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jkaufman comments on Pay other people to go vegetarian for you? - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: jkaufman 12 April 2013 01:56AM

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Comment author: jkaufman 14 April 2013 05:17:41AM 1 point [-]

You'd have to value animal suffering at least two orders of magnitude less to claim that poverty-related causes.

Value the suffering of 1 human over 100 animals? I would, and I think that's pretty common even among people who care about animal suffering. For example, upthread we have approximately 1:1000.

Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 14 April 2013 01:44:41PM *  -1 points [-]

OK, I see. I just find this hard to defend, at least if we specify that we're talking about the same intensity of suffering. But I guess that this is the point where people declare the ratio a "terminal value" and then the discussion is over.

What I do understand is that some people think killing adult healthy humans is much worse than killing animals, because there you can conceive a clear difference in abilities that at least plausibly seems relevant to the badness of killing. But then for anti-speciesism they should also agree that killing adult healthy humans is intrinsically much worse than killing cognitively disabled people or human infants.

(Also, if killing people is so bad because it violates preferences, then that leads to a handful of counterintuitive conclusions, e.g. having to care about preferences of those already dead.)

Comment author: kalium 14 April 2013 10:45:13PM 1 point [-]

Killing adult healthy-minded humans (who want to live) is obviously much worse than killing non-sapient human infants. But historically attempts to single out a group of humans to assign moral value to have turned out badly, so we try not to do that.