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SaidAchmiz comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - LessWrong
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I think that fights the hypothetical a bit much. Imagine something a bit sharper, like citizenship. Why not restrict our moral sphere to US citizens? Or take Derek Parfit's within-a-mile altruism, where you only have concern for people within a mile of you. Weird, I agree. But irrational? Hard to demonstrate.
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So do you think nonhuman animals may not suffer? I agree that's a possibility, but it's not likely. What do you think of the body of evidence provided in this post?
I don't think there is a tidy resolution to this problem. We'll have to take our best guess, and that involves thinking nonhuman animals suffer. We'd probably even want to err on the safe side, which would increase our consideration toward nonhuman animals. It would also be consistent with an Ocham's razor approach.
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What would you suggest?
I basically agree with pragmatist's response, with the caveat only that I think many (most?) people's moral spheres have too steep a gradient between "family, for whom I would happily murder any ten strangers" and "strangers, who can go take a flying leap for all I care". My own gradient is not nearly that steep, but the idea of a gradient rather than a sharp border is sound. (Of course, since it's still the case that I would kill N chickens to save my grandmother, where N can be any number, it seems that chickens fall nowhere at all on this gradient.)
Well, you can phrase this as "nonhuman animals don't suffer", or as "nonhuman animal suffering is morally uninteresting", as you see fit; I'm not here to dispute definitions, I assure you. As for the evidence, to be honest, I don't see that you've provided any. What specifically do you think offers up evidence against points 3 through 5 of RobbBB's post?
I don't think so; or at least this is not obviously the case.
Well, just the stuff about boundaries and hypotheticals and such that you referred to as "fighting the hypothetical". Is there something specific you're looking for, here?
The essay cited the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, as well as a couple of other pieces of evidence.
Here is another (more informal) piece that I find compelling.
That's not evidence, that's a declaration of opinion.
In particular, reading things like "Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots" (emphasis mine) makes me highly sceptical of that opinion.
It's not scientific evidence, but it is rational evidence. In Bayesian terms, a consensus statement of experts in the field is probably much stronger evidence than, say, a single peer-reviewed study. Expert consensus statements are less likely to be wrong than almost any other form of evidence where I don't have the necessary expertise to independently evaluate claims.
Not if I believe that this particular panel of experts is highly biased and is using this declaration instrumentally to further their undeclared goal.
That may or may not be true, but doesn't seem to be particularly relevant here. The question is what constitutes "near human-like levels consciousness". If you point to an African grey as your example, I'll laugh and walk away. Maybe, if I were particularly polite, I'd ask in which meaning you're using the word "near" here.
If I were in your place, I'd be skeptical of my own intuitions regarding the level of consciousness of African grey parrots. Reality sometimes is unintuitive, and I'd be more inclined to trust the expert consensus than my own intuition. Five hundred years ago, I probably would have laughed at someone who said we would travel to the moon one day.
I trust reality a great deal more than I trust the expert consensus. As has been pointed out, science advances one funeral at a time.
If you want to convince me, show me evidence from reality, not hearsay from a bunch of people I have no reason to trust.
This is evidence from reality. In reality, a bunch of neuroscientists organized by a highly respectable university all agree that many non-human animals are approximately as conscious as humans. This is very strong Bayesian evidence in favor of this proposition being true.
What form of evidence would you find more convincing than this?
No, I don't think so.
That's not a statement of fact. That's just their preferred definition for the expression "approximately as conscious as humans". I can define slugs to be "approximately as conscious as humans" and point out that compared with rocks, they are.
Generally untrue.
African grays are pretty smart. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call them near-human, but from what I've read there's a case for putting them on par with cetaceans or nonhuman primates.
The real trouble is that the research into this sort of thing is fiendishly subjective and surprisingly sparse. Even a detailed ordering of relative animal intelligence involves a lot of decisions about which researchers to trust, and comparison with humans is worse.