Interesting, I'm sympathetic to this kind of analysis of suffering and have found it useful for dealing with ordinary physical pain. But I've also got an intuition that 2nd order states don't matter much when you are in excruciating pain. Like, if you're being burned alive, is there some way of 'reacting' to the sensation that make it not unimaginably horrible? In these examples, the badness of the raw sensation seems much more important to the total badness of pain.
Yes, I agree there's plausibly some point where the immediate badness of a particular sensation overcomes the second-order badness of the reactive states it triggers *at that time.* But it could still be the case 1) that your reactive states still contribute an extra load of suffering on top, and 2) that after the immediate horrendous experience, second-order reactive states continue for long periods of time in a way that contributes to more badness overall. For example, you could imagine being tortured for an hour and then thrown into a cell for a week - in that case, you might get "60 badness points" from the physical sensations of the torture, "40 badness points" from the fear, despair, trauma, etc you experience at that time and then "80 badness points" from those reactive states continuing during your imprisonment. So even if there's some point where sensations take over in the moment, the possibility of long-term suffering adding up over time on the basis of these reactive states seems likely.
Yeah that sounds right. My other thought is that perhaps my 2nd-order reaction to being burned alive is simply involuntary, whereas my 2o reaction to lesser pains can be more flexibly changed by the executive part of the brain.
I think the broader vibe I'm trying to articulate is something like: 'everyone thinks suffering is an illusion until the torture starts'.
I would say it's very likely that newborns have at least some fundamental set of reactive states "pre-programmed" into their cognitive faculties from the first moments of consciousness, but also that it probably takes some time for those states to develop in richness and complexity.
I think you are broadly correct in your account of suffering. That said I think you miss some points on the application to EA.
1. I think EAs already have something like this on mind. Take oysters for example. Many EAs will say they have no moral value, as they have no central nervous system. They do have a periferical nervous system, which is enough for the seeking/avoiding behavior, but without a central nervous system they can't have that second order thinking necessary for suffering. But notice that the bar is very low. If they have brains, and shrimp and bees do, then there is at least the possibility of identity formation necessary for suffering. That said, you could still doubt that they actually have individual identities, specially bees being eusocial animals.
2. I take your point about the uncertainty of these kinds of analysis. But uncertainty is also quantifiable. Uncertainty cannot be grounds for moral paralysis. How confident are you that shrimp suffer? 10%? 1%? So just divide the results by 10 or 100, and see if that still warrant action.
Yes, like I said I don't think we should use this analysis to dismiss the possibility of arthropod suffering or to say the whole thing is unknowable. It's more about setting the terms for future investigations - what we do with the certainty we have now is another question (although that's also an area where I think the EA moral risk arguments are overly simplistic, unfortunately).
Super interesting! I agree that the intrinsic quality of pain probably isn't (very) bad in itself. But I think this is probably because the (un)satisfaction of desires is what matters instead. This seems to me to fit well with my experience and capture what seems bad about things.
But I wonder how this would interact with your argument here? It doesn't seem like desires necessarily require thinking about your own mental states (though perhaps you didn't intend "second-order reactive states to have this connotation). And it looks very likely that any animal that is conscious will also have desires in some sense.
I'm interested in what you make of this! I suspect you might say that desire is just an ill-defined folk-psychological concept (though I suspect we can make it somewhat precise).
You suspect wrong! I think any plausible theory of mind is going to need something at least roughly tracking with the folk concept of desire, so I'm definitely willing to work with it as a conceptual fundamental. And I agree that desire fulfillment or desire thwarting plays a major role in the valence of any particular experience. But, with that said, it seems plausible to me that having a desire *just is* having a tendency towards certain reactive responses to something obtaining or not obtaining, in which case it's an open question whether "lower" animals actually have desires at all. (This is arguably the Buddhist position anyway, although of course traditional Buddhism does hold that all sentient beings have those clinging states.) And if they are separate things, then I still think you'd need the reactive stance towards the desire being fulfilled or unfulfilled to actually qualify as suffering or flourishing. Of course, in practice, I imagine our desires and our reactive stances towards their being fulfilled or thwarted are tied up so intimately that it's hard to disentangle them. But it doesn't seem totally incoherent to me that someone could at least in principle have a desire be thwarted and not suffer as a result.
I'm glad we agree that far! That's an interesting conception of desire. I would (tentatively) think of it more as a proactive than reactive attitude. That is, my desire to eat cake is not as much my evaluating cake-eating positively after the fact, but rather my drive to eat cake before doing so. In this sense, desire would be something analogous to a force--I have a desire for X just in case I'd do X all else being equal.
It might be very hard to separate the two empirically, as whenever I have a negative reactive attitude towards X happening, I presumably also have a drive to stop X from happening and vice versa. But it seems like lower animals (if conscious) certainly have the drive kind, even if they don't have the reflective attitude kind. The question (or one question at least) is then which of the two senses is actually morally important.
This might get more into ethical theory now. You might be right that suffering requires the reactive attitude (I'll have to think more about that), but then I'd resist the idea that suffering is the only front on which desires are valenced. For instance, it seems to me like it is bad for me if all my friends are just pretending to like me, without my knowledge. This is captured by the drive account (I am trying to get people to like me, but my end is not reached), however it is not captured by reactive attitudes (I don't realize and so don't have a negative reactive attitude).
You might want to cash the badness out in terms of some disposition to have a negative attitude (though it's hard for me to see how a disposition like this is bad), or just insist that it's not bad for me so long as I don't know about it.
Anyways, that might be a bit of a ramble, but I think it's a very interesting objection, and a lot better than most of the anti-insect/shrimp stuff you find!
That's an interesting case - I agree that you can be harmed without suffering because of it, and I think this is clearly a case of that. But I don't think the desires have much to do with it, because I think you'd be harmed even if you didn't care about having true friends (in the same way you'd be harmed by eating sawdust in your food even if you didn't care about being healthy). It could be that having true friends is just an objectively good thing, and that anyone who lacks it is harmed in some way by that lack. But if it were to cause you any suffering, it would have to be because at some point you took a negative reactive posture towards their duplicity (which might be reasonable, or might be grounded in a self illusion as well).
But with that said, I do agree with you that desires are probably best understood as motivational and prior to whatever is desired - but I think that motivational heft, at least in a traditional Buddhist analysis, is granted by a deeper set of reactive attitudes. For example, if I desire to eat a slice of cake, that could be cashed out as a motivating urge to pursue the slice of cake, but that sort of craving is itself driven by a reactive attitude against the absence of cake I have right now. In other words, to desire something is to feel aversion to its absence, and it's that aversion that actually drives the desire. And sometimes we even have an aversion *to the desire itself,* as Kierkegaard (I think?) points out when he says that, paradoxically, to have a desire is to desire its absence - hunger can be felt as a desire to eat, but also a desire to not have the desire to eat (ie to not be hungry anymore).
> It might be very hard to separate the two empirically, as whenever I have a negative reactive attitude towards X happening, I presumably also have a drive to stop X from happening and vice versa.
I think learning to let go of this is part of the point of Buddhism. It's possible to accept the unpleasant sensation of pain without accepting the negative sensation of suffering.
This is very compelling. Personally I think the culprit isn't a false view of the self but the widespread application of the is/ought distinction. Basically, pain becomes suffering when you apply a normative attitude towards it (namely: I shouldn't have to feel this way/this shouldn't be the case). You're modest in your conclusions, but what your essay really points to is the possibility that the very distinction that created ethics also created suffering. So, in a sense, ethics created suffering.
Buddhadasa Bhikkhu has a great talk along these lines, although unfortunately I can't find it right now online. But he basically talks about the Adam and Eve story, and how weird it is that they're condemned for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, since that should seemingly be a good thing to have contact with. But his basic point is that all suffering ultimately comes from exactly that normative distinction you're talking about, and that their state in the garden before that point was a metaphor (in his mind) for enlightenment.
And yet, if you were in the garden, having never tasted suffering, and were offered the opportunity to taste it, wouldn't you be tempted? And doesn't that suggest that both the analytic and Buddhist views are missing something? Maybe suffering isn't just to-be-avoided or to-be-transcended. Suffering, after all, seems necessary for growth. Imagine meeting someone who has never suffered -- wouldn't they be in a state of arrested development? Your view suggests that suffering may be uniquely human -- that it's that in virtue of which we're special. If so, is it really so obvious that we should aim to get rid of it either by transcendence or by elimination?
I’m not particularly sold on the arguments against fish pain (I’ve analyzed Rose and bros papers in great detail), but I think this article makes some good points. One possibility which you don’t interact with is Richard Dawkins’ concern that because most animals don’t have a second-order perspective on their pain, they have nothing to rationalize and ergo mitigate it. I don’t think Dawkins’ concern matches how we see animals behave, but it’s something worth considering counterfactually based on the ideas in this article.
I definitely agree that some reactive attitudes can help minimize suffering in response to pain just as much as they might generate that suffering, so I don't think the concern is crazy at all. But like you say, it doesn't tend to match our observations about how "simpler" creatures respond to pain, and I'm still skeptical that reactive attitudes have an overall positive result when it comes to suffering - I still think I'd take the pure, unmitigated experience of a certain pain over that same pain with all the reactive attitudes most commonly associated with it.
Putting this out for consideration, not necessarily saying I believe it: If mature/enlightened humans are capable of choosing to put aside the various sequelae sufferings from physical pain sensation, but other sentients are not so able (even if they do not have nearly as much of the sequelae due to neurological limitations), wouldn’t that *increase* their relative potential suffering (those controversial percentages). Compare: we care a lot more about a child suffering physical pain than ourselves suffering it because we know the kid can’t manage to push away the suffering like we can.
Yeah, that's a point some EAs have made - that, because these minds are so simple, a single experience of pain will dominate them in a way that it wouldn't in a more complex brain. I'm not sure what to make of an argument like this, because I don't know enough about the actual biology involved, but it seems to me we have to make a distinction between having the ability to regard something as X and actively not doing so, and having no such ability in the first place. That's why it's so difficult, I think, for us to even comprehend what non-human experience is like: We're thinking about ourselves voluntarily "giving up" the use of certain mental features, rather than really imagining what it would be to have no access to them at all.
This is much more in line with the traditional Buddhist interpretation: animals are said to suffer more than humans, not less. It's taught that when one achieves stream entry and can no longer be reborn in the animal realm, this is a great relief. Whether you believe the metaphysical claim or not, the post frames this in terms of Buddhist teachings on suffering, and rebirth is deeply tied up with that in Buddhist thought. If Buddhism accepts that animals don't have second-order reactions, and yet animals are said to suffer more than humans, then suffering can't be equated to second-order reaction within Buddhist thought.
Yes, to be clear, traditional Buddhism does hold that animals do have second-order reactions of the kind I'm describing! In fact, it holds that they have even more powerful self-regarding reactions because, as you say, they cling even more intensely and therefore suffer more. I don't think that's plausible in light of current scientific knowledge, but you're definitely right that the concern I'm raising doesn't apply to people who are traditional Buddhists (as opposed to those who are just influenced by their fundamental philosophical commitments).
One of the distinctions I'm trying to bring attention to is between what you're calling second-order reactions and the clinging (I think this is not the right word, as clinging comes after craving in dependent origination, so I think it should be craving here) that makes animals suffer more in traditional Buddhist thought. The craving is something that happens either below or peripheral to any given reaction or thought.
The overall issue I see with what you're saying is that "self-regarding reactions" sounds too propositional to me. Maybe you don't mean it this way, but that's how I read it. A self-regarding reaction is entirely consistent with not-self, it's just that it's also not-self.
I think that the level that ignorance works on (and therefore craving, as they co-arise) is so subtle that anything science has investigated as of yet won't touch upon it. It doesn't necessarily have to be beyond science or something that science can't access, but I'm skeptical that science could really have anything to say about it either way at this point in time.
I was very on board with this for about the first half. But overall, I don't agree with the way you've described suffering, and consequently, the rest of the argument doesn't work for me.
The first hint that something is off with the way you've defined suffering as a second-order reactive state that animals lack is pretty straightforward: according to Buddhist cosmology, animals suffer *more* than humans. So if you're building an argument based on a Buddhist concept, but the way you've described it invalidates the context that is used to set forth its meaning, then I don't think you've actually built an argument around a faithful interpretation of that concept. The idea that animals have simpler minds is baked into the tradition as well, so it can't be that canonical Buddhism teaches that animals suffer more based on some assumption that they are actually more complex internally than we are. Instead, the higher degree of animal suffering is based in something separate from the complexity that you're calling on here.
The more complex issue is that you have sort of reduced suffering to a bodily state, just a more complex one. Consider that, in Buddhism, the mind (mano) is a sense base, and is part of a broader phenomenological "body of experience". Then there is citta, which is something more fundamental, often equated with the "heart". These two are not the same, and suffering occurs on the level of citta, not mano. So when you say:
>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.
it seems like you're conflating the two. Resentment, fear, disappointment, anxiety, guilt, etc., are all emotions, and suffering occurs in response to those emotions — consider how the Buddha, who was beyond suffering, was able to grieve the passing of Sariputta. Grief is an emotion, but it was able to arise even without suffering. That indicates that the second-order states you're referring to are not equivalent to suffering, as they can be experienced separately without any suffering arising.
So, between these two things (1. that animals suffer more than humans despite not having second-order states and 2. that second-order states do not inherently entail suffering) it doesn't seem reasonable to reach the conclusion you have here.
What makes this all come together into a coherent picture is seeing suffering as something even more fundamental — not an emotion that can be directly taken on as an object of experience, but as a sort of direction that experience can move in, and which we naively tend to take. The ending of suffering, then, becomes the realization that there is no reason to ever go in that direction, and so you stop going there. But mere negative thoughts and emotions don't equate to suffering so long as this more fundamental non-reactivity is in place.
I would actually be curious your thoughts on that essay, as I haven't seen it discussed in philosophical circles.
Last thing to note is that in the Sallasutta, the Buddha says this about the suffering of an unlearned disciple:
"If they feel a pleasant feeling, they feel it attached.
If they feel a painful feeling, they feel it attached.
If they feel a neutral feeling, they feel it attached."
One way to describe being "attached" to a feeling might be that it takes up the entirety of your experience so that there is, in some sense, no longer any room to reflect "this isn't me". This would mirror the most extreme pain that leaves people unable to think about anything else — it just becomes their whole experience. It becomes them — "I am this". Similarly, recalling when I was a child, any displeasure at all took up all my mental room, and there was no ability to think beyond it — the slightest pain was the worst possible thing every time because I couldn't reason "well, it's just a shot, it's good for me and only lasts a moment". If this is what attachment is, then it would make sense why animals suffer more: their lack of second-order thought processes leaves them entirely attached to their sensations.
Thank you for this detailed response! As I said in my other reply, I totally agree with you that traditional Buddhism sees non-human animals as clinging even more intensely and suffering even greater harms as a result. As to the second point, I will admit it's been many years since I've gone through the suttas on this subject, so I would defer to your expertise here. But I will say that the only sutta I'm aware of regarding Sariputta's death (the Cunda sutta) doesn't have the Buddha displaying what we'd normally take to be grief, and the Kosala sutta says grief is the result of the uninstructed person improperly clinging to permanence. So I'm not confident that the emotions you're referring to would have been seen as entirely separate from suffering, although of course they do tend to set off a chain of even more harmful reactive attitudes when experienced by those who are less developed for sure. I'll read Ven. Anigha's piece though, thank you for sharing it!
You may be right about the suttas regarding Sariputta's death — this is something I've heard my teachers talk about, but looking for references, I can't find the story I was thinking of. The closest I've found is the Ukkacela Sutta (SN 47.14), in which the Buddha says:
"Bhikkhus, this assembly appears to me empty now that Sāriputta and Moggallana have attained final Nibbāna. This assembly was not empty for me earlier, and I had no concern for whatever quarter Sāriputta and Moggallana were dwelling in."
I think it's reasonable to read this as the Buddha feeling a bit sad about this, but not suffering on account of it. In common language, it's a "mental" unpleasantness, not a "bodily" one in the common sense. But since any functioning body would notice this and view it as unpleasant due to ingrained habits, it's ultimately a bodily sensation that is not in one's direct control. And since vedana is not dukkha, unpleasant vedana that arises on account of mental perceptions, which I think would count as your second-order reactions, would not be dukkha. Dukkha, in my view, would lie in the way that one relates to the second-order reactions.
What might be more clarifying for this is taking a look at Ananda's reaction to the Buddha's passing. At the time, Ananda was a stream-enterer and displayed a severe grief reaction. Depending on your interpretation of the Sallasutta, this would be a clear indication of grief without suffering. The Sallasutta contrasts the experience of an ariyasavaka and a puthujjana, and notes that the puthujjana experiences bodily and mental suffering, but the ariyasavaka only experiences a bodily feeling, not a mental suffering. Technically, a stream-enterer is an ariyasavaka, and so they should not experience mental suffering based on this sutta, and yet we see Ananda exhibiting serious grief. The traditional explanation of this apparent discrepancy is that in the context of the sutta, the Buddha is referring solely to arahants. However, Ven. Anigha and the other monks at Hillside Hermitage interpret it as saying that all ariyasavakas are free of suffering on the level of citta, but not on the level of mano, and that an arahant does not even suffer on the level of mano. That would explain why the Buddha, being fully enlightened, does not experience grief the same way (although he does seem to hint at some unpleasantness), but Ananda could still grieve despite generally being free of suffering.
Personally, I am not quite sure what I think of the various interpretations. I tend to just refer back to my own experience. Taking a feeling like anxiety, for example, there is a stark divide between being anxious and then suffering on account of that anxiety. If I experience anxiety and mentally move in an attached direction, I suffer. If I experience anxiety and simply know it as anxiety (not propositionally, i.e. actually stating "this is anxiety", but in a know-how sense of not "holding it" the same way), I don't suffer anywhere near the same degree. The bodily reaction of anxiety will continue until it runs out, and that may include anxious thoughts — those are not in my control. But there is something else that occurs below the surface that allows the fuel to run out and to not attach in the same way.
I think you're definitely right that, no matter what the theoretical analysis ultimately is, it would be a mistake to adopt a mindset that basically says, "Oh, there's anxiety? Well then I must be suffering already, there's no hope for me." So certainly maintaining a distinction between these reactive states and suffering is practically valuable. It also seems possible to me both that you can mindfully consider these reactive states as they arise without suffering, and that the suffering experienced by clinging to those reactive states *just is* those reactive states experienced unmindfully, or with clinging - just like you can have something burning in your vision without getting burned, but if you do reach out and grab it, there isn't something extra thing created by the grabbing that ends up hurting you.
Yeah, definitely — I think that's basically the distinction between the 5 aggregates and the 5 clinging aggregates. An arahant (or Buddha) has the 5 aggregates without clinging, and everyone else has the 5 clinging aggregates.
The interesting distinction here, I think, is that these are seemingly presented as two different modes of aggregates, not different configurations of aggregates. This is where I think "how" vs "what" comes into play. The cessation of suffering is often considered a cessation of the "what", i.e., a cessation of aggregates coming together in a certain way. And this is true to some extent, as that does eventually happen (that's the ending of rebirth). But I think what's more fundamental is the "how", i.e., some knowledge that relates to whatever formation is there.
A quick example of the distinction could be riding a bike. If you don't know how to ride a bike, you push off, and you might ride for a second, but then you fall. If you know how to ride a bike, you have that same initial experience, but the mode of it is different, as it leads to continued riding, not falling. Observing just that initial time slice, they're the same, but the context or mode they fit into is different.
No, it's more like "We have no reasonable grounds for assessing the overall moral character of industrial honey production at this point." But it's a moot point on a personal level anyway since I don't think I've purchased honey in years, lol.
Interesting, I'm sympathetic to this kind of analysis of suffering and have found it useful for dealing with ordinary physical pain. But I've also got an intuition that 2nd order states don't matter much when you are in excruciating pain. Like, if you're being burned alive, is there some way of 'reacting' to the sensation that make it not unimaginably horrible? In these examples, the badness of the raw sensation seems much more important to the total badness of pain.
Yes, I agree there's plausibly some point where the immediate badness of a particular sensation overcomes the second-order badness of the reactive states it triggers *at that time.* But it could still be the case 1) that your reactive states still contribute an extra load of suffering on top, and 2) that after the immediate horrendous experience, second-order reactive states continue for long periods of time in a way that contributes to more badness overall. For example, you could imagine being tortured for an hour and then thrown into a cell for a week - in that case, you might get "60 badness points" from the physical sensations of the torture, "40 badness points" from the fear, despair, trauma, etc you experience at that time and then "80 badness points" from those reactive states continuing during your imprisonment. So even if there's some point where sensations take over in the moment, the possibility of long-term suffering adding up over time on the basis of these reactive states seems likely.
Yeah that sounds right. My other thought is that perhaps my 2nd-order reaction to being burned alive is simply involuntary, whereas my 2o reaction to lesser pains can be more flexibly changed by the executive part of the brain.
I think the broader vibe I'm trying to articulate is something like: 'everyone thinks suffering is an illusion until the torture starts'.
Do you think human newborns have second-order reactive states, and if they don’t, what would be the moral implication of that?
I would say it's very likely that newborns have at least some fundamental set of reactive states "pre-programmed" into their cognitive faculties from the first moments of consciousness, but also that it probably takes some time for those states to develop in richness and complexity.
I think you are broadly correct in your account of suffering. That said I think you miss some points on the application to EA.
1. I think EAs already have something like this on mind. Take oysters for example. Many EAs will say they have no moral value, as they have no central nervous system. They do have a periferical nervous system, which is enough for the seeking/avoiding behavior, but without a central nervous system they can't have that second order thinking necessary for suffering. But notice that the bar is very low. If they have brains, and shrimp and bees do, then there is at least the possibility of identity formation necessary for suffering. That said, you could still doubt that they actually have individual identities, specially bees being eusocial animals.
2. I take your point about the uncertainty of these kinds of analysis. But uncertainty is also quantifiable. Uncertainty cannot be grounds for moral paralysis. How confident are you that shrimp suffer? 10%? 1%? So just divide the results by 10 or 100, and see if that still warrant action.
Yes, like I said I don't think we should use this analysis to dismiss the possibility of arthropod suffering or to say the whole thing is unknowable. It's more about setting the terms for future investigations - what we do with the certainty we have now is another question (although that's also an area where I think the EA moral risk arguments are overly simplistic, unfortunately).
Super interesting! I agree that the intrinsic quality of pain probably isn't (very) bad in itself. But I think this is probably because the (un)satisfaction of desires is what matters instead. This seems to me to fit well with my experience and capture what seems bad about things.
But I wonder how this would interact with your argument here? It doesn't seem like desires necessarily require thinking about your own mental states (though perhaps you didn't intend "second-order reactive states to have this connotation). And it looks very likely that any animal that is conscious will also have desires in some sense.
I'm interested in what you make of this! I suspect you might say that desire is just an ill-defined folk-psychological concept (though I suspect we can make it somewhat precise).
You suspect wrong! I think any plausible theory of mind is going to need something at least roughly tracking with the folk concept of desire, so I'm definitely willing to work with it as a conceptual fundamental. And I agree that desire fulfillment or desire thwarting plays a major role in the valence of any particular experience. But, with that said, it seems plausible to me that having a desire *just is* having a tendency towards certain reactive responses to something obtaining or not obtaining, in which case it's an open question whether "lower" animals actually have desires at all. (This is arguably the Buddhist position anyway, although of course traditional Buddhism does hold that all sentient beings have those clinging states.) And if they are separate things, then I still think you'd need the reactive stance towards the desire being fulfilled or unfulfilled to actually qualify as suffering or flourishing. Of course, in practice, I imagine our desires and our reactive stances towards their being fulfilled or thwarted are tied up so intimately that it's hard to disentangle them. But it doesn't seem totally incoherent to me that someone could at least in principle have a desire be thwarted and not suffer as a result.
I'm glad we agree that far! That's an interesting conception of desire. I would (tentatively) think of it more as a proactive than reactive attitude. That is, my desire to eat cake is not as much my evaluating cake-eating positively after the fact, but rather my drive to eat cake before doing so. In this sense, desire would be something analogous to a force--I have a desire for X just in case I'd do X all else being equal.
It might be very hard to separate the two empirically, as whenever I have a negative reactive attitude towards X happening, I presumably also have a drive to stop X from happening and vice versa. But it seems like lower animals (if conscious) certainly have the drive kind, even if they don't have the reflective attitude kind. The question (or one question at least) is then which of the two senses is actually morally important.
This might get more into ethical theory now. You might be right that suffering requires the reactive attitude (I'll have to think more about that), but then I'd resist the idea that suffering is the only front on which desires are valenced. For instance, it seems to me like it is bad for me if all my friends are just pretending to like me, without my knowledge. This is captured by the drive account (I am trying to get people to like me, but my end is not reached), however it is not captured by reactive attitudes (I don't realize and so don't have a negative reactive attitude).
You might want to cash the badness out in terms of some disposition to have a negative attitude (though it's hard for me to see how a disposition like this is bad), or just insist that it's not bad for me so long as I don't know about it.
Anyways, that might be a bit of a ramble, but I think it's a very interesting objection, and a lot better than most of the anti-insect/shrimp stuff you find!
That's an interesting case - I agree that you can be harmed without suffering because of it, and I think this is clearly a case of that. But I don't think the desires have much to do with it, because I think you'd be harmed even if you didn't care about having true friends (in the same way you'd be harmed by eating sawdust in your food even if you didn't care about being healthy). It could be that having true friends is just an objectively good thing, and that anyone who lacks it is harmed in some way by that lack. But if it were to cause you any suffering, it would have to be because at some point you took a negative reactive posture towards their duplicity (which might be reasonable, or might be grounded in a self illusion as well).
But with that said, I do agree with you that desires are probably best understood as motivational and prior to whatever is desired - but I think that motivational heft, at least in a traditional Buddhist analysis, is granted by a deeper set of reactive attitudes. For example, if I desire to eat a slice of cake, that could be cashed out as a motivating urge to pursue the slice of cake, but that sort of craving is itself driven by a reactive attitude against the absence of cake I have right now. In other words, to desire something is to feel aversion to its absence, and it's that aversion that actually drives the desire. And sometimes we even have an aversion *to the desire itself,* as Kierkegaard (I think?) points out when he says that, paradoxically, to have a desire is to desire its absence - hunger can be felt as a desire to eat, but also a desire to not have the desire to eat (ie to not be hungry anymore).
> It might be very hard to separate the two empirically, as whenever I have a negative reactive attitude towards X happening, I presumably also have a drive to stop X from happening and vice versa.
I think learning to let go of this is part of the point of Buddhism. It's possible to accept the unpleasant sensation of pain without accepting the negative sensation of suffering.
This is very compelling. Personally I think the culprit isn't a false view of the self but the widespread application of the is/ought distinction. Basically, pain becomes suffering when you apply a normative attitude towards it (namely: I shouldn't have to feel this way/this shouldn't be the case). You're modest in your conclusions, but what your essay really points to is the possibility that the very distinction that created ethics also created suffering. So, in a sense, ethics created suffering.
Buddhadasa Bhikkhu has a great talk along these lines, although unfortunately I can't find it right now online. But he basically talks about the Adam and Eve story, and how weird it is that they're condemned for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, since that should seemingly be a good thing to have contact with. But his basic point is that all suffering ultimately comes from exactly that normative distinction you're talking about, and that their state in the garden before that point was a metaphor (in his mind) for enlightenment.
And yet, if you were in the garden, having never tasted suffering, and were offered the opportunity to taste it, wouldn't you be tempted? And doesn't that suggest that both the analytic and Buddhist views are missing something? Maybe suffering isn't just to-be-avoided or to-be-transcended. Suffering, after all, seems necessary for growth. Imagine meeting someone who has never suffered -- wouldn't they be in a state of arrested development? Your view suggests that suffering may be uniquely human -- that it's that in virtue of which we're special. If so, is it really so obvious that we should aim to get rid of it either by transcendence or by elimination?
I’m not particularly sold on the arguments against fish pain (I’ve analyzed Rose and bros papers in great detail), but I think this article makes some good points. One possibility which you don’t interact with is Richard Dawkins’ concern that because most animals don’t have a second-order perspective on their pain, they have nothing to rationalize and ergo mitigate it. I don’t think Dawkins’ concern matches how we see animals behave, but it’s something worth considering counterfactually based on the ideas in this article.
I definitely agree that some reactive attitudes can help minimize suffering in response to pain just as much as they might generate that suffering, so I don't think the concern is crazy at all. But like you say, it doesn't tend to match our observations about how "simpler" creatures respond to pain, and I'm still skeptical that reactive attitudes have an overall positive result when it comes to suffering - I still think I'd take the pure, unmitigated experience of a certain pain over that same pain with all the reactive attitudes most commonly associated with it.
Putting this out for consideration, not necessarily saying I believe it: If mature/enlightened humans are capable of choosing to put aside the various sequelae sufferings from physical pain sensation, but other sentients are not so able (even if they do not have nearly as much of the sequelae due to neurological limitations), wouldn’t that *increase* their relative potential suffering (those controversial percentages). Compare: we care a lot more about a child suffering physical pain than ourselves suffering it because we know the kid can’t manage to push away the suffering like we can.
Yeah, that's a point some EAs have made - that, because these minds are so simple, a single experience of pain will dominate them in a way that it wouldn't in a more complex brain. I'm not sure what to make of an argument like this, because I don't know enough about the actual biology involved, but it seems to me we have to make a distinction between having the ability to regard something as X and actively not doing so, and having no such ability in the first place. That's why it's so difficult, I think, for us to even comprehend what non-human experience is like: We're thinking about ourselves voluntarily "giving up" the use of certain mental features, rather than really imagining what it would be to have no access to them at all.
This is much more in line with the traditional Buddhist interpretation: animals are said to suffer more than humans, not less. It's taught that when one achieves stream entry and can no longer be reborn in the animal realm, this is a great relief. Whether you believe the metaphysical claim or not, the post frames this in terms of Buddhist teachings on suffering, and rebirth is deeply tied up with that in Buddhist thought. If Buddhism accepts that animals don't have second-order reactions, and yet animals are said to suffer more than humans, then suffering can't be equated to second-order reaction within Buddhist thought.
Yes, to be clear, traditional Buddhism does hold that animals do have second-order reactions of the kind I'm describing! In fact, it holds that they have even more powerful self-regarding reactions because, as you say, they cling even more intensely and therefore suffer more. I don't think that's plausible in light of current scientific knowledge, but you're definitely right that the concern I'm raising doesn't apply to people who are traditional Buddhists (as opposed to those who are just influenced by their fundamental philosophical commitments).
One of the distinctions I'm trying to bring attention to is between what you're calling second-order reactions and the clinging (I think this is not the right word, as clinging comes after craving in dependent origination, so I think it should be craving here) that makes animals suffer more in traditional Buddhist thought. The craving is something that happens either below or peripheral to any given reaction or thought.
The overall issue I see with what you're saying is that "self-regarding reactions" sounds too propositional to me. Maybe you don't mean it this way, but that's how I read it. A self-regarding reaction is entirely consistent with not-self, it's just that it's also not-self.
I think that the level that ignorance works on (and therefore craving, as they co-arise) is so subtle that anything science has investigated as of yet won't touch upon it. It doesn't necessarily have to be beyond science or something that science can't access, but I'm skeptical that science could really have anything to say about it either way at this point in time.
Bees can definitely get angry. I was part of a team that conducted a study on the subject, with impressive results.
Unfortunately the supposedly impartial peer-review process is heavily biased against crying second graders.
I was very on board with this for about the first half. But overall, I don't agree with the way you've described suffering, and consequently, the rest of the argument doesn't work for me.
The first hint that something is off with the way you've defined suffering as a second-order reactive state that animals lack is pretty straightforward: according to Buddhist cosmology, animals suffer *more* than humans. So if you're building an argument based on a Buddhist concept, but the way you've described it invalidates the context that is used to set forth its meaning, then I don't think you've actually built an argument around a faithful interpretation of that concept. The idea that animals have simpler minds is baked into the tradition as well, so it can't be that canonical Buddhism teaches that animals suffer more based on some assumption that they are actually more complex internally than we are. Instead, the higher degree of animal suffering is based in something separate from the complexity that you're calling on here.
The more complex issue is that you have sort of reduced suffering to a bodily state, just a more complex one. Consider that, in Buddhism, the mind (mano) is a sense base, and is part of a broader phenomenological "body of experience". Then there is citta, which is something more fundamental, often equated with the "heart". These two are not the same, and suffering occurs on the level of citta, not mano. So when you say:
>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.
it seems like you're conflating the two. Resentment, fear, disappointment, anxiety, guilt, etc., are all emotions, and suffering occurs in response to those emotions — consider how the Buddha, who was beyond suffering, was able to grieve the passing of Sariputta. Grief is an emotion, but it was able to arise even without suffering. That indicates that the second-order states you're referring to are not equivalent to suffering, as they can be experienced separately without any suffering arising.
So, between these two things (1. that animals suffer more than humans despite not having second-order states and 2. that second-order states do not inherently entail suffering) it doesn't seem reasonable to reach the conclusion you have here.
What makes this all come together into a coherent picture is seeing suffering as something even more fundamental — not an emotion that can be directly taken on as an object of experience, but as a sort of direction that experience can move in, and which we naively tend to take. The ending of suffering, then, becomes the realization that there is no reason to ever go in that direction, and so you stop going there. But mere negative thoughts and emotions don't equate to suffering so long as this more fundamental non-reactivity is in place.
A really solid essay that gets this across much better than I'm doing here is "Unyoked From Biology" by Ven. Anigha: https://www.hillsidehermitage.org/unyoked-from-biology/
I would actually be curious your thoughts on that essay, as I haven't seen it discussed in philosophical circles.
Last thing to note is that in the Sallasutta, the Buddha says this about the suffering of an unlearned disciple:
"If they feel a pleasant feeling, they feel it attached.
If they feel a painful feeling, they feel it attached.
If they feel a neutral feeling, they feel it attached."
One way to describe being "attached" to a feeling might be that it takes up the entirety of your experience so that there is, in some sense, no longer any room to reflect "this isn't me". This would mirror the most extreme pain that leaves people unable to think about anything else — it just becomes their whole experience. It becomes them — "I am this". Similarly, recalling when I was a child, any displeasure at all took up all my mental room, and there was no ability to think beyond it — the slightest pain was the worst possible thing every time because I couldn't reason "well, it's just a shot, it's good for me and only lasts a moment". If this is what attachment is, then it would make sense why animals suffer more: their lack of second-order thought processes leaves them entirely attached to their sensations.
Thank you for this detailed response! As I said in my other reply, I totally agree with you that traditional Buddhism sees non-human animals as clinging even more intensely and suffering even greater harms as a result. As to the second point, I will admit it's been many years since I've gone through the suttas on this subject, so I would defer to your expertise here. But I will say that the only sutta I'm aware of regarding Sariputta's death (the Cunda sutta) doesn't have the Buddha displaying what we'd normally take to be grief, and the Kosala sutta says grief is the result of the uninstructed person improperly clinging to permanence. So I'm not confident that the emotions you're referring to would have been seen as entirely separate from suffering, although of course they do tend to set off a chain of even more harmful reactive attitudes when experienced by those who are less developed for sure. I'll read Ven. Anigha's piece though, thank you for sharing it!
You may be right about the suttas regarding Sariputta's death — this is something I've heard my teachers talk about, but looking for references, I can't find the story I was thinking of. The closest I've found is the Ukkacela Sutta (SN 47.14), in which the Buddha says:
"Bhikkhus, this assembly appears to me empty now that Sāriputta and Moggallana have attained final Nibbāna. This assembly was not empty for me earlier, and I had no concern for whatever quarter Sāriputta and Moggallana were dwelling in."
I think it's reasonable to read this as the Buddha feeling a bit sad about this, but not suffering on account of it. In common language, it's a "mental" unpleasantness, not a "bodily" one in the common sense. But since any functioning body would notice this and view it as unpleasant due to ingrained habits, it's ultimately a bodily sensation that is not in one's direct control. And since vedana is not dukkha, unpleasant vedana that arises on account of mental perceptions, which I think would count as your second-order reactions, would not be dukkha. Dukkha, in my view, would lie in the way that one relates to the second-order reactions.
What might be more clarifying for this is taking a look at Ananda's reaction to the Buddha's passing. At the time, Ananda was a stream-enterer and displayed a severe grief reaction. Depending on your interpretation of the Sallasutta, this would be a clear indication of grief without suffering. The Sallasutta contrasts the experience of an ariyasavaka and a puthujjana, and notes that the puthujjana experiences bodily and mental suffering, but the ariyasavaka only experiences a bodily feeling, not a mental suffering. Technically, a stream-enterer is an ariyasavaka, and so they should not experience mental suffering based on this sutta, and yet we see Ananda exhibiting serious grief. The traditional explanation of this apparent discrepancy is that in the context of the sutta, the Buddha is referring solely to arahants. However, Ven. Anigha and the other monks at Hillside Hermitage interpret it as saying that all ariyasavakas are free of suffering on the level of citta, but not on the level of mano, and that an arahant does not even suffer on the level of mano. That would explain why the Buddha, being fully enlightened, does not experience grief the same way (although he does seem to hint at some unpleasantness), but Ananda could still grieve despite generally being free of suffering.
Personally, I am not quite sure what I think of the various interpretations. I tend to just refer back to my own experience. Taking a feeling like anxiety, for example, there is a stark divide between being anxious and then suffering on account of that anxiety. If I experience anxiety and mentally move in an attached direction, I suffer. If I experience anxiety and simply know it as anxiety (not propositionally, i.e. actually stating "this is anxiety", but in a know-how sense of not "holding it" the same way), I don't suffer anywhere near the same degree. The bodily reaction of anxiety will continue until it runs out, and that may include anxious thoughts — those are not in my control. But there is something else that occurs below the surface that allows the fuel to run out and to not attach in the same way.
I think you're definitely right that, no matter what the theoretical analysis ultimately is, it would be a mistake to adopt a mindset that basically says, "Oh, there's anxiety? Well then I must be suffering already, there's no hope for me." So certainly maintaining a distinction between these reactive states and suffering is practically valuable. It also seems possible to me both that you can mindfully consider these reactive states as they arise without suffering, and that the suffering experienced by clinging to those reactive states *just is* those reactive states experienced unmindfully, or with clinging - just like you can have something burning in your vision without getting burned, but if you do reach out and grab it, there isn't something extra thing created by the grabbing that ends up hurting you.
Yeah, definitely — I think that's basically the distinction between the 5 aggregates and the 5 clinging aggregates. An arahant (or Buddha) has the 5 aggregates without clinging, and everyone else has the 5 clinging aggregates.
The interesting distinction here, I think, is that these are seemingly presented as two different modes of aggregates, not different configurations of aggregates. This is where I think "how" vs "what" comes into play. The cessation of suffering is often considered a cessation of the "what", i.e., a cessation of aggregates coming together in a certain way. And this is true to some extent, as that does eventually happen (that's the ending of rebirth). But I think what's more fundamental is the "how", i.e., some knowledge that relates to whatever formation is there.
A quick example of the distinction could be riding a bike. If you don't know how to ride a bike, you push off, and you might ride for a second, but then you fall. If you know how to ride a bike, you have that same initial experience, but the mode of it is different, as it leads to continued riding, not falling. Observing just that initial time slice, they're the same, but the context or mode they fit into is different.
is your inference after these considerations 'continue supporting industrial honey production'?
No, it's more like "We have no reasonable grounds for assessing the overall moral character of industrial honey production at this point." But it's a moot point on a personal level anyway since I don't think I've purchased honey in years, lol.
well, there are several grounds for assessing it that weren't mentioned in bb's article.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/think-of-honeybees-as-livestock-not-wildlife-argue-experts
https://peerj.com/articles/14699/