Abstract
The suffering of non-human animals is great and omnipresent. This is because animals are vulnerable to disease, disfigurement, injury, predation, age-related physical decline and death, and—today—it is also because human beings are subjecting animals to unprecedented violence in two different domains. Human activities and their byproducts are devastating wild animal habitats at such a fantastic rate that we are obliged to speak of a “sixth mass extinction” (e.g., Kolbert 2014), and, while the crisis is typically measured in terms of the loss of entire species, it plays itself out concretely on the bodies ofindividuals. At the same time, industrialized societies now objectify and “process” animals on a massive scale in a variety of settings, for instance—to mention but the numerically most significant—in CAFOs, industrial slaughterhouses and aquafarms, where each year the whole lifecycles of hundreds of billions of land and sea creatures are controlled without any consideration for their pain or terror except insofar as it threatens the economically efficient growth and harvesting of their edible tissues. How should we best respond to the awfulness, and the enormity, of animal suffering?
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Notes
- 1.
Tolstoy (2009, 38 and 41) also discusses butchers and cattle dealers who, despite being in possession of relevant facts about how animals are killed in abattoirs, fail to register the awfulness of slaughter, having adopted the attitude that what is done to animals doesn’t raise any questions of right and wrong.
- 2.
Diamond’s work is also relevant to appreciating challenges of bringing into empirical focus animal suffering that isn’t in any straightforward sense human-caused. I focused here on suffering caused by humans because I believe we urgently need to address it and because—although I can’t discuss the topic further here—I want to push back against the misguided, theory-driven overemphasis, within academic ethics, on animal suffering produced by predation (see, e.g., Korsgaard 2018, Chapter 10 and Kagan 2019, 10.4).
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Crary, A. (2021). Seeing Animal Suffering. In: Balaska, M. (eds) Cora Diamond on Ethics. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59219-6_7
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