Murray’s first suggestion as a reply to the argument from animal suffering is that perhaps, non-human animals do not have what he calls “phenomenal consciousness” of the pain, but only what he calls “access consciousness”[1]
On this proposal, basically non-human animals would be in pain sometimes, but they would not be aware that they’re in pain – something similar to blindsight, going by Murray’s example.
So, on this proposal, non-human animals would experience pain, but wouldn’t feel it – not in the sense of “feel” that would be relevant if this understanding of pain were correct.
Craig, referring apparently to this suggestion, says that one of Murray’s strongest points is that (non-human) animals do not have “first person” view of their experiences, cannot “adjoin to their experiences” expressions asserting that one thinks or feels that something is the case.
I will argue that the suggestion fails, for the following reasons:
1. There seems to be no good reason to believe that what Murray calls “higher order thought” is required to feel pain in a way that would be morally relevant. One plausibly does not need to think ‘I am in pain...' to actually feel the pain, it seems to me.
2. Leaving 1. aside, many animals are capable of passing the mirror test, including chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, Asian elephants, European magpies, orcas, and bottlenose dolphins. That seems to be good evidence that they are in fact self-aware, and if so, they would seem to meet the requirement for higher order thought, and in particular for being aware that they're in pain.
3. With respect to language, there seems to be no good reason to think that it’s required for self-awareness, and actually there are good reasons to conclude it’s not. That includes both the evidence I mentioned above in 2., and the fact that, for example, deaf humans who develop before sign language was invented, or humans who grow in a feral state, are self-aware even if they have no language – and moreover, it’s clear that those humans can feel pain in the morally relevant sense.
4. Craig outlines Murray’s argument in his website[2], explaining that according to Murray’s suggestion, awareness that one is in pain – what Murray calls “level 3” awareness – is associated with a neural pathway that only appears late in evolutionary history, and is only present in humans and (other) great apes. Moreover, he claims that the classification and the claim about the pathways are based on neurological research.
However, there is no research suggesting that other animals that pass the mirror test – for example – would not have awareness of being in pain just because their brains do things differently from the brains of humans.
Moreover, even if some pathway is a recent development in evolutionary terms, and it’s present not only in humans, but also in chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans, one may reckon that it was present also in Homo Habilis and australopithecines as well. But if australopithecines, etc., experienced pain in the relevant way, that’s millions of years of entities suffering. That’s surely more than enough to run an argument from suffering; a far shorter period would suffice too.
Now, it might be suggested that even if the pathway is required for
being aware that one is in pain, it’s not sufficient, and
furthermore, that perhaps chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, Homo
Habilis, australopithecines, etc., are/were not aware of being in
pain, even if they have/had the pathway.
However, in that case
the objection to the argument from suffering is obviously not
based on any research, or any knowledge of the brain.
It’s just skepticism about the mental states of other animals,
regardless of what kind of brains they have. And
it’s quite implausible at that, given the fact that other
non-human animals seem to react to pain like humans do. On that note:
5. Let’s consider a present-day human, say Alice, who feels pain normally. So, she can be in pain, and be aware that she’s in pain. Let’s now consider her mother, then her grandmother, and so on, up till the time of our most recent common ancestor with chimpanzee (CHLCA), about 5-8 million years ago.[3]
In that scenario, if their experiences of pain had changed significantly from one of the mothers to her daughter, then we would expect also a significant shift in the way they react to pain, but given the similarity between the reactions to pain by chimpanzees and humans, and given that the brains of the mother and the daughter would be extremely similar, that appears to be very implausible.
Now, a reply to the argument from suffering – Murray’s “response 1” or any other – that distinguishes between humans and non-human animals and suggests that the pain of the latter is not morally significant, runs into this problem of gradual changes in brains, and gradual changes in behavior.
More precisely, we have the following alternatives:
5.a. There is a situation in our evolutionary past after CHLCA in which the pain of a daughter is as morally significant as the pain of humans, but the pain of her mother is morally irrelevant, even if their brains are almost the same, and their behavior in reaction to pain is also essentially the same.
5.b. That is not the case, but the pain of the mother is much less relevant than that of the daughter, who is as relevant as that of any human.
5.c. Changes in moral significance of the pain from mother to daughter are always gradual.
5.a. is also untenable. Why would the mother’s pain
not be significant, if everything – from behavior to brain –
indicates she experienced pain in the same or almost exactly the same
way as her daughter did, and the pain of the daughter was as morally
significant as that of any of us?
On the other hand, 5.c. is lethal for any response to the argument from suffering that attempts to deny the moral significance of the pain of non-human animals, since there is pain that is not as significant as that of humans – so, it’s not the pain of humans -, but it’s still significant. Moreover, it’s significant in increasing degrees as we approach the present, so there is very significant pain in non-human animals.
As for 5.b., it’s also untenable, and for essentially the same reasons as 5.a, even if those reasons are present to a somewhat lesser degree. Why would the mother’s pain be much less significant morally, if everything – from behavior to brain – indicates she experienced pain in the same or almost exactly the same way as her daughter did, and the pain of the daughter was as morally significant as that of any of us?
Additionally, 5.b. has the problem that on 5.b, there is also morally significant pain in non-human animals, even if not to the same extent as in 5.c.
[1] http://www.reasonablefaith.org/animal-pain-re-visited
[2] http://www.reasonablefaith.org/animal-suffering
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee-human_last_common_ancestor
7 comments:
The argument from animal suffering and pain goes roughly like:
1. The degree of moral relevance of animal pain is weakly correlated with the degree of significance of animal pain.
2. If God exists, then the degree of moral relevance of any being's pain is strongly (and not weakly) correlated with the degree of significance of animal pain.
3. So, God does not exist.
I think that opponents of this argument accept (2) and reject (1).
One must notice that it animal pain is only a problem because there seems to be a weak correlation between moral relevance and the significance of pain.
So animal pain would not be a problem if animals felt highly significant pain AND highly morally relevant pain.
Your reply to (5.c) says the opponent of the argument cannot maintain (5.c) since it implies that animal pain is highly significant AND animal pain is not highly morally relevant- that's because such a claim goes against the plausible premise (2).
But that's not what (5.c) implies. What (5.c) says is changes in moral relevance of pain is always gradual AND (keeping with premise (2)) the changes in the significance of pain is similarly gradual, such that both are as low or as high.
Nothing wrong with that!
In fact, it might be plausible if moral relevance=free will and significance of pain meant phenomenal consciousness of pain. Both free will and phenomenal consciousness come in degrees and similarly supervene on brain states (or self awareness).
That's how the opponent would argue. It doesn't matter if some animals feel pain like we do as long as they enjoy free will as much as we do, and it seems like the two don't come apart since they are related to each other via their individual relation to evolved brain states.
But I guess that my personal opinion is that some animals do have evolved brain states which support human-like phenomenal consciousness of pain but don't have a similar moral relevance for their pain (at least far from the moral relevance of human pain).
And I'm not sure if phenomenal consciousness comes in degrees.
Mark,
I'm not sure how you're making the distinction between "morally relevant" and "significant". Are you using "significant" to talk about the intensity of the pain?
In any case, I'm not making a distinction like that. I'm objecting an argument that holds that the pain of non-human animals is not morally relevant/significant.
The point is that with almost the same behavior, brains, etc., there will be almost the same sort of pain, in terms of moral significance - and, if you like, also in intensity.
The point of 5.c. is that the result would be that for a long time (i.e., millions of years) there were some non-human animals that experienced pain of considerable moral significance, even if of somewhat less moral significance than the pain of humans.
As for the free will angle, the pain of entities with free will is morally significant, and if there are other animals with considerable free will, that would only make the point that - contra Murray - there are non-human animals that experience morally significance pain, and Murray's reply would still fail.
I'm not sure why you bring up free will, but if you're thinking that somehow a theist might posit that free will is an adequate answer to the problem of suffering of those non-human animals because they somehow are at fault, they deserve it, etc., that would not work, as it does not work in humans: human children do not deserve to suffer in the horrible ways they sometimes suffer, for example - and actually the same goes for adults, but the case of children suffices.
A common Christian reply to the issue of pain in humans seems to be that the Fall or generally the immoral behaviors of people justify it somehow.
I would say those answers do not work, but leaving that aside, if they tried the same sort of answer in the case of non-human animals, they would need to grant that those non-human animals are moral agents, that they behave immorally, and perhaps they're fallen, etc. (depending on the answer they would be mirroring).
Even if that reply worked (I'd say it doesn't, as it doesn't in the case of humans; the immorality of some people does not provide an adequate answer to the suffering of others), it would at best be a way of saving theism from this particular argument but at the cost of giving up on central Christian tenets, at least on versions of Christianity comprising nearly all adherents, Murray included (extremely liberal versions might avoid it, but my reply is a reply to Murray's argument, not to extremely liberal versions of Christianity).
First of all, I have to correct premise (2) of my first comment:
(corrected 2) If God exists, then the degree of moral relevance of any being's pain is strongly (and not weakly) correlated with the degree of significance of that being's pain.
Anyway, you say:
"I'm objecting an argument that holds that the pain of non-human animals is not morally relevant/significant."
My point was this: if you are objecting an argument that denies the conclusion of the problem of animal suffering (which I sketched above), then you must be objecting to denial of premise (1).
But this is not what you are doing.
Perhaps you are referring to a different argument from animal suffering which goes as follows:
(1*) If God exists, then animal suffering is not morally significant.
(2*) Animal suffering is morally significant.
(3*) So, God does not exist.
It seems to me that theists can deny either (1*) or (2*).
They can deny (2*) by referring to the existence of some animals with low levels of self-consciousness such that their pain is not morally significant.
They can also deny (1*) by accepting your point that some animals have human-like consciousness of pain and so their pain is similarly morally significant (relative to human pain). This does not conflict with God's existence.
Perhaps you would like to argue that given the vast amount of morally significant animal pain, this ADDS to the general problem of morally significant suffering.
I agree with this, but one must notice that any theodicy which has been presented to treat the problem of human suffering will similarly apply to the problem of animal suffering so the problem of animal suffering is reduced to the original problem of human suffering.
But it's true, as I said, the original problem is worse only in the sense that the size of the class of sufferers is now bigger than what was once assumed- by introducing animal pain.
I would not press this version of the argument from animal suffering, because it does not have significant dialectical advantages.
I would instead opt for the argument I presented, since it presents a different challenge than the challenge of human pain.
It is argued that the intensity of human pain is justified (i.e., it is necessary for some greater good), but the animal pain challenge is the following:
(some) animal intensity of pain is similar to humans, but the justifications don't apply to it.
Take free will for example. Free will is said to be the greater good which outweighs the negative existence of human pain. But animals feel similar pain and have limited free will, so the theist cannot use free will to justify the existence of animal pain.
Mark,
Just to be clear, I'm using "morally significant" and "morally relevant" as synonyms. I also used "significant" when I talked about whether there would be a significant shift in the way they react to pain, meaning a non-minuscule change.
When I say "On the other hand, 5.c. is lethal for any response to the argument from suffering that attempts to deny the moral significance of the pain of non-human animals, since there is pain that is not as significant as that of humans – so, it’s not the pain of humans -, but it’s still significant. Moreover, it’s significant in increasing degrees as we approach the present, so there is very significant pain in non-human animals.", I meant "morally significant".
I don't know if that resulted in any misunderstanding; sorry if it did. I will edit the post to clarify the matter, adding "morally" in those cases, and clarifying the other cases too, just in case.
Anyway, as I said, I'm objecting to an argument that holds that the pain of non-human animals is not morally relevant/morally significant. More precisely, it's Murray's argument - and Craig's, or more precisely Murray's argument, endorsed by Craig.
I posted the relevant links, so that shouldn't be a problem. Did you read Murray's points in the links I provided?
I don't know why you say I must be objecting to the denial of premise 1. Could you clarify what the connection is?
In any case, I'm not referring to the new argument you present, either. Rather, I'm objecting to Murray's argument (here "argument" is used in the sense of "arguing a case", not restricted to a short syllogism - usually, the "meat" of the arguments is in the defense of the premises; the syllogism is trivial).
On second thought, I'll leave the post unchanged, and post an updated reply.
Okay, the update is here.
Hopefully, this will clarify my argument to you, in case the wording caused a misunderstanding.
On the other hand, if you think your objection or a modified variant holds, I would like to ask for clarification, because I get the impression that we're talking past each other.
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