That said, I, at least, am not making this error, I think:
Another concern I have is that most people seem to neglect the difference between “exhibiting an external behavior in the same way that humans do, and for the same reasons we do”, and “having additional follow-on internal responses to that behavior”.
An example: If we suppose that it’s very morally important for people to internally subvocalize “I sneezed” after sneezing, and you do this whenever you sneeze, and all your (human) friends report that they do it too, it would nonetheless be a mistake to see a dog sneeze and say: “See! They did the morally relevant thing! It would be weird to suppose that they didn’t, when they’re sneezing for the same ancestral reasons as us!”
The ancestral reasons for the subvocalization are not the same as the ancestral reasons for the sneeze; and we already have an explanation for why animals sneeze, that doesn’t invoke any process that necessarily produces a follow-up subvocalization.
None of this rules out that dogs subvocalize in a dog-mental-language, on its own; but it does mean that drawing any strong inferences here requires us to have some model of why humans subvocalize.
Seeing a pig “scream in pain”, when you cut off its tail does not make it a foregone conclusion that the pig is experiencing anything at all or something like what pain means to me. But it does seem like a pretty good guess.
And I definitely don’t look at turtle doing any kind of planning at all and think “there must be an inner life in there!”
I’m real uncertain about what consciousness is and where it comes from, and there is an anthropic argument (which I don’t know how to think clearly about) that it is rare among animals. But from my state of knowledge, it seems like a better than even chance that many mammals have some kind of inner listener. And if they have an inner listener at all, pain seems like one of the simplest and most convergent experiences to have.
Which makes industrial factory farming an unconscionable atrocity, much worse than American slavery. It is not okay to treat conscious beings like that, no matter how dumb they are, or how little they narrativize about themselves.
My understanding is that (assuming animal consciousness), there are 100 billion experience-years in factory farms every year.
It seems to me that, in my state of uncertainty, it is extremely irresponsible to say “eh, whatever” to the possible moral atrocity. We should shut up and multiply. My uncertainty about animal consciousness only reduces the expected number of experience-years of torture by a factor of 2 or so.
An expected 50 billion moral patients getting tortured as a matter of course is the worst moral catastrophe perpetrated by humans ever (with the exception of our rush to destroy all the value of the future).
Even if someone has more philosophical clarity than I do, they have to be confident at at a level of around 100,000 to 1 that livestock animals are not experiencing beings, before the expected value of this moral catastrophe starts being of comparable scale to well-known moral catastrophes like the Holocaust, and American slavery, and the Mongol invasion of the world. Anything less than that, and the expected value of industrial meat production is beating every other moral catastrophe by orders of magnitude (again, with the exception of x-risk).
(Admittedly there are some assumptions here about the moral value of pain and fear, relative to other good and bad things that can happen to a person, which might influence how we weight the experiences of animals compared to people. But “pain and terror are really bad, and it is really bad for someone to persistently experience them” seems like a not-very-crazy assumption.)
Anyway, this is a digression from the point of this post, but I apparently had a rant in me, and I don’t want animal welfare considerations to be weak-maned. A concern for animal welfare isn’t fundamentally based on shoddy philosophy. It seems to me that it is a very natural starting point, given our state of philosophical confusion.
That said, I, at least, am not making this error, I think:
Seeing a pig “scream in pain”, when you cut off its tail does not make it a foregone conclusion that the pig is experiencing anything at all or something like what pain means to me. But it does seem like a pretty good guess.
And I definitely don’t look at turtle doing any kind of planning at all and think “there must be an inner life in there!”
I’m real uncertain about what consciousness is and where it comes from, and there is an anthropic argument (which I don’t know how to think clearly about) that it is rare among animals. But from my state of knowledge, it seems like a better than even chance that many mammals have some kind of inner listener. And if they have an inner listener at all, pain seems like one of the simplest and most convergent experiences to have.
Which makes industrial factory farming an unconscionable atrocity, much worse than American slavery. It is not okay to treat conscious beings like that, no matter how dumb they are, or how little they narrativize about themselves.
My understanding is that (assuming animal consciousness), there are 100 billion experience-years in factory farms every year.
It seems to me that, in my state of uncertainty, it is extremely irresponsible to say “eh, whatever” to the possible moral atrocity. We should shut up and multiply. My uncertainty about animal consciousness only reduces the expected number of experience-years of torture by a factor of 2 or so.
An expected 50 billion moral patients getting tortured as a matter of course is the worst moral catastrophe perpetrated by humans ever (with the exception of our rush to destroy all the value of the future).
Even if someone has more philosophical clarity than I do, they have to be confident at at a level of around 100,000 to 1 that livestock animals are not experiencing beings, before the expected value of this moral catastrophe starts being of comparable scale to well-known moral catastrophes like the Holocaust, and American slavery, and the Mongol invasion of the world. Anything less than that, and the expected value of industrial meat production is beating every other moral catastrophe by orders of magnitude (again, with the exception of x-risk).
(Admittedly there are some assumptions here about the moral value of pain and fear, relative to other good and bad things that can happen to a person, which might influence how we weight the experiences of animals compared to people. But “pain and terror are really bad, and it is really bad for someone to persistently experience them” seems like a not-very-crazy assumption.)
Anyway, this is a digression from the point of this post, but I apparently had a rant in me, and I don’t want animal welfare considerations to be weak-maned. A concern for animal welfare isn’t fundamentally based on shoddy philosophy. It seems to me that it is a very natural starting point, given our state of philosophical confusion.