Shriver, Adam - Minding Mammals

02/09/2007

Philosophical Psychology Vol 19 No 4 August 2006

Author mainly replies to one major objection in the ethics of humane treatment of animals. Proponents of treating animals as worthy of moral consideration often takes an 'analogy' argument: some animals are similar to us in the relevant ways, we deserve moral consideration, therefore animals do. First of all, for this to work with the prima facia badness of 'pain', we need to use a vaguely utilitarian model, not (probably) in a Kantian deontological model. The next problem is about how similar we want to get. This becomes difficult when dealing with 'pain', since there are varieties of pain-like responses that all sorts of animals display, but we don't want to give them moral consideration. (pg 435) A more sophisticaed objection is that it isn't just 'pain' that is prima facie morally bad, but pain that is attended to as unpleasantly painful. This might seem redundant but there are common psychological phenomena of dissociation between a painful feeling and an unpleasant feeling. For instance morphine users may report feeling pain but not 'minding' it. (Dennett points out how this is trouble for our folk conception of qualia)

Author uses science to reply. Recent work on pain pathways have found at least two, one 'lateral' and one 'medial'. The theory is that the lateral plays the part of reporting on a pain-like feeling (pain) and the medial, using the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), reports the unpleasantness of pain (suffering). Crudely, a distinction between pain and suffering. Data from various experiments are held to support this higher-level theory. Mammals have both pathways, therefore strengthening the argument by analogy. These two pathways are probably absent in birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish since those species lack neocortices, but there might be some sort of analogue we might discover.

The ACC also gets excited at a variety of times, example: social exclusion, human mothers hearing a baby cry, at the expectation of pain. Suffering without physical pain.

Author finally considers other skeptical arguments that animals aren't worthy of moral consideration because they don't have 'higher-order' conscisousness (Carruthers, Tye). This is not relevant.