The world is full of suffering. Nature is not a scene of harmony, but of violence, pain, and indifference. And yet, we continue to live as if we inhabited an ethical fairy tale, in a moral fantasy that justifies our actions with comfortable and heroic narratives. This is, perhaps, one of the main obstacles to the advancement of animalism: not a lack of compassion, but the fear of being seen as hypocrites.
We live obsessed with personal virtue, with coherence, with being “good people.” The cognitive dissonance that arises from recognizing the interests of animals—their capacity for suffering, for enjoyment, for valuable experiences—while we continue to eat, use, and enslave them, is usually resolved by denying it, by escaping from it.
And how do we escape? By appealing to a form of humanism that, in many ways, functions like a religion: a worldview that elevates human beings to a quasi-divine status. Only in this way can we morally justify continuing to use other animals as if they were things, as if their interests didn’t matter. We tell ourselves we are different, superior, unique. And so we silence the internal conflict. In a way, human deification is correct: humans are a kind of gods for animals. But if humans are gods for animals, we could be benevolent gods.
The solution is not in moral purity.
Veganism has offered a powerful formula: to live without harming animals, or at least to try. It’s estimated that a vegan can prevent the deaths of about 15,000 animals throughout their lifetime, including fish and shellfish. Although the exact number varies depending on the estimate and context, the individual impact of veganism on animal lives is undeniably significant. It’s an admirable proposal, but it has a structural flaw: it remains focused on individual virtue, on how to be consistent, on how to be a good person. Somehow, it manages to reconcile a world that is a prison of suffering with the idea that one can remain pure, clean, and virtuous. It builds an inner moral garden, a private moral paradise while all around is a jungle and a hell.
Reducetarianism, on the other hand, is more pragmatic. It focuses on quantitatively reducing suffering, not on achieving perfect coherence. It focuses more on victims than on perpetrators. Thanks to its flexibility and ambition to reach a broader segment of human society, reducetarianism’s potential for reducing suffering is greater. But even this more consequentialist approach remains trapped in a logic of individual action, of moral self-image, and neglects the animals who suffer in nature. It resolves cognitive dissonance with greater pragmatism, but it is still interpreted in terms of virtue, of what affects us personally.
Meanwhile, the majority of the population resolves cognitive dissonance by simply ignoring animals. They don’t consider them. They don’t see them. They don’t exist.
We Need a Paradigm Shift
For moral consideration of animals to advance and extend to the whole of human society, we need to break with the religion of humanism and the obsession with moral coherence. We must dare to accept our immorality and the immorality of the world, our contradictions, our limitations. And still, move forward.
We shouldn’t be afraid of being called hypocrites. We are. We all are. Peter Singer demonstrated this in his fable of the boy who falls into the pond. The important thing is that, despite this, we consider other sentient beings. That we take them into account. That we recognize that they feel, that they suffer, that they have interests. Only in this way can we involve more people, even those who are unwilling to live the life we consider perfect.
A shield against intense, involuntary, and useless suffering
If we manage to take this step—if we set aside the need to be consistent and accept the challenge of building a less cruel world based on our own imperfection—then we can aspire to something much greater: building a shield against intense suffering.
Biotechnology, genetics, and neuroscience offer us unprecedented tools to mitigate pain. I’m not talking about naive utopias, but about realistic medium-term projects. We can modify ecosystems, intervene in evolutionary trajectories, even redesign pain sensitivity in certain species.
Does this sound like playing god? Maybe. But we’re already doing it. We’ve already done it. We’ve exterminated almost all the large mammals that threatened us. We’ve redesigned ecosystems for our benefit. We’ve modified the entire planet.
Now we must choose whether that power will continue to be used only for our benefit or whether it can also serve to protect others from the most terrible and pointless suffering.
And if we succeed—if we ever manage to solve the problem of intense and involuntary suffering—history will be split in two: the time before we raised a shield against pain… and the time since then.
For the beings of the future, looking back will be like contemplating a long-gone nightmare. They will find it hard to imagine that for so long, so much suffering was tolerated as if it were inevitable. They will live in a world that will look back on the past with astonishment, perhaps with shame, like someone who discovers that for centuries they lived with a monstrous injustice without flinching.
The fable of the boy in the pond or “the boy in the well” is a thought experiment proposed by Peter Singer in his book The Life You Can Save (2009), although its roots lie in his classic 1972 article, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” The idea is simple, but devastating in its moral implications.
Singer suggests we imagine the following situation:
You are walking through a park when you see a small child who has fallen into a shallow pond and is drowning. No one else is around. You can easily save him, but to do so, you’ll have to wade into the water and ruin your expensive shoes, as well as be late for your appointments.
What do you do?
Most people would answer without hesitation: you would save the child, even if it means getting wet or ruining your expensive clothes. The cost is negligible compared to saving a life. Most people not only believe they should do it, but they would also consider anyone who didn’t do it a moral monster.
But then Singer takes a turn:
Millions of children die each year from easily preventable causes—malnutrition, preventable diseases, lack of clean water—and, with a fraction of the money we spend on luxuries, we could save many lives. So why don’t we act with the same urgency?
The power of this fable is that the child in the well is closer, but moral obligation doesn’t depend on distance. Our passivity isn’t based on a lack of capacity, but on a systematic failure of our everyday ethics.
My thesis proposes a radically consistent version of this idea: we live in a moral fantasy where we rationalize our behavior to protect our self-image. Humans prefer to appear virtuous rather than confront its dissonances. Just as we ignore children in the real world because they are not “in plain sight,” we also ignore animal suffering because it is not before us in visible or narrative terms. We prefer the comfort of our ethical fiction.
Peter Singer, with his fable, not only exposes moral inconsistency: he demonstrates the normalization of immorality in the world, and particularly in our species.
I propose that the resolution of cognitive dissonance is not coherence, but rather the acceptance of our own immorality in order to act despite it.
