novalis comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong

67 Post author: PhilGoetz 16 August 2013 09:05PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 18 August 2013 05:19:52PM *  16 points [-]

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.

Comment author: MugaSofer 18 August 2013 10:46:45PM 5 points [-]

I kinda think the opposite is true. It's people who live in cities who join PETA. Country folk get acclimatized to commoditizing animals.

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.

Comment author: novalis 19 August 2013 06:31:15AM 1 point [-]

Um, what about the actual slaves and ex-slaves?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 19 August 2013 11:07:23PM 7 points [-]

In this analogy, they correspond to non-human animals, who have not yet expressed an opinion on the matter.

Comment author: novalis 20 August 2013 04:46:43AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: MugaSofer 24 August 2013 01:18:46PM -1 points [-]

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.".