= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
deskglass comments on Link: Rob Bensinger on Less Wrong and vegetarianism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (77)
I think RobbBB does not understand a typical omnivore's (me!) point of view. He also makes irrational conclusions about the ways to reduce the amount of suffering of (potentially somewhat sentient) animals.
Yes, cattle suffer, so do chickens, to a lesser degree. They likely do not suffer in the same way people do. Certainly eggs are not likely to suffer at all. Actually, even different people suffer differently, the blanket moral prohibition against cannibalism is just an obvious Schelling point.
So it would be preferable to not create, raise, slaughter and eat animals if there was an alternative source of meat with the same nutritional and taste properties omnivores are used to. Maybe some day. Until then we should strive to minimize needless suffering, at a marginal cost to the consumers.
So, if you are an effective altruist who includes cows and chickens in the potential list of the entities who should be protected from suffering what do you do? Write blogs aimed at an extremely limited audience who do not appear to be overly receptive, anyway? That's not very "effective", is it? How about working to develop and make feasible new alternatives to "torturing animals"? For example:
support/participate in the research to produce vat-grown meat
expose existing cattle/chicken abuse in farms and slaughterhouses
support/participate in the research to develop a species of farm animals who are physically unable to suffer.
Certainly if a headless chicken can survive for a while, it should be feasible to breed/genetically modify them to not have the brain structures responsible for suffering. Or maybe it's as easy as injecting eggs with some substance which stifles the formation of pain centers.
As SSC notes,
Yet I know of no effective animal altruists who spend majority of their efforts figuring out and working on the task which is likely to provide the greatest payoff. Pity.
It's typically the chickens laying the eggs that people are concerned about. And maybe to a lesser extent the male chickens of the chicken breed used for egg production. (Maybe you're already clear on that, but I have spoken to people who were confused by veganism's prohibition on eating animal products in addition to animals.)
It doesn't seem safe to assume that their suffering is subjectively less bad than our suffering. Maybe it's worse - maybe the experience of pain and fear is worse when you can only feel it and can't think about it. Either way, I don't see why you'd err on the side of 'It's an uncertain thing so lets keep doing what we're doing and diminish the potential harms when we can' rather than 'It's not that unlikely that we're torturing these things, we should stop in all ways that don't cost us much.'
But yes, creating vat-grown meat and/or pain-free animals should be a priority.
So, there's a heuristic that I think is a decent one, which is that less-conscious things have less potential suffering. I feel that if you had a suffer-o-meter and strapped it to the heads of paramecia, ants, centipedes, birds, mice, and people, they'd probably rank in approximately that order. I have some uncertainty in there, and I could be swayed to a different belief with evidence or an angle I had failed to consider, but I have a hard time imagining what those might be.
I think I buy into the notion that most-conscious doesn't strictly mean most-suffering, though - if there were a slightly less conscious, but much more anxious branch of humanoids out there, I think they'd almost certainly be capable of more suffering than humans.