You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

davidpearce comments on Group Rationality Diary, August 1-15 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: therufs 01 August 2013 08:38PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (61)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: davidpearce 03 August 2013 01:14:30PM 2 points [-]

This is a difficult question. By analogy, should rich cannibals or human child abusers be legally permitted to indulge their pleasures if they offset the harm they cause with sufficiently large charitable donations to orphanages or children's charities elsewhere? On (indirect) utilitarian grounds if nothing else, we would all(?) favour an absolute legal prohibition on cannibalism and human child abuse. This analogy breaks down if the neuroscientfic evidence suggesting that pigs, for example, are at least as sentient as prelinguistic human toddlers turns out to be mistaken. I'm deeply pessimistic this is the case.

Comment author: peter_hurford 03 August 2013 01:25:32PM 0 points [-]

I wasn't speaking at all about "moral offsets". I was attempting to counter Qiaochu_Yuan's point that a high value put on eating meat by meat eaters indicates that being vegetarian is difficult.