As for encouraging people to feel guilty about contributing without reasonable cause to the suffering and death of a fellow creature, I think guilt is an appropriate and even a necessary feeling to have toward one’s innocent victims, as long as it empowers rather than impairs the ability to think and act better as a result.
[This article was first published December 6, 2021 on Animals 24-7..]
UPC's 2013 White House Demo
“Without guilt improvement is drastically diminished.”
– Thomas Coates, Facebook comment, Nov 22, 2021
The fact that animals are suffering and dying for appetites that can
be satisfied in many other ways makes some people, perhaps many,
uncomfortable, though not necessarily because of guilt. People get
annoyed that you’re bothering them, trying to curtail their freedom
and uncover a guilt they may not feel or feel strongly enough, so
that some end up feeling “guilty” because they don’t feel guilty,
just vexed that they’re being victimized.
If animals are largely overlooked in the range of human endeavors,
is it any wonder that their suffering is barely accorded human
knowledge, and that it makes sense to speak of the “secret” and
“hidden” suffering of animals?
Even so, many people regard pain and suffering as morally
objectionable and would agree with the Reverend Dr. Humphry Primatt,
who wrote in 1776, “Pain is Pain, whether it be inflicted on man or
on beast; and the creature that suffers it, whether man or beast,
being sensible of the misery of it whilst it lasts, suffers Evil.”
Ecology of Pain and Suffering
Yet the idea that pain and suffering are evil per se is not always
true. Pain can be constructive as well as debilitating. Pain that is
degrading in one situation may be uplifting in another, as when a
person suffers for the sake of a loved one or a worthwhile cause.
Philosopher Jeff Sebo writes, for example, that “people often claim
that traumatic events serve as catalysts for rational behavior,
helping them to reprioritize their lives and focus on what is
important.”
At the most basic level, pain is informative. Physical pain informs
us biologically that we are injured or ill, while the pang of guilt
informs us morally that we have done or are doing something wrong.
Few would argue that a morally pain-free person is enviable simply
because lacking a conscience is soothing and freedom from moral
restraint is gratifying.
The fact is, not all pain is the same
While it is true that pain is
pain regardless of who suffers it, other considerations apply. For
instance, if I have to choose between suffering from cancer and
suffering in a concentration camp, I will choose cancer. Why?
Because cancer is not a sign of human character; it’s a malignant
physical disease, not a malignant assertion of human will. Cancer is
unfortunate, whereas a concentration camp is evil.
The contrast between human agency and random occurrence is important
to counter the claim that it makes no difference whether a human or
a nonhuman animal, say, starves to death from natural causes or as
part of someone’s research; whether she or he suffers in the course
of natural predation or in the machinery of somebody’s factory farm.
Pain has a context. There are not only degrees and durations of
pain; there are also causes and conditions. There may be motives and
attitudes that enter into it that include a guilty, if
unacknowledged, consciousness.
Clearly seen, each episode of pain reflects the environment that
produced it. Images of animals undergoing vivisection and slaughter,
Auschwitz inmates recounting their experience of being experimented
on by Nazi doctors, the testimony of the doctors themselves, all
show that there is a moral ecology of pain and suffering, as well as
a natural ecology of misfortune, which may or may not overlap.
Pain is a symbol in the sense of something that is a part of – that
stands out from and illuminates – a larger reality. To talk
meaningfully about pain, we must take into account the conditions in
which it occurs, including whether those conditions are primarily
moral – involving human attitudes, motives, and conduct – or
natural, like a plague or an earthquake. We will not then be
confounded when someone dares to assert, as I once heard a
researcher say at the National Institutes of Health concerning the
head-bashing experiments that were being conducted on baboons at the
University of Pennsylvania, that what “happens” to animals in
laboratories isn’t so bad, because “life is full of suffering.” A
guilt-free mind is indeed a great comfort.
By contrast, Thomas Coates, who is quoted at the beginning of this
article, goes on to say in his Facebook comment, “There are a lot of
things I used to do that were immoral. Guilt has continuously guided
me to learn and improve. I’d hope that anyone watching this footage
[of turkeys enduring massive cruelty on a turkey farm] will
experience guilt and use it to make more educated and kinder
decisions.”
Can Guilt Constructively Penetrate the Wall?
Animal advocates struggle with how to get people to care enough
about animals to do more than just passively agree that animals
shouldn’t be made to suffer. Speaking of activist efforts in China
in words with global applicability, Mercy For Animals’ president,
Leah Garcés, was recently quoted in Why the future of animal welfare
lies beyond the West: “I think we have to keep throwing spaghetti at
the wall and see what sticks. We have not cracked the code. Nobody
has.”
Should the “spaghetti” we throw include an effort to induce
consciousness of guilt in people who are in a position to make a
positive difference for animals in their personal lives? B.R. Myers
wrote in The Atlantic, in 2007, in Hard to Swallow: The gourmet’s
ongoing failure to think in moral terms: “Try forcing most Americans
to consider the suffering of the animals they consume, and they will
conclude . . . that the whole exercise has more to do with
punishment than persuasion.”
As for encouraging people to feel guilty about contributing without
reasonable cause to the suffering and death of a fellow creature, I
think guilt is an appropriate and even a necessary feeling to have
toward one’s innocent victims, as long as it empowers rather than
impairs the ability to think and act better as a result. Guilt can
be motivating along with pity and remorse and the uplift of deciding
to wash one's hands of contributing further to an abuse, and in this
way transform the guilt incurred when one behaved less mindfully.
Further Reading:
Moral Injury in Animal Advocates and Nonhuman Animals and the Commonality of Being Reduced to “Lesser Beings”