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Tiiba comments on Unspeakable Morality - Less Wrong
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Comments (116)
If you don't mind me asking... How does anyone who believes that pain and/or death is bad NOT conclude that pepperoni pizza is bad?
A google search I did yesterday for a recipe turned up the book "Eat what you want and die like a man"; I haven't read it except for the two pages that the search showed me, but I'd be willing to bet that the author holds exactly that position...
Apparently, the idea that killing animals for food is evil is so alien to modern people that everyone thought I'm talking about HUMAN pain and death.
When the motivations of others are so different from yours that they can't even understand your questions, you must consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the reason is something more interesting than a genetic accident.
To be frank, I'm a vegetarian and I didn't pick up on that one.
Ah. Actually, I think a reason I didn't get this was that when I hear "X is bad" I tend to look to its consequences before looking to its antecedents. For example, if you said "soap is bad", I would first think "being clean is bad?" before "maybe there's something wrong with the process that manufactured the soap". Utilities flow backward in time, not forward. Unless all this is just a post-facto rationalization, rather than my actually being unusually good at verbalizing the cognitive algorithms behind a thought...
My mom taught me to look both ways.
When you buy meat, you pay for the next round of butchery. So it does flow forward. So if you have to eat meat, steal it.
Hey, could someone explain the logic of vegetarianism to me? I get the part where vegeterianism is supposedly healthier. But I don't get the part about not wanting to eat animals because they get killed. I mean, it's not like cows would live happily ever after if nobody ate them. If all humans suddenly stopped eating cows, there would be no reason to raise cows anymore apart from zoos, and cows are not very good at taking care of themselves in the wild. It seems like vegeterianism would lead to cow extinction or very close to it.
I value a lack of cow suffering. I do not value the existence of the cow species, except inasmuch as cows are useful towards ends I care about, and since I don't eat them and don't think they're cute or interesting, they are useful to me only for milk and, in limited quantities, skin. (I'll assume you meant to assume that widespread veganism and leather boycott would lead to the extinction of cows.)
Sounds very pessimistic to value a lack of cow suffering, but completely discount cow enjoyment.
I mean, if we're quantizing stuff, might as well quantize everything, right?
Do you think there is morally wrong to eat meat?
I have the same preferences as you when it comes to meat, but I still eat it. Maybe if it was proven that a lot of animal suffering goes into the meat I eat, I might stop. Otherwise, a cow's non-suffering, short-lived existence is more favorable than not existing at all.
I've rehashed this several times, but I'll repeat it for your benefit: I think it is wrong for many people to eat meat. Some people, through circumstances beyond their control, would find their quality of life unacceptably diminished by a lack of meat consumption. I do not think it is morally wrong for those people to eat meat: their quality of life is more important than the lives of the animals they eat. I, and many other people, can be happy vegetarians. People who can be happy vegetarians (or who won't be significantly less happy as vegetarians than as omnivores) should be vegetarians. For those people, it is wrong to eat meat because it is unnecessarily destructive of animal lives, which have non-negligible value even if they aren't more important than human quality of life.
There is an overwhelming amount of gory detail about the suffering undergone by the majority of domesticated meat animals in developed countries. If you are curious about how much suffering your food underwent to arrive at your plate, PETA et. al. will be happy to supply that information and you can find it without my help.
I disagree. I think many animals (and people, for that matter) ought not to have been born.
I'm not particularly curious. I have no doubt that I could find plenty of testimony from partisans. Why should I expect that testimony to present the issue in a fair light? Are there any non-partisans trying to find a middle position and present a balanced view of the issue?
Ok, so there is a cost to eating meat (beyond the price tag) and some people love meat so much, it's worth the cost. You don't think there is a chance that the hidden cost is actually much worse than meat eaters think? That, given the true cost, not even the most meat-loving person would eat meat?
I dont' think the true cost is high enough to warrant all meat-eating bad, but substantially worse than most meat eaters think.
That's because you're adding other details. Assuming a person or animal contributed to society an equal amount to its cost to society, would living a non-suffering, short-lived existence still be worse than no existence at all?
Elsewhere (http://lesswrong.com/lw/14r/unspeakable_morality/10jc) you said:
I've been reading your vegetarian comments with interest. Can you please explain how you don't think stuff should be destroyed unnecessarily, yet would not care if an entire species vanished?
Is it that it's somehow ok if something is destroyed as long as it's not intentional? I.e., if a famous painting was about to fall into a fire or something accidentally, it seems to me (if I follow your logic) you would catch it if you could do so without undue danger to your person, even if you didn't particularly like the painting. So how can you be ok with cows (or, let's say pigs, since as far as I know they are not used for leather or milk) going extinct?
I distinguish between taking action to destroy something, and ceasing to take measures to preserve it. The domestic cow species, as well as the domestic pig species, requires continual human support to keep it in existence. I would not have any problem with cows or pigs ceasing to exist if the following conditions were met:
I would have problems of greater or lesser degree with the extinction of cows (pigs) if any of the above conditions were not fully met, as in fact they are not at this time.
I'm usually careful to specify that I think an action can be unethical only if it was intentional or negligent.
...Which is why I didn't use the world "ethical" :)
More to the point,
So I gather that it is the act of destruction you find bad, and not the loss of the thing destroyed?
(And my follow-up question if you answer in the affirmative: Why, then, is it bad to destroy things?)
(And don't construe this line of questioning as disagreeing or agreeing with you; I'm just trying to understand your point of view)
It would, but that's an entirely separate issue from animal cruelty.
So does that mean vegetarians are ok with eating animals that were treated very humanly or that died of natural causes? Could a vegetarian here explain?
In case there are no vegetarians on this site, how are we driving away or failing to attract vegetarians?
I'm a pescetarian, but let's assume I count. I wouldn't eat those animals because non-fish meat no longer resembles food to me; because if I resumed eating meat of any kind, it would be more difficult to resist meat of inappropriate provenance; and because humanely-treated meat is hard to come by (and still has to be slaughtered) and naturally-dead meat is of suspect quality.
For an idea of how many vegetarians we have, check out this poll.
Do you think it is unethical for humans to eat other animals? If so, what do you suggest?
I'm a vegetarian, and if I weren't a bit repulsed by meat, I would have no ethical qualms about eating the flesh of a wild animal (or person) that died of natural causes, assuming my eating it didn't have other negative consequences.
I was, actually, fine with eating free range meat at first. After all, even their deaths might be less horrible than my own. But then I thought that if everyone did that, having so many animals living like people might be more than the Earth can take. It's having trouble with people living like people.
Basically, free-range meat is a move in the right direction, but suboptimal.
There are many different logics. See this thread http://lesswrong.com/lw/ei/essayquestion_poll_dietary_choices/ for some of them, including my own.
If you heard "sweatshops are bad" or "styrophone cups are bad" you would first look for its antecedents. So maybe the cognitive algorithm goes something like this: If X in "X is bad" is not associated with unfavorable antecedents, then examin X's consquences by default.
Pepperoni pizza was an odd example to use if you're talking about the evils of killing animals for food. There isn't even much meat on there. That's just poor communication. How about you reword like this:
That seems much clearer, if that's what you intended to communicate.
Ah, that makes your comment make sense. Obviously I know that peperoni is an animal product, but the pizza part threw me off, possibly because peperoni pizza is like the poster-child for foods that are supposedly bad for you.
I have no problem with the idea that modern factory-style living conditions for chickens, etc, are inhumane (and I personally buy cage-free, etc., both for that reason and because they apparently have more nutrients). But you seem to be suggesting that any killing of any animal for food purposes is immoral. So now I have to ask if you think it's evil for a lion to kill and eat an antelope?
If lions didn't eat antelopes, they would starve, and so would the antelopes when their burgeoning populations run out of food. Bad end. Pain, suffering, death.
Now, if lions could be made vegetarian, and antelopes could be made to use condoms... That'd be the perfect solution.
I got your point, and my response was that people generally don't think pain and death are bad in all cases and without exceptions. Many people think that the pain and death of their enemies is good, and that the pain and death of creatures sufficiently different from them (according to various criteria such as degree of sentience or sapience or ability to feel pain) is neutral.
Pepperoni pizza isn't bad. Human metabolisms are bad.
Both pepperoni pizza and human metabolisms are good, and gluttony is bad.
Well, good enough for government work.
Pepperoni pizza, human metabolisms, and gluttony are good, and being fat is bad. Thus we have a philosophical paradox!
I think considering 'gluttony' good is just abusing the language.
As for your philosophical paradox... drugs to the rescue?
Does anybody think pain and/or death are unconditionally bad, in all cases, with no exceptions? I've never heard of such a person. But perhaps I misunderstood what you were asking.
In all cases, with no exceptions.
Exceptions
You don't?
When is pain or death not bad?
Masochism.
Pain: when it wakes you up to alert you that you are in mortal danger.
At the risk of getting into semantics: in that case, pain serves a useful purpose, but that doesn't make pain itself non-bad. Creating an alternative ("upgraded") alert system that served the wake-up function but wasn't painful would be better. If pain in that context wouldn't be bad, then "does the alert system cause pain" would be an irrelevant question and the upgraded alert system wouldn't be considered any better.
Right, which was exactly my point: not every instance of pain should be classified as bad, and so it doesn't make sense to say the general phenomenon is "unconditionally bad, in all cases, with no exceptions", which is exactly what Bongo implicitly asserted.
To be perfectly fair, the absolute is difficult to assert due to the fuzziness of the concept. I mean, is tearing a piece of paper in half bad, because you killed the paper? What about tearing a virus in half? What about a bacterium? Where does the transition come in from merely irreversible to murderous.