The Guardian 8/6/05: All beings that feel pain deserve human rights - Equality of the species is the logical conclusion of post-Darwin morality

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1543755,00.html

 

Comment

 

All beings that feel pain deserve human rights

 

Equality of the species is the logical conclusion of post-Darwin morality

 

Richard Ryder

Saturday August 6, 2005

The Guardian

 

The word speciesism came to me while I was lying

in a bath in Oxford some 35 years ago. It was

like racism or sexism - a prejudice based upon

morally irrelevant physical differences. Since

Darwin we have known we are human animals related

to all the other animals through evolution; how,

then, can we justify our almost total oppression

of all the other species? All animal species can

suffer pain and distress. Animals scream and

writhe like us; their nervous systems are similar

and contain the same biochemicals that we know

are associated with the experience of pain in

ourselves.

 

Our concern for the pain and distress of others

should be extended to any " painient " -

pain-feeling - being regardless of his or her

sex, class, race, religion, nationality or

species. Indeed, if aliens from outer space turn

out to be painient, or if we ever manufacture

machines who are painient, then we must widen the

moral circle to include them. Painience is the

only convincing basis for attributing rights or,

indeed, interests to others.

 

Many other qualities, such as " inherent value " ,

have been suggested. But value cannot exist in

the absence of consciousness or potential

consciousness. Thus, rocks and rivers and houses

have no interests and no rights of their own.

This does not mean, of course, that they are not

of value to us, and to many other painients,

including those who need them as habitats and who

would suffer without them.

 

Many moral principles and ideals have been

proposed over the centuries - justice, freedom,

equality, brotherhood, for example. But these are

mere stepping stones to the ultimate good, which

is happiness; and happiness is made easier by

freedom from all forms of pain and suffering

(using the words " pain " and " suffering "

interchangeably). Indeed, if you think about it

carefully you can see that the reason why these

other ideals are considered important is that

people have believed that they are essential to

the banishment of suffering. In fact they do

sometimes have this result, but not always.

 

Why emphasise pain and other forms of suffering

rather than pleasure and happiness? One answer is

that pain is much more powerful than pleasure.

Would you not rather avoid an hour's torture than

gain an hour's bliss? Pain is the one and only

true evil. What, then, about the masochist? The

answer is that pain gives him pleasure that is

greater than his pain!

 

One of the important tenets of painism (the name

I give to my moral approach) is that we should

concentrate upon the individual because it is the

individual - not the race, the nation or the

species - who does the actual suffering. For this

reason, the pains and pleasures of several

individuals cannot meaningfully be aggregated, as

occurs in utilitarianism and most moral theories.

One of the problems with the utilitarian view is

that, for example, the sufferings of a gang-rape

victim can be justified if the rape gives a

greater sum total of pleasure to the rapists. But

consciousness, surely, is bounded by the

boundaries of the individual. My pain and the

pain of others are thus in separate categories;

you cannot add or subtract them from each other.

They are worlds apart.

 

Without directly experiencing pains and pleasures

they are not really there - we are counting

merely their husks. Thus, for example, inflicting

100 units of pain on one individual is, I would

argue, far worse than inflicting a single unit of

pain on a thousand or a million individuals, even

though the total of pain in the latter case is

far greater. In any situation we should thus

concern ourselves primarily with the pain of the

individual who is the maximum sufferer. It does

not matter, morally speaking, who or what the

maximum sufferer is - whether human, non-human or

machine. Pain is pain regardless of its host.

 

Of course, each species is different in its needs

and in its reactions. What is painful for some is

not necessarily so for others. So we can treat

different species differently, but we should

always treat equal suffering equally. In the case

of non-humans, we see them mercilessly exploited

in factory farms, in laboratories and in the

wild. A whale may take 20 minutes to die after

being harpooned. A lynx may suffer for a week

with her broken leg held in a steel-toothed trap.

A battery hen lives all her life unable to even

stretch her wings. An animal in a toxicity test,

poisoned with a household product, may linger in

agony for hours or days before dying.

 

These are major abuses causing great suffering.

Yet they are still justified on the grounds that

these painients are not of the same species as

ourselves. It is almost as if some people had not

heard of Darwin! We treat the other animals not

as relatives but as unfeeling things. We would

not dream of treating our babies, or mentally

handicapped adults, in these ways - yet these

humans are sometimes less intelligent and less

able to communicate with us than are some

exploited nonhumans.

 

The simple truth is that we exploit the other

animals and cause them suffering because we are

more powerful than they are. Does this mean that

if those aforementioned aliens landed on Earth

and turned out to be far more powerful than us we

would let them - without argument - chase and

kill us for sport, experiment on us or breed us

in factory farms, and turn us into tasty

humanburgers? Would we accept their explanation

that it was perfectly moral for them to do all

these things as we were not of their species?

 

Basically, it boils down to cold logic. If we are

going to care about the suffering of other humans

then logically we should care about the suffering

of non-humans too. It is the heartless exploiter

of animals, not the animal protectionist, who is

being irrational, showing a sentimental tendency

to put his own species on a pedestal. We all,

thank goodness, feel a natural spark of sympathy

for the sufferings of others. We need to catch

that spark and fan it into a fire of rational and

universal compassion.

 

All of this has implications, of course. If we

gradually bring non-humans into the same moral

and legal circle as ourselves then we will not be

able to exploit them as our slaves. Much progress

has been made with sensible new European

legislation in recent decades, but there is still

a very long way to go. Some international

recognition of the moral status of animals is

long overdue. There are various conservation

treaties, but nothing at UN level, for example,

that recognises the rights, interests or welfare

of the animals themselves. That must, and I

believe will, change.

 

… Dr Richard Ryder was Mellon Professor at Tulane

University, New Orleans, and has been chairman of

the RSPCA council; he is the author of Painism: A

Modern Morality, and his new book, Putting

Morality Back into Politics, will be published by

Academic Imprint in 2006

 

ianmerrett

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