Edit: sorry that was a bit snarky. I don’t think you’re completely off the mark but I would think an animal needs at least a nervous system to experience pain, so there are categories to consider and it may be morally virtuous to abstain from eating some animals but not necessarily immoral, and we should be careful to anthropomorphize other animal emotional states.
So fish have nociceptors, and a brain that connects to them, and they avoid painful stimuli. They have analgesic response systems in their brain to dull painful stimuli.
Even the most cautious interpetation of misery would include pain, so I would not kill and eat it.
Fish display sentience, therefore it is immoral to kill them for pleasure.
Maybe I’m off on this but suffering/misery would include pain + the emotional state of unhappiness or we would just use pain for both? Avoiding painful stimuli doesn’t tell me about their emotional state or cognitive awareness of the pain, just an awareness of the stimuli.
How do you measure how much misery a cod feels?
Edit: sorry that was a bit snarky. I don’t think you’re completely off the mark but I would think an animal needs at least a nervous system to experience pain, so there are categories to consider and it may be morally virtuous to abstain from eating some animals but not necessarily immoral, and we should be careful to anthropomorphize other animal emotional states.
So fish have nociceptors, and a brain that connects to them, and they avoid painful stimuli. They have analgesic response systems in their brain to dull painful stimuli. Even the most cautious interpetation of misery would include pain, so I would not kill and eat it. Fish display sentience, therefore it is immoral to kill them for pleasure.
Maybe I’m off on this but suffering/misery would include pain + the emotional state of unhappiness or we would just use pain for both? Avoiding painful stimuli doesn’t tell me about their emotional state or cognitive awareness of the pain, just an awareness of the stimuli.