(September 1, 2015 at 4:43 pm)wallym Wrote:
You kill, what, hundreds? of fleas to make your dog more comfortable? That's an interesting rationality to place the comfort of a big animal over the life of a smaller one.
Have you considered looking into feeling of pain/loss/suffering/etc of various animals to develop your behavior a bit more rationally rather than somewhat guessing?
In the case of fleas, it is not entirely certain that they feel pain. In the case of the dog, it is pretty well known that the dog feels pain.
That said, I think it would be good to try to avoid harming insects whenever reasonably possible, as they might feel pain. But since they might not feel pain, there might be no problem at all with killing an infinite number of fleas to save a dog from even the slightest twinge of pain.
On the other hand, a flea inherently causes pain for another animal in its lifecycle. That is a reason to prefer another animal that does not inherently do that. Of course, dogs often kill other animals for food (or in the case of domesticated animals, typically animals are killed for it by humans, though it is possible to feed a dog a healthy vegetarian diet if one is careful about it), so one may decide that something else might matter more than the dog.
Also, this is not a question of the size of the animal; it is a question of their ability to feel pain and the extent of the pain they are capable of feeling. Research on the question is at present such that it is not known precisely which animals feel pain and which, if any, do not. Of course, we know that many do feel pain, but there are many where it is far from certain one way or the other. It seems unlikely, though, that an amoeba feels pain. But to be absolutely certain, one would have to know exactly what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for an organism to feel pain, and that does not seem to be known with precision at this time.
Probably though, the following is the most important aspect to what robvalue is doing. In this case, if the dog were killing the fleas, it would be self defense. With robvalue killing the fleas, he is defending the dog from attack. My guess is, he might strike another dog if it attacked his dog. In morality, there is generally a distinction people make between defense and offense, and in the case of killing fleas on the dog, it is defensive killing. It would be a different situation if robvalue went out into the world to kill things that were not harming anyone or anything else.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
