Don’t Kill Those Who Can Feel Pain

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 11, 2011

I couldn’t help but notice last Wednesday that Oklahoma has followed Nebraska and Kansas in attempting to pass a law which protects unborn children capable of feeling pain. In Nebraska, this has become law, but in Kansas and Oklahoma it has thus far gotten through only one of the two legislative bodies. This is another example of the peculiar stratagems pro-lifers must employ to protect the unborn, in this case babies 20 weeks or older. They have been proven to be able to feel pain.

It is what I was talking about in late February (see Virginia’s Attempt to Close Abortion Clinics). In politics, we must try all sorts of techniques to gain objectives which, otherwise, might be out of reach. On the whole, since we live in a very imperfect world,I would have to be in favor of this law were it to come up in Virginia. But it carries an interesting danger.

Have you ever heard of animal rights? I have gotten some heartfelt messages from those who believe it is morally wrong to do anything to an animal which causes it to feel pain. The ability to feel pain is also seen as a differentiator for some animal rights activists (and others, who simply love mammals) between those animals we ought to take special care of, and those we don’t need to worry so much about. Certain aspects of this position are seriously wrong.

The presence of pain cannot serve as a moral determinant of an action. Not only is pain morally neutral (it is not always even a natural evil, since it is a protection mechanism for those creatures which can feel pain), but it can also be perfectly moral—even morally required—to inflict pain for appropriate reasons, such as when we perform an operation to save someone’s life. So the presence of pain only draws attention to the need to have a rationale for determining when we may properly inflict it, and when we may not, and on whom.

Now the desire to inflict pain, or avoid inflicting it, has its own moral trajectory, either good or evil, based on what it says about the moral character of the person who entertains such a desire. The little boy who tortures cats tells us far more about himself than he does about cats, and he even offends against his own humanity more than he does against the being of the cat, since (though it is an argument for another day) the boy is a person and the cat is not. Cats are ultimately disposable (hold your emails) in ways that human persons are not.

But can we honestly expect twenty-first century Western men and women to sort all this out, when they are so culturally closed to the transcendent dimensions of personhood which all other embodied creatures lack? I think not. And I would hate for an argument to be developed that suggests it is perfectly all right to kill someone if only we will take the trouble to anesthetize him first. And, of course, we know (or at least we think we know) that there are many ways to kill without inflicting pain at all.