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Environment
Is Harming Animals Ever Justifiable?
Stevan Harnad argues that humans should stop breeding and using animals.
Posted May 8, 2020
In late 2015, a new journal was founded that dedicated itself to the investigation of animal sentience: that is, the capacity of animals to experience subjective states such as pleasure or pain. Its official title: Animal Sentience.
What follows is Part Three of my interview with Dr. Stevan Harnad on the first four years of Animal Sentience. Click here for Part One.
Walter Veit: There has been a rapid improvement in our understanding of what harms and benefits nonhumans. Where do you locate the primary causes of harm to animals?
Stevan Harnad: The primary cause of harm to nonhuman animals is obviously and incontestably human animals. There is no second or third cause. All further causes are human-caused too (such as environmental degradation, habitat invasion, pollution, climate change, destruction of biodiversity, and the agony imposed on human-bred animals for human uses.
Walter Veit: How severe do you think are these harms? How urgent is it that we change our practices?
Stevan Harnad: The harm is catastrophic both to wildlife and to “livestock.” Nothing could be more urgent (for them). But the growing pandemic menace as well as climate change, pollution, and ecological damage are making it increasingly urgent for humans too.
Walter Veit: Equating our treatment of animals with the Holocaust has often been heavily criticized. What would you respond to these arguments and perhaps more generally those that deny any moral status to animals?
Stevan Harnad: I have likened the Eternal Treblinka we inflict on animals to the Holocaust too. The Holocaust is Humanity’s Greatest Crime Against Humanity. But the Eternal Treblinka we inflict on animals is Humanity’s Greatest Crime. The difference is obvious: Jews were slaughtered because they were Jews; animals are slaughtered for the taste. For the victims, it makes no difference.
Slaughtering humans is illegal; most humans would never do it, and most are against it. Slaughtering animals is legal, and most humans support and sustain it. The only basis for moral status is sentience (the capacity to feel). It is morally unjustifiable to cause harm except in the case of conflict of vital (life or death) necessity for survival. The horrors that humans inflict on animals today are not inflicted out of life or death necessity. Their motivation is not Darwinian but hedonic.
Walter Veit: To what extent is research in animal sentience built on the motivation to debunk the claim that animals lack mental lives like ours—and thus should be included in rather than excluded from our moral communities?
Stevan Harnad: Sentience can never be “proved,” even in humans, because of the “other minds problem.” Some of the research on sentience is to provide evidence that animals are sentient, i.e., that they can feel. But most scientists already know, from the evidence, that all vertebrates and probably all invertebrates can feel. The research on sentience is about what they can feel and do.
Whether organisms can feel only becomes a genuine scientific question in simple organisms that lack any nervous system, such as microbes and plants.
Walter Veit: Let's say you could freely design animal protection laws for 2040. What would your ideal scenario look like?
Stevan Harnad: It should be illegal to breed, own, use, or harm nonhuman animals except in cases of vital (life or death) necessity for survival. Further encroachment on the territory of wildlife should be illegal except in cases of vital (life or death) necessity for survival.
It would be unrealistic not to mention that laws are also needed to “flatten” and reduce the curve of human reproduction.
Walter Veit: I am unfamiliar with the debate on companion animals. Don't you think that at least some human-bred species greatly enjoy their lives with humans (I am here primarily thinking of dogs and cats)?
Stevan Harnad: Yes, some human-bred animals can lead happy lives under domestication. But most do not: The collateral damage of animal breeding (abuse, neglect, homelessness) is enormous.
The only justification for humans continuing to inflict this on present and future generations of animals is again hedonic, not moral.
Walter Veit: What do you think of the wild-animal suffering thesis? If it turns out that the "natural life" for most or many species is a "living hell"—would we have any obligations to interfere with these species?
Stevan Harnad: Darwinian evolution is amoral. “It” generated both sentience and suffering. (Pleasure (hedonics) is morally trivial.)
Evolution is not a moral agent. Humans are.
We are morally responsible for causing suffering as well as for failing to prevent suffering (except in case of vital [life or death] necessity for survival). We have already tampered (inadvertently as well as deliberately) with ecology, with disastrous results. It is even unclear whether we can now simply step back and stop tampering.
But the fact is that we have no idea how to intercede ecologically to minimize suffering.
And global utilitarian calculations about minimizing suffering are not only extremely speculative but so mechanical as to be almost amoral (“deer culls,” etc.).
Our primary moral obligation is to stop breeding and using animals and to stop encroaching on the little that is left of the wild.
