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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - LessWrong
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Well, and what would you say to someone who thought that?
I don't know. It doesn't feel like I do. You could try to convince me that I do even if you're a moral anti-realist. It's plausible I just haven't spent enough time around animals.
Probably. I mean, all else being equal I would prefer that an animal not be tortured, but in the case of farming and so forth all else is not equal. Also, like Vaniver said, any negative reaction I have directed at the person is based on inferences I would make about that person's character, not based on any moral weight I directly assign to what they did. I would also have some sort of negative reaction to someone raping a corpse, but it's not because I value corpses.
My favorite non-meat dish is substantially less delicious than my favorite meat dish. I do currently get a decent amount of protein from non-meat sources, but asking someone who gets their protein primarily from meat to give up meat means asking them to incur a cost in finding and purchasing other sources of protein, and that cost needs to be justified somehow.
Really? This can't be that hard a problem to solve. We could use a service like Fiverr, with you paying me $5 not to eat meat for some period of time.
Right now, I don't know. I feel like it would be playing a losing game. What would you say?
I'm not sure how I would do that. Would you kick a puppy? If not, why not?
How could I verify that you actually refrain from eating meat?
I would probably say something like "you just haven't spent enough time around them. They're less different from you than you think. Get to know them, and you might come to see them as not much different from the people you're more familiar with." In other words, I would bet on the psychological unity of mankind. Some of this argument applies to my relationship with the smarter animals (e.g. maybe pigs) but not to the dumber ones (e.g. fish). Although I'm not sure how I would go about getting to know a pig.
No. Again, all else being equal, I would prefer that animals not suffer, but in the context of reducing animal suffering coming from human activity like farming, all else is not equal. I wouldn't chop down a tree either, but it's not because I think trees have moral value, and I don't plan to take any action against the logging industry as a result.
Oh, that's what you were concerned about. It would be beneath my dignity to lie for $5, but if that isn't convincing, then I dunno. (On further thought, this seems like a big problem for measuring the actual impact of any proposed vegetarian proselytizing. How can you verify that anyone actually refrains from eating meat?)
"No. Again, all else being equal, I would prefer that animals not suffer, but in the context of reducing animal suffering coming from human activity like farming, all else is not equal. I wouldn't chop down a tree either, but it's not because I think trees have moral value, and I don't plan to take any action against the logging industry as a result."
All else is never precisely equal. If I offered you £100 to do one of these of your choice, would you rather a) give up meat for a month b) beat a puppy to death
I suspect that the vast majority of people who eat battery chicken to save a few dollars would require much more money to directly cause the same sort of suffering to a chicken. Whereas when it came to chopping down trees it would be more a matter of if the cash was worth the effort. Of course, it could very easily be that the problem here is not with Person A (detached, callous eater of battery chicken) but with Person B (overemphathic anthrophomorphic person who doesn't like to see chickens suffering), but the contrast is quite telling.
For what it's worth, I also wouldn't treat painlessly and humanely slaughtering a chicken who has lived a happy and fulfilled life with my own hands equivalently to paying someone else to do so where I don't have to watch. There's quite a contrast there, as well, but it seems to have little to do with suffering.
That said, I would almost undoubtedly prefer watching a chicken be slaughtered painlessly and humanely to watching it suffer while being slaughtered.
Probably also to watching it suffer while not being slaughtered.
Mostly, I conclude that my preferences about what I want to do, what I want to watch, and what I want to have done on my behalf, are not well calibrated to one another.
Yeah, that's the only clear conclusion. The general approach of moral argument is to try to say that one of your intuitions (whether the not caring about it being killed offstage or not enjoying throttling it) is the true/valid one and the others should be overruled. Honestly not sure where I stand on this.
Mm. If you mean to suggest that the outcome of moral reasoning is necessarily that one of my intuitions gets endorsed, then I disagree; I would expect worthwhile moral reasoning to sometimes endorse claims that my intuition didn't provide in the first place, as well as claims that my intuitions consistently reject.
In particular, when my moral intuitions conflict (or,as SaidAchmiz suggests, when the various states that I have a hard time cleanly distinguishing from my moral intuitions despite not actually being any such thing conflict), I usually try to envision patterning the world in different ways that map in some fashion to some weighting of those states, ask myself what the expected end result of that patterning is, see whether I have clear preferences among those expected endpoints, work backwards from my preferred endpoint to the associated state-weighting, and endorse that state-weighting.
The result of that process is sometimes distressingly counter-moral-intuitive.
Sorry, I was unclear: I meant moral (and political) arguments from other people - moral rhetoric if you like - often takes that form.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that's true.
I don't think that "not enjoying killing a chicken" should be described as an "intuition". Moral intuitions generally take the form of "it seems to me that / I strongly feel that so-and-so is the right thing to do / the wrong thing to do / bad / good / etc." What you do or do not enjoy doing is a preference, like enjoying chocolate ice cream, not enjoying ice skating, being attracted to blondes, etc. Preferences can't be "true" or "false", they're just facts about your mental makeup. (It may make sense to describe a preference as "invalid" in certain senses, however, but not obviously any senses relevant to this current discussion.)
So for instance "I think killing a chicken is morally ok" (a moral intuition) and "I don't like killing chickens" (a preference) do not conflict with each other any more than "I think homosexuality is ok" and "I am heterosexual" conflict with each other, or "Being a plumber is ok (and in fact plumbers are necessary members of society)" and "I don't like looking inside my plumbing".
Now, if you wanted to take this discussion to a slightly more subtle level, you might say: "This is different! Killing chickens causes in me a kind of psychic distress usually associated with witnessing or performing acts that I also consider to be immoral! Surely this is evidence that this, too, is immoral?" To that I can respond only that yes, this may be evidence in the strict Bayesian sense, but the signals your brain generates may be flawed. We should evaluate the ethical status of the act in question explicitly; yes, we should take moral intuitions into account, but my intuitions, at least, is that chicken-killing is fine, despite having no desire to do it myself. This screens off the "agh I don't want to do/watch this!" signal.
The dividing lines between the kinds of cognitive states I'm inclined to call "moral intuitions" and the kinds of cognitive states I'm inclined to call "preferences" and the kinds of cognitive states I'm inclined to call "psychic distress" are not nearly as sharp, in my experience, as you seem to imply here. There's a lot of overlap, and in particular the states I enter surrounding activities like killing animals (especially cute animals with big eyes) don't fall crisply into just one category.
But, sure, if we restrict the discussion to activities where those categories are crisply separated, those distinctions are very useful.