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- Richard Holton & Rae Langton (1998). Empathy and Animal Ethics. In Dale Jamieson (ed.), Singer and His Critics. Oxford.In responding to the challenge that we cannot know that animals feel pain, Peter Singer says: We can never directly experience the pain of another being, whether that being is human or not. When I see my daughter fall and scrape her knee, I know that she feels pain because of the way she behaves—she cries, she tells me her knee hurts, she rubs the sore spot, and so on. I know that I myself behave in a somewhat similar—if more inhibited—way when I feel pain, and so I accept that my daughter feels something like what I feel when I scrape my knee. The basis of my belief that animals can feel pain is similar...1 . Singer here suggests that the epistemological problem facing animal ethics is really the more general problem of other minds: the Cartesian problem of how to escape solipsism, how to cross the bridge from my own thoughts and feelings to the thoughts and feelings of any other being. The suggestion is that no-one can seriously be in the thrall of this sceptical problem. The method for building the bridge to other minds is familiar to us all: we use it every day in our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to people near and dear, and to those far away. And we use it every day in our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to animals.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Though the vegetarian movement sparked by Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation has achieved some success, there is more animal suffering caused today due to factory farming than there was when the book was originally written. In this paper, I argue that there may be a technological solution to the problem of animal suffering in intensive factory farming operations. In particular, I suggest that recent research indicates that we may be very close to, if not already at, the point where we can genetically engineer factory-farmed livestock with a reduced or completely eliminated capacity to suffer. In as much as animal suffering is the principal concern that motivates the animal welfare movement, this development should be of central interest to its adherents. Moreover, I will argue that all people concerned with animal welfare should agree that we ought to replace the animals currently used in factory farming with animals whose ability to suffer is diminished if we are able to do so.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Do non-human animals have rights? The answer to this question depends on whether animals have morally relevant mental properties. Mindreading is the human activity of ascribing mental states to other organisms. Current knowledge about the evolution and cognitive structure of mindreading indicates that human ascriptions of mental states to non-human animals are very inaccurate. The accuracy of human mindreading can be improved with the help of scientific studies of animal minds. But the scientific studies by themselves do not by themselves solve the problem of how to map psychological similarities (and differences) between humans and animals onto a distinction between morally relevant and morally irrelevant mental properties. The current limitations of human mindreading – whether scientifically aided or not – have practical consequences for the rational justification of claims about which rights (if any) non-human animals should be accorded.
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jme.bmj.com jme.bmjjournals.com people.pwf.cam.ac.uk ncbi.nlm.nih.gov dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jme.bmj.com jme.bmjjournals.com people.pwf.cam.ac.uk ncbi.nlm.nih.gov dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A vegetarian argument: We should avoid meat not because we think that animals are like us but because most animals are very different from humans. Most animals are not persons: they think and feel but do not have thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings. With persons the obligation to prevent suffering, and indeed the obligation to preserve life, can be over-ridden by mutual agreement. I'll risk my life and welfare to protect your children if you do the same for mine. And even when the agreement is not explicit a person is capable of understanding what might have been part of a necessary trade-off. But this is not possible with non-persons: their lives are not held together by anticipations of future experiences and understanding of past ones. There are no social contracts, no deals. So a modern agricultural economy in which meat is produced cheaply at the expense of suffering for animals cannot be justified by any benefits to us, or to the animals. Their suffering is simply suffering; it can't be balanced away.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Animal rights and moral theories -- Arguing for one's species -- Utilitarianism and animals : Peter Singer's case for animal liberation -- Tom Regan : animal rights as natural rights -- Virtue ethics and animals -- Contractarianism and animal rights -- Animal minds.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Animals have moral standing; that is, they have properties (including the ability to feel pain) that qualify them for the protections of morality. It follows from this that humans have moral obligations toward animals, and because rights are logically correlative to obligations, animals have rights.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... I argue that recent developments in animal cognition support the conclusion that HOT theory is consistent with animal consciousness. There seems to be growing evidence that many animals are indeed capable of having I-thoughts, including episodic memory, as well as have the ability to understand the mental states of others.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... I May, at a gathering, notice that Peter is sitting very stiffly in his chair. I say to myself, “Perhaps he has a pain. Yes, I think he has some sort of pain.” I have inferred a feeling of some sort from bodily behavior. It is not an impossible thing to do, to infer sometimes a feeling from bodily behavior. But it is a puzzling thing to do, at least in a philosophieal sense. Because we ordinarily hold that we cannot “observe” the feelings of another, that we can never directly confront these feelings, that feelings as actually felt are private to each of us. There may be interesting ways of challenging this sort of remark—for instance, by way of telepathy. But there is an advantage in puzzling over the kind of inference indicated, without the challenge of telepathy or similar abilities.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Reading list
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| | Other links: journals.cambridge.org jstor.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Philosophical defenders of animal liberation believe that we have direct duties to
animals. Typically a presumption of that belief is that animals have the capacity to experience pain and suffering. Notoriously, however, a strand of Western scientific and philosophical thought has held animals to be incapable of experiencing pain, and even today one frequently encounters in discussions of animal liberation expressions of scepticism about whether animals really experience pain.
The Analogical Argument for Animal Pain responds to this scepticism by claiming that it is just as reasonable for me to believe that animals feel pain, given my only evidence for this is shared behaviour and physiology, as it is for me to believe that other humans feel pain on the basis of similar evidence. In this paper I expound and defend this Argument.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Do animals other than humans feel pain? How do we know? Well, how do we know if anyone, human or nonhuman, feels pain? We know that we ourselves can feel pain. We know this from the direct experience of pain that we have when, for instance, somebody presses a lighted cigarette against the back of our hand. But how do we know that anyone else feels pain? We cannot directly experience anyone else's pain, whether that "anyone" is our best friend or a stray dog. Pain is a state of consciousness, a "mental event", and as such it can never be observed. Behavior like writhing, screaming, or drawing one's hand away from the lighted cigarette is not pain itself; nor are the recordings a neurologist might make of activity within the brain observations of pain itself. Pain is something that we feel, and we can only infer that others are feeling it from various external indications.
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| | Other links: animal-rights-library.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Richard Holton & Rae Langton, Empathy and animal ethics
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