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Do Animals Feel Pain?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Peter Harrison
Affiliation:
Bond University

Extract

In an oft-quoted passage from The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Jeremy Bentham addresses the issue of our treatment of animals with the following words: ‘the question is not, Can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ The point is well taken, for surely if animals suffer, they are legitimate objects of our moral concern. It is curious therefore, given the current interest in the moral status of animals, that Bentham's question has been assumed to be merely rhetorical. No-one has seriously examined the claim, central to arguments for animal liberation and animal rights, that animals actually feel pain. Peter Singer's Animal Liberation is perhaps typical in this regard. His treatment of the issue covers a scant seven pages, after which he summarily announces that ‘there are no good reasons, scientific or philosophical, for denying that animals feel pain’. In this paper I shall suggest that the issue of animal pain is not so easily dispensed with, and that the evidence brought forward to demonstrate that animals feel pain is far from conclusive.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

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20 Thus Descartes admitted in his letter to More that his thesis about animals was only probable. Philosophical Letters, 244.Google Scholar

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