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BlueSun comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - Less Wrong
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A question I have is how to evaluate the morality of the two options:
If everyone went vegetarian, the animal population would likely be greatly diminished and it isn't obvious to me that I'd choose option B over option A if I were on the menu. Are there some standard objections to the idea that option A is better than option B?
One quick objection might be that it proves too much. If John Beatmykids told me he wouldn't have kids unless he was permitted to beat them, I wouldn't give him a pass to beat any future children. Another objection might be that there's always a choice C, but here I don't see another option as realistic.
This is a great argument, and is known as the "Logic of the Larder" (for reasons I have never comprehended). This paper goes into more detail than you probably care about; the main point is that your guess:
Isn't generally true, because wild animals have a much greater density than farm animals.
Have you read much about the lives of farm animals? In general once people do I think they agree that these are lives that are not worth living. There's plenty of footage on the web too.
Indeed so. Factory-farmed nonhuman animals are debeaked, tail-docked, castrated (etc) to prevent them from mutilating themselves and each other. Self-mutilitary behaviour in particular suggests an extraordinarily severe level of chronic distress. Compare how desperate human beings must be before we self-mutilate. A meat-eater can (correctly) respond that the behavioural and neuroscientific evidence that factory-farmed animals suffer a lot is merely suggestive, not conclusive. But we're not trying to defeat philosophical scepticism, just act on the best available evidence. Humans who persuade ourselves that factory-farmed animals are happy are simply kidding ourselves - we're trying to rationalise the ethically indefensible.
This seems to address one of my points raised here.
Self-mutilation is certainly a proxy for very low or negative quality of life, even if directly suicidal behaviour is not available (because the animal can't form a concept of suicide as a way out). If the docking, castrating etc. is to prevent mutilation of other nearby animals, that's a bit different of course.
I'm very wary of deeming any life to be of negative quality unless there is very compelling evidence that the life-form itself feels the same way.
Also, see my other comment: what happens if a few changes to farming practice can make the quality of life positive, even if just barely so? Does the objection to meat really go away?
drnickbone, the argument that meat-eating can be ethically justified if conditions of factory-farmed animals are improved so their lives are "barely" worth living is problematic. As it stands, the argument justifies human cannibalism. Breeding human babies for the pot is potentially ethically justified because the infants in question wouldn't otherwise exist - although they are factory- farmed, runs this thought-experiment, their lives are at least "barely" worth living because they don't self-mutilate or show the grosser signs of psychological trauma. No, I'm sure you don't buy this argument - but then we shouldn't buy it for nonhuman animals either.
For evolutionary reasons, humans have instinctive reactions to both human infants and cannibalism that are unrelated to whether a course of action is really ethical, so claiming that something is bad because it justifies eating infants is often a cheat.
And if we actually started eating infants, the existence of those instincts would mean that it would be done mostly by people who lack those instincts because of brain malfunction. This would in practice lead to people with brain malfunctions controlling the project, which would quickly extend it to unethical areas regardless of whether the original version is ethical.
So you're saying that farming human infants can be ethically justified in contrived circumstances? I agree. But most people wouldn't, which suggests that this might not be their true rejection. A continued practice of farming animals would send the wrong message to people who aren't consequentialists, it would send the message that treating beings differently simply because of their species-membership is normal/okay, which could have very bad consequences for nonhumans in the long run.
If most people don't agree with farming human infants, but they do agree with other things for which similar arguments can be made, that does not imply that their reasons for accepting the other things aren't genuine. It may instead imply that their reasons for rejecting the farming of human infants aren't genuine. Given the existence of powerful human instincts related to both infants and cannibalism, I find the latter explanation to be more likely than the former.
The question is not whether they themselves would farm the infants, but whether they see an ethical objection to doing it in hypothetical circumstances where those indirect reasons you mention are removed. Imagine we'd ask people the following question:
Suppose we discover an isolated island where the islanders farm infants and where the whole society is completely fine it. You have a magic button that could remodel the society in a way stopping that practice. All else would remain equal, i.e. no one on that island would become better or worse off because of the button. Would you push it or are you indifferent? And if you would push it, how much money would you be willing to pay for pushing it? Furthermore, we specify that after pushing or not pushing the button, you will forget about the island.
My guess is that people would pay money for this, which suggests that it's not just their emotional dispositions that are responsible for their judgment but rather the underlying moral principles they are following.
Given the strong instinctual aversion to doing such things, anyone who is willing to do them probably has a brain malfunction. (Note that "believing they are ethical" is not the same as "willing to do them".) Most people would consider an island whose inhabitants have brain malfunctions to be something to be stopped. And you can't postulate a society of people who don't have brain malfunctions and yet like to do such things unless they are not human.
Furthermore, most people asked such a thing will be unable to separate their instinctual reactions from ethical judgments. I suspect most people if told of an island where people eat shit, would be willing to make some non-zero expenditure to stop it. That doesn't mean they're basing their judgment on moral principles.
Hmm, I can't see any obvious utilitarian approach under which a cannibal society would be justified.
First, it would have to be a non-human society, or a society where humans had been substantially modified to remove their revulsion at eating other humans.
Second, under total utilitarian logic, it looks like there could be more people sustained on a bare subsistence diet (all of them with lives barely worth living) than could be sustained by breeding one bunch of humans to be consumed by other humans. So total utilitarians should reject the cannibal society: ironically, it may not be repugnant enough for the Repugnant Conclusion to hold! Under the same "repugnant" logic, total utilitarians would abolish meat eating and eradicate wild animals, whenever that led to an increase in the human population.
Average utilitarians would also reject the cannibal society, since they could improve the welfare of an average human by just not breeding the cannibal victims. It's less clear to me what average utilitarians should do about farm animals and wildlife. This depends on whether these animals are included in the average at equal weight with humans, or whether there are different weighting factors. If equal weighting, then eradicating all non-human animal life would increase the average welfare of what's left. This is another sort of repugnant conclusion of course.
However, none of these is the strongest reason for rejecting a cannibal scenario. The strongest reason appears to be the Kantian one: it's wrong to treat human beings as means to an end. Whereas there seems to be no similar Kantian injunction against treating animals as means to an end.
It's interesting that there is this asymmetry, which does initially look like outright speciesism. However, the crucial asymmetry is probably between agents who can be expected to be bound by a shared set of moral rules (including the rule of not using each other) and other beings who are not and cannot be bound by the same rules. If there were non-human animals, with whom we could agree to share a moral code, then the code could say it is wrong to use them as means to an end as well.
Humans have no general aversion to eating other humans. Same as they have no general aversion to killing other humans. Their were enough societies that routinely ate killed enemies. Humans do have aversion to killing and eating anyone/anything the feel empathy for. But whom you feel empathy for is strongly socialized. Sure empathy with children is strong but children of enemies were also often killed.
Don't commit the 'typical society fallacy' of projecting and generalizing your (societies) values. Our society exists because it is more stable and competitive than tribal societies which played a less efficient competitive game. This means that a having humane values is a winning strategy for a society. But it is not 'right'. It is just ethical.
Otherwise I basically agree with the utilitarian reasoning. Note that utilitarianism isn't neccessarily the only possible approach.
That is not true because cannibalism is rare. Moreover, many cases of cannibalism are ritual and symbolic.
That is not true either. Being psychopathic is not a human norm. Clearly, humans can and do kill other humans when they feel the need for it, but "aversion" is a very weak work. I have no problem saying that humans do have a general aversion to killing other humans and that they manage to overcome that aversion rather easily.
Agreed. Rare it is. But then you agree that it does occur voluntary in normal healthy adult humans.
That only qualifies it but doesn't exclude it. In the opposite it means that it can be sufficiently 'normal' to have become part of tradition and customs.
That has nothing to do with psychosis. It just means that killing other people can be quite nomal for human tribes. I recommend having a look at the Yanomamö:
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/06/10/the-yanomamo-and-the-origins-of-male-honor/
ADDED QUOTES:
The range of behavior that historically has occurred "voluntary in normal healthy adult humans" is very very wide.
Not psychosis but psychopathy.
Yes, sometimes. However I stand by my assertion in the parent post.
Most people would object to breeding brainless human babies for the pot, even though by definition brainless human babies are not people, cannot feel or suffer, and can be treated as objects because they are objects.
This is not because breeding brainless human babies would be wrong. It's because our species has an instinctive aversion to cannibalism and an instinctive tendency to treat anything with baby-like physical features as people (which also accounts for the many anti-abortion arguments that depend on the physical attributes of the fetus).
I'm interested if that is the real objection though.
Presumably it is possible to design a more humane farming system such that the quality of farmed animal life is > 0 (i.e. these are genuinely lives worth living). Presumably it is also possible to legislate to enforce such a system on meat producers.
And it may well be easier to do that than to persuade everyone to give up eating meat, or to persuade them voluntarily to eat humane meat (at a higher price). So that on consequentialist grounds, campaigning for "humane farms" legislation is a better strategy.
But that's not what the original poster is advocating. I'm not sure why.
I'm not sure whether that would be feasible. The current rate of meat consumption in affluent countries is already straining the global amount of resources, and projections suggest that meat consumption is on the rise. Increasing animal welfare while keeping production constant (or even scaling it) will be even more inefficient and will require even more resources. So this only seems feasible if you reduce the overall rate of consumption, and how would you do that more effectively than by promoting vegetarianism or something similar?
If this were true, I'd expect it to be reflected in the price of meat.
Unless governments subsidize the hell out of it.
The reason to prefer option B over option A is the standard considerations of "suffering is bad". On most consequentialist considerations, a life of entirely suffering is not worth living. Would you want to exist if the only thing that would happen to you is torture and then death?
Your example with John Beatmykids is a good one.
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Choice C might be to raise animals that are engineered to not feel pain.