Speciesism, Painism and Happiness by Richard D. Ryder

Author:Richard D. Ryder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speciesism, painism, animal lberation, animal rights, animal experiments, vivisection, bloodsport, RSPCA, morality, moral theory, zoology, happiness
ISBN: 9781845405052
Publisher: Andrews UK Ltd.
Published: 2017-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

What Makes Painism Different: Not Adding Pains and Pleasures Across Individuals

By emphasising pain (and ultimately happiness) it seems to me that, like Utilitarianism, I am focusing upon what really matters to us all, and not upon rather abstract notions such as rights, virtues or principles. As we have seen, painism avoids the great flaw in Utilitarianism, which is the adding up of the pains and pleasures of separate individuals to make big totals which can lead to absurd cases such as the apparent justification of gang-rape, experiments on unconsenting humans and torture. This is the crucial point on which I have disagreed with Singer since we first met. In Utilitarianism a gang-rape may possibly be deemed to be a good thing if the pleasures of all the rapists, when added together, outweigh the sufferings of the victim. Similarly, a severe experiment on a human (or a small group of humans) may be condoned if it produces a cure for a disease that causes greater total suffering to millions. (See Peter Singer’s Foreword.) In Utilitarianism there is the common assumption that the benefits of the many trump the pains of the few.

I have never seen this spelled out but presumably the Utilitarian loosely assumes that the greater the number of those who benefit (e.g. from a painful experiment or political torture or gang rape) the greater is the probability that the total of their benefits or pleasures, when added together, will outweigh the totalled pains of the smaller number of victims (of experimentation, torture or rape). Even if the benefits are miniscule in each case, provided there are enough beneficiaries, then this may, of course, be true. But it is nonsense to say that the agony of one individual can be justified because it causes mild comforts to many individuals that happen to be, in total, greater than his agony. Pains and pleasures have to be experienced to be real, and no-one experiences such totals. We do not add up the other feelings of a group of people such as their angers, surprises or loves, and expect such totals to be significant, so why do Utilitarians do it with feelings of pain and pleasure?[5] The pains of others are merely the reports of pain. Unless our brains were to be connected by futuristic cables that can unify our consciousnesses, I can never say that I directly experience your feelings in addition to mine.

This rejection of the totalling of the pains and pleasures across separate individuals is the most important innovation in painism. It dispenses with the Utilitarian habit of totalling such pains and pleasures and judging actions accordingly. Instead, painism rates the goodness or badness of an action by the amount of pain it reduces or causes in the most affected individual. The level of badness of a situation is thus to be measured by the pain of the so-called maximum sufferer. A world in which no individual is extremely happy but in which nobody is in extreme pain seems preferable

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