Ryder has always focused on pain - talked about a worldwide community of pain I think. Painism is part of RR concentration of Darwinian kinship notions of degree and not kind.
Painism seems to have had a generally negative reaction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story ... 55,00.htmlAll beings that feel pain deserve human rights
Equality of the species is the logical conclusion of post-Darwin morality
Richard Ryder
Saturday August 6, 2005
The Guardian
The word speciesism came to me while I was lying in a bath in Oxford some 35
years ago. It was like racism or sexism - a prejudice based upon morally
irrelevant physical differences. Since Darwin we have known we are human
animals related to all the other animals through evolution; how, then, can
we justify our almost total oppression of all the other species? All animal
species can suffer pain and distress. Animals scream and writhe like us;
their nervous systems are similar and contain the same biochemicals that we
know are associated with the experience of pain in ourselves.
Our concern for the pain and distress of others should be extended to any
"painient" - pain-feeling - being regardless of his or her sex, class, race,
religion, nationality or species. Indeed, if aliens from outer space turn
out to be painient, or if we ever manufacture machines who are painient,
then we must widen the moral circle to include them. Painience is the only
convincing basis for attributing rights or, indeed, interests to others.
Many other qualities, such as "inherent value", have been suggested. But
value cannot exist in the absence of consciousness or potential
consciousness. Thus, rocks and rivers and houses have no interests and no
rights of their own. This does not mean, of course, that they are not of
value to us, and to many other painients, including those who need them as
habitats and who would suffer without them.
Many moral principles and ideals have been proposed over the centuries -
justice, freedom, equality, brotherhood, for example. But these are mere
stepping stones to the ultimate good, which is happiness; and happiness is
made easier by freedom from all forms of pain and suffering (using the words
"pain" and "suffering" interchangeably). Indeed, if you think about it
carefully you can see that the reason why these other ideals are considered
important is that people have believed that they are essential to the
banishment of suffering. In fact they do sometimes have this result, but not
always.
Why emphasise pain and other forms of suffering rather than pleasure and
happiness? One answer is that pain is much more powerful than pleasure.
Would you not rather avoid an hour's torture than gain an hour's bliss? Pain
is the one and only true evil. What, then, about the masochist? The answer
is that pain gives him pleasure that is greater than his pain!
One of the important tenets of painism (the name I give to my moral
approach) is that we should concentrate upon the individual because it is
the individual - not the race, the nation or the species - who does the
actual suffering. For this reason, the pains and pleasures of several
individuals cannot meaningfully be aggregated, as occurs in utilitarianism
and most moral theories. One of the problems with the utilitarian view is
that, for example, the sufferings of a gang-rape victim can be justified if
the rape gives a greater sum total of pleasure to the rapists. But
consciousness, surely, is bounded by the boundaries of the individual. My
pain and the pain of others are thus in separate categories; you cannot add
or subtract them from each other. They are worlds apart.
Without directly experiencing pains and pleasures they are not really
there - we are counting merely their husks. Thus, for example, inflicting
100 units of pain on one individual is, I would argue, far worse than
inflicting a single unit of pain on a thousand or a million individuals,
even though the total of pain in the latter case is far greater. In any
situation we should thus concern ourselves primarily with the pain of the
individual who is the maximum sufferer. It does not matter, morally
speaking, who or what the maximum sufferer is - whether human, non-human or
machine. Pain is pain regardless of its host.
Of course, each species is different in its needs and in its reactions. What
is painful for some is not necessarily so for others. So we can treat
different species differently, but we should always treat equal suffering
equally. In the case of non-humans, we see them mercilessly exploited in
factory farms, in laboratories and in the wild. A whale may take 20 minutes
to die after being harpooned. A lynx may suffer for a week with her broken
leg held in a steel-toothed trap. A battery hen lives all her life unable to
even stretch her wings. An animal in a toxicity test, poisoned with a
household product, may linger in agony for hours or days before dying.
These are major abuses causing great suffering. Yet they are still justified
on the grounds that these painients are not of the same species as
ourselves. It is almost as if some people had not heard of Darwin! We treat
the other animals not as relatives but as unfeeling things. We would not
dream of treating our babies, or mentally handicapped adults, in these
ways - yet these humans are sometimes less intelligent and less able to
communicate with us than are some exploited nonhumans.
The simple truth is that we exploit the other animals and cause them
suffering because we are more powerful than they are. Does this mean that if
those aforementioned aliens landed on Earth and turned out to be far more
powerful than us we would let them - without argument - chase and kill us
for sport, experiment on us or breed us in factory farms, and turn us into
tasty humanburgers? Would we accept their explanation that it was perfectly
moral for them to do all these things as we were not of their species?
Basically, it boils down to cold logic. If we are going to care about the
suffering of other humans then logically we should care about the suffering
of non-humans too. It is the heartless exploiter of animals, not the animal
protectionist, who is being irrational, showing a sentimental tendency to
put his own species on a pedestal. We all, thank goodness, feel a natural
spark of sympathy for the sufferings of others. We need to catch that spark
and fan it into a fire of rational and universal compassion.
All of this has implications, of course. If we gradually bring non-humans
into the same moral and legal circle as ourselves then we will not be able
to exploit them as our slaves. Much progress has been made with sensible new
European legislation in recent decades, but there is still a very long way
to go. Some international recognition of the moral status of animals is long
overdue. There are various conservation treaties, but nothing at UN level,
for example, that recognises the rights, interests or welfare of the animals
themselves. That must, and I believe will, change.
· Dr Richard Ryder was Mellon Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans,
and has been chairman of the RSPCA council; he is the author of Painism: A
Modern Morality, and his new book, Putting Morality Back into Politics, will
be published by Academic Imprint in 2006
