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MugaSofer comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong
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I think this is wrong in an interesting way: it's an Industrial Age blind spot. Only people who've never hunted or herded and buy their meat wrapped in plastic have never thought about animal welfare. Many indigenous hunting cultures ask forgiveness when taking food animals. Countless cultures have taboos about killing certain animals. Many animal species' names translate to "people of the __." As far as I can tell, all major religions consider wanton cruelty to animals a sin, and have for thousands of years, though obviously, people dispute the definition of cruelty.
I kinda think the opposite is true. It's people who live in cities who join PETA. Country folk get acclimatized to commoditizing animals.
I'd like to see a summary of the evidence that many Native Americans actually prayed for forgiveness to animal spirits. There's been a lot of retrospective "reframing" of Native American culture in the past 100 years--go to a pow-wow today and an earnest Native American elder may tell you stories about their great respect for the Earth, but I don't find these stories in 17th thru 19th-century accounts. Praying for forgiveness makes a great story, but you usually hear about it from somebody like James Fenimore Cooper rather than in an ethnographic account. Do contemporary accounts from the Amazon say that tribespeople there do that?
(Regarding the reliability of contemporary Native American accounts: Once I was researching the Cree Indians, and I read an account, circa 1900, by a Cree, boasting that their written language was their own invention and went back generations before the white man came. The next thing I read was an account from around 1860 of a white missionary who had recently learned Cree and invented the written script for it. I may possibly be confusing the Cree with Ojibway, but it was the same language in both stories.)
I'm not aware of any Western religion that says cruelty to animals is a sin. Individual interpretations, maybe, but I'm pretty sure you won't find a word about it in the whole of the Bible. The Anglican church was fine with bear-baiting. I don't think the Catholic church complained about vivisection.
And it's certainly true that tribal cultures gave zero or negative weight to the well-being of competing tribes. Utilitarianism is tricky to apply when you have to periodically kill your neighbors to survive.
In any case, indigenous cultures aren't the ones complaining that utilitarianism leads to utility monsters. The people who've made those arguments do have their own preferred utility monsters.
This sounds right to me. After all, you don't find plantation owners agitating for the rights of slaves. No, it's people who live off far away from actual slaves, meeting the occasional lucky black guy who managed to make it in the city and noting that he seems morally worthy.
Um, what about the actual slaves and ex-slaves?
In this analogy, they correspond to non-human animals, who have not yet expressed an opinion on the matter.
You mean, have not yet expressed an opinion in a way that you understand.
Anyway, the fact that slaves and ex-slaves did advocate for the rights of slaves indicates that closeness to a problem does not necessarily lead one to ignore it.
They did not benefit from slavery, as the plantation owners did.
Sorry, that was meant to be the implication of "plantation owners" - "they're biased", not "anyone who actually met slaves was fine with it.".
This makes the claim unfalsifiable. People who work closely with animals are the greatest believers in animal rights? Obviously animals should have rights, since they're the ones who know the best. People who work closely with animals believe in animal rights the least? Obviously animals should have rights, since people who work closely with animals are rationalizing it away like slaveholders and the people with the least contact with animals are the most objective. No matter what happens, that "proves" that the people who talk about animal rights are the ones we should listen to.
There are two axes here - knowledge and bias. Those who own farms are most biased, but also most knowledgeable. Those who own farms but don't work on them are both biased and ignorant, so I would predict they are most in favour of farming. Those who are ignorant, but only benefit indirectly - the city dwellers - I would predict higher variance, since it may prove convenient for various reasons to be against it. And finally, the knowledgeable and who benefit only slightly; I would predict that the more knowledge, the more likely that it outweighed the bias.
Of course, I already know these to be true in both cases, pretty much. (Can anyone think of a third example to test these predictions on?) But in general, I would expect large amounts of bias to outweigh knowledge - power corrupts - and low amounts of bias to be eventually overcome by the evidence of nastyness. That's just human nature (or my model of it), and slavery is just a handy analogy where stuff lined up much the same way.
This argument doesn't help you. The problem is that the original (implied) claim (that the positions of city-dwellers and farmers happen because vegetarianism is good but people oppose it for irrational reasons) is unfalsifiable: if city-dwellers favor it and farmers oppose it, that happens because vegetarianism is good; if city-dwellers oppose it and farmers favor it, that still happens because vegetarianism is good.
Your explanation in terms of two axes is not wrong, but that explanation implies that the positions of farmers and city-dwellers can go either way regardless of whether vegetarianism is good. In other words, your explanation doesn't save the original claim, and in fact demolishes it instead.
What? No. Where are you getting that from?
Which original claim? I just pointed out that you have to take bias into account.
I could make equally-valid stories up to come to the opposite conclusion: People who work closely with animals are the greatest believers in animal rights? Obviously they are prejudiced by their close association. People who work closely with animals believe in animal rights the least? Obviously they're the ones who know best.
If you can explain everything, you can't explain anything.