Question Is it equally wrong to hurt a cow and human, if the pain experienced by each is equal?

Accepted:
June 17, 2010

Comments

Great question. A huge amount of thought is being devoted to the assessment of the mental life of nonhuman animal. Some (but I don't think a majority) philosophers still deny that we can rightly recognize (morally relevant) pain in beings without language, but I think it is quite reasonable to think that cows feel pain (given what appears to be pain-avoidance behavior, their brains and nervous system) even in the absence of language. So, let us grant that a human being and a cow can be hurt, they both can feel pain, and then ask whether if the hurt causes equal pain, then hurting the human and cow is equally wrong. There is some reason to think that we cannot draw that conclusion, because of factors that go beyond pain. Imagine a cow feels the same intensity of pain, you feel when someone slaps you (hard). The pain felt by the cow and you may be equal, but there could be more serious harms going on in your case (you have just been insulted or been betrayed by a friend or ..) that is not undergone by the cow. Being insulted or betrayed can be painful, but we often think of such harms in terms of suffering rather than, say, painful sensations. Similarly, compare another case in which harm has been done to a human and cow, there is equal pain, but not equal wrongness: imagine a human being robs someone and a policeman harms the wrong-doer in apprehending him (pain level L) and a cow experiences the same level of pain (L) through some accident (the cow receives a shock from an electric fens). In this case we might think that the pain inflicted on the robber was not morally wrong at all owing to the circumstances, but that the pain the cow experiences was worse (let's say the farmer should have used less voltage).

Question Is it equally wrong to hurt a cow and human, if the pain experienced by each is equal? Accepted:June 17, 2010

Question Is it equally wrong to hurt a cow and human, if the pain experienced by each is equal?

Accepted:
June 17, 2010