The Overwhelming Prevalence of Suffering in Nature

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.

Ethology, 2008

Can suffering in non-human animals be studied scientifically? Apart from verbal reports of subjective feelings, which are uniquely human, I argue that it is possible to study the negative emotions we refer to as suffering by the same methods we use in ourselves. In particular, by asking animals what they find positively and negatively reinforcing (what they want and do not want), we can define positive and negative emotional states. Such emotional states may or may not be accompanied by subjective feelings but fortunately it is not necessary to solve the problem of consciousness to construct a scientific study of suffering and welfare. Improvements in animal welfare can be based on the answers to two questions: Q1: Will it improve animal health? and Q2: Will it give the animals something they want? This apparently simple formulation has the advantage of capturing what most people mean by 'improving welfare' and so halting a potentially dangerous split between scientific and non-scientific definitions of welfare. It can also be used to validate other controversial approaches to welfare such as naturalness, stereotypies, physiological and biochemical measures. Health and what animals want are thus not just two of many measures of welfare. They provide the definition of welfare against which others can be validated. They also tell us what research we have to do and how we can judge whether welfare of animals has been genuinely improved. What is important, however, is for this research to be done in situ so that it is directly applicable to the real world of farming, the sea or an animal's wild habitat. It is here that ethology can make major contributions.

2022

Provided that theology and biology agree evolution is good for God’s creation, this article argues that humanity must acknowledge that ecological suffering ought to be viewed in two distinct forms. The first form of suffering allows human and non-human creation to experience suffering that promotes biological, spiritual, and intellectual progress. In contrast, the second form of suffering not only manifests itself through human sin, but also perverts the progression of nature that would exist in the absence of immoral action. This paper examines humans’ and non-human animals’ relationship with suffering in an effort to reconcile environmentalist attempts to mitigate environmental degradation caused by humans with the apparent necessity of suffering for natural progress. Elizabeth A. Johnson’s interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus in Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love serves as the primary basis for the method proposed to determine the necessity and ethicality of human i...

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2018

Most people believe that suffering is intrinsically bad. In conjunction with facts about our world and plausible moral principles, this yields a pro tanto obligation to reduce suffering. This is the intuitive starting point for the moral argument in favor of interventions to prevent wild animal suffering (WAS). If we accept the moral principle that we ought, pro tanto, to reduce the suffering of all sentient creatures, and we recognize the prevalence of suffering in the wild, then we seem committed to the existence of such a pro tanto obligation. Of course, competing values such as the aesthetic, scientific or moral values of species, biodiversity, naturalness or wildness, might be relevant to the all-things-considered case for or against intervention. Still, many argue that, even if we were to give some weight to such values, no plausible theory could resist the conclusion that WAS is overridingly important. This article is concerned with large-scale interventions to prevent WAS and their tractability and the deep epistemic problem they raise. We concede that suffering gives us a reason to prevent it where it occurs, but we argue that the nature of ecosystems leaves us with no reason to predict that interventions would reduce, rather than exacerbate, suffering. We consider two interventions, based on gene editing technology, proposed as holding promise to prevent WAS; raise epistemic concerns about them; discuss their potential moral costs; and conclude by proposing a way forward: to justify interventions to prevent WAS, we need to develop models that predict the effects of interventions on biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and animals' well-being. Nicolas Delon and Duncan Purves have contributed equally to the production of this paper.

Between the Species: An Online Journal for the Study of Philosophy and Animals, 2012

Moral life often presents us with trade-offs between the sufferings of some individuals and the sufferings of others. Researchers may need to consider, for example, whether the suffering imposed on animals by a certain line of medical experimentation justifies the relief that the resulting discoveries may bring to (human or non-human) others. Often in such cases, the suffering of some individuals is incomparable with-that is neither greater than nor less than nor equal tothe suffering of others. While this complicates moral decision-making across species, it does not undermine it.

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.

It is commonly believed that animal ethics entails respect for natural processes, because nonhuman animals are able to live relatively easy and happy lives in the wild. However, this assumption is wrong. Due to the most widespread reproductive strategy in nature, r-selection, the overwhelming majority of nonhuman animals die shortly after they come into existence. They starve or are eaten alive, which means their suffering vastly outweighs their happiness. Hence, concern for nonhuman animals entails that we should try to intervene in nature to reduce the enormous amount of harm they suffer. Even if this conclusion may seem extremely counter-intuitive at first, it can only be rejected from a speciesist viewpoint.

One task of environmental ethics is to delineate our duties toward the values in nature. The existence of natural evil makes this project problematic. Evil is thought to be present in nature because the world is rife with naturally-caused suffering, and suffering equals evil. But the values concerned are in nature, so anthropocentric accounts of natural value (good or bad) are generally to be rejected. I present three arguments for why equating suffering with evil is anthropocentric. First, to equate suffering with evil is to make interpersonal norms the template for nonhuman behaviour, which is an anthropocentric move. Second, equating suffering with evil requires an anthropocentric principle, namely the is/ought dichotomy. Third, the equation is itself anthropocentric, as it presupposes morally atomistic preference-satisfaction and organismic invulnerability as ecologically ideal. Therefore, even the presence of gratuitous suffering in nature cannot count as evidence against the value claims of environmental ethics. This conclusion would also hold for the theological problem of natural evil.

Relations 3 (1), 2015

Studies about the moral consideration of nonhuman animals have experienced a tremendous development in the last decade. An important topic which is recently receiving increasing attention is the idea that we may have reasons not only to abstain from harming wild animals but also to help those in need. Life in the wild is far from being idyllic: wild animals undergo systematic harms on a daily basis, due to intra and interspecific aggressions (predation, parasitism) and other natural causes (e.g. starvation, disease, harsh weather conditions). Though it is usually accepted that we have no obligation to prevent or to reduce the occurrence of these harmful states of affairs, if the interests of nonhuman animals are morally relevant at all, it seems that the interests of animals living in the wild should also be taken into account in moral deliberation. This number will be dedicated to addressing in detail this vastly unexplored issue, challenging life in the wild as a “flat moral landscape”.