I find both of these arguments persuasive. Bentham's Bulldog's logic is flawless. But Walt is right too, in that realistically nothing is going to change until there's an equally tasty and affordable option.
This is one issue that helps me understand how it is that people accepted terrible things like slavery or burning people at the stake, or tarring and feathering, in the past. Because I very much look forward to the day when we have lab grown, delicious meat, and then a generation can be raised never having tasted or known corpse meat, and then they can all develop ultra snotty attitudes about how terrible people were in the past and how morally superior they are, and then they can start shaming their elders. This is what I expect to happen, but it won't happen until technology makes it costless and convenient, and then all those future people can pat themselves on the back for how enlightened they are.
I have always had intense sympathy for and interest in animals since I was very young. My parents took me to some Polynesian cultural event when I was a kid and I saw a roast pig on a spit for the first time, with its burned up face and a stick down its throat, and I cried about it for two days straight and embarrassed them terribly. So I would love to have lab grown meat. But one of my problems is that I think meat is very good for you, health wise, and that not eating meat is bad for you. I wish that it weren't true, but it seems to be true. So for me it's not as trivial as just taste, I think eating meat is healthier than eating plants.
But there are way too many humans to have everyone on a mostly meat diet, and the number of animals we slaughter is truly sickening to a level I can't think about. So the way I'll reconcile this tension between the logical and moral versus the realistic is that funding research for lab grown meat should be a major priority. It is not going to make a lick of difference if I eat less steak, but putting resources into developing suffering-free meat maybe should be a priority.
To Walt's point, usually I send my charitable dollars to the Humane Society...cats and dogs, and local ones at that. But possibly the money is better spent funding fake meat.
You make various points here. One of the things you point out is that a lot of people don't actually care about, for instance, the negative impacts of our actions on people far away--through porn and purchasing child labor goods. But there's a big difference between what people actually do care about and what they should. It wouldn't be a convincing argument in favor of banning gay marriage to say "look around--so many people are opposed to gay marriage," because we don't have a *reason* to oppose gay marriage. Similarly, I think we have a reason to not grotesquely torture animals for trivial pleasures even if we don't actually care. In regards to porn and purchasing sweatshop goods, I think purchasing sweatshop goods is a good thing https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Powellsweatshops.html and porn is probably a bit bad to view, but not a huge deal. We have to think at the margin: the average meat eater causes hundreds of years of extra suffering, porn consumption has very little marginal effect. So it's much, much more important to stop eating meat than almost anything else you might be doing, just like, if a guy was torturing dozens of dogs in his basement, or paying someone else to torture dozens of dogs, stopping doing that would be a lot more important than, say, not buying sweatshop goods.
Next you argue that moral realism is false because "if something doesn’t have a source, and you believe it exists primarily because of an intuition, it sounds to me like you’re kinda just making it up." First of all, you definitely don't have to be a moral realist to think my arguments work. Even if you don't think morality is objective, you should want an ethics that makes sense--you shouldn't draw lines arbitrarily for no good reason and support causing lots of suffering. This is the kind of reasoning that we'd accept in every other context--if arguing about abortion or gay marriage we'd try to think logically about whether there's a reason it's bad. Second of all, if you don't rely on seemings then it's hard to justify any belief. If you ask how you know anything you think you know, you'll explain it by reference to other things, but if we get to your foundational beliefs, they can't be justified except by seemings. And lots of them seem to be justified. Your belief that there's an external world (which doesn't have a source, btw) and that there can't be contradictory states or affairs (also doesn't have a source) is justified even though your only justification comes from the fact that it seems obvious.
You suggest that moral principles aren't real because they aren't in the physical world. But the fact that there can't be married bachelors isn't in the world--even if there had been no world married bachelors would have been impossible--and so not all real things are in the physical world. Logical truths also don't seem to be in the physical world.
I also don't think moral claims are true by definition. When people argue about abortion, for instance, or gay marriage, they're not arguing about how words are used. They're arguing about what matters. It wouldn't do to suggest "well, it's okay to torture random people because our society has agreed that that's what the term means." Even if morality is objective, your moral views should make sense and be non-arbitrary. Just like you shouldn't draw distinctions based on unimportant traits like skin color, you shouldn't draw them based on unimportant things like species (of course, species affects lots of other important traits, but it doesn't matter in itself).
How do you propose we do moral reasoning? My proposal is: we think about our moral views and see if they make sense. You seem to think that our moral views don't have to make sense, they can be arbitrary because they are by their nature foundationally arbitrary. But then that seems to make any type of moral deliberation impossible.
Next you object to my worldview on the grounds that I'm a utilitarian and think lots of weird and unintuitive things so I can't justify my moral views by appealing to intuition. First of all, my case for veganism doesn't depend at all on utilitarianism, and might be even stronger if I weren't a utilitarian.
But I think utilitarianism is the most intuitive moral view when one systematizes their intuitions and have argued this across literally hundreds of articles. You say utilitarianism is unintuitive in its implications for how one should care about their family vs strangers--I agree that's unintuitive on its face, but it's supported by ironclad arguments https://benthams.substack.com/p/believers-in-special-obligations?utm_source=publication-search.
There's also a big difference between a thing just sounding good and it seeming right. There are lots of things that sound bad and are thus rejected by normies but when you really think about them they seem right. That's true of, I think, a lot of the implications of utilitarianism. You also bring up utilitarianism's global impartiality as an objection--I've defended that here https://benthams.substack.com/p/america-second?utm_source=publication-search.
//When you tell the chuds in Wyoming to donate to Africa, they’re just going to laugh at you. Tell them to help their local tweakers and they’ll probably give it some thought.//
But I don't care about what chuds in Wyoming will be convinced by just like I don't get my political views by seeing what chuds in Wyoming would actually care about. I care about what makes sense!
Returning to animals, finally, you suggest that humans have an especially strong obligation to dogs, cats, and horses. First of all, even if you think that, the argument can still work. You have a stronger obligation, on most view, to your mom than to a stranger, but you shouldn't kill and eat a stranger. We normally think it's wrong to cause animals extreme torture for slight benefit--it would be wrong to burn live cows for biofuel.
Additionally, it just seems super obvious that our justification for mistreating animals wouldn't fly in other cases. Imagine a person had no emotional connection to dogs, and so tortured them to produce a good-tasting chemical. That person would be evil. Yet how is that different in moral character from what is typically done by meat-eaters (note, I'm not saying they're typically evil, just that they do bad things)? You suggest that the reason is that we as a society disapprove of harming dogs, but that doesn't seem to be a good enough reason. If society disapproved of squishing plants, there wouldn't be a strong moral reason not to squish plants because squishing plants isn't really serious. Similarly, if the prohibition on harming dogs is just an arbitrary convention, we have no reason to follow it.
Dogs are cuter than pigs and chickens. But when one thinks about it, it's obvious that cuteness doesn't determine whether it's okay to mistreat a being. Even if we found some very non-cute dogs, we shouldn't torture them for the sake of small pleasure.
Animals are proximate, but it would be wrong to press a button that caused dogs in China to be held down, tortured, and savagely beaten even if it gave you a hamburger in the process. Proximity seems to be to be morally irrelevant (do your obligations decrease to a person as you get on a plane going away from them), but even if it matters, it can't matter so much that it makes animal torture fine.
Finally, you describe being opposed to factory farms. But you say getting rid of them isn't politically tenable. So? Even if most people won't support abolishing meat (which I suspect they will when lab meat hits the market) you can still abstain from meat. Eating meat at the margin increases the scale of factory farming https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is?utm_source=publication-search, so if you think factory farms are bad, you should support reducing meat consumption at the margin. If you think factory farms are super bad, you shouldn't do things that cause there to be more of the super bad things!
I agree that we should be practical and operate in the world that is. But in the world that is, it's possible for me and many others not to eat meat. It's possible to convince others to do that. I do both of those things precisely because they are important. I don't have any illusions that factory farms will be abolished by purely moral considerations of the type that I levy, but nonetheless, I don't eat meat because I try not to cause lots of bad stuff for slight pleasure.
A solid argument but, if anything, I think you short sell our dog friends contributions. Domestication of wolves not only gave us companionship and night time guardians but essential services in herding which, in turn, granted us wider access to domestication at large and, through that, modern development in general. Without widespread animal domestication the odds of us, as a species, developing modern levels of tech are remote. No dogs; no modernity.
Good arguments. I'm a Christian, so I naturally agree with you on moral realism at least. I was once an atheist, but I've always had a deep distaste for the vast majority of atheistic moral philosophy (utilitarianism in particular), which I'd say BB is engaging in here even if he isn't technically an atheist. Your own approach is interesting at least, and it makes more sense to me than what BB is doing.
The way I see it, atheistic moral philosophy is basically a psyop that you run against yourself. And if I was going to run a psyop against myself, I wouldn't use it to make eating food -- one of life's great pleasures -- into an ordeal. Or to convince myself that a kid on the other side of the world, and some chicken somewhere on the planet, are just as morally important as my own kids and my own dogs.
I think it's tough for a man to have a fully mature attitude towards animals unless he has both killed animals and raised children. The children, so that he understands an animal is not a child. In most cases, it's not even a dog. If you ever watch a sow trample her piglet to death and then turn around and eat it, and then go about her day, this sinks in on a level that counting neurons and translating them to utils on a spreadsheet will never capture. It also thoroughly undoes any residual effects from watching "Charlotte's Web".
the thing is we have kind of selectively bred cats and especially dogs to act and even look like toddlers, and relative to their intelligence level (comparable to a 2yo for cats and 3yo for dogs IIRC) they do show a remarkable amount of emotional depth, empathy, etc. I don't think it's inappropriate to anthropomorphize them a bit.
With pigs it's hard bc they are actually much smarter than dogs and cats and capable of being cute / cuddly, but they're also kind of assholes. A pig is like an enormous nonverbal autistic 5 year old. You can keep one as a pet and it will absolutely love you and be cute sometimes, but because it's "more of an animal" it will also be incredibly annoying and often destroy your house.
This creates the horribly sad phenomenon of people wanting to get a pet piggy but then abandoning piggy when it starts destroying everything because it's a livestock animal, not a domestic companion animal. I feel so bad for these pigs, because it does feel like they should have a higher status than cows and chickens on some level... but if people want pet pigs we need to selectively breed and dogify them more.
"anthropomorphize them a bit" -- I'm committed to the idea that there's a category difference in moral worth, but still sympathetic to this point, depending on what exactly is meant by "a bit".
Years ago, a friend dated a girl who was certain that if her dog could talk, he would be pro-choice, like her. I thought she was joking. Words were exchanged; I wasn't allowed back over to their place for the duration of that relationship. It's possible to be quite nutty when it comes to attributing human traits to dogs. And there's a lot more of that going around, with our era's greatly-delayed childbearing.
Even when it comes to much milder forms of anthropomorphizing, practically every dog- or cat-lover goes through a change in how he views pets, after he has kids. And I'll posit that the after-kids version of you should be seen as the wiser.
It's hard to compare an animal's intelligence to that of a young child. An average dog might be able to outcompete a child in something like solving a maze until age 3, don't know, but my firstborn son knew that farts were funny at 6 months, while I don't think my dogs will ever know what "funny" is.
Mostly agree with you on pet pigs (other than maybe not caring if they have higher status than cows). Even if most people have some illusions about dogs, they at least know dogs much better than they know pigs. Maybe we need a new word: cynomorphize. There's a lot of this out there in the exotic pet world, from rabbits to tigers, even sometimes snakes and tarantulas. People imagine that all animals will bond with them similarly to how a dog would. Turns out NO animal will do that, usually not even a cat. "Man's best friend": not just marketing copy.
>Even when it comes to much milder forms of anthropomorphizing, practically every dog- or cat-lover goes through a change in how he views pets, after he has kids. And I'll posit that the after-kids version of you should be seen as the wiser.
This is unironically a reason I sort of don't want to have kids.
There seems to be an implicit tension between kid people and pet people.
On some level I'm not interested in spreading my genes if it means viewing my cats as any less significant. And I'm not really interested in being a father to young children anyway--I am much higher impact as a role model if I have additional time/energy and can show guys in their 20s how to make money and get laid.
From where I'm sitting, seems like a mistake looking ahead 20-30 years, but you're obviously a man who's lived some life and knows himself and where he wants to go.
A girl would have to be insanely gorgeous for me to even consider dating her if she believed her dog had thoughts on abortion policy. That's worse than astrology!
(Being long-married, this is, of course, hypothetical.)
Honestly can't remember what she looked like. I'm inclined to think around a 6-7.
But let's be clear, it's always a mistake to get involved with crazy, no matter how hot. At least she didn't retaliate after the breakup in any way that I can remember hearing about.
Just to be clear, the argument doesn't require you think that animals are as important as people and I don't even think that, depending on exactly what one means by that. All on has to think is that you shouldn't cause others to undergo great suffering for small benefits.
As the utilitarian argument has been presented to me before, it suggests that there is some large number of chickens, or even worms, whose lives, or whose suffering, is equivalent to that of a human. And not due to some pragmatic concerns about the ecological effects of killing a billion worms, but purely out of the moral worth of a worm.
I appreciate the correction if this isn't your thinking.
My last paragraph was meant to say, I think there's a tremendous amount of anthropomorphizing of animals in the zeitgeist. It's not to call you out directly, but I just think nearly everyone is influenced by it subconsciously to some degree, regardless of whether our arguments come across as emotive or dispassionate, and to the degree we're not, it's mostly a product of life experiences and not Internet arguments.
There's also, by the way, an opposite effect where a certain type of conservative urbanite overcorrects and says "screw those tree-huggers, to hell with nature." It's good to have positive experiences with nature, to be able to appreciate animals *as animals*, as part of God's creation, and not merely as slow-witted and strangely-shaped humans.
I do accept that view, though you don't have to accept that view to be a utilitarian and you don't have to be a utilitarian to accept the argument for veganism.
There is some anthropomorphization, but my argument for veganism doesn't depend on claims that animals are like us. It comes from the obvious truth that suffering is bad combined with the notion that you shouldn't cause tremendous amounts of bad things for the sake of small benefit.
The bible instructs us, at various points, to not treat animals badly. But factory farms are the epitome of bad treatment of animals.
Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the 5 freeway is a massive cattle ranch many people have nicknamed Cowschwitz. Ten minutes later, and you get to the In-N-Out Burger. Being human means throwing on a cognitive dissonance filter and just moving on with life. Is a lot of this culturally subjective? Most definitely. One of the greatest culture shocks I've had traveling was seeing how poorly some countries did treat cats and dogs. One country in the Balkans where you'd hear about someone's pet cat getting lose and some teenagers in the neighborhood torturing it to death for an escape from boredom. Explained away as a legacy of the Communist regime that wanted to engineer an unthinking, uncaring population. And then a street market in Southeast Asia where you could see a cat had escaped becoming someone's meal, minus its tail. Cats and dogs really are different, because they've been selectively bred to be companion animals, not food. It really is an exception to the Lion King Circle of Life.
On veganism... last year I met up with two different friends that I hadn't seen respectively in two and four years (they didn't know each other, but were from the same small country in eastern Europe) that had each gone vegan. At first I was ready to roll my eyes and go, ok, sometimes people change and go woke etc, not all friendships are without an expiration date... But they chose veganism more for pragmatic health reasons (additives in food, associated health risks of factory farming), and not for sanctimonious vitrue signaling. They both hate "the other kind" of vegans. I ended up trying several vegan dishes at various cafe in the city, and it was actually pretty good. Would I give up meat entirely? No. But as an occasional marginal harm reduction to the factory farming we all know is bad for the animals and unhealthy for humans? Why not.
For the record, while some vegans are woke, many are not, and I am certainly not. It can't just be that you label any group trying to do something about morality woke. The woke are annoying because they signal their superiority, vacuously signal, and don't do anything. But if a guy, like, gave away his kidney and tried to convince others to do the same, that wouldn't be woke.
Hello. First I'd like to say that while I disagree with you, I admire you for sticking your neck out in internet debates, which are often just an exercise in frustration thanks to too many bad faith assholes. My main exposure to Effective Altruism is from all the articles Vox has done on it, and of course SBF.
I can certainly understand why there could be multiple subtypes of vegans based upon motivation, with woke vs not woke being a low resolution heuristic (and woke itself being an open to interpretation term). But it is the internet, and time is limited. Suffice to say perhaps the loudest vegans and the ones creating the stereotypes are the virtue signaling performative activist (aka woke) ones? Aside from the friends I mentioned, my main encounters with vegans has been while traveling. In many parts of the Balkans, a discussion regarding vegan food would just inspire laughter among the locals for its lack of cultural awareness. In the most touristy parts of Southeast Asia, an entire ecosystem of restaurants has sprung up to serve vegan travelers, where there is an obnoxious performative aspect (plus Instagram selfies) at play. One of the friends I mentioned above even told me "the worst thing about veganism is vegans". I can understand to some vegans, their diet reflects morality. To others, it can instead be interpreted as just another limousine liberal / campaign socialist tendency of signaling a luxury belief. And the "woke" do hold social and cultural power relative to their small numbers.
As to the question of if donating a kidney to a stranger was woke... it would depend on the person's motivation and again on how the relatively vacuous label of woke might apply. The Vox writer (Dylan Matthews) that gave up his kidney to a stranger is definitely a woke person. I'm nonreligious, so it's hard for me to identify with people of faith and their reasoning. EA strikes me as a quasi-religion, so it's hard to disaggregate the faith and the reason aspects of it. Donating a kidney could very well code as a luxury belief... trusting that if something later in life happened to you, a family member, or a close friend that they themselves would be taken care of by the system. I remember Matthews writing that if he needed a kidney later, he'd go to the top of the donor list, but that is taking as a given the reciprocity of the system, and would that equally apply to close relations? At the very least, it assumes a high degree of social trust. To others with low social trust, it's hard to understand it in general. Finally, as to trying to convince others to donate organs to strangers... forced or coercive organ donation is a common trope in dystopian fiction. So a slippery slope fear could apply there as well, especially with the social credit score concept out there.
I guess all I can say is morality is subjective, and with different worldviews, it's hard to fully understand where someone else is coming from.
I don't think that wokeism is just caring a lot about morality and talking about it. Ignoring the demands of morality and not talking about them is just failing to take morality seriously. https://fakenous.substack.com/p/preachy-vegans
Re organ donors: it might be bad for you to donate your organs, but you have a strong moral reason to do it.
Bulldog, if nobody donated organs, there would be a strong incentive to develop synthetic or lab-grown replacement organs. Which would be better all-around.
That said, one problem that I have with your sort of Singeresque utilitarianism and effective altruism is that such analyses often ignore second order effects, incentives, and institutions. Like, why can't those countries that need bed nets make their own? Why don't they have the good institutions and cultural practices that allow for economic self-sufficiency? How does charity and aid affect the likelihood of development of such institutions and practices?
Maybe I'm wrong about the marginal increase in incentives caused by cessation of organ donations, but it really is a question that utilitarians need to ask.
I think what can happen is narcissistic performative activists attach themselves to Current Thing (TM) causes and then disrupt realistic solutions. Exhibit A: climate change. I definitely would want to see the abuses of factory farming reduced. It would be good for not just the animals, but the public health of humans as well. I can see why some vegans would have good faith arguments against the current food system. But a lot of people do shut down when confronted using certain tactics. At the same time, likely in 100 years it'll be a source of deep regret and guilt (probably abortion too if truly easy contraception becomes available).
As to the morality of organ donation... I just don't have enough trust in society to consider it. Way too many people are taken advantage of by others.
What's interesting is social breakdowns in trust play a role in both cases.
The additives in factory farmed foods aren't really that big a deal health-wise.
Putting aside Chris Hemsworth, who has personal chefs at his command and who may or may not have pharmaceutical assistance, I don't know of any vegans or vegetarians who aren't scrawny and weak. I'm not Bronze Age Pervert, and I think people who are into iron can be a bit much. But every male vegan or vegetarian I've ever personally met is scrawny and weak. It's really hard to get complete proteins on a vegan diet.
I do, when possible, choose hunted or ethically-raised meats.
I find both of these arguments persuasive. Bentham's Bulldog's logic is flawless. But Walt is right too, in that realistically nothing is going to change until there's an equally tasty and affordable option.
This is one issue that helps me understand how it is that people accepted terrible things like slavery or burning people at the stake, or tarring and feathering, in the past. Because I very much look forward to the day when we have lab grown, delicious meat, and then a generation can be raised never having tasted or known corpse meat, and then they can all develop ultra snotty attitudes about how terrible people were in the past and how morally superior they are, and then they can start shaming their elders. This is what I expect to happen, but it won't happen until technology makes it costless and convenient, and then all those future people can pat themselves on the back for how enlightened they are.
I have always had intense sympathy for and interest in animals since I was very young. My parents took me to some Polynesian cultural event when I was a kid and I saw a roast pig on a spit for the first time, with its burned up face and a stick down its throat, and I cried about it for two days straight and embarrassed them terribly. So I would love to have lab grown meat. But one of my problems is that I think meat is very good for you, health wise, and that not eating meat is bad for you. I wish that it weren't true, but it seems to be true. So for me it's not as trivial as just taste, I think eating meat is healthier than eating plants.
But there are way too many humans to have everyone on a mostly meat diet, and the number of animals we slaughter is truly sickening to a level I can't think about. So the way I'll reconcile this tension between the logical and moral versus the realistic is that funding research for lab grown meat should be a major priority. It is not going to make a lick of difference if I eat less steak, but putting resources into developing suffering-free meat maybe should be a priority.
To Walt's point, usually I send my charitable dollars to the Humane Society...cats and dogs, and local ones at that. But possibly the money is better spent funding fake meat.
You make various points here. One of the things you point out is that a lot of people don't actually care about, for instance, the negative impacts of our actions on people far away--through porn and purchasing child labor goods. But there's a big difference between what people actually do care about and what they should. It wouldn't be a convincing argument in favor of banning gay marriage to say "look around--so many people are opposed to gay marriage," because we don't have a *reason* to oppose gay marriage. Similarly, I think we have a reason to not grotesquely torture animals for trivial pleasures even if we don't actually care. In regards to porn and purchasing sweatshop goods, I think purchasing sweatshop goods is a good thing https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Powellsweatshops.html and porn is probably a bit bad to view, but not a huge deal. We have to think at the margin: the average meat eater causes hundreds of years of extra suffering, porn consumption has very little marginal effect. So it's much, much more important to stop eating meat than almost anything else you might be doing, just like, if a guy was torturing dozens of dogs in his basement, or paying someone else to torture dozens of dogs, stopping doing that would be a lot more important than, say, not buying sweatshop goods.
Next you argue that moral realism is false because "if something doesn’t have a source, and you believe it exists primarily because of an intuition, it sounds to me like you’re kinda just making it up." First of all, you definitely don't have to be a moral realist to think my arguments work. Even if you don't think morality is objective, you should want an ethics that makes sense--you shouldn't draw lines arbitrarily for no good reason and support causing lots of suffering. This is the kind of reasoning that we'd accept in every other context--if arguing about abortion or gay marriage we'd try to think logically about whether there's a reason it's bad. Second of all, if you don't rely on seemings then it's hard to justify any belief. If you ask how you know anything you think you know, you'll explain it by reference to other things, but if we get to your foundational beliefs, they can't be justified except by seemings. And lots of them seem to be justified. Your belief that there's an external world (which doesn't have a source, btw) and that there can't be contradictory states or affairs (also doesn't have a source) is justified even though your only justification comes from the fact that it seems obvious.
You suggest that moral principles aren't real because they aren't in the physical world. But the fact that there can't be married bachelors isn't in the world--even if there had been no world married bachelors would have been impossible--and so not all real things are in the physical world. Logical truths also don't seem to be in the physical world.
I also don't think moral claims are true by definition. When people argue about abortion, for instance, or gay marriage, they're not arguing about how words are used. They're arguing about what matters. It wouldn't do to suggest "well, it's okay to torture random people because our society has agreed that that's what the term means." Even if morality is objective, your moral views should make sense and be non-arbitrary. Just like you shouldn't draw distinctions based on unimportant traits like skin color, you shouldn't draw them based on unimportant things like species (of course, species affects lots of other important traits, but it doesn't matter in itself).
How do you propose we do moral reasoning? My proposal is: we think about our moral views and see if they make sense. You seem to think that our moral views don't have to make sense, they can be arbitrary because they are by their nature foundationally arbitrary. But then that seems to make any type of moral deliberation impossible.
Next you object to my worldview on the grounds that I'm a utilitarian and think lots of weird and unintuitive things so I can't justify my moral views by appealing to intuition. First of all, my case for veganism doesn't depend at all on utilitarianism, and might be even stronger if I weren't a utilitarian.
But I think utilitarianism is the most intuitive moral view when one systematizes their intuitions and have argued this across literally hundreds of articles. You say utilitarianism is unintuitive in its implications for how one should care about their family vs strangers--I agree that's unintuitive on its face, but it's supported by ironclad arguments https://benthams.substack.com/p/believers-in-special-obligations?utm_source=publication-search.
There's also a big difference between a thing just sounding good and it seeming right. There are lots of things that sound bad and are thus rejected by normies but when you really think about them they seem right. That's true of, I think, a lot of the implications of utilitarianism. You also bring up utilitarianism's global impartiality as an objection--I've defended that here https://benthams.substack.com/p/america-second?utm_source=publication-search.
//When you tell the chuds in Wyoming to donate to Africa, they’re just going to laugh at you. Tell them to help their local tweakers and they’ll probably give it some thought.//
But I don't care about what chuds in Wyoming will be convinced by just like I don't get my political views by seeing what chuds in Wyoming would actually care about. I care about what makes sense!
Returning to animals, finally, you suggest that humans have an especially strong obligation to dogs, cats, and horses. First of all, even if you think that, the argument can still work. You have a stronger obligation, on most view, to your mom than to a stranger, but you shouldn't kill and eat a stranger. We normally think it's wrong to cause animals extreme torture for slight benefit--it would be wrong to burn live cows for biofuel.
Additionally, it just seems super obvious that our justification for mistreating animals wouldn't fly in other cases. Imagine a person had no emotional connection to dogs, and so tortured them to produce a good-tasting chemical. That person would be evil. Yet how is that different in moral character from what is typically done by meat-eaters (note, I'm not saying they're typically evil, just that they do bad things)? You suggest that the reason is that we as a society disapprove of harming dogs, but that doesn't seem to be a good enough reason. If society disapproved of squishing plants, there wouldn't be a strong moral reason not to squish plants because squishing plants isn't really serious. Similarly, if the prohibition on harming dogs is just an arbitrary convention, we have no reason to follow it.
Dogs are cuter than pigs and chickens. But when one thinks about it, it's obvious that cuteness doesn't determine whether it's okay to mistreat a being. Even if we found some very non-cute dogs, we shouldn't torture them for the sake of small pleasure.
Animals are proximate, but it would be wrong to press a button that caused dogs in China to be held down, tortured, and savagely beaten even if it gave you a hamburger in the process. Proximity seems to be to be morally irrelevant (do your obligations decrease to a person as you get on a plane going away from them), but even if it matters, it can't matter so much that it makes animal torture fine.
Finally, you describe being opposed to factory farms. But you say getting rid of them isn't politically tenable. So? Even if most people won't support abolishing meat (which I suspect they will when lab meat hits the market) you can still abstain from meat. Eating meat at the margin increases the scale of factory farming https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is?utm_source=publication-search, so if you think factory farms are bad, you should support reducing meat consumption at the margin. If you think factory farms are super bad, you shouldn't do things that cause there to be more of the super bad things!
I agree that we should be practical and operate in the world that is. But in the world that is, it's possible for me and many others not to eat meat. It's possible to convince others to do that. I do both of those things precisely because they are important. I don't have any illusions that factory farms will be abolished by purely moral considerations of the type that I levy, but nonetheless, I don't eat meat because I try not to cause lots of bad stuff for slight pleasure.
A solid argument but, if anything, I think you short sell our dog friends contributions. Domestication of wolves not only gave us companionship and night time guardians but essential services in herding which, in turn, granted us wider access to domestication at large and, through that, modern development in general. Without widespread animal domestication the odds of us, as a species, developing modern levels of tech are remote. No dogs; no modernity.
Good arguments. I'm a Christian, so I naturally agree with you on moral realism at least. I was once an atheist, but I've always had a deep distaste for the vast majority of atheistic moral philosophy (utilitarianism in particular), which I'd say BB is engaging in here even if he isn't technically an atheist. Your own approach is interesting at least, and it makes more sense to me than what BB is doing.
The way I see it, atheistic moral philosophy is basically a psyop that you run against yourself. And if I was going to run a psyop against myself, I wouldn't use it to make eating food -- one of life's great pleasures -- into an ordeal. Or to convince myself that a kid on the other side of the world, and some chicken somewhere on the planet, are just as morally important as my own kids and my own dogs.
I think it's tough for a man to have a fully mature attitude towards animals unless he has both killed animals and raised children. The children, so that he understands an animal is not a child. In most cases, it's not even a dog. If you ever watch a sow trample her piglet to death and then turn around and eat it, and then go about her day, this sinks in on a level that counting neurons and translating them to utils on a spreadsheet will never capture. It also thoroughly undoes any residual effects from watching "Charlotte's Web".
the thing is we have kind of selectively bred cats and especially dogs to act and even look like toddlers, and relative to their intelligence level (comparable to a 2yo for cats and 3yo for dogs IIRC) they do show a remarkable amount of emotional depth, empathy, etc. I don't think it's inappropriate to anthropomorphize them a bit.
With pigs it's hard bc they are actually much smarter than dogs and cats and capable of being cute / cuddly, but they're also kind of assholes. A pig is like an enormous nonverbal autistic 5 year old. You can keep one as a pet and it will absolutely love you and be cute sometimes, but because it's "more of an animal" it will also be incredibly annoying and often destroy your house.
This creates the horribly sad phenomenon of people wanting to get a pet piggy but then abandoning piggy when it starts destroying everything because it's a livestock animal, not a domestic companion animal. I feel so bad for these pigs, because it does feel like they should have a higher status than cows and chickens on some level... but if people want pet pigs we need to selectively breed and dogify them more.
"anthropomorphize them a bit" -- I'm committed to the idea that there's a category difference in moral worth, but still sympathetic to this point, depending on what exactly is meant by "a bit".
Years ago, a friend dated a girl who was certain that if her dog could talk, he would be pro-choice, like her. I thought she was joking. Words were exchanged; I wasn't allowed back over to their place for the duration of that relationship. It's possible to be quite nutty when it comes to attributing human traits to dogs. And there's a lot more of that going around, with our era's greatly-delayed childbearing.
Even when it comes to much milder forms of anthropomorphizing, practically every dog- or cat-lover goes through a change in how he views pets, after he has kids. And I'll posit that the after-kids version of you should be seen as the wiser.
It's hard to compare an animal's intelligence to that of a young child. An average dog might be able to outcompete a child in something like solving a maze until age 3, don't know, but my firstborn son knew that farts were funny at 6 months, while I don't think my dogs will ever know what "funny" is.
Mostly agree with you on pet pigs (other than maybe not caring if they have higher status than cows). Even if most people have some illusions about dogs, they at least know dogs much better than they know pigs. Maybe we need a new word: cynomorphize. There's a lot of this out there in the exotic pet world, from rabbits to tigers, even sometimes snakes and tarantulas. People imagine that all animals will bond with them similarly to how a dog would. Turns out NO animal will do that, usually not even a cat. "Man's best friend": not just marketing copy.
>Even when it comes to much milder forms of anthropomorphizing, practically every dog- or cat-lover goes through a change in how he views pets, after he has kids. And I'll posit that the after-kids version of you should be seen as the wiser.
This is unironically a reason I sort of don't want to have kids.
There seems to be an implicit tension between kid people and pet people.
On some level I'm not interested in spreading my genes if it means viewing my cats as any less significant. And I'm not really interested in being a father to young children anyway--I am much higher impact as a role model if I have additional time/energy and can show guys in their 20s how to make money and get laid.
From where I'm sitting, seems like a mistake looking ahead 20-30 years, but you're obviously a man who's lived some life and knows himself and where he wants to go.
A girl would have to be insanely gorgeous for me to even consider dating her if she believed her dog had thoughts on abortion policy. That's worse than astrology!
(Being long-married, this is, of course, hypothetical.)
Honestly can't remember what she looked like. I'm inclined to think around a 6-7.
But let's be clear, it's always a mistake to get involved with crazy, no matter how hot. At least she didn't retaliate after the breakup in any way that I can remember hearing about.
Just to be clear, the argument doesn't require you think that animals are as important as people and I don't even think that, depending on exactly what one means by that. All on has to think is that you shouldn't cause others to undergo great suffering for small benefits.
As the utilitarian argument has been presented to me before, it suggests that there is some large number of chickens, or even worms, whose lives, or whose suffering, is equivalent to that of a human. And not due to some pragmatic concerns about the ecological effects of killing a billion worms, but purely out of the moral worth of a worm.
I appreciate the correction if this isn't your thinking.
My last paragraph was meant to say, I think there's a tremendous amount of anthropomorphizing of animals in the zeitgeist. It's not to call you out directly, but I just think nearly everyone is influenced by it subconsciously to some degree, regardless of whether our arguments come across as emotive or dispassionate, and to the degree we're not, it's mostly a product of life experiences and not Internet arguments.
There's also, by the way, an opposite effect where a certain type of conservative urbanite overcorrects and says "screw those tree-huggers, to hell with nature." It's good to have positive experiences with nature, to be able to appreciate animals *as animals*, as part of God's creation, and not merely as slow-witted and strangely-shaped humans.
I do accept that view, though you don't have to accept that view to be a utilitarian and you don't have to be a utilitarian to accept the argument for veganism.
There is some anthropomorphization, but my argument for veganism doesn't depend on claims that animals are like us. It comes from the obvious truth that suffering is bad combined with the notion that you shouldn't cause tremendous amounts of bad things for the sake of small benefit.
The bible instructs us, at various points, to not treat animals badly. But factory farms are the epitome of bad treatment of animals.
Fake and gay. Kill the fucking dog. Lol
Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the 5 freeway is a massive cattle ranch many people have nicknamed Cowschwitz. Ten minutes later, and you get to the In-N-Out Burger. Being human means throwing on a cognitive dissonance filter and just moving on with life. Is a lot of this culturally subjective? Most definitely. One of the greatest culture shocks I've had traveling was seeing how poorly some countries did treat cats and dogs. One country in the Balkans where you'd hear about someone's pet cat getting lose and some teenagers in the neighborhood torturing it to death for an escape from boredom. Explained away as a legacy of the Communist regime that wanted to engineer an unthinking, uncaring population. And then a street market in Southeast Asia where you could see a cat had escaped becoming someone's meal, minus its tail. Cats and dogs really are different, because they've been selectively bred to be companion animals, not food. It really is an exception to the Lion King Circle of Life.
On veganism... last year I met up with two different friends that I hadn't seen respectively in two and four years (they didn't know each other, but were from the same small country in eastern Europe) that had each gone vegan. At first I was ready to roll my eyes and go, ok, sometimes people change and go woke etc, not all friendships are without an expiration date... But they chose veganism more for pragmatic health reasons (additives in food, associated health risks of factory farming), and not for sanctimonious vitrue signaling. They both hate "the other kind" of vegans. I ended up trying several vegan dishes at various cafe in the city, and it was actually pretty good. Would I give up meat entirely? No. But as an occasional marginal harm reduction to the factory farming we all know is bad for the animals and unhealthy for humans? Why not.
For the record, while some vegans are woke, many are not, and I am certainly not. It can't just be that you label any group trying to do something about morality woke. The woke are annoying because they signal their superiority, vacuously signal, and don't do anything. But if a guy, like, gave away his kidney and tried to convince others to do the same, that wouldn't be woke.
Hello. First I'd like to say that while I disagree with you, I admire you for sticking your neck out in internet debates, which are often just an exercise in frustration thanks to too many bad faith assholes. My main exposure to Effective Altruism is from all the articles Vox has done on it, and of course SBF.
I can certainly understand why there could be multiple subtypes of vegans based upon motivation, with woke vs not woke being a low resolution heuristic (and woke itself being an open to interpretation term). But it is the internet, and time is limited. Suffice to say perhaps the loudest vegans and the ones creating the stereotypes are the virtue signaling performative activist (aka woke) ones? Aside from the friends I mentioned, my main encounters with vegans has been while traveling. In many parts of the Balkans, a discussion regarding vegan food would just inspire laughter among the locals for its lack of cultural awareness. In the most touristy parts of Southeast Asia, an entire ecosystem of restaurants has sprung up to serve vegan travelers, where there is an obnoxious performative aspect (plus Instagram selfies) at play. One of the friends I mentioned above even told me "the worst thing about veganism is vegans". I can understand to some vegans, their diet reflects morality. To others, it can instead be interpreted as just another limousine liberal / campaign socialist tendency of signaling a luxury belief. And the "woke" do hold social and cultural power relative to their small numbers.
As to the question of if donating a kidney to a stranger was woke... it would depend on the person's motivation and again on how the relatively vacuous label of woke might apply. The Vox writer (Dylan Matthews) that gave up his kidney to a stranger is definitely a woke person. I'm nonreligious, so it's hard for me to identify with people of faith and their reasoning. EA strikes me as a quasi-religion, so it's hard to disaggregate the faith and the reason aspects of it. Donating a kidney could very well code as a luxury belief... trusting that if something later in life happened to you, a family member, or a close friend that they themselves would be taken care of by the system. I remember Matthews writing that if he needed a kidney later, he'd go to the top of the donor list, but that is taking as a given the reciprocity of the system, and would that equally apply to close relations? At the very least, it assumes a high degree of social trust. To others with low social trust, it's hard to understand it in general. Finally, as to trying to convince others to donate organs to strangers... forced or coercive organ donation is a common trope in dystopian fiction. So a slippery slope fear could apply there as well, especially with the social credit score concept out there.
I guess all I can say is morality is subjective, and with different worldviews, it's hard to fully understand where someone else is coming from.
Thanks for the kind words!
I don't think that wokeism is just caring a lot about morality and talking about it. Ignoring the demands of morality and not talking about them is just failing to take morality seriously. https://fakenous.substack.com/p/preachy-vegans
Re organ donors: it might be bad for you to donate your organs, but you have a strong moral reason to do it.
Bulldog, if nobody donated organs, there would be a strong incentive to develop synthetic or lab-grown replacement organs. Which would be better all-around.
There is that incentive now and they haven't been developed.
I was partly just being tongue-in-cheek.
That said, one problem that I have with your sort of Singeresque utilitarianism and effective altruism is that such analyses often ignore second order effects, incentives, and institutions. Like, why can't those countries that need bed nets make their own? Why don't they have the good institutions and cultural practices that allow for economic self-sufficiency? How does charity and aid affect the likelihood of development of such institutions and practices?
Maybe I'm wrong about the marginal increase in incentives caused by cessation of organ donations, but it really is a question that utilitarians need to ask.
I think what can happen is narcissistic performative activists attach themselves to Current Thing (TM) causes and then disrupt realistic solutions. Exhibit A: climate change. I definitely would want to see the abuses of factory farming reduced. It would be good for not just the animals, but the public health of humans as well. I can see why some vegans would have good faith arguments against the current food system. But a lot of people do shut down when confronted using certain tactics. At the same time, likely in 100 years it'll be a source of deep regret and guilt (probably abortion too if truly easy contraception becomes available).
As to the morality of organ donation... I just don't have enough trust in society to consider it. Way too many people are taken advantage of by others.
What's interesting is social breakdowns in trust play a role in both cases.
The additives in factory farmed foods aren't really that big a deal health-wise.
Putting aside Chris Hemsworth, who has personal chefs at his command and who may or may not have pharmaceutical assistance, I don't know of any vegans or vegetarians who aren't scrawny and weak. I'm not Bronze Age Pervert, and I think people who are into iron can be a bit much. But every male vegan or vegetarian I've ever personally met is scrawny and weak. It's really hard to get complete proteins on a vegan diet.
I do, when possible, choose hunted or ethically-raised meats.