ARO: Beyond Suffering paper

Looking Beyond Suffering: Ethical Problems of Unnecessary Killing

by Tony Levin

Once people start to learn about the mental lives of various beings (like cats and dogs and pigs and chickens), they often quickly realize that we should try to not cause suffering in these kinds of beings. But sometimes it is less obvious for people to see the problems with just killing nonhuman animals without causing suffering or discomfort. But most of us do see that there are really big problems with killing a human, whether this killing involves any suffering or not, so the question is "why is it different with nonhuman animals?". To help figure out why there is something wrong about unnecessary killing, it’s useful to look at what it is that makes anything right or wrong. In other words it’s useful to understand some things about ethics and ethical reasoning. (Even if you use your religion to figure out ideas about right and wrong, then you may want to use some other non-religious ideas to make guidelines that you think would be good to follow in your life. See www.ARoutreach.org/ARintro2.html for more ideas about this.)

A good starting point in ethical thinking is realizing that we, as humans, have such a great ability to understand another being’s situation and that we have strong emotions that make us want to see other beings live out good lives, so it is upsetting for us to see others suffering or being killed (since we can definitely say that a being who had to deal with lots of suffering or was killed at a young age did not live out a good life, or at least not as good as it could have been). If we use our imagination to understand the lives of others, then we end up having these emotional responses for any beings that care about their lives, like humans or cats or chickens.

Some people think we should only be concerned about beings that can use a complicated language or understand complex logical problems but people who are willing to really listen to their emotions will realize that they would still would be bothered to see such beings getting killed or hurt (and there are some humans, like infants and some mentally handicapped people that are not capable of using a complex language or doing logic problems, but we still have concern for these humans). To help get an idea of how you feel about allowing other beings to be killed, with or without causing suffering, imagine if you were to see someone walk over to a dog and shoot a bullet through the dog’s brain (killing the dog instantly), just for the hell of it. Would it not bother you to see this happen? But dogs are like pigs and chickens in that they all care about their own lives and want to live out good lives. Pigs are often better than dogs at understanding certain things and solving logical problems but this really isn’t the important issue. The important issue is that all of these animals have emotions and desires and really care about their own lives.

There are definitely some problems with using an emotions as a starting points in ethics. One problem is that people often learn to not pay attention to their emotions, especially if they live in a society that encourages them to do this. For instance, in the US during the slavery period, many people were encouraged to not pay attention to their anger and sadness at seeing many innocent humans being used as slaves. These people likely still had these emotions buried within themselves but they became good at ignoring them. Similarily, people in our current society are encouraged to not pay attention to their anger and sadness at seeing certain nonhuman animals being imprisoned or killed. Most of us have these emotions buried within us but we often don’t recognize this or try to ignore this. So, to make really good ethical decisions, we need to really listen to our emotions.

Many people say that they don’t think there could possibly be anything wrong with us killing nonhumans in order to eat them since, in the natural world, nonhumans regularly kill other nonhumans in order to eat each other. But it is very problematic to say that some particular act is ethically ok simply because this act happens in the natural world. For instance,.in nature, there are many animals that force themselves sexually upon other animals but this does not imply that it is morally ok for humans to rape humans.

Some of you may still be wondering if certain animals used in the food industry really are capable about caring about what goes on in their lives. The webpage www.ARoutreach.org/ARintro6.html presents a fair amount of evidence from various scientific articles and other sources that shows that chickens, pigs, cows and at least some fish do in fact have complicated emotional lives which make it possible for them to care about what goes on in their lives and in the lives of others. There really is a lot of misconceptions out there regarding these animals. For instance, did you know that some fish teach each other what to eat and some fish protect their babies?

Many people assume that fish do not suffer very much in the fishing industry. This is definitely not true. The fish that are caught in the ocean and sold at stores are usually caught by ships that drag huge nets under water. The fish are then left to die in huge piles where they die miserable deaths by either not being able to breathe or by getting crushed by the fish on top of them. There are also a lot of fish that are confined in miserable conditions and then slaughtered. These fish are usually kept in very crowded netted areas on the coast or they are sometimes kept in very crowded concrete pools. These confinement areas are often called "fish farms" and a significant portion of fish that are sold come from these areas. You can read more about fish farms at www.fanweb.org/fishfarms.