2010 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Kevin 22 December 2010 06:27AM

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Comment author: gwern 23 December 2010 03:59:50PM 1 point [-]

Nothing anthropocentric about it. We're not eating Clippy, after all. Pigs, cows, sheep - all stupider than us and of less moral consequence.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini comment score below threshold [+] (13 children)

Comment author: gwern 23 December 2010 05:51:00PM 3 points [-]

Either the community you are diagnosing with biases or humanity in general; they both work for my statement. Asking which is not useful.

And you wonder why you aren't being upvoted for your oh-so-hip contrarianism...

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 23 December 2010 06:11:10PM 3 points [-]

Some humans are stupider than some pigs, cows, or sheep. Would it be okay to eat them?

The question I asked is useful, I believe, because the two listed interpretations of 'us' do not exhaust the relevant alternatives, and because the argument would have a different structure under some of the alternatives not listed.

I'm sorry if my comment sounded contrarian. It wasn't written in that spirit, as I tried to explain in a more recent comment.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 23 December 2010 06:40:10PM 7 points [-]

"Would it be okay to eat them?"

It would cause sufficient emotional harm to their loved ones that I would argue against it. But I wouldn't condemn as inherently immoral a society that considered it acceptable to feast on the flesh of their departed loved ones. What would be immoral would be to kill people for their flesh.

I rather think you need clarify your own position. Is your position that eating animal flesh is immoral, or that killing animals for their flesh is immoral? Is killing animals for their flesh less or more immoral than letting other animals kill them for their flesh?

What's morally better, to eat a sheep, or to let a wolf eat a sheep? In both cases, a sheep gets eaten, but the first case pleases the belly of a human, the latter pleases the belly of a wolf. What's better, to make a human happy or to make a wolf happy?

Also I think you're confusing emotional bias with cognitive bias. I freely admit I'm emotionally biased in favor of humanity, compared to animals. This will govern my goals and utility functions. It isn't the same as cognitive bias, thinking the world is other than it actually is.

Comment author: gwern 23 December 2010 07:17:10PM 1 point [-]

Some humans are stupider than some pigs, cows, or sheep.

You refer of course to human vegetables and the like. I don't consider them morally human except inasmuch as they may cease to be vegetables in the future and whatnot; nor do I consider abortion to be murder, on the same psychological criteria of personhood. If there were a cow as smart as your average adult, then I would regard eating them as murder.

On the general question of 'not whether they can speak but whether they can suffer' (a quote that ought to be familiar to someone with a username like yours), I regard the evil of being eaten as less than the evil of never having been born. Since the billions of chickens and cattle and whatnot would never come into existence if it weren't for meat-eating, I don't regard them as having been wronged or a net source of suffering.

These are all old, practically hackneyed, arguments and considerations in this area of morality. Do you have anything new or especially interesting to say?

Comment author: TobyBartels 23 December 2010 07:34:18PM * 5 points [-]

I regard the evil of being eaten as less than the evil of never having been born

I've never understood this evil of never having been born. Vegetarianism aside, does this mean that you promote the increase of the human population as much as possible? Should well-off people try to sire or bear a new child every two years at minimum?

(I know, this is still off topic. And hackneyed. I would RSVP if I lived near Berkeley.)

Comment author: gwern 23 December 2010 08:59:50PM 1 point [-]

I've never understood this evil of never having been born.

Never having been born means one can't benefit from one's life, I would point out. If the animals we eat are not suffering terribly each moment, that means they have good moments or great ones where they are happy to be alive; enough of these to counterbalance death, and their life is a net gain to them.

One is free to argue that their death or portions of their life are so cruel and filled with suffering that their lives are not actually a net gain, but this is a difficult argument to make and implausible except for a few cases. (For example, veal.)

More intelligent animals (humans) usually judge their lives worth living even under conditions of outright torture and rarely commit suicide; if that is so with all their tastes and aspirations and expectations, why would we expect less intelligent animals to have higher standards?

Vegetarianism aside, does this mean that you promote the increase of the human population as much as possible?

I don't know. It's an active question (which actually I think Hanson has discussed in the past because wealthy 1st Worlders could reproduce a lot more than they do): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

Besides the utilitarian questions, there are practical factual questions - eg. how much does economic growth depend on the demographic transition and holding down the human population?

Comment author: sfb 23 December 2010 09:55:19PM * 6 points [-]

Never having been born means one can't benefit from one's life,

This seems as much a mis-answer as the saying "someone lost their life", as if the someone and the life are separable.

"One can't benefit from one's life if one isn't born" implies that one exists before one is born - that there is a "person" (a specific person) hanging around somewhere real, waiting to be born. This is not the case. A child is born and it's neural patterns arrange themselves into a person.

Before a child is born, there is no real extant thing, anywhere, posessing the attribute "lack-of-benefitting-from-it's-possible-future-life".

(Similarly, you cannot ask what it would be like if you were born in another country, or born in 1750, or born to a wealthier family, because that style of question makes the same mistake of getting the order of the wrong way around).

There isn't any X to satisfy the sentence "X is not being born", so "not being born" isn't evil. [Edit: I suppose, unless you class miscarriages or abortions, but I think the point still holds because that still carries the same misconception of a whole "you" within the unborn cell cluster somewhere].

Comment author: TobyBartels 26 December 2010 08:50:27AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for your reply. I mostly agree with sfb (sibling to this comment), although I wouldn't classify your statement as an error (as sfb seems to do). It certainly doesn't match my values, however. (I find the Repugnant Conclusion truly repugnant, and happily its hypotheses are not met.)

Anyway, I hope that the party was enjoyable (if you went).

Comment author: prase 23 December 2010 06:31:44PM * 1 point [-]

Where would you draw the boundary, and why? Is eating insects OK? Flatworms? Jellyfish?

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 23 December 2010 06:52:19PM 1 point [-]

I would draw the boundary at sentience, because there is no moral disagreement about the intrinsic badness of (undeserved) pain. That we are currently uncertain about where exactly sentience begins in the animal kingdom does not constitute an objection to the moral argument; nor is that empirical uncertainty relevant in this context, since no reasonable person would deny that pigs, cows and sheep are all sentient beings.

Comment author: prase 24 December 2010 11:27:18AM 1 point [-]

We may be actually more uncertain about what sentience is rather than where it begins. It could belong to the "free will" category of concepts.

gwern comments on Newtonmas Meetup, 12/25/2010 - Less Wrong

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