Animal pain, suffering, and death: why does it matter?

[West]

I should mention that I haven't read any of the other replies in this thread, and I'm not sure if I'll bother to or not. This subject has been debated around here numerous times before.

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People think it is generally bad for anything to suffer, and bad for anything to die. But why?

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I think we should be clear about the obvious fact that suffering and dieing, and their counterparts, torturing and killing, are not exactly the same things.

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I feel that those of you who are not religious, and view the world objectively and with an open mind (as I strive to do) need to defend your postion on this if it is anything other than "It matters not at all, except by the effect it has."

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I'm not sure if everyone would agree on what "not religious" means, but I think your suggestion is ridiculous in any case. I assume you do believe that human suffering and death does matter, morally? If so, what exactly makes human suffering and death more important morally, than other animals.

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However, I stronly suspect that a large portion of agnostic and athieistic readers of this board maintain that it is immoral to torture a rat, or an unwanted mut, or to mass slaughter cows. Why?

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I consider it immoral to torture another animal for the same basic reason I consider it immoral to torture a human being: I wouldn't want to be tortured myself. It's not exactly that simple - I also wouldn't want to be killed and eaten, but I think the realities of our existence as we know it allow for a lot more justification on this than for torture, for obvious reasons.

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morals exist, and in a larger sense all norms and values, becuase they help society in so many ways (we could spend a lot of time on this but I do not wish to). This is the view of morality that I have found the majority of smart non-religious people hold.

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I think the idea of why the concept of morality exists isn't the same thing as what morality actually is, or should be. (If morality exists as a concept to us because of the benefits it has brought to human society, it doesn't follow that what is moral is only what "benefits" human society.)

A question for you: if you were ever "called on the carpet" by some sort of higher power, and asked to justify humans torturing animals, how would you defend it? What would you say that doesn't boil down to being on top of the food chain and might makes right?