Craig on Animal Pain *Again*

Mooch and friend

I've written before on William Lane Craig's curious views on animal pain, which amount to a dismissal of it as a phenomenon we need to worry about morally. Here I discussed the views he put forward in a debate with Stephen Law, that suggested that animal pain, following work done by Michael Murray, did not exacerbate the problem of evil for theists, and here I followed up that post with a statement by one of the co-authors of a paper that Murray used to support his findings, philosopher of mind David Rosenthal, who countered Murray and Craig:

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.

In a new Question of the Week entitled Animal Consciousness Once More, Craig again dismisses animal pain. Joshua, having examined the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, is concerned that this puts animals on the same footing (before God) as humans:

If animals do have the same states of consciousness as we do, that animals have the same value and importance, biologically speaking, than us.

The Cambridge Declaration says, amongst other things:

...the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

In his reply, Craig says this:

...there is no evidence that animals other than the higher primates have a consciousness of self that enables them to think I myself am in pain. That has huge implications for the problem of animal suffering and so-called natural evil. For even though animals may have an awareness of pain (are conscious), they are not aware that they themselves are in pain (are not self-conscious) and so do not suffer as we do.

He draws the distinction between awareness and self-awareness, which I think is an important distinction, but one that does not mean we can discount awareness. The curious thing about this answer is that Craig concedes that higher primates have a consciousness of self, so presumably he thinks that chimpanzees etc are moral agents, and he already has a significant problem to address.

But, in any case, his 'answer' does not cut the mustard because, as Rosenthal says above, it's the suffering that should be the concern for us as moral agents, not the sense of self. I think it's plausible that a sense of self might change the quality of pain, but it's possible that lacking a sense of self might make awareness of pain worse. For example, lacking self-consciousness one would always be living in the moment - there would be little sense of pain passing, just happening. As self-conscious beings we can often endure periods of pain and comfort ourselves with it passing, or with rewards of future pleasure.

Craig explicitly denies that suffering is morally relevant, instead suggesting that moral obligations simply arise from God's mandate:

Lacking God as a foundation for objective moral values and duties, the naturalist must find something in animals themselves to warrant their ethical treatment. That will be their awareness of pain. ... This naturalistic attempt to ground ethical treatment of animals is doomed to failure, however, since not all animals are sentient--not to speak of rainforests and oceans! A sound environmental ethic, including the ethical treatment of animals, will be grounded in the creation mandate given by God to man to steward the Earth as God’s good gift.

(Note that Craig even bizarrely suggests that rainforests and oceans don't deserve any ethical consideration under naturalism, because naturalists can only ground morality in awareness of pain. Even if they did (and other considerations can be brought in), clearly rainforests (if we're just talking about the wood) and oceans (if we're just talking about the water) wouldn't deserve any ethical consideration per se, but since they are the very environment of many forms of life that can feel pain, they obviously would deserve ethical consideration. Conversely it seems obvious that his morality, if grounded in God's mandate, is arbitrary. If God has imposed a moral duty on us to look after rainforests and oceans as we should look after humans, then will Craig save a tree before a person? Perhaps God has instructed him to protect humans before trees; but is he really committed to a morality that is simply dictated by God? Well, of course, he is!)

The questioner, while confused, is bringing up a significant problem for theists. Why are humans exceptional? Craig's answer seems to be because of self-awareness. But not self-awareness per se, I guess, but self-awareness as evidence that humans have a self or soul that is the object of moral considerations. But even if that's the case, in this quote Craig concedes the problem of animal pain, because he says 'not all animals are sentient'. No naturalist would deny that, but even Craig allows that some animals are sentient, so he has not successfully drawn a distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, so the problem of animal suffering remains.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

Craig's Odd Views on Animal Suffering

Stephen Law has drawn attention to the above video, by SkyDivePhil (good work), that presents the scientific evidence to debunk William Lane Craig's odd view of the animal kingdom:

God has shielded almost the entire animal kingdom throughout its history from an awareness of being in pain! For those of us who are pet owners and lovers of animals, this is a tremendous comfort and a cause of praise to God for His goodness and wondrous, even ingenious, care of creation. Who would have guessed that God had done such a thing? These neurological insights, documented by Murray, greatly reduce the force of the problem of evil posed by animal suffering.

(The quote from Craig shows at least that he accepts that there is a problem of evil, or he wouldn't even bother to make such a silly unscientific suggestion. That is, if there is enormous suffering in the world, then this is evidence against his god.)

As the video points out too, Craig bases this determination of the science solely on the writings of Christian apologist philosopher Michael Murray. The video details what the science really says by asking, er, scientists:

Dr Anita Alvarez, Imperial College/UCL
Prof Stuart Firestein, Columbia University
Prof Joaquinn Fuster, UCLA
Prof Bruce Hood, Bristol University
Dr Lori Marino, Emory University
Dr Diana Reiss, City University NY

They say that Craig is wrong.

So, he gets the science completely wrong, which is odd for someone who wants to present himself as a scientifically-informed philosopher. As Law says, in the comments:

Of course Craig might well be entirely unaware it's misleading thing for him to say. He may have been misled by Murray into thinking this was a scientifically well-attested view.

This appears to be the situation. Craig himself has written this about his investigations into this key plank of his apology against the problem of evil, in a response in his weekly Q&A to a questioner who was not at all keen on his Cartesian dismissal of animal suffering:

So your attacks on Michael Murray’s credibility are quite unwarranted. True, Murray is a philosopher and not a scientist. But he has done a responsible job of studying the scientific literature on animal pain, and his book contains citations of the literature which the interested reader may pursue. 

This suggests that Craig wasn't an interested enough reader himself to examine the citations, else he would not have been so easily misled!

Clearly Craig got a lot of pushback from the Q&A that I quote at the top, since he said in this follow-up post:

I’ve been surprised by the emotional reactions I’ve received to last week’s Question! It almost seems as if some atheists would actually prefer that animals experience terrible suffering than have to give up the objection to theism based on the problem of animal pain! 

This is a daft thing to say. Atheists are responding to the uncomfortable facts that science has revealed about animal suffering, not rejoicing in their implications for theism. The facts show that we humans are part of the animal kingdom and that human exceptionalism cannot be used to justify ill treatment of our fellow travellers. That we share vast amounts of DNA with them, share much of the same ancestry and share many of the same features and functionality. These facts combine to show us we have no more reason to dismiss animal suffering than we do to dismiss the suffering of friends, relatives, or indeed strangers, in need.

In fact, Craig seems mightily confused about the whole issue. He uses Murray's arbitrary three level pain hierarchy:

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

So this leads to the unfounded notion (as the video shows) that "Other animals lack the neural pathways for having the experience of Level 3 pain awareness." and  "So even though animals like zebras and giraffes, for example, experience pain when attacked by a lion, they really aren’t aware of it." What a relief for them, as they writhe on the ground being eaten alive!

The purpose of this nonsense is obvious: to show that animal suffering is not 'real' in some sense, to extinguish the problem of evil:

Viewed theologically, this discovery magnifies the mercy and goodness of God. God has shielded almost the entire animal kingdom throughout its history from an awareness of being in pain! For those of us who are pet owners and lovers of animals, this is a tremendous comfort and a cause of praise to God for His goodness and wondrous, even ingenious, care of creation.

The implication is clear that only third level awareness of pain matters. So the questioner the next week asks the obvious follow-up question:

If animals can not experience pain, is there anything wrong with committing acts against animals which if committed against humans would be expected to cause pain? 

After a lot of poorly thought out objections to a naturalistic grounding for morals, the only reason he suggests it is wrong is because his god has told us to be good stewards:

The theist enjoys the advantage that the ethical treatment of animals can be grounded in God’s commands to human beings to be good stewards of the Earth.

...and...:

Inflicting unjustified pain on animals would be morally prohibited to us by God.

There's no other reason not to inflict animal suffering? He can't think of one other than that someone told him not to do it? In what sense are we being 'good stewards' by avoiding acts towards animals as if they would cause pain, when in fact they don't? Carving a rock into the shape of a kitten would not be inconsistent with good stewardship, and neither would carving a kitten into the shape of a rock, if animal suffering does not contribute to the problem of evil. But then he says:

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. 

But this is a back-pedal. If the second level pains should be avoided as well as the third level ones then we still have a massive problem of evil to resolve. He could argue that they are lesser evils, which he does based on incorrect science, but his previous response left the impression that there was little left to worry about - remember he wrote:

For those of us who are pet owners and lovers of animals, this is a tremendous comfort and a cause of praise to God for His goodness and wondrous, even ingenious, care of creation.

But there is still a massive amount of second level pain which could be avoided if god was benevolent, even granting Craig's nonsensical proposition. This is no solution to the problem of evil, for any pet owner or animal lover.


(Incidentally, another curious point of Craig's apology is the idea that pain requires a pre-frontal cortex. Pain is a quale of the mind, and the pre-frontal cortex is material. So Craig is saying that minds require a material grounding, which rather blows his dualism. Do disembodied minds not have qualia? Is pain a peculiar quale? Now he could say, I guess, that this is just a feature of embodied minds only, but this is falling foul of all the usual problems that even Descartes saw in dualism - there is no way to relate the immaterial meaningfully to the material. Check out QualiaSoup's video for a good summary of its problems: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS4PW35-Y00&list=UUc_xdkOBgSYLmXTn-VSQ4uA&index=2&feature=plpp_video)

UPDATE: Jean Kazez has written a good analysis of the video, and how the scientists' responses relate to Craig's claims, here. Or, at least, to what Craig appears to claim because, as I say above, it's not too clear what Craig is arguing for, imo.

Read more »