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Originally Posted by kirin
i think we can safely say that earthworms and / or fish don't have personalities in the way human persons do and that they can't experience psychological or emotional pain, but they would find some experiences physically undesirable, which, due to their biology, would compel them to avoid those experiences, in the same way a newborn human infant would recoil from such experiences.
so the question is whether human satisfaction should outweigh physically undesirable experiences of non-persons. or at least earthworms and fish. but we would still draw the line somewhere, and for most people, that line is arbitrary. for example, you might be ok with slaughtering 10 million cows to satisfy human desires but not 10 million dogs...?
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That's not what I'm arguing. Just that their comment that their claim that the nervous systems of fish is misleading, if not outright wrong. It shares similarities, but so do the nervous systems of all animals.
i go by level of intelligence. We are (so far as we know) the most intelligent form of life on Earth. High levels of intelligence are evident in other forms of mammals, who have a similarly enlarged cerebral cortex. A dog has a primitive cerebral cortex and since MRI scans and physiological evidence leads us to believe that this is the area of the brain responsible for cognitive thought and intelligence, it can be reaonably theorized that a dog has a rudimentary intelligence.
A fish, on the other hand, doesn't have a cerebral cortex at all. It has a cerebrum, which may be viewed as a precursor to a cerebral cortex, but even that is small and undeveloped. From this it can be conjectured that a fish doesn't feel pain. And an earthworm doesn't even have a brain. It has what's referred to as a cerebral ganglion, which is just a small cluster of nerves responsible for reacting to stimuli. Despite the name, this ganglion is much closer to clusters of nerves in our spinal column in structure than it is to a brain. Neither of these animals is capable of thought; they simply react to stimuli. Given that,
it can be concluded that neither animal is capable of suffering. They can 'feel pain' only insofar as they can react to negative stimuli.
There are plants that are capable of the same thing. Is it cruel to cut a flower just because it can move towards sunlight?
If you want to discuss the ethics of slaughtering cattle (or any other mammals) vs. killing dogs and cats, you're right; that line is completely arbitrary. A cow, with a rudimentary brain is capable of rudimentary thought and therefore capable of suffering. You could make a case that a cow may very well feel pain in exactly the way we do (note that being capable of thought is in no way the same thing as being sentient; none of these animals would pass a Turing test). So that's a bit muddier.Hell, even birds. Next to mammals they have the most developed cerebrum and therefore may have the capacity to experience pain like ours. But fish? The necessary physical components just aren't there.
In case you couldn't tell, I am not a 'save the critters' kinda guy.
EDIT - and your comparison with human babies is inaccurate. A human infant has a well developed brain in terms of the components, even though the neural pathways haven't yet been established. Infants learn at an incredibly fast rate and start learning even before birth. We can't say that a human infant is capable of complex thought, but we can't rule the possiblity out either.