Greta wrote: ↑May 2nd, 2020, 6:51 pmThe proto-consciousness experienced by plants and simple animals will not produce the kind of emotional affects that are important when considering the ethics of killing. As things stand, we humans are often so self-absorbed that we cannot even empathise with pigs, cattle, sheep and chickens - all intelligent, sensitive species that suffer similarly to human children. Given the situation, with most human societies supplying most of their meat needs with ruthlessly cruel containment and slaughter factories, plants don't stand any chance of mustering empathy.
You cannot empathize with what isn't a subject of experience, since empathy consists in imagining what it's like to experience the world from the first-person perspective of what or who you empathize with. The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology defines "empathy" as "the capacity to understand and enter into another person's feelings and emotions or to experience something from the other person's point of view." The problem is that I as a human being with a human mind can hardly or even not at all imagine what it's like to be a nonhuman being with a nonhuman mind, depending on how biologically and psychologically close the animal species in question is to homo sapiens. That's why Peter Carruthers argues that what matters morally isn't empathy but sympathy.
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"[E]mpathy requires first-personal identification with the feelings of the subject empathized with. To empathize with someone means imagining, in a first-person way, what that person is feeling—thereby, to a degree,
sharing that feeling (or at least
aiming to share that feeling, since empathy may miss its target and go awry). Because any state that we consciously imagine in this way will perforce be phenomenally conscious, that raises the question whether it is
appropriate to feel empathy for any given species of animal. If that animal is capable of phenomenally conscious experience, then it will be; but if it isn’t, then it won’t. And if there is no fact of the matter, this would seem to fall into the same category as definite
lack of phenomenally conscious status. It would appear to require the definite presence of phenomenal consciousness for empathy for the states of a creature to be appropriate. For one might think that it can only be appropriate to take a first-person perspective on the simulated states of a creature if the creature, too, can take just such a perspective.
Empathy can be morally problematic even in the human case, however. One reason is that it is highly
partial. It is much easier to generate empathy for a family member, a loved one, or a friend than it is to feel empathy for a stranger or an out-group member. Moreover, the accuracy of one’s empathic feelings (i.e. their degree of resemblance to the feelings of the target) is highly dependent on one’s knowledge of the other person, as well as on the degree to which one’s psychological profiles are similar.
Empathy is especially problematic in connection with nonhuman animals, even setting aside the question of consciousness. For imagination is likely to be a highly unreliable guide to the mental life of an animal. This is because anything we imagine, and any set of images we form, will be globally broadcast to our own set of consumer systems and emotional systems, which differ quite significantly from those of the target animal. So the result will be a distinctively human emotional state, rather than a strictly animal one. Empathizing with an animal held in captivity, for example, one might feel that its situation is a terrible one. But that might not reflect the perspective of the animal at all (and will vary on a species-by-species basis). Likewise, empathizing with a circus animal, one might feel that its situation is degrading. But I am pretty confident that no animal ever feels degraded. That presupposes forms of social embeddedness and a concern for reputation that are arguably uniquely human. And in the opposite direction, empathizing with a mouse that remains motionless while one holds it gently in one’s hands, one might think that it is enjoying the comforting warmth, when in fact it is frozen in fear.
Empathy should be distinguished from
sympathy, however. When empathizing, one simulates in the first person the presumed situation of the other, and enters into an emotional state that is (if everything goes well, and one is sufficiently similar in nature to the other) the same as the emotional state of the other. In empathizing with someone’s grief at the death of a loved one, for example, one ends up in a grief-like state oneself. Sympathy, in contrast, can be grounded in a third-personal understanding of the situation and emotional state of the other. Understanding that the other person is grieving, and caring about how they feel, one comes to see their grief as bad. (That is, one experiences negative valence directed at their state of grief: one
wants them to feel better.) This then motives one to do what one can to alleviate their grief.
Sympathy
can be grounded in imagination, of course. Imagining what it is like to lose a loved one, one enters a grief-like state. This provides one with knowledge of what the other person is likely feeling. One then comes to see that what the other is feeling is bad, and consequently one wants to help. Plainly, however, one should
not use imagination to ground one’s sympathy directed at the plight of an animal. For what one imagines will be broadcast to one's own affective and valuational systems, not the animal's. So the resulting affective response is likely to be quite wide of its target, and one will end up with false beliefs about what the animal feels. If one thinks that it might be important to be sympathetic towards the situation of an animal, one should seek an accurate third-person understanding of its needs and affective states, not project one's own feelings onto it.
Indeed, it seems plain that sympathy can be independent of questions of consciousness."
(Carruthers, Peter.
Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. pp. 174-6)
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