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>>5157135
The second colony down the road is about half the size of the one in the park. I always considered living there to be more precarious because people tend to drive fast, though the cats have more shelter since the road is between a high school campus and well-vegetated private properties.

We trap-neuter-release (TNR) all cats, but the trapping causes complications when there is a medical case. Understandably, cats hate being in traps, and the experience leaves them with lasting trauma. Even years later, they may avoid entering a trap even if that is the only source of food. As a result, catching a cat for a second time is tricky and better done with a different technology: a drop trap instead of a traditional one, a net (gloves are necessary!), or a hard carrier with its bottom removed. All of these methods are more intense, involved, and riskier.

I don’t know how she did it, but about ten days ago Rin managed to catch a cat with a growing tumor on her right ear we’ve been observing for months. White and other light-colored cats tend to be more exposed to UV rays and thus more likely to develop skin cancer. This is the diagnosis of the cat Rin named Azuki after the red beans used in Japanese desserts.

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>>5157136
Since a tumor was beginning to develop on her other side as well, if she were to survive, Azuki needed to have both of her ears removed; her surgery was on Good Friday. And since she is prone to cancer and will be without both external ears, living outside is no longer an option for her. We won’t allow it anyway.

3.

Managing a cat colony is both rewarding and heart-breaking. I have had to pick up dead bodies several times, and it just doesn’t get easier.

Some of these bodies had bullets in them: there was an organized attack on the animals a while ago by what appears to be animal lovers. I know because they helpfully explained their intentions with a blue spray can:

>>5157137
Message received. Loud and clear. We’re killing animals to help animals. There is a zero-sum relation between cats and seals by way of toxoplasmosis. When we stop feeding the former, the latter will be free of toxoplasmosis. When we stop feeding the former, they will not attack wildlife or start rummaging through people’s trash cans, but will politely invite themselves out of existence. Anything unclear? No.

And just to be sure we’re interpreting the threat correctly, there is a dead body next to it. “Watch it or else.”

The next night, we picked up the body of a cat who must have been sufficiently friendly to allow the killer to come close enough to put a bullet in its forehead, execution style. This is just what the animal-loving mafia does: sending clear messages.

Sometimes, it pays off for a colony cat to be extremely suspicious of humans. That cat may have survived if it ran away and hid, but it made a fatal mistake trying to befriend a new human.

Inhabit for a second the psychology of the person killing the cat. Unlike the case with Gigi, this killing was certainly intentional. Imagine yourself doing it.

>You call the cat to come closer, so close that its forehead is against the barrel of your gun.
>Then you shoot.

No, I mean it. Imagine it. Imagine harder.

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>>5157138
While all violent deaths are dramatic, not all of them are anthropogenic.

Archie and Veronica were an interesting case of a bonded pair in a colony. People who foster cats know that occasionally two cats get so close that it would be psychologically cruel to separate them. In most cases, these are siblings or, more rarely, a parent and an offspring, but every now and then the cats are not related at all. Archie and Veronica didn’t seem to be related, or in any case I don’t believe they were not only because they look quite different but also because Archie was younger than Veronica – I remember having him trapped and neutered just about two years ago.

>They were our colony’s celebrity couple Varchie, or perhaps Archonica

>>5157140
Her demise was sudden. She had contracted some disease and appeared to have aged overnight. Archie would still bump his head on hers as if nothing had changed, and they would contentedly lie side by side after eating – except that she was disheveled and 20% skinnier than in the photo above.

But it wasn’t Veronica’s disease that she died from, though it may have contributed.

About a week into her illness, I received a text asking me to pick up another dead body. I didn’t connect the dots that it would be hers even after I saw the mass of black fur half covered by soil. I didn’t want to accept that she is gone when just a week ago she was frolicking around with Archie.

The body had been there for more than two days – it was stiff and the smell of carcass was beginning to settle in. I grabbed it with the inside of a black trash bag, trying not to breathe in. Archie was nowhere to be found that night.

There were no visible wounds, so I assumed Veronica had been hit by a car. But I was wrong: another feeder told me later that she had been mauled by a large dog. Because she was so weak, she couldn’t have escaped into a tree, and she met her death screaming but powerless as her little body was thrown left and right or pinned down to the asphalt, suffocating in the jaws of a larger creature.

>>5157137
And they were correct in their actions. Feral cats are pest animals. Feral dogs are pest animals. Etc. These are human bioengineering projects, not part of nature. Cats were designed to live in storehouses and protect grain. In nature they are broken. They kill more than they need to eat, spread disease, and die shortly thereafter but not before having 20 children.

If you like the cats, please put them in an enclosed sanctuary. Sooner or later all of the ferals will have to die. You won’t be able to stop it. When the government does it, they use poisons.

>>5157142
This is not a horror you have experienced, and I haven’t either. Few have survived an animal attack that may have killed them to tell the tale. One of them is Australian feminist and animal rights activist Val Plumwood, who against all odds made it alive after a saltwater crocodile attack in 1985. I recommend reading her very short description called “Being Prey.” Read it, but remember that you still don’t know what it’s like. Let me give you a taste:

>The crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism are not suited to prolonged struggle, so the roll is an intense burst of power designed to overcome the victim’s resistance quickly. The crocodile then holds the feebly struggling prey underwater until it drowns. The roll was a centrifuge of boiling blackness that lasted for an eternity, beyond endurance, but when I seemed all but finished, the rolling suddenly stopped. My feet touched bottom, my head broke the surface, and, coughing, I sucked at air, amazed to be alive. The crocodile still had me in its pincer grip between the legs. I had just begun to weep for the prospects of my mangled body when the crocodile pitched me suddenly into a second death roll….

>As in the repetition of a nightmare, the horror of my first escape attempt was repeated. As I leapt into the same branch, the crocodile seized me again, this time around the upper left thigh, and pulled me under. Like the others, the third death roll stopped, and we came up next to the sandpaper fig branch again. I was growing weaker, but I could see the crocodile taking a long time to kill me this way. I prayed for a quick finish and decided to provoke it by attacking it with my hands.

>>5157138
Toxoplasmosis doesn’t just harm seals. It harms children and pregnant women and pervasively infests mud and soil wherever feral cats live.

People who survive it or never get sick still suffer covert brain damage. It ruins lives.

>>5157143
But putting that many cats inside enclosed sanctuaries is not always possible. Why is spaying not enough

>>5157142
Betty did this

>>5157146
According to the cdc
Approximately 11% of the US population has been infected with Toxoplasma gondii, while in some areas of the world, this percentage can exceed 60%.

How bad is it for people who aren’t completely immuno compromised like people with hiv aids

>>5157144
We also don’t know what it’s like for an animal to experience such a death. This is even further removed from our capacities to imagine. For one, a non-human animal does not anticipate the future. Its entire existence while being eaten alive or killed to be eaten is pain. The embodiment of pain. We humans can hope for death, but other animals don’t have that concept and cannot hope for anything. They live the pain and the fear as the pain and fear consume them and as they are being consumed.

We have no vocabulary for those emotions and sensations. Our concepts and our imagination do not extend far enough in that direction to elucidate even what is approximately true.

5.

Sometimes our suffering is intense like a flash flood, and sometimes it destroys us slowly like erosion. Veronica’s was the former, and Azuki’s slow bleeding from her tumor bean was the latter.

And sometimes there are institutional barriers that stand in the way of preventing or ameliorating either type. There is an entire system of qualified people following procedures and acting in professional capacity that has been set up for TNRing cats and dogs (though stray dogs are rare where I live). There is no system for members of many other species that could in theory be TNRed, given medication for parasites, and fed like we feed cats. It’s not that there is something unusual about members of these species; it’s just that members of our species have decided that there is something unusual. ( Laws often distinguish “companion animals” from others and provide more protection for the former )

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>>5157151
I am not sure if this is true, but it may well be that the most disadvantaged beings on earth are mammals with relatively advanced cognitive capabilities and range of possible experience that happen to be members of r-selected species.

In biology, r-selection is to be contrasted with K-selection. The former is a reproductive strategy of low or minimal parental investment and a large number of offspring of whom on average only one per parent survive. K-selected species have the reverse reproductive strategy.

Since these are abstractions, species are best thought of as being placeable on a sliding scale between the extremes. Humans and elephants are very much K-selected, while most fish and frogs are very much r-selected.

The welfare range and qualities of sentience available to mammals complicate this scale morally. While cats are closer to the r-selection endpoint than elephants, rats are firmly r-selected. Yet because humans have decided that while cats are pets, rats are pests, there are no institutional frameworks put in place to protect the latter. The amount of wasted life is staggering, and so is, by extension, the amount of premature death.

March was a rainy month. I was coming home after my nightly feeding of the neighborhood cats when I saw a small, wet, immobile but clearly alive creature lain on the sidewalk. I looked around: there were no people other than me nearby.

I hurried home and grabbed a cat carrier and a broom. I swept the rat’s weak body inside (I didn’t want to touch it) and took it upstairs. I had no plan beyond leaving some cat kibble and watermelon along with paper towels as a bed. I didn’t expect that I will see the rat alive the next day; there seemed to be something wrong with one of its hind legs.

>supporting feral pest animals
they're part of the problem

>>5157152
Mistaken again. The rat was surprisingly vigorous – vigorous and scared. This vitality reminded me that the animal in front of me had not had any contact with humans or been in their captivity. I named it Hank, though I had no idea of its sex; as it will become clear later, it was more important to name it than to make sure I don’t misgender it.

Because rats eat nearly everything, evolution has instilled in them a curious feeding strategy to protect them from poisoning: they only take samples even when given a variety of foods. The watermelon and kibble were only partially eaten. I took it as a good sign that there was excrement. One of Hank’s hind legs was still unnaturally bent.

I opened the carrier to leave some more food, and I heard a horrified shriek that sounded almost alien. It became clear that being confined was itself a cause of Hank’s suffering.

The same night I released Hank at a rat colony in my neighborhood, a walkway between two buildings providing shelter and a sidewalk with bags of trash in front of it providing food. Hesitant at first, Hank burst out of the opened crate dragging a paper towel behind as if it were a drunk that had just gone to the restroom. Since Hank demonstrated that it could run, I called my mission complete.

But I have no idea if I did the right thing. Perhaps the broken leg will slowly eat at Hank, eroding more and more functions until it slowly dies of starvation and thirst or an automobile tire or a cat, maybe even one of those I feed.3 Have I condemned Hank to a life of pain? (
I love cats, but they are assholes. I will later show why this should not be held against them. )

>>5157153
>>5157149
>>5157143
Original article https://pavelstankov.substack.com/p/the-pain-thats-far-away

>>5157154
I don’t know if I did the right thing, but I know that I had no open alternative. If euthanasia were the best course of action, I was neither medically equipped to supply the eu- part, nor psychologically capable to bring the thanasia.

6.

It was just a few weeks ago when the feeding went on a little longer because of unforeseen circumstances.

As my wife was up the hill with the food and I was counting the cats for my colony census – there was no point in refilling their water containers considering the frequent rain – a slim figure approached with interest. I was ready for either of the two common reactions; I didn’t expect both.

“What are you doing? Do you know that they will keep procreating? And then there…”

“Ma’am…”

“…will just be more of them!”

“Ma’am…”

“And this is not helping…”

“This is a managed colony.”

“What?”

“This is a managed colony. These cats are fixed. We fix them. And then we release them back to live out their lives.”

180°.

“Oh my God, this is so good that you’re doing that!”

She was attractive, on the tall side for what is typical of her mixed heritage. Life must have been unfair to her because she had aged to look older than she was, as I eventually learned. It didn’t help that she drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney – and she had been drinking that night.

Sandra told me her name and extended a dainty hand. She was not from the West Coast, but she spoke with a West Coast accent.

“I was named after a porn star that killed herself,” she helpfully added later.

>>5157153
>>5157149
>>5157146
>>5157143

>>5157157
I introduced myself too. Something pushed a button that made her unreasonably enthusiastic, and she was flirting with me a mere minute after coming to tell me I’m a horrible person. Both are compatible, I suppose. Then she mumbled seemingly out of nowhere:

“I came here to kill myself.”

My wife was coming down the hill carrying the food bucket.

“Is this your boo? Is she Eastern European too?”

“You know, we always need other feeders to help us. It’s really rewarding.” I didn’t do my usual “Actually, I’m from Southeastern Europe” spiel because the red light was back on.

My wife intuited what was happening without my having to explain. We shared some stories of triumph and failure just to keep Sandra grounded to the good she could do in the only world that exists – for example the story of my wife rescuing a street dog she named Chloe.

“Ugh, I know a Chloe. She’s a total slut,” Sandra quipped, seemingly incapable of paying attention. “She would suck your man’s dick in front of you,” she waved in the general direction of my loins before turning back to her: “Then she’ll suck your clit too.”

“Wow. This Chloe sounds great,” I thought. I didn’t say it.

We came to learn that Sandra was unhappy with her marriage. Her husband was older and had children from a previous relationship. She had one of her own who apparently hated her. When I was gone to feed in a remote section of the park, she intimated that there was some abuse, at least emotional but maybe also physical. It seems like she just needed someone to hear her, perhaps a reset and a connection, or perhaps a fling.

“Do you believe in God?,” she asked.

“We are not religious.”

“I feel like this is a very special moment,” she said fuckfully.

“I feel that too,” I responded after a quick calculation.

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>>5157155

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wtf is your motive the one in OP is clearly not your image the text body and some of the images is straight ripped from
https://pavelstankov.substack.com/p/the-pain-thats-far-away

>>5157158
Sandra was clearly suffering. She was lonely and probably felt misunderstood. Whatever was making her suffer, however, was very different from the suffering I already described. Whatever was making her suffer was distinctly human, not for any speciesist reasons, but because of our being the kind of creatures who could deliberate on our possible actions and evaluate them – adult, neurotypical Homo sapiens individuals. Thus, even though the cause was likely anthropogenic, its instantiation was very different from the instantiations of anthropogenic suffering in the cases of Gigi and the executed cat. This is because Sandra’s suffering consisted in regret and perhaps the sense that life was passing her by. These forms of suffering are particular to moral agents, and moral agency is the property of having the capacity to deliberate and evaluate. We, moral agents, are conventionally responsible for what we do not only because we can provide a reasoned response about it but also because we respond to reasons about it. In short, moral agents are the subjects of morality, those whom it’s reasonable to call moral or immoral.

Conversely, the kind of entities who are the objects of morality are moral patients. It’s not reasonable to call them moral or immoral; they are amoral. The agents in the story so far have been the humans: Sandra, my wife, me, Val Plumwood, and the asshole who shot the cat in the head. The patients have been the sentient animals: Gigi, Azuki, Archie and Veronica, the dog that mauled Veronica, the cat shot in the head, the crocodile that attacked Plumwood, and Hank the rat. The border between patiency and agency is fuzzy, malleable, and stretches a good decade – I would say for most of us it was our second decade of life.

Perhaps as moral agents we are more likely to sympathize with other agents. But that intuition is wrong because being a moral patient does not entail less concern.

>>5157161
Being in the scope of concern is the same as being a moral patient, and being able to extend consideration to entities in the scope of concern by itself does not place one in some more special inner circle of higher concern. Now, the type of suffering available to a moral agent in virtue of an agent’s cognitive capacity (for example, being dejected and forlorn like in a 1950s chanson) may open distinct ways to care for them, but that’s a question about the type – not degree – of concern.

>>5157160
I was reposting his article. All the images and text are from his article

>>5157162
Things get messier because patiency and agency happen to map on biological categories because on our planet only adult, neurotypical members of what we call Homo sapiens can be agents. Thus, prejudice for moral agents may just be plain old prejudice based on species membership.

Adult, neurotypical members of our species can express their pain to others and seek and receive consolation. But even adult, neurotypical members of other species do not have the cognitive architecture to experience complex emotions such as regret or the sense that life has passed them by. What they could experience are basic emotions (fear, anger, satisfaction) and visceral, dumb, physical pain and pleasure. That restricted capacity makes such creatures moral patients, and the property to experience points on the hedonic spectrum without necessarily being an agent is moral patiency. Every moral agent is also a moral patient, though most moral patients are not moral agents.

The lion’s share of suffering, and I use this phrase deliberately, is not experienced by moral agents like you and me but by moral patients, and nearly all of that suffering consists in that visceral, dumb, physical pain. Proportionally, visceral, dumb, physical pain swallows every instance of regret and other uncomfortable complex emotions available to moral agents out there.

Listen, I don’t care what you thought when you were 15: physical pain is way, way worse than emotional pain. The most likely reason why anyone would say the opposite is because they would feel like they are saying something interesting or profound. Another reason might be to energize us to care about emotional pain a bit more, a bit like we would viscerally and sincerely care about another’s physical pain.

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>>5157163
But it might be for a good reason that some of us care about physical pain a little more. At first glance, physical pain is not like emotional pain in one very important respect: unless whatever causes it is stopped, it signals the discontinuation of the very existence of its experiencer. That would be bad because with the discontinuation of the existence of the experiencer, all possibility for anything desired, anything good, and anything that is both (just in case there’s a difference between them) is erased.

In moral agents like us, however, complex emotional pain could drive us toward annihilation, both of ourselves and of another moral patient. This is why I still take emotional pain seriously. If we didn’t have the capacity to take irrevocable actions, I would have looked at emotions like regret and the sense that life has passed us by only with mild concern. But I cannot be cavalier about them: I’m the “biological existence is good because it allows all further valuing” guy. That’s my whole thing. (I’m exaggerating, but not by a lot.) Emotional pain without danger to the existence of the experiencer is manageable. I’ve managed it. You’ve managed it. Look at you alive and shit. But the moment that pain encroaches asymmetrically on our capacity for further experiencing, valuing, and acting is when we should pay attention.

Put in perspective, this more cognitively demanding suffering is a joke compared to the life-and-death struggle for survival other animals endure. That’s where the pain is on our planet. Yes, it is a joke until we take ourselves so seriously that we contemplate the irrevocable.

Anyway, we managed to distract Sandra enough to clear her head of silly thoughts. By the end of our feeding window she was playing with some of the friendlier cats.

>Ricky is always good with the ladies. Here he is in my wife’s lap.

>>5157164
I thought this was an outcome as reasonable to hope for as any. We said our goodbyes, and she drove behind us, following us out of the park.

On our way back home, my wife said:

“She would’ve totally fucked you in her truck.”

I just smiled like Mona Lisa.

8.

So far I gave examples of several types of suffering. But let me be more systematic.

Moral patiency and agency are useful concepts to consider when looking at both the source of a given suffering and its target. Since we cannot suffer unless we are at least a moral patient, in the table below I understand “moral agent” to entail patiency too. Since all moral agents today are humans and the term “anthropogenic” already exists in the literature on animal suffering, I will simply use that term with the clarification that it entails agency. Some authors have started to use “naturogenic” as the term opposite to “anthropogenic.” This is fine, and I will adopt that use here, but I should also flag that it obscures the difference between moral patiency and agency as parts of what describes the causal sources of suffering. The difference does not entail assumptions of control or the capacity to decide – those are intelligible only for agents – but it does entail a certain care in our treatment of patients that we don’t extend to non-patients. This will become important later.

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>>5157166
One more thing: naturogenic harms that are not caused by a moral patient can be dramatic like Azuki’s cancer, but are typically much more mundane. This is the common background of existential suffering that the more sensitive among us, I am told, cannot turn off. Not just aging itself but also the awareness of death, something that seems unavailable to members of other species, impacts nearly everyone, including (probably) you. This is weak sauce suffering, but it has to be listed for completeness’ sake.

So this is what I have:

>Columns list sources of suffering, and rows list types of sufferers

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>>5157167
I consider the central problem of ethics to be about handling suffering and injustice occurring outside of the subject and the subject’s near-term concerns. Most of us moral agents are not in any serious or life threatening pain. Most of us also tend to be preoccupied with our rather insignificant misadventures and discomforts. Some of us take our rather insignificant misadventures and discomforts seriously enough to hire therapists to bitch to or perhaps endlessly complain to ever-validating AI chatbots. But even outside of drama prone narcissists with learned helplessness and loci of control so external that they hardly exist, the human condition often consists in the drawn out awareness of how much life sucks now and only now for me and only me.

This is done to the neglect of what some Buddhists have called “the ocean of suffering” around us. We are vanishingly small points in it, and we are significant only from our own little perspectives. Learning how to transcend them, I believe, is the point of ethics.

>>5157168
It’s hard to imagine more suffering than the one in nature, the suffering we don’t see and rarely think about, and when we do, we shrug it off because it’s easier to think that nothing could be done than to think what could be done. No other suffering could be further away from us. Not only is it usually physically removed from our sanitized modern homes, schools, and office spaces, but it’s also psychologically unavailable. Few of us have the combination of near-death experience and literary gift that Plumwood had to make a scintilla of it available to others. That suffering, as a result, is always in the dark, its endless jaws constantly working to devour more and more victims far away from us.

2.

Evolution doesn’t care about our suffering or our happiness. Its chief agent of change is natural selection, a ruthless process that depends on death for its very function. What matters is that the next generation contains some mutations that may result in successful procreation and survival considering the particular environment. Most mutations will not have an effect, and among those that do, the effects are in expectation bad for the individual organisms whose genetic code had the misfortune to develop them.

Natural selection is not good because it’s natural because there isn’t anything that is good because it’s natural. Naturalness is orthogonal to morality or to value in general, and believing that it is not is a fallacy. That fallacy comes in two forms. The more common one is Appeal to Nature, according to which the natural world and its processes are good, perhaps even morally good, just because they are natural and no further reason. The less common form doesn’t seem to have an established name, so I will just call it Appeal to Artificiality. (It’s different from Appeal to Novelty because its opposite is Appeal to Tradition, both of which seemingly imply artificiality.)

>>5157169
You rarely hear that appeal; I have never seen a commercial that proudly announces “made with artificial ingredients.”

Appeal to Nature is a nasty fallacy because it’s so deeply ingrained in human culture. Thankfully, it’s rather easy to spot. What it must not be confused with, however, and I know that readers of PhilStack know better, is naturalist realism – which happens to be my view across a number of domains.

Naturalist moral realism does not stand opposite to some anthropogenic moral realism. It’s not called, notice, naturogenic moral realism. It stands opposite to non-naturalist realism, that is, to views that the truth-maker of true moral propositions is outside of the natural world. But I don’t know by what mechanism a thing outside of the natural world could make statements about that world true. That mechanism, to preserve the non-naturalness of the realism, must be in some way outside of the world in which it has effects. But this semantic and causal entanglement creates a problem: if two things are entangled in such a way, aren’t they by necessity part of the same world?

Anyway, non-naturalist realists are easier to deal with than their more sophisticated arch-enemies. Though they differ on the details, many of our anti-realist friends believe that they and their own stances are in some way or another what makes suffering bad. Now, I admire high agency, confident people. I consider myself not far from that ideal – I like to work out topless, in jeans, mouthing the words to “(Simply) The Best” by Tina Turner.

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>>5157170
But even I wouldn’t go as far as anti-realists: I am not some demiurge that makes moral reality – even for myself. So I endorse the view that the badness of suffering comes already decided for me by the nature of the world and I have no power to change it. (Sad face.)

Let’s consider what it would have looked like if it were in some way arbitrary that suffering is bad. Then it would have been entirely mysterious why sentient beings happen to want the same thing as if constricted by something outside of them – to flourish free from suffering – if the badness of suffering occurred arbitrarily. It fits what we know of the world more readily to simply say that we are discovering the same thing rather than inventing, implausibly, the same thing.

There is a type of undue confidence that comes with claiming that in some respects what is normatively wrong depends on us. Perhaps if we have no freedom to find normatively wrong something other than what we do in fact find normatively wrong, finding it doesn’t fundamentally depend on us. And if it doesn’t depend on us, we have arrived at stance-independence.

Thus, “decided by nature” is different from “good because it is nature.” It’s not that something is good because it’s evolved (that is a fallacy), but it may well be that something has evolved partially and by necessity tracking the good; evolution is not perfect in that just like we are not. It’s the asymmetry between what leads to survival and further valuing and what doesn’t that to me serves as a metaphysical foundation on which naturalist realism may be grounded. That asymmetry is a plain old natural fact about the world, no demiurge-like abilities to construct moral facts needed.

>I spend time on the difference between moral patiency and agency and on distinguishing my view from Appeal to Nature also to warn against pure retardium like this.

>>5157171
To a large degree, however, our particular metaethical and normative frameworks don’t even matter as soon as we recognize our shared desire for survival and flourishing. You may agree with me or you may be wrong. Whatever. Just don’t be wrong about what types of beings share that desire: as I said, “sentient creatures want the same thing – to flourish free from suffering.” Let’s unpack that a little.

It seems clear, unless one is a panpsychist, (
I have no idea what living morally as a panpsychist entails. It may just be killing and paying for the death of others just like most people do, but with the extra, spethial, spiritual awareness stamped with Mother Gaia’s sign of approval that we are deeply – energetically and vibrationally – one with the juicy piece of steak at the tip of our fork. (I do not suggest that panpsychists need to have their panpsychism energetically and vibrationally slapped out of them, and you must believe that I am not doing this here.) ) that not all things are subjects to experience. But those that are create a relation between themselves and their experiences on the one hand and that which impacts them and their experiences on the other. That relation has a morally relevant component because from the perspective of each sentient being, and each sentient being is an expert on its own perspective, some of these experiences are unwanted and bad while others are wanted and good. ( Realists say that they are unwanted because they are bad and wanted because they are good, while anti-realists say that they are bad because they are unwanted and good because they are wanted, but this is a distinction without a difference here. )

>>5157172
That biological life entails teleology hardly needs to be argued for. Organisms change themselves and their environment in predictable ways, and one can easily tell an organism that is flourishing from one that isn’t. These observations suggest that the changes are directional, not random. Moral relevance comes in when that teleology is experienced, which is the case with at least all chordates (creatures with a spine like me and, hopefully, you), cephalopods (octopuses, squids, cuttlefish), and decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, crayfish). You can read my treatment of sentience and its moral relevance across the phylogenetic tree in this equally epic post: https://pavelstankov.substack.com/p/the-birds-and-the-bees-and-the-other

This teleology is self-sustaining and self-promoting, and that should be appreciated as interesting in itself. Sometimes the most important truths are derivable from the most obvious ones. In Fellow Creatures (2018, p. 112), Christine Korsgaard writes:

>>5157174
>A well-functioning animal likes to eat when she is hungry, is eager to mate, feeds and cares for her offspring, works assiduously to keep herself clean and healthy, fears her enemies, and avoids the sources of injury. Don’t say, ‘Well, of course she does!’ Allow yourself to be struck by the fact that there are entities, substances, things, that stand in this relation to themselves and their own condition. Because what I am saying is that an animal functions, in part, by making her own well-functioning, the things that are good for her in the functional sense, an end of action, a thing to go for, a final good.

I already argued that both the suffering that befalls us and the flourishing available to us are equally parts of nature. Now we should acknowledge Korsgaard’s insight that since we’re experts on our welfare states and often what tends to lead to them, we are experts on what is good for us.

It’s true that our expertise is limited by our cognitive capacities. A child doesn’t know why he needs to go to the dentist, and going to the dentist appears to be nothing but pain. Yet, the pain experienced while going to the dentist is instrumental to the greater welfare states available now that the child has gone to the dentist. We can surmise that were he to know better, the child too would like to go to the dentist to make these greater welfare states available. This is because the child knows best what his own welfare looks like when it obtains even if the path to it is not always obvious to him.

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>>5157175
While a cat is trapped for TNR, the benefits of that procedure are completely opaque to the animal. Still, they exist: neutered cats are less likely to develop certain cancers, males are less aggressive and prone to roaming and fighting with other males, and females are spared the pain of having to endure barbed penises during mating. https://cats.com/do-cats-enjoy-mating But these benefits are not cognitively available to the cats before they occur. That’s why they need to be caught against their will, so that their lives are made better against their will. Yet I’m confident that the paternalism is worth it and that cats would prefer the welfare states now available to them over the suffering states entailed by the absence of these benefits.

>He’s an expert on his welfare, and his welfare includes splooting for the camera

>>5157177
Viewed this way, reductively, which is the way I like to view things because it allows me to distinguish the important from the unimportant, the overwhelming cause of suffering is the frustration of our desires. The fact that we are experts on the states of welfare we want but may be inept about the paths to it does not make the suffering caused by our frustrated desires along paths that don’t lead to our most wanted state of welfare less bad. Every frustrated desire, including that of the heroin addict unable to procure the next dose, is bad pro tanto it is suffering. Likewise, the frustrated desire of the tiger to eat a deer is bad for the tiger, though we should notice that the good for the deer is not being eaten, not the tiger’s frustration over not eating the deer.

4.

This is how Korsgaard (2018, p. 157) summarizes her point on the normativity of our expertise, while opening the door to a deep problem:

>Every creature necessarily pursues what is good-for her as if it were absolutely valuable, just as we ourselves do. Having no firmer ground for doing so than they do, we should grant that every creature’s final good is absolutely worth pursuing. But the goods of different creatures are in unavoidable and deep conflict with each other.

>>5157179
Natural selection has pitted us, sentient creatures, against each other. This includes competition for mates and food and other resources, but also the more serious concerns of parasitism and predation. While it’s true that most parasites are, as far as we could tell, not sentient, some are: for example, both cuckoos and the birds duped to lay their eggs are beyond any doubt moral patients.

The most cruel form of a biological relationship where one party benefits at the expense of another, of course, is predation. We may think that game theoretically predation is zero-sum because in the typical case gain for one of the parties entails loss for the other. There can be no scenario of predation in which both of the parties win, and there could be no scenario where at least one of the parties doesn’t lose. In some cases, attempts for predation result in scenarios where both lose – that may happen, for example, when a poisonous animal kills its predator post mortem. (
I don’t consider cases when a poisonous animal kills its predator without itself dying a form of predation because no party is predated on; such bizarre cases are documented https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvBi5Wv8-qg for roughskin newts, North American amphibians with extremely poisonous skin that could walk out of the mouths of snakes that had swallowed them whole unscathed. )

>>5157180
Now, this may be controversial, and I won’t spend much time defending it, but I don’t consider relations of injustice intrinsically possible only for and thus restricted to moral agents. Prima facie, if you have two dogs of about the same size and appetite and you feed one twice the amount you feed the other, then you are doing something unjust. It’s natural to think that the dog suffering from injustice is the one you feed less, but that’s true only provided that the other dog is getting the optimal amount of food. At the same time, it’s the dog that is getting twice the optimal amount that is treated unjustly since your making it fatter than it needs to be is negatively impacting its flourishing. So it seems that the differential of which dog eats more is not the variable that defines a relation of injustice – it’s the differential between the actual amount eaten and the possible optimal amount, by which I mean the amount most conducive to the dog’s flourishing. ( Don’t ask me to define flourishing. I mean, I can, but I don’t have to, and you may not agree with me anyway. I’ll let you define it the way you want to. I am confident that any serious definition would do. )

>>5157181
But possible optimal amounts that don’t get instantiated are ever-present in the lives of all creatures subject to welfare, that is, creatures whose lives can go badly or well. This includes all of us, those who are both agents and patients and those who are only patients. There is some optimal amount of food a dog needs, some optimal number of ears Azuki needs, and some optimal amount of lifestyle advice from Kristi Noem’s husband I need. Some of these might be ranges of values, others likely are specific numbers, and still others are null values, that is, none at all.

It follows that no instance of predation is just since no instance of predation could allow both of its parties to come close to the optimum of what is needed for their flourishing. No flourishing is available to the victim, and if both the victim and the predator are sentient, then the latter is not inherently more deserving than the former. (In virtue of what property would the predator be more deserving than the prey?)

>>5157182
Preventing unnecessary death is good because preventing death is good, and preventing death is good because death is an evil in virtue of, at least, its prevention of all subsequent positive experience. ( In Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (2020, pp. 16–17), Kyle Johannsen employs Don Marquis’s “future like ours” argument to a purpose similar to mine here only to, somewhat lamely, qualify a moment later that it doesn’t apply to abortion, even though that was the argument’s original purpose. Johannsen writes that in the case of abortion unlike in cases after birth – don’t ask how – there is no identifiable victim. (There is.) ) Conversely, causing death is bad because it prevents all subsequent positive experience.

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>>5157183
In this way, the entire relationship between predator and prey is profoundly unjust because it is not an ordinary zero-sum game where the loss of one is the same as the gain of another. The stakes are higher here because they are existential: one party is prohibited from all further experience, which includes all further flourishing, so that the other party could simply remain alive. This is a bad hand if there ever is one because the one who gains gains a little, while the one who loses loses everything. ( I should note that calculating death as possessing infinitely negative value is an oversimplification. In a previous article, I take the point of the “future like ours” argument more seriously and calculate the negative value of dying as the difference between the co-occurring negative experience during dying and the product of the average positive experience per unit of time and the expected remaining units of time from the organism’s natural lifespan. The numbers are nearly always large for sentient beings with welfare ranges close to those of humans, so they could be thought of as functionally infinite. This is why this simplification is excusable, I hope. Besides, this is a long post already, and I don’t need to derail us with 2,000 more words accounting for these more subtle details. I will still have to come back to them at the end to deal with a pesky challenge, but for now let’s just say that dying is infinitely bad. ) Between limited gain and what for all intents and purposes is infinite loss, no option is exactly good.

The term for this is “catastrophic asymmetry.” In this game, one player faces moderate benefit of continuing to exist for some time, until hunger sets in again and presses them to kill for survival, while the other player faces pretty much infinite downside. Let’s represent the outcomes with a table to see how shitty they are.

>There is no winning with predation

>>5157184
Let’s notice that there are only two possible outcomes. There is no situation where both parties succeed because “succeed” for a predator entails catching the prey and for the prey it entails not getting caught. And as I already suggested, the rare case when both fail, such as when a poisonous animal kills its attacker post mortem, is not properly predation. So the two possible outcomes are perfectly anti-correlated. But that doesn’t mean that there is a true win either. In the case of more cognitively complex animals (certainly all mammals and birds), every adversarial interaction of the type necessary for predation involves significant stress for the prey, so even when it escapes with its life, it still suffers psychologically. This is why I place a small negative value on escaping, even though it is of course preferable to the nearly infinite negative value of dying. It’s important to note that even the better option is net negative. At the same time, predators suffer more because they have to endure hunger for longer when their hunt is unsuccessful – that’s why the negative value is -5. The values in the worst case entail moderate, temporary benefit for one party and functionally infinite loss for the other. Thus, even the better outcome necessitates suffering on both sides, while the worse outcome is catastrophic. Each of the two is negative-sum, and in one sense my analysis may stop here since this is all we need to know about predation.

With these reflections in mind, I’d like to propose another outrageous reduction: the overwhelming cause of injustice is the difference between our functionally optimal state of welfare and the actual state of welfare. Injustice itself is thus slightly different from conceptually, though closely related in practice, to suffering.

>>5157185
Then predation entails maximal injustice to the deer, whose sentience is not meaningfully different from that of the tiger, on account of its death and lack of possibility of further experience and maybe even some injustice to the tiger, whose most optimal state of welfare might in fact not be achieved by eating the deer.

My stance against predation is counterintuitive to many, including many animal rights activists. In the second edition of The Case for Animal Rights (2004), Tom Regan argues that humans should leave naturogenic animal suffering alone because its cause is not traceable to a moral agent and only moral agents are culpable for the harms they cause. At the same time, we should intervene to stop a tiger from mauling a human child (Regan 2004, p. xxxviii).

In his treatment, Regan seems to mix and match mutually exclusive views on the agentive capacities of animals. On the one hand, humanity is to stay away from animal affairs, including predation, because there is no moral wrong committed if there are no moral agents to commit it. On the other hand, animals are to be left to their own devices lest we, humans, commit the moral sin of paternalism by telling them how to live their lives.

But we cannot have it both ways. The fact that non-human animals (and many humans) are moral patients without being moral agents explains and justifies our concern for them.( Humans who are not moral agents but are moral patients are called “marginal cases.” I’d argue that there is nothing marginal about a stage of human development that everyone goes through, including the person who came up with that demeaning term. ) Paternalism is wrong when it’s applied to moral agents, not to patients. No one thinks that my parents were wrong for being paternalistic to me; indeed, they are expected to have been while I was a child and even a teenager.

>>5157187
Is paternalism reserved only for our progeny though? That would entail that we shouldn’t be paternalistic, for example, to an abandoned toddler at the mall. Avoiding paternalism is not what morally sane people do in these situations, of course. That’s because the particular genetic relation we happen to have or not have is recognized as inexorably beside the point when we consider the actual capacities of the sentient being in question and the possible harmful situations that may arise.

Then what may justify the proposed difference in treatment of a deer about to be attacked by a tiger and of a strange human child about to be attacked by a tiger other than speciesism? Why is it that it’s not a part of the human child’s flourishing to die in the jaws of a tiger but it is a part of flourishing for the deer? On what basis? The saltwater crocodile that attacked Val Plumwood seems to have found eating her conducive to its flourishing. Remember that the relationship of predation is anti-correlated: the interests of the two parties are in sharp opposition to each other. They can’t both be satisfied. So if we’re not speciesists, then we must say that there is nothing wrong in predation when a tiger is eating a deer and when a crocodile is eating Plumwood. It’s all flourishing, right? But then was she incorrect to not consider death in the jaws of a crocodile a part of her flourishing? Do we need to educate her?

>>5157188
Well, let’s read what she says for some insight:

>Before the encounter, it was as if I saw the whole universe as framed by my own narrative, as though the two were joined perfectly and seamlessly together. As my own narrative and the larger story were ripped apart, I glimpsed shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being. >The thought, “This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than just food!” was one component of my terminal incredulity.

It’s easy to claim from the comfort of our contemporary human existence that the carnage on Slaughterhouse Earth is not so bad after all. But on evolutionary timescales members of our species stopped being prey …five minutes ago. Is our memory that short? Plumwood found out the hard way that we are ourselves edible things: amino acids digestible by the members of many other species. That view on humans is not obvious when growing up human in our time.

>>5157190
Encounters like Plumwood’s remind us that our ancestors have fought long and hard to insulate us from the dangers that we now have decided constitute flourishing for wild animals. These were sustained, painful efforts over hundreds of generations. As a result of them, we have now escaped the natural circumstances to which authors subscribing to what Catia Faria calls “the idyllic view of nature” ( Catia Faria, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 4. ) want to condemn less fortunate animals. We have the privilege to imagine ourselves outside of nature because humans of the past few thousand years developed the philosophy, science, and technology to allow us that privilege. But now that we have escaped, how should we justify keeping others down? Cognitively, these others are just like the lost toddler at the mall. Functionally and morally, they are in a significantly more dire situation because, unlike the mall, Slaughterhouse Earth never closes and is way more dangerous.

>Our indifference to the suffering in the wild is to a large degree caused by our neglect of its scope and variety and to our lost ability to empathize with its victims for we are no longer among them.

go away OP. you're clearly some tourist spamming your work from another place and no one is going to read it

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>>5157191
Let me venture a guess: you’re not worried about dying from predators, starvation or thirst, or most communicative diseases. The removal of large predators such as wolves was one condition for the expansion of human settlement since it allowed for agriculture. Speaking of which, the Agricultural Revolution from 10,000 years ago made people significantly more secure in food provision. People haven’t had to rely on natural food cycles in ages. Finally, the germ theory of disease was a revolution in our thinking about what makes us and other animals sick.

You don’t have to worry about any of this. It’s been taken care of by others, by people you’ve never met, people who are long dead but have made our life today magnitudes of difference better than the vicious, fearful lives of our ancestors in East Africa half a million years ago – not to mention the lives of their ancestors swimming, crawling, and flying around to find prey or to avoid becoming prey.

toxoplasmeltie

>>5157149
kek

>>5157201
This

>>5157203
I don’t get the joke who is betty

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>>5157206

>>5157140
>>5157208
Makes sense now thank you

I guess I am too young