Does a painless death harm an invertebrate?

Invertebrate animals are usually seen as a kind of "aliens" which do not deserve any moral consideration. However, there is a growing amount of evidence indicating that many of them do have the capacity to experience pain. The same criteria that are usually applied in order to infer that vertebrates are sentient beings (behavioral response, learning capacity, memory, a certain specific neurophysiological structure…) lead to the idea that many invertebrates are sentient as well. Therefore, under the skeptical premise that we have no direct evidence of the experience of pain in vertebrates, we are forced to hold that it exists in both vertebrates and invertebrates.

Evolutionary Psychology

is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Vermont and a prolific author on topics in nature. He is best known for his research and writings on insect and bird behavior. His most recent book is advertised as a naturalistic perspective on animal death, and it delivers on this promise by surveying the many fascinating ways that living things have evolved to benefit from the death that surrounds them. Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death moves quickly through engaging anecdotes on scavenging, mating, burial, and conservation with an inquisitive, almost childlike joy. The book offers a collection of essays on animal behavior in the presence of death but does not represent a concerted effort to understand the role of death in an ecosystem, the evolution of death, or even a working definition of death. Heinrich does, however, provide firm foundations for discussion of these and other theoretical issues.

Diseases of Aquatic Organisms, 2007

This paper first explores 3 philosophical bases for attitudes to invertebrates, Contractarian/Kantian, Utilitarian, and Rights-based, and what they lead us to conclude about how we use and care for these animals. We next discuss the problems of evaluating pain and suffering in invertebrates, pointing out that physiological responses to stress are widely similar across the animal kingdom and that most animals show behavioral responses to potentially painful stimuli. Since cephalopods are often used as a test group for consideration of pain, distress and proper conditions for captivity and handling, we evaluate their behavioral and cognitive capacities. Given these capacities, we then discuss practical issues: minimization of their pain and suffering during harvesting for food; ensuring that captive cephalopods are properly cared for, stimulated and allowed to live as full a life as possible; and, lastly, working for their conservation.

The thesis is about the moral importance of ‘small animals,’ by which I mean invertebrates such as insects, spiders, earthworms, and snails, but not micro-organisms, such as amoebas or bacteria. I focus on the sentientist approach to moral importance and investigate the moral importance of small animals on the basis of that they may be able to have morally relevant negative mental states. I argue that, on such an assumption, one can at least say that small animals have a claim to virtue ethical significance. At least, it is a requirement of a morally decent (or virtuous) person that she pays attention to and is cautious regarding small animals in a morally relevant way, that she allows them to affect her moral-psychological life. For the person who does not already consider small animals in this way, this could plausibly be a big change in her moral psychology.

South African journal of philosophy, 2009

Epicurus argued that death can be neither good nor bad because it involves neither pleasure nor pain. This paper focuses on the deprivation account as a response to this Hedonist Argument. Proponents of the deprivation account hold that Epicurus's argument fails even if death involves no painful or pleasurable experiences and even if the hedonist ethical system, which holds that pleasure and pain are all that matter ethically, is accepted. I discuss four objections that have been raised against the deprivation account and argue that this response to Epicurus's argument is successful once it has been sufficiently clarified.

Annali dell'Istituto superiore di sanità, 2013

While invertebrates make up the majority of animal species, their welfare is overlooked compared to the concern shown to vertebrates. This fact is highlighted by the near absence of regulations in animal research, with the exception of cephalopods in the European Union. This is often justified by assumptions that invertebrates do not experience pain and stress while lacking the capacity for higher order cognitive functions. Recent research suggests that invertebrates may be just as capable as vertebrates in experiencing pain and stress, and some species display comparable cognitive capacities. Another obstacle is the negative view of invertebrates by the public, which often regards them as pests with no individual personalities, gastronomic entities, or individuals for scientific experimentation without rules. Increasingly, studies have revealed that invertebrates possess individual profiles comparable to the personalities found in vertebrates. Given the large economic impact of inv...

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 2017

The classical problem of natural evil holds that the suffering of sentient beings caused by natural processes is an evil for which a divinity is morally responsible. Theodicies either explain natural evil as a punitive imperfection in nature, which humans ought to avoid and/or purify, or as a constituent part of a greater good whereby the evil is redeemed. The environmental ethics literature has taken the latter route with respect to the secular problem of natural evil, arguing that local disvalues such as predation or pain are transmuted into systemic-level ecological goods. The anti-hunting literature takes the former route, arguing that humans should not participate in the predatory aspects of the natural order. The anti-predation literature, furthermore, argues that nature should be redeemed-so far as is technologically and economically possibleof its unsavoury predatory aspects. While all sides of the debate employ strategies analogous to those found in the philosophy of religion, the immanentizing function of secularism moves the target of ultimate moral evaluation away from the divine and onto the natural. Environmental ethics' teleological approach culminates with nature as a transcendent good, whereas anti-hunting and anti-predation critiques view nature in the here-and-now as riven with evil, requiring humans to distance themselves while decontaminating it. Ré sumé : Le problème classique du mal naturel soutient que la souffrance d'êtres sensibles causée par des processus naturels est un mal dont la responsabilité morale demeure liée au divin. Les théodicées expliquent le mal naturel soit comme une imperfection punitive de la nature que l'humanité doit ou éviter ou purifier, ou comme élément d'un bien plus grand au moyen duquel le mal se rachète. En ce qui concerne le problème profane du mal naturel, l'éthique écologique prit la dernière position, plaidant que les malfaisances locales se transforment au niveau général en biens écologiques. La

While invertebrates make up the majority of animal species, their welfare is overlooked compared to the concern shown to vertebrates. This fact is highlighted by the near absence of regulations in animal research, with the exception of cephalopods in the European Union. This is often justified by assumptions that invertebrates do not experience pain and stress while lacking the capacity for higher order cognitive functions. Recent research suggests that invertebrates may be just as capable as vertebrates in experiencing pain and stress, and some species display comparable cognitive capacities. Another obstacle is the negative view of invertebrates by the public, which often regards them as pests with no individual personalities, gastronomic entities, or individuals for scientific experimentation without rules. Increasingly, studies have revealed that invertebrates possess individual profiles comparable to the personalities found in vertebrates. Given the large economic impact of invertebrates, developing certain attitude changes in invertebrate welfare may be beneficial for producers while providing higher welfare conditions for the animals. While the immense number and type of species makes it difficult to suggest that all invertebrates will benefit from increased welfare, in this review we provide evidence that the topic of invertebrate welfare should be revisited, more thoroughly investigated, and in cases where appropriate, formally instituted.

Do we harm animals if we painlessly kill them? The idea that animals are harmed by death faces the challenge that animals lack self-awareness and, therefore, are incapable of valuing their own continued lives. Some people object that death harms animals because it forecloses their future opportunities for pleasure. However, this argument is problematic because it's unclear why animals' future opportunities have value for them if they are incapable of caring about them. A more promising argument holds that many animals have an interest in life insofar as they have certain ongoing enjoyments in life, where animals' enjoyments are best understood not merely as fleeting experiences but rather as dispositional desires that animals continue to have over time.

2020

Mikhalevich and Powell (2020) argue that it is both scientifically and morally wrong to dismiss the evidence for sentience in invertebrates, though they refrain from offering any insights into how their welfare may be considered or improved. Here, we draw on animal welfare science to make several suggestions on possible ways forward in this area, in particular to avoid the demandingness objection by showing that these need not require overly demanding actions.