I’m aware that it may feel pain either just like I do, or in a different way. My question is why should I be agitated by this thought, iow what is the reason to reduce it. I don’t relate its suffering to my “soul” or a mental state. Not talking about morals here, I wouldn’t boil a live crab in a presence of people who would react negatively. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29305117
Your line of questioning gives me the shivers, because it applies equally to humans. You might be intellectually aware that you're causing someone to suffer, but - unless someone else is watching - why should you care?
You say you're "not talking about morals" - what, then, are morals?
(I'm not the person you were replying to but I am very interested in this conversation)
There's a specific carnal aspect to eating meat that I imagine is lost on a lot of people, especially when they don't have firsthand experience butchering animals. For me, it was when I was gutting the first deer I killed. There's this weird thing where you become incredibly conscious of the movement of your internal organs when you are holding another animal's warm entrails. It's almost entirely physical rather than mental, like what it feels like when you meditate on your breathing, except instead of breathing it's the pressure of food sludge sliding down your intestines.
I realized that me and the deer are both just slightly differently-arranged sacks of meat. I always thought I'd have some revelation about the sanctity of life when I killed a deer, but instead I felt an immediate detachment from it, like how I'm just part of an uncaring physical system ("nature") and that system doesn't care about my "morals" or lack thereof.
Sorry for the weird pretentious rambling. My response is that humans are part of nature, not apart from it, that nature has no morals or good or bad. Morals are just this weird thing human brains do to cooperate as individual members of a species to increase our fitness and individually to feel better or worse. I care about other humans because I care about them. I don't care about crabs because I don't care about them. They are two separate, non-intersecting roads in my brain. I don't mind if you think I'm a heartless psycho for articulating it this way, in fact the main drawback of this way of mental mapping is literally the social stigma of being considered heartless and cruel, which is why I am less likely to phrase it this way in IRL conversation. But I feel nothing when I crush a house fly (rather, I feel great satisfaction at getting rid of such a nuisance, and I think most others would feel the same), and feel nothing when I boil a crab alive except the pleasant anticipation of a delicious meal.
I think the answer is most people will suffer negative mental effects if they believe they have caused more suffering to an animal than is necessary to achieve the same outcome (i.e. feeding oneself) and also that they believe that boiling an animal could cause it more suffering than to kill it by an alternative method.
Most people don’t wish to cause undue harm to others, human or animal, because it causes them anguish. We are capable of abstract thought and understand persistence of objects.
I think those two facts are sufficient to understand why intelligent beings are agitated even by indirect expressions of suffering.
It’s the relation between your own past/present suffering and Suffering as a concept. You know Suffering is bad because you’ve experienced it, so it makes sense to reduce it beyond the scope of just yourself.
