Animals and the Harm of Death - Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics - page 36

painful situations, the desire to eat or the desire to rest. Thus, according
to this view, death can harm animals to different degrees. For normal
adult humans, death is a great harm if they strongly wish to live on
and have all kinds of plans for the nearer and further away future. Great
apes appear to have future-oriented projects as well and might desire
their continued existence. 2 However, they seem to live more by the day,
similarly to most other non-human animals. So, it seems that death is a
significantly lesser harm for non-human animals than for normal adult
humans. Unborn and newborn babies and young children, as well as
some mentally impaired humans are comparable to non-human animals
in this respect. They live more by the day and seem to have only a very
limited grasp of their own existence over time. Like non-human animals,
they are harmed significantly less by death, according to this view.
On this view, the harm of death consists in the frustration of fulfilling
existing preferences. Unsatisfied preferences, according to this view,
have a negative value for the individual (or they can even be considered
to have negative value simply as such, as it were, 'for the world').
Even those who define welfare in terms of desire-satisfaction acknowl-
edge that getting what one desires is not always beneficial and not
getting what one wants is not always harmful. If one wants to marry
a person and does so, this can turn out not to contribute positively to
one's welfare after all. Likewise, if a suicidal teenager wants to die and is
prevented from it, not getting what she wants at this point might actu-
ally be good for her, if the desire is based on mistaken beliefs. Therefore,
proponents of the desire account usually stipulate that only informed
and rational desires count. Here a dilemma comes in. If the desire account
defines welfare in terms of the satisfaction of actual desires, it might get
the wrong results, as in the cases mentioned above. If, in contrast, it
counts only desires about what is really good for a being, the view will
not focus on what is desired but on what is valuable for a being. 3
So, the question arises to what extent the focus should be on rational
and informed desires rather than on actual desires. Some want to go as
far as arguing that a foetus would have the desire to stay alive if she were
fully informed and rational. 4 Thus, a foetus would be harmed by death,
even though it may not actually possess any future-oriented desires.
However, others have argued that this interpretation of the informed
desire account stretches things too far:
Adjusting a person's actual desires for errors is one thing; attributing
a wholly new desire to a being that is not capable of having any desires
at all , or any desires of the relevant kind is something else altogether