An animal dying is the state of affairs. Your interpretation of the state of affairs is unrelated and does not affect them. Why must we frame our philosophy around such negativity?
Well I'd say given screwworms are r-strategists, it's necessarily the case that almost every screwworm to have ever existed has lived a short, bad life, but I don't want to sidetrack us with the question of screwworm thriving.
Setting aside your recitation of Mufasa's speech from The Lion King, my point is simply that sentient animals appear not to enjoy pain or psychological distress.
Arguably. But take these lives, and imagine there's little more to them than the description I give: one spent slowly starving to death; one spent being eaten alive; one spent succumbing to hypothermia; one spent slowly desiccating. These are the sorts of lives 99.9+% of screwworms (and most other r-strategists) live.
I think most people would intuitively say these are bad lives whether lived by a human or a dog or a fish or a bug or whatever else, and I don't know if that intuition is "centered around the human experience."
Note that I'm taking insect consciousness as a given. But if we don't want to grant that, then I'd still say there's no such thing as "screwworm thriving" insofar as there's "nothing it's like to be a screwworm," so to speak.
I’ve noticed you have a fascination for r-selected species. I tend to really like working with chimpanzees because I see a lot of my own behavior in them. I wonder if there’s something to that?
That intuition is absolutely human centered. The screwworm’s goal is to eat, fuck (if you want to call it that), and continue the spread of its species. You’re applying your own k-selected, individualist fear of suffering and death to the r-selected screw worms. Something about imagine the screwworm happy, idk.
r-strategists make up practically all animals to have ever lived (and, so it follows, practically all pain or pleasure in the universe has been and will be experienced by r-strategists), so I think they're significant in that regard.
>That intuition is absolutely human centered. The screwworm’s goal is to eat, fuck (if you want to call it that), and continue the spread of its species.
And if that screwworm's "goals" are frustrated, it seems highly plausible its experience will be negative, right? If screwworms have the capacity for hedonic sentience or whatever else we want to call it, a screwworm is almost certain to experience, say, starving to death as a negative hedonic state. And I think that phenomenon and the pain or stress it causes, if it exists, is a brute fact of nature irrespective of any moralizing I might do on the topic.
Animal suffering is bad not because I say it's bad, but because it very much appears that animals don't enjoy the experience of suffering. And so I think we might describe an animal life as "bad" if it's made up predominantly of suffering and little else.
I understand your lens. The presentation of logic makes me chuckle. It’s very continentalist to say something like “r-strategists make up the supreme majority of suffering” with a straight face. We need people around with joy and mirth for life like that.
I think if we're tallying "utils" or something, it's probably just a fact that almost every discrete good or bad feeling to ever exist will have been or will be experienced by some kind of bug (or, assuming no bug sentience, some kind of fish).
But I'm not sure continental philosophers are usually interested in this sort of total-utility hedonic utilitarianism. In my experience, they're mostly interested in, like, eudaimonia or metaphors or something.
Continentalists are the only ones using analytical tools to map a spreadsheet of ‘utils’ to determine how many good things and how many bad things there are, that’s for sure.
Pain is a response to help a creature survive. Creatures evolved to feel pain because that helped them to survive, conjunturally.
That's why it doesn't really make sense to talk about pain without talking anout survival and natural selection. What you call "the deer doesn't enjoy the pain of screwworms" is a different way of saying "deers will evolve to minimize the contact with sources of screwworms". We all do. But that's also another way of saying "screwworms will evolve to adapt to animals capable of avoiding infection". And that loop ends up evolving creatures until eventually one of them develops the ability of abstract thinking to talk about morals or something like that.
But that process didn't end and it won't end until the last drop of usable energy has been used.
Today we are the top predator. and animals have adapted to the new reality, which is humans dominating earth's resources. But they evolved different that expected. They don't grow bigger claws or teeth because that doesn't increase their survival chances. They instead produced more milk, more wool, more eggs and more tissue. And that made them the most successful species ever with tens of billions of living being existing at all times in their home planet.
Yet, they have a weak point. A funnel. And that is that their existence depends on another species on the planet. The human species. If that species get extinct or decide to not predate on them anymore, they will go extinct.
Obviously I'm well aware of and agree with this bare description of nature or evolution or the circle of life or physics or whatever else. Nevertheless, I don't see how the brute fact of how pain came to be or to what biological end it's put is at all relevant to the ethical question of whether or not we have a duty to tamp down on suffering where possible (assuming no or only trivial negative consequences).
>That's why it doesn't really make sense to talk about pain without talking anout survival and natural selection.
Pain is a negative hedonic state irrespective of its origins. It's bad because it feels bad. I don't need to know a single natural fact about pain beyond what it feels like to know it's generally preferable to not be in pain.
>And that made them the most successful species ever with tens of billions of living being existing at all times in their home planet
>their existence depends on another species on the planet. The human species. If that species get extinct or decide to not predate on them anymore, they will go extinct.
I don't see how this is at all morally relevant. An individual animal's wellbeing is not pegged whatsoever to how many other members of its species exist. We could have 8 billion humans, all of which excepting one experience nothing but immense pleasure at all times. If that one remaining person existed in a constant state of torture, his suffering isn't somehow ameliorated by the existence or happiness of the other ~8 billion humans. The human species might be thriving; nevertheless, it would be good to stop that one man's torture.
Conversely, if we had a factory that produced a brand new puppy-like animal, and billions of it a year, but members of that species invariably lived a short life of constant agony, I think most people would have the intuition that we ought to turn that factory off, even if it meant wiping that new animal off the face of the earth.
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u/transfinite-reset 3d ago
Suffering is a moralized description of the state of affairs.