An apologists fallacious rejection of the significance and the proper ontological status of what it is for animals to suffer.

[Madej]

This time around, we will analyze William Lane Craig's incoherent and contradictory analysis of animal sentience. Source material. Shall we begin? I love reading material from this particularly dishonest apologist. Oh, and I really do mean dishonest. Do I need hard examples of dishonesty? Here is one: in a debate with Michael Tooley, Tooley presented the inductive version of the problem of evil. You know what William Lane Craig's main objection was? It was towards an early, disputed proof of induction that Michael Tooley was using. However, the problem is that he then went on to say that the conclusion would not follow from a Bayesian proof of induction. Except for the fact that it does. And except for the fact that there are a multitude of Bayesian forms of the inductive problem of evil. You know, he does boast often about how he is a "professional academic philosopher", and he is so wrapped into apologetics that he simply must have been aware of the fact that you can formulate the inductive problem of evil with Bayesian proofs of induction just as logically, and so other defenses against the problem of evil are necessary. So, yeah, he is dishonest.

Oh, and now to the actual material that I set out to criticize:

I’m grateful for your question, AJ, because it affords me the opportunity to clarify what I meant concerning animals’ experience of pain. In his book Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Michael Murray explains on the basis of neurological studies that there is an ascending three-fold hierarchy of pain awareness in nature:i


Level 3: Awareness that one is oneself in pain
Level 2: Mental states of pain
Level 1: Aversive reaction to noxious stimuli

Level 3 is the awareness that the self is in pain, i.e. made possible through the ability to self-identify; to be self-aware. Level 2 is awareness of being in pain and thus experiencing it. This is the key thing here. Unless he has a warped, incoherent idea of mental states, I cannot concede that he would deny that L2 necessitates an awareness of being in pain--and thus the experience of it--but is just lacking the awareness that there is the self that is aware of her experiencing of pain.

Level 2 awareness arrives on the scene with the vertebrates. Their nervous systems are sufficiently developed to have associated with certain brain states mental states of pain. So when we see an animal like a dog, cat, or horse thrashing about or screaming when injured, it is irresistible to ascribe to them second order mental states of pain. It is this experience of animal pain that forms the basis of the objection to God’s goodness from animal suffering. But notice that an experience of Level 2 pain awareness does not imply a Level 3 awareness. Indeed, the biological evidence indicates that very few animals have an awareness that they are themselves in pain.

There is a key difference between awareness that oneself is in pain, and awareness of being in pain. Where is the moral significance of the former? Why does it have primacy over the latter, and why is the latter insignificant? It seems the fundamental moral principle applies in both cases: they experience things like pain, hence we derive the prescriptive fact that we should not cause them unnecessary suffering. This is why it is permissible to chop up plants, grass, and step on insects. And this is why it is not permissible to chop up cows, other cattle, and break the legs of chickens to haul them easier across a distance.

Level 3 is a higher-order awareness that one is oneself experiencing a Level 2 state. Your friend asks, “How could an animal not be aware of their suffering if they're yelping/screaming out of pain?" Brain studies supply the remarkable answer. Neurological research indicates that there are two independent neural pathways associated with the experience of pain. The one pathway is involved in producing Level 2 mental states of being in pain. But there is an independent neural pathway that is associated with being aware that one is oneself in a Level 2 state. And this second neural pathway is apparently a very late evolutionary development which only emerges in the higher primates, including man. Other animals lack the neural pathways for having the experience of Level 3 pain awareness. So even though animals like zebras and giraffes, for example, experience pain when attacked by a lion, they really aren’t aware of it.

He just literally just said that L3 is L2 with the addition of the awareness that the self is in pain. Then, ad hoc, he stated that animals are not really aware of the experience of pain, after already establishing that L2 entails exactly that; just without the L3 conditions of awareness that the self is experiencing pain. Second, how can he coherently say that there exists an experience of pain without an accompanying awareness of it? That makes no sense whatsoever. Remember: there is a distinction between awareness of experiencing pain and awareness of the self experiencing pain. The former being L2, the latter being L3. L2 being the case for animals, and L3 being the case for persons. If I am not aware of an experience, then I cannot be experiencing. So, do animals experience pain, or do they not? You just gave me two contradictory answers here, Bill. I take it should be obvious what kind of experience we are talking about; the only intelligible one, or the one at least worth talking about: the internal experience of something. I get the vibe that what he is really trying to conclude is that "animals don't really feel pain", as opposed to something unbelievably stupid like "only persons feeling pain matters because they are aware that there is a self involved in that experiencing of pain". I hope it is not the latter. Please, just do not be the latter. I am pretty sure it is the former, so in that case, it should be noted that he has utterly failed to establish the former. His argument for it is incoherent and contradictory. He is going against a known fact in folk psychology for a thousand years, and one known through harder sciences for at least one hundred--with an argument that isn't even consistent with itself.

To help understand this, consider an astonishing analogous phenomenon in human experience known as blind sight. The experience of sight is also associated biologically with two independent neural pathways in the brain. The one pathway conveys visual stimuli about what external objects are presented to the viewer. The other pathway is associated with an awareness of the visual states. Incredibly, certain persons, who have experienced impairment to the second neural pathway but whose first neural pathway is functioning normally, exhibit what is called blind sight. That is to say, these people are effectively blind because they are not aware that they can see anything. But in fact, they do “see” in the sense that they correctly register visual stimuli conveyed by the first neural pathway. If you toss a ball to such a person he will catch it because he does see it. But he isn’t aware that he sees it! Phenomenologically, he is like a person who is utterly blind, who doesn’t receive any visual stimuli. Obviously, as Michael Murray says, it would be a pointless undertaking to invite a blind sighted person to spend an afternoon at the art gallery. For even though he, in a sense, sees the paintings on the walls, he isn’t aware that he sees them and so has no experience of the paintings.

This is not analogous at all. In the first scenario, he describes two neural pathways that causally explain two things: L2, the mental states of being in pain, and L3; that which allows for the awareness that the self is experiencing mental states. In the just quoted scenario, he talks first about something that is akin to L1: objective senses that process objective perceptual stimuli about external objects, and then only talks about L2 for the other neural pathway explained in the quote. Oh, and the last bolded part of the quote contains him self-admitting that my extended analysis of L2 is true; that there is an awareness-experience relationship. It is just what you are aware of that differs.

Now neurobiology indicates a similar situation with respect to animal pain awareness. All animals but the great apes and man lack the neural pathways associated with Level 3 pain awareness. Being a very late evolutionary development, this pathway is not present throughout the animal world. What that implies is that throughout almost the entirety of the long history of evolutionary development, no creature was ever aware of being in pain.

And now what about L2? He skipped over that entirely. What he just did here was use an example of L1 "seeing" to not-establish that the L2 status of animals is akin to this L1 state in both moral weight, and the apparent "fact" that they "are not really aware of being in pain". Are you serious?

Your second question can be more quickly answered. The facts you mention support the claim that if there is no God to serve as the transcendent source of moral values and duties, then human moral behavior has no more objective validity than similar behavior exhibited by social animals. Such behavior is useful to a species in the struggle for survival and so gets programmed into us by natural selection. So given atheism, I think your scepticism about the objectivity of human morality would be entirely justified. On the other hand, if there really is a God who is the paradigm of goodness and the source of our moral obligations and prohibitions, then morality is securely grounded in a transcendent reality beyond the evolutionary process. Indeed, one of the advantages of theism is that the moral realm and the natural realm are both under the sovereign hegemony of God, so that the accord between the moral realm and the natural realm need not be viewed as an unbelievable coincidence.

More dishonesty. This precludes theories like a causal link between fundamental, foundational, intuitive, and cross-culturally agreed upon moral brute facts and their related superphysical abstract objects, from which this point we can reason out more complex moral belief systems. This also precludes notions like that it is of the nature of superphysical minds to have awareness of fundamental, foundational, intuitive, and cross-culturally agreed upon moral brute facts from which we can reason out more complex moral beliefs. And other theories of course. Of course, a serious debate arises regarding proposed epistemological problems of theories like the aforementioned, but the point is that he is acting as if atheism entails the cosmic coincidence; it does not. He is also begging the question against a posteriori accounts for the knowledge of the moral reality, and naturalist meta-ethics (the two usually go together). And while they certainly have problems of their own, they do not suffer the problem of the cosmic coincidence either. The usual objection I see Craig give to a posteriori and naturalistic accounts for the knowledge of and the status of the morality reality (respectively) is one that confuses the cause of moral belief with contents. I.E. he will point out there exists psychological and evolutionary theories that apparently sum up morality in an entirely naturalistic worldview, but these are theories about the causes of belief; they have naught to do with the contents of said beliefs. So, while it is true that this is an "advantage", it is also true that almost all secular meta-ethics enjoy this "advantage" too. So it is redundant.

[Portuguese Rebel]

then human moral behavior has no more objective validity than similar behavior exhibited by social animals.

Well, what of it? Seriously dude, what a way to shoot yourself in the foot right there... Objective validity regarding moral behaviour? ROFL...

[Madej]

Well, what of it? Seriously dude, what a way to shoot yourself in the foot right there... Objective validity regarding moral behaviour? ROFL...

I really wish you would have included his name in the quote, because it would look like you were quoting me to anyone who didn't bother to read the OP.

Your questionably inspired mockery of a respectable concept is peculiar.

[Portuguese Rebel]

I really wish you would have included his name in the quote, because it would look like you were quoting me to anyone who didn't bother to read the OP.

If they did not bother to read the op why should you care what they think?

Your questionably inspired mockery of a respectable concept is peculiar.

It's only derived from the fact that by professional inclination i tend to mock humans who think that they are too high in the complexity chain to be lumped with the rest of the social animals. If you send one day observing interactions of an average family of primates and an average family of humans you'll leave with pretty much the same notes. Sometimes the primates are nicer to each other too. Certainly more attentive to one another for a longer period of time

Plus, i dislike idiotic conclusions based on half baked assumptions.

[xcorps]

Yeah, I spend hours picking and eating fleas off my kids and flinging poo at noisy neighboors. It's how we roll.

[Portuguese Rebel]

Yeah, I spend hours picking and eating fleas off my kids and flinging poo at noisy neighboors. It's how we roll.

As opposite to certain families i know that don't take care of the lice their kids have even after being told to sort it out and basically living in their own trash?

Seriously, tech levels aside, you have to groom your kids even if they don't have fleas, and flinging poo isn't a normal behaviour (it occurs in locked up primates because they don't have other projectiles). I'm going to risk and say that if you were locked up and had this sort of munition your would use it too.

Funny stuff aside, when you abstract from the peculiarities inherent to the differences, the actions are pretty much the same. Specially anything to do with morality. The way primates create bonds and have moral flexibility like we do is just scary. Same situation, different players often equals different moral judgments.

[Himster]

Great, now we have an atheist version of Jean-de-la-Valette, lol.

[Portuguese Rebel]

Great, now we have an atheist version of Jean-de-la-Valette, lol.

As long as this guy doesn't go on a huge rant about the immaterial he is good in my book.

[Taiji]

Your questionably inspired mockery of a respectable concept is peculiar.

Please kick some more ass and explain why you respect the concept of objective morality - Mostly enjoyed the OP BTW, good job there

[Marie Louise von Preussen]

There is no such thing as a "secular meta-ethics", just like there is no such thing as a "natural law". "Secular meta-ethics" is a form of Kantian voluntarism, sic volo, sic jubeo, which is purely subjective and therefore self-refuting.

But OK.

By the way, according to the understanding forwarded by the Council of Trent and Thomism, animals and women both have no souls. Amusing.

[Phier]

By the way, according to the understanding forwarded by the Council of Trent and Thomism, animals and women both have no souls. Amusing.

Amusing you feel this indeed.