Arguments Against Speciesism
There have been some posts about animals lately, for instance here and here. While normative assumptions about the treatment of nonhumans played an important role in the articles and were debated at length in the comment sections, I was missing a concise summary of these arguments. This post from over a year ago comes closest to what I have in mind, but I want to focus on some of the issues in more detail.
A while back, I read the following comment in a LessWrong discussion on uploads:
I do not at all understand this PETA-like obsession with ethical treatment of bits.
Aside from (carbon-based) humans, which other beings deserve moral consideration? Nonhuman animals? Intelligent aliens? Uploads? Nothing else?
This article is intended to shed light on these questions; it is however not the intent of this post to advocate a specific ethical framework. Instead, I'll try to show that some ethical principles held by a lot of people are inconsistent with some of their other attitudes -- an argument that doesn't rely on ethics being universal or objective.
More precisely, I will develop the arguments behind anti-speciesism (and the rejection of analogous forms of discrimination, such as discrimination against uploads) to point out common inconsistencies in some people's values. This will also provide an illustrative example of how coherentist ethical reasoning can be applied to shared intuitions. If there are no shared intuitions, ethical discourse will likely be unfruitful, so it is likely that not everyone will draw the same conclusions from the arguments here.
What Is Speciesism?
Speciesism, a term popularized (but not coined) by the philosopher Peter Singer, is meant to be analogous to sexism or racism. It refers to a discriminatory attitude against a being where less ethical consideration i.e. caring less about a being's welfare or interests is given solely because of the "wrong" species membership. The "solely" here is crucial, and it's misunderstood often enough to warrant the redundant emphasis.
For instance, it is not speciesist to deny pigs the right to vote, just like it is not sexist to deny men the right to have an abortion performed on their body. Treating beings of different species differently is not speciesist if there are relevant criteria for doing so.
Singer summarized his case against speciesism in this essay. The argument that does most of the work is often referred to as the argument from marginal cases. A perhaps less anthropocentric, more fitting name would be argument from species overlap, as some philosophers (e.g. Oscar Horta) have pointed out.
The argument boils down to the question of choosing relevant criteria for moral concern. What properties do human beings possess that makes us think that it is wrong to torture them? Or to kill them? (Note that these are two different questions.) The argument from species overlap points out that all the typical or plausible suggestions for relevant criteria apply equally to dogs, pigs or chickens as they do to human infants or late-stage Alzheimer patients. Therefore, giving less ethical consideration to the former would be based merely on species membership, which is just as arbitrary as choosing race or sex as relevant criterion (further justification for that claim follows below).
Here are some examples for commonly suggested criteria. Those who want may pause at this point and think about the criteria they consult for whether it is wrong to inflict suffering on a being (and separately, those that are relevant for the wrongness of killing).
The suggestions are:
A: Capacity for moral reasoning
B: Being able to reciprocate
C: (Human-like) intelligence
D: Self-awareness
E: Future-related preferences; future plans
E': Preferences / interests (in general)
F: Sentience (capacity for suffering and happiness)
G: Life / biological complexity
H: What I care about / feel sympathy or loyalty towards
The argument from species overlap points out that not all humans are equal. The sentiment behind "all humans are equal" is not that they are literally equal, but that equal interests/capacities deserve equal consideration. None of the above criteria except (in some empirical cases) H imply that human infants or late stage demented people should be given more ethical consideration than cows, pigs or chickens.
While H is an unlikely criterion for direct ethical consideration (it could justify genocide in specific circumstances!), it is an important indirect factor. Most humans have much more empathy for fellow humans than for nonhuman animals. While this is not a criterion for giving humans more ethical consideration per se, it is nevertheless a factor that strongly influences ethical decision-making in real-life.
However, such factors can't apply for ethical reasoning at a theoretical/normative level, where all the relevant variables are looked at in isolation in order to come up with a consistent ethical framework that covers all possible cases.
If there were no intrinsic reasons for giving moral consideration to babies, then a society in which some babies were (factory-)farmed would be totally fine as long as the people are okay with it. If we consider this implication to be unacceptable, then the same must apply for the situations nonhuman animals find themselves in on farms.
Side note: The question whether killing a given being is wrong, and if so, "why" and "how wrong exactly", is complex and outside the scope of this article. Instead of on killing, the focus will be on suffering, and by suffering I mean something like wanting to get out of one's current conscious state, or wanting to change some aspect about it. The empirical issue of which beings are capable of suffering is a different matter that I will (only briefly) discuss below. So in this context, giving a being moral consideration means that we don't want it to suffer, leaving open the question whether killing it painlessly is bad/neutral/good or prohibited/permissible/obligatory.
The main conclusion so far is that if we care about all the suffering of members of the human species, and if we reject question-begging reasoning that could also be used to justify racism or other forms of discrimination, then we must also care fully about suffering happening in nonhuman animals. This would imply that x amount of suffering is just as bad, i.e. that we care about it just as much, in nonhuman animals as in humans, or in aliens or in uploads. (Though admittedly the latter wouldn't be anti-speciesist but rather anti-"substratist", or anti-"fleshist".)
The claim is that there is no way to block this conclusion without:
1. using reasoning that could analogically be used to justify racism or sexism
or
2. using reasoning that allows for hypothetical circumstances where it would be okay (or even called for) to torture babies in cases where utilitarian calculations prohibit it.
I've tried and have asked others to try -- without success.
Caring about suffering
I have not given a reason why torturing babies or racism is bad or wrong. I'm hoping that the vast majority of people will share that intuition/value of mine, that they want to be the sort of person who would have been amongst those challenging racist or sexist prejudices, had they lived in the past.
Some might be willing to bite the bullet at this point, trusting some strongly held ethical principle of theirs (e.g. A, B, C, D, or E above), to the conclusion of excluding humans who lack certain cognitive capacities from moral concern. One could point out that people's empathy and indirect considerations about human rights, societal stability and so on, will ensure that this "loophole" in such an ethical view almost certainly remains without consequences for beings with human DNA. It is a convenient Schelling point after all to care about all humans (or at least all humans outside their mother's womb). However, I don't see why absurd conclusions that will likely remain hypothetical would be significantly less bad than other absurd conclusions. Their mere possibility undermines the whole foundation one's decisional algorithm is grounded in. (Compare hypothetical problems for specific decision theories.)
Furthermore, while D and E seem plausible candidates for reasons against killing a being with these properties (E is in fact Peter Singer's view on the matter), none of the criteria from A to E seem relevant to suffering, to whether a being can be harmed or benefitted. The case for these being bottom-up morally relevant criteria for the relevance of suffering (or happiness) is very weak, to say the least.
Maybe that's the speciesist's central confusion, that the rationality/sapience of a being is somehow relevant for whether its suffering matters morally. Clearly, for us ourselves, this does not seem to be the case. If I was told that some evil scientist would first operate on my brain to (temporarily) lower my IQ and cognitive abilities, and then torture me afterwards, it is not like I will be less afraid of the torture or care less about averting it!
Those who do consider biting the bullet should ask themselves whether they would have defended that view in all contexts, or whether they might be driven towards such a conclusion by a self-serving bias. There seems to be a strange and sudden increase in the frequency of people who are willing to claim that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with torturing babies when the subject is animal rights, or more specifically, the steak they intend to have for dinner.
It is an entirely different matter if people genuinely think that animals or human infants or late-stage demented people are not sentient. To be clear about what is meant by sentience:
A sentient being is one for whom "it feels like something to be that being".
I find it highly implausible that only self-aware or "sapient" beings are sentient, but if true, this would constitute a compelling reason against caring for at least most nonhuman animals, for the same reason that it would pointless to care about pebbles for the pebbles' sake. If all nonhumans truly weren't sentient, then obviously singling out humans for the sphere of moral concern would not be speciesist.
What irritates me, however, is that anyone advocating such a view should, it seems to me, still have to factor in a significant probability of being wrong, given that both philosophy of mind and the neuroscience that goes with it are hard and, as far as I'm aware, not quite settled yet. The issue matters because of the huge numbers of nonhuman animals at stake and because of the terrible conditions these beings live in.
I rarely see this uncertainty acknowledged. If we imagine the torture-scenario outlined above, how confident would we really be that the torture "won't matter" if our own advanced cognitive capacities are temporarily suspended?
Why species membership really is an absurd criterion
In the beginning of the article, I wrote that I'd get back to this for those not convinced. Some readers may still feel that there is something special about being a member of the human species. Some may be tempted to think about the concept of "species" as if it were a fundamental concept, a Platonic form.
The following likely isn't news to most of the LW audience, but it is worth spelling it out anyway: There exists a continuum of "species" in thing-space as well as in the actual evolutionary timescale. The species boundaries seem obvious just because the intermediates kept evolving or went extinct. And even if that were not the case, we could imagine it. The theoretical possibility is enough to make the philosophical case, even though psychologically, actualities are more convincing.
We can imagine a continuous line-up of ancestors, always daughter and mother, from modern humans back to the common ancestor of humans and, say, cows, and then forward in time again to modern cows. How would we then divide this line up into distinct species? Morally significant lines would have to be drawn between mother and daughter, but that seems absurd! There are several different definitions of "species" used in biology. A common criterion -- for sexually reproducing organisms anyway -- is whether groups of beings (of different sex) can have fertile offspring together. If so, they belong to the same species.
That is a rather odd way of determining whether one cares about the suffering of some hominid creature in the line-up of ancestors -- why should that for instance be relevant in regard to determining whether some instance of suffering matters to us?
Moreover, is that really the terminal value of people who claim they only care about humans, or could it be that they would, upon reflection, revoke such statements?
And what about transhumanism? I remember that a couple of years ago, I thought I had found a decisive argument against human enhancement. I thought it would likely lead to speciation, and somehow the thought of that directly implied that posthumans would treat the remaining humans badly, and so the whole thing became immoral in my mind. Obviously this is absurd; there is nothing wrong with speciation per se, and if posthumans will be anti-speciesist, then the remaining humans would have nothing to fear! But given the speciesism in today's society, it is all too understandable that people would be concerned about this. If we imagine the huge extent to which a posthuman, or not to mention a strong AI, would be superior compared to current humans, isn't that a bit like comparing chickens to us?
A last possible objection I can think of: Suppose one held the belief that group averages are what matters, and that all members of the human species deserve equal protection because of the group average for a criterion that is considered relevant and that would, without the group average rule, deny moral consideration to some sentient humans.
This defense too doesn't work. Aside from seeming suspiciously arbitrary, such a view would imply absurd conclusions. A thought experiment for illustration: A pig with a macro-mutation is born, she develops child-like intelligence and the ability to speak. Do we refuse to allow her to live unharmed -- or even let her go to school -- simply because she belongs to a group (defined presumably by snout shape, or DNA, or whatever the criteria for "pigness" are) with an average that is too low?
Or imagine you are the head of an architecture bureau and looking to hire a new aspiring architect. Is tossing out an application written by a brilliant woman going to increase the expected success of your firm, assuming that women are, on average, less skilled at spatial imagination than men? Surely not!
Moreover, taking group averages as our ethical criterion requires us to first define the relevant groups. Why even take species-groups instead of groups defined by skin color, weight or height? Why single out one property and not others?
Summary
Our speciesism is an anthropocentric bias without any reasonable foundation. It would be completely arbitrary to give special consideration to a being simply because of its species membership. Doing so would lead to a number of implications that most people clearly reject. A strong case can be made that suffering is bad in virtue of being suffering, regardless of where it happens. If the suffering or deaths of nonhuman animals deserve no ethical consideration, then human beings with the same relevant properties (of which all plausible ones seem to come down to having similar levels of awareness) deserve no intrinsic ethical consideration either, barring speciesism.
Assuming that we would feel uncomfortable giving justifications or criteria for our scope of ethical concern that can analogously be used to defend racism or sexism, those not willing to bite the bullet about torturing babies are forced by considerations of consistency to care about animal suffering just as much as they care about human suffering.
Such a view leaves room for probabilistic discounting in cases where we are empirically uncertain whether beings are capable of suffering, but we should be on the lookout for biases in our assessments.
Edit: As Carl Shulman has pointed out, discounting may also apply for "intensity of sentience", because it seems at least plausible that shrimps (for instance), if they are sentient, can experience less suffering than e.g. a whale.
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Comments (474)
Here's an argument for something that might be called speciesism. though it isn't strictly speciesism because moral consideration could be extended to hypothetical non-human beings (though no currently known ones) and not quite to all humans - contractarianism. We have reason to restrict ourselves in our dealings with a being when it fulfills three criteria: it can harm us, it can choose not to harm us, and it can agree not to harm us in exchange for us not harming it. When these criteria are fulfilled, a being has rights and should not be harmed, but otherwise, we have no reason to restrict ourselves in our dealings with it.
Indeed, consistently applied, this view would deny rights to both non-human animals and some human individuals, so it wouldn't be speciesist. There is however another problem with contractarianism: I think the way it is usually presented is blatantly not thought through and non sequitur.
What do you mean by "we have reason"? If you mean that it would be in our rational self-interest to grant rights to all such beings, then that does not follow. Just because a being could reciprocate doesn't mean it will, so granting rights to all such beings might well, in some empirical circumstances, go against your rational self-interest. So there seems to be a (crucial!) step missing here. And if all one is arguing for is to "do whatever is in your rational self-interest", why give it a misleading name like contractarianism?
There is always the option to say "I don't care about others". Apart from the ingenuous argument about personal identity that implies that your own future selves should also classify among "others", there is not much one can say to such a person. Such a person would refuse to act along with the outcome specified by the axiome of impartiality/altruism in the ethics game. You may play the ethics game intellectually and come to the conclusion that systematized altruism implies some variety of utilitarianism (and then define more terms and hash out details), but you can still choose to implement another utility function in your own actions. The two dimensions are separate, I think.
True, but it would be in their rational self-interest to retaliate if their rights aren't being respected, to create a credible threat so their rights would be respected.
It's not a misleading name, it means that morality is based on contracts. It's more specific than "do whatever in your rational self-interest", as it suggests something that someone who is following their self-interest should do. Also, not everyone who advocates following one's rational self-interest is a contractarian.
You'd need something like timeless decision theory here, and I feel like it is somehow cheating to bring in TDT/UDT when it comes to moral reasoning at the normative level... But I see what you mean. I am however not sure whether the view you defend here would on its own terms imply that humans have "rights".
There are two plausible cases I can see here:
1) The suggestions collides with "do whatever is in your rational self-interest"; in which case it was misleading.
2) The suggestions deductively follows from "do whatever is in your rational self-interest"; in which case it is uninteresting (and misleading because it dresses up as some fancy claim).
You seem to mean:
3) The suggestions adds something of interest to "do whatever is in your rational self-interest"; here I don't see where this further claim would/could come from.
What do you mean by "morality"? Unless you rigorously define such controversial and differently used terms at every step, you're likely to get caught up in equivocations.
Here are two plausible interpretations for "morality" in the partial sentence I quoted I can come up with:
1) people's desire to (sometimes) care about the interests of others / them following that desire
2) people's (system two) reasoning for why they end up doing nice/fair things to others
Both these claims are descriptive. It would be like justifying deontology by citing the findings from trolleyology, which would beg the question as to whether humans may have "moral biases", e.g. whether they are rationalising over inconsistencies in their positions, or defending positions they would not defend given more information and rationality.
In addition, even if the above sometimes applies, it would of course be overgeneralising to classify all of "morality" according to the above.
So likely you meant something else. There is a third plausible interpretation of your claim, namely something resembling what you wrote earlier:
Perhaps you are claiming that people are somehow irrational if they don't do whatever is in their best self-interest. However, this seems to be a very dubious claim. It would require the hidden premise that it is irrational to have something other than self-interest as your goal. Here, by self-interest I of course don't mean the same thing as "utility function"! If you value the well-being of others just as much as your own well-being, you may act in ways that predictably make you worse off, and yet this would in some situations be rational conditional on an altruistic goal. I don't think we can talk about rational/irrational goals; something can only be rational/irrational according to a stated goal.
(Or well, we could talk about it, but then we'd be using "rational" in a different way than I'm using it now, and also in a different way than is common on LW, and in such a case, I suspect we'd end up arguing whether a tree falling in a forest really makes a sound.
This makes specific what part of "acting in your rational self-interest" means. To use an admittedly imperfect analogy, the connection between egoism and contractarianism is a bit like the connection between utilitarianism and giving to charity (conditional on it being effective). The former implies the latter, but it takes some thinking to determine what it actually entails. Also, not all egoists are contractarians, and it's adding the claim that if you've decided to follow your rational self-interest, this is how you should act.
What one should do. I realize that this may be an imprecise definition, but it gets at what utilitarians, Kantians, Divine Command Theorists, and ethical egoists have in common with each other that they don't have in common with moral non-realists, such as nihilists. Of course, all the ethical theories disagree about the content of morality, but they agree that there is such a thing - it's sort of like agreeing that the moon exists, even if they don't agree what it's made of. Morality is not synonymous with "caring about the interests of others", nor does it even necessarily imply that (in the ethical-theory-neutral view I'm taking in this paragraph). Morality is what you should do, even if you think you should do something else.
As for your second-to-last paragraph (the one not in parentheses) -
Being an ethical egoist, I do think that people are irrational if they don't act in their self-interest. I agree that we can't have irrational goals, but we aren't free to set whatever goals we want - due to the nature of subjective experience and self-interest, rational self-interest is the only rational goal. What rational self-interest entails varies from person to person, but it's still the only rational goal. I can go into it more, but I think it's outside the scope of this thread.
If some means could be found to estimate phi for various species, a variable claimed by this paper to be a measure of "intensity of sentience", it would the relative value of the lives of different animals to be estimated and would help solve many moral dilemmas. Intensity of suffering as a result of a particular action would be expected to be proportionate to the intensity of sentience, however whilst mammals and birds (the groups which possess neocortex, the parts of the brain where consciousness is believed to occur) can be assumed to experience suffering when doing activities that decrease their evolutionary fitness (natural beauty etc. also determine pleasure and pain and are as yet poorly understood, but they are likely to be less significant in other species anyway, extrapolating from the differences in aesthetics from humans with high vs low IQ). However for AI it is much harder to determine what makes it happy or whether or not it enjoys dying, for which we will need to find a simple generalisable definition of suffering that can apply to all possible AI rather than our current concept which is more of an unrigorous Wittgensteinian family resemblance.
I think this is runaway philosophizing where our desire to believe something coherent trumps what types of beliefs we have been selected for, and the types of beliefs that will continue to keep us alive.
Why should there be a normative ethics at all? What part of rationality requires normative ethics?
I, like you and everyone else, have a monkey-sphere. I only care about the monkeys in my tribe that are closest to me, and I might as well admit it because it's there. So, nevermind cows and pigs, if push came to shove I'll protect my friends and family in preference to strangers. However, it protects me and my monkey-sphere if we can all agree to keep expropriation and force to a bare minimum and within strictly prescribed guidelines.
So I recognize the rights of entities capable of retaliating and at the same time capable of being bound by an agreement not to. Them and their monkey spheres.
In short, the reason I'd rather have dinner with you than of you is some combination of me liking you and my pre-commitment to peaceful and civilized coexistence. It's not exactly something I feel like a nice person for admitting, but I don't see why that should be enough to make it a tough issue.
Why should I believe what humans have been selected for? Why would I want to keep "us" alive?
I think those two questions are at least as begging as the reasons for my view, if not more.
What I know for sure is that I dislike my own suffering, not because I'm sapient and have it happening to me, but because it is suffering. And I want to do something in life that is about more than just me. Ultimately, this might not be a "more true" reason than "what I have been selected for", but it does appeal to me more than anything else.
All rationality requires is a goal. You may not share the same goals I have. I have noticed, however, that some people haven't thought through all the implications of their stated goals. Especially on LW, people are very quick to declare something to be of terminal value to them, which serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy unfortunately.
I discovered that intuitions are easy to change. People definitely have stronger emotional reactions to things happening to those that are close, but do they really, on an abstract level, care less about those that are distant? Do they want to care less about those that are distant, or would they take a pill that turned them into universal altruists?
And how do you do that?
If a situation arises where you can benefit your self-interest by defecting, the rational thing to do is to defect. Don't tell yourself that you're being a decent person only because of pure self-interest, you'd be deceiving yourself. Yes, if everyone followed some moral code written for societal interaction among moral agents, then everyone would be doing well (but not perfectly well). However, given that you cannot expect others to follow through, your decision to not "break the rules" is an altruistic decision for (at least) all the cases where you are unlikely enough to get caught.
You may also ask yourself whether you would press a button that inflicts suffering on a child (or a cow) far away, give you ten dollars, and makes you forget about all that happened. Would you want to self-modify to be the person who easily pushes the button? If not, just how much altruism is it going to be, and why not go for the (non-arbitrary) whole cake?
I don't know, and I feel it's important that I admit that. My code of conduct is incomplete. It's better that it be clearly incomplete than have the illusion of completeness created by me deciding what a hypothetical me in a hypothetical situation ought to want.
It does seem to me the payoff for pushing the button should be equal to how much it would take to bribe you not to make all your purchasing decisions contingent on a thorough investigation of the human/animal rights practices of every company you buy from and all their upstream suppliers. Those who don't currently do this (me included) are apparently already being compensated sufficiently, however much that is.
I appreciate the honest reply!
Perhaps you are setting the demands too high. I think the button scenario is relevantly different in the amount of sacrifice/inconvenience it requires. Making all-things-concerned ethical purchases is a lot more difficult than resisting the temptation of ten dollars (although the difference does become smaller the more you press it in some given timescale).
Maybe this is something you view as "cheating" or a rationalization of cognitive dissonance as you explain in the other comment, but I genuinely think that a highly altruistic life may still involve making lots of imperfect choices. The amount of money one donates, for instance, and where to, is probably more important in terms of suffering prevented than the effects of personal consumption.
Being an altruist makes you your own most important resource. Preventing loss of motivation or burnout is then a legitimate concern that warrants keeping a suitable amount of self-interested comfort. And it is also worth noting that people differ individually in how easily altruism comes to them. Some may simply enjoy doing it or may enjoy the signalling aspects, while others might have trouble motivating themselves or even be uncomfortable with talking to others about ethics. One's social circle is also a huge influence. These are all things to take into account; it would be unreasonable to compare yourself to a utility-maximizing robot.
Obviously this needn't be an all-or-nothing kind of thing. Pushing the button just once a week is already much better than never pushing it.
That's a testable assertion. How confident are you that you would follow the path of self consistency if upon being tested the assertion turned out to be false? Someone who chooses pragmatism only needs to fight their own ignorance to be self consistent while someone who does not has to fight both their own ignorance and all too often their own pragmatism in order to be slf-consistent.
Yes, it's testable and the estimates so far strongly support my claim. (I'm constantly on the lookout for data of this kind to improve my effectiveness.) I wouldn't have trouble adjusting because I'm already trying to reduce my unethical consumption through habit forming (which basically comes down to being vegan and avoiding expensive stuff). Even if its not very effective compared to other things, as long as I don't have opportunity costs, it is still something positive. I'm just saying that even for people who won't, for whatever reasons, make changes to the kind of stuff they buy, these people could still reduce a lot of suffering by donating to the most effective cause.
I wonder if pragmatists are less likely to reject information they don't want to hear since their self interest is their terminal goal, so for example entertaining the possibility that Malthus can be right in some instances does not imply that they must unilaterally sacrifice themselves.
Perhaps the reason so many transhumanists are peak oil deniers and global warming deniers is that both of these are Malthusian scenarios that would put the immediate needs of those less fortunate in direct and obvious opposition to the costly, delayed-payoff projects we advocate.
Experience and observation of others has taught me that when one tries to derive a normative code of behavior from the top-down, they often end up with something that is in subtle ways incompatible with selfish drives. They will therefore be tempted to cheat on their high-minded morals, and react to this cognitive dissonance either by coming up with reasons why it's not really cheating or working ever harder to suppress their temptations.
I've been down the egalitarian altruist route, it came crashing down (several times) until I finally learned to admit that I'm a bastard. Now instead of agonizing whether my right to FOO outweighs Bob's right to BAR, I have the simpler problem of optimizing my long-term FOO and trusting Bob to optimize his own BAR.
I still cheat, but I don't waste time on moral posturing. I try to treat it as a sign that perhaps I still don't fully understand my own utility function. Imagine how far off the mark I'd be if I was simultaneously trying to optimize Bob's!
Nonhuman animals are integrated with human "monkey spheres" - e.g. people live with their pets, bond with them and give them names.
A second mistake is that you decry normative ethics, only to implicitly establish a norm in the next paragraph as if it were a fact:
Obviously, there are people whose preferences include the welfare of cows and pigs, hence this discussion and the well-funded existence of PETA etc. By prescribing to a monkey-sphere that "everyone" has and that doesn't include nonhuman animals, you are effectively telling us what we <i>should</i> care about, not what we actually care about.
Even if you don't care about animal welfare, the fact that others do has an influence on your "monkey-sphere", even if it's weak.
Btw, aren't humans apes rather than monkeys?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I trust my friend's judgment how much members of her monkeysphere are worth to her, and utility to my friend is weighed against utility to others in my monkeysphere proportional to how close they are to me.
My monkeysphere has long tails extending by default to all members of my species whose interests are not at odds with my own or those closer to me in the monkeysphere. Since I would be willing to use force against a human to defend myself or others at the core of my monkeysphere, it seems that I should be even more willing to use force against such a human and save the lives of several cattle in the process.
Cults are well-funded too. I don't dispute that people care about both them and animal rights. What I dispute is whether supporting either of them offers enough benefits to the supporter that I would consider it a rational choice to make.
The term "monkeysphere", which is a nickname for Dunbar's Number, originates from this Cracked.com article. The term relates not only to the studies done on monkeys (and apes), but also the idea of there existing a limit on the number of named, cutely dressed monkeys about which a hypothetical person could really care.
Yes, precisely. Thanks for finding the link.
Although I think of mine as a density function rather than a fixed number. Everyone has a little bit of my monkey-sphere associated with them. hug
For selfish reasons, if I had a say in policy I would want to influence the world greatly against this. Whether true or not, I could easily get a disease in the future or go senile (actually quite likely) to such an extent that my moral worth in this system is reduced greatly. Since I still want to be looked after when that happens, I would never support this.
This doesn't refute any of the arguments, but for those who have some percentage chance of losing a lot of brain capacity in the future without outright dying (i.e probably most of us) it may be a reason to argue against this idea anyway.
DISCLAIMER: the following is not necessarily my own opinions or beliefs, but rather done more in the spirit of steelmaning:
There seems to be a number of signs that the deciding factor might be the ability to form long term memories, especially if we go into very near mode.
It seems that if we extrapolate volition for an individual that is made to suffer with or without memory blocking in various sequences, and allowing it to chose tradeofs, it'll repeatedly observe clicking a button labelled "suffer horrific torture with suppressed memory" followed blacking out, and clicking a button labelled "suffer average torture with functioning memory" followed by being tortured. It'd thus learn to value experiences without memory much less.
If I remember correctly some anaesthetics used for surgery basically paralyses you and disable memory formation, and this is not seen as an outrage or horrifying, even by those that have or will be experiencing it.
If we consider increasing the intelligence of various animals while directing them to become humanlike, then by empathic modelling it seems that those capable of forming long term memories beforehand would identify with their former selves, get angry at people who had harmed them, empathize strongly and prevent the suffering in beings similar to what they were before, etc. while for those that couldn't, the opposite of these things would be true.
If I am given the choice to have one type of cognitive functionality disabled before being tortured, in almost all circumstances it seems the ability to form long term memories would be the best choice.
Without also functioning as pain control, or in addition to that role? In either case, I'd be interested to know which anaesthetics these are; it seems like there might be interesting literature on them. (For instance, I'm curious to know whether they are first-line choices, or just used when there is no viable alternative.)
Yes, very interesting: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8wi/inverse_pzombies_the_other_direction_in_the_hard/
I don't know, if you find out please tell me.
That's a common fallacy. Let me illustrate:
The notions of hot and cold water are nonsensical. The water temperature is continuous from 0C to 100C. How would you divide this into distinct areas? You would have to draw a line between neighboring values different by tiny fractions of a degree, but that seems absurd!
The usual solution involving water temperature is to have levels of suitability.
I want to shower in hot water, not cold water. Absurd? Not really. Just simplified. In fact, the joy I will gain from a shower is a continuous function of water temperature with a peak somewhere near 45C. The first formulation just approximated this with a piecewise line function for convenience.
Carrying the analogy back, we can propose that the moral weight of suffering is proportional to the sentience of the sufferer. Estimating degrees of sentience now becomes important. ISTR that research review board have stricter standards for primates than rodents, and rodents than insects, so aparently this isn't a completely strange idea.
If you're going to say that "hot" and "cold" are absolute things rather than continous on a spectrum, yes. Similiarly, it is absurd to say that species is an absolute thing rather than an arbitrary system of classification imposed on various organisms which fit into types broadly at best.
For a morally relevant example, it is quite absurd to suppose that humans aged 18 years and 0 days are mature enough to vote, whereas humans aged 17 years and 364 days are not mature enough. So voting ages are morally unacceptable?
Ditto: ages for drinking alcohol, sexual consent, marriage, joining the armed services etc.
Actually, there is a case to say that they are. Discrimination by category membership, instead of on a spectrum, means that candidates which have more merit are passed aside in favor of ones with lesser merit- particularly in the case of species, this can be problematic. The right of a person to be judged on their merits, if asked in abstract, would be accepted.
The only counter-case I can think of it is to say that society simply does not have the resources to discriminate (since discrimination it is) more precisely. However, even this does not entirely work out as within limits society could easily improve it's classification methods to better allow for unusual cases.
The main advantage of simple discrimination rules is that they are less subject to Goodhart's law.
I'm not the one arguing for dividing this up into distinct areas, my whole point was to just look at the relevant criteria and nothing else. If the relevant criterion is temperature, you get a gradual scale for your example. If it is sentience, you have too look for each individual animal separately and ignore species boundaries for that.
Right, you're the one arguing for complete continuity in the species space and lack of boundaries between species. Similar to the lack of boundary between cold and hot water.
I'm confused. You seem to think it's useful to sit by an anthill and test each individual ant for sentience..?
I think "animal" was used in the sense of "kind of animal" here.
Also, standard argument against a short, reasonable-looking list of ethical criteria: no such list will capture complexity of value. They constitute fake utility functions.
My utility function feels quite real to me and I prefer simplicity and elegance over complexity. Besides, I think you can still have lots of terminal values and not discriminate against animals (in terms of suffering), I don't think that's mutually exclusive.
People get anaesthesia before undergoing surgery and get drunk before risking social embarrassment all the time.
Anaethesia reduces pain, which is the primary reason people take it. Getting drunk reduces inhibitions (which is good if you're trying to do something despite embarrasment), plus you tend not to remember the events afterwards.
EDIT: Just trying to clarify ice9's point here, to be clear.
Animals are not walking around anaesthetized, and I don't think the primary reason why alcohol helps with pain is that it makes you dumber (I might be wrong about this).
If there were no intrinsic reasons for a feather to fall slower than a rock, then in a vacuum a feather would fall just as fast as a rock as long as there's no air. But you don't neglect the viscosity of air when designing a parachute.
Many arguments here seem to take the mindkilling form of "If we had to derive our entire system of moral value based on explicitly stated arguments, and follow those arguments ad absurdum, bad thing results."
Since bad thing is bad, and you say it is in some situation justified, clearly you are wrong, with the (reasonably explicit) accusation that if you use this line of reasoning you are (sexist! racist! in favor of killing babies! in favor of genocide! or worse, not being properly rational!)
That's common practice in ethics.
You need something to work with otherwise ethical reasoning couldn't get off the ground. But it doesn't necessarily imply that people are not being properly rational (irrational would have to be defined according to a goal, and ethics is about goals.)
One, do you believe that those five links also take a similarly mindkilling form and that mindkilling is justified because it is standard practice in ethics? If this is true, does the fact that it is standard practice justify it, and if so what determines what is and isn't justified by an appeal to standard practice?
Refuting counter-argument X by saying that if X was your full set of ethical principles you would reach repugnant conclusion Y is at its strongest an argument that X is not a complete and fully satisfactory set of ethical principles. I fail to see how it can be a strong argument that X is invalid as a subset of ethical principles, which is how it appears to have been used above.
In addition, when we use an argument of the form "X leads to some conclusion Y for which Y can be considered a subset of Z, and all Z are bad" we imply that for all such Z, you can (even in theory) create an internally consistent ethical system, even in theory, where for any given principle set P such that P is under some circumstance leading to an action in some such set Z, P is wrong. I would claim that if you include all your examples of such Z, it is fairly easy to construct situations such that the sets Z contain all possible actions and thus all ethical systems P, which would imply no such ethical systems can exist, and if you well-define all your terms, I would be happy to attempt to construct such a scenario.
I don't think this form of argument is mindkilling. "Bad thing" needs to refer to something the person whose position you're criticizing considers unacceptable too. You'd be working with their own intuitions and assumptions. So I'm not advocating begging the question by postulating that some things are bad tout court (that would be mindkilling indeed).
The first one is just a description of the most common ethical methodology. The other papers I'm linking too are excellent, with the exception of the third one which I do consider to be rather weak. But these are all great papers that use the procedure I quoted from you.
This doesn't necessarily follow, but if I discover that the set of principles I endorse lead to conclusions I definitely do not endorse, then I have reasons to fundamentally question some of the original principles. I could also go for modifications that leave the overall construct intact, but that usually comes with problems as well.
I'm not sure whether I understand your last paragraph. It seems like you're talking about impossibility theorems. This has indeed been done, for instance for population ethics (the second paper I linked to above). There are two ways to react to this: 1) Giving up, or 2) reconsidering which conclusions go under Z. Personally I think the second option makes more sense.
In the past, the arguments against sexism and racism were things like "they're human too", "they can write poetry too", "God made all men equal" and "look how good they are at being governesses". None of these apply to animals; they're not human, they don't write human, God made them to serve us, and they're not very good governesses. Indeed, you seem to think all these are irrelevant criteria.
Speaking as a 21st century person in a liberal, western country, I believe sexism and racism are wrong basically because other people told me they were, who believed that because ... who believed that because they were convinced by argumentum ad governess. But now I've just discovered that argumentum ad governess is invalid. Should I not withdraw my belief that sexism and racism are wrong, which apparently I have in some sense been fooled into, and adopt the traditional, time-honoured view that they are not?
Where was the argument for that? Non-humans attaining rights by a different path does not erase all other paths.
But, on the other side, there's no way to reinforce the argument to prevent it from going the other extreme: what negates the interpretation of an amoeba retracting from a probe to call it "pain"? It is just the anatomical quality of the nerves involved or is the computation itself that matters? In either case, the argument is doomed.
The main problem to me it seems that caring as a basis for a moral argument is really not apt to be captured by a real number.
I edited the very end of my post to account for this. I think the question whether a given organism is sentient is an empirical question, i.e. one that we can unambiguously figure out with enough knowledge and computing power. Some people do disagree with that and in this case, things would become more complicated
This objection doesn't work if you rigidify over the beings you feel sympathy toward in the actual world, given your present mental capacities. And that is clearly the best version of this view, and the one that people probably really mean when they say this. On this version of the view, you don't say that if you didn't care about humans, human's wouldn't matter. You do have to say, "If it actually turns out that I don't care about humans, then humans don't matter." Of course, you might want to change the view if things (very unexpectedly!) don't turn out that way.
I don't think this version gives animals no weight, but I think it typically gives animals less weight than humans. (Disclaimer that should be unnecessary: I recognize that there are other objections to H. It is not necessary to respond to what I have said by raising a distinct objection to H.)
Hmm, maybe I didn't read the argument carefully enough, but it seems that the argument from marginal cases proves too much ., non-US citizens should be allowed to serve in the army, some people without medical licenses should be allowed to practice as surgeons and many more things.
The argument from marginal cases may well prove too much, but this strikes me as a failed counter-example. Using non-citizens as part of a military force is a reasonably standard practice. Depending on the circumstances it can be the smart thing to do. (Conscripting citizens as cannon fodder tends to promote civil unrest.)
Sure, I shouldn't have used the US military as an example - I retract it. Trying again the argument from marginal cases proves that some 12 year olds should be allowed to vote.
This is relevant
Not one of Scott's better ideas.
You mean his other ideas are even better!? My God... (But seriously, folks ... what exactly are your counterarguments?)
I brought them up elsewhere in the thread.
I'll address my replies there then. Still, it's slightly ... off to just post "not a good idea" on it's own?
This slippery scope really isn't sounding all that bad...
... what makes you think that's wrong? I remember being twelve, seems to me basing that sort of thing on numerical age is fairly daft, albeit relatively simple.
Your memories of being twelve must be very different from mine.
Quite possibly. But then, that's rather the point, isn't it?
Indeed, I wouldn't object to this directly. One could however argue that it is bad for indirect reasons. It would acquire huge administrative efforts to test teens for their competence at voting, and the money and resources might be better spent on education or the US army (jk). In order to save administrative costs, using a Schelling point at the age of, say, 18, makes perfect sense, even though there certainly is no magical change taking place in people's brains the night of their 18th birthday.
Not to mention the temptation to sneak political biases into the competency tests.
(You meant require, not acquire)
It would also require huge administrative efforts to test 18-year-olds for competence. So we simply don't, and let them vote anyway. It's not clear to me that letting all 12-year-olds vote is so much terribly worse. They mostly differ from adults on age-relevant issues: they would probably vote school children more rights.
It may or may not be somewhat worse than the status quo, but (for comparison) we don't take away the vote from all convicted criminals, or all demented people, or all people with IQ below 60... Not giving teenagers civil rights is just a historical fact, like sexism and racism. It doesn't have a moral rationale, only rationalizations.
A randomly chosen 18-year-old is more likely than a randomly chosen 12-year-old to be ready to vote -- though I agree that age isn't necessarily the best cheap proxy for that. (What about possession of a high-school diploma?)
Many would argue we should.
That's the same problem under a different name. What does "ready to vote" mean?
That excludes some people of all ages, but it still also excludes all people younger than 16-17 or so. You get a high school diploma more for X years of attendance than for any particular exam scores. There's no way for HJPEV to get one until he's old enough to have spent enough time in a high school.
We should be clear on what we're trying to optimize. If it's "voting for the right people", then it would be best to restrict voting rights to a very few people who know who would be right - myself and enough friends whom I trust to introduce the necessary diversity and make sure we don't overlook anything.
If on the other hand it's a moral ideal of letting everyone ruled by a government, give their consent to the government - then we should give the vote to anyone capable of informed consent, which surely includes people much younger than 18.
I think it works out better if you ignore your own political affiliations, which makes sense because mindkilling.
Even ignoring affiliations, if I really believe I can make better voting choices than the average vote of minority X, then optimizing purely for voting outcomes means not giving the vote to minority X. And there are in fact minorities where almost all of the majority believes this, such as, indeed, children. (I do not believe this with respect to children, but I believe that most other adults do.)
Yes, that would probably have better results, but mine is a better Schelling point, and hence more likely to be achieved in practice, short of a coup d'Ʃtat. :-)
12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents. It's easy for a parent to threaten a kid to make him vote one way, or bribe him, or just force him to stay in the house on election day if he ever lets his political views slip out. (In theory, a kid could lie in the first two scenarios, since voting is done in secret, but I would bet that a statistically significant portion of kids will be unable to lie well enough to pull it off.)
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you'll get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable. (Exercise for the reader: why is 'well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway' not a good response?)
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
This is not a priori obvious. In any case why are imperfections with the test that happen to be correlated with race worse than imperfections correlated with occupation, social class, or any other trait that could act as a proxy for political beliefs?
Don't these two arguments cancel each other out? How can you simultaneously be concerned that children will vote immaturely and vote the same way as their parents?
My favourite response to this is to retain the "everyone gets to vote at 18" aspect regardless of child enfranchisement. At least until you have tests people find acceptable or whatever.
I have described two separate failure modes. I see no reason to believe that the two failure modes would cancel each other out.
That doesn't work. If everyone above age 18 can vote, black children can vote down to IQ 65, and white children can vote down to IQ 60, the result will still be skewed, although not by as much as if the IQ test was applied to everyone.
... you don't? Could you explain your reasoning on this?
It doesn't work perfectly. That's far from the same thing as not working at all.
The problem with letting 12 year olds vote is not that they'd be overly influenced by their parents, it's that they they're worse at seeing through the various dark arts techniques people routinely employ and this would have the result of making politics even more of a dark arts contest than it already is.
So we should test for resistance to Dark Arts Techniques, rather than base it on age? Excellent idea!
And how exactly to you propose doing testing in a way that doesn't run into the problems with Goodhart's law I mentioned here?
You know, I can think of a worse test than that ... eh, I'm not even going to bother working out a complex "age test" metaphor, I'm just gonna say it: age is a worse criterion than that test.
You might be able to argue that since people of different races don't live to the exact same age, an age test is still biased, but I'd like to see some calculations to show just how bad it is. Also, even though an age test may be racially biased, there aren't really better and worse age tests--it's easy to get (either by negligence or by malice) an IQ test which is biased by multiple times the amount of a similar but better IQ test, but pretty much impossible to get that for age.
There's also the historical record to consider. It's particularly bad for IQ tests.
No, sorry, I mean it's worse overall, not worse because racist.
I'd like to add this to the other posters' responses:
Please taboo "immaturity" for me. After all, if taken literally it just means "not the same as mature, adult people". But the whole point of letting a minority vote is that they will not vote the same way as the majority.
How is this different from saying that no test of 12-year-olds for "maturity" is perfect and therefore we do not give the vote to any 12 year olds at all?
It isn't all that different, but all that that proves is that we shouldn't decide who votes based on maturity tests any more than we should on IQ tests.
And 75-year-olds are highly influenced by their children. (And 22-year-olds are highly influenced by their friends, for that matter.)
(I'm not saying we should allow 12-year-olds to vote, but just that I don't find that particular argument convincing.)
I don't find arguments against letting children vote very convincing either, except the argument that 18 is a defensible Schelling point and it would become way too vulnerable to abuse if we changed it to a more complicated criterion like "anyone who can give informed consent, as measured by X." After all, if we accept the argument that 12-17 year olds should vote (and I'm not saying it's a bad argument), then the simplest and most effective way to enforce that is to draw another arbitrary line based on age, at some lower age. Anything more complex would again be politicized and gamed.
But I think you're misrepresenting the "influenced by parents" argument. 22-year-olds are influenced by their friends, yes, but they influence their friends to roughly the same degree. Their friends do not have total power over their life, from basic survival to sources of information. A physical/emotional threat from a friend is a lot less credible than a threat from your parents, especially considering most people have more than one circle of friends. The same goes for the 75-year-old - they may be frail and physically dependent on their children, but society doesn't condone a live-in grandparent being bossed around and controlled the way a live-in child is, so that is not as big a concern.
Indeed, we outsource the job to nursing homes instead.
"Maturity" isn't obviously a desirable thing. What people tend to describe as 'maturity' seems to be a developed ability to signal conformity and if anything is negative causal influence on the application of reasoned judgement. People learn that it is 'mature' to not ask (or even think to ask) questions about why the cherished beliefs are obviously self-contradicting nonsense, for example.
I do not expect a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote to have worse outcomes than a country that does not. Particularly given that it would almost certainly result in more voting-relevant education being given to children and so slightly less ignorance even among adults.
In my experience "voting-relevant education" tends to mean indoctrination, so no.
Or sometimes "economics" and "critical thinking.
That's a trick statement, because the biggest reason that a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote won't have worse outcomes is that the number of such people voting isn't enough to have much of an influence on the outcome at all. I don;t expect a country that adds a few hundred votes chosen by throwing darts at ballots to have worse outcomes, either.
The proper question is whether you expect a country that allows them to vote to have worse outcomes to the extent that letting them vote affects the outcome at all.
There is no trick. For it to be a trick of the kind you suggest would require that the meaning people take from it is different from the meaning I intend to convey. I do not limit the claim to "statistically insignificant worse outcomes because the 25 million people added are somehow negligible". I mean it like it sounds. I have not particular expectation that the marginal change to the system will be in the negative direction.
In the US there are about 25m 12-17-year-olds.
In the last (2012) presidential election the popular vote gap between the two candidates was 5m people.
"Maturity" is pretty much a stand-in for "desirable characteristics that adults usually have and children usually don't," so it's almost by definition an argument in favor of adults. But to be fair, characteristics like the willingness to sit through/read boring informational pieces in order to be a more educated voter, the ability to accurately detect deception and false promises, and the ability to use past evidence to determine what is likely to actually happen (as opposed to what people say will happen) are useful traits and are much more common in 18-year-olds than 12-year-olds.
Interesting argument, I had never thought of that. I'm still sceptical about what the quality of such voting-relevant education would be.
On timescales much longer than politicians usually think about.
I might be a little more generous than that. The term casts a pretty broad net, but it also includes some factors I'd consider instrumentally advantageous, like self-control and emotional resilience.
I'm not sure how relevant those are in this context, though.
I certainly recommend maturity. I also note that the aforementioned signalling skill is also significantly instrumentally advantageous. I just don't expect the immaturity of younger voters to result in significantly worse voting outcomes.
"Well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway" is not a good response, but "show me your data that places 12-17 yo people significantly more immature then the rest of humanity, and taboo "immaturity" while you're at it" is.
The first two, sadly, do make more sense, but then emancipation should become qualification to vote.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that pure experience - just raw data in your long-term memory - is a plausible criterion for a good voter. It's not that intelligence and rationality is unimportant, since rational, intelligent people may well draw more accurate conclusions from a smaller amount of data.
What does matter is that everyone, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent, would be better off if they have a few elections and a few media scandals and a few internet flame wars and a few nationally significant policy debates stored in their long-term memory. Even HJPEV needs something to go on. The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they're already pretty good.
By the same argument, they'd be even better voters 10 years later. Why not give the vote at 30 years of age, say?
This seems like a reasonable thing to prove!
This would be mixing up the normative level with the empirical level. The argument from marginal cases seeks to establish that we have reasons against treating beings of different species differently, all else being equal. Under consequentialism, the best path of action (including motives, laws, societal norms to promote and so on) would already be specified. It would be misleading to apply the same basic moral reasoning again on the empirical level where we have institutions like the US army or the establishment of surgeons. Institutions like the US army are (for most people anyway and outside of political philosophy) not terminal values. Whether it increases overall utility if we enforce "non-discrimination" radically in all domains is an empirical question determined by the higher order goal of achieving as much utility as possible.
And whenever this is not the case (which it may well be, since there is no reason to assume that the empirical level perfectly mirrors the normative one), then "all else" is not equal. Because it might not be overall beneficial for society / in terms of your terminal values, it could be a bad idea to allow an otherwise well-qualified someone without a medical license to practice as a surgeon. There might be negative side-effects of such a practice.
A practical example of this would be animal testing. If enough people were consequentialists and unbiased, we could experiment on humans and thereby accelerate scientific progress. However, if you try to do this in the real world, there is the danger that it will go wrong because people lose track of altruistic goals and replace them with other things (altough this argument applies to animal testing as well almost as much), and there is a big likelihood of starting a civil war or worse if someone would actually start experimenting on humans (this one doesn't). So even though experimenting on animals is intrinsically on par with experimenting on humans with similar cognitive capacities, only the former even stands a chance at increasing overall utility rather than decreasing it. Here the indirect consequences are decisive.
(Edit: In this sense, my example about men and a right to abortion was misleading, because that would of course be a legal right, where empirical factors come into play. But I was using the example to show that being against some form of discrimination doesn't mean that all differences between beings ought to be ignored.)
Thank you for the response, I think I get the argument now.
I don't have a good answer for why we allow animal testing but not human testing. If one is fine with animal experimentation then there doesn't seem to be any way to object to engineering human babies that would have human physiology but animal level cognition and conduct tests on them. While the idea does make me uncomfortable I think I would bite that bullet.
The problem is that it makes the Schelling points more awkward.
I strongly object to the term "speciesism" for this position. I think it promotes a mindkilled attitude to this subject ("Oh, you don't want to be speciesist, do you? Are you also a sexist? You pig?").
It's not sexist to say that women are more likely to get breast cancer. This is a differentiation based on sex, but it's empirically founded, so not sexist.
Similarly, we could say that ants' behavior doesn't appear to be affected by narcotics, so we should discount the possibility of their suffering. This is a judgement based on species, but is empirically founded, so not speciesist.
Things only become _ist if you say "I have no evidence to support my view, but consider X to be less worthy solely because they aren't in my race/class/sex/species."
I genuinely don't think anyone on LW thinks speciesism is OK.
Ah, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by one little ugly fact... :-D
I do feel speciesism is perfectly fine.
Same here, I think speciesism is a fine heuristic here and now (it may not be so in the future).
If it's a heuristic, then it's not speciesism.
If it's a "heuristic" that overrides lots of evidence, then it's speciesism. Which is just another way of saying that you aren't performing a Bayesian update correctly.
The issue, though, is not that beliefs are founded on no evidence. Rather, it is that they are founded on insufficient evidence. It would, in my estimation, require some strange, inhuman bigot to say such a thing; rather, they will hold up their prejudices based on evidence which sounds entirely reasonable to them. There is nearly always a justification for treating the other tribe poorly; healthy human psychology doesn't do well with baseless discrimination, so it invents (more accurately, seeks out with a hefty does of confirmation bias) reasons that its discrimination is well-founded.
In this case, the fact that ants do not appear to be affected by narcotics is evidence that they are different from humans, but it seems that it is insufficient to discount their suffering. I am very curious, however, as to why a lack of behavioral reaction to narcotics indicates that ant suffering is morally neutral. I feel that there is an implicit step I missed there.
The question of pain in insects is incredibly complicated, so please don't take my glib example as anything more than that.
But if ants don't have something analogous to opiods, then that would indicate that pain is never "bad" for them, which would be an (non-conclusive) indication they don't suffer.
You evade the issue, I think. It is sexist (or _ist) if you say "I consider X to be less worthy because they aren't in my race/class/sex/species, and I do have evidence to support my view."?
Sure, saying women are more likely to get breast cancer isn't sexist; but this is a safe example. What if we had hard evidence that women are less intelligent? Would it be sexist to say that, then? (Any objection that contains the words "on average" must contend with the fact that any particular women may have a breast cancer risk that falls anywhere on the distribution, which may well be below the male average.)
No one is saying "I think pigs are less worthy than humans, and this view is based on no empirical data whatever; heck, I've never even seen a pig. Is that something you eat?"
We have tons of empirical data about differences between the species. The argument is about exactly which of the differences matter, and that is unlikely to be settled by passing the buck to empiricism.
Upvoted just for this.
I wouldn't say it is, but other people would use the word āsexistā with a broader sense than mine (assuming that each person defines āsexismā and āracismā in analogous ways).
No. Because your statement "X is less worthy because they aren't of my gender" in that case is synonymous with "X is less worthy because they lack attribute Y", and so gender has left the picture. Hence it can't be sexist.
Ok, but if you construe it that way, then "X is less worthy just because of their gender" is a complete strawman. No one says that. What people instead say is "people of type T are inferior in way W, and since X is a T, s/he is inferior in way W".
Examples: "women are less rational than men, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' because they're women"; "black people are less intelligent than white people, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' ..."; etc.
By your construal, are these things not sexist/racist? But then neither is this speciesist: "nonhumans are not self-aware, unlike humans, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' because they're nonhumans".
I think we are getting into a discussion about definitions, which I'm sure you would agree is not very productive.
But I would absolutely agree that your statement "nonhumans are not self-aware, unlike humans, which is why they are inferior, not 'just' because they're nonhumans" is not speciesist. (It is empirically unlikely though.)
Agreed entirely, let's not argue about definitions.
Do we disagree on questions of fact? On rereading this thread, I suspect not. Your thoughts?
I think so? You seem to have indicated in a few comments that you don't believe nonhuman animals are "self-aware" or "conscious" which strikes me as an empirical statement?
If this is true (and I give at least 30% credence that I've just been misunderstanding you), I'd be interested to hear why you think this. We may not end up drawing the moral line at the same place, but I think consciousness is a slippery enough subject that I at least would learn something from the conversation.
Ok. Yes, I think that nonhuman animals are not self-aware. (Dolphins might be an exception. This is a particularly interesting recent study.)
Dolphins aside, we have no reason to believe that animals are capable of thinking about themselves; of considering their own conscious awareness; of having any self-concept, much less any concept of themselves as persistent conscious entities with a past and a future; of consciously reasoning about other minds, or having any concept thereof; or of engaging in abstract reasoning or thought of any kind.
I've commented before that one critical difference between "speciesism" and racism or sexism or other such prejudices is that a cow can never argue for its own equal treatment; this, I have said, is not a trivial or irrelevant fact. And it's not just a matter of not having the vocal cords to speak, or of not knowing the language, or any other such trivial obstacles to communication; a cow can't even come close to having the concepts required to understand human behavior, human concepts, and human language.
Now, you might not think any of this is morally relevant. Fine. But I would meet with great skepticism ā and, sans compelling evidence, probable outright dismissal ā any claim that a cow, or a pig, or, even more laughably, a chicken, is self-aware in anything like the sense I outlined above.
(By the way, I am reluctant to commit to any position on "consciousness", merely because the word is used in such a diverse range of ways.)
Birds lack a neocortex. But members of at least one species, the European magpie, have convincingly passed the "mirror test" [cf. "Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition" http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?representation=PDF&uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202] Most ethologists recognise passing the mirror test as evidence of a self-concept. As well as higher primates (chimpanzees, orang utans, bonobos, gorillas) members of other species who have passed the mirror test include elephants, orcas and bottlenose dolphins. Humans generally fail the mirror test below the age of eighteen months.
Well, do you disagree WRT conclusions? Are you, in fact, a vegetarian?
Nope, definitely not a vegetarian. I think that's a broader topic though.
To be absolutely clear: you agree that nonhumans are probably self-aware, feel pain, and so on and so forth, and are indeed worthy of moral consideration ... but for reasons not under discussion here, you are not a vegetarian? Fair enough, I guess.
EDIT: Apparently not.
Maybe I was already mindkilled (vegetarian speaking), but it seems like a precisely appropriate term to use, given the content of this post.
What term would you prefer?
[Bonus points: if racism and speciesism were well-known errors of the past, would sexist!you object to the term "sexism" on the same grounds?]
Humanism, maybe. Yes.
That's taken, though ... but then it's been taken before, and repurposed, it's such a catchy word with such lovely connotations.
It's not only the term. The post explicitly uses that exact argument: Since sexism and racism are wrong, and any theoretical argument that disagrees with me can be used to argue for sexism or racism, if you disagree with me you are a sexist, which is QED both because of course you aren't sexist/racist and because regardless, even if you are, you certainly can't say such a thing on a public forum!
No no no. I'm not saying "Since sexism and racism are wrong," - I'm saying that those who don't want their arguments to be of the sort that it could analogously justify racism or sexism (even if the person is neither of those), then they would also need to reject speciesism.
Mindkilling-related issues aside, I am going to do my best to un-mindkill at least one aspect of this question, which is why the frame change.
Is this similar to arguing that if the bloody knife was the subject of an illegal search, which we can't allow because allowing that would lead to other bad things, and therefore is not admissible in trial, then you must not only find the defendant not guilty but actually believe that the defendant did not commit the crime and should be welcome back to polite society?
No, what makes the difference is that you'd be mixing up the normative level with the empirical one, as I explained here (parent of the linked post also relevant).
In that post, you seem to be making the opposite case: That you should not reject X (animal testing) simply because your argument could be used to support repugnant proposal Y (unwilling human testing); you say that the indirect consequences of Y would be very bad (as they obviously would) but then you don't make the argument that one must then reject X, instead that you should support X but reject Y for unrelated reasons, and you are not required to disregard argument Q that supports both X and Y and thereby reject X (assuming X was in fact utility increasing).
Or, that the fact that a given argument can be used to support a repugnant conclusion (sexism or racism) should not be a justification for not using an argument. In addition, the argument for brain complexity scaling moral value that you now accept as an edit is obviously usable to support sexism and racism, in exactly the same way that you are using as a counterargument:
For any given characteristic, different people will have different amounts of that characteristic, and for any two groups (male / female, black / white, young / old, whatever) there will be a statistical difference in that measurement (because this isn't physics and equality has probability epsilon, however small the difference) so if you tie any continuous measurement to your moral value of things, or any measurement that could ever not fully apply to anything human, you're racist and sexist.
Exactly. This is because the overall goal is increasing utility, and not a societal norm of non-discrimination. (This is of course assuming that we are consequentialists.) My arguments against discrimination/speciesism apply at the normative level, when we are trying to come up with a definition of utility.
I wouldn't classify this as sexism/racism. If there are sound reasons for considering the properties in question relevant, then treating beings of different species differently because of a correlation between species, and not because of the species difference itself, is in my view not a form of discrimination.
As I wrote:
Speciesist language, not cool!
Haha! Anyway, I agree that it promotes mindkilled attitude (I'm often reading terrible arguments by animal rights people), but on the other hand, for those who agree with the arguments, it is a good way to raise awareness. And the parallels to racism or sexism are valid, I think.
Haha only serious. My brain reacts with terror to that reply, with good reason: It has been trained to. You're implicitly threatening those who make counter-arguments with charges of every ism in the book. The number of things I've had to erase because one "can't" say them without at least ending any productive debate, is large.
Actually, I think it's precisely the parallels to racism and sexism that are invalid. Perhaps ableism? That's closer, at any rate, if still not really the same thing.
I don't think that's a "but on the other hand;" I think that's a "it is a good way to raise awareness because it promotes mindkilled attitude."
Typically human xenophobia doesn't single out one attribute. The similar are treated preferentially, the different are exiled, shunned, excluded or slaughtered. Nature builds organisms like that: to favour kin and creatures similar, and to give out-group members a very wide berth. So: it's no surprise to find that humans are often racist and speciesist.
While I was writing this comment, CarlShulman posted his, which makes essentially the same point. But since I already wrote it a longer comment, I'm posting mine too. (Writing quickly is hard!)
In practice we must have a quantitative model of how much "moral value" to assign an animal (or human). I think your position that:
Is wrong, and the reasons for that fall out of your own arguments.
As you point out, there is a continuum between any two living things (common descent). Nevertheless we all think that at least some animals have zero, or nearly zero, moral weight: insects, perhaps, but you can go all the way to amoebas. You must either 1) assign gradually diminishing moral value to beings ranged from humans to amoebas; or 2) choose an arbitrary, precise point (or several points) at which the value decreases sharply, with modern species boundaries being an obvious Schelling point but not the only option. Similar arguments have of course been made about the continuum between a sperm and an egg, and an eventual human being.
Option 1 lets you assign non-human animals moral value. But then, you must specify the criteria you use to calculate that value, from your list A-G or otherwise. These same criteria will then tell you that some humans have less moral value then others: children, people with advanced dementia or other severe mental deficiencies, etc. Some biological humans may have much less value than, say, a chicken (babies), or none at all (fetuses). Also, at least some post-humans, aliens, and AIs would have far more moral value than any human - even to the point of becoming utility monsters for total utilitarians.
Option 2 is completely arbitrary in terms of what animals you value, so (among its other problems) people won't be able to agree about it. And if you don't determine moral value by measuring some underlying property, you won't be able to determine the value of radical new varieties, such as post-humans or AIs.
You seem to support option 2 (value everyone equally) but you don't say where you draw the line - and that's the crucial question.
My own position is option 1, open to modification against failure modes like utility monsters that would conflict too strongly with my other moral intuitions.
My reasoning can't justify racism and sexism, because my moral criteria don't differ noticeably between sexes and races. This is an empirical fact. If it were true that e.g. some race was less sentient than other races, then that would be a valid reason to assign people of that race less moral value. But it's just not true.
I don't understand what you mean by (2), could you give an example? If a utilitarian calculation forbids you from doing something, then what could be your reason for doing it anyway? Your utility function can't be separate from your morals; on the contrary it must incorporate your morals. (Inconsistent morals are a problem, but without a single VNM-compliant utility function, utilitarianism can't tell you anything at all.)
Some other notes:
I would like to note that this is actual basis of almost all human moral reasoning, and all the rest is post-facto rationalizations. When those rationalizations come in conflict with moral intuitions, they are labelled "repugnant conclusions". I think you dismiss this factor far too lightly.
I am willing to bite the bullet about babies, quite easily in fact. I assign no more value to newborn human babies than I do to chickens. I only care about babies insofar other humans care about babies.
I do care about animal suffering - in proportion to some of the measures A-G on your list, so less than human suffering, but (for many animals) more than human baby suffering.
I wouldn't mind treating babies like we treat some farm animals; that is not because I value those animals as highly as I do humans, but because I value both babies and humans much less than I do adult humans. (Some farming methods are acceptable to me, and some are not.)
Please play rationalist's taboo here. What empirical test or physical fact tells you whether "it feels like something" to be a certain animal? And moreover, quantitatively so - "how much" it feels like something to be that animal?
Baby-ism and racism have nothing in common (except that you're against both). I don't assign human-level moral status to babies, but I'm not a racist. This is precisely because humans of all races have roughly the same distribution on A-G (and other relevant parameters), whereas newborn babies would test below adults of most (all?) mammalian species.
By this I meant literally the same amount (and intensity!) of suffering. So I agree with the point you and Carl Shulman make, if it is the case that some animals can only experience so much suffering, then it makes sense to value them accordingly.
I'm arguing for 1), but I would only do it by species in order to save time for calculations. If I had infinite computing power, I would do the calculation for each individual separately according to indicators of what constitutes capacity for suffering and its intensity. Incidentally, I would also assign at least a 20% chance that brain size doesn't matter, some people in fact have this view.
By "utilitarianism" I meant hedonistic utilitarianism in general, not your personal utility function that (in this scenario) differentiates between sapience and mere sentience. I added this qualifier because "you'd have to be okay with torturing babies" is not a reductio, since utilitarians would have to bite this bullet anyway if they could thereby prevent an even greater amount of suffering in the future.
I only have my first-person evidence to go with. This bothers me a lot but I'm assuming that some day we will have solved all the problems in philosophy of mind and can then map out what we mean precisely by "sentience", having it correspond to specific implemented algorithms or brain states.
I agree, those are simply the two premises the conclusion that we should value all suffering equally is based on. You end up with coherent positions by rejection one or both of the two.
What evidence do you have for thinking that your first-person intuitions about sentience "cut reality at its joints"? Maybe if you analyze what goes through your head when you think "sentience", and then try to apply that to other animals (never mind AIs or aliens), you'll just end up measuring how different those animals are from humans in a completely arbitrary and morally-unimportant implementation feature.
If after solving all the problems of philosophy you found out something like this, would you accept it, or would you say that "sentience" was no longer the basis of your morals? In other words, why might you prefer this particular intuition to other intuitions that judge how similar something is to a human?
If I understand it correctly, this is the position endorsed here. I don't think realizing that this view is right would change much for me; I would still try to generalize criteria for why I care about a particular experience and then care about all instances of the same thing. However, I realize that this would make it much more difficult to convince others to draw the same lines. If the question of whether a given being is sentience translates into whether I have reasons to care about that being, then one part of my argument would fall away. This issue doesn't seem to be endemic to the treatment of non-human animals though, you'd have it with any kind of utility function that values well-being.
Why should there be a "correct" solution for ethical reasoning? Is there a normative level regarding which color is the best? People function based on heuristics, which are calibrated on general cases, not on marginal cases. While I'm all for showing inconsistencies in one's statements, there is no inconsistency in saying "as a general rule, I value X, but in these cases, I value Y, which is different from X".
Why the impetus towards some one-size-fit-all solution? And more importantly, why disallow that marginal cases get special "if-clauses"?
Imagine forcing a programmer to treat all incoming data with the exact same rule. It would be a disaster. Adding a "as a general rule" solves the inconsistencies, and it's not cheating, and it's not something in need of fixing.
Well, obviously this wouldn't hold for, say, paperclippers ... but while I suspect you may disagree, most people seem to think human ethics are not mutually contradictory and are, in fact, part of the psychological unity of humankind (most include caveats for psychopaths, political enemies, and those possessed by demons.)
Such a (highly complex) rule is known as a "program".
In context here, a "rule" is shorthand for a general rule, not for any sort of algorithm whatsoever. A rule that describes a specific case by name is not a general rule.
Thought experiment: Go up to a random person and find out how they avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Repeat with some other famous ethical paradoxes. Even if some of those have solutions, you can bet the average person 1) won't have thought about them, and 2) won't be able to come up with a solution that holds up to examination.
Most people have not thought about enough marginal cases involving human ethics to be able to determine whether human ethics is mutually contradictory.
That was mostly a joke :)
(My point, if you could call it such, was that morality need only be consistent, not simple - although most special cases turn out to be caused by bias, rather than actual special cases, so it was a rather weak point. And, apparently, a rather weak joke.)
And yet, funnily enough,most people agree on most things, and the marginal cases are not unique for every person. Ethics, as far as I can tell, is a part of the psychological unity of mankind.
That said, there is the much more worrying prospect that these common values could be internally incoherent, but we seem to have intuitions for resolving conflicts between lower-level intuitions and I think - hope - it all works out in the end.
(Kawoomba has stated that he considers it ethical for a parent to destroy the earth rather than risk their family, though, so perhaps I'm being overly generous in this regard. pulls face)
As a bonus, the exception class of "enemies" and "immoral monsters" tends to be contrived to include anyone who has a sufficient degree of difference in ethical preferences. All True humans are ethically united...
I'm torn between grinning at how marvelously well-contrived it is on evolution's part and frustrated that, y'know, I have to live here, and I keep stepping in the mindkill.
Of course, I'll note they're usually wrong. Except about some of the psychopaths, I suppose, though even they seem to contain bits of it if I understand correctly.
If you want your choices to be consistent over time, you still need a meta-rule for choosing and modifying your rules. How do you know what exceptions to make?
Personally, I don't think my choices (as a human) can be consistent in this sense, and I'm pretty resigned to following my inconsistent moral intuitions. Others disagree with me on this.
Your choices won't be consistent over time anyways, because you won't be consistent over time. For your Centenarian self, the current you is a but a distant memory.
That my desires won't be consistent over very long periods of time, is no reason to make my choices inconsistent over short periods of time when my desires don't change much.
I agree that species membership as such is irrelevant, although it is in practice an extremely powerful summary piece of information about a creature's capabilities, psychology, relationship with moral agents, ability to contribute to society, responsiveness in productivity to expected future conditions, etc.
Animal happiness is good, and animal pain is bad. However, the word anti-speciesism, and some of your discussion, suggests treating experience as binary and ignoring quantitative differences, e.g. here:
This leaves out the idea of the quantity of experience. In human split-brain patients the hemispheres can experience and act quite independently without common knowledge or communication. Unless you think that the quantity of happiness or suffering doubles when the corpus callosum is cut, then happiness and pain can occur in substructures of brains, not just whole brains. And if intensive communication and coordination were enough to diminish moral value why does this not apply to social groups like firms, herds, flocks, hives and the like?
Animals vary enormously in the number of neurons and substructures, including ones engaged in reinforcement learning responsive to pleasure and pain. For example, a fly's brain contains 100,000 neurons, where a human's contains about a million times as many. Here are brain masses for some animals:
Particularly for birds, fish, and insects one sees extremely large ratios. If, as is quite plausible in light of the decentralized operations of brains (stunningly demonstrated in split-brain patients, but also a routine feature of information processing in nervous systems), smaller subsystems can experience pleasure and pain, then animals with large nervous systems may be orders of magnitude more important than one would otherwise think. Importantly, this is not a consideration lowering the expected experience of animals with small nervous systems, but increasing the expected experience of animals with large nervous systems, so it does not need to be held with very high confidence to much affect behavior: "what if small neural systems suffer and delight?" is analogous to "what if snails sufffer and delight?").
Would you say that making such adjustments is speciesist? For example wikipedia gives the world chicken population as 24 billion, mostly kept in horrible conditions, and 1.3 billion cows. If one ignores nervous system scale the welfare of the chickens dominates in importance, but if one thinks that quantity of experience scales then the aggregate welfare of the cows looms larger. Is it speciesist to prioritize cows over chickens or fish on this basis?
Note that by this measure, ants are six times more important than humans.
But to address your question: "specieism" is not a label that's slapped on people who disagree with you. It's merely a shorthand way of saying "many people have a cognitive bias that humans are more 'special' than they actually are, and this bias prevents them from updating their beliefs in light of new evidence."
Brain-to-body quotient is one type of evidence we should consider, but it's not a great one. The encephalization quotient improves on it slightly by considering the non-linearity of body size, but there are many other metrics which are probably more relevant.
You linked to a page comparing brain-to-body-weight ratios, rather than any absolute features of the brain, and referring not to ants in general but to unusually miniaturized ants in which the rest of the body is shrunken. That seems pretty irrelevant.
I was using total brain mass and neuron count, not brain-to-body-mass.
I agree these are relevant evidence about quality of experience, and whether to attribute experience at all. But I would say that quality and quantity of experience are distinguishable (although the absence of experience implies quantity 0).
This statement implies that humans can be more or less special "actually", as if it were a matter of fact, of objective reality.
That is not true, however. Humans are special in the same way a roast is tasty or a host charming. It is entirely in the eye of the beholder, it's a subjective opinion and as such there is no "actually" about it.
Your point is equivalent to saying "many people have a cognitive bias that roses are more 'pretty' than they actually are".
The local explanation of this concept is the 2-place word, which I rather like.
Well yes, yes it does. Even if "specialness" is defined purely within human neurology doesn't mean you can't apply it's criteria to parts of reality and be objectively right or wrong about the result - just like, say, numbers.
Now, you could argue that humans vary with regards to how "special" humanity is to them, I suppose ... but in practice we seem to have a common cause, generally. Alternately, you could complain that paperclippers disagree about our "specialness" (or rather mean something different by the term, since their specialness algorithm returns high values for paperclips and low ones for humans and rocks), and is therefore insufficiently objective, but ...
I disagree. Here is the relevant difference: if you're using "special" unconditionally, you're only expressing a fuzzy opinion which is just that, an opinion. To get to the level of facts you need to make your "special" conditional on some specific standard or metric and thus convert it into a measurement.
It's still the same as saying that prettiness of roses is objective. Unconditionally, it's not. But if you want to, you can define 'prettiness' sufficiently precisely to make it a measurement and then you can objectively talk about prettiness of roses.
Indeed. The difference being that humans don't all have the same prettiness-metrics, which is why the comparison fails.
Humans all have the same specialness metrics?? I don't think so.
As mentioned in the original post, the same can be said of race: I may subjectively prefer white people.
You might bite the bullet here and say that yes, in fact, racism, sexism etc. is morally acceptable, but I think most people would agree that these __isms are wrong, and so speciesism must also be wrong.
This does not follow.
Yes. That's perfectly fine. In fact, if you examine the revealed preferences (e.g. who people prefer to have as their neighbours or who do they prefer to marry) you will see that most people in reality do prefer others of their own race.
And, of course, the same can be said of sex, too. Unless you are an evenhanded bi, you're most certainly guilty of preferring some specific sex (or maybe gender, it varies).
"Morally acceptable" is a judgement, it is conditional on which morality you're using as your standard. Different moralities will produce different moral acceptability for the same actions.
Perhaps you wanted to say "socially acceptable"? In particular, "socially acceptable in contemporary US"? That, of course, is a very different thing.
Sigh. This is a rationality forum, no? And you're using emotionally charged guilt-by-association arguments? (it's actually designed guilt-by-association since the word "speciesism" was explicitly coined to resemble "racism", etc.).
Warning: HERE BE MIND-KILLERS!
I apologize for presenting the argument in a way that's difficult to understand. Here are the facts:
Is there a better way to phrase this?
(* "We" here means the broader LW community. I realize that you disagree, but I didn't know that at the time of writing.)
By the way, thank you for spelling out your position with a clear, valid argument that keeps the conversation moving forward. In the heat of argument we often forget to express our appreciation of well-posed comments.
This does not follow. (It can be repaired by adding an "all" to the antecedent but then then the conclusion in '3' would not follow from 1 and 2.)
Basically, no. Your argument is irredeemably flawed.
This is not a core belief of the broader LW community. An actual core belief of the LW community:
I'm not sure that is quite true. It is controversial and many are not comfortable with it without caveats.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
That's curious. My and your ideas of morality are radically different. There's even not that much of a common base.
Let me start by re-expressing in my words how do I read your position (so that you could fix my misinterpretations). First, you're using "morally acceptable" without any qualifiers of conditionals. This means that you believe there is One True Morality, the Correct One, on the basis of which we can and should judge actions and opinions. Given your emphasis on "evidence", you also seem to believe that this One True Morality is objective, that is, can be derived from actual reality and proven by facts.
Second, you divide subjective opinions into two classes: "not based on evidence" and, presumably, "based on evidence". Note that this is not at all the same thing as "falsifiable" vs. "non-falsifiable". For example, let's say I try two kinds of wine and declare that I like the second wine better. Is such a subjective opinion "based on evidence"?
You also have major logic problems here (starting with the all/some issue), but it's a mess and I think other comments have addressed it.
To contrast, I'll give a brief outline of how I view morality. I think of morality as a more or less coherent set of values at the core of which is a subset of moral axioms. These moral axioms are certainly not arbitrary -- many factors influence them, the three biggest ones are probably biology, societal/cultural influence, and individual upbringing and history -- but they are not falsifiable. You cannot prove them right or wrong.
Evidence certainly matters, but it matters mostly at the interface of moral values and actions: evidence tells you whether the actual outcomes of your actions match your intent and your values. It is, of course, often the case that they do not. However evidence cannot tell you what you should want or what you should value.
Heh. I neither believe you have the power to speak for the entire LW community, nor do I care what you find morally acceptable or unacceptable.
As has been noted, your logic is flawed. However the bigger issue is your confusion between arguments and declarative statements (that e.g. reflect personal values). Arguments serve to persuade, to change someone's mind -- subjective opinions do not. If I say I hate tomatoes that's not a reason for you to modify your attitude towards tomatoes, it's just an observation about myself. I am not sure what do you mean by "accepting" it.
Y'got some... logical problems going on, there.
Firstly, your (1), while true, is misleading; it should read "If you believe that subjective opinions which are not based on evidence are morally acceptable, then you must believe that [long, LONG, probably literally infinite list of possible views, of which sexism and racism may be members but which contains innumerably more other stuff] are morally acceptable". Sure, accepting beliefs without evidence may lead us to sexism and/or racism, but that's hardly our biggest problem at that point.
Secondly, you presuppose that sexism and racism are necessarily not based on evidence. Of course, you may say that sexism and racism are by definition not based on evidence, because if there's evidence, then it's not sexist/racist, but that would be one of those "37 Ways That Bad Stuff Can Happen" or what have you; most people, after all, do not use your definition of "sexist" or "racist"; the common definition takes no notice of whether there's evidence or not.
Thirdly, for every modus ponens there is a modus tollens ā and, as in this case, vice versa: we could decide that "subjective" opinions not based on evidence are morally acceptable (after all, we're not talking about empirical matters, right? These are moral positions). This, by your (1) and modus ponens, would lead us to accept sexism and racism. Intended? Or no?
Finally ā and this is the big one ā it strikes me as fundamentally backwards to start from broad moral positions, and reason from them to a decision about whether we need evidence for our moral positions.
Thank you Said for your helpful comments. How is this:
Regarding your "Finally" point - I was responding to Lumifer's statement:
I agree that most people wouldn't take this position, so my argument is usually more confusing than helpful. But in this case it seemed relevant.
This has the same flaw as before, just phrased a little differently. "Suppose I am ordering a pizza. If we don't require it to be square, then all sorts of ridiculous possibilities are possible, such as a pizza a half inch wide and 20 feet long. We don't want these ridiculous possibilities, so we better make sure to always order square pizzas."
"If we don't require evidence, then ridiculous conclusions are possible" can be interpreted in English to mean
1) In any case where we don't require evidence, ridiculous conclusions are possible.
2) In at least one case where we don't require evidence, ridiculous conclusions are possible.
Most people who think that the statement is true would be agreeing with it in sense #2, just like with the pizzas. And your argument depends on sense #1.
In other words, you're assuming that if evidence isn't used to rule out racism, then nothing else can rule out racism either.
Fair enough. What if we replace (1) with
Keep in mind that I was responding to Lumifer's comment:
This is not intended to be a grand, sweeping axiom of ethics. I was just pointing out that allowing these subjective opinions proves more than we probably want.
The issue isn't whether you require evidence. The issue is solely which moral yardstick are you using.
The "evidence" is the application of that particular moral metric to beings A and B, but it seems to me you're should be more concerned with the metric itself.
To give a crude and trivial example, if the metric is "Long noses are better than short noses" then the evidence is length of noses of A and B and on the basis of this evidence we declare the long-nose being A to be more valuable (conditional on this metric, of course) than the short-nose being B. I don't think you'll be happy with this outcome :-)
Oh, and you are still starting with the predefined conclusion and then looking for ways to support it.
There's a bigger logical flaw: "belief that subjective opinions not based on evidence are acceptable" is an ambiguous English phrase. It can mean belief that:
1) if X is a subjective opinion, then X is acceptable.
2) there exists at least one X such that X is a subjective opinion and is acceptable
Needless to say, the argument depends on it being #1, while most people who would say such a thing would mean #2.
I believe that hairdryers are for sale at Wal-Mart. That doesn't mean that every hairdryer in existence is for sale at Wal-Mart.
Good point, thank you. I have tried again here.
Yes, good point ā the "some" vs. "all" distinction is being ignored.
Lumifer, should the charge of "mind-killers" be levelled at anti-speciesists or meat-eaters? (If you were being ironic, apologies for being so literal-minded.)
It can be levelled at most people who use employ either of those terms.
Neither. It just looks like it would be a useful sign in front of animal-rights discussions.
I see people having strong emotional priors and marshaling arguments in favour of predefined conclusions. Not that different from politics, really, except maybe there's less tribal identity involved.
I'm fairly sure it's for the examples referencing the politically charged issues of racism and sexism.
Brain size or number of neurons might work within a general group such as "mammals", however for example birds seem to be significantly smarter in some sense than a mammal of equivalently-sized brain, probably accounting for some difference in underlying architecture.
Do you have a specific bird and mammal in mind?
Brain mass grows with body mass. It's so noisy that people can't decide whether it is the 2/3 or 3/4 power of body mass.* It is said that a mouse is as smart as a cow. What the cow is doing with all that gray matter, I don't know. Smart animals, like apes, dolphins, and ravens have bigger brains than the trend line, but the deviation is small, so they have smaller brains than larger animals. From this point of view, saying that birds are smart for their brain size is just saying that they are small.
* probably the right answer is 3/4 and 2/3 is just promoted by people who found 3/4 inexplicable, but Geoffrey West says that denominators of 4 are OK.
Well yea. Although i guess mammals tend to have bigger brain relative their bodies so you'd still expect the opposite?
Some of the relevant differences to look at are energy consumption, synapses, relative emphasis on different brain regions, selective pressure on different functions, sensory vs cognitive processing, neuron and nerve size (which affects speed and energy use), speed/firing rates. I'm just introducing the basic point here. Also see my other point about the distinction between intelligence and experience.
I think there's a link not showing due to broken formatting.
How small a subsystem can experience pleasure or pain? If we developed configurations specifically for this purpose and sacrificed all the other things you normally want out of a brain we could likely get far more sentience per gram of neurons than you get with any existing brain. If someone built a "happy neuron farm" of these, would that be a good thing? Would a "sad neuron farm" be bad?
EDIT: expanded this into a top level post.
I don't think that we should be confident that such things are all that matter (indeed, I think that's not true), or that the value is independent of features like complexity (a thermostat program vs an autonomous social robot).
I would answer "yes" and "yes," especially in expected value terms.
I fully agree with this point you make, I should have mentioned this. I think "probabilistic discounting" should refer to both "probability of being sentient" and "intensity of experiences given sentient". I'm not convinced that (relative) brain size makes a difference in this regard, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out, so this indeed factors in probabilistically and I don't consider this to be speciesist.
Isn't it better to consider brain-to-body mass ratios? A lion isn't 1.5 orders of magnitude smarter than a housecat. I wouldn't assume that quantity of experience is linear in the number of neurons.
Computer performance in chess (among many other things) scales logarithmically or worse with computer speeds/hardware. Humans with more time and larger collaborating groups also show diminishing returns.
But if we're talking about reinforcement learning and sensory experience in themselves, we're not interested in the (sublinear) usefulness of scaling for intelligence, but the number of subsystems undergoing the morally relevant processes. Neurons are still a rough proxy for that (details of the balance of nervous system tissue between functions, energy supply, firing rates, and other issues would matter substantially), but should be far closer to linear.
I would prefer to see posts like this in the Discussion section.
May I ask why?
I think Main should be for posts that directly pertain to rationality. This post doesn't seem to do that.
That said, my standards for what belongs in main seem somewhat different from those of other users. For instance I think "The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ" belongs in Discussion as well, and that post is not only in Main but promoted to boot.
Since grandparent received so many upvotes, I'm going to explain my reasoning for posting in Main:
Rules of thumb:
(At least one of) LW's primary goal(s) is to get people thinking about far future scenarios to improve the world. LW is about rationality, but it is also about ethics. Whether anti-speciesism is especially important or useful is something that people have different opinions on, but the question itself is clearly important because it may lead to different/adjusted prioritizing in practice.
I disagree with the FAQ in that respect (among others-- see for instance my thoughts on the use of the term "tapping out"). My preference is that people only post to Main if their post discusses core Less Wrong topics, and maybe not even then.
Upvoted for the "directly pertain to rationality" rule of thumb; I agree with that. That said, I thought that the Anti-FAQ was appropriate for Main.
The anti-FAQ was of much higher quality.
This strikes me as a very impatient assessment. The human infant will turn into a human, and the piglet will turn into a pig, and so down the road A through E will suggest treating them differently.
Similarly, the demented can be given the reverse treatment (though it works differently); they once deserved moral standing, and thus are extended moral standing because the extender can expect that when their time comes, they will be treated by society in about the same way as society treated its elders when they were young. (This mostly falls under B, except the reciprocation is not direct.)
(Looking at the comments, Manfred makes a similar argument more vividly over here.)
My sperm has the potential to become human. When I realized almost all of them were dying because of my continued existence, I decided that I will have to kill myself. It was the only rational thing to do.
It seems to me there is a significant difference between requiring an oocyte to become a person and requiring sustenance to become a person. I think about half of zygotes survive the pregnancy process, but almost all sperm don't turn into people.