Thrust said he didn't care about chickens suffering, not that they don't.
One question that doesn't seem to get asked in these discussions is, if chickens have this certain mental machinery doing certain things when I hurt them, why should I care, given that I don't already? Is there a sequence of value comparisons showing that such a non-preference is incoherent? Or a moral argument that I am not considering? If not, I'd rather just follow my actual preferences.
Thrustvectoring said:
I don't think that some animals are capable of suffering
From what Thrust has said, I think it's ambiguous between whether he cares he thinks animals can't suffer and doesn't care about them for that reason or he just doesn't care about animal suffering as you describe. Or , more likely, he is in some middle state.
As to your second point, yes that's the approach. And it seems largely that is what is happening when it comes up in the discussion here.
At this moment, it seems unclear. Wild animals are definitely a problem. I don't think they suffer more than farm animals, but they might. I'm not sure what the best intervention strategy is, but it's clear that some kind of strategy is needed, both in the short-run and long-run.
I've heard a considerable number of people on this site echo the position that wild animals suffer so much their existence must be a net negative. This strikes me as awfully unlikely; they live in the situations they're adapted to, and have the hedonic treadmill principle going for them as well. You can observe at a zoo how many animals can become neurotic when they're removed from the sorts of circumstances they're accustomed to in the wild, but all their physical needs are accounted for.
Animals are adapted to be reproductively successful in their environments, not to be maximally happy, but considering the effects constant stress can have on the fitness of animals as well as humans, it would be quite maladaptive for them to be unhappy nearly all the time.
For animals that are R-selected or, in other words, having many offspring in the hopes that some will survive, the vast majority of the offspring die very quickly. Most species of Fish, Amphibians and many less complex animals do this. 99.9% of them dieing in before reaching adulthood might be a good approximation for some species. A painful death doesn't seem worth a brief life as a wild animal.
It's true that most people wouldn't be functioning optimally if they were not somewhat happy and extrapolating this to other animals who seem to be similar to us in basic emotion, I would agree that an adult wild animal seem like they would live an alright life.
Opium in the feed? Cut their nerves? Some sort of computerised gamma-ray brain surgery? I'm certain that if there were a tiny financial incentive for agribusiness to do it then a way would swiftly be found.
It's not so hard to turn humans into living vegetables. Some sorts of head trauma seem to do it. How hard can it be to make that reliable (or at least reasonably reliable) for cows?
Least convenient world and all that: If we could prevent animal suffering by skilfully whacking calves over the head with a claw hammer, would that be a goal to which the rational vegan would aspire? It would be just as good as killing them, plus pleasure for the meat eaters. Also it would probably be possible to find people who'd enjoy doing it, so that's another plus.
So just kill all the farm animals painlessly now? Sure that sounds good. But if there will still be farm animal being raised then it seems there still is a problem. Or if you are just talking about ways of making slaughter painless for continuing to factory farm, that sounds better than nothing.
For what is worth, here are the results of a survey that Vallinder and I circulated recently. 85% of expert respondents, and 89% of LessWrong respondents, believe that there is at least a 1% chance that insects are sentient, and 77% of experts and 69% of LessWrongers believe there is at least a 20% chance that they are sentient.
Very interesting. What were they experts in? And how many people responded?
Can you summarize the properties you look for when making these kinds of estimates of whether an insect is conscious/sentient/etc.? Or do you make these judgments based on more implicit/instinctive inspection?
I mostly do it by thinking about what I would accept as evidence of pain in more complex animals and see if it is present in insects. Complex pain behavior and evolutionary and functional homology relating to pain are things to look for.
There is a quite a bit of research on complex pain behavior in crabs by Robert Elwood. I'd link his site but it doesn't seem to be up right now. You should be able to find the articles, though. Crabs have 100,000 neurons which is around what many insects have.
Here is a pdf of a paper that find that a bunch of common human mind altering drugs affecting crawfish and fruit flies.
Yes, my current estimate for that is less than 1%, but this is definitely something I should look into more closely. This has been on my to-do list for quite a while already.
Another thing to consider is that insects are a diverse bunch. I'm virtually certain that some of them aren't conscious, see for instance this type of behavior. OTOH, cockroaches or bees seem to be much more likely to be sentient.
Yes. Bees and Cockroaches both have about a million neurons compared with maybe 100,000 for most insects.
I'm already taking insects or nematodes into consideration probabilistically; I think it is highly unlikely that they are sentient, and I think that even if they are sentient, their suffering might not be as intense as that of mammals, but since their numbers are so huge, the well-being of all those small creatures makes up a non-negligible term in my utility function.
A priori, it seems that the moral weight of insects would either be dominated by their massive numbers or by their tiny capacities. It's a narrow space where the two balance and you get a non-negligible but still-not-overwhelming weight for insects in a utility function. How did you decide that this was right?
I think there are good arguments for for suffering not being weighted by number of neurons and if you assign even a 10% to that being the case you end up with insects (and maybe nematodes and zooplankton) dominating the utility function because of their overwhelming numbers.
Having said that, ways on increasing the well being of these may be quite a bit different from increasing it for larger animals. In particular, because they so many of them die so within the first few days of life, their averaged life quality seems like it would be terrible. So reducing the populations looks like the current best option.
There may be good instrumental reasons for focusing on less controversial animals and hoping that they promote the kind of antispeciesism that spills over to concern about insects and does work for improving similar situations in the future.
I'm really curious why all of the major animal welfare/rights organizations seem to be putting more emphasis on vegan outreach than on in-vitro meat/genetic modification research. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where any arbitrary (but large) contribution toward vegan outreach leads to greater suffering reduction than the same amount put toward hastening a more efficient and cruelty-free system for producing meat.
Well if vegan/vegetarian outreach is particularly effective then it may do more to develope lab meat than just donating to lab meat causes themselves (because there would be more people interested in this and similar technologies). Additionally, making people vegan/vegetarian may have a stronger effect in promoting anti speciesism in general which seems like it will be of larger overall benefit than just ending factory farming. This seems like it would happen because thoughts follow actions.
You mean you want a ride? I'm afraid I don't know everyone's LW handle, maybe I'm confused, but if not pm me with more details?
Yeah, I would like a ride and it's Max.
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Not everyone has harm (avoidance) as their primary moral value; many people would voluntarily accept harm to have more purity, autonomy, or economic efficiency, to give three examples.
I don't think that very many people would except extreme harm to have these things, though. I used to think that I valued some non-experiential things very strongly, but I don't think that I was taking seriously how strong my preference not to be tortured is. And for most people I don't think there are peak levels of those three things that could outweigh torture.