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Animal Pain: What It Is And Why It Matters, Bernard E. Rollin
Animal Pain: What It Is And Why It Matters, Bernard E. Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by ‘‘pangs of pleasure’’ that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, ‘‘mattering’’ would be positive, …