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grouchymusicologist comments on Vegetarianism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Our justifications for working to minimize the pain of our fellow humans aren't neurological. Our justifications for thinking that our fellow humans do experience pain are, in part, neurological (and in part based on our observations of their behavior). Once we have good reason to think that some action of ours does cause our fellow humans pain, then we have a moral reason to avoid that action. That moral reason may or may not be an insurmountable one, but causing a fellow human pain at least requires some appeal to some good that outweighs the pain.
I had assumed that the leap here for most people would be extending moral consideration to non-humans. I'm surprised to see that the leap in this case appears to be extending moral consideration to beings other than oneself.
I don't buy this. There may be situations in which suffering motivates some other positive action, but I can't see in what sense suffering itself could be positive -- as in, ceteris paribus, better to have suffering than not to.
I'm sorry, I'm being unclear. I'm not arguing that person X should maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain and not care about anyone else. I'm arguing that person X should find a different utility function than pleasure minus pain (and that includes their own).
I'm very glad you included this phrase, because that's where our disagreement lies. I don't think ceteris paribus is an option in most of the cases I'm considering. For example, the positive effect of a rite of passage scales with the amount of suffering undergone during it.
My favorite pieces of art are mostly very sad. If you could somehow preserve everything else about them while taking away only the tragedy, I'd value them much less. Ceteris paribus, I prefer to live in a world where I can be driven to tears by stories of heroic self-sacrifice (for example).
This is totally irrelevant to the question of animal suffering, though.