Philosophical Vegan Forum

I feel this is something very important for me to answer. I've always made the assumption even as a meat eater before I was vegan that animals suffer a lot but now that I'm vegan I realize I have to justify this assumption with more hard evidence since a lot of the carnist I talk to claim we cant say conclusively how much animals suffer.

I try to tell them that its too big of a coincidence that the correlation of the animals responses to stimuli is so high and the explanation that animals suffer has no flaws that I know of. When ever I ask them what the flaws are with this explanation they cant think of any besides claiming I have no evidence. I ask this because the less flaws an explanation has and the more complicated the explanation, the more likely the explanation is to be true. Its like if I tell 100 lies versus 1 lie, your more likely to find flaws within my one hundred lies rather then the one lie assuming the lies are of the same degree.

So the explanation that animals suffer makes a lot of sense but everyone I talk to says we still cant conclusively say animals suffer. They tend to say that its not based on science and I'm using too much intuition. So then I say you have to be able to interpret what the facts say, not just what the data is, data doesn't tell you anything about how to interpret it. Then they tell me intuition is not a good way to discover truth, so I then say that we have start at some base level of intuition to get anywhere. Like its an intuition that A=A.

So I end up having to explain foundationalism in order to prove animals suffer but it just becomes a mess of a conversation and no one can follow it that I have talked to since not everyone is as interested in philosophy as me. So I'm wondering if anyone thinks there is any flaw within the way I prove animals suffer. I'm also asking for more simple ways to prove animals suffer without having to explain how I build my beliefs from the ground up.

We can not say "conclusively" to an absolute certainty anything empirical -- even things like that the moon orbits the Earth and that orbits the sun, or that anything even exists in any way like we assume.

If somebody will not grant moral consideration without "conclusive" proof, then solipsism can not be disproved and humans should not receive moral consideration either. What matters is knowledge to a moral certainty, which we have plenty of.

As to whether nonhuman animal suffering is based on science: it absolutely is. The scientific consensus is that many animals can suffer and experience affective states. See The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
wiki/index.php/Consensus

Dogmatic idiots of every stripe want to ignore scientific consensus when they don't like it and decide that they with no relevant education in the field know better than dozens, hundreds, or thousands of experts with multiple PhDs. This denialism ranges from denying nonhuman animal consciousness to denying global warming, even to denying evolution and claiming the Earth is only a few thousand years old. What these people are doing is no more honest or scientific than young Earth creationism -- however, denying animal sentience is more unethical than other forms of science denialism. Consider the following wager:

Nonhuman animals in question are sentient: If we treat them well we have done moral right AND we benefit (reducing climate change and reducing the chance of pandemics), if we treat them cruelly we have done moral wrong and we harm ourselves too (climate change, pandemics).

Nonhuman animals in question aren't sentient: If we treat them well we suffer no harm but actually benefit anyway (climate change, pandemics), if we treat them cruelly we've done no harm to animals but is to our detriment anyway (global warming, pandemics)

It makes sense in any case to treat them as if they are sentient even if we really didn't know (we actually do know to a moral certainty that they are sentient) because it doesn't harm us to do so and the consequences are beneficial to us in either case. Even just the possibility of sentience only adds to the reasons to treat nonhuman animals as such.

@brimstoneSalad
Right, I have heard of the source "the Cambridge declaration of consciousness". Ill have to bring that up next time I'm having this conversation with someone. If they think they can interpret the data on animal suffering better then experts on the subject, they have got a lot of explaining to do.

But when you bring up the point about how there are benefits to acting like animals suffer even if they don't, I feel like that could only lead people to be plant based and not necessarily vegan, so I think there are certain things that can only be argued through the scope of assuming animals suffer. Plant based eaters might have a steak on very few rare occasions with very little detriment to their health or the environment but vegans have a moral stance and wouldn't actually be vegan if they knowingly ate a steak once a year.

NickNack wrote:If they think they can interpret the data on animal suffering better then experts on the subject, they have got a lot of explaining to do.

In my experience, they will respond that those scientists are unqualified because they supposedly have not studied philosophy (I am not sure what is a convincing response to that). Or with "I don't care about sentience. Sentient beings are as common as dirt. We should care only about sapient beings." (to which I think bringing up the Moravec Paradox is a good response).

@t@teo123
Science is a particular kind of philosophy. They have studied philosophy since they studied science, which is just a version of philosophy. Science is all about the study of interpreting data, not just gathering data, because if you only found data with zero interpretation, the data would be useless, since you would have no logic to use on the data to come to any conclusions at all. So I think its safe to say scientist who are experts in their fields know a lot more about the philosophy that goes into their field then any well rounded philosopher who studies philosophy in general. They have a particular specialization in philosophy according to what kind of scientist they are.

NickNack wrote: ↑Sat Dec 12, 2020 9:20 pm @t@teo123
Science is a particular kind of philosophy. They have studied philosophy since they studied science, which is just a version of philosophy. Science is all about the study of interpreting data, not just gathering data, because if you only found data with zero interpretation, the data would be useless, since you would have no logic to use on the data to come to any conclusions at all. So I think its safe to say scientist who are experts in their fields know a lot more about the philosophy that goes into their field then any well rounded philosopher who studies philosophy in general. They have a particular specialization in philosophy according to what kind of scientist they are.

Well, I don't think most people would agree with that. When you say "philosophy of mind", most educated people think of Danel Dennett (who claims only human beings are conscious), rather than of somebody like Steven Pinker.
And, you know, I think I can see why a philosopher might deny the existence of animal consciousness. Philosophically, there seems little reason to believe in the mere existence of the material world. After all, thoguths and feelings obviously exist, but the physical world (including our brains) might well be an illusion. If our brains can be an illusion, there seems to be little reason to assume it evolved over hundreds of millions of years, much less that our mind somehow evolved with it. The point is, there are many philosophical positions you can take that seem coherent, but which seem to be incompatible with animal consciousness. Of course, they also seem to be incompatible with science.

@teo123
Can animals not be conscious and suffer similarly to us if the physical world isn't all there is? Does the evidence for animal consciousness and suffering not hold if I grant you for the sake of argument that the physical world isn't all there is and our minds didn't evolve?

NickNack wrote: ↑Sun Dec 13, 2020 2:18 pm @teo123
Can animals not be conscious and suffer similarly to us if the physical world isn't all there is? Does the evidence for animal consciousness and suffering not hold if I grant you for the sake of argument that the physical world isn't all there is and our minds didn't evolve?

Well, it is hard to tell. I think that, if we knew for certain that souls existed, it would be more likely that only humans have a soul than that other animals as well have a soul because an explanation involving fewer supernatural entities is simpler. A soul which only does high-level cognition (present only in humans) requires fewer supernatural interventions than one which does all cognition, and is thus a simpler explanation.

@teo123
Does something need a soul in order to be sentient if the physical world isn't all there is?

NickNack wrote: ↑Sun Dec 13, 2020 8:28 pm @teo123
Does something need a soul in order to be sentient if the physical world isn't all there is?

Well, I think that if we knew with reasonable certainty that only human beings had a soul, it would make some sense to only consider humans to be moral objects. Then the distinction between who deserves to be treated ethically and who does not made by people against animal rights would not be as arbitrary.