Consciousness
Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective
Carruthers, Peter Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland
Print publication date: 2005 (this edition)
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2005
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-927736-0
doi:10.1093/0199277362.003.0010
Peter Carruthers
Takes up the same topic as the previous one – the appropriateness of sympathy for non-human animals – but argues for a similar conclusion in a very different way. The focus of the chapter is on forms of suffering, such as pain, grief, and emotional disappointment. It argues that these phenomena can be made perfectly good sense of in purely first-order (and hence, for me, non-phenomenal) terms. And it argues that the primary forms of suffering in the human case are first-order also. So although our pains and disappointments are phenomenally conscious, it is not (or is not primarily) by virtue of being phenomenally conscious that they cause us to suffer, the author claims.
Keywords: first order, higher order, non-phenomenal suffering, pain, phenomenal consciousness, suffering, sympathy,
doi:10.1093/0199277362.003.0010
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