This long essay, “A Theory of Human Dignity,” presents and defends a general theory of human dignity, with special attention paid to spelling out its background metaphysics, formulating and justifying a basic set of dignitarian moral principles, and critically addressing hard cases for the theory.
“A Theory of Human Dignity” is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download, read, and/or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.
This eighteenth installment contains section V.3.2.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. Refuting the Dignity-Skeptic and Debunking a Dignity-Debunking Argument
III. The Metaphysics of Human Dignity
III.2 Real Persons and Minded Animals
III.3 A Metaphysical Definition of Real Personhood
IV. Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
IV.0 How Nonideal Can a World Be?
IV.2 How to Solve the Universalizability and Rigorism Problems
IV.3 How to Solve the Problem of Moral Dilemmas
IV.4 Policy of Truth: The Murderer-at-the-Door Revisited
IV.5 One Last Thing, By Way of Concluding This Section
V. Some Hard Cases For Broadly Kantian Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
V.0 How Hard Can Hard Cases Be?
V.1 Abortion and Infanticide: Introduction
V.1.1 The Neo-Person Thesis, Neo-Persons, and Non-Persons
V.1.2 A Five-Step Argument for the Neo-Person Thesis
V.3 Non-Human Animals and Their Associate Membership in The Realm of Ends
V.3.1 Real Persons and Different Species
V.3.2 Pain and Suffering
VI. Enacting Human Dignity and The Mind-Body Politic
VII. Conclusion
V.3.2 Pain and Suffering
The available psychological, neurobiological, and ethological evidence strongly suggests that all minded animals, whether human or non-human, experience pain.[i] Now what medical researchers and cognitive neuroscientists call nociception is the neurobiological process underlying the experience of pain in suitably complex living organisms. By contrast, what I’ll neologistically call “nociperception” is the experience of pain in minded animals. Given The Deep Consciousness Thesis, and given the notion of minimal sentience, all nociception entails at least minimal nociperception.
Nociperception, as I am understanding this notion, is the experience of a minded animal in direct response to tissue damage or neurobiological systemic disruption caused by various intrusive exogenous stimuli such as burns, cuts, and collisions, or by various noxious endogenous stimuli including relatively enduring conditions such as disease or neurosis, and more temporary conditions such as migraine or emotional distress. Or in other words, nociperception is the direct, intimate, and endogenous—and, in the case of sentient, fully minded animals, reflexive or self-referring—witness to the fact that a minded animal is being harmed. Sentient, fully minded nociperception also includes an egocentric centering of pain in the essentially embodied conscious animal subject. But even proto-sentient or simple minded nociperception includes some sort of non-centered, or relatively unfocused, feeling of pain.
In sentient, fully minded animals, nociperception is almost always, but not necessarily—for reasons we shall see shortly—something that the subject of pain-experience does not want. The normal unwantedness of experienced pain is not surprising, however. The overall function of nociperception is to detect exogenous or endogenous damage, disruption, or distress, and thereby to witness the fact of harm to the living organism: hence the subjective experience of pain directly, intimately, and reflexively witnesses the fact that something bad is happening to the minded animal. Nevertheless this function can be disrupted. For example, in the relatively rare case of congentital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, or CIPA, it is possible for subjects to be exogenously damaged and harmed without actually having the subjective experience of pain, or being in nociperceptual states.[ii] It is also worth noticing, however, that subjects with CIPA can also subjectively experience endogenously-generated nociperception, for example, emotional distress, hence CIPA is consistent with the general thesis that all minded animals experience pain.
It’s empirically known that both the degree and also the specific character of nociperception are not wholly determined by the amount of tissue damage or neurobiological systemic disruption, but instead, in self-conscious or self-reflective, hence rational, human minded animals at least, are partially determined by other factors such as anxiety-level, attention, prior experience, and suggestion.[iii] This is what I will call the subject-dependency of self-conscious pain. Moreover it’s widely held by contemporary philosophers of mind (although it is of course not wholly uncontroversial) that the causal-functional characterization of pain—that is, pain as characterized abstractly and relationally in terms of the overall pattern of causal transitions from sensory and behavioral stimulus inputs to the minded animal, through the specific neurobiological constitution of the animal, to behavioral outputs from the minded animal—can be held fixed, while systematically varying, across the actual world as well as across logically and metaphysically possible worlds, the specific neurobiological constitution of the minded animal.[iv] This is what I’ll call the multiple realizability of pain. Finally, it’s also widely held by contemporary philosophers of mind (although, again, it’s of course not wholly uncontroversial) that the specific phenomenal character of the subjective experience of pain can be held fixed, while systematically varying, again across the actual world as well as across logically and metaphysically possible worlds, the causal-functional characterization of pain.[v] This is what I’ll call the multiple functionality of pain.
Nociperception, whether proto-sentient/simple minded, sentient/fully minded, or self-conscious/self-reflective, also needs to be distinguished from pain-behavior. Behavior in general is how a minded animal moves or orients its own living body, or at least is disposed to move or orient its own living body, in response to exogenous or endogenous stimuli. Pain-behavior in particular is the characteristic set of dispositions for unlearned or uncultivated species-specific behavioral responses to tissue damage or neurobiological systemic disruption. Correspondingly, it seems clearly correct to hold that necessarily, other things being equal, if a minded animal is “in” pain, or experiencing pain—that is, is in a nociperceptual state—then it will also either occurrently exhibit or at least be disposed to exhibit the characteristic pain-behavior of its species.[vi]
This necessary truth about pain-behavior also implies, in turn, that pain-behavior is, under some special enabling conditions, a reliable indicator of nociperception. But nociperception is not, strictly speaking, identical to pain-behavior; nor is pain-behavior a strictly sufficient condition of nociperception. This is because when other things are not equal and the special enabling conditions are not satisfied, it is logically and also really possible for a minded animal or indeed even an entire species of minded animals, to be in pain, or experience pain, and thereby be in nociperceptual states, but fail occurrently to exhibit, or even to be disposed to exhibit, the characteristic pain-behavior of its species.[vii] Conversely, even when other things are equal, it remains logically and also really possible for all the members of that species to fake pain by exhibiting the relevant pain-behavior, without actually also experiencing pain or being in a nociperceptual state. So pain-behaviorism is false.
This brings me to a crucial distinction between (i) bodily nociperception, the experience of pain in a minded animal’s own living body, and (ii) suffering, self-conscious or self-reflective emotional pain.
Bodily nociperception is pain-experience that is phenomenologically spatially localized in some part or parts of the minded animal’s own living body for a certain definite duration of time, and also has a bodily cause. The actual bodily cause of bodily nociperception might not be spatially localized in the same area in which that bodily nociperception is phenomenologically spatially localized. This is vividly evident, for example, when the experience of pain is phenomenologically spatially localized in a “phantom limb.” Nevertheless, bodily nociperception is necessarily always phenomenologically spatially localized somewhere or another in the minded animal’s own living body, or, in the case of self-conscious/self-reflective minded animals like rational human minded animals, in its body-image.[viii] Furthermore, all bodily nociperception has a bodily cause, in the sense that some event inside or at the surface of the minded animal’s living body is a sufficient condition, under some psychological-cum-neurobiological law—and in particular, a law that is “hedged” or ceteris paribus[ix]—of an episode of pain-experience that is not earlier than the first event. Nevertheless, given the subject-dependency of conscious pain, the degree of nociperception may be altogether out of proportion to the actual extent of tissue damage or neurobiological systemic disruption. Bodily nociperception is also multiply realizable and multiply functional. For example, it is both logically and also really possible for human minded animals and bats to have the same causally-functionally characterized type of bodily nociperception, by being burned or cut; and it is also logically and really possible for the same subjective experience of bodily pain to have different causal-functional characterizations and thereby play different causal-functional roles, for example, the ordinary subjective experience of being burned or cut vs. masochism.
Suffering, by a categorical contrast, is the self-conscious or self-reflective emotional pain of a rational minded animal or real person, which may or may not also involve any bodily nociperception. Suffering therefore need not necessarily be spatially phenomenologically localized—although suffering is always experienced during a certain definite duration of time—and need not necessarily have a bodily cause that is also the cause of bodily pain. Like bodily nociperception in self-conscious/self-reflective minded animals, suffering too is (i) subject-dependent, which means that the degree or specific character of suffering is partially dependent on anxiety-level, attention, prior experience, and suggestion, (ii) multiply realizable, since Great apes, other primates, perhaps dolphins, and conceivably Martians—or, slightly closer to home, species-wise, the “Nexus VI replicants” of Ridley Scott’s classic 1982 science fiction film Bladerunner—can suffer too, and (iii) multiply functional, since the same subjective experience of suffering can play different causal-functional roles: for example, there are suffering-masochists, just as there are bodily-pain-masochists. Moreover, both bodily nociperception and suffering can at least sometimes be alleviated by drugs: sometimes by the same drug (for example, alcohol), although usually by different ones (for example, ibuprofen vs. anti-depressants). Yet both suffering and bodily nociperception cannot always be alleviated by drugs. Certain kinds of emotional pain are remarkably resistant to pharmacological remedy, and there are also certain kinds of awful “central” bodily nociperception that are similarly drug-resistant—although they may still respond to neurosurgery.
In human real persons, bodily nociperception can materially constitute suffering, which is to say that in higher-level or Kantian rational minded human animals, aka human moral agents, there can be a spatiotemporal coincidence and also a metaphysical dependence relation—more specifically, a grounding relation—between the subject’s phenomenologically localized self-conscious/self-reflective bodily nociperception and the cause of suffering. For example, I can suffer when my right leg hurts and just because my right leg has been damaged. But in principle, that token experience of suffering could have been spatiotemporally coincident with another different phenomenologically localized bodily nociperception, and similarly with a different token of that type of suffering: I might have identically suffered, whether it was my left leg or my right leg that was hurting (so token suffering can be preserved under phenomenological enantiomorphism in the animal body); and I might have suffered in just the same way, whether it was my leg or arm or head that was hurting (so type suffering can be preserved under change of phenomenological spatial localization in the animal body).
This points up the absolutely crucial fact that bodily nociperception is not necessarily equivalent with suffering, despite the obvious fact that bodily nociperception and suffering very often go together. It’s possible to experience mild or intense bodily nociperception but not suffer at all—for example, high performance athletes, women during childbirth, professional dancers, solitary masochists, consensual sadomasochistic sex-partners, ancient Greek Stoics, and so-on. Indeed, for at least some of these people, at least some of the time, the specific character of the experience of pain is positively and self-consciously needed or wanted.
Conversely, it’s also possible to suffer mildly or intensely but not be in any sort of bodily nociperceptual state—for example, extreme embarrassment, extreme shyness, guilt, jealousy, extreme disappointment, anxiety, fear, depression, and also the kind of suffering that is the result of certain forms of emotional trauma such as rejection, betrayal, loss of a loved one, etc.—which might be collectively called grief. It’s of course true that extreme embarrassment, extreme shyness, guilt, jealousy, extreme disappointment, anxiety, fear, depression, and grief can also be combined with bodily nociperception, just as they are usually combined with bodily reactions like flushing, heart palpitations, shivers, turning pale, or sweating. My point is simply that the various forms of suffering are not strictly always or necessarily combined with the experience of bodily pain, just as they need not strictly always or necessarily be combined with flushing, heart palpitations, shivers, turning pale, or sweating.
Does the non-equivalence of bodily nociperception and suffering still seem implausible to you? Let me try another line of argument. The same basic point can also be indirectly made by recalling the necessary ceteris paribus connection between being in pain or experiencing pain and pain-behavior: necessarily, other things being equal, if a minded animal is in pain or experiences pain, then it will also exhibit the pain-behavior of its species. Now think of, or imagine, what a human minded animal who is in a considerably intense nociperceptual state and also intensely suffering looks like and behaves like—for example, someone being tortured—and then contrast that with what a human minded animal who is in a relevantly similar sort of considerably intense nociperceptual state and yet not suffering at all looks like and behaves like—for example, long distance runners or consensual sadomasochistic sex-partners. Correspondingly, again think of, or imagine, what a human minded animal who is in a considerably intense nociperceptual state and also intensely suffering looks like and behaves like—for example, again, someone being tortured—and then contrast that with what the behavior of a human minded animal who is not in any sort of bodily pain and yet also intensely suffering to a relevantly similar degree looks like and behaves like—for example, someone wracked with guilt. In each pair of cases, I think, the manifest visual and behavioral differences are radically sharp. This in turn strongly suggests that the conceptual distinction between bodily nociperception and suffering is something that we all clearly and unreflectively recognize in everyday life. For example, the human figure represented in Breckwoldt’s sculpture Prüfung is instantly and unreflectively recognizable as someone suffering but by no means necessarily in bodily pain, i.e., by no means necessarily experiencing a conscious nociperceptual episode.
So far I‘ve been using, as a preliminary general characterization of suffering, that it’s the self-conscious or self-reflective emotional pain of a rational minded animal or real person. But what, more specifically, is suffering? My broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory-based view is that, as opposed to mere bodily nociperception, suffering essentially expresses a self-conscious or self-reflective rational minded animal’s direct, intimate, endogenous, and reflexive sense of harm to the constitution of its own will and to its own real personhood. All experience of pain directly, intimately, and endogenously witnesses a minded animal’s being harmed. But, more specifically, real personal suffering directly, intimately, and reflexively witnesses a self-conscious or self-reflective real person’s being harmed in its own capacity for intentional agency—hence “where it really hurts” or “right where she lives”—that might or might not also involve bodily harm.
In other words, my suffering witnesses the fact that I am being harmed in respect of what I self-consciously or self-reflectively care about and want most deeply. To suffer is to subjectively experience emotional pain for a practical reason. This isn’t to say that I always self-consciously or self-reflectively represent that practical reason to myself, that I’m always at that time choosing or acting on that reason, or even that, recognizing that reason, I am always prepared to adopt it henceforth as mine. Indeed, the cause of suffering is very often brutally or brutely imposed upon us, altogether against our wills, and without self-consciousness or self-reflection, for example, in the sufferings of those in the grip of a non-catastrophic but irremediable mental illness. And suffering is rarely, if ever, the result of self-conscious or self-reflective deliberation and future planning—although it seems at least barely conceivable, but perhaps no more than that, that someone could plan to suffer. Nevertheless, it remains true that at least in principle I can understand the reason why I’m suffering. More generally, it remains true of all self-conscious and self-reflective higher-level or Kantian human real persons like us, aka human moral agents, that there’s always a certain minimal sense in which we choose to suffer, in that suffering is always both motivated and justified by reasons which, at least in principle, we can become self-consciously and self-reflectively aware of, which we can understand, and which we can self-consciously and self-reflectively either adopt or reject as our own.
This line of thinking leads to a perhaps surprising conclusion. Other things being equal, people are neither blamed nor praised by others for their suffering: instead, other things being equal, they are only pitied for their suffering. But at the same time, if I’m a self-conscious and self-reflective, autonomous, human rational minded animal, a higher-level or Kantian human real person, a human moral agent, then I’m still in a certain minimal sense deeply morally responsible for my own suffering. I’m the ultimate sourceof it, and it is up to me. Anyone’s suffering may well be, and very often is, absolutely not his or her fault. So the point I am making is absolutely different from “blaming the victim.” Nevertheless, in the special sense I have just described, my suffering is “my thing,” my Sisyphean rock to push all the way up that cursed hill, temporarily, or day after day, endlessly. Suffering expresses my direct, intimate, endogenous, and reflexive sense of harm to my own rational human minded animal capacity for intentional agency. Therefore, at least in principle, I can become self-consciously and self-reflectively aware of the practical reason why I am suffering, and get a rational and emotional handle on it, and then self-consciously and self-reflectively either accept it or refuse it. So, ultimately, in such cases, I can either suffer or not suffer, either by freely accepting this harm as harm-to-me, or by freely refusing this harm as harm-to-me. Especially in the case of refusing-to-suffer, I’m not saying that this is in any way easy to do. In fact, it may be fantastically difficult to do. But I do think that it’s at least really possible for a human moral agent to do. As per Wittgenstein’s striking trope in the Tractatus, even while the physical facts—the facts describable by scientific language and theory—all remain the same, I can make the normative structure of my world wax or wane by resolutely turning it into the world of the happy:
If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language. In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.[x]
This is also what Kant calls a revolution of the heart or revolution of the will (Rel 6: 48).
So, for all these reasons, the somewhat clichéd saying, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional,” turns out to have more than a grain of existential and moral truth in it. It’s crucial to note, however, that being able to understand a practical reason for one’s own suffering, and being deeply morally responsible for one own suffering, are not characteristic features of lower-level or Frankfurtian human real persons, such as normal, healthy toddlers or other normal, healthy older children. For better or worse, these lower-level human real persons can suffer for a practical reason without in any way being able to understand the reason why, simply because they lack the sophisticated conceptual competence and the sophisticated reflective capacity to do so, and thus they are not in any way morally responsible for their own suffering, even in the special sense I’ve been spelling out. Lower-level or Frankfurtian human real persons are self-conscious without also being self-reflective.
In any case, once we recognize that suffering is a higher-level or Kantian human real person’s, a human moral agent’s, self-conscious or self-reflective experience of emotional pain for a practical reason, then I think that we can also recognize that suffering falls naturally into three distinct categories, corresponding to the three main categories of things that practical reasons can be about (i) my practical relations to myself, (ii) my practical relations to the world, or (iii) my practical relations to other human real persons. Thus it seems clear that either (i*) I suffer because I am not what I want to be or the way I want to be (self-emanating suffering), or (ii*) I suffer because the world is not what I want it to be or the way I want it to be (world-emanating suffering), or (iii*) I suffer because other real persons are not what I want them to be or the way I want them to be (other-emanating suffering). This tripartite scheme, in turn, carries over aptly and smoothly into folk wisdom about the nature of suffering. I am “my own worst enemy” (self-emanating suffering). The world is “a vale of tears” (world-emanating suffering). And “hell is other people” (other-emanating suffering). Of course, and sadly, suffering can also involve combinations of the three basic kinds. For example, if someone I deeply love dies, I might suffer as much from thinking that I miserably failed to treat them as lovingly as I should have (self-emanating suffering), as I also do from the truly awful fact that they are simply no longer there in the world to be with me (other-emanating suffering); and at the same time, I may also suffer equally intensely from the thought that their permanent absence from the world and from my life is nothing but a cruel joke (world-emanating suffering). So, to summarize this part of the argument:
Suffering is the self-conscious or self-reflective experience of emotional pain—anguish, despair, grief, sorrow, and so-on—consequent upon a human real person’s being a direct, intimate, endogenous, and reflexive witness to her being harmed in her capacity for intentional agency, and in what she cares about and wants most, either by her own means, by means of the world, by means of other people—or, again sadly, also by means of any two or three of the above.
It’s self-evident, given the nature of suffering, that the suffering of any human real person is always a target of serious moral concern for every higher-level or Kantian human real person, every human moral agent. Otherwise put, wherever and whenever suffering happens, it’s never morally insignificant or irrelevant to us. It does not follow, however, that we’re morally obligated to prevent or reduce suffering in ourselves or others—that’s morally great, and morally heroic, but also supererogatory. But it does follow that we are morally obligated always to heed suffering and to take it into account in our moral choices, actions, and deliberations, other things being equal. There is, however, one important and stronger qualification to this relatively weak moral principle that I’ll spell out three paragraphs below, according to which we’re morally obligated never intentionally to cause, and also always to try to prevent or reduce, a certain special kind of suffering in human real persons.
Above all, we can now clearly and distinctly recognize that suffering can occur without bodily nociperception, and also that bodily nociperception can occur without suffering. So bodily nociperception does not strictly always or necessarily involve suffering. This fact in turn directly implies that Bentham’s and Singer’s famous direct inference from the mere fact of a minded animal’s experience of bodily pain to that minded animal’s suffering is fallacious: for later reference, I’ll call this The Bentham-Singer Fallacy.
The recognition of The Bentham-Singer Fallacy also leads on to a deeper point. The crucial feature of suffering, as opposed to bodily nociperception, is that necessarily, whether human or non-human, all and only real persons can suffer. That’s because suffering requires a psychological complexity, in virtue of constitutively necessary capacities, that is characteristic of all and only real persons, whether human or not. In other words, as real persons, whether human or not, we’re essentially the only conscious animals in the universe who can suffer—and choose and do evil, whether banal evil, like Arendt’s Eichmann, under the guise of the good, or near-satanic evil, like Shakespeare’s fictional Iago, Cormack McCarthy’s fictional Anton Chiurgh, or real-world Hitler, under the guise of the bad.[xi] Lucky us. But from this it also directly follows that non-persons cannotsuffer, even if they can subjectively experience bodily pain or have episodes of conscious bodily nociperception, and therefore even if they are sentient, fully minded animals. This has fundamental moral implications. Treating a human real person with sufficient respect means never directly intentionally harming that human real person by violating their dignity. Such a violation causes a certain special kind of suffering in the human real person whose dignity has been violated—the suffering of someone who has been harmed by being directly disrespected and treated as a mere thing. Let’s call it degradation.
Degradation can be contrasted with oppression, which is treating people in ways that fall saliently below what is even minimally sufficient to meet the moral demands of respect for their human dignity. It’s possible to be oppressed without being degraded—for example, the very fact of human persons working in shit jobs as wage-slaves, living in poverty, or without adequate healthcare, anywhere, when the means to alleviate the worst effects of big-capitalism, to end poverty, or to provide adequate healthcare are available—is always oppression but not always degradation. This is because oppression can occur through social-institutional means, not only in past, recent, or contemporary authoritarian or totalitarian states, but also in contemporary neoliberal more-or-less democratic States, without any one individual’s, or any group’s, explicit or self-conscious intention to harm people by violating their human dignity.[xii] In any case, all degradation is also oppression, because degradation involves coercion, and coercion is a necessary and minimally sufficient condition of oppression.[xiii]
Moreover and above all, as I think we all know with self-evidence, it’s truly awful for someone to be degraded by others. Degradation may of course also literally kill the degraded human real person. But even if degradation does not literally kill you, nothing in this world is subjectively or objectively worse than someone’s treating you like a mere thing, like a piece of garbage or offal, fully without your actual or possible rational consent, and with manifest cruelty. And for the degraded one, that is, in some cases you, being treated this way burns and hurts like the fires of hell, only it is even more terrible, since it is utterly undeserved. This is one central reason why, for example, torture, lynchings, rape, and child abuse or child murder are such heinous moral crimes: they’re so patently treating someone not only as a mere means but also a mere thing, coercively, without their rational consent, and cruelly. So sufficiently treating a real human person with respect for their dignity also means being morally obligated never to treat that person in such a way as intentionally to cause them that kind of suffering, degradation, and also always in such a way as to prevent or reduce degradation, other things being equal. Therefore, and now fully explicitly, we’re strictly morally obligated never to treat human real persons, and also any non-human real persons there might be, in such a way as to degrade them, and also always in such a way as to try to prevent or reduce their degradation.
At the same time, however, it’s not the case that we’re generally or strictly morally obligated to prevent or reduce the bodily nociperception of real persons, whether human or non-human, or even generally or strictly morally obligated to prevent or reduce the bodily nociperception of sentient, fully minded animals, for two reasons.
First, in real persons, whether human or non-human, not all bodily nociperception entails suffering, and not all suffering entails bodily nociperception. Therefore, other things being equal, we are not morally obligated to prevent or reduce bodily nociperception in those real human persons like us who are capable of suffering, but are not actually suffering, even though they are undergoing bodily nociperception. For example, other things being equal, we’re not morally obligated to prevent or reduce anyone’s everyday experience of minor bodily pains due to bumps, eye-strain headaches, hangnails, scratches, sore muscles after exercising, stubbing one’s toe, and so-on. Nor, other things being equal, are we morally obligated to prevent or reduce the experience of even intense bodily pain in high performance athletes, women during childbirth when they have specifically chosen natural birthing, professional dancers, solitary masochists, consensual sadomasochistic sex-partners, or Stoics, even if there would be some moral value in doing so, and even if it would also be morally permissible to do so.
The case of bodily nociperception in women during childbirth when they have specifically chosen natural birthing, is a particularly good example of this. In such cases, because of their rationally-formed personal views about natural childbirthing and their high levels of commitment to this project, these women self-consciously prefer and specifically request in advance that no experience of bodily pain during childbirth, even highly intense bodily pain, be prevented or reduced by the use of medical anaesthetics.[xiv] That’s perfectly reasonable and morally permissible. By sharp contrast, many other pregnant women self-consciously prefer and specifically request that all experience of bodily pain be prevented or reduced by the use of medical anaesthetics. And that’s perfectly reasonable and morally permissible too. Furthermore, some other pregnant women, belonging to neither the pro-natural-birthing-pain group or the anti-birthing-pain group, self-consciously prefer and request waiting to find out what their bodily nociperceptive pain-levels are actually like during childbirth itself, then request or refuse medical anaesthesia: and that is also perfectly reasonable and morally permissible. Therefore, bodily nociperception in real human persons like us, even highly intense bodily nociperception, other things being equal, is morally neutral.
Second, some human or non-human animals that are capable of bodily nociperception—whether proto-sentient and simple minded animals, or sentient and fully minded animals—aren’t capable of suffering, precisely because they are not real persons. So obviously, then, we aren’t generally or strictly morally obligated to try to prevent or reduce the bodily nociperception of non-person minded animals, whether human or non-human, if we aren’t generally or strictly morally obligated to try to prevent or reduce the bodily nociperception of rational minded animals or real persons, whether human or non-human.
Does this mean that non-rational sentient and fully minded animals in bodily pain, or even proto-sentient and simple minded animals in bodily pain, may be treated like mere things? No. These animals are still experiencers of moral value and primary targets of our moral concern—that is, they have interests, and we must heed those interests—and we are therefore obligated, at the very least, to consider them, and to take them fully into account in our moral reasoning. In the case of sentient, fully minded animals, this involves treating them as primary, serious targets of our moral concern. And in sub-sub-section V.3.4, I’ll examine more precisely what it means to treat sentient, fully minded animals as primary, serious targets of our moral concern. But in the next sub-sub-section I’ll consider the moral comparison between, on the one hand, our obligations to the minded animals who can suffer, and, on the other hand, our obligations to the minded animals who cannot suffer but instead are capable only of experiencing bodily pain.
NOTES
[i] See, e.g., C. Allen, “Animal Pain,” Noûs 38 (2004): 617-643.
[ii] See S. Rosenberg, S.K. Marie, and S. Kliemann, “Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy type IV),” Pediatric Neurology 11 (1994): 50-56. Anhidrosis is lack of sweating.
[iii] See R. Melzack, “Pain,” in R. Gregory (ed.), Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 574-575.
[iv] This corresponds to the possibility of what David Lewis calls Martian pain. See D. Lewis, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain,” in N. Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology (2 vols., Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 216-222.
[v] This corresponds to the possibility of what Lewis calls mad pain. See Lewis, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain.”
[vi] See J. Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), p. 38.
[vii] See H. Putnam, “Brains and Behavior,” in H. Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 325-341.
[viii] On the notion of a body-image, see M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 98-147; and S. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), ch. 3.
[ix] See J. Fodor, “Special Sciences, or the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis,” in Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, pp. 120-133.
[x] L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), prop. 6.43, p. 185.
[xi] See R. Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), sections 3.3-3.4.
[xii] An excellent example of this sort of oppression is the USA’s healthcare system.
[xiii] See R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 4) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), parts 2 and 3.
[xiv] In other words, other things being equal, such birth-mothers—provided that, after the fact, they do not regret their choice—don’t suffer during childbirth. If someone didn’t regret her choice and yet still said she had suffered, it would be plausible to think she was either just using language loosely or committing the Bentham-Singer fallacy.
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