I have recently begun reflecting upon some questions that have bothered me for some time: “Is a non-human animal’s death bad for the animal?” and “Is painlessly killing a non-human animal wrong?” These questions are potentially independent, for an animal’s death may not be bad for it but could be wrong for other reasons, such as the harm it causes humans who care about the animal or the affects it has on the environment; and it may be bad for the animal to die but in the majority of cases where we kill an animal this badness may be outweighed by the strong benefits that arise from the killing. I believe these are important questions, both for our everyday treatment of many non-human animals such as our pets but also for whether any form of raising and killing animals for their meat is morally justified. I find the latter consideration to be the most pertinent, though I believe that the animal agricultural industry as it currently exists is morally unjustified regardless of the morality of killing animals because of the intense amount of suffering these industries cause. However I still think the answers to these questions could have a bearing on the justification of any system in which animals are raised and killed, so they should be reflected upon and proposed answers to them critically examined. I intend to write a blog post in the future that will give a broad examination of the morality of animal death and killing, where I will try to argue for the position that an animal’s death harms the animal and, as a result, killing them is typically wrong. However, since said post is taking some time to formulate, I have decided to critically examine one purported answer to the problem of killing animals that I have read.
In this post, I will examine the article “What a pain: the ethics of killing animals humanely” by John Hadley, which was posted to the website “the Conversation” in 2011 (available at https://theconversation.com/what-a-pain-the-ethics-of-killing-animals-humanely-1751). This article was written following the controversial ban on the live export of animals from Australia to Indonesia in 2011 following an investigation that revealed serious animal welfare abuses occurring in Indonesian abattoirs. Hadley’s article attempts to argue that killing an animal is wrong in most circumstances, and thus even though the treatment of many animals in Indonesia was worse than that in places like Australia, our killing of these animals for meat is still deeply wrong.
My examination will be in three sections. In Section 1, I will provide a discussion of the content of the article and present my interpretation of the two arguments Hadley gives for his belief that painlessly killing animals is wrong. I will call these the valuable life argument and the consistency argument. In Section 2, I will criticize these arguments, finding flaws in both but also seeing a way they could be amended or improved to provide better reasons for Hadley’s conclusion. In Section 3, I will summarize what I have done and conclude the post.
For the purpose of this post, “animal” refers to non-human animal.
1
Hadley begins his article by raising the problem he wishes to discuss: “Does a painless death harm an animal? Is it wrong to painlessly kill an animal?” He contends that many people believe that as long as an animal lives a good life, killing it painlessly is not bad for it and thus not wrong. He questions whether such a view is actually justified, and proceeds to argue for the contrary position that painlessly killing an animal is actually wrong.
In the valuable life argument, Hadley first asks us to consider why we think causing pain and suffering to animals is wrong. He believes the primary reason in the affect it has upon the animal, and because he takes this to be a widely held belief he says he will assume it for the remainder of his article. Having established that causing pain to an animal is wrong because of it’s affect upon the animal, he then attempts to show how this leads to the conclusion that an animal’s life is intrinsically valuable, and thus killing it is wrong except when there are strong counter considerations. He argues for this by having us consider why being in pain is bad for an individual. He believes there are two reasons: the way pain feels to the subject and the affect it has upon the subject’s life. It is this second consideration that he believes supports the idea that an animal’s life has worth in itself. I interpret his argument as follows:
1. If it is a good thing for an animal’s life to be pain free, then the animal’s life is valuable for it’s own sake [premise]
2. It is a good thing for an animal’s life to be pain free [premise]
3. An animal’s life is valuable for it’s own sake [inferred from 1, 2 by modus ponens]
I derive this interpretation from the following passages:
“The bad thing about suffering is not simply how it feels on the inside. It is also that it interferes with something that is otherwise valuable…
…when we oppose animal suffering or cruelty we are not simply registering an idiosyncratic or in principle “anti-suffering” or “anti-cruelty” predilection. Instead, suffering and cruelty are bad because they are a blight upon something that is worth not being blighted; namely, the life of the sufferer.
But, if the life that suffering impacts upon is worth being pain free, then it must be valuable for its own sake.
How can it be then that painlessly taking animal life is of little ethical consequence when we acknowledge that it is a good thing for animals’ lives to be as far as possible pain-free?”
In the third paragraph Hadley asserts premise (1) of the argument, and I think my reformulation of this is fairly direct. I amended “the life that suffering impacts upon is worth being pain free” to “it is a good thing for an animal’s life to be pain free” as I take this to be more clear and Hadley uses this way of expressing the idea in the fourth paragraph. Premise (2) is simply the assertion of the antecedent of Premise (1), and is found in the fourth paragraph.
I think this constitutes the core of Hadley’s argument, though I am wary that I have misinterpreted him as I found his reasoning somewhat difficult to follow. I think the crux of Hadley’s argument is Premise (1), and I believe he relies upon a problematic proposition in affirming this premise. However I will leave a discussion of this until Section 2, where I evaluate his argument.
Having concluded that animal’s lives are valuable in themself, Hadley then goes on to consider the consequences of this position. He accepts that human lives may be more important than animal’s, but he thinks if we consider spectrum of “valuable lives” with insects at the bottom and humans on top, we will conclude that the difference in value between human and many animals lives will not be gargantuan. As such, while it would be acceptable to kill an animal in certain circumstances, he think we should err on the side of caution and only kill an animal when it is absolutely necessary to do so. He does not fully explicate what he means by “absolutely necessary” but I take him as asserting that due to the intrinsic value of their lives, animals should not be killed unless there is something that is obviously more valuable and important at stake. Because most people living in developed countries can easily obtain nutritionally adequate food at reasonable prices that do not involve killing animals, Hadley concluded that killing animals for food is not justified in developed countries and thus painlessly killing an animal in this context would be wrong.
Following this argument, Hadley considers another way one could argue that killing animals is wrong based on consistency of our judgments. He first considers an argument that is often given for why killing an animal is not wrong, or is at least of minor ethical importance. This is expressed in the following passages:
“Most cognitive ethologists and philosophers agree that animals have no concept of the future and cannot imagine themselves existing into the future. This lack of psychological sophistication, most ethicists contend, means that painlessly killing animals does them no harm and therefore painless killing does not raise much of an ethical quandary.”
I interpret Hadley as making the following argument:
4. Animals have no concept of the future and cannot imagine themself existing into the future [explicit premise]
5. A being can have a desire to go on living only if it has a concept of the future and can imagine itself existing into the future [implicit premise]
6. Animals do not have a desire to go on living [inferred from 4, 5 modus tollens]
7. It is seriously wrong to kill a being only if it has a desire to go on living [implicit premise]
8. It is not seriously wrong to kill an animal [inferred from 6, 7 by modus tollens]
My reconstruction of his argument relies upon two implied premises: 5 and 7. I believe, based upon his later discussion, that he does assume these in presenting this argument and I believe other philosopher’s have affirmed them so I think it is reasonable to put them into the argument. Premises 4 and 6 are stated explicitly by the author.
After he has presented this argument Hadley proceeds to criticize it via use of a reductio ad absurdum focusing on premise 7. He uses the case of an infant less than 10 months old which he contends that we would all accept is wrong to kill. His argument is as follows:
7. It is seriously wrong to kill a being only if it has a desire to go on living [provisional premise]
9. Infants less than 10 months old do not have a desire to go on living [explicit premise]
10. It is not seriously wrong to kill infants less than 10 months old [inferred from 7, 9 by modus tollens]
11. If (9) and (7), then it is not wrong to kill an infant less than 10 months old [conditionalization of 7, 9 and 10]
12. It is seriously wrong to kill an infant less than 10 months old [explicit premise]
13. Either (9) is false or (7) is false [12, 11 by modus tollens]
14. (9) is not false [assumed]
15. (7) is false [13, 14 by disjunctive syllogism]
Thus his argument establishes that premise 7 must be false, as it would imply that killing an infant less than 10 months old is not seriously wrong. Thus, he rejects the former argument that killing an animal is not seriously wrong by rejecting (7). He concludes this argument by asserting:
“But, if painlessly killing a human infant would be wrong, then it must also be wrong to painlessly kill an animal that has comparable psychological capacities to an infant.”
That is
16. If painlessly killing a human infant is wrong, then it is wrong to painlessly kill an animal with comparable psychological capacities to the infant
He concedes that comparisons across species are inexact, but again relying upon the continuity of species he believes the differences between infants an animals would be one of degree, not of kind, so the above claim is plausible.
Hadley then concludes the article by considering what these arguments mean for our view of animals. If his arguments have succeeded, then we must now think it is typically wrong to kill an animal, even if the killing is painless. This should lead to a readjustment of the way we view our relationship to other animals in order to see ourselves as “one species among many rather than one species over many”. It also means that, while the treatment of animals in some Indonesian abattoirs was worse than that in Australia’s abattoirs, our killing of the animals is still wrong and thus is also in need of a change.
Before I move on to critiquing these arguments, I must make a few points. Firstly, I commend Hadley’s discussion, especially since we agree on the wrongness of killing animals and the bearing this has on animal agriculture as a whole. Furthermore, I would like to emphasize that his article is a short piece published on a site primarily for lay people such as myself. As such Hadley may not have had the space to develop his arguments in full, and therefore my criticisms may not be applicable to more developed versions he may give elsewhere.
2
I will now proceed to critically evaluate Hadley’s arguments, beginning with the valuable life argument and then the consistency argument.
The valuable life argument is valid, and thus any fault in it lies in the truth of either one of the premises. I find Premise (2) to be highly plausible because I think, all else equal, it is very good for an animal to be free of pain. As a result of this I think an animal’s life is worth being free of pain, which I interpret as meaning it is good for the animal that it’s life be as pain free as possible. I also think this belief is widely shared, and underlies our opposition to cruelty to animals.
Thus I believe his argument hinges on Premise (1). This premise asserts that if an animal’s life is worth being free of pain, then it’s life is valuable for it’s own sake i.e intrinsically valuable. If this Premise fails, then I believe his argument as a whole fails.
Premise (1) would be rendered false by a counterexample showing that it was possible for it to be good for an animal’s life to be free of pain and yet it’s life is not intrinsically valuable. I think this is possible, and highly plausible. There are plausible theories of value that assert that the only thing’s that have intrinsic value are certain mental states, such as pain and pleasure. Unless we construe “life” as simply being a sequence of mental states, then these theories would deny that “life” or “living” are intrinsically valuable. Yet these theories can still make sense of how an animal’s life being free of pain is good. These theories can assert that because pain is intrinsically bad, being free of pain is good on two grounds. Firstly it is good in a comparative sense, as lacking something that is bad could be considered good. Secondly, being in pain may prevent you from achieving pleasurable mental states, while being free of pain may allow you to best to do. Thus being free of pain would also be good in that it allowed you to best experience pleasurable mental states. Thus, such a theory of value could affirm the antecedent of Premise (1) and accept Premise (2) while rejecting the consequent of Premise (1). This is because they contend that life, or at least an animal’s life, is not intrinsically valuable but rather extrinsically valuable i.e valuable through it’s relation to something else.
I think the flaw in Hadley’s reasoning is failing to consider the complexities of extrinsic value. Some thing, x, has extrinsic value if it is related in some way to something with intrinsic value, y. Some thing, y, has intrinsic value if it’s value does not rely upon it’s relation to something else that is valuable. Saying pain is bad because of the way it feels is, to me, to affirm that pain is intrinsically bad (i.e possesses negative intrinsic value). To say pain is bad because of how it interferes with or affects something else is to say pain is also extrinsically bad. So far so good. But then Hadley infers that because pain is extrinsically bad because of it’s affect on an animal’s life, that means the life is intrinsically valuable. But such an inference is invalid, because having a pain free life may be extrinsically valuable through it’s connection either to something else with extrinsic value or some ultimate source of value. Maybe having a life free of pain best allows an animal to experience intrinsically good mental states such as pleasure. So Hadley has not considered the possibility that pain is extrinsically bad ultimately via it’s relation to something other than life, though it is through it’s influence upon life that it comes to affect this ultimate source of value.
There are many cases where something can be extrinsically good or bad due to it’s affect on something else, but this second thing is itself not intrinsically good but rather also affects another thing and so on until the chain terminates with something that is intrinsically good. Consider taking antibiotics when you have a chest infection. Taking these antibiotics is good, because it will cure you of your chest infection. But this does not show that being free of a chest infection is good in itself. Rather, being free of a chest infection is good because it is necessary for being in good physical health, which itself may be intrinsically valuable, or perhaps is extrinsically valuable as if we are in good health we can better achieve our desires and attain pleasurable mental states.
Now, none of this discussion shows that Hadley is wrong in thinking that an animal’s life is intrinsically valuable. This may in fact be true, and this view is shared by philosopher’s such as Tom Regan. However Hadley’s argument for this conclusion is flawed due to him not considering a possible chain of extrinsically valuable things that extends belong having a life free of pain to something else. I also wish to note that I do not myself necessarily accept the above theory of value, I only put it forward to show that Hadley has not considered other possibilities in his argument and needs to discuss these in order to establish his conclusion.
Despite the failure of Hadley’s argument, I think his analysis of the badness of pain points towards an argument that could establish the wrongness of painlessly killing an animal. Hadley asserts that pain is both intrinsically and extrinsically bad. It is intrinsically bad for the sufferer in that it feels terrible to be in pain, while it is extrinsically bad in how it affects the sufferer’s life. But in what way does pain affect our life, and why is this bad? Think of your own experience with pain, suffering or disease of some kind. When we are in pain or we are sick, we are often unable to pursue activities we take to be good or enjoy pleasurable mental states. We often need to keep ourselves from engaging in activities because the pain prevents us from doing so or how we feel forces us to lie in bed while we wait to improve. We dislike these restrictions, as it prevents us from engaging in enjoyable activities and projects. Thus, being in pain or being sick is bad partly because of how it interferes with our ability to enjoy the goods of life. But, surely pain is bad for animals for similar reasons: pain feels terrible for them and being in pain prevent them from enjoying the goods of life. A dog with arthritis is unable to run around and play, a cow with a painful tongue or jaw is unable to eat and graze and a pig with a painful snout is unable to dig and root around in hay and dirt. Thus, being in pain also prevents animals from enjoying the goods in their lives, and it seems bad for them to be prevented from enjoying these goods just as it is bad for us. However, killing an animal also prevents the animal from enjoying the goods of life, as it is no longer alive to do any of the activities it would have found enjoyable. Thus, it seems that killing is extrinsically bad in a way that is (in part) similar to the badness of an animal being in pain. To summarize, this new argument would be:
a. Pain is bad in part because it prevents the being in pain from enjoying the goods of life [premise]
b. It is bad to prevent a being from enjoying the goods of life [inferred from a]
c. Death prevents the victim from enjoying the goods of life [premise]
d. Death is bad for the victim [inferred from b,c]
This argument rests upon the assumption that animals can enjoy certain things, thus there are goods in their life that they can be deprived of. It also assumes that being deprived of or prevented from attaining certain goods (not necessarily all goods) is bad. I think the first is a reasonable assumption, as most of us believe animals enjoy things and it would be implausible for animal’s to be able to experience negative emotions to motivate them away from harm (pain) but no positive emotions to motivate them towards things that improve their fitness (pleasure). I also think the second assumption is plausible, based upon the examples I gave before and on reflection on our own situation. Thus, I think this argument is prima facie plausible, and shows that an animal’s death, even a painless one, can be bad for the animal. As it is bad for the animal to die, and killing the animal obviously leads to it’s death, this may be enough to show that killing an animal is wrong if there are no countervailing reasons that weigh in favor of killing them. Like Hadley, I do not think that the pleasure of eating meat is a strong enough reason to weigh against the badness of an animal’s death, though I will not argue for this in this post. I only wish to say that while Hadley’s argument is flawed, it does point to a potentially better argument that could also justify his conclusion.
I will now turn to discussing Hadley’s second argument, which I have dubbed the consistency argument. This argument targets the idea that it is not seriously wrong to kill an animal because they do not desire to go on living. I find his reductio ad absurdum of this view quite compelling, and I believe such considerations show that either having a desire to go on living is not a necessary condition for it to be seriously wrong to kill you or it is not seriously wrong to kill an infant less than 10 months old. Now, someone could accept that having this desire is necessary for it to be wrong for the victim to be killed, but that the killing could be wrong for other reasons, such as it’s affect upon the family or society. This is conceivable, but I think the argument as a whole would still stand as in these cases the wrongness of the killing would depend on external circumstances and if the infant was of little use to society and no one cared about it then it would not appear to be seriously wrong to kill the infant. Furthermore, seeing as I think most people believe that killing is seriously wrong for the infant this reductio ad absurdum would still defeat the desire account of the wrongness of death. Someone could also simply accept that it is not seriously wrong to kill an infant, but I also find this implausible ad so will not discuss it in this post.
Despite the cogency of the reductio ad absurdum, Hadley’s conclusion as expressed in (16) does not follow. The reductio demonstrates an issue with having a desire to live as a necessary condition for the wrongness of killing; it does not express anything more about the connection between infant and animal. There could be relevant differences between an infant and animal that make killing the one wrong while killing the other is permissible despite their similar psychological characteristics. For example, the infant may have an immortal soul, or have intrinsic value because it has the potential to become a rational autonomous being, or the fact that the infant will possess the desire to live at a future time may be relevant. I am not myself agreeing to any of these distinguishing features, but only offering them as possibilities to show that the inference to (16) is invalid. Hadley needs further argument to establish that (16) is true, potentially by providing a positive argument for it or by refuting the possibilities I raised. As such, while I take the reductio ad absurdum to be a sound argument against the desire to live as a necessary condition for the wrongness of killing, the overall argument for (16) is not cogent.
Despite this, it is possible that Hadley was trying to express in (16) what is commonly called “The argument from marginal cases”. This argument is typically employed to show that animal’s are deserving of moral status i.e we should consider them in our moral decision making and we have direct duties to them. However, he could be attempting to employ a slightly different version of this argument in support of (16) that may go like this:
17. If it is wrong to painlessly killing any human and it is not wrong to painlessly kill any animal, then there must be a relevant feature possessed by all and only humans that justifies this claim [premise]
18. Any feature possessed by all humans will be possessed by some animals [premise]
19. Any feature not possessed by animals will not be possessed by some humans [premise]
20. Either it is not wrong to painlessly kill some humans or it is wrong to painlessly kill some animals [inferred from 17, 18, 19]
“Some humans” generally includes infants and those with diminished mental capacities due to disease, age or developmental problems. They are commonly referred to as “marginal cases”, hence the name for the argument. If, for the sake of this argument, we interpret the “some humans” in the above statements as “infants less than 10 months old” then (21) becomes:
21. Either it is not wrong to painlessly kill infants less than 10 months old or it is wrong to painlessly killing some animals
Which is equivalent to
22. If it is wrong to painlessly kill infants less than 10 months old, then it is wrong to painlessly killing some animals
And if by “some animals” we mean “animals which share relevant features with infants less than 10 months old” and relevant features as “psychological capacities” we obtain:
23. If it is wrong to painlessly kill infants less than 10 months old, then it is wrong to painlessly kill animals which share similar psychological capacities to the infant
Which to me is similar enough to (16) to understand the above as a potential argument for (16). So perhaps this was the argument Hadley attempted to make, and he was using his reductio ad absurdum against the desire account as an illustration of how the argument from marginal cases would work in this context. That is, he took a feature we many think grounds the claim that it is wrong to kill all and only humans and shows how this fails to justify the difference in treatment because the feature is lacked by some humans.
If this is true, then his argument for (16) is a lot stronger than it appears. However, I still do not think that it is conclusive. This is because he still has to show how other features, such as those I mentioned earlier, are not actually relevant to the wrongness of killing marginal humans or that these features are actually possessed by animals as well. Thus, while the argument from marginal cases may give us pause to think about whether there is some difference between certain humans and animals with similar psychological abilities that would ground differential treatment, this has not been conclusively established.
3
In summary, I have discussed and analysed the arguments made by John Hadley in his piece “What a pain: the ethics of killing animals humanely”. I have interpreted Hadley as making two arguments for the conclusion that it is wrong to painlessly kill animals. The first is the valuable life argument, which contends that an animal’s life has intrinsic value because an animal being in pain is extrinsically bad due to the affect on the animal’s life. This argument fails because Hadley has not considered the possibility that the animal’s life itself could also be extrinsically valuable through it’s relation to some other valuable thing, rather than having worth in itself. Despite this, the valuable life arguments points towards a different line of reasoning that may show that killing an animal is bad for the animal as it interferes with the animal’s ability to enjoy the goods of it’s life. The second argument is based on consistency. Hadley considered the position that killing a being is only wrong if the being desires to live, and succesfully refutes it using a cogent reductio ad absurdum that appeals to the wrongness of killing infants that lack the desire to live. From this, Hadley invalidly concludes that if it is wrong to kill infants, then it is wrong to kill animals with similar psychological capacities. This inference fails as Hadley has not considered other features that may differentiate animals and infants. However this assertion may be justified by appeal to the argument from marginal cases, but Hadley would still need to consider various differentiating properties and show how they are either not relevant or are in fact shared by both animals and infants.
Thus, while Hadley’s arguments as given do not succeed, they point the way to better arguments that might succeed. In future posts I may explore some of these arguments in making my own case for the wrongness of painlessly killing animals.
