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Xodarap comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - Less Wrong
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It doesn't seem like you're really criticizing "pro-animal people" - you're just critiquing utilitarianism. (e.g. "Is it arbitrary to state that suffering is bad?" "What if you could help others only at great expense to yourself?")
Supposing one does accept utilitarian principles, is there any reason why we shouldn't care about the suffering of non-humans?
This is half a criticism and half a reflection of arguments that have been used against my position that I think are problematic. To the extent that you think these arguments are problematic, I probably agree.
Resources spent on alleviating the suffering of non-humans are resources that aren't spent on alleviating the suffering of humans, which I value a lot more.
Why?
(Keeping in mind that we have agreed the basic tenets of utilitarianism are correct: pain is bad etc.)
Oh. No. Human pain is bad. The pain of sufficiently intelligent animals might also be bad. Fish pain and under is irrelevant.
There is nothing inconsistent about valuing the pain of some animals, but not of others. That said, I find the view hard to believe. When I reflect on why I think pain is bad, it seems clear that my belief is grounded in the phenomenology of pain itself, rather than in any biological or cognitive property of the organism undergoing the painful experience.
Pain is bad because it feels bad. That's why I think pain should be alleviated irrespective of the species in which it occurs.
Truthfully, I'm not even sure I believe pain is bad in the relevant sense. It's certainly something I'd prefer to avoid under most circumstances, but when I think about it in detail there always ends up being a "because" in there: because it monopolizes attention, because in sufficient quantity it can thoroughly screw up your motivational and emotional machinery, because it's often attached to particular actions in a way that limits my ability to do things. It doesn't feel like a root-level aversion to my reasoning self: when I've torn a ligament and can't flex my foot in a certain way without intense stabbing agony, I'm much more annoyed by the things it prevents me from doing than by the pain it gives me, and indeed I remember the former much better than the latter.
I haven't thought this through rigorously, but if I had to take a stab at it right now I'd say that pain is bad in roughly the same way that pleasure is good: in other words, it works reasonably well as a rough experiential pointer to the things I actually want to avoid, and it does place certain constraints on the kind of life I'd want to live, but I'd expect trying to ground an entire moral system in it to give me some pretty insane results once I started looking at corner cases.
I don't share these intuitions. Pain is bad if it happens to something I care about. I don't care about fish.
I don't care about fish either. I care about pain. It just so happens that fish can experience pain.
You probably don't want to draw the line at fish.
What point are you trying to make with that link?
Probably that fish don't seem to be hugely different from amphibians/reptiles, birds, and mammals in terms of the six substitute-indicators-for-feeling-pain, and so it's hard to say whether their pain experience is different.
I would agree that fish pain is less relevant than human pain (they have a central nervous system, yes, but less of one, and a huge part of what makes human pain bad is the psychological suffering associated with it).
My claim was that I don't care about fish pain, not that fish pain is too different from human pain to matter. Rather, fish are too different from humans to matter.
Could you expand on this idea?
How is the statement "fish and humans feel pain approximately equally" different from the statement "we should care about fish and human pain approximately equally?"
You and I feel pain approximately equally, but I care about mine a lot more than about yours.
"I care about X's pain" is mostly a statement about X, not a statement about pain. I don't care about fish and I care about humans. You may not share this moral preference, but are you claiming that you don't even understand it?
Fair enough. I think "too X to matter" is a complex concept, though.
I may be misunderstanding you, but I thought you were suggesting that there is a non-arbitrary set of physiological features that vertebrates share but fish don't. I was pointing out that this doesn't seem to be the case.
No, I'm suggesting that I don't care about fish.
That's a false dichotomy. Resources that stop being spent on alleviating the suffering of non-humans do not automatically translate into resources that are spent on alleviating the suffering of humans. Nor is it the case that there are insufficient resources in the world today to eliminate most human suffering. The issue there is purely one of distribution of wealth, not gross wealth.
Yes, but they're less available. Maybe I triggered the wrong intuition with the word "resources." I had in mind resources like the time and energy of intelligent people, not resources like money. I think it's plausible to guess that time and energy spent on one altruistic cause really does funge directly against time and energy spent on others, e.g. because of good-deed-for-the-day effects.