Does this mean carniverous animals are immoral?
In the atheist world, “pain” is just electrical signals that get converted to certain muscular reactions. How can there be a moral component to electrical signals or muscular reactions?
But if “pain” is just electrical signals that get converted to muscular reactions, does that mean I get to not
feel it?
I think casting it in those terms is very theoretical, and is not the be-all-and-end-all of talking about values.
It’s from the realm of direct experience that one
can speak intelligibly about values, I think. Namely, believer and non-believer alike would generally prefer – health to painful disease; emotional companionship to complete social ostracism; life to death.
Why do they prefer it? I submit that is as utterly uninteresting a question – from the realm of experience – as why I see in colors, hear sounds, or have a sense of taste. It is that rock solid – predictable and universal (exceptions would be comparable to those who are blind – existent, but in the minority).
One doesn’t torture animals if one is not sadistic or lacking in empathy. And, to put it simply – if human beings
were completely sadistic and lacking in empathy, the world would look very different (in spite of its problems) than it does today. In other words, there would be
no cooperation, no protection of the weak by the strong; the human race, in fact, would probably be extinct, for
why should a parent bother to care about its child, or to care about anything that is not itself?
Even ants cooperate, and if the human being were a completely isolated unit – incapable and
uninterested in cooperation, empathy, and fellow-feeling – we would not be having this discussion on this complex device of highly evolved electronics (the result of the collaboration of thousands of individuals, over essentially hundreds of years); and, as mentioned, there probably wouldn’t be a species
homo sapiens, because no defenseless child would have had the opportunity to survive into adulthood.
It is true, I am not describing morality in a metaphysical sense, but fundamental human values – nothing less than the means by which the human race has survived (i.e., has prevented itself from devouring itself). As to the question
why live I, again, believe it is questioning something so fundamental in the human breast as, “why see in colors? Why not in black and white? Why hear sounds?”
Animals can’t defend themselves against human cruelty, whereas other humans can; regarding our fellow humans, part of the reason why we tapped into our empathetic natures is that, when we hurt others, either they – or those who cared about them – tried to hurt us back, or to hurt those that
we care about. In other words, a perpetual state of war.
But because we’ve developed empathy – as a matter of survival, frankly, both individual and collective – most also have empathy for other living creatures. They’ve benefitted from stuff that the human race has “figured out” over an untold thousands of years, not least of all because our relationship to animals – subconsciously, at least – is not dissimilar to our relation to newborn babies (the question of the unborn is a battle of perception; if the unborn were perceived with the same consideration as newborn babies, the problem would be largely solved).
Of course, it has limits – not much empathy in our poultry or beef industry, in the U.S. Few believe that animal life is as compellingly worthy of empathy as human life. This is not merely an idealistic recognition of the inherent dignity of the human being, and of its unique qualities; it is part of the more mundane self-love and self-regard of the human species, that does not love other species as much as it loves itself. Humans first.
