Not so sure. Dave believes that pains have an "ought-not-to-be-in-the-world-ness" property that pleasures lack. And in the discussions I have seen, he indeed was not prepared to accept that small pains can be outweighed by huge quantities of pleasure. Brian was oscillating between NLU and NU. He recently told me he found the claim convincing that such states as flow, orgasm, meditative tranquility, perfectly subjectively fine muzak, and the absence of consciousness were all equally good.

David, is this thing with the names a game?

Hey, I already said that I actually do have some empathy and altruism for chickens. "Warm and fuzzy" isn't an insult: it's just another part of how our minds work that we don't currently understand (like consciousness). My primary point is that we should hold off on assigning huge value to things prior to actually understanding what they are and how they work.

Usually when we say "consciousness", we mean self-awareness. It's a phenomenon of our cognition that we can't explain yet, we believe it does causal work, and if it's identical with self-awareness, it might be why we're having this conversation.

I personally don't think it has much to do with moral worth, actually. It's very warm-and-fuzzy to say we ought to place moral value on all conscious creatures, but I actually believe that a proper solution to ethics is going to dissolve the concept of "moral worth" into some components like (blatantly making names up here) "decision-theoretic empathy" (agents and instances where it's rational for me to acausally cooperate), "altruism" (using my models of others' values as a direct component of my own values, often derived from actual psychological empathy), and even "love" (outright personal attachment to another agent for my own reasons -- and we'd usually say love should imply altruism).

So we might want to be altruistic towards chickens, but I personally don't think chickens possess some magical valence that stops them from being "made of atoms I can use for something else", other than the general fact that I feel some very low level of altruism and empathy towards chickens. Or, to argue Timelessly, we might say that I ought to operate with some level of altruism for the general class of minds like mine, which includes most Earth-based animals, since the foundations of our cognitive architectures evolved very, very slowly (and often in parallel shapes, under similar selection pressures); certainly I personally generally feel a moral impulse to leave Nature alone, since I cannot treat with most of it as one equal being to another.

Consciousness definitely exists, but I think it's worth not treating it as magic.

I also wonder if the extreme "abolitionist" position (with regard to suffering) should be listed along anti-aging and intelligence enhancement. Abolitionism seems like it might be off-putting even to people who might support the first two planks.

Another interesting question is to ask current vegetarians how much they would pay to stay vegetarian.

You are right, the mirror test is evidence of self-concept. I do not take it to be nearly sufficient evidence, but it is evidence.

Humans generally fail the mirror test below the age of eighteen months.

This supports my view that very young humans are not self-aware (and therefore not morally important) either.

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 — and, sans compelling evidence, probable outright dismissal — 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.)

the same can be said of race: I may subjectively prefer white people.

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).

You might bite the bullet here and say that yes, in fact, racism, sexism etc. is morally acceptable

"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.

I think most people would agree that these __isms are wrong, and so speciesism must also be wrong.

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 don't see how this is relevant to my argument. I'm just pointing out that your definition doesn't track the concept you (probably) have in mind; I wasn't saying anything empirical* at all.

*other than about the topology of concept-space.