A Short Note on Animal Suffering and Buddhism

How the teachings of the Buddha can help you be less compassionate

Pictured: The Buddha, peacefully ignoring honey bee suffering

It looks like another wave of animal suffering discourse has hit Substack lately, this time set off (I think?) by Bentham’s Bulldog writing a new piece titled “Don’t Eat Honey.” His piece, which argues that bees raised in the commercial honey industry experience an extreme amount of suffering, is a good representation of a modern strain in EA-aligned thinking that extends moral consideration not only to common targets of animal rights activism like chickens and pigs but also to “lower” organisms like fish, shrimp, and insects. I’m personally skeptical of these arguments, and I think both “Eating Honey is (Probably) Fine, Actually” by Linch and “Do Fish and Shrimp Suffer Agonizing Pain and Excruciating Deaths?” by Defending Feminism are solid rebuttals that should at least introduce major skepticism. But I have absolutely zero experience with the relevant biology or any other aspect of the science involved, so I won’t even try to get into the weeds and pick a side on those merits. Instead, I thought it would be valuable to step back and critically examine the basic conception of pain and suffering that western philosophers (especially those with EA tendencies) often take for granted, and contrast it with a more plausible approach grounded in Buddhist ethics and philosophy of mind. I’m sure nothing I say here will settle things one way or the other, but I do hope it can at least encourage people to consider the debate from a different perspective.

It might sound strange to say that Buddhist philosophy could lead us to doubt the moral importance of certain animals, given that Buddhism has such a reputation for being focused on universal compassion for all beings. But it also has a lot to say about suffering that directly contradicts many of the assumptions that prop up the case for their welfare. Most importantly, Buddhism rejects the idea that suffering is inherent to any particular sensation by itself. There are, of course, sensations that Buddhism recognizes as inherently unpleasant: Having a toothache, slamming your finger in a door, being set on fire, whatever. It doesn’t teach that those things are no big deal, or that a sufficiently enlightened being wouldn’t care about them. (Even the Buddha took time to rest and seek out medical treatment when his back pain was acting up.) But what Buddhism does teach is that actual, honest-to-goodness suffering takes more than just direct contact with an unpleasant sensation. It also requires a complex psychological response wherein we identify the sensation as essentially ours and take a reactive posture of aversion towards it. This is what the Buddha is referring to whenever he speaks about desire, or tanhā: Not just chanda, which is any preference or evaluative intention, but rather the specific cognitive process in which we claim some sensation (or emotion, or thought, or whatever) as “belonging to us” and develop a second-order emotional investment in its presence or absence.

We do this, according to Buddhism, because we hold to the mistaken view that we are selves - that is, we inappropriately reify a complex aggregation of causally connected psychophysical states into a single entity that we identify with essentially (in the same way mereological nihilists argue we mistake particular arrangements of simples for concrete objects that exist over and above their constituent parts). This fundamental conceptual illusion may offer the same sort of evolutionary advantage given by related perceptual illusions, in that it allows us to more efficiently sort through, evaluate, and act on our experiences in ways that promote fitness and reproduction. But it also has the unfortunate side effect of introducing the possibility of real suffering, by allowing for a wide range of self-regarding psychological responses that induce a state of stress across the entire system: Resentment, fear, disappointment, anxiety, guilt, and so on. Without these second-order mental states, sensations can certainly still be unpleasant in a morally relevant way. But legitimate suffering is constituted by certain reactive, self-referential psychological responses, rather than existing inherently in those unpleasant sensations themselves. For this reason, the Buddha taught us to approach not just physical bodies, but also mental states and even consciousness itself, with the attitude of Netaṁ mama, nesoham-asmi, na meso attā ti - this is not mine, this is not me, this is not my self.

Of course, I realize most people on either side of this debate aren’t Buddhists. And that’s fine! You don’t have to buy into the Dhamma wholesale to at least accept that ol’ Siddhartha was onto something when he taught that self-regarding psychological responses to various sensations play a huge role in determining the overall valence of an experience. If you’re up for it, you can think back to a major instance of suffering in your life and make a list of mental states that were present at the time. It’s very likely there was some discrete experience of physical pain or discomfort involved, and those particular sensations were inherently unpleasant. But there was also almost certainly fear, hurt, anger, disappointment, resentment, anxiety, and so on present in the background, mixed in with those sensations to such a degree that it’s almost impossible to disentangle them. Try, if you can, to abstract the two in your head as best you can and ask yourself: If I felt those sensations today, in the absence of any negative emotions whatsoever, how bad would that experience be? Maybe it would still be pretty bad - but it would almost certainly be much better than if those same sensations were accompanied by the intensely negative emotional response that usually comes with them as a package deal.

And it isn’t just instances of intense, deeply personal suffering where this dynamic plays out. Even the most trivial misfortunes are shot through with all sorts of negative emotional reactions that we often uncritically fold into the basic pain sensation itself. This is one of the first lessons a meditation practice can teach you: The naive subject-object dichotomy we use to frame our experiences with external stimuli obscures a much more complex interplay of inputs and outputs, one where the line between the feeling “out there” and our internal reaction to it is often indistinct. What we tend to conceptualize as one singular, discrete, and essentialized feeling - you might call it “capital-P PAIN” - is really a tight bundle of related feedback loops popping off in an instant, and much of the badness we see as intrinsic to PAIN comes in reality from the array of psychological states that arise in response to it. If you’re skeptical here, then try an experiment: The next time you stub your toe, take a moment afterwards to really consider what displeasure came from the pain itself and what came from the sense of shock, frustration, and annoyance that hit you milliseconds afterwards. My claim isn’t that the bare physical sensation of stubbing your toe apart from those states would be pleasant, of course. But I think you’ll be surprised by how little “work” that actual pain is doing, compared to the second-order misery inflicted by your reaction to it.¹

While different people are going to weight the relative importance of immediate sensations and reactive stances differently, even just acknowledging some relevance for the latter has clear implications for common EA-style arguments. Most obviously, it shows that conceptualizing the overall valence of a particular experience solely by reference to a single linear scale of sensational vividness or intensity is fundamentally illegitimate; if suffering is constituted to a meaningful degree by higher-level reactive states, then the raw “oomph” of any particular experience is only half the story (or maybe even less). This is especially true when we consider that the wide range of self-regarding psychological responses available are all evolutionarily contingent and don’t necessarily come as a package deal. In other words, we have no reason whatsoever to assume that an animal experiencing raw sensations at some level of intensity must also experience a related self-referential posture of despair, frustration, anger, fear, or anything else at a similar level. In fact, the mere fact that they experience any particular sensation at any particular level is no evidence they’ve evolved those related capacities at all! There’s nothing remotely incoherent or even implausible about the idea of a creature who feels the raw sensation of pain at half the intensity we do, while also experiencing little to none of the psychological states that massively impact the overall moral weight of the experience as a whole.

Therefore, if commonly cited figures for “suffering intensity” are understood purely in terms of the intensity of particular sensations, they’re entirely insufficient when it comes to capturing the actual amount of suffering taking place; the fact that a honey bee experiences 7% of the pain a human would is valuable information, but our overall picture of that pain’s badness to the honey bee is severely limited without a full account of how that honey bee reacts to and conceptualizes that pain. And if figures like these rely instead on the assumption that every suffering-relevant facet of a baseline human psychological profile has been equally “scaled down” - in other words, if they say a honey bee will be 7% as scared, 7% as angry, 7% as gripped by despair, and so on - then such claims have essentially no empirical basis whatsoever, since no one can seriously claim to have an account of a honey bee’s overall psychological profile anywhere close to that fine-grained. We might be able to make plausible arguments for the general evolutionary utility of some reactive states across the board, and therefore suggest that something like fear or anger should be present in any creature capable of feeling pain, but we should have little to no confidence in anything beyond the vaguest generalities. It’s still very possible that honey bees (and other arthropods) are simply incapable of the reactive states that constitute the bulk of human suffering, regardless of how intensely they experience raw sensations, or that they have an entirely distinct set of reactive states that don’t carry a morally relevant first-person valence.

I want to be clear here that, my ironic sub-heading aside, these theoretical difficulties don’t automatically give us license to throw up our hands and just assume without evidence that arthropods or other “lower” animals deserve no moral consideration whatosever; in my mind, their moral status is still an open question, and it’s an open question we’re nowhere close to solving. But if we do want to solve it one day, then I’m certain we’ll have to move beyond simplistic models of pain and suffering that clearly fail to properly account for the role of second-order reactive states. And in doing so, the One Big Question of whether honey bees (or shrimp, or fish, or whatever) suffer will break down into a bunch of more specific and conceptually clear questions, like:

• What second-order reactive states contribute most to the experience of suffering in humans, and how does the impact of those states on overall wellbeing compare to the impact of raw unpleasant sensation?

• How do we determine if a particular animal has the capacity for similar kinds of second-order reactive states, and what is the likelihood that other species-specific reactive states can play a similar role?

• What would the experience of raw unpleasant sensation be like in the absence of these second-order reactive states, either for human beings or for other animals?

• What is the general relationship between the ability to experience raw unpleasant sensation and the ability to conceptualize those sensations in terms of second-order reactive states?

• Are raw sensations and resulting second-order reactive states truly distinct in a psychological, neurobiological, or metaphysical sense, or are even the most basic sensational experiences structured by implicit reactive stances and vice versa?

I personally have no idea what the answers to these questions would be! But I hope both sides of the debate over animal welfare start asking them clearly soon, or else we’ll spend the next ten thousand eons locked in Substack discourse Saṃsāra.

1. This is why sufficiently advanced meditators sometimes report the experience of “pain that doesn’t hurt” - that is, they reach a state of deep mental stillness that allows them to hold the bodily sensation of pain in their awareness without triggering the related psychological response that makes it a true source of suffering.