At first: is it the ability to phenomenal conscious and self- awareness in a human being that decides how we treat a person? People who lie in hospitals in coma or maybe are even brain death; do we treat them differently from healthy people that are awake and totally conscious? Is phenomenal consciousness and self- awareness some kind of level or “degree” on a scale from where we can check and see how we should treat someone? From my own experiences of life as a whole and also from specific jobs in health care, I cannot see that we treat people differently depending on if they are phenomenal conscious or have self- awareness. Of course, there are these people who treats patients that maybe are disable in some way of communicating or making themselves understood, really bad, just because they can but that is not a majority or a basic idea either in health care or elsewhere in the world.
So: if we do not treat people based on whether they are conscious or self- aware, why should we then treat animals based on those ideas? Is it just because they do not have the ability to disagree and say no? My opinion is that their disability to say no probably is the main reason to why we treat animals differently from humans. Even though many animals scream of pain if we physically hurt them, we do not seem to care. Is it just because their scream is not a whole sentence like “No, stop, do not hurt me!”? I believe that if animals had the opportunity to verbally assert themselves and speak up, say “no”, we would treat them differently. I do not think we should treat animals differently depending on if they would have phenomenal consciousness or self- awareness. I think we should treat creatures, or everything in the world based on if the specific creature can feel.
