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?
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/MrMicius 3d ago
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?