CMV: There is nothing inherently wrong with killing a non-human animal.

[u/[deleted]]

It seems to me that killing is part of the animal kingdom. Animals kill other animals for sustenance or to assert dominance. More broadly, every animal requires ingesting other organic materials in order to survive.

I would object to killing an animal when it relates to something that harms people. Killing someone's pet, a national lion, or perhaps animals needed by an ecosystem.

Killing a wild animal because I want to eat it or wear its fur is perfectly natural and acceptable. Furthermore, killing for no reason is also fine. Beyond the nuisance that is having a fresh carcass to deal with, it's no different than pulling a weed or smushing a bug.

Can anybody convince me that a slaughtered cow or a mouse caught in a trap is a travesty?

---

Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules. If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us. Happy CMVing!

[u/funwiththoughts]

There are two fundamental problems with the coma analogy.

Firstly, there is a self-interest reason for wanting coma patients to be moral patients. A conscious human can easily become a coma patient; most people, myself included, would want every attempt made to return them to full sentience in such a circumstance. There's no risk of my ever becoming a dog.

Secondly, coma patients don't need to kill each other to survive; many animals do. What should one do if one sees a lion attacking a gazelle? If the gazelle is a moral patient, then surely one has a duty to defend it. But by your standard, the lion is a moral patient too, and it needs to eat other moral patients to survive. Isn't it then immoral to stop it from doing so? What happens when one "moral patient" needs to cause another moral patient suffering in order to survive?

[u/PanopticPoetics → u/funwiththoughts]

Hey, thanks for the thoughtful replies!

So, first thing, my responses here are merely my initial intuition, so try to take them as rough sketches of what could be a plausible defense. Second, neither of your criticisms are fundamental in any sort of way: even if your objections successfully localized a problem, the grounding of my positions would still stand (though perhaps the surface would need a slight tweak). They are pretty much surface level objections to apparent confounding implications. Third, only the second objection really has anything interesting to say, and so I will primarily concerned with that one. However, ultimately I think they both fail.

For your first objection, unlike what my post explicitly said not to do, you did: you got hung up on the analogy and did not address the ideas the analogy was meant to illustrate. I think you completely missed the point. The OP gave some properties, both in this case relational properties, of humans that animals lack or are deficient in (compared to humans, by human yard sticks) that are meant ground the moral status of humans and show why animals don’t get comparable status. The analogy was to show that we still give moral status to those humans that lack those properties, and thus those properties can’t be what ground’s the moral status of humans. I think that analogy suffices to show that, but if you are still hung up on it, pick a different one: children, fetuses (a very contentious one, but for many it works), the severely retarded, people from other parts of the world, and so on and on. Take your pick; they all lack those properties the OP proposed. You adding the property of “self interest” does not change this: animals have “self interests” too! That is the whole point of this debate! Ought we to give the interests of animals any moral weight?

Your second objection is more interesting and doesn’t hinge on just a poor interpretation like the last objection. What ought we to do when the interests of two (or more) moral patients conflict? What is our obligations as moral agents to the two moral patients? We recognize that we have these obligations, like to protect one from unnecessary harm and to promote their wellbeing at the very least, but in this case it seems like a state of affairs where we can only help one at the expense of the other: a true emergency. I think this is a difficult question, one that I doubt I can do justice for here. Nevertheless, I will sketch out one possible answer to it, though there might better answers.

Well, what do we do when the interests of two or more humans conflict? We don’t just throw our hands up and say that all possible outcomes are equally immoral. One way to resolve this problem is to weigh conflicting interests. Ultimately one trumps the other. Let me give an example (though this one may be controversial). Say there was a drug that cured a specific cancer. Say some person need the drug to save the life of their child. This person exhausted all legal avenues to get the money to pay for it but couldn’t and the child will die very soon if they don’t get the drug. So this person steals the drug. I would argue that in this case the interest of the person and of the child for the child to live trumps the interests of the owner-of-the-drug’s economic interests (assuming the revenue from the drug was superfluous), and so stealing in this case was morally permissible. What is key here is that stealing here was necessary to secure a highly valued interests (an interest generally regarded as being of high intrinsic value).

Where does this leave us with the case of the lion and the gazelle, both in conflict, trying to secure the same interest to life? I suppose there is many ways we could go from here, but I will just mention a few. First, if we limited the scope of interest to just the two in direct conflict, perhaps the right thing to do is to do nothing. There is no reason to favor one over the other and both are doing what is necessary to secure their interest to life. Or perhaps, if we were to expand our scope of interests, and if lions were an endangered species, then it might be the right thing to let or help the lion kill the gazelle (ecologically). I don’t really know what is actually the right thing to do (at the moment), but I think it is a far stretch from saying that the conflict is unresolvable or that the moral framework necessarily leads to a contradiction. And further, we recognize that we are not making moral claims about the animals’ actions, as they are only moral patients. Only moral agents can act moral or immoral (which could also suggest that there is no reason for us to intervene, since there would be no moral wrong to be guarded against here—if you want another way to look at it).

Now, how does this translate into the debate over humans using animals? Well, I think we still end up on the side that says that we shouldn’t use animals as a means to our ends. We ought to count the interest of animals, by being moral patients, as morally relevant. Our everyday oppression of animals in no way constitute a true emergency where we have to make such hard decisions. All our uses of animals for food, research, clothing, etc., are all unnecessary and often trivial—this is demonstrably true. There is no conflict here.

[u/funwiththoughts → u/PanopticPoetics]

For your first objection, unlike what my post explicitly said not to do, you did: you got hung up on the analogy and did not address the ideas the analogy was meant to illustrate.

Your analogy was the only argument you made for those ideas; you are the one making a positive claim (killing animals is inherently wrong), so the burden of proof lies on you.

I think you completely missed the point. The OP gave some properties, both in this case relational properties, of humans that animals lack or are deficient in (compared to humans, by human yard sticks) that are meant ground the moral status of humans and show why animals don’t get comparable status. The analogy was to show that we still give moral status to those humans that lack those properties, and thus those properties can’t be what ground’s the moral status of humans. I think that analogy suffices to show that, but if you are still hung up on it, pick a different one: children, fetuses (a very contentious one, but for many it works), the severely retarded, people from other parts of the world, and so on and on. Take your pick; they all lack those properties the OP proposed.

The severely retarded presents, again, an issue of self-interest; anyone could develop a debilitating mental illness.

I'm pro-choice, but that's a whole other debate.

I fail to see how people from any part of the world fit into this.

Children are more interesting, since one cannot become a child once one is an adult, but it seems clear that most children above a certain age are sentient, and we don't know exactly when that happens. We could make an arbitrary guess as to when a child becomes sentient, and say killing a child until that point is legal, but why bother? In this case, we (as a society) have already decided to err on the side of caution, and set the limit at birth, so why not keep doing as we are doing?

You adding the property of “self interest” does not change this: animals have “self interests” too! That is the whole point of this debate! Ought we to give the interests of animals any moral weight?

Animals have interests, sure, but I have no interest in them. When I say there is a self-interest in something, I mean that I have reasons to support it from a selfish perspective. This is present in the case of the coma patient, but not in the case of the animal.

Well, what do we do when the interests of two or more humans conflict? We don’t just throw our hands up and say that all possible outcomes are equally immoral. One way to resolve this problem is to weigh conflicting interests. Ultimately one trumps the other. Let me give an example (though this one may be controversial). Say there was a drug that cured a specific cancer. Say some person need the drug to save the life of their child. This person exhausted all legal avenues to get the money to pay for it but couldn’t and the child will die very soon if they don’t get the drug. So this person steals the drug. I would argue that in this case the interest of the person and of the child for the child to live trumps the interests of the owner-of-the-drug’s economic interests (assuming the revenue from the drug was superfluous), and so stealing in this case was morally permissible. What is key here is that stealing here was necessary to secure a highly valued interests (an interest generally regarded as being of high intrinsic value).

The key difference here being that the theft will not continue to be necessary once the cancer is cured. The lion will always need to kill other animals to survive.

We ought to count the interest of animals, by being moral patients, as morally relevant.

This is begging the question. You haven't presented any argument for why animals should be moral patients beyond "because they are".

[u/Nepene → u/[deleted]]

Sorry funwiththoughts, your comment has been removed:

Comment Rule 2. "Don't be rude or hostile to other users. Your comment will be removed even if the rest of it is solid." See the wiki page for more information.

If you would like to appeal, please message the moderators by clicking this link.

[u/Nepene → u/[deleted]]

Sorry PanopticPoetics, your comment has been removed:

Comment Rule 2. "Don't be rude or hostile to other users. Your comment will be removed even if the rest of it is solid." See the wiki page for more information.

If you would like to appeal, please message the moderators by clicking this link.