[Avodah] anti-meat rhetoric "according to Judaism"

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2010 at 01:39:58PM +0000, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
: > Level 1: Feeling pain. Pain is an input to an animal's psyche.
: > It's not an input to a stalk of celery's psyche, because there
: > isn't even a psyche to talk about.

: > Level 2: Feeling the fact that it's feeling pain. This requires
: > self-awareness, which in turn is a property of free will. With
: > free will, people have their thoughts as inputs to our psyches,
: > so that we can adjust our thoughts and decisions. But animals
: > don't have free will, they don't have self awareness, so it
: > doesn't go to level 2.
...
: Here is my understanding of what you claim:

: Celery can be injured, but it cannot feel pain. It never thinks, "Ow,
: that hurts," because it cannot think. An animal can feel pain and think,
: "Ow, that hurts." But it is not self-aware, and cannot think, "I am in
: pain", or "I like it better when I am not in pain", or "I hope someone
: will help me." The most it can do is find the source of the pain and
: try to remove it.

: Am I correct? If so, what do you mean by "An animal's pain doesn't rise
: to a level of suffering." Why doesn't "That hurts" meet your definition of
: "suffering"?

I used the word suffering for the level 2 experience just to have "pain"
and "suffering" as distinct terms.

Someone could be asleep and avoid a source of pain. Pain doesn't require
consciousness. Suffering does.

For an animl, there is no "I". We can't really picture what it's like to
think like an animal does. "That hurts, so I should get away from it"
is a possible thought, but "I am hurting" is not. They are somewhere
between a sleeping person and one who is conscious. Recall that I am
saying that a lack of free will implies they feel pain, but they are not
conscious of feeling pain -- that in fact the entire concept of animal
consciousness isn't what you or I experience.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             One doesn't learn mussar to be a tzaddik,
micha at aishdas.org        but to become a tzaddik.
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