For some time, I've been thinking about human vs animal experience (that is, the experience of other non-human animals). In particular, I'm interested in animal pain. It's plainly obvious that many animals feel pain. It's less obvious whether animals feel pain in the same way that we do, and whether animal pain counts for as much, ethically speaking, as human pain. Given that this is clearly an important question for the issue of how we treat animals, I'd like to understand it better. (More immediately, my post is inspired by some recent research on crabs as reported on the BBC.)
One view that I'm attracted do, and which I'd like to explore further, is that humans feel pain in a way that is somehow essentially rational. That is to say, in very rough terms, that the various rational responses that we have to certain sensations, such as feelings of anxiety, striving to remove the source of the pain, thinking that this is a bad situation to be in etc., are partly constitutive of pain as experienced by humans. In support of this view, I offer the following thought experiment.
- Geoffrey Ferrari's blog
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