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Jules Morrison's avatar

I would happily suppress my ability to suffer from pain (without suppressing my ability to notice it). I would happily do likewise for animals. And I suspect that linkage will persist: people will not be willing to modify animals "against nature" unless they generally approve of "better living through science". This is simply squeamishness about the breakdown of naive essentialism.

Caveat: suppressing suffering isn't an excuse to give the animals a poor quality of life or slap them around since they "can't be hurt".

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Presumably, if it is desirable to genetically engineer cows to feel discomfort instead of pain, then it is equally desirable to engineer humans in that way. In both cases the reasoning is "less pain is better". Yet I suspect the idea would be much more popular for farm animals than for people. Why is this?

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