MorganHouse comments on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Alicorn 03 May 2009 03:27PM

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Comment author: Yvain 03 May 2009 09:12:49PM 6 points [-]
  1. I don't eat meat.
  2. Ethical. If I wouldn't want people torturing dogs, I have no justification to be okay with people torturing cows, pigs, and chickens, and from what I've seen conditions in a lot of farms and slaughterhouses are tantamount to torture. Even though animals can't think verbally, they still have some level of awareness and the ability to feel pain, so causing them suffering is verboten. I am kind of sympathetic to the argument that free range meat raised with the animals' welfare in mind isn't so bad, and to the argument that if we weren't raising these animals for food they'd probably be endangered or extinct. But free range is only a small percent of meat products, and there are major environmental costs anyway, and the meat-farming industry just does so much damage in so many ways that I feel I need to do my part to discourage it. Right now my goal is to aim for zero meat and accept the inevitable lapses when they come as not being an ethical disaster.
  3. I'm not too strict about it. When I'm traveling or a guest somewhere it's pretty tough to avoid meat, so I let myself get away with it.
  4. Hard to tell. I think I'd at least share my reasons with them, but if they didn't want to that's their choice. As long as they can provide a rational explanation, of course :)
  5. Never tried.
  6. I eat a lot of Quorn when I'm in the British Isles, and soy products when I'm elsewhere. Quorn is better, but I haven't been able to find it outside Britain and Ireland.
  7. I'm pretty live-and-let-live about this.
  8. Became a vegetarian in elementary school, I think, maybe middle school. Gave it up on three or four occasions for a few months, usually after moving and not being able to find good vegetarian foods there, but always went back. Sometimes give it up for a few months when I go back to my parents' place, because the food there is too good and I don't have as much control over my diet.
  9. I love meat and I want it all the time.
  10. I don't really eat many fruits or vegetables. I hate them to the point where I have trouble keeping them down. This doesn't apply as much to salads. So I kind of live off of grain products, with some milk and eggs and Quorn thrown in. There are a lot of diet theories that suggest I should be very fat right now, but I'm actually pretty thin. Go figure.
Comment author: MorganHouse 03 May 2009 10:39:32PM *  9 points [-]

Ethical. If I wouldn't want people torturing dogs, I have no justification to be okay with people torturing cows, pigs, and chickens

Dogs are genetically selected for living together with humans. As such, and unlike their wolf predecessors, dogs are friendly towards us. In many cases, care is reciprocal, in that we more often care about people who care about us. I propose that chickens don't have even the slightest sense of morality, and don't care whether their siblings live or die. With this in mind, I think it's a somewhat justified to torture birds and low mammals, since they don't care about our or their families' well-being to begin with.

However, I would never torture a chicken unless I was at least 99% sure it had valuable information, and the future of the farm was at stake.

Comment author: Yvain 03 May 2009 11:06:49PM 8 points [-]

Kin selection suggests that chickens may care about their siblings, and general evolution suggests they definitely care about their children.

...which is exactly the problem. You sound like you're holding a grudge against chickens for not being evolutionarily programmed in a certain way. Let it go. If you set some criteria for "deserving" our respect, of course a lot of animals can't live up to it. But it doesn't seem right to use that as justification for hurting them.

Thought experiment: I take Bob and cut out the part of his brain involved in empathy. Now he can't care about other people, but his thought and emotions are otherwise intact. Is it now okay to torture Bob?

Comment deleted 04 May 2009 12:05:41AM [-]
Comment author: Yvain 04 May 2009 12:16:14AM 7 points [-]

What's so inherently bad about pain?

The proper way to prove that pain is bad is proof by induction: specifically, hook an electric wire to the testicles of the person who doesn't think pain is bad, induce a current, and continue it until the person admits that pain is bad (this is also the proper way to prove that creationism is false, or at least the most fun).

Is it morally questionable to run a piece of control software for a cleaning robot, that has a "const bool in_pain = true;"?

This is getting into the subject of qualia, which I freely admit to not understanding. But I'm pretty sure I have some, and I'm pretty sure they're harder to produce than a variable with the label "pain".

With his intelligence intact, he can still be valuable to us, and depending on what he did in the past, we may be in moral debt to him.

I'd guess from this statement that you're either not a consequentialist, or you're some exotic type of consequentialist straight out of Alicorn's syllabus. If you clarify exactly what your moral theory is, I can give you a better estimate on how likely we are to be talking past each other because we have completely different premises.

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 04 May 2009 12:56:24AM 4 points [-]

specifically, hook an electric wire to the testicles of the person who doesn't think pain is bad, induce a current, and continue it until the person admits that pain is bad (this is also the proper way to prove that creationism is false, or at least the most fun).

Hmm. Methinks this strategy could make debating female creationists somewhat problematic.

Comment deleted 04 May 2009 12:45:00AM *  [-]
Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 04 May 2009 12:52:17AM 6 points [-]

For example, the cells in my brain registering pain will experience lots of pain in their lives, and probably little else, for the benefit of the body as a whole.

I don't think it's obvious that individual cells meaningfully experience pain, in the qualia-type sense we seem to be talking about. Qualia are a function of minds, not brains, or brain-pieces.

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