Reflections on Ethical Vegetarianism, Part 2

Reply to Huemer and Adelstein's criticism of me

[continued from yesterday]

In the last fifth of their interview, Adelstein and Huemer discuss my views. I now respond point by point.

13. Adelstein:

    And it just almost feels like there's something different going on when Bryan Caplan does moral reasoning than when I do. Where it almost feels like what he's doing is an exercise, and just like finding things about the world that would sound weird and then if you can like offload them onto the opposing view then like that's a cost for them.

    Adelstein’s right, there is a difference. I’m doing normal moral philosophy, where you can challenge grand moral theories with pointed counterexamples. Adelstein is doing dogmatic utilitarianism, where you instantly reject all the counterexamples because they contradict your grand moral theory.

    Take, for example, the classic “Sheriff scenario” counterexample to utilitarianism, where a Sheriff can avert a bloody riot by executing an innocent man. You have the option of saying, “Does not compute, utilitarianism is always true, your example proves nothing.” But the normal thing is to admit, “Yes, it seems like utilitarianism gives the wrong answer, so that undermines the likelihood that utilitarianism is correct.” I’m doing the normal thing. We should all do the normal thing.

14. Huemer:

    In the Three Body Problem, there's a point where okay so the aliens the trisolarans, they've been doing these advanced physics particle experiments and at some point they discover that when they do these experiments they're actually destroying entire universes. Okay and then the alien decides to use to give an argument that destroying other civilizations is not a big deal because like yeah we just destroy universes all the time.

    No, that’s not what I’m doing. I don’t say that ignoring animal suffering is not a big deal because we do it all the time. I’m saying that the moral importance of suffering seems to me to heavily depend on the intelligence of the sufferer. Most people share this intuition, and both Adelstein and Huemer just keep insisting that we’re wrong and epistemically negligent.

15. Huemer continues:

    It's not totally implausible that there would be some psychological influence in this direction if you find out that you've been doing this all along then you sort of like downplay how important it is and then other horrible things that are similar start to seem better.

    I agree that it’s not totally psychologically implausible. In fact, I take this possibility seriously. But after taking it seriously, I stand my ground. I’m in the same position as Huemer in The Problem of Political Authority when he weighs the utilitarian view that it’s wrong for him to buy an extra jacket in a world where other people are hungry. Yes, maybe he refuses to accept this “undeniable” truth because he’s trying to weasel out of his onerous moral obligations to total strangers. But after pondering this possibility, he still thinks it’s moral permissible to buy the jacket.

16. Adelstein:

    If the world is weird, just as a matter of fact, then there should be weird ethical judgments. So like you were responding to the charge that factory farming is the worst thing in the world is weird. Like what's unintuitive because we don't normally vividly consider the fact that we're torturing a population as large as the number of people who have ever lived every two years, causing more agony in a few years than has ever existed in all of human history.

    OK, I’ve vividly considered this fact, and I’m not remotely persuaded. No matter how much I think about the issue, I still think that one human baby’s life is more morally valuable than the lives of a million wild birds. I don’t know how to convince Adelstein or Huemer that I’m right, but the problem isn’t lack of vivid consideration.

17. To be fair to ethical vegetarians, I agree that most meat-eaters would be dumbfounded by their arguments. Walter Block’s piece on this issue was truly terrible. But the best explanation isn’t that the arguments for ethical vegetarianism are unanswerable. The best explanation is that most humans are terrible at philosophy! They have no decent response to solipsism, skepticism, moral relativism, eliminative materialism, the Problem of Other Minds, or virtually any other fundamental challenge to common sense. But common sense is still correct.

18. One of the main lessons I learned from Huemer is that straightforward appeals to common sense are philosophically very strong. Faced with skepticism about the external world, for example, one of the best replies really is: “The conclusion that we can’t know if there’s a physical world contradicts common sense, so either one of your premises or your reasoning are wrong. I’m not smart enough to figure out more, but that’s enough.”

19. Huemer:

    You know how they say you can't infer an ought from an is? Now, maybe that's true, maybe that's not, but surely you can't go the other way, right? Like you can't just take your moral judgments and then figure out the descriptive facts of the world from your moral judgments, right? Like something has gone wrong there, okay? So like that's kind of like what the Caplan argument is doing.

    I protest that I am not doing this. Huemer would be correct if I denied the descriptive fact that factory farming causes immense suffering, but I don’t. I’m weighing one moral premise against another, which is precisely what moral reasoning is all about.

20. Huemer:

    If every time you scratched your ear an infinite number of people were tortured to death it would scratching your ear would be the worst thing you ever did.

    I agree, because this is a well-crafted hypothetical. But I still don’t think it’s wrong to make animals suffer horribly for minor benefits.

21. Back in 2010, Huemer wrote the following in a symposium on Ayn Rand’s Objectivism:

    Objectivists seem to find that essay [“The Objectivist Ethics”] completely convincing. But hardly anyone else finds it at all convincing. This is not a trivial observation — one often finds that people who do not accept a whole philosophical system nevertheless find certain parts of it plausible. And one often finds that people who are not ultimately persuaded by an argument nevertheless see some plausibility in it. But neither of these things is true of the argument of “The Objectivist Ethics”—hardly anyone finds that argument even slightly plausible, unless they also buy into virtually all of Ayn Rand’s views. This is not true of most of her other views: one would not be surprised to find a non-Objectivist who nevertheless thinks Rand’s political views are reasonable, or her epistemological views, or her aesthetic theories. The explanation is simple: the theory of “The Objectivist Ethics” is simultaneously the most distinctive and the least plausible, worst defended of all of Rand’s major ideas.

    I don’t think that Huemer’s arguments for ethical vegetarianism are as implausible and poorly defended as Rand’s arguments in “The Objectivist Ethics.” (Adelstein’s, though, are). But frankly, they are self-confidently cultish in the same way. Almost no one who isn’t a zealous ethical vegetarian finds any of the following positions “even slightly plausible”:

    1. A year’s worth of animal suffering is worse than the Holocaust.

    2. Exterminating mice because they’re befouling your basement is morally wrong.

    3. If humans and bees were the only species, and humans could end bee suffering by eradicating all bees, which would in turn reduce human living standards by 20%, they are morally obligated to do so.

    4. We should donate $1 to shrimp charities.

22. Sure, Huemer can insist, “Everyone who isn’t a zealous ethical vegetarian is morally benighted.” But this really does put him in the same boat as the cultish Objectivists. The strength of Huemer’s approach to philosophy is that you strive to start with innocuous common sense premises that would be plausible to almost anyone. If common sense happens leads to absurd conclusions, you salvage as much common sense as you can. You don’t ride the Crazy Train all the way to Absurdia.

23. Ethical vegetarianism isn’t absurd on its face, but it readily leads to absurdity. What’s the alternative? Accept the common sense views that eating meat, wearing leather, animal experimentation, and casually crushing insects is fine — and that giving money to shrimp and insect charities in a world with hungry human children is silly at best.