Yes, Fish Suffer, and No, Vegetarians Don't Eat Them (On Singer vs. Cowen)

Yesterday morning, Ezra Klein posted the below video featuring a conversation between Peter Singer and Tyler Cowen. These days, when I read or hear something Singer has said regarding animals and animal rights, I far more often want to respond (and do respond) with "What the hell, man?" than I want to thank him for it. But in this case, I was glad to see Singer hold his ground on the fact that fish--yes, fish--do suffer terrible deaths, and we don't need to inflict suffering and death on them because we don't need to eat them, while Cowen stubbornly insisted that he just doesn't think it's wrong to kill a fish, with--in my opinion--not very strong arguments to back up that position.

"There's no humane killing of fish," said Peter Singer. For that, thank you, Singer. (And now, please, make that unwavering statement regarding the killing of all other sentient beings, would ya?) And although Cowen wished to just put aside all the environmental and ocean food-web implications in this debate, you can't do that; you can't separate that out. And how does Cowen justify the issue of bycatch, whereby millions of non-target fish, sharks, rays, turtles, and whales are incidentally caught and killed each year and just thrown back? What's Cowen's defense of this?

-More after the jump-

Cowen wants to render Singer's position invalid simply by insisting that it's not a utilitarian argument, but even if it isn't (and I'm certainly not agreeing that it's not), so what? So what if it's a moral argument? Not utilitarian = not valid? Cowen says this at the start of the conversation: "When it comes to morality, for instance, my view is that it's perfectly fine to eat fish . . . the mere act of killing & eating a fish, I don't find anything wrong with." So Cowen can reference morality in his weak argument to defend fish-killing and to self-justify, but if Singer is perceived as stepping into a moral argument, his argument is dismissed?

And for the record, because Cowen brought it up, let's talk definitions: someone who eats fish is not just "not a pure vegetarian." That person is simply not a vegetarian at all. Pescatarians eat and condone the intentional killing of fish, yes. But vegetarians (and, obviously, vegans) do not. Fish are feeling animals, not plants; living in a watery world rather than on land does not strip them of their animal status, their capacity for suffering, or their desire to live.

Update, 3/27/09: This morning I was alerted to the article "Crabs 'feel and remember pain' suggests new study," which notes further research, beyond what's already been done, proving that crustaceans feel pain. Why we have to keep doing studies on this, I don't understand. Why it takes scientific studies to make us believe that non-mammals feel pain--why we presume until having proof that only humans have such experiences--baffles me.

Image at top from Flickr user petname