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conchis comments on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices - Less Wrong
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I'm afraid I don't really have a good answer. I think that where we draw our sphere of moral concern is basically arbitrary; I just happen to find the idea of sacrificing human welfare for non-human animals deeply unattractive. I might be willing to accept a lexicographic ordering that took other animals' welfare into account only when human well-being was unaffected, but I doubt that adopting such an view would have (m)any practical consequences.
I agree with everything you said, except that I believe non-human animals deserve non-zero moral weight.
Do you believe infants, or people with dementia, or severe mental disabilities deserve non-zero moral weight? Independent, of course, of how their welfare effects the welfare of mature intelligent humans who care about them.
Does witnessing animal torture not bother you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eQQQBn4dlo&feature=channel Note, I do not endorse everything PETA does.
Lexicographic ordering is non-zero weight. (Well, sort of. You can't represent a lexicographic ordering with a real-valued social welfare function, so nothing will have "weight" in that sense, but you get the point.)
Yes to all three limbs of your first question, with a possible reservation depending on what exactly falls within the sphere of "severe mental disability".
Oddly enough, before actually clicking through to the link, I was quite expecting to be bothered. As it turned out, I wasn't bothered much at all, I think largely due to the lack of gore. I'm not sure what this says about me, but it does tend to reinforce my view that "being bothered by watching something" is a weak guide to morality. My lack of bother at that video doesn't say much about the inherent moral status of pigs, much as my distress at this video doesn't say much about the inherent moral value of Britney Spears.
I absolutely agree that being bothered by watching something is a weak guide to morality. I wish I'd mentioned that with my first link. Sometimes such exposure can worsen moral judgments. That said, it seems better to have spent some time watching things like this rather than no time.
Given how strongly our self-interest can structure our judgments of morality, we should be quite a bit more suspicious of our moral conclusions when they justify what we wanted to do. (Yes, some vegetarians surely take some satisfaction from being part of a "morally superior" minority.)
But honestly, to create a toy problem, would you really refuse to pinch yourself or make a friend 60 seconds late for a dentist appointment if it could relieve 10/100/1000 animals in extreme pain? Do you oppose every conceivable law that regulate the treatment of animals? Note, answering "No," to the above questions certainly doesn't imply that vegetarianism is mandatory.
Something about animals' minds... their ability to experience pleasure and pain, their ability to have simple ideas, etc. makes me feel that they deserve non-zero moral weight.
Gore, for those who are interested and willing
Cats and dogs
At this point, I think I'm going to refrain from answering your question directly, but rest assured I'm not ignoring it.
I'm in the interesting (and somewhat surprising) position that my intuitions may have shifted somewhat since last I thought about these matters in depth.
I'm not quite sure what to do about that yet. Either in terms of my general thoughts about how to respond to changes in intuitions, or in terms of how I would update if I decided to run with the new ones. I worry that trying to answer immediately could bias my response towards rationalizing my existing set of beliefs, and I don't want to do that, so I'm going to take some more time to think through things.
Lexicographic ordering is zero weight outside of toy problems, since even the smallest possibility of making a difference at the highest order will exclude even the greatest possibility of making a difference at lower orders from attention – but this may have been the point of your previous comment.
Agreed. (And, yes, that was the point of my earlier comment. ;))
In this case it basically allows you to be a heartless b*****d without admitting to actually being a heartless b*****d.