I'm guessing that we're thinking of different things when we read "sapience is what makes suffering bad (or possible)". Do you think that my version of the thought doesn't feature in your ethical framework? If not, what does determine which objects are morally weighty?

For me, suffering is what makes suffering bad. Or, rather, I care about any entity that is capable of having feelings and experiences. And, for each of these entities, I much prefer them not to suffer. I care about not having them suffer for their sakes, of course, not for the sake of reducing suffering in the abstract. I don't view entities as utility receptacles.

But I don't think there's anything special about sapience, per se. Rather, I only think sapeince or agentiness is relevant in so far as more sapient and more agenty entities are more capable of suffering / happiness. Which seems plausible, but isn't certain.

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Practically speaking from an animal rights perspective, this means that I would consider it a moral victory if meat eaters shifted a greater portion of their meat diet downwards towards "lower" animals like fish and arthropods

This seems plausible to me from a perspective of "these animals likely are less capable of suffering", but I think you're missing two things in your analysis: ...(1) the degree of suffering required to create the food, which varies between species, and ...(2) the amount of food provided by each animal.

When you add these two things together, you get a suffering per kg approach that has some counterintuitive conclusions, like the bulk of suffering being in chicken or fish, though I think this table is desperately in need of some updating with more and better research (something that's been on my to-do list for awhile).

After all, you'd never want people to start farming humans, right? So why agree that it's okay once it starts?

There are perfectly good circumstances to start farming animals, like when your survival depends on it. I suspect that there could be a similar situation with farming humans (or at least process them into Soylent Green). Other that that, I agree on the status quo bias.

Re slavery:

Yes, this obvious analogy occurred to me. I would feel more urgency to reevaluate my ethical system if I considered farm animals my equals. Your reasons for doing so may differ. Presumably the emancipation was in part based on that reason, in part on compassion or other reasons, I am not an expert in the subject matter.

Idea: if you're very interested in promoting veganism or vegitarianism, help make it taste better, or invest in or donate to those who are helping make it taste better. As my other much-downvoted comment showed, I am very skeptical that appeals to altruism will have nearly as much of an affect as appeals to self-interest, especially outside of this community. I believe most people eat meat because it just tastes better than their alternatives.

Grown crops are far more efficient to produce than livestock, so there are plenty of other good reasons to transition away from the use of livestock in agriculture. If steak were made to "grow on trees", why pay all that extra for the real thing? If you lower the cost of vegetarianism by improving taste, more people will adopt it. If they don't adopt it they'll still be more likely to forgo meats for vegetarian dishes if those dishes taste better.

In the case of low-quality meats (e.g. McDonalds) the taste bar isn't even set very high.

When I first decided to be a vegetarian, I simply switched from tasty hamburgers to tasty veggieburgers and there was no problem at all.

I think your sample size might have lead you astray here. My personal experience is exactly the opposite. That said, I looked for studies of meat vs. faux meat taste and didn't find anything. I wonder if a love of meat over alternatives is innate or is learned, and if there exist vegetarian recipes which really do taste as good as the real thing.

Thank you for the explanation. I was trying to play the devil's advocate a bit and I didn't think my comment would be well-received. I'm glad to have gotten a thoughtful reply.

Thinking about it some more, I was not meaning to anthropomorphize evolution, just point out homo-hypocritus. On any particular value of a person's, we have:

• What they tell people about it.
• How they act on it.
• How they feel about it.

I feel bad about a lot of suffering (mostly that closest to me, of course). However its not clear to me that what I feel is any more "me" than what I do or what I say.

Most everyone (except psychopaths) feels bad about suffering, and tells their friends the same, but they don't do much about it unless its close to their personal experience. Evolution programmed us to be hypocritical. However in this context its not clear to me why we'd chose to act on our feelings instead of feel like our actions (stop caring about distant non-cute animals), or why we'd chose to stop being hypocritical at all. We have lots of examples throughout history of large groups of people ceasing to care about suffering of certain groups, often due to social pressures. I think the tide can swing both ways here.

So I have trouble seeing how these movements would work without social pressures and appeals to self-interest. I guess there's already a lot of pro-altruism social pressure on LW?

Edit: as a personal example, I feel more altruistic than I act, and act more altruistic than I let on to others. I do this because I've only gotten disutility from being seen as a nice guy, and have refrained from a lot of overt altruism because of this. I think I'd need a change in micro-culture to change my behavior here; appeals to logic aren't going to sway me.

To be completely honest, I agree with you but find it hard to come up for a good argument for why that should be. One way I've thought about it in the past is that the parents or caretakers of a child are sort of like stewards of a property that will be inherited one day. If I'm going to inherit a mansion from my grandfather on my 18th birthday, my parents can't arbitrarily decide to burn it down when I'm 17 & 364 days old. Harming children (physically or emotionally) is damaging the person they will be when they are an adult in a similar way.

don't we also value something that can't so easily be quantified about wild animals and the wild environment?

This an interestingly common position (that I share) considering how little time people spend in the nature. What exactly is it that I value, some vague idea about wildlife that can't be had without diverse wildlife existing somewhere out there? I like to watch nature documentaries, but I'm not sure what exactly I value in them.

Consider the two groups of animals.

Group A consists of factory farmed animals which suffer a total of X units of pain in their lives. Group B consists of animals in the wild that also suffer a total of X units of pain in their lives*

We could try to reduce suffering by preventing Group A's existence (your suggestion), or we could try to reduce suffering by preventing Group B's existence. Ignoring convenience why should we choose your option?

*I used the groups so as to address the fact that the individual animals may suffer different amounts.

My other comment was downvoted below the troll level, so I'll ask here. Suppose we found a morphine-like drug which effectively and provably wireheads chickens to be happy with their living conditions, and with no side effects for humans consuming the meat. Would that answer your arguments about suffering?