Many Thomists, like Timothy Hsiao https://philpapers.org/rec/HSIIFI and Brian Besong, are of the view that we have no direct duties to animals. While perhaps we have some indirect duties to them—hurting animals might be bad because it perverts our character—we have no reason to help animals for their sake. When animals suffer, when they cry out in pain, that’s not a genuinely bad thing unless it makes us sad or corrupts us.

Adorable Dog Breeds That Always Look Like Puppies | Always Pets
(Could we really have no direct duties to this little guy? On this view, if he was tortured to death but it didn’t negatively affect any human, such a thing wouldn’t be genuinely bad).

Fortunately, such a view isn’t universal among Thomists. Friend of the blog Pat Flynn https://journalofabsolutetruth.substack.com/ informed me that he thinks animal welfare matters, and the Thomistic case for caring about them has been defended in print https://philpapers.org/rec/MACAAR-12 . My devout Catholic friend James Reilly years ago wrote an article panning factory farming titled "Dark Satanic Mills," https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/dark-satanic-mills (Catholics tend not to be fans of things that are dark and satanic!) Matthew Scully, a conservative Christian who worked for Bush and Trump, even wrote an entire book titled Dominion https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dominion-Matthew-Scully/dp/0312319738 about the cruel ways that we mistreat animals, advocating for an end to them.

Ordinary Christians in the pews rarely go as far as the Thomists in holding that animals don’t matter at all, but it tends not to be their issue. Christians in my country are mostly conservative, and they tend to regard advocacy for animal welfare as a left-wing cause that only effeminate socialists care about. They’re against hitting or kicking dogs, but don’t support major institutional reforms to how we raise animals.

>>40781623 (OP)
I think Christians should take animal welfare a lot more seriously. There’s a lot that can be done about it. Billions of land animals https://benthams.substack.com/p/factory-farming-delenda-est and trillions of sea creatures languish and die painful deaths on the factory farms. They live in feces and filth, caged and mutilated, without enough space to turn around or express their natural behaviors. Chickens are in such horrifying and unnatural conditions that they routinely go insane, https://welfarefootprint.org/research-projects/laying-hens/ attacking the chickens around them, leading to constant brutal injury. On average, hens endure about 300 hours of pain https://benthams.substack.com/p/extreme-suffering-on-the-farms as intense as the most intense pain that the typical human is ever subjected to.

Fortunately, there’s a lot that can be done about it. You can go vegan, but even more impactful than that is giving to highly effective animal charities https://animalcharityevaluators.org/recommended-charities/ which can prevent, on average, animals from being caged for five years per dollar https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EEMpNRJK5qqCw6zqH/a-cost-effectiveness-analysis-of-historical-farmed-animal they’re given. This frees around one animal from a cage per penny that you give. That’s pretty incredible; if I could free a bird in front of me from a cage for just a penny, doing so would be a no-brainer! But that’s the opportunity that we all have, with every dollar in our possession. If you give 1,000 dollars per year to animal charities, every year, you’ll prevent animals from languishing in cages for 5,000 years!

>>40781636
The position that animal suffering doesn’t matter is really an extreme position. Think about what it’s like to be in really intense pain. It’s bad! And what makes it bad isn’t that you’re smart or are a particular species or have some kind of essence. What makes it bad is that it hurts! So if animals can hurt then we should try to prevent them from hurting. The most detailed report ever compiled https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/ found that chickens feel pain, on average, about a third as intensely as we do.

If animals feel pain a third as intensely as we do and their pain matters, then the fact that billions of them are going insane in grotesquely inhumane conditions is very morally serious, that we grind up baby chicks in macerators, that we slice off their beaks without anesthetic, and that half a million birds are boiled alive https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/26/half-million-chickens-will-be-boiled-alive-year is morally serious. We’re doing things that would be called torture if done to a dog to billions of animals, and almost no one seems to take it seriously.

Have you ever stepped on a dog’s tail by accident? When you do it, I think you can see that something bad has happened. And it’s not bad just because it made you sad. It’s bad because it hurt and frightens the dog. But if we have no direct duties to animals, then hurting dogs is only bad because of what it does to us. If a dog fell into a blender, so long as no one ever found out about it, on the indirect duties view, this wouldn’t be bad at all.

>>40781640
If we can treat animals however we want so long as it benefits us, then suppose that we could burn live cats for biofuel and this was slightly more efficient than other ways of powering cars. We’d load live cats into cars, set them on fire, and use them to power engines—we could seal up the car so that we aren’t bothered by their screams. On this view, such a thing wouldn’t be immoral, and in fact would be a great idea. But this is nuts.

(Were I to pull a Trump and give my opponents mean names, I’d call Brian Besong, a proponent of such a view, Bonobo biofuel Brian).

In fact, I think this view can’t even account for our intuitions about it being wrong to hurt animals. It’s often said that the reason it’s wrong to hurt animals is because it makes us worse people—many serial killers hurt animals as children. But suppose things went the other way? Suppose that psychologists discovered that hurting animals doesn’t make one any less caring; it’s being less caring that makes people hurt animals. In such a world, on this view, we’d have no moral reason not to hurt animals. But this is deranged!

I think we can see from natural reason that animals matter. But Christians don’t just rely on natural reason, instead relying also on revelation. So, in the words of Tovia Singer, “what’s God’s opinion on all this?”

>>40781646
The Bible is clear that animals matter. It tells us https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+12%3A10&version=ESV “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.” In numbers https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%2022&version=ESV 22:32, God condemns Balaam for hitting his donkey. Genesis 1:21 describes that “God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” In Luke 14:5 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2014&version=ESV , Jesus argues that pulling an Ox out of a ditch that fell in is so important that you should do it even on the Sabbath, something rejected by many at that time. This isn’t motivated by profit loss from an Ox dying—an Ox won’t die after lying in a ditch for a few days—but instead is motivated by concerns about welfare.

Jesus constantly makes comparisons involving animals. He describes himself as a good Shephard, caring after his people the way a Shephard cares after his sheep https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2010&version=NIV . A good Shephard, according to Jesus, cares about his flock not just because they’ll benefit him, but for their own sake. Deuteronomy tells us https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+25%3A4&version=ESV that “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain,” and Exodus says https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+23%3A5&version=ESV “If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him.” The Bible is clear: animals matter.

>>40781655

It’s true that the Bible describes God giving man dominion over animals. But dominion just means having power over another. A parent has dominion over children, but that doesn’t mean he can do what he wants to his children. A parent shouldn’t eat his child! In fact, dominion can’t mean we can do whatever we want to animals because when God first grants humans dominion over animals, he commands us to be vegetarians.

It’s true that God later says that we can eat meat. But the fact that we can eat animals doesn’t mean we can treat them however we want. The Bible is against animal cruelty, even if it sanctions meat-eating.

Furthermore, it sure seems like God allowing us to eat animals is his recognition of a non-ideal situation rather than something ideal. Immediately before he permits humans to eat animals he explains https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%208&version=KJ21 “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” This is the rationale behind permitting meat eating; he is making a concession to our wicked nature. That’s why in the eschatological age, when God’s plan is carried out, the wolf and the lamb will lie down together. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+11%3A6&version=ESV

Both moral intuition and the Bible are clear: animals matter. The fact that we grind up and cage, mutilate and gruesomely slaughter, debeak and starve, boil and burn, tens of billions of creatures every year is horrendous and something worth doing something about.

(If you’d like to do something about this, I’d encourage you to give to the statistically most cost-effective charities https://animalcharityevaluators.org/ working on the problem).

>>40781623 (OP)
>hurting animals might be bad because it perverts our character—we have no reason to help animals for their sake
Stopped reading here, the author of this retarded blog has no understanding of the natural law tradition.
It's not just animals. Hurting anyone at all is "bad" (a moral evil, to be precise) exactly insofar as it perverts our character and for no other reason. We never have any reason to do good to anyone except for the sake of perfecting the soul, which is ultimately the same as the love of God. The soul is our nature as God has formed it, and it is nature that determines right and wrong
t. paid attention in Jesuit philosophy classes

>>40782119
>Hurting anyone at all is "bad" (a moral evil, to be precise) exactly insofar as it perverts our character and for no other reason. We never have any reason to do good to anyone except for the sake of perfecting the soul, which is ultimately the same as the love of God.

I'm agnostic but this seems insane to me.
I want to help others because it just seems good to reduce others suffering all else being equal.
I have emotional and cognitive empathy.

>>40782531
Natural law ethics tries to address the questions why it seems good to reduce others' suffering all else being equal, and what it means to be the kind of person who successfully does that. To the latter, the virtue of compassion makes righteous action possible. If you have this virtue, then it just seems good to reduce others' suffering.

>>40782704
Why isn't this possible in a atheist world?

>>40782716
Any conceivable world presupposes that its existence is caused by something whose very nature is to exist, and the name God stands for whatever this is (in Thomism, God has only a nominal definition, not a quidditative one). We call good that which actualizes its own nature, so good actions are those which conform to the nature of the actor. Since this nature proceeds from the subsistent act of being itself, it requires a God. This is why it is said that God's grace is necessary for salvation. (But note that it doesn't imply that atheists are incapable of doing good, I have to add this because we are on /x/ where religion posting is... psychotic to put it charitably)

The ever watchful god that is in this world is greatly affected with all the unnecessary pain caused to every living being - whether they are exploited, tortured, abandoned, tied, left alone, worked to death, or kept in cages to produce more meat, milk, and fur.

>>40782816
What caused God?

>>40782884
I agree but I don't really know what you mean by "unnecessary"
Unnecessary for happiness? Health? Survival?
I think it's best to just avoid violating animals rights but I think those rights exist only in my head I guess there's also utilitarianism

>>40782940
Nothing.

>>40782966
So why can't nothing cause the universe? Why can't it have always existed? Not all physicists are thiests

>>40782994
If the universe's very nature were to exist, then it could be caused by nothing, and Thomists would call it God. But everything in the universe has a beginning and an end, so that it exists is clearly distinct from what it is.

>>40783014
Show me the exact dates, for everything in the universe, if you mean to defend your claim.

>>40783014
Maybe you're right I'm not sure.
I'll have to think about it and probably ask someone smarter than me on these types of topics
My knee jerk reaction is this argument has been made before and many atheists have already "debunked" it. But I have to start thinking for myself more

As an atheist I think hurting animals is wrong because pain and suffering are bad and it's good to reduce the suffering in the world. It just is. Animals are people too.

>>40783032
Can you think of even one thing known to have no beginning?
>>40783035
I'm just giving a QRD on the Thomistic viewpoint because OP got it wrong. It's always best to think for yourself.

>>40783041
Based