Philosophy for Animals

This article concerns the content of “Chapter 4: The harms of suffering, confinement, and death” in David DeGrazia‘s Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction.

Definitions: Types of Harm

Intrinsic harm: something that is harmful in and of itself

Instrumental harm: something that is harmful because of its consequences

See: Intrinsic vs. Instrumental Value

Before you can say much about how we should or should not treat animals in society, it’s important to be specific about what forms harm to animals can take and why these are harms.

In Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction, DeGrazia discusses three major categories of harm that are routinely caused to animals and explains why, precisely, these are harmful.

3 Harms to Animals

Suffering

Suffering can be used to describe, in general, an unpleasant mental state, like fear, anxiety, or pain. Suffering is both an intrinsic harm, because the experience feels inherently negative, and can also be an instrumental harm if it prevents an individual from pursuing their goals.

This is the least contentious of the three harms mentioned in this chapter, as it’s pretty easy for most people to see why it’s wrong to cause animals to suffer.

Confinement

DeGrazia defines confinement as “external constraints on movement that significantly interfere with one’s ability to live well“. Thus, confinement as a harm is specifically applicable to situations where the limitation of movement or action prevents the animal from having a good quality of life–such as in the situation of a goldfish in a small bowl.

This issue becomes thornier when weighing trade-offs between the safety and confinement of captivity, vs. the danger and freedom of the wild, most relevant in the debate over keeping animals in zoos. I will write another post about that most likely.

Death

This one, in my opinion, is the most important and harm out of the three. This is because most people do not seem to regard death as a harm for animals, even though we view it as a harm for humans.

As someone who is very passionate about veganism, I believe that even if you gave a cow the best life possible on a farm, it would still be wrong to kill and eat her. But why?

DeGrazia starts by discussing the theory that death is a harm because it violates someone’s desire to continue living. This can be referred to as the desire-based approach. And it’s present in a lot of common chants and rhetoric from vegans. (“Animals want to live! Just like us!”, “Can you humanely kill someone who doesn’t want to die?”, etc)

However, do animals really understand the concept of staying alive? Some may argue that they don’t have this concept–I personally believe that we can’t really say what they understand or not about death. Some people modify the desire-based approach to also include desires to accomplish future tasks that would be prevented by death. But there is a bigger problem with the desire-based approach.

DeGrazia outlines the hypothetical case of a newborn baby who dies painlessly in their sleep. The baby had no future plans, no understanding of death and thus no desire to remain alive, and they didn’t suffer–yet we still consider the baby to have been harmed.

Therefore, there must be something in addition to violating a desire to stay alive or a desire to accomplish future goals that makes death a harm. DeGrazia states, “death is an instrumental harm in so far as it forecloses the valuable opportunities that continued life would afford.”

On this view, death is harmful because of the very fact that it prevents future positive experiences that a sentient individual would have. This can be called the opportunities-based approach. The only situation where death would not be a harm according to the opportunities-based approach is if the individual a) did not want to live b) did not have any other desires that required staying alive and c) had a future dominated by negative rather than positive experiences.

Are Humans and Non-Humans Equally Harmed by Death?

In the discussion of death as a harm, DeGrazia states as a “cautious claim” that “ordinarily, death harms human beings more than it harms members of a large class of sentient beings including at least those animals ‘below’ mammals.”

The reasoning given for this is that humans have a greater range of experiences and thus lose more opportunities due to death, making the harm more significant.

I know I expressed an agreement with it in my post on equal consideration, but I started to have some doubts about this reasoning when reading this chapter. If we’re considering the harm of something, shouldn’t we look at it from the vantage point of the victim? If a chicken is killed, they lose everything they have known and all of their future possible opportunities. From the vantage point of the chicken, that is the biggest possible harm. Just because we as humans view our lives as superior due to our “more advanced” capabilities (I honestly am not of the belief that humans have better quality of life; I think our intelligence is a kind of curse, but that’s a discussion for another day), doesn’t mean that we can say that it’s inherently more harmful. It’s only more harmful from our standpoint. I’m not sure if that makes sense at all, but let me know in the comments if you have thoughts on this question.