Q&A: Should we morally care about the suffering of animals?
Should we morally care about the suffering of animals?
Question
Should we morally care about the suffering of animals?
If they have no free choice, then they also have no soul, so there is no difference between them and a plant or a stone or a robot.
Answer
Let’s set aside your strange assumptions. Is there suffering there? Shouldn’t we care about their suffering? See Column 45.
Discussion on Answer
What is there to address? If they have no choice, then they have no soul. Why? And without those two, they do not suffer, like a stone or a robot. Where does that come from?
As for the first question: if there is no free choice, what is a soul? So maybe ChatGPT also has a soul?
As for the second question: if it has neither of those two, then who suffers? Who is it that feels pain?
I won’t answer the first one because that’s just stubbornness. Do you think materialists don’t think people feel pain?
Someone who is a pure materialist, meaning believes that a person is a machine made up of atoms and has no soul, can hold that there is a pain system that is ultimately just chemical reactions. I don’t see the difference between that and ChatGPT saying that it hurts. If you do, explain it to me.
And a follow-up question:
If the God of the Hebrew Bible permitted eating animals and also permitted relative abuse of them (kosher slaughter without stunning), then three possibilities arise, and I haven’t found any others:
1. The Creator is not moral
2. The Creator did not really command what is written in the Torah
3. Animals have no soul, and therefore their “pain” is no different from any other collection of atoms undergoing a chemical process, or from ChatGPT saying it hurts, for that matter.
What does ChatGPT have to do with this? Just because it imitates humans means it is like humans? Where did you get this strange analogy from? Animals don’t talk. So they don’t have pain? The question is whether our consciousness that feels pain emerges from the material whole, or whether it takes place in the soul according to the dualists.
As for your second question, the three possibilities are not correct. See Column 541. Briefly: even if eating them is permitted, abuse was not permitted. And even if abuse were permitted, that would not mean there is no moral problem with it. It may be permitted according to Jewish law but forbidden morally.
But I’m not going to open a discussion of that here, since the topic has been discussed to exhaustion in several places on the site.
Maybe you could also address the strange assumptions?