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Alicorn comments on Unspeakable Morality - Less Wrong
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I think you mean "vegetarian". There are probably lots of happy veterinarians who love meat. But anyway, although I never liked meat nearly that much, it doesn't seem impossible in principle to get so much pleasure out of a bite of steak that removing steak would be an unacceptable infringement on quality of life.
Damn, I should pay more attention to my spell checker.
So you accept that there is a certain level of happiness derived from meat-eating that warrants meat-eating itself (given that you can be a happy vegetarian). But where do you draw the line? The line between a sufficient and insufficient level of happiness.
I would expect your line to be drawn at a much higher level than mine. If that's true, what determines who is right? I would think it's up to personal preference.
I accept that there may be, in theory, such a level of happiness. I have no way of knowing if anyone actually experiences that much pleasure from the consumption of meat. It probably also depends on the other happiness-inducing factors in the person's life. If the availability of bacon is the difference between someone being merely okay and being great, then I'll probably err on the side of letting the person have bacon... if it's the difference between being great and being ecstatic, I'm less inclined to do so, even if in some mathematical sense the improvement in each case is the same. So, I don't think that "given that you can be a happy vegetarian" (for conservative definitions of "happy") merely liking meat a lot will tend to be enough to warrant eating it.
I don't think it's up to personal preference - I'm a moral realist, these are moral questions. However, there is a fair amount of epistemic uncertainty about where the line is located, and so within limits, for practical purposes, I don't see a better option than allowing it to be guided by individual preferences.
Do you agree that where the line is drawn is determined by a person's individual utility function? In other words, there exists a unique line for every person, depending on their terminal value for saving animals and what not.
I'm not sure I believe in the existence of coherent utility functions per se. Whatever passes for a utility function affects my ethical system only indirectly, anyway. I don't think that a given person's care for animal salvation typically affects whether they can be a happy vegetarian (although it might affect whether they would be independently motivated to become one), so I doubt it need come into play.