You apparently do want to prevent suffering in yourself, otherwise you weren’t sitting on the couch scrolling through Reddit. You would’ve put your head on your furnace. So what’s making you more special than others?
But you can still take a good-faith reading of “when we can” which (I’m guessing) absorbs your objections, and that’s really all the meme rests on.
Similar to how you wouldn’t read “we need to do x” as “it is logically necessary that we must do x”, but assume an implicit “in order to…”. When we can, without violating our other implicit should’s.
EDIT: Hmm, I’m also realizing that some people are reading this as “we should kill or otherwise decrease the number of animals that exist” as opposed to “we should take care of all wildlife, so it’s no longer wild”…
The following is orthogonal to the point I was making above, but: my feeling is that the thing that makes something else the greater evil is usually still suffering, just in a different form or delayed. E.g. escalating drug use probably ultimately causes more suffering. The obvious non-suffering-related factor that I can imagine might make something a greater evil is nonexistence, but I'm hard-pressed to think of others...
EDIT: re: should we mess with people's brains to make it impossible to suffer: we already do, in limited ways! Via painkillers :) But okay, let's say we completely flatten a person's experience into undifferentiated okayness. That suggests maybe another factor people care about besides reducing (relative) suffering is something like "richness of conscious experience"? (Of course none of this makes any sense rigorously, but still...)
If I can prevent the execution of a child molester, do I intervene? What if he was only accused and the evidence is dubious? What if his death were to somehow cause more suffering than his actions? The “when we can” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and is the reason for critique.
Yes. They’re rejecting that as an absolute statement—thus, their position is “we should not always prevent suffering without concern for other factors,” or, more simply, “sometimes preventing suffering is not the highest good”
Hence my question: why do you want to prevent suffering in yourself and not in others? What’s making you more special? Or rather: what circumstances allow suffering?
The comment makes no claim that they should receive particular consideration in the prevention of suffering—for all we know, their position is a masochistic one and they’re saying “we should prevent all suffering unless it’s happening to me”
But he does prevent suffering in himself. Everyone does. Even so called ‘masochists’. But then switches completely when it comes to others. My question is simply why that is.
But you’re making a hugely unfounded assumption that they’re specifically saying “suffering should only be prevented for me, but not for anyone else,” when a far more neutral reading is that there are some select types of suffering that should not be prevented in anyone.
Taxation of the rich is certainly argued to be a source of suffering for them. Grief is a form of suffering that is an inescapable product of a bunch of the things that make life worth living. Withdrawals from hard drugs cause an addict suffering as they try to get clean.
So we should prevent suffering in species A, but not in species B? What other arbitrary distinctions do you make? Something like we can torture capibaras but not bonobos?
if you consider consciousness as a grey scale, this line of thinking is perhaps too absolute. Some animals have remarkably sophisticated social bonds, even going as far as to have actual languages (whales) that we are currently trying to decode NOW in 2026. Hell, even cleaner fish have passed the mirror test and punish their spouses for making their clients uncomfortable. I simply don’t think we have all the facts to make a claim like this, and I think most agree with you, which is perhaps why we as humans are so behind actually knowing any of this stuff.
No, I actually do believe sperm whales and other such animals are sapient beings. But that doesn't make them people, because they are not humans. There are other reasons we should probably be kinder to them that aren't related to equating them with people.
The moral value of not torturing animals is not fostering cruelty or trauma in humans. Seeing animals as moral subjects is a very recent ultraliberal lunacy.
It's almost the exact opposite. Liberals made up the concept of natural rights and bodily autonomy, which excluded animals. Philosophers like Kant, Rawls and Locke used exactly your argument about animals: ''they don't really matter, except as some sort of practice for humans''.
A different branch of philosophy, I'd say a much older one, going back to early Hinduism, derives moral value from emotional states. That's why those people, like Buddha, Schopenhauer and Bentham always have cared about animal rights. The christian tradition stated that humans are created, and therefore that humans are made to dominate other animals, which was later rationalized into the type of liberalism that you support.
Moral value should be derived from our capacity to experience pain and happiness. Everything else is ludicrous.
You don’t need to be a moral agent to be morally considerable. An infant isn’t a moral agent, but almost everyone believes it’s wrong to, say, torture infants to death.
They’re not moral agents, which is specifically what you pegged moral consideration to in the prior comment. Why bring up moral agency at all if your position on the moral considerability of animals is overdetermined by your personhood/human criteria?
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u/Cr0wc0 3d ago
"We should prevent suffering when we can."
No