Richard Dawkins: There’s quite a lot in Science in the Soul about the ethics of the
way we treat nonhuman animals.
I say nonhuman because, of course, we are animals we’re not plants, we’re not fungi,
we’re not bacteria, we are animals.
There is a double standard in our ethics at present, which builds a wall around our own
species Homo Sapiens, which is rather un-evolutionary if you think about the fact that we are close
cousins of chimpanzees, if you think about the fact that we are descended from a common
ancestor that lived only about six or seven million years ago.
If you want to erect a moral wall around our species and say, for example, that a human
embryo, even a very beginning human embryo (long before it develops a nervous system)
is somehow worthy of more moral consideration than an adult chimpanzee, then that is a rather
un-evolutionary view point.
If you look back in our ancestry, at what point would you draw the line?
Would you give... if there were Australopithecus—almost certainly our ancestor Australopithecus three
million years ago—if you were to meet one if one had survived in the African jungle,
would you give it the same moral consideration as the rest of us or would you say “No,
no—that has the same moral consideration as a chimpanzee”?
If we look back in history a couple of centuries ago most people accepted slavery and nowadays,
of course, that's a horrifying thought.
No civilized person today accepts slavery.
And if you look back further still we had the appalling things that the Romans were
doing in the Colosseum with spectator sport, watching people killing other people, lions
killing people, regarding it as fun entertainment to take the children out to.
We’re certainly getting better, as Steven Pinker has said in his book The Better Angels
of Our Nature, and Michael Shermer in his book on The Moral Arc, so we’re changing
a lot and it’s sort of a fairly obvious thing to do to look in the future and say
“What will our future descendants think when they look back at us the way we look
back at our slave-owning ancestors with horror?
What will our descendants look back in our time?
And I think the obvious candidate would be the way we treat nonhuman animals.
My view would be that we want to avoid suffering; therefore the criteria would be “Can this
creature suffer?”
This is the criteria that Jeremy Bentham the great moral philosopher laid out: “Can they
suffer?”
There’s every reason to think that mammals, at least and probably many more, can suffer
perhaps as much as we can pain.
If you think about what pain is for, biologically speaking, pain is a warning to the animal:
“Don’t do that again.”
If the animal does something which results in pain, that is a kind of ritual death—it’s
telling the animal, “if you do that again you might die and you might fail to reproduce.”
That’s why natural selection has built pain into our nervous systems, built the capacity
to feel pain into our nervous systems.
So don’t mess around with hornets because it’s painful; don’t do that again.
Don’t pick up burning coals from the fire; don’t do that again.
There’s absolutely no reason as far as I can see why a nonhuman animal, a dog or a
chimpanzee or a cow, should be any less capable of feeling pain than we can, when you think
about what pain is actually doing.
Pain feels like something primitive, feels like something like seeing color or smelling
a rose or something like that.
It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing for which you need intellect.
And actually you can go even further than that—you might say since pain is there to
warn the animal not to do that again, an animal which is a slow learner, an animal which is
not particularly intelligent might actually need more intense pain in order to deter it
from doing that again than a human who is intelligent enough to learn quickly not to
do that again.
So it’s even possible that nonhuman animals are capable of feeling more intense pain than
we are.
I’m not sure how far I want to push that argument, but I think at least I could say
there’s absolutely no reasons to suppose that they feel less pain than we do and we
should give them the benefit of the doubt.