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Oscar_Cunningham comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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My parents are both vegetarian, and have been since I was born. They brought me up to be a vegetarian. I'm still a vegetarian. Clearly I'm on shaky ground, since my beliefs weren't formed from evidence, but purely from nurture.
Interestingly my parents became vegetarian because they perceived the way animals were farmed to be cruel (although they also stopped eating non-farmed animals such as fish), however my rationalization for not eating meat is that it is the killing of animals that is wrong (generalising from the belief that killing humans is worse than mistreating them). Since eating meat is not necessary to live, it must therefore be as bad as hunting for fun, which is much more widely disapproved of. (I'm not a vegan, and I often eat sweets containing gelatine, if asked to explain this, I would rationalise that eating these thing causes the death of many fewer animals than actually eating, like, steak).
But having read all of Eliezer's posts, I now realise that I could have come up with that rationalisation even if eating meat were not wrong, and that I'm now in just a bad a position as a religious believer. I want a crisis of faith, but I have a problem... I don't know where to go back to. There's no objective basis for morality. I don't know what kind of evidence I should condition on (I don't know what would be different about the world if eating meat was good instead of bad). If a religious person realises they have no evidence they should go back to their priors. Because god has a tiny prior, they should immediately stop believing. I don't know exactly what the prior on "killing animals is wrong" is, but I think it has a reasonable size (certainly larger than that for god), and I feel more justified in being vegetarian because of this. What should I do now?
Footnote: I probably don't have to say this, but I don't want arguments for or against vegetarianism, simply advice on how one should challenge one's own moral beliefs. I've used "eating meat" and "killing animals" interchangeably in my post, because I think that they are morally equivalent due to supply and demand.
I hope this isn't a vegatarianism argument, but remember that you have to rehabilitate both killing and cruelty to justify eating most meat, even if killing alone has held you back so far.
That's an excellent point, and one I may not have spotted otherwise. Thank you.
Do you want to eat meat?
Or do you just want to have a good reason for not wanting to eat meat?
It's... y'know... food. I don't have an ethical objection to peppermint but I don't eat it because I don't want to.
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If Omega told me that the rest of my life would be more painful than it was pleasant I would still choose to live. I think most others here would choose similarly (except in cases of extreme pain like torture).
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Even if my life would be painful on net, there are still projects I want to finish and work I want to do for others that would prevent me from choosing death. Valuing things such as these is no more irrational than valuing your own pleasure.
Perhaps our disagreement is over the connection between pain/pleasure and utility. I would prefer a world in which I was in pain but am able to complete certain projects to one in which I was in pleasure but unable to complete certain projects. In the economic sense of utility (rank in an ordinal preference function), my utility would be higher in the former world than the latter world (even though the former is more painful).
I think your disagreement is over time preference. Which path you choose now depends on how much you discount future pain versus present moral guilt or empathy considerations.
In other words, you would make that choice now because that would make you feel best now. Of course (you project that) you would make the same choice at time T, for all T occurring between now and the completion of your projects.
This is known as having a high time preference. It might seem like a quintessential example of low time preference, because you get a big payoff if you can persist through to completing those projects. However, the initial assumption was that "the rest of my life would be more painful than it was pleasant," so ex hypothesi the payoff cannot possibly be big enough to balance out the pain.
Pleasure and pain have little to do with it.
Thanks, I read the article, and I think everything in it is actually answered by my post above. For instance:
He's confused about time structure here. He doesn't want to take the pill now, because that would have a dreadful effect on his happiness now. Whether we call it pleasure/pain, happiness/unhappiness or something else, there's no escaping it.
Eliezer says his values are not reducible to happiness. Yet how unhappy (or painful) would it be for him right now to watch the happy-all-the-time pill slowly being inched toward his mouth, knowing he'll be made to swallow it? I suspect those would be the worst few moments of his life.
It's not that values are not reducible to happiness, it's that happiness has a time structure that our language usually ignores.
What if you sneak up on him while he's sleeping and give him the happy-all-the-time injection before he knows you've done it? Then he wouldn't have that moment of unhappiness.
Yes, and he would never care about it as long as he never entertained the prospect. I don't think there is a definition of "value" that does everything he needs it to while at the some time not referring to happiness/unhappiness or similar. Charity requires that I continue to await such definition, but I am skeptical.
When do you think suicide would be the rational option?
When doing so causes a sufficiently large benefit for others (ie, 'a suicide mission', as opposed to mere suicide). Or when you have already experienced enough danger (that is, situations likely to have killed you) to overcome your prior and make you conclude that you have quantum immortality with high enough confidence.
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Is it meaningful to put a probability on 'killing animals is wrong' and absolute moral statements like that? Feels like trying to put a probability on 'abortion is wrong' or 'gun control is wrong' or '(insert your pet issue here) is wrong/right' or...
No, it's not meaningful to put a prior probability on it, unless you seriously think something like absolute morality exists. Having said that, the prior for "killing animals is wrong" is still higher than the prior for the God of Abraham existing.
If morality is a fixed computation, you can place probabilities on possible outputs of that computation (or more concretely, on possible outputs of an extrapolation of your or humanity's volition).
Note that Bayesian probability is not absolute, so it's not appropriate to demand absolute morality in order to put probabilities on moral claims. You just need a meaningful (subjective) concept of morality. This holds for any concept one can consider, any statement can be assigned a subjective probability, and morality isn't an exceptional special case.
I find this paper to be a good resource to think about this subject: https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf
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The underscores need escaping.
See this discussion of my own meat-eating. My conclusion was that there is not much of a rational basis for deciding one way or the other -- my attempts to use rationality broke down.
I think you should go out and get yourself something deliciously meaty, while still being mostly vegetarian. "Fair weather vegetarianism". Unless you don't actually like the taste of meat. That's ok. There's also an issue of convenience. You could begin the slippery slope of drinking chicken broth soup and Thai food with lots of fish sauce.
We exist in an immoral system and there isn't much to do about it. Being a vegetarian for reasons of animal suffering is symbolic. If we truly cared about the holocaust of animal suffering, we would be waging a guerrilla war against factory farms.
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In this case, other people seem to have concluded that the value of not eating a piece of an animal is in the long run equal to that much animal not suffering/dying. So I know the difference one person could make and it seems too small to be worth the hassle of not eating meat that other people prepare for me, and not worth the inconvenience of not getting the most delicious item on the menu at restaurants.