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Alicorn comments on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices - Less Wrong
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This isn't obvious to me at all. Can you explain?
Pain is not the only form of suffering. Temple Grandin has suggested that animals are worse off when they are afraid than when they are in pain.
I think he means that since the animals on the preserve will eat one another, if you think they'd be better off not existing than living to one day be eaten, you should destroy the preserve.
Oh. If that's what it means, then it's only equivalent for someone who rejects the doing-allowing distinction to an extreme degree and considers destroying the preserve in the first place a neutral act, rather than an act which would have an impact on other valuable things like biodiversity and make a lot of humans angry.
This suggests that the consequentialist vs. non-consequentialist distinction might actually the right one after all. (Of course, the claim that only consequentialists act in ways that are broadly consistent with their values is still, er... contentious, to say the least.)
Not at all! Consequentialists can get doing-allowing distinctions via self-other asymmetries or agent relativization, and non-consequentialists don't have to embrace the distinction.
Fair enough. I tend to code self-other asymmetry and agent-relativization as non-consequentialist, even though they can be formally treated as such; but that's admittedly a matter of (potentially idiosyncratic) taste. (I worry that otherwise consequentialism doesn't uniquely identify anything; perhaps such fears are unwarranted.) Your second point is of course valid either way.