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Yvain comments on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices - Less Wrong
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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?
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).
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".
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.
Hmm. Methinks this strategy could make debating female creationists somewhat problematic.
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.