Concluding Comments - 2014 Greer-Heard Forum

A panel discussion concluding the Greer-Heard Forum.

Excellent response by Tim Maudlin to William Lane Craig's assertion that moral objectivity requires theism, @ c30mins, who also makes a good point about blind luck in his concluding comments.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom", Craig says in his concluding comments, which I tend to agree with, although theism does not have a good record on that score!

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Rosenthal on Murray

Mooch the cat

Following my previous post on William Lane Craig's question of the week, Animal Pain Re-visited, I wondered about the distinction that Michael Murray drew between first order and higher order mental states. I could see that Murray was right in the sense that there is a debate about the distinction, but I couldn't see he was right about what that distinction entailed. In particular he wrote:

Do we know that any of the possibilities I describe (that animal pain is like blindsight—experienced but not felt (response 1)—or like “lobotomy pain”—felt but not undesirable (response 2)) are true in the case of animals? Absolutely not. But do we know that they are not the case? I argue that we don’t. That is, for all we know, animal pain works as described in one of those options. The scientific data do not resolve the philosophical question. And thus we don’t know if we have a problem of animal pain.
Do people disagree about this? Yes. However, I think that most scientists who think about these questions do not have the full range of distinctions that philosophers of mind do when reasoning about these matters. So I think that the scientists who disagree don’t fully appreciate the relevant philosophical subtleties. (However, some neuroscientist/philosopher collaborations have been looking at exactly such issues, indeed suggesting that the prefrontal cortex plays just the sort of role I suggest when it comes to phenomenal consciousness—whether of pain or other sensory states. See for example, Lau and Rosenthal, “Empirical Support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness,” Trends in Cognitive Science, August 2011, vol. 15, no 8.) - my emphasis

Murray says that Lau and Rosenthal's paper suggests that the prefrontal cortex 'plays just the sort of role' he suggests - that is, that pain is experienced but not felt, or felt but not undesirable - so animal pain should not count as evil.

Having read Lau and Rosenthal's paper, I still could not see that it supported this view. However, I may not have understood it (!), so I asked philosopher of mind and co-author of the paper David Rosenthal if he cared to comment on it. He very kindly gave me this response, which I quote in its entirety; I think it speaks for itself:

Mark Jones has kindly called my attention to a blog post by Michael Murray about pain and nonhuman animals, at http://www.reasonablefaith.org/animal-pain-re-visited.  In that post, Murray appeals to higher-order-thought theories of consciousness, such as that which I have advanced (http://tinyurl.com/drpubn) and, in particular, to "Empirical Support for Higher-Order Theories of Conscious Awareness", coauthored by Hakwan Lau and me, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 8 (August 2011): 365-373.

I have written a few remarks in that connection and sent them to Mark Jones with my permission to quote them.

The term 'phenomenal consciousness', as currently used in philosophical, psychological, and neuropsychological research, is used to cover both the qualitative character of mental states--e.g., what differs between seeing red and seeing green or between a pain and a tickle--and the subjective awareness that goes with conscious cases of such states.  The point of most higher-order theories of consciousness--including the one I have advanced in many writings and the version Lau and I defend by a very compelling array of empirical findings--is that these two factors do not always occur together.

The appeal to phenomenal consciousness, therefore, is theoretically loaded in an unfortunate way, tying together two mental phenomena--qualitative character and subjective awareness--that need not cooccur.  In the context of Murray's post, it effectively begs the question.
The qualitative character of pain, e.g., can occur without subjective awareness.  The pain, with its qualitative character, would be a first-order mental state; the subjective awareness on our theory--supported by a very great deal of empirical work--can occur distinctly, and is a higher-order state whose content is in some suitable way directed onto the first-order pain state. Genuine pain can, and does, occur without being conscious.

But the qualitative character of pain--even in the absence of subjective awareness--is plainly a bad thing.  It impedes pleasurable activity and enjoyment and other mental processing, it distracts and commands attention, and it impedes a very great many normal bodily processes. Pain can occur without being conscious pain, and because of the effects of such nonconscious pain, it counts by any reasonable definition as suffering, often very intense suffering.  Suffering need not itself be conscious.  

Anybody who insists that pain and its attendant effects are not very bad for the creature even when the pain is not conscious pain seems to me to be looking for an excuse not to bother with what is plainly a significant case of suffering.  There is no sound empirical reason nor any or valid theoretical reason to count pain as suffering only if the pain is conscious.  This is simply a matter of defining suffering away by stipulation.

Lau & Rosenthal appeals to prefrontal cortex in humans as the likely neural mechanism for the higher-order processes that result in subjective awareness.  There is solid empirical evidence that this so for primates generally and likely in many other mammals.  But that finding for humans does not preclude other neural mechanisms' being responsible for such higher-order awareness in other animals.  The studies have not been done so far except for primates.  So prefrontal cortex is not known to be necessary for subjective awareness--of pain or any other types of mental state--for nonprimates generally.

(End quote)

Of course, I understand Murray's point that his appeal is only one suggestion he is making to mitigate the problem of evil, and others may be successful, but I think this one approach, championed by Craig in at least one debate, does not work and should be abandoned.

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Craig adds to the Pain

Mooch the cat (and friend)

In a debate with Stephen Law, William Lane Craig claimed that science shows that animals aren't aware of the pain they are in, and this might be an answer to the perennial theistic problem of evil. It's not at all clear to me how that follows, and Stephen Law subsequently pointed out, with the help of a film made by skydivephil, that Craig simply had the science wrong anyway. Jerry Coyne also posted on the subject, noting:

But there’s no difference between feeling pain and being aware that you’re feeling pain. Pain is a “quale” (plural “qualia”)—a conscious and subjective sensation—which demands awareness, unless it’s simply a sensation that you have learned (or evolved) to avoid.  But if you’ve learned or evolved to avoid it because it’s unpleasant, then you are indeed aware of feeling pain! Finding a sensation unpleasant demands sufficient consciousness to experience qualia.

I tend to agree, although I could concede there may be a difference between the pain felt by animals that have self-awareness about pain, like humans, (what Craig calls third-level pain) and those that don't (second-level pain). However, I cannot see that self-awareness alone renders the pain morally relevant. Oddly Craig did ask himself this question on a question of the week some time ago:

So let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that Murray has got it right about the science concerning animal pain: sentient animals do experience pain, but they (apart from the higher primates) are not aware that they are themselves in pain. What ethical implications for the treatment of animals would this affirmation have?

The only answer I can see him offering is this:

Inflicting unjustified pain on animals would be morally prohibited to us by God. Yes, remember that on the view we’re discussing, sentient animals do experience second-level states of pain, which should not be needlessly inflicted. So stunning animals before killing them for food is, indeed, a good idea. Even with regard to animals which do not experience second-level pain, the theist can maintain that we should not needlessly impair or kill them.

...which appears to concede that animal pain is morally relevant (it's 'a good idea' to avoid it), even if his distinction between second-level and third-level pain stands.

Craig has now added a follow-up with a response from Michael Murray, who originally drew the distinction. Craig seems to think the strongest point that Murray makes is:

...that non-human animals do not have a first-person perspective on their experiences, including experiences of pain, that is to say, they cannot adjoin to their experiences the prefix “I think/feel that. . . ,”so that animals, even if in pain, are not aware that they are themselves in pain.

Once again, he does not argue here why that makes the pain morally irrelevant, but he does think that:

Dr. Murray shows that his critics have not shown that animal suffering of a morally significant sort really exists.

That's a pretty weak claim; likewise one presumes that Craig and Murray also think that no-one has shown that baby suffering of a morally significant sort really exists either, if the distinction is simply that the organism cannot adjoin to their experiences the prefix "I think/feel that...". Further, it is a betrayal of the cautionary principle: that if animals, and babies, display the symptoms of pain, we should assume they are feeling pain.

Murray appeals to the possibility that animals have pain without any “negative-feeling”, based on reports of humans that have reported such a thing after disruption to their prefrontal cortexes. Well I'm no scientist, so I will leave that one to them, but it seems far from clear why we need to prove the precise nature of animal pain before we consider it relevant to our moral calculations. Murray's argument is simply that:

...perhaps most animals do not experience negative-feeling-pain (because they lack a PFC).

But either animal pain is not negative, in which case avoiding it is neither a good idea nor a bad idea, contra Craig above, or it is a negative, in which case the problem of natural suffering is not answered by this argument.

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