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Eugine_Nier comments on Vegetarianism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Taboo "suffer".
I do not believe that this is an instance in which an extended taboo facilitates better understanding. Particularly if you go as far as to insist on tabooing even 'pain'. It is true that if you 'taboo' for long enough you will end up with a reductionist technical explanation of physiology such that applying moral evaluations of any kind seems inappropriate. Yet given that the meaning of 'pain' is rather well understood this obfuscates discussion of values more than it helps.
It is also utterly absurd to insist that your opponent taboo 'suffer' and 'pain' while you yourself throw around "subjective experience" as a more appropriate alternative.
Why?
(I'm not doubting you have a good reason, but the weight of the word "suffer" is essential to what morality's about IMO. I think it's valuable to be able to explain your views without using the word, but not necessary. If necessary "experience pain" works just as well.)
So, this is what Nietzsche called the morality of timidity. He enjoyed contrasting moralities that were about seeking X and moralities that were about avoiding Y- and I think that's a pretty good way to look at moralities (though I don't agree with his approach very strongly). A morality that pursues pleasure- even at the cost of pain- strikes me as more vibrant than a morality that pursues lack of pain- even at the cost of pleasure. Now, that's not an argument for happy vegetarians to become carnivores, but it is an argument for happy carnivores to not care about unhappy animals.
I don't know this aspect of Nietzsche's thought well at all, but this seems to be a case where he was just completely wrong. What metaethics makes judgments based on whether some ethical system is more "vibrant" than some other? What does that mean? Can moralities really be consistently classified into "seeking" and "avoiding"? What happens if you replace "carnivores" and "animals" in your last phrase with "criminals" and "victims"?
One could see it as an extension of natural selection. I agree with you it's odd- but metaethics is even more slippery than ethics, so I am reluctant to pass judgments instead of making descriptions.
If I recall correctly, he had significant affection for the likes of Genghis Khan. I don't think he would sympathize very much with the petty robber but considers the mighty and powerful as operating on a different level from normal people, with correspondingly different morality. But it's been a while since I've read his work along those lines, and so I'm not entirely confident about that. I do recall a passage where Zarathustra claimed his favorite animals were the eagle and the snake, and he approves of predation in general, I suspect.
So basically he's the real-world version of Salazar Slytherin?
With due respect to your wit, I would point out that although Slytherin the fictional character lived centuries ago, he was, in fact, invented after Nietzsche, and it is possible the correlation is noncoincidental and begins with Nietzsche as a cause.
I lolled. Apparently, yes.
Interestingly, Nietzsche's famous last rational action was interposing himself between a horse and its owner, who was beating it.
I'm a little leery of the whole idea that the powerful have a different set of moral standards applied to them (as opposed to their having a different morality, which seems psychologically likely). Praising the great and powerful no matter what they do while still condemning Leopold and Loeb as monsters is a very convenient stance to take.
I don't have a perfect reply to that suggestion, but here's a start, which perhaps is good enough for the case at hand. I loosely paraphrase Peter Singer.
Let's suppose we know what it means for ourselves (humans) to suffer -- we could get really specific about what that means, but we seem to have a kind of intersubjective consensus that suffices for the moment. Now, unless we believe we have immortal souls or something that enables us uniquely to suffer, our suffering (if, say, someone decided to kill and eat us) is due to our neurological makeup and is demonstrated externally by various kinds of observable behaviors.
So, when we see that other organisms have neurological systems that are rather similar to ours (as most vertebrates do), and exhibit similar behaviors when injured or killed, a good hypothesis is that they are experiencing something like we are when we suffer.
This is another case where, it seems to me, rather tortured reasoning is required to argue that other animals aren't really suffering even when we have every reason to think they are. Surely we want to err on the side of not causing the kind of suffering we ourselves would feel if injured or killed?
How far up the evolutionary tree do you believe suffering extends? Primates? Mammals? Vertebrates? Any animal with a nervous system? What about plant suffering? Does an overworked computer suffer as it frantically swaps memory between RAM and disk? Are you sure you're not committing the mind projection fallacy.
Also, while we're on the subject why should suffering be the basis of morality, as opposed to something like subjective experience?
I suspect your definition of "tortured reasoning" amounts to any complex reasoning that leads to conclusions you don't like.
I'm doing my best not to commit these fallacies, though of course not claiming to be infallible.
I mean, we know a fair bit about what causes pain for humans in the physiological/neurological sense -- we know about nociceptors and how they work -- and we also know what kinds of behavior we expect to see when a human is in pain. We also know that mammals have the same kinds of physiological mechanisms that humans do for pain, and we know they respond to injury with the same kinds of external behavior that humans do when injured.
(All this could not be said of plants, computers, or even quite likely non-vertebrate animals (although I do err on the side of caution with those and don't eat them either).)
So, yes, I am claiming that there is a lot of evidence that pain and suffering for non-human mammals is a similar kind of thing to the pain and suffering that humans experience. And I am suggesting that when we cannot possibly know another being's subjective experience as if from the inside, but everything we do know about that experience (the neurology and the behavior) is consistent with it being the kind of thing we would normally hold ourselves ethically obligated to avoid, then we are ethically obligated to avoid it.
(Disclaimer: although it's still under development, my current moral system is based on satisfying the preferences as many entities as possible.)
I believe it is possible that any of the above experience suffering. But I recognize that attempting to consider every possible source of suffering is impossible. So I'm using my best judgment based on how I know that I personally experience suffering, and how other creatures are likely to be similar to me. I am assuming that suffering requires a fairly complex nervous system, and that it is unlikely to have developed in lifeforms that don't respond much to stimuli.
I eat clams, because as far as I can tell there is no reason for them to have developed the ability to suffer. They also (as far as I know, although it is possible I am wrong here) usually farmed in a manner that's most independent of the rest of the ecosystem. (Whereas I'd be okay with eating shrimp, but they are harvested from the ocean, not only catching other animals in the process but disrupting the food chain of creatures that eat them).
When it stops being under development, will you describe it in a top-level post?
It is not clear what you mean by this statement. Are you suggesting subjective experience is a better alternative or that both are equally absurd?
It has already been interpreted to be the former at least once.