The Experiment

Consider this moral experiment. There’s a torturing machine in front of you. You need to use the machine to deliver an agonising electric shock to either a rabbit or a human for 4 hours.

Which would you choose? Chances are, you’ll choose to deliver the shock to the rabbit. That’ll also be my choice too.

What about this then: You have a machine and a slightly uncomfortable chair, this chair is no big deal, it’s just like chairs used by nasty malls to prevent people staying for too long (like the one shown in the picture). You must either make the human sit on the chair for 10 seconds or shock the rabbit for 4 hours non-stop. What will be your choice?

I would choose to make the man sit on the chair. Without meticulous statistics, I bet most people would do the same.

The only difference between the two scenarios is that, in the second scenario, the human suffers less than the first one.

What does it imply, then, if people are changing their mind?

The non-vegetarians who changed their mind, or at least found the decision process harder, endorse that there’s a proportionality between the moral-worth of humans and other animals, and such moral-worth is comparable.

Wow. That sounds like a bunch of jargon! Fret not though — let me explain bit by bit.

Let’s start with what do I mean by “moral-worth is comparable”. By saying “comparable”, I mean the worth of humans and the worth of other animals are on the same continuum. They can be directly compared, even with the assumption that humans worth far higher than any other animals.

The fact that the worth of animals and humans can be compared is precisely why some people would choose to make the human sit on the uncomforable chair over shocking the rabbit. Making a person feel uncomfortable is a form of human suffering, but in the face of casting a rabbit into excruciating pain, the former is better. In other words:

An extreme form of non-human animal suffering is far worse than trivial, mild humans suffering.

This is what I mean by comparable: A human’s pain and an non-human animal pain are not in different moral categories — it is not the case that a form of trivial human suffering carries more moral significance than the most horrendous form of non-human animals suffering.

Second, proportionality.

Say if we gradually increase the level of suffering for the human, going from a very uncomfortable chair, to receiving an injection, to a slap on their face, to shock him for an hour, and so-and-so forth. Plausibly more people would side to shock the rabbit to save the human from pain.

Different people may have different turning points; some are higher, some are lower. It’s, though, very likely that you have one also, unless you agreed to torture a rabbit to save a human from sitting on a chair that is probably just a bit less comfy then the chair you’re sitting on.

This shows proportionality: when the suffering of the human relative to the rabbit exceeds a certain proportion held by us, we choose to torture the rabbit. It is based on our moral (maybe arbitrary) judgement of how much more humans are worth than other animals. We attempt to derive the optimal moral choice in every case. Therefore, we can see that moral choices on non-human animals are based on: