I will turn to examining them. However, I am not blind to the issues in the reasons I have provided or the problems that still need to be worked out. This individual will recover from their depression in a week but is currently without long term desires that would be frustrated by their death. Besides the basic endangering species and destroying the natural balance, there is so much more that we ignore when answering this question. This will naturally include slaying animals. Why is killing animals wrong? Killing a human is wrong because you are basically killing your own species and that is something that even many animals can't do. We could use symbolic communication; they couldn’t. In contrast, killing a normal adult human is wrong because it fails to respect them as a person, it frustrates their desire to live and deprives them of a valuable future. These animals are often scared and show disturbing … after all is a lion wrong and evil if it feeds on meat. What I am trying to show here is that I think this belief is probably fairly widely held already, and is very intuitive. However, this also fails to explain H for reasons similar to that given for (5). If we are committed to W, then even without causing significant amounts of suffering and pain these industries will still involve significant wrongdoing. The problem is making them suffer. 2. Yet it once again seems intuitive that it is wrong. These include cases of self defense, when an animal is in extreme pain with little to no chance of recovery, or if killing and eating the animal is necessary for a group of humans to survive. In addition, I will try to work out some of the practical implications believing this would have. In the fourth section, I will consider the practical implications my conclusion has for an individual’s dietary choices. Now that I have concluded that it is wrong to deprive humans of a valuable future, I will consider whether this is also true of animals.
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