Suffering in Animals vs. Humans

Core claim

There is wide consensus that at least higher animals can consciously suffer, and even substantial doubt about this wouldn’t much affect expected-value calculations. The claim that humans suffer more intensely because of deeper emotional experience is questionable — raw pain represents a nontrivial fraction of the total badness of suffering — and even discounting animals wouldn’t much change the calculus given their extraordinary numbers relative to humans.

Provenance

First written summer 2012; last nontrivial update 14 August 2017.

Animal consciousness

• Nearly all modern scientists agree that at least mammals and birds are almost certainly conscious of their emotions; the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness is one clear expression of this consensus.
• Agnostics remain, some of them “noble in spirit.” The piece focuses on the exchange between Marian Stamp Dawkins (“Convincing the Unconvinced That Animal Welfare Matters”) and Marc Bekoff (“Dawkins’ Dangerous Idea: We Really Don’t Know If Animals Are Conscious”).
  • Dawkins urged advocates not to claim science knows animals are conscious, and to advance other reasons for caring — including human-centred ones.
  • Bekoff replied that this ignores too much of the existing case for animal consciousness.

Scientific certainty vs. practical action

• The key distinction is between certainty in science and certainty in ethics. Dawkins is right that science should stay sceptical and seek proof independent of existing assumptions.
• But saying we don’t know “for certain” misleads laypeople into assuming odds around 50%. Tomasik’s own estimates: >80% chance of chicken consciousness, >85% for pigs, against maybe 95% that another person is conscious.
• With odds like that it’s better to say the case is proved, since many people are unmotivated by anything short of absolute certainty. Emphasising scientific doubt hurts animals on average — compare what talking about uncertainty has done for the global-warming debate.

Evidence for animal consciousness

• Dawkins is correct that we don’t understand why animals are conscious — we don’t know why people are conscious either. Blindsight shows you can walk and avoid objects without being conscious of them. If we didn’t experience our own consciousness directly, we’d have scientific doubts about humans too.
• Behavioural studies of sophisticated, self-reflective behaviour are excellent evidence but not conclusive proof, since such tests can’t currently prove human consciousness either. (In future, once we understand how consciousness works, we should be able to assess it by looking at the brain and its algorithms.)
• The strongest reason is evolutionary and neural: animals are close to us on the evolutionary tree and their brain structures are remarkably similar.
  • Griffin & Speck (2004): “the search for neural correlates of consciousness has not found any consciousness-producing structure or process that is limited to human brains.”
  • Berridge & Kringelbach (2012): hedonic brain mechanisms are largely shared between humans and other mammals; the neural similarity indicates an early phylogenetic appearance of pleasure circuits and their conservation, including deep brain circuits, in later species.
• On this basis, 50% is too low as a probability for mammal and bird consciousness.

Should we use other arguments to help animals?

• Making people care about animals for human-welfare reasons: Tomasik would push a button to do it, but ranks it low among priorities for scarce advocacy resources.
• Short-term gains are good, but to prevent future humans from multiplying wild-animal suffering into the galaxy, our descendants must actually care about animals — coincidence between animal and human interests today isn’t guaranteed to persist.
• He does endorse one Dawkins line: remaining “militantly agnostic if necessary” keeps alive the possibility that a large number of species have conscious experiences, not just the clever or overtly emotional ones. His complaint is only that among the general public the language of uncertainty confuses and demotivates.

Is animal suffering less bad than human suffering?

• The objection: even granting that animals suffer, they may suffer less intensely for lack of high-level mental suffering.
• First response — the premise is doubtful, at least for “higher” animals:
  • Animals show many of the psychopathologies humans do and are used as models for depression in drug testing.
  • Elephants have death rituals; crows appear to go sledding for fun.
  • Bekoff, Balcombe and other ethologists have documented complex emotional lives in mammals, birds, fish and even octopuses.
• Second response — how much less? Probably not orders of magnitude. If not, the basic calculation showing that animal welfare takes priority at the margin still holds.
  • Thought experiment: a chicken being scalded and drowned in a boiling defeathering tank. How much less bad would that be without broader thoughts about the end of one’s life, the injustice of the situation, missing one’s friends? The raw physical pain would likely overwhelm those subsidiary thoughts in the moment — and even if not, the higher-level thoughts wouldn’t be vastly stronger than the raw pain.
• Third response — understanding sometimes reduces suffering. A human with food poisoning knows the agony will end in a day or two and that friends and family will help; an animal in the same state may have no idea what is happening, whether it will end, or what will become of its life.
• Tomasik adds a subjective observation (possibly illusory): his daily experiences feel less emotional, and hence less morally important on a hedonistic view, as an adult than as a child, when he had less ability to regulate his emotional state.
• Rolls (2008) is quoted on the other side: in humans grief may be particularly potent because it is represented in a system that can plan ahead and understand the enduring implications of loss — though verbal reflection can also help identify alternative reinforcers and realise consequences may not be as bad as feared.
• Framing caveat: modern humans live extremely comfortable lives compared with factory-farmed or wild animals, so it isn’t surprising that our worst memories are mostly of purely emotional injury.
• Regardless of where the relative-magnitude question settles, Tomasik doesn’t think it likely to tip calculations about where dollars and hours do the most good.

Importance of self-awareness?

• LeDoux and Brown (2017) treat a representation of self as crucial for emotion: “Without the self there is no fear or love or joy… no you, no emotion.” The self is the glue tying multidimensional integrated representations together.
• Tomasik’s objection: strong emotions like pain are mostly a message of “bad thing happening now!”; situating the pain within a concept of me as the experiencer is icing on the cake. What matters most is the strong motivation pain produces, and that motivation doesn’t seem to depend significantly on a self-concept.
• LeDoux and Brown further invoke Tulving’s claim that autonoetic consciousness is exclusive to humans, so that other animals could have noetic states about being in danger but — lacking self-involvement — these would not be emotions.
• Tomasik’s response: even if true for some sufficiently specific notion of autonoetic consciousness, it seems overly parochial to count only those kinds of minds as having emotions.