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Did you read the article? It attempts to explain why verifying "pain" is difficult: simply reacting to a stimulus is an unacceptably low bar, unless you're livi

Did you read the article? It attempts to explain why verifying "pain" is difficult: simply reacting to a stimulus is an unacceptably low bar, unless you're living your life believing that all the plants you've eaten and the bacteria you've soaped off your hands were murdered, so they're attempting more subtle analysis to pull back the curtain on the inner states of animals, point being that the inner state is what's necessary for pain.

throwanem 3y ago
> all the plants you've eaten and the bacteria you've soaped off your hands were murdered Yes. And? A few years ago I watched paper wasps hunt caterpillars to dismember alive and chew up into meatballs, then fly them home to feed their baby sisters. Would the wasps have been more virtuous to embrace pacifism, and let their sisters starve? Were the caterpillars ennobled by whatever suffering inheres in being torn apart? Was I wrong to document without interfering, or would I have been wrong to chase the wasps away? It was beautiful and hideous to watch, enough of both to beggar all the human concepts I know of how the world "should be". What I do know is that all life in this world subsists on death, and we are not so special as to escape that - not while we live and kill to eat, nor when we die and are eaten in our turn. That's not a question of should or shouldn't, just a statement of what is. Certainly it takes some reckoning with, at least for anyone who isn't satisfied merely to revel in base sadism. But it seems more ethically hazardous to try to establish a concept of which life it's permissible to kill and not care one way or another about it - "biological robots", one might perhaps say, forgetting this name has been given by humans to other humans well within living memory, and also that every such line we've drawn in the past we've gone on to rub out on "learning" - rediscovering, more like - that, no, this doesn't after all suffice to pretend we're not "really" killing, not in a way that counts.

throwanem 3y ago

> all the plants you've eaten and the bacteria you've soaped off your hands were murdered Yes. And? A few years ago I watched paper wasps hunt caterpillars to dismember alive and chew up into meatballs, then fly them home to feed their baby sisters. Would the wasps have been more virtuous to embrace pacifism, and let their sisters starve? Were the caterpillars ennobled by whatever suffering inheres in being torn apart? Was I wrong to document without interfering, or would I have been wrong to chase the wasps away? It was beautiful and hideous to watch, enough of both to beggar all the human concepts I know of how the world "should be". What I do know is that all life in this world subsists on death, and we are not so special as to escape that - not while we live and kill to eat, nor when we die and are eaten in our turn. That's not a question of should or shouldn't, just a statement of what is. Certainly it takes some reckoning with, at least for anyone who isn't satisfied merely to revel in base sadism. But it seems more ethically hazardous to try to establish a concept of which life it's permissible to kill and not care one way or another about it - "biological robots", one might perhaps say, forgetting this name has been given by humans to other humans well within living memory, and also that every such line we've drawn in the past we've gone on to rub out on "learning" - rediscovering, more like - that, no, this doesn't after all suffice to pretend we're not "really" killing, not in a way that counts.