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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - Less Wrong
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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.
Do you consider this part of morality?
I mean, I personally experience selfish emotions, but I usually, y'know, try to override them?
Most people probably wouldn't consider that moral as such (though they'd likely be okay with it on pragmatic grounds), but the more general idea of treating some people's pain as more significant than others' is certainly consistent with a lot of moral systems. Common privileged categories: friends, relatives, children, the weak or helpless, people not considered evil.
It's perfectly moral for me to be selfish to some degree, yes. I cannot care about others if I don't care about myself. You might work differently, but utter unselfishness seems like an anomaly.
It also seems like a lie (to the self or to others).
Fair enough. To restate but with different emphasis: "we should care about fish and human pain approximately equally?"
"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?
No, I have a lot of biases like this: the halo effect makes me think that humans' ability to do math makes our suffering more important, "what you see is all there is" allows me to believe that slaughterhouses which operate far away must be morally acceptable, and so forth.
Anyway, fish suffering isn't a make-or-break decision. People very frequently have the opportunity to choose a bean burrito over a chicken one (or even a beef burrito over a chicken one), and from what Peter has presented here it seems like this is an extremely effective way to reduce suffering.
Fair enough. I think "too X to matter" is a complex concept, though.