"Exterminating mice because they’re befouling your basement is morally wrong."
Many people who aren't ethical vegetarians/vegans prefer to use humane mousetraps - presumably for moral reasons.
"We should donate $1 to shrimp charities."
Many people who are not ethical vegatarian/vegans donate regularly to charities that help bees and butterflies.
"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."
I don't think this makes any sense for an ethical vegetarian/vegan. It's basically the same as arguing that we should end all human suffering by making humans extinct.
Honestly though I think Bryan's biggest failure here is failing to recognise that cows and pigs are much closer to humans in intelligence than they are to insects. This is clearly motivated reasoning.
Mice, removed from their homes and turned out into the wild, are going to be violently and swiftly predated anyhow.
There are good reasons to donate to charities that help insects which have nothing to do with utilitarianism. For instance, they are quite pretty and interesting creatures with whom I’m happy to share a planet. There is considerable overlap between people who love insects in general but also readily capture and kill specimens for personal collections.
The bee example is Caplan condensing some of the stuff Adelstein in particular was saying in the conversation Caplan in responding to. I agree with what you say, except Adelstein seems to think that insect lives are so bad that they might not be worth living.
In terms of both intelligence and sense of consciousness, there's no inherent difference between an adult pig and a special needs toddler besides being of different species. We just avoid that argument because the implications are too disturbing to fathom.
A preponderance of evidence leads us to that conclusion. So either one denies it based on some (usually) religious epistemological/theological framework or just an innate discomfort with the implications.
Are bee and butterfly donations meant to relieve suffering or allow more bees and butterflies to be born and survive longer? I doubt any donors care about their suffering.
Bryan: it’s OK to eat meat even though it has a big cost to animals and small benefit to people.
You: That implies dog torture for fun is also permitted, right?
Me (defending Bryan): Torturing a dog is bad for the torturer too, so the analogy fails. Even if you value the dog’s welfare at zero, there are still good reasons to not torture dogs that rely only on looking at whether torturing an animal is good for the psyche of of the person involved.
Would it be just as bad for a psychiatric hospital to give a sadistic patient a realistic robot dog to torture, as to give a living dog? Almost as bad?
I dunno, we’re pretty far into goofytown with this example. Personally, I’m against dog torture both because the dog’s feelings matter and because it’s wrong for the human to torture, so real dog is worse. But again, this is pretty contrived and I’m not sure the illuminative value of the example is very high.
I mean, the contrivance is meant to test whether a particular person's (to me, prima facie insane) claim that the primary badness in a human torturing a puppy for a tiny bit of fun lies in corruption of the human rather than badness of tortured puppy experience, is a genuine moral attitude, or a rationalization latched onto because they realize they do something strongly analogous to puppy torture. If someone doesn't want to talk about goofy things like "torturing" robot dogs, teddy bears and video game NPCs, maybe they shouldn't start with a claim that's goofy enough to require such further probing. Right?
The point is that there are obviously a lot of cases where it's morally wrong to make animals suffer horribly for minor benefits, such as at least many instances of torturing a dog for fun, or mildly hurting a dog for fun (such as by kicking it).
Who decides what is morally wrong? “Mildly hurting” a dog? One could easily argue that tug of war hurts a dog, or that kicking a dog away from the BBQ hurts it.
Please tell me you're joking. It's such an obvious truth that there are things that you can do to a dog that are morally wrong (whether moral realism is true or false).
I don't believe that your values are so antithetical to the vast majority of other humans' moral values that you disagree. I think you just want to disagree and are trying to find something to say that makes it seem reasonable for you to disagree.
I have found that when people say X is obvious instead of just stating X, they know it's not obvious and they know there are differences of opinion but they don't want to go to the trouble of proving the superiority of their opinion.
I don’t think “causing large amounts of suffering for comparably trivial joy is wrong” is less initially plausible than any of the crazy-seeming conclusions you’re suggesting — indeed, it seems like just about the most initially plausible normative claim I can think of.
But there’s many reasons to think the initial plausibility of the conclusions that seem crazy is a lot more suspicious, e.g., status quo bias. Compare: to most people, anarcho-capitalism seems utterly insane and indeed crazier than a lot of the common-sense views that you and Huemer argue should be strong evidence for substantial libertarianism. But there’s significant biases involved that make people not want to accept non-statist views.
Additionally, a lot of the source of common sense views on issues like insects pointing in one direction is tied to empirical beliefs (e.g., about their consciousness). It seems like common sense is a much worse guide to empirical beliefs about difficult scientific questions than it is to normative questions about how we should act.
I think you’re confusing the ethical vegetarian argument and attacking straw men. Ethical vegetarianism is about pain and suffering.
“I still think that one human baby’s life is more morally valuable than the lives of a million wild birds.” However, one baby’s feeling of pain is unlikely to be greater than the pain of a million birds.
You also lumped together “eating meat, wearing leather, animal experimentation, and casually crushing insects”. These differ vastly in how much pain and suffering they cause. Eating meat can mean factory farmed animals suffering months and sometimes years of misery and pain, or it can mean hunting a wild animal which usually suffers momentary pain before it dies. Ethical vegetarianism cares about the process way more than the outcome. No ethical vegetarian is against eating a deer if you find it dead in the woods.
The reason ethical vegetarians are ok with killing insects is because their capacity to feel pain is greatly diminished compared to mammals, their pain is usually momentary, and the benefits we derive from their deaths are large (transportation, construction, etc.)
The animals we eat feel far more pain for far longer, and there are cheap and easy substitutes for animal products as well as the option of simply treating them better while using them. I really don’t think it’s that absurd.
“A year’s worth of animal suffering is worse than the Holocaust.” We see the Holocaust as worse because other factors other than the amount of suffering, such as the moral corruption of the perpetrators compared to the ethical standards of the time, and our ability to empathize with the sufferers based on pictures and testimonies, and the total pointlessness of the Holocaust compared to the expedience of factory farming.
Perhaps if we saw more of what animals experience and the scale, we might feel that it is “worse”. In terms of the amount of suffering, I’m not sure which one has caused more.
I am surprised by Bryan's commitment to common sense and intuition when it comes to moral philosophy. Much of humanity's success has been due to our ability to use reason to transcend our limited and often wrong biases. Is quantum mechanics obviously wrong because it completely violates our intuitions and common sense?
I also think the "Sheriff scenario” has been debunked from many angles as a counter example to utilitarianism and some of the problems are even mentioned in the linked Wikipedia article. I am not a utilitarian, but I think the only logically valid objection to utilitarianism is "I do not like some of the outcomes when utilitarianism is faithfully applied because they contradict my common sense and intuition", which leads back to my first point.
Quantum mechanics is testable and disprovable. Moral philosophy is simply not. This is probably we know the charge of the electron to ten decimal places but nobody has yet managed to weigh a human soul.
As with anti-consequentialist thought experiments in general, when I take steps to rectify the sleazy attention biases at work in Sheriff, any tension goes away. If I imagine myself spending equal time (say 5 minutes each) reflecting upon the lives of 100 friendly acquaintances, with all off their happiness, goals, relationships, and then being asked in a forced choice whether I'd prefer to have one of them falsely accused and summarily executed, or 99 of them die in a riot, the intuitive answer is clearly the former.
I think the largest hole in this argument is the fact that common sense moral judgements change over time. Enslaving a group of people was morally permissible via common sense for thousands of years.
First, this argument proves too much. In general it just shows that all common moral judgements could be wildly wrong, not that this specific one (animal welfare) is analogous.
Second, slavery was hotly debated and many members of slave owning societies were deeply troubled by the practice.
Finally, there was always a large group of people opposed to slavery - the slaves themselves - and there were many slaves and former slaves who were able to advocate for their own liberty. There can be no shrimp Frederick Douglas or chicken 54th Massachusetts to demonstrate the humanity and courage of the oppressed.
I don't believe ancient Greeks were troubled by the practice. I think that idea only occurred among Christians.
> Finally, there was always a large group of people opposed to slavery - the slaves themselves
No, that's historically illiterate. Spartacus didn't rebel to abolish slavery but merely to escape it themselves. Many former slaves have become slave-owners.
If the moral importance of suffering is heavily dependant on intelligence. Why is killing a baby worse than killing an adult pig that it's clearly more intelligent?
Potentially gives you more rights than never, as is the case with humans vs. everything else. That's one of the reasons why we think bacteria are less valuable than humans. because they can't potentially become humans. If they could and we knew how to turn them into humans, then we would consider them very differently.
A chicken egg is potentially an adult chicken. Everybody is perfectly ok with boiling an egg, but boiling a live chicken is found repulsive.
I don't think potentiality is why we think that about bacteria. If in the near future through technology you could transform any cell of your body into an adult human nobody would be screaming genocide every time you scratch your arm.
It's not the only factor but it is sognificant enough to explain certain cases. There is no monocausal moral problem. Countless factors are involved. If we could make humans without women via artificial wombs, the moral value of a single cell and other embryological developmental periods will also increase. People will thus become more averse towards abortion. Just one example.
Consider the statements "We can't just let any outsider who wants to to join our group," and "my group includes the people in my nation." Both of these statements are very commonly held. Many people would claim that they are so obvious that they should count as common sense. Jointly, they entail that we should limit immigration, possibly heavily.
You reject these claims. You (correctly) think that we should have open borders. Part of why you are happy to reject what others would call common sense is that (1) you are well aware that people are often biased when thinking about foreigners, and (2) you know that more reliable and foundational principles of ethics tell us that we should draw the opposite conclusion from the one drawn by others.
Humans have a well-documented tendency to have trouble taking seriously the hardships of those who are different from them. There is good reason to think our basic judgments in such cases are more likely to be subject to bias than our basic moral principles are. Other species are very different from us, so we should expect this failure to take the experiences of others seriously to be very dramatic in our judgments of the relative importance of their experiences. In addition, there are incredibly basic principles of ethics such as "pain and suffering are bad," and "it's wrong to cause a large amount of badness to occur in order to allow for a small amount of pleasure" that jointly show that we shouldn't purchase from factory farms.
In both cases, basic principles of ethics, in their apparently straightforward application, appear to conflict with very common judgments that we have good reason to think might be biased. In both cases, you should (correctly) make use of the same principles of evidence that lead to the unpopular but correct conclusion. The fact that you're atypical in lacking one bias and typical in having the other shouldn't affect the proper prioritization of basic consequences of general ethical principles over common judgments where bias is very common. You appear to be unjustifiably applying different standards in the two cases, though.
I'd be really interested to see Caplan debate Hofstadter on this point instead. I'm reading I Am a Strange Loop and was surprised to discover an extended argument for vegetarianism on ethical grounds.
Hofstadter also has a sophisticated understanding of physicalist accounts of consciousness on which biologically discrete organisms are often not the best points of comparison to one another. An individual ant, for example, may be much more akin to one lowish-level neuronal group within a mammalian brain, than to the entire mammal.
> Take, for example, the classic “Sheriff scenario” counterexample to utilitarianism, where a Sheriff can avert a bloody riot by executing an innocent man.
The downside would seem to be that if people discover the sheriff violated his duties because he expected the people to wrongly believe something, that would undermine his authority going forward. I should note that the link describes a sheriff framing an innocent man, and I think that would never be necessary: merely arresting the suspect and moving him to a secure facility rather than arranging evidence to make him look guilty should suffice.
> I’m doing the normal thing. We should all do the normal thing.
You believe that normal people fall short of your moral standards all the time. The "normal thing" is not normative for you.
> I’m saying that the moral importance of suffering seems to me to heavily depend on the intelligence of the sufferer.
I don't believe that's true of you. You admit that you DON'T assign more moral weight to aliens more intelligent than humans. That suggests to me that your criteria isn't actually "intelligence", but instead what you pointed to as justification for you pre-existing prioritization of humans over other species. In contrast, my criteria https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dvc7zrqsdCYy6dCFR/suffering?commentId=pjPbCamDYMNsPf9HB derived from amoral contractarianism freely admits that other species could get higher weight, exactly analogous to humans vs other Earthly species.
> Most people share this intuition
Most people prioritize humans, but most DON'T agree with Peter Singer that mentally retarded humans have less weight than the most intelligent members of other species.
> We should donate $1 to shrimp charities.
I don't donate to any animal welfare charities, but enough people do that when I asked my own family to donate to GiveWell recommended charities instead of buying gifts, one of them donated to a non-recommended animal welfare one (not an EA type admittedly, instead a local & less bang-for-buck one). $1 is small enough that I think more people would find that plausible than a, b or c.
> 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.
Or everyone who believes in objective morality is in the same boat.
So an important point here that I feel keeps getting lost with you, and others, is you can preclude the entire nonsensical argument by simply admitting, and I didn't know why people are ashamed to, you are a human supremacist. You are trying to argue with flat earthers in their own game, you won't win.
Animals don't matter to human morality hence I don't need to consider anything about them any more than I would a rock. There is no shame in that and you don't have to fancy it up.
BTW as an aside "normal moral philosophy" is also known as virtue signalling hypocrisy. Adelstein rightly calls you out of that.
#16 can't be said enough though I'd have said cute pet puppies to hammer it more home. Veal, the better white meat.
This is also my take. Humans have intuitions around suffering because of _human_ suffering and mammals aren't that physically different. There is nothing wrong with puppy torture by itself. But the disgust intuition is that someone violating a cultural taboo like that is a bad person and likely to hurt other humans - and that seems plausible to me.
Also there always prevarication on what pain and suffering means. On the one-hand if you mean it to be physical pain - does blocking pain receptors all of sudden make it murder ok? Then on the other-hand, to handle this case you then define it to mean doing something the person/animal doesn't want, then that redefines suffering such that simple insect like pain doesn't actually matter and intellect does, or or the argument is just incoherent.
Though I'd place the line at something closer to able to exercise human-like moral agency. If we encounter star-trek style aliens that basically have minds similar enough to humans - we can ascribe moral value to them. Or uplifted dolphins or whatever. By being able to reciprocate in a moral community you are worth moral consideration. But you could also imagine much more alien minds - such as the Ender's game aliens or paper-clip-max-agi that aren't able to join our moral community - maybe we can ignore each other - but if not - despite high intelligence I'd preclude them from assessment of moral worth.
One wrinkle is that we should have a strong prior to presume moral inclusiveness just due to the risk of being wrong. That is pretty much the only reason I'm against the death penalty. There are plenty of crimes for which death is a fitting punishment ... but what kind of risk of malattribution (or worse corruption of the system) is acceptable to systematically allow such a high cost, non-reversible act?
Here some excerpts touching other aspects of Adelstein's writings, like i.a. his usage of vivid and emotionally charged hypotheticals vs. detached ones.
In „Michael Huemer Should be a Utilitarian“ Adelstein defends the Transplant case refering to a new detached version of the famous hypothetical („Martian Harvest“) - by Chappell - where we imagine the patients to be „rational, intelligent gelatinous blobs“ - basically insect or mollusk like beings. One is chosen for „redistributing the entirety of his vital gel to the other five“. Similarly in „Contra Wollen on Organ Harvesting“. Also still relevant seem the remarks in „Utilitarianism wins outright part 13“, where Adelstein argues against Nozick' objection to utilitarianism writing about „the obvious moral imperative to allow the utility monster to run roughshod over cities eating every man, woman, non-binary person, and child in its path“ and that „we act like utility monsters“, however „the utility monster has a much stronger case for mistreating us than we do for insects. […] We are justified in discounting the interests of fruit flies to a large degree—albeit probably not to the degree we do now.“
One point needs to be stressed that is behind Adelstein's and Tomasik's ethics: the importance of extreme suffering and its infinite badness. Tomasik invites us to imagine the brazen bull - a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece - and how much we would give up to not be caged in it - especially in the situation we are already trapped. The negative value seems infinite to him. Furthermore, from his viewpoint suffering can not be justified unless it reduces more suffering. A hypothetical hedonistic happy large society depending on the existence of one child living in misery seems incomprehensible to him. Adelstein writes in his essay „The Horror of Unfathomable Pain“ that „ I think the horror of suffering is one of life’s most important insights. There are experiences too horrific to fathom, too horrific to bear, and these are common. […] The worst thing about our world is the fact that it is filled with this extreme agony.„
There already seems to be a body of literature in defence of wild animal existence and the view that their lives are net positive (e.g. by Heather Browning & Walter Veit) - what Avram Hiller calls the „global happiness hypothesis“ - as well as for the opposing view (i.a. defended by Yew-Kwang Ng and Oscar Horta). For the former position, browning et al. wrote the 2023 paper „Positive Wild Animal Welfare“. In an essay they write e.g. that „We can see in cases of human depression that one of the main symptoms is a lack of motivation and an unwillingness to move. For an animal needing to acquire food and other things necessary to live, this could mean death. So for evolutionary reasons it would be logical for the baseline experience of animals to be at least slightly positive.“
"Exterminating mice because they’re befouling your basement is morally wrong."
Many people who aren't ethical vegetarians/vegans prefer to use humane mousetraps - presumably for moral reasons.
"We should donate $1 to shrimp charities."
Many people who are not ethical vegatarian/vegans donate regularly to charities that help bees and butterflies.
"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."
I don't think this makes any sense for an ethical vegetarian/vegan. It's basically the same as arguing that we should end all human suffering by making humans extinct.
Honestly though I think Bryan's biggest failure here is failing to recognise that cows and pigs are much closer to humans in intelligence than they are to insects. This is clearly motivated reasoning.
Mice, removed from their homes and turned out into the wild, are going to be violently and swiftly predated anyhow.
There are good reasons to donate to charities that help insects which have nothing to do with utilitarianism. For instance, they are quite pretty and interesting creatures with whom I’m happy to share a planet. There is considerable overlap between people who love insects in general but also readily capture and kill specimens for personal collections.
The bee example is Caplan condensing some of the stuff Adelstein in particular was saying in the conversation Caplan in responding to. I agree with what you say, except Adelstein seems to think that insect lives are so bad that they might not be worth living.
In terms of both intelligence and sense of consciousness, there's no inherent difference between an adult pig and a special needs toddler besides being of different species. We just avoid that argument because the implications are too disturbing to fathom.
We can't know that.
A preponderance of evidence leads us to that conclusion. So either one denies it based on some (usually) religious epistemological/theological framework or just an innate discomfort with the implications.
Are bee and butterfly donations meant to relieve suffering or allow more bees and butterflies to be born and survive longer? I doubt any donors care about their suffering.
"I still don’t think it’s wrong to make animals suffer horribly for minor benefits."
It's not wrong for a sadist to torture a dog for fun?
Much of the wrong inherent in the sadist torturing the dog is the harm done to the soul of the sadist.
If souls exist, then much of our beliefs need drastic revisions in any case.
I'm not sincerely arguing for a particular metaphysical concept so much as using "soul" as shorthand for "character" or "psyche".
Mama bears, lions, and other predators capture prey and keep it alive to train their cubs. Is that torture?
We had cats when I was a kid. They played (and you know what I mean) with lizards and mice they had caught. Was that torture?
I don't think the actions of wild animals can be moralized in that way, so i wouldn't call that torture or sadism.
Because you can't punish wild animals and thus they won't respond to your norms the way that humans would?
And? That doesn't change the fact that what Bryan said is clearly wrong.
Bryan: it’s OK to eat meat even though it has a big cost to animals and small benefit to people.
You: That implies dog torture for fun is also permitted, right?
Me (defending Bryan): Torturing a dog is bad for the torturer too, so the analogy fails. Even if you value the dog’s welfare at zero, there are still good reasons to not torture dogs that rely only on looking at whether torturing an animal is good for the psyche of of the person involved.
Does the factory farming industry not also force humans to torture animals in ways that are harmful to the psyches of the humans participating?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030243
Yes it does and those jobs sound absolutely awful to perform.
Would it be just as bad for a psychiatric hospital to give a sadistic patient a realistic robot dog to torture, as to give a living dog? Almost as bad?
I dunno, we’re pretty far into goofytown with this example. Personally, I’m against dog torture both because the dog’s feelings matter and because it’s wrong for the human to torture, so real dog is worse. But again, this is pretty contrived and I’m not sure the illuminative value of the example is very high.
I mean, the contrivance is meant to test whether a particular person's (to me, prima facie insane) claim that the primary badness in a human torturing a puppy for a tiny bit of fun lies in corruption of the human rather than badness of tortured puppy experience, is a genuine moral attitude, or a rationalization latched onto because they realize they do something strongly analogous to puppy torture. If someone doesn't want to talk about goofy things like "torturing" robot dogs, teddy bears and video game NPCs, maybe they shouldn't start with a claim that's goofy enough to require such further probing. Right?
There are no such things as souls.
It's a metaphor.
Maybe dogs satisfy Caplan's intelligence threshold?
Nice unanswerable question until you define your particular sadism.
Some people think slapping a dog's nose is sadistic.
Some people think rubbing a dog's nose in its pee is sadistic.
The point is that there are obviously a lot of cases where it's morally wrong to make animals suffer horribly for minor benefits, such as at least many instances of torturing a dog for fun, or mildly hurting a dog for fun (such as by kicking it).
I don't agree. If someone owns an animal, it's nobody else's business.
People will make it their business, and I mean by ostracizing offenders, regardless of whether they demand the government do something about it.
Do it out of sight, and that problem literally disappears.
Who decides what is morally wrong? “Mildly hurting” a dog? One could easily argue that tug of war hurts a dog, or that kicking a dog away from the BBQ hurts it.
Please tell me you're joking. It's such an obvious truth that there are things that you can do to a dog that are morally wrong (whether moral realism is true or false).
I don't believe that your values are so antithetical to the vast majority of other humans' moral values that you disagree. I think you just want to disagree and are trying to find something to say that makes it seem reasonable for you to disagree.
More to the point, where do you draw the line, and what makes you think "the vast majority" would agree with you?
Don't just wave it away with "it's obvious". You use that word to the point of abuse.
I have found that when people say X is obvious instead of just stating X, they know it's not obvious and they know there are differences of opinion but they don't want to go to the trouble of proving the superiority of their opinion.
As should be obvious, it's your turn.
I don’t think “causing large amounts of suffering for comparably trivial joy is wrong” is less initially plausible than any of the crazy-seeming conclusions you’re suggesting — indeed, it seems like just about the most initially plausible normative claim I can think of.
But there’s many reasons to think the initial plausibility of the conclusions that seem crazy is a lot more suspicious, e.g., status quo bias. Compare: to most people, anarcho-capitalism seems utterly insane and indeed crazier than a lot of the common-sense views that you and Huemer argue should be strong evidence for substantial libertarianism. But there’s significant biases involved that make people not want to accept non-statist views.
Additionally, a lot of the source of common sense views on issues like insects pointing in one direction is tied to empirical beliefs (e.g., about their consciousness). It seems like common sense is a much worse guide to empirical beliefs about difficult scientific questions than it is to normative questions about how we should act.
I think you’re confusing the ethical vegetarian argument and attacking straw men. Ethical vegetarianism is about pain and suffering.
“I still think that one human baby’s life is more morally valuable than the lives of a million wild birds.” However, one baby’s feeling of pain is unlikely to be greater than the pain of a million birds.
You also lumped together “eating meat, wearing leather, animal experimentation, and casually crushing insects”. These differ vastly in how much pain and suffering they cause. Eating meat can mean factory farmed animals suffering months and sometimes years of misery and pain, or it can mean hunting a wild animal which usually suffers momentary pain before it dies. Ethical vegetarianism cares about the process way more than the outcome. No ethical vegetarian is against eating a deer if you find it dead in the woods.
The reason ethical vegetarians are ok with killing insects is because their capacity to feel pain is greatly diminished compared to mammals, their pain is usually momentary, and the benefits we derive from their deaths are large (transportation, construction, etc.)
The animals we eat feel far more pain for far longer, and there are cheap and easy substitutes for animal products as well as the option of simply treating them better while using them. I really don’t think it’s that absurd.
“A year’s worth of animal suffering is worse than the Holocaust.” We see the Holocaust as worse because other factors other than the amount of suffering, such as the moral corruption of the perpetrators compared to the ethical standards of the time, and our ability to empathize with the sufferers based on pictures and testimonies, and the total pointlessness of the Holocaust compared to the expedience of factory farming.
Perhaps if we saw more of what animals experience and the scale, we might feel that it is “worse”. In terms of the amount of suffering, I’m not sure which one has caused more.
I am surprised by Bryan's commitment to common sense and intuition when it comes to moral philosophy. Much of humanity's success has been due to our ability to use reason to transcend our limited and often wrong biases. Is quantum mechanics obviously wrong because it completely violates our intuitions and common sense?
I also think the "Sheriff scenario” has been debunked from many angles as a counter example to utilitarianism and some of the problems are even mentioned in the linked Wikipedia article. I am not a utilitarian, but I think the only logically valid objection to utilitarianism is "I do not like some of the outcomes when utilitarianism is faithfully applied because they contradict my common sense and intuition", which leads back to my first point.
Quantum mechanics is testable and disprovable. Moral philosophy is simply not. This is probably we know the charge of the electron to ten decimal places but nobody has yet managed to weigh a human soul.
Agreed- my point being only that common sense and intuition can be unreliable tools for making good decisions.
Moral beliefs don't pay rent https://www.readthesequences.com/Making-Beliefs-Pay-Rent-In-Anticipated-Experiences
As with anti-consequentialist thought experiments in general, when I take steps to rectify the sleazy attention biases at work in Sheriff, any tension goes away. If I imagine myself spending equal time (say 5 minutes each) reflecting upon the lives of 100 friendly acquaintances, with all off their happiness, goals, relationships, and then being asked in a forced choice whether I'd prefer to have one of them falsely accused and summarily executed, or 99 of them die in a riot, the intuitive answer is clearly the former.
I think the largest hole in this argument is the fact that common sense moral judgements change over time. Enslaving a group of people was morally permissible via common sense for thousands of years.
First, this argument proves too much. In general it just shows that all common moral judgements could be wildly wrong, not that this specific one (animal welfare) is analogous.
Second, slavery was hotly debated and many members of slave owning societies were deeply troubled by the practice.
Finally, there was always a large group of people opposed to slavery - the slaves themselves - and there were many slaves and former slaves who were able to advocate for their own liberty. There can be no shrimp Frederick Douglas or chicken 54th Massachusetts to demonstrate the humanity and courage of the oppressed.
I don't believe ancient Greeks were troubled by the practice. I think that idea only occurred among Christians.
> Finally, there was always a large group of people opposed to slavery - the slaves themselves
No, that's historically illiterate. Spartacus didn't rebel to abolish slavery but merely to escape it themselves. Many former slaves have become slave-owners.
Were the slavery against slavery per se or were they for not being slaves themselves.
In ancient times, slavery was pretty normal.
There's a huge variation throughout human history. I got a lot of value from this Hardcore History episode (https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-68-blitz-human-resources/).
If the moral importance of suffering is heavily dependant on intelligence. Why is killing a baby worse than killing an adult pig that it's clearly more intelligent?
Because the baby will grow up to become an adult while the pig won't. Potential is important.
You don't give the child the right to vote or to drive because they'll become an adult. Potentially does not automatically grant you rights.
Potentially gives you more rights than never, as is the case with humans vs. everything else. That's one of the reasons why we think bacteria are less valuable than humans. because they can't potentially become humans. If they could and we knew how to turn them into humans, then we would consider them very differently.
A chicken egg is potentially an adult chicken. Everybody is perfectly ok with boiling an egg, but boiling a live chicken is found repulsive.
I don't think potentiality is why we think that about bacteria. If in the near future through technology you could transform any cell of your body into an adult human nobody would be screaming genocide every time you scratch your arm.
It's not the only factor but it is sognificant enough to explain certain cases. There is no monocausal moral problem. Countless factors are involved. If we could make humans without women via artificial wombs, the moral value of a single cell and other embryological developmental periods will also increase. People will thus become more averse towards abortion. Just one example.
The human baby has parents who will object.
What if the parents want to kill it?
Consider the statements "We can't just let any outsider who wants to to join our group," and "my group includes the people in my nation." Both of these statements are very commonly held. Many people would claim that they are so obvious that they should count as common sense. Jointly, they entail that we should limit immigration, possibly heavily.
You reject these claims. You (correctly) think that we should have open borders. Part of why you are happy to reject what others would call common sense is that (1) you are well aware that people are often biased when thinking about foreigners, and (2) you know that more reliable and foundational principles of ethics tell us that we should draw the opposite conclusion from the one drawn by others.
Humans have a well-documented tendency to have trouble taking seriously the hardships of those who are different from them. There is good reason to think our basic judgments in such cases are more likely to be subject to bias than our basic moral principles are. Other species are very different from us, so we should expect this failure to take the experiences of others seriously to be very dramatic in our judgments of the relative importance of their experiences. In addition, there are incredibly basic principles of ethics such as "pain and suffering are bad," and "it's wrong to cause a large amount of badness to occur in order to allow for a small amount of pleasure" that jointly show that we shouldn't purchase from factory farms.
In both cases, basic principles of ethics, in their apparently straightforward application, appear to conflict with very common judgments that we have good reason to think might be biased. In both cases, you should (correctly) make use of the same principles of evidence that lead to the unpopular but correct conclusion. The fact that you're atypical in lacking one bias and typical in having the other shouldn't affect the proper prioritization of basic consequences of general ethical principles over common judgments where bias is very common. You appear to be unjustifiably applying different standards in the two cases, though.
I'd be really interested to see Caplan debate Hofstadter on this point instead. I'm reading I Am a Strange Loop and was surprised to discover an extended argument for vegetarianism on ethical grounds.
Hofstadter also has a sophisticated understanding of physicalist accounts of consciousness on which biologically discrete organisms are often not the best points of comparison to one another. An individual ant, for example, may be much more akin to one lowish-level neuronal group within a mammalian brain, than to the entire mammal.
> Take, for example, the classic “Sheriff scenario” counterexample to utilitarianism, where a Sheriff can avert a bloody riot by executing an innocent man.
The downside would seem to be that if people discover the sheriff violated his duties because he expected the people to wrongly believe something, that would undermine his authority going forward. I should note that the link describes a sheriff framing an innocent man, and I think that would never be necessary: merely arresting the suspect and moving him to a secure facility rather than arranging evidence to make him look guilty should suffice.
> I’m doing the normal thing. We should all do the normal thing.
You believe that normal people fall short of your moral standards all the time. The "normal thing" is not normative for you.
> I’m saying that the moral importance of suffering seems to me to heavily depend on the intelligence of the sufferer.
I don't believe that's true of you. You admit that you DON'T assign more moral weight to aliens more intelligent than humans. That suggests to me that your criteria isn't actually "intelligence", but instead what you pointed to as justification for you pre-existing prioritization of humans over other species. In contrast, my criteria https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dvc7zrqsdCYy6dCFR/suffering?commentId=pjPbCamDYMNsPf9HB derived from amoral contractarianism freely admits that other species could get higher weight, exactly analogous to humans vs other Earthly species.
> Most people share this intuition
Most people prioritize humans, but most DON'T agree with Peter Singer that mentally retarded humans have less weight than the most intelligent members of other species.
> We should donate $1 to shrimp charities.
I don't donate to any animal welfare charities, but enough people do that when I asked my own family to donate to GiveWell recommended charities instead of buying gifts, one of them donated to a non-recommended animal welfare one (not an EA type admittedly, instead a local & less bang-for-buck one). $1 is small enough that I think more people would find that plausible than a, b or c.
> 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.
Or everyone who believes in objective morality is in the same boat.
So an important point here that I feel keeps getting lost with you, and others, is you can preclude the entire nonsensical argument by simply admitting, and I didn't know why people are ashamed to, you are a human supremacist. You are trying to argue with flat earthers in their own game, you won't win.
Animals don't matter to human morality hence I don't need to consider anything about them any more than I would a rock. There is no shame in that and you don't have to fancy it up.
BTW as an aside "normal moral philosophy" is also known as virtue signalling hypocrisy. Adelstein rightly calls you out of that.
#16 can't be said enough though I'd have said cute pet puppies to hammer it more home. Veal, the better white meat.
That would explain why Bryan doesn't place more moral weight on super-intelligent beings. Intelligence isn't truly his criteria.
This is also my take. Humans have intuitions around suffering because of _human_ suffering and mammals aren't that physically different. There is nothing wrong with puppy torture by itself. But the disgust intuition is that someone violating a cultural taboo like that is a bad person and likely to hurt other humans - and that seems plausible to me.
Also there always prevarication on what pain and suffering means. On the one-hand if you mean it to be physical pain - does blocking pain receptors all of sudden make it murder ok? Then on the other-hand, to handle this case you then define it to mean doing something the person/animal doesn't want, then that redefines suffering such that simple insect like pain doesn't actually matter and intellect does, or or the argument is just incoherent.
Though I'd place the line at something closer to able to exercise human-like moral agency. If we encounter star-trek style aliens that basically have minds similar enough to humans - we can ascribe moral value to them. Or uplifted dolphins or whatever. By being able to reciprocate in a moral community you are worth moral consideration. But you could also imagine much more alien minds - such as the Ender's game aliens or paper-clip-max-agi that aren't able to join our moral community - maybe we can ignore each other - but if not - despite high intelligence I'd preclude them from assessment of moral worth.
One wrinkle is that we should have a strong prior to presume moral inclusiveness just due to the risk of being wrong. That is pretty much the only reason I'm against the death penalty. There are plenty of crimes for which death is a fitting punishment ... but what kind of risk of malattribution (or worse corruption of the system) is acceptable to systematically allow such a high cost, non-reversible act?
23 summs it up correctly
Here some excerpts touching other aspects of Adelstein's writings, like i.a. his usage of vivid and emotionally charged hypotheticals vs. detached ones.
In „Michael Huemer Should be a Utilitarian“ Adelstein defends the Transplant case refering to a new detached version of the famous hypothetical („Martian Harvest“) - by Chappell - where we imagine the patients to be „rational, intelligent gelatinous blobs“ - basically insect or mollusk like beings. One is chosen for „redistributing the entirety of his vital gel to the other five“. Similarly in „Contra Wollen on Organ Harvesting“. Also still relevant seem the remarks in „Utilitarianism wins outright part 13“, where Adelstein argues against Nozick' objection to utilitarianism writing about „the obvious moral imperative to allow the utility monster to run roughshod over cities eating every man, woman, non-binary person, and child in its path“ and that „we act like utility monsters“, however „the utility monster has a much stronger case for mistreating us than we do for insects. […] We are justified in discounting the interests of fruit flies to a large degree—albeit probably not to the degree we do now.“
One point needs to be stressed that is behind Adelstein's and Tomasik's ethics: the importance of extreme suffering and its infinite badness. Tomasik invites us to imagine the brazen bull - a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece - and how much we would give up to not be caged in it - especially in the situation we are already trapped. The negative value seems infinite to him. Furthermore, from his viewpoint suffering can not be justified unless it reduces more suffering. A hypothetical hedonistic happy large society depending on the existence of one child living in misery seems incomprehensible to him. Adelstein writes in his essay „The Horror of Unfathomable Pain“ that „ I think the horror of suffering is one of life’s most important insights. There are experiences too horrific to fathom, too horrific to bear, and these are common. […] The worst thing about our world is the fact that it is filled with this extreme agony.„
There already seems to be a body of literature in defence of wild animal existence and the view that their lives are net positive (e.g. by Heather Browning & Walter Veit) - what Avram Hiller calls the „global happiness hypothesis“ - as well as for the opposing view (i.a. defended by Yew-Kwang Ng and Oscar Horta). For the former position, browning et al. wrote the 2023 paper „Positive Wild Animal Welfare“. In an essay they write e.g. that „We can see in cases of human depression that one of the main symptoms is a lack of motivation and an unwillingness to move. For an animal needing to acquire food and other things necessary to live, this could mean death. So for evolutionary reasons it would be logical for the baseline experience of animals to be at least slightly positive.“
Bryan, what do you make of American tribes known for killing children (not all obviously).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953608005327
How about primitive tribes which kill twins and the incapacitated because they don't have the wealth to take care of unproductive mouths?