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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - Less Wrong
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I strongly object to the term "speciesism" for this position. I think it promotes a mindkilled attitude to this subject ("Oh, you don't want to be speciesist, do you? Are you also a sexist? You pig?").
It's not only the term. The post explicitly uses that exact argument: Since sexism and racism are wrong, and any theoretical argument that disagrees with me can be used to argue for sexism or racism, if you disagree with me you are a sexist, which is QED both because of course you aren't sexist/racist and because regardless, even if you are, you certainly can't say such a thing on a public forum!
No no no. I'm not saying "Since sexism and racism are wrong," - I'm saying that those who don't want their arguments to be of the sort that it could analogously justify racism or sexism (even if the person is neither of those), then they would also need to reject speciesism.
Mindkilling-related issues aside, I am going to do my best to un-mindkill at least one aspect of this question, which is why the frame change.
Is this similar to arguing that if the bloody knife was the subject of an illegal search, which we can't allow because allowing that would lead to other bad things, and therefore is not admissible in trial, then you must not only find the defendant not guilty but actually believe that the defendant did not commit the crime and should be welcome back to polite society?
No, what makes the difference is that you'd be mixing up the normative level with the empirical one, as I explained here (parent of the linked post also relevant).
In that post, you seem to be making the opposite case: That you should not reject X (animal testing) simply because your argument could be used to support repugnant proposal Y (unwilling human testing); you say that the indirect consequences of Y would be very bad (as they obviously would) but then you don't make the argument that one must then reject X, instead that you should support X but reject Y for unrelated reasons, and you are not required to disregard argument Q that supports both X and Y and thereby reject X (assuming X was in fact utility increasing).
Or, that the fact that a given argument can be used to support a repugnant conclusion (sexism or racism) should not be a justification for not using an argument. In addition, the argument for brain complexity scaling moral value that you now accept as an edit is obviously usable to support sexism and racism, in exactly the same way that you are using as a counterargument:
For any given characteristic, different people will have different amounts of that characteristic, and for any two groups (male / female, black / white, young / old, whatever) there will be a statistical difference in that measurement (because this isn't physics and equality has probability epsilon, however small the difference) so if you tie any continuous measurement to your moral value of things, or any measurement that could ever not fully apply to anything human, you're racist and sexist.
Exactly. This is because the overall goal is increasing utility, and not a societal norm of non-discrimination. (This is of course assuming that we are consequentialists.) My arguments against discrimination/speciesism apply at the normative level, when we are trying to come up with a definition of utility.
I wouldn't classify this as sexism/racism. If there are sound reasons for considering the properties in question relevant, then treating beings of different species differently because of a correlation between species, and not because of the species difference itself, is in my view not a form of discrimination.
As I wrote:
Speciesist language, not cool!
Haha! Anyway, I agree that it promotes mindkilled attitude (I'm often reading terrible arguments by animal rights people), but on the other hand, for those who agree with the arguments, it is a good way to raise awareness. And the parallels to racism or sexism are valid, I think.
Haha only serious. My brain reacts with terror to that reply, with good reason: It has been trained to. You're implicitly threatening those who make counter-arguments with charges of every ism in the book. The number of things I've had to erase because one "can't" say them without at least ending any productive debate, is large.
I don't think that's a "but on the other hand;" I think that's a "it is a good way to raise awareness because it promotes mindkilled attitude."
Actually, I think it's precisely the parallels to racism and sexism that are invalid. Perhaps ableism? That's closer, at any rate, if still not really the same thing.
It's not sexist to say that women are more likely to get breast cancer. This is a differentiation based on sex, but it's empirically founded, so not sexist.
Similarly, we could say that ants' behavior doesn't appear to be affected by narcotics, so we should discount the possibility of their suffering. This is a judgement based on species, but is empirically founded, so not speciesist.
Things only become _ist if you say "I have no evidence to support my view, but consider X to be less worthy solely because they aren't in my race/class/sex/species."
I genuinely don't think anyone on LW thinks speciesism is OK.
You evade the issue, I think. It is sexist (or _ist) if you say "I consider X to be less worthy because they aren't in my race/class/sex/species, and I do have evidence to support my view."?
Sure, saying women are more likely to get breast cancer isn't sexist; but this is a safe example. What if we had hard evidence that women are less intelligent? Would it be sexist to say that, then? (Any objection that contains the words "on average" must contend with the fact that any particular women may have a breast cancer risk that falls anywhere on the distribution, which may well be below the male average.)
No one is saying "I think pigs are less worthy than humans, and this view is based on no empirical data whatever; heck, I've never even seen a pig. Is that something you eat?"
We have tons of empirical data about differences between the species. The argument is about exactly which of the differences matter, and that is unlikely to be settled by passing the buck to empiricism.
I wouldn't say it is, but other people would use the word “sexist” with a broader sense than mine (assuming that each person defines “sexism” and “racism” in analogous ways).
Upvoted just for this.
No. Because your statement "X is less worthy because they aren't of my gender" in that case is synonymous with "X is less worthy because they lack attribute Y", and so gender has left the picture. Hence it can't be sexist.
Ok, but if you construe it that way, then "X is less worthy just because of their gender" is a complete strawman. No one says that. What people instead say is "people of type T are inferior in way W, and since X is a T, s/he is inferior in way W".
Examples: "women are less rational than men, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' because they're women"; "black people are less intelligent than white people, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' ..."; etc.
By your construal, are these things not sexist/racist? But then neither is this speciesist: "nonhumans are not self-aware, unlike humans, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' because they're nonhumans".
I think we are getting into a discussion about definitions, which I'm sure you would agree is not very productive.
But I would absolutely agree that your statement "nonhumans are not self-aware, unlike humans, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' because they're nonhumans" is not speciesist. (It is empirically unlikely though.)
Agreed entirely, let's not argue about definitions.
Do we disagree on questions of fact? On rereading this thread, I suspect not. Your thoughts?
I think so? You seem to have indicated in a few comments that you don't believe nonhuman animals are "self-aware" or "conscious" which strikes me as an empirical statement?
If this is true (and I give at least 30% credence that I've just been misunderstanding you), I'd be interested to hear why you think this. We may not end up drawing the moral line at the same place, but I think consciousness is a slippery enough subject that I at least would learn something from the conversation.
Ok. Yes, I think that nonhuman animals are not self-aware. (Dolphins might be an exception. This is a particularly interesting recent study.)
Dolphins aside, we have no reason to believe that animals are capable of thinking about themselves; of considering their own conscious awareness; of having any self-concept, much less any concept of themselves as persistent conscious entities with a past and a future; of consciously reasoning about other minds, or having any concept thereof; or of engaging in abstract reasoning or thought of any kind.
I've commented before that one critical difference between "speciesism" and racism or sexism or other such prejudices is that a cow can never argue for its own equal treatment; this, I have said, is not a trivial or irrelevant fact. And it's not just a matter of not having the vocal cords to speak, or of not knowing the language, or any other such trivial obstacles to communication; a cow can't even come close to having the concepts required to understand human behavior, human concepts, and human language.
Now, you might not think any of this is morally relevant. Fine. But I would meet with great skepticism — and, sans compelling evidence, probable outright dismissal — any claim that a cow, or a pig, or, even more laughably, a chicken, is self-aware in anything like the sense I outlined above.
(By the way, I am reluctant to commit to any position on "consciousness", merely because the word is used in such a diverse range of ways.)
Birds lack a neocortex. But members of at least one species, the European magpie, have convincingly passed the "mirror test" [cf. "Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition" http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?representation=PDF&uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202] Most ethologists recognise passing the mirror test as evidence of a self-concept. As well as higher primates (chimpanzees, orang utans, bonobos, gorillas) members of other species who have passed the mirror test include elephants, orcas and bottlenose dolphins. Humans generally fail the mirror test below the age of eighteen months.
Well, do you disagree WRT conclusions? Are you, in fact, a vegetarian?
Nope, definitely not a vegetarian. I think that's a broader topic though.
To be absolutely clear: you agree that nonhumans are probably self-aware, feel pain, and so on and so forth, and are indeed worthy of moral consideration ... but for reasons not under discussion here, you are not a vegetarian? Fair enough, I guess.
EDIT: Apparently not.
Ah, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by one little ugly fact... :-D
I do feel speciesism is perfectly fine.
Same here, I think speciesism is a fine heuristic here and now (it may not be so in the future).
If it's a heuristic, then it's not speciesism.
If it's a "heuristic" that overrides lots of evidence, then it's speciesism. Which is just another way of saying that you aren't performing a Bayesian update correctly.
The issue, though, is not that beliefs are founded on no evidence. Rather, it is that they are founded on insufficient evidence. It would, in my estimation, require some strange, inhuman bigot to say such a thing; rather, they will hold up their prejudices based on evidence which sounds entirely reasonable to them. There is nearly always a justification for treating the other tribe poorly; healthy human psychology doesn't do well with baseless discrimination, so it invents (more accurately, seeks out with a hefty does of confirmation bias) reasons that its discrimination is well-founded.
In this case, the fact that ants do not appear to be affected by narcotics is evidence that they are different from humans, but it seems that it is insufficient to discount their suffering. I am very curious, however, as to why a lack of behavioral reaction to narcotics indicates that ant suffering is morally neutral. I feel that there is an implicit step I missed there.
The question of pain in insects is incredibly complicated, so please don't take my glib example as anything more than that.
But if ants don't have something analogous to opiods, then that would indicate that pain is never "bad" for them, which would be an (non-conclusive) indication they don't suffer.
Maybe I was already mindkilled (vegetarian speaking), but it seems like a precisely appropriate term to use, given the content of this post.
What term would you prefer?
[Bonus points: if racism and speciesism were well-known errors of the past, would sexist!you object to the term "sexism" on the same grounds?]
Humanism, maybe. Yes.
That's taken, though ... but then it's been taken before, and repurposed, it's such a catchy word with such lovely connotations.