Reflections on Ethical Vegetarianism, Part 1
Dissecting the Huemer-Adelstein exchange
Now that you’ve watched and/or read the Matthew Adelstein-Mike Huemer conversation on the ethics of insect suffering, I hope you’re ready to hear my reaction.
I’m going to post this in two parts.
In part 1, I dissect Adelstein and Huemer’s exchange with each other.
In part 2, I reply to their criticism of me.
In case it’s not obvious, I hold the intelligence of both of these philosophers in highest regard. As I’ve often said, Huemer is the best philosopher. And young Adelstein has immense potential, though I fear he’s too dogmatic to reach his potential.
In our earlier exchanges on ethical vegetarianism, Huemer was highly confident that insects are not conscious. This allowed him to dismiss the empirical premise on which my challenge rests. In their interview, however, Adelstein very effectively rebuts Huemer’s skepticism. The connection between neurons and consciousness is complex, so insisting “Bugs don’t have the right kind of brains to be conscious” is silly. Furthermore, insects typically respond to pain like any other animal. While they may feel less chronic pain than higher animals, they still seem to intensely feel acute pain. As Adelstein tells Huemer:
But one thing that seems plausibly true of fish and also potentially true of insects, is that it looks like they have the immediate shooting chronic pain. Sorry, opposite of chronic pain, like the immediate shooting pain when you cut someone, but they don't really have chronic pain. And so if that's true, that would explain the findings of why they seem to kind of ignore injuries after they've gotten them, but when you do injure them for the first time, then they act very adversely. And this is kind of what you'd expect if insects have these really short lives. Having lasting chronic pain that influences their behavior in the long term isn't that beneficial.
Adelstein surprised me (and, I think, Huemer as well) when he used “insects suffer horribly” to craft a utilitarian argument for mass extermination of insects. But there’s a weird logic to it. In Adelstein’s eyes, bug suffering is so horrible that the typical bug would be better off dead. Death doesn’t just end their misery, but the misery of all their descendants.
Adelstein also has a creative biological story for why bugs are better-off dead but humans aren’t: Bugs use a “high offspring, low survival probability” reproductive strategy (r-selection), while humans are a “few offspring, high survival probability” reproductive strategy (K-selection). The typical bug is a hedonic loser; the typical human, a hedonic winner.
That said, Adelstein rushes to advocate mass extermination of bugs, instead of calling for a massive research project on bug consciousness. Question: Given bugs’ fragility, isn’t it fairly likely that bugs and humans are miserable for similar percentages of their lives? Humans spend more more total time lingering in agony than insects. How often does a bug survive severe trauma for even a few days? If you respond, “Well, bugs might suffer from long-lasting starvation,” consider the fact that many bugs have evolved to eat less frequently than humans.
Like most utilitarians, Adelstein ends up with surprisingly conventional moral conclusions. Killing bugs to build houses is actually good — not because humans’ welfare is vastly more important than bug welfare, but because a dead bug is a better-off bug. But Adelstein could readily reach totally insane conclusions with a little extra thought. Consider: By his logic, exterminating all bees would be great for bees. Unfortunately, losing these pollinators would probably mean mass famine for humans. Since bees vastly outnumber humans, however, Adelstein should still consider bee extermination a net good (except insofar as the combined extermination of bees and humans ends up increasing the total number of non-bee insects).
Impatient readers will think that Adelstein and Huemer derive ethical vegetarianism from the same moral foundation, but they totally don’t. Adelstein is a bullet-biting utilitarian. As a result, he is immune to all moral counterexamples. The sole way to change his mind on moral questions is to show that he’s made a mistake about the best way to maximize total happiness. Huemer, in contrast, is a moral pluralist, skeptical of all comprehensive moral theories. He derives his ethical vegetarianism from a more modest foundation than “Always do whatever maximizes total happiness.” Namely:
1. Suffering is bad.
2. It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.The upshot: Morally speaking, Adelstein and I are at an impasse. If none of the classic counterexamples to utilitarianism sway him, what hope do I have? The most I can say is that, for all his brilliance, Adelstein begs the question when he says things like “[S]uffering is bad. This isn't because we can do calculus or are smart, the badness of your headaches have nothing to do with how smart you are.” While this is a trivial deduction from utilitarianism, many people think that a random human’s headache is obviously morally worse than the painful death of a random mouse. If such people are right, utilitarianism is wrong.
In contrast, Huemer and I start from a similar place of moral pluralism. I freely concede that both of the moral premises underlying his ethical vegetarianism initially seem plausible. But since they lead to radically implausible conclusions, the only rational response is to reject at least one of the premises. Remember, if a is a good argument for b, then not-b is automatically a good argument for not-a. Which in turn requires us to weigh the plausibility of a versus not-b.
For example, you could have a=”It is wrong to cause enormous suffering to build a swimming pool,” and b=”It is wrong to cause enormous suffering to ants to build a swimming pool.” a implies b, so not-b implies not-a, which means we have to weigh the (nontrivial) plausibility of ”It is wrong to cause enormous suffering to build a swimming pool” against the (overwhelming) plausibility of “It is NOT wrong to cause enormous suffering to ants to build a swimming pool.”
On further reflection, both Huemerian premises are overstated. To repeat myself:
Some suffering is morally good. Making Hitler burn in Hell for eternity, for example, would be morally wonderful, even if zero potential wrongdoers were deterred.
The moral badness (and goodness) of suffering varies widely depending on the characteristics of the being who suffers. The suffering of low-intelligence creatures like bugs is vastly less bad than the suffering of high-intelligence creatures like humans.
How do I “prove” either of my alternative premises? I don’t — and ultimately, neither do any other moral philosophers. To “prove” something means to logically derive it from other premises. When you evaluate foundational premises, however, you have to rely on intuition. How plausible is the premise? How plausible are its implications? That’s all I’ve got. That’s all anyone’s got. See Huemer’s Ethical Intuitionism for detailed discussion.
Isn’t it better to have one foundational premise, and derive everything from that one premise? Only if that foundational premise is supremely invulnerable to counterexamples. Otherwise, you should be a moral pluralist, who thinks there are multiple compatible foundational moral premises. After studying the history of moral philosophy for years, I haven’t located a single supremely invulnerable foundational moral premise. Huemer should agree, seeing as he’s the man who made me a moral pluralist.
[to be continued]
Besides moral pluralism, there's a further question as to whether one accepts any kind of *epistemic priority* of more fundamental moral judgments over less fundamental ones.
Compare: Imagine someone argued, "Utilitarianism is true. Killing Bob is wrong. Therefore, Killing Bob must fail to maximize utility." Despite its logical validity, this seems like bad reasoning. The problem is that a utilitarian isn't in a position to judge whether killing Bob is wrong or not *until* they've determined the more fundamental question of whether it fails to maximize utility.
I think a lot of moral judgments have this feature. We shouldn't be confident of various particular moral judgments *unless* we have good grounds for prior confidence in the underlying empirical facts that ground the moral judgment. The grounding facts have epistemic priority.
Now, a big worry about commonsense judgments about the moral innocuousness of damaging ants (etc.) is that we tend to assume (as Huemer used to) that ants aren't conscious. That seems part of our commonsense view of the world. But then we can't necessarily hold onto the moral judgment if we update our associated empirical beliefs. We need to go back and assess the intrinsic credibility of the competing underlying moral principles -- whether it really seems like the badness of suffering is conditional on high intelligence, and not just the intrinsic aversive feel of the suffering itself. (Imagine yourself getting progressively stupider and see whether there's some point at which you think your pain stops mattering.)
Crucially, the epistemic priority thesis suggests that we cannot, at this step, appeal back to our commonsense moral verdicts about the innocuousness of crushing ants to build swimming pools. The fundamental moral principles need to be assessed for their *intrinsic* credibility, and then the particular moral verdicts simply follow as they may.
These arguments are starting to bug me.