#903 Animal Suffering
September 01, 2024Hello Dr. Craig,
Recently, I read a transcript of your '09 debate with Dr. Francisco Ayala on the viability of Intelligent Design, and the conversation turned to animal suffering. You cited work from Dr. Michael Murray, saying, (1) some animals experience pain but do not suffer as a human being because they lack a certain self-awareness, and (2) other animals like spiders and insects may exhibit injury-avoidant behaviors yet not experience pain. Both of these caused me some consternation when I first read them. However, after reading RF Q&A #'s 113 and 243 I came to see my reflexive repulsion to (1) was unfounded. In particular, the thought experiment of the zebra was of great help to me. Many of us get confused and imagine that the duty we intuitively experience to not hurt or kill the zebra lies in a "right" intrinsic to the zebra rather than flowing down from God to us as stewards of the Earth. However, as the thought experiment points out, such a "location" for this "right" would imply it is also wrong for lions to kill zebras, but clearly lions have no such duty to abstain from zebra. Upon introspection, I also realized in the human realm I would not consider a person with functioning pain receptors to have greater worth than one without. So, if animals do not experience suffering the same way humans do, that does nothing to change our moral duties towards them nor does it imply their Creator values them any less.
However, I still find myself troubled by the statements you made in regards to (2). In particular, you say, "It's plausible they [spiders and insects] aren't sentient beings at all, having some sort of subjective inner experience." Why is that plausible? Given that consciousness does not arise from the brain (non-conscious matter), what makes arthropods so plausibly non-sentient? I expect they would not experience the world with as much detail or understanding as we do, but if consciousness is immaterial (even if it is linked to brain-states) I do not see why a simpler neurology would imply a total lack of qualia. It seems as if that chain of thought would lead to the conclusion that the existence of minds depends on the existence of physical substrates, a view I think as Christians we should (and do) deny.
Lastly, if arthropods do lack consciousness entirely, now is there a shift in their moral status? i.e., is it morally neutral to pluck off the legs of a spider and leave it to starve because it has no conscious states, but immoral to do the same to a zebra or lion who do have conscious states? I am not sure I see that the original zebra thought experiment also covers non-sentient beings, which would be objects instead of creatures.
Apologies for the wordy question, but I thought my path to processing (1) might provide context for my questions regarding (2).
Thank you,
Joshua
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
In connection with the locus Doctrine of Creation for my forthcoming Systematic Philosophical Theology I’ve learned some amazing things about animal consciousness, Joshua.
Recall Michael Murray’s three ascending levels in a pain hierarchy:
Level III: a second-order awareness that one is oneself experiencing (II)
Level II: a first order, subjective experience of pain
Level I: information-bearing neural states produced by noxious stimuli, resulting in aversive behavior
Recent research indicates that many more types of animals than previously thought may have Level II pain awareness. The founding of the journal Animal Sentience in 2016 signaled the emergence of a new scientific discipline devoted to the study of animal consciousness. Jonathan Birch et al. report that the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in 2012 “crystallised a scientific consensus that humans are not the only conscious beings and that ‘non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses’ possess neurological substrates complex enough to support conscious experiences” (Jonathan Birch, Alexandra K. Schnell, and Nicola S. Clayton, “Dimensions of Animal Consciousness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24/10 [October, 2020], p. 789). Just this year, a new Declaration on Animal Consciousness was released, signed by over one hundred scientists and philosophers, stating “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects [bees])” (Dan Falk, "Insects and Other Animals May Have Consciousness," Nautilus (May 3, 2024), https://nautil.us/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-571584/).
Still, the vast majority of animals plausibly do not experience phenomenal states of consciousness at all and so are down in Level I. Birch sums up the research by stating, “There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue” (Jonathan Birch, “The search for invertebrate consciousness,” Noûs 56 [2022]: 133). With respect to insects, he explains that because they are so evolutionarily distant from humans and their nervous systems so simple and so differently organized, “There is no agreement about whether insects are conscious or not, and, more fundamentally, no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue” (p. 134). The same problem arises in other disputed cases of consciousness in invertebrates such as cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans. Debates of a very similar character also occur even in relation to fish. Birch says that such organisms may be “natural zombies,” i.e., creatures that exhibit cognitively sophisticated behaviors with no conscious experiences (p. 134). A robot could be designed that could do the same things, but we should not therefore attribute consciousness to the robot. Birch points out that learned avoidance behaviors are found in animals as simple as the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, with its mere 302 neurons, and even in the spinal cords of rats that have been disconnected from the brain!
In answer to your question, the reason that it is plausible that such animals lack phenomenal states of consciousness is that their neurological systems are too primitive to support a mind or soul. Even the dualist-interactionist recognizes that states of consciousness in organisms require a neurological system sufficiently complex to sustain consciousness. Since these organisms are, in effect, like little machines, we do not have the same ethical obligations toward such primitive creatures as toward higher beasts. So you can swat a mosquito or take anti-biotics. But that doesn’t imply that anything goes. As stewards of the Earth we may have obligations to sustain the forests and coral reefs, for example, and not to despoil God’s creation. Neither would God want us to develop a moral character that takes sadistic pleasure in pulling wings off flies. Just as our ethical obligations toward animals having Level II awareness does not depend on their being moral agents with Level III awareness, so our obligations toward primitive lifeforms is not dependent on their having a Level II awareness.
At the same time, the evidence continues to confirm that sentient animals at Level II lack a full self-awareness and so do not suffer as human beings do. Birch et al. talk of “dimensions of animal consciousness (Birch et al. “Dimensions of Animal Consciousness,” p. 797). They explain that self-consciousness, which they define as “the conscious awareness of oneself as distinct from the world outside,” admits of gradations:
(i) A minimal level of self-consciousness involves registering a difference between self and other: “registering some experiences as representing internal bodily events and other experiences as representing events in an external world. Any complex, actively mobile animal needs a way of disentangling changes to its sensory input that are due to its own movements from changes due to events in the world.”
(ii) A more sophisticated grade of self-consciousness involves “awareness of one’s own body as a persisting object that exists in the world.” This capacity is plausibly needed to pass a mirror-mark test, in which the test subject is able to recognize a mark seen in a mirror as a mark on its own body. Chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, Asian elephants, and magpies have reportedly passed such a test. Even fish have reportedly passed the mirror-mark test! “These results are controversial, but they suggest that the grade of self-consciousness required to pass the mirror-mark test is possessed by a wide range of animals.”
(iii) The foregoing fall short of a yet more sophisticated grade of self-consciousness, which involves “awareness of oneself as the persisting subject of a stream of experiences, distinct from other such subjects.” This is an ability related to so-called “mindreading” (or theory-of-mind). It involves turning mindreading inward, to recognise oneself as the subject of mental states. Significantly, Birch et al. note that while “there is (debated) evidence to suggest that non-human apes and corvids possess some mindreading ability,” “there is very little evidence of the ‘turning inward’ of mindreading,” which is vital for self-consciousness in a rich philosophical sense.
So even though animals like dogs, cats, and horses experience pain, nevertheless the evidence is that they do not experience Level III, the awareness that they are themselves in pain. For the awareness that one is oneself in pain requires full self-awareness, which is missing in all animals except perhaps for the humanoid primates. All of this has enormous implications for the problem of animal suffering and for the doctrine of man’s creation in the image of God.
- William Lane Craig