Among people who are aware of some of these issues, I frequently hear the most amazingly complex discussions concerning which kinds of meat consumption are ethically OK and which aren’t. The ethical systems constructed in this way can become quite baroque. Needless to say, a large degree of assuming-the-consequent is involved in creating these ethical “systems.”
That is, it reminds me of nothing so much as the sort of handwaving that well-meaning people sometimes do concerning the necessity of death (recently discussed, e.g., here and here). In both situations, there’s one possibility that seems too fantastic to most people to be worth discussing: in one case, that death is unnecessary and worth fighting against; in the other; that it’s wrong to kill and eat creatures that can feel and suffer.
Unfortunately, the suggestion that there might be ethical considerations to one’s diet is usually considered extremely impolite to discuss. Obviously, various community consensuses do arise about these things in certain circles, but in society at large there’s this sense that “nobody has the right to pass judgment on someone else’s diet.”
Anyway, whenever I hear these kinds of contortions I’m tempted to chime in: embrace the consequences of your beliefs. On some level you know you shouldn’t be killing animals and eating them. Stop it.
What strikes me as particularly weird is that I have a vegan friend who made a point of saying “I’m not going to tell someone else they shouldn’t eat meat.” I don’t actually know what she meant by that—whether she honestly didn’t think it was her business, or whether she simply had observed that telling people they shouldn’t eat meat has the opposite intended effect—they get pissed at you for telling them what they should and shouldn’t do, and either ignore you or eat more meat just to spite you.
If she meant the latter, I agree. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten someone else to become Vegetarian, but the approach that seems to produce most.… “respect” I guess is when I:
a) Make an effort to point out that I will have a hard time eating at a particular restaurant or event because of few vegetarian options. I say this as matter-of-fact-ly as I can. When people go “wait what?” I say “yeah I’m vegetarian” without attaching any particular judgment to it.
b) when/if people ask “why,” I focus almost entirely on reasons to cut back on meat that are [i]entirely in humanity’s best interest.[/i] Most people are vaguely aware that there are “health reasons”. And in fact, a lot of people say with hopeful looks “for health reasons, right?” because I don’t sound judgy, and they have assumptions that the health-vegetarians are cool whereas the ethical-vegetarians are judgmental jerks. What people DON’T usually realize how bad the meat industry is for humanity as a whole (by way of the environment).
c) when I get to the ethical concerns, I focus specifically on factory farming. I’m not 100% sure how I feel about the absolute moral weight of animals who are killed humanely for food, but letting people feel like there’s SOME way to ethically eat meat makes it feel less like I’m attacking them (even if that ethical way will almost never be relevant to the food that they’ll have access to).
People SHOULDN’T need more reason than “animals are raised in cages, given growth hormones to the point where they can barely walk, left to sit in their own feces and then killed.” But the magnitude of that reason is such that most people can’t process it. So it’s pretty convenient that there’s plenty of other good reasons to help open people up to the idea.
I… don’t see a quantification in his comment, and so I’m not sure how you’re so confident he’s misjudging it. The only implied one is “not worth the pleasure of eating meat,” which strikes me as plausible.
It’s actually even less than that: my implied quantification is “significant enough that you should at least make an attempt to study the issue before coming to a conclusion that you are acting correctly.”
Well, as thew cows we currently need for meat alone produce about 18% CO2 equivalent gases, that’s about 1⁄2 to 2⁄3 what traffic produces, it is an issue. It would remain an issue if we would go the zero-CO2 route through a thought-through nuclear option. It will become more an issue as traffic and heating/cooling gets improved through technology, but as more people get richer, the meat-consumption increases.
ETD: see this line as deleted. kept for history.
Well, these are just the facts. Judge by yourself.
I don’t mean to imply that I disagree; what you’ve said sounds plausible enough to my admittedly rather uninformed mind.
I appreciate facts (especially ones that come with citations). But your last line is unnecessary and snarky. Either (a) you’ve given us enough facts that we can come to a reasonable judgment without needing anything further, or (b) you have not. If (a), then why the final sentence? If (b), then why refer to what you’ve said as “the” facts?
Well, it seems that “just the” does not have the same softening tone in English than “lediglich” in German, and “judge by yourself” is somehow negatively associated. Wieder ins Fettnäpfchen getreten.
A shorter version of my comment: I very much doubt that there is a convincing rebuttal to Bentham’s and Singer’s view that the crucial question we should ask when deciding whether to kill something and eat it is “Can it suffer?”
I do not believe that this is an instance in which an extended taboo facilitates better understanding. Particularly if you go as far as to insist on tabooing even ‘pain’. It is true that if you ‘taboo’ for long enough you will end up with a reductionist technical explanation of physiology such that applying moral evaluations of any kind seems inappropriate. Yet given that the meaning of ‘pain’ is rather well understood this obfuscates discussion of values more than it helps.
It is also utterly absurd to insist that your opponent taboo ‘suffer’ and ‘pain’ while you yourself throw around “subjective experience” as a more appropriate alternative.
(I’m not doubting you have a good reason, but the weight of the word “suffer” is essential to what morality’s about IMO. I think it’s valuable to be able to explain your views without using the word, but not necessary. If necessary “experience pain” works just as well.)
I’m not doubting you have a good reason, but the weight of the word “suffer” is essential to what morality’s about IMO.
So, this is what Nietzsche called the morality of timidity. He enjoyed contrasting moralities that were about seeking X and moralities that were about avoiding Y- and I think that’s a pretty good way to look at moralities (though I don’t agree with his approach very strongly). A morality that pursues pleasure- even at the cost of pain- strikes me as more vibrant than a morality that pursues lack of pain- even at the cost of pleasure. Now, that’s not an argument for happy vegetarians to become carnivores, but it is an argument for happy carnivores to not care about unhappy animals.
I don’t know this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought well at all, but this seems to be a case where he was just completely wrong. What metaethics makes judgments based on whether some ethical system is more “vibrant” than some other? What does that mean? Can moralities really be consistently classified into “seeking” and “avoiding”? What happens if you replace “carnivores” and “animals” in your last phrase with “criminals” and “victims”?
One could see it as an extension of natural selection. I agree with you it’s odd- but metaethics is even more slippery than ethics, so I am reluctant to pass judgments instead of making descriptions.
What happens if you replace “carnivores” and “animals” in your last phrase with “criminals” and “victims”?
If I recall correctly, he had significant affection for the likes of Genghis Khan. I don’t think he would sympathize very much with the petty robber but considers the mighty and powerful as operating on a different level from normal people, with correspondingly different morality. But it’s been a while since I’ve read his work along those lines, and so I’m not entirely confident about that. I do recall a passage where Zarathustra claimed his favorite animals were the eagle and the snake, and he approves of predation in general, I suspect.
With due respect to your wit, I would point out that although Slytherin the fictional character lived centuries ago, he was, in fact, invented after Nietzsche, and it is possible the correlation is noncoincidental and begins with Nietzsche as a cause.
Interestingly, Nietzsche’s famous last rational action was interposing himself between a horse and its owner, who was beating it.
I’m a little leery of the whole idea that the powerful have a different set of moral standards applied to them (as opposed to their having a different morality, which seems psychologically likely). Praising the great and powerful no matter what they do while still condemning Leopold and Loeb as monsters is a very convenient stance to take.
Could you clarify what moral system you use without using pain, suffering or related words? (I honestly cannot think of a way to do so for mine, but that may just be me being new to the Taboo concept).
If your moral system doesn’t care about suffering at all (human or otherwise) than there is no contradiction.
The thrust of my reply to these questions is that we don’t need to have fully general answers to them in order to be pretty sure—i.e., sure enough to stop doing it—that killing animals and eating them is wrong. All you need to know is that (a) you and your fellow humans experience the thing we call pain, (b) that it is wrong to cause other humans needless pain, and (c) that other animals are not sufficiently neurologically different from humans that you can be sure that killing them doesn’t cause them the same pain that it would be wrong to cause a human.
It is hard to explain a non sequitur. And the worse the reasoning used the harder it is to give an explanation more precise than “WTF? Um, no.”. Fortunately your argument is not that bad—it is just missing a premise “it is wrong to cause pain to animals”.
That’s the premise I am trying not to use, because I don’t think there is a supportable reason to draw a distinction between humans and animals when it comes to the acceptability of causing them pain and suffering. Let me rephrase.
I think it’s wrong to needlessly cause the-thing-we-know-as-pain to any creature capable of experiencing it. We know this includes humans, because we ourselves feel pain and can communicate that fact to others. We have every reason to think this includes a whole lot of non-human animals, because their physiology and behavior are similar enough to ours that it is very likely.
While we can’t live up to this moral guideline in every respect, some things—like not killing animals to eat them—are low-hanging fruit.
What’s the “same pain”? The same degree of pain? The same type? I think this might be a sticking point in your argument, along with the one wedrifrid has pointed out (unless it turns out that the answer to my question also clears up wedrifid’s objection).
I don’t have a perfect reply to that suggestion, but here’s a start, which perhaps is good enough for the case at hand. I loosely paraphrase Peter Singer.
Let’s suppose we know what it means for ourselves (humans) to suffer—we could get really specific about what that means, but we seem to have a kind of intersubjective consensus that suffices for the moment. Now, unless we believe we have immortal souls or something that enables us uniquely to suffer, our suffering (if, say, someone decided to kill and eat us) is due to our neurological makeup and is demonstrated externally by various kinds of observable behaviors.
So, when we see that other organisms have neurological systems that are rather similar to ours (as most vertebrates do), and exhibit similar behaviors when injured or killed, a good hypothesis is that they are experiencing something like we are when we suffer.
This is another case where, it seems to me, rather tortured reasoning is required to argue that other animals aren’t really suffering even when we have every reason to think they are. Surely we want to err on the side of not causing the kind of suffering we ourselves would feel if injured or killed?
How far up the evolutionary tree do you believe suffering extends? Primates? Mammals? Vertebrates? Any animal with a nervous system? What about plant suffering? Does an overworked computer suffer as it frantically swaps memory between RAM and disk? Are you sure you’re not committing the mind projection fallacy.
Also, while we’re on the subject why should suffering be the basis of morality, as opposed to something like subjective experience?
This is another case where, it seems to me, rather tortured reasoning is required to argue that other animals aren’t really suffering even when we have every reason to think they are.
I suspect your definition of “tortured reasoning” amounts to any complex reasoning that leads to conclusions you don’t like.
I’m doing my best not to commit these fallacies, though of course not claiming to be infallible.
I mean, we know a fair bit about what causes pain for humans in the physiological/neurological sense—we know about nociceptors and how they work—and we also know what kinds of behavior we expect to see when a human is in pain. We also know that mammals have the same kinds of physiological mechanisms that humans do for pain, and we know they respond to injury with the same kinds of external behavior that humans do when injured.
(All this could not be said of plants, computers, or even quite likely non-vertebrate animals (although I do err on the side of caution with those and don’t eat them either).)
So, yes, I am claiming that there is a lot of evidence that pain and suffering for non-human mammals is a similar kind of thing to the pain and suffering that humans experience. And I am suggesting that when we cannot possibly know another being’s subjective experience as if from the inside, but everything we do know about that experience (the neurology and the behavior) is consistent with it being the kind of thing we would normally hold ourselves ethically obligated to avoid, then we are ethically obligated to avoid it.
(Disclaimer: although it’s still under development, my current moral system is based on satisfying the preferences as many entities as possible.)
I believe it is possible that any of the above experience suffering. But I recognize that attempting to consider every possible source of suffering is impossible. So I’m using my best judgment based on how I know that I personally experience suffering, and how other creatures are likely to be similar to me. I am assuming that suffering requires a fairly complex nervous system, and that it is unlikely to have developed in lifeforms that don’t respond much to stimuli.
I eat clams, because as far as I can tell there is no reason for them to have developed the ability to suffer. They also (as far as I know, although it is possible I am wrong here) usually farmed in a manner that’s most independent of the rest of the ecosystem. (Whereas I’d be okay with eating shrimp, but they are harvested from the ocean, not only catching other animals in the process but disrupting the food chain of creatures that eat them).
I very much doubt that there is a convincing rebuttal to Bentham’s and Singer’s view that the crucial question we should ask when deciding whether to kill something and eat it is “Can it suffer?”
I think Nietzsche has put forward some rather tempting justifications for ignoring that. I don’t think he’s put forward convincing reasons for ignoring the pain of others, and so I don’t know whether or not to call that a convincing rebuttal.
Essentially, Singer’s view strikes me as unconvincing because it’s tautological. We should care about suffering because we should care about suffering.
No. We should care about suffering because suffering is bad. We care about the suffering of our fellow humans (surely you don’t dispute that we are correct to do so?), and Singer’s view is that most of the animals we eat are sufficiently close to humans neurologically that we should care about their suffering too. There’s no tautology there.
We should care about suffering because suffering is bad.
This is where the tautology resides. (Perhaps it would be clearer to call it “defining your conclusion” or “circularity”?)
surely you don’t dispute that we are correct to do so?
I am ambivalent that we should categorically seek to reduce the suffering of our fellow humans (and ourselves). I am personally moved by most suffering I see, but I recognize that as an emotional response. I am aware of many situations in which suffering is a dramatically positive force, and many in which it is not. I don’t like calling things bad, I like calling them bad at X.
I also don’t think our justifications for working to minimize the pain of our fellow humans are neurological- and so the biological similarity does not strike me as relevant for many valid approaches to the situation.
The idea that suffering can have positive effects is in no way mutually exclusive with the idea that it is itself bad.
Here we’re discussing definitions, I think. If you assume suffering is bad a priori, that seems to me to preclude there being (worthwhile) benefits from suffering. I find that difficult to swallow.
And this isn’t just “surgery is worth it, even with the pain, but it would be more worth it without the pain”- this is looking at “no pain no gain” situations. Do they exist? I strongly suspect so. (I think many people overestimate how many there are, but that doesn’t mean something things aren’t better with a sting.)
It shows that the benefit to the people is greater than the pain to the people. The pain of the pig is ignored. Considering the vast majority of the pain is to the pig, that’s a pretty big oversight.
It shows that the benefit to the people is greater than the pain to the people.
No, it doesn’t say anything about pain to humans. It shows that people collectively consider it worth it. That information is valuable when considering questions like:
Is there any reason why the suffering of factory-farmed animals would be worth it?
But, if you could pith the pig painlessly (or engineer pigs that did not suffer while their meat is grown / harvested), then the quality of the bacon would not alter (unless you’re a sadist).
Our justifications for working to minimize the pain of our fellow humans aren’t neurological. Our justifications for thinking that our fellow humans do experience pain are, in part, neurological (and in part based on our observations of their behavior). Once we have good reason to think that some action of ours does cause our fellow humans pain, then we have a moral reason to avoid that action. That moral reason may or may not be an insurmountable one, but causing a fellow human pain at least requires some appeal to some good that outweighs the pain.
I had assumed that the leap here for most people would be extending moral consideration to non-humans. I’m surprised to see that the leap in this case appears to be extending moral consideration to beings other than oneself.
I am aware of many situations in which suffering is a dramatically positive force
I don’t buy this. There may be situations in which suffering motivates some other positive action, but I can’t see in what sense suffering itself could be positive—as in, ceteris paribus, better to have suffering than not to.
I’m surprised to see that the leap in this case appears to be extending moral consideration to beings other than oneself.
I’m sorry, I’m being unclear. I’m not arguing that person X should maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain and not care about anyone else. I’m arguing that person X should find a different utility function than pleasure minus pain (and that includes their own).
ceteris paribus, better to have suffering than not to.
I’m very glad you included this phrase, because that’s where our disagreement lies. I don’t think ceteris paribus is an option in most of the cases I’m considering. For example, the positive effect of a rite of passage scales with the amount of suffering undergone during it.
I can’t see in what sense suffering itself could be positive—as in, ceteris paribus, better to have suffering than not to.
My favorite pieces of art are mostly very sad. If you could somehow preserve everything else about them while taking away only the tragedy, I’d value them much less. Ceteris paribus, I prefer to live in a world where I can be driven to tears by stories of heroic self-sacrifice (for example).
This is totally irrelevant to the question of animal suffering, though.
“Can it suffer” is relevant when the decision is about its suffering. “How much is its potential future life valued” (by humans, and by itself if it has a concept of the future) is more relevant to killing in particular. Arguably you could weigh the suffering involved in an immanent death more than the suffering in a much later death.
Among people who are aware of some of these issues, I frequently hear the most amazingly complex discussions concerning which kinds of meat consumption are ethically OK and which aren’t. The ethical systems constructed in this way can become quite baroque. Needless to say, a large degree of assuming-the-consequent is involved in creating these ethical “systems.”
That is, it reminds me of nothing so much as the sort of handwaving that well-meaning people sometimes do concerning the necessity of death (recently discussed, e.g., here and here). In both situations, there’s one possibility that seems too fantastic to most people to be worth discussing: in one case, that death is unnecessary and worth fighting against; in the other; that it’s wrong to kill and eat creatures that can feel and suffer.
Unfortunately, the suggestion that there might be ethical considerations to one’s diet is usually considered extremely impolite to discuss. Obviously, various community consensuses do arise about these things in certain circles, but in society at large there’s this sense that “nobody has the right to pass judgment on someone else’s diet.”
Anyway, whenever I hear these kinds of contortions I’m tempted to chime in: embrace the consequences of your beliefs. On some level you know you shouldn’t be killing animals and eating them. Stop it.
What strikes me as particularly weird is that I have a vegan friend who made a point of saying “I’m not going to tell someone else they shouldn’t eat meat.” I don’t actually know what she meant by that—whether she honestly didn’t think it was her business, or whether she simply had observed that telling people they shouldn’t eat meat has the opposite intended effect—they get pissed at you for telling them what they should and shouldn’t do, and either ignore you or eat more meat just to spite you.
If she meant the latter, I agree. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten someone else to become Vegetarian, but the approach that seems to produce most.… “respect” I guess is when I:
a) Make an effort to point out that I will have a hard time eating at a particular restaurant or event because of few vegetarian options. I say this as matter-of-fact-ly as I can. When people go “wait what?” I say “yeah I’m vegetarian” without attaching any particular judgment to it.
b) when/if people ask “why,” I focus almost entirely on reasons to cut back on meat that are [i]entirely in humanity’s best interest.[/i] Most people are vaguely aware that there are “health reasons”. And in fact, a lot of people say with hopeful looks “for health reasons, right?” because I don’t sound judgy, and they have assumptions that the health-vegetarians are cool whereas the ethical-vegetarians are judgmental jerks. What people DON’T usually realize how bad the meat industry is for humanity as a whole (by way of the environment).
c) when I get to the ethical concerns, I focus specifically on factory farming. I’m not 100% sure how I feel about the absolute moral weight of animals who are killed humanely for food, but letting people feel like there’s SOME way to ethically eat meat makes it feel less like I’m attacking them (even if that ethical way will almost never be relevant to the food that they’ll have access to).
People SHOULDN’T need more reason than “animals are raised in cages, given growth hormones to the point where they can barely walk, left to sit in their own feces and then killed.” But the magnitude of that reason is such that most people can’t process it. So it’s pretty convenient that there’s plenty of other good reasons to help open people up to the idea.
This is called leaving a line of retreat, and it’s a very good strategic consideration within a disagreement.
Not nearly as bad as you seem to think it is.
I’ve voted this down because it lacks helpful information or reasons. This topic can turn uncivil, or at least useless, rather quickly.
Applied ethics is often a mindkiller.
I… don’t see a quantification in his comment, and so I’m not sure how you’re so confident he’s misjudging it. The only implied one is “not worth the pleasure of eating meat,” which strikes me as plausible.
It’s actually even less than that: my implied quantification is “significant enough that you should at least make an attempt to study the issue before coming to a conclusion that you are acting correctly.”
Well, as thew cows we currently need for meat alone produce about 18% CO2 equivalent gases, that’s about 1⁄2 to 2⁄3 what traffic produces, it is an issue. It would remain an issue if we would go the zero-CO2 route through a thought-through nuclear option. It will become more an issue as traffic and heating/cooling gets improved through technology, but as more people get richer, the meat-consumption increases.
ETD: see this line as deleted. kept for history.
Well, these are just the facts. Judge by yourself.
Voted down because of the last line.
I don’t mean to imply that I disagree; what you’ve said sounds plausible enough to my admittedly rather uninformed mind.
I appreciate facts (especially ones that come with citations). But your last line is unnecessary and snarky. Either (a) you’ve given us enough facts that we can come to a reasonable judgment without needing anything further, or (b) you have not. If (a), then why the final sentence? If (b), then why refer to what you’ve said as “the” facts?
Well, it seems that “just the” does not have the same softening tone in English than “lediglich” in German, and “judge by yourself” is somehow negatively associated. Wieder ins Fettnäpfchen getreten.
Yes, “these are just the facts” usually indicates strong disapproval of anyone who doesn’t agree.
No, not that I know of.
Thanks for the pointer.
A shorter version of my comment: I very much doubt that there is a convincing rebuttal to Bentham’s and Singer’s view that the crucial question we should ask when deciding whether to kill something and eat it is “Can it suffer?”
Taboo “suffer”.
I do not believe that this is an instance in which an extended taboo facilitates better understanding. Particularly if you go as far as to insist on tabooing even ‘pain’. It is true that if you ‘taboo’ for long enough you will end up with a reductionist technical explanation of physiology such that applying moral evaluations of any kind seems inappropriate. Yet given that the meaning of ‘pain’ is rather well understood this obfuscates discussion of values more than it helps.
It is also utterly absurd to insist that your opponent taboo ‘suffer’ and ‘pain’ while you yourself throw around “subjective experience” as a more appropriate alternative.
Why?
(I’m not doubting you have a good reason, but the weight of the word “suffer” is essential to what morality’s about IMO. I think it’s valuable to be able to explain your views without using the word, but not necessary. If necessary “experience pain” works just as well.)
So, this is what Nietzsche called the morality of timidity. He enjoyed contrasting moralities that were about seeking X and moralities that were about avoiding Y- and I think that’s a pretty good way to look at moralities (though I don’t agree with his approach very strongly). A morality that pursues pleasure- even at the cost of pain- strikes me as more vibrant than a morality that pursues lack of pain- even at the cost of pleasure. Now, that’s not an argument for happy vegetarians to become carnivores, but it is an argument for happy carnivores to not care about unhappy animals.
I don’t know this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought well at all, but this seems to be a case where he was just completely wrong. What metaethics makes judgments based on whether some ethical system is more “vibrant” than some other? What does that mean? Can moralities really be consistently classified into “seeking” and “avoiding”? What happens if you replace “carnivores” and “animals” in your last phrase with “criminals” and “victims”?
One could see it as an extension of natural selection. I agree with you it’s odd- but metaethics is even more slippery than ethics, so I am reluctant to pass judgments instead of making descriptions.
If I recall correctly, he had significant affection for the likes of Genghis Khan. I don’t think he would sympathize very much with the petty robber but considers the mighty and powerful as operating on a different level from normal people, with correspondingly different morality. But it’s been a while since I’ve read his work along those lines, and so I’m not entirely confident about that. I do recall a passage where Zarathustra claimed his favorite animals were the eagle and the snake, and he approves of predation in general, I suspect.
So basically he’s the real-world version of Salazar Slytherin?
With due respect to your wit, I would point out that although Slytherin the fictional character lived centuries ago, he was, in fact, invented after Nietzsche, and it is possible the correlation is noncoincidental and begins with Nietzsche as a cause.
I lolled. Apparently, yes.
Interestingly, Nietzsche’s famous last rational action was interposing himself between a horse and its owner, who was beating it.
I’m a little leery of the whole idea that the powerful have a different set of moral standards applied to them (as opposed to their having a different morality, which seems psychologically likely). Praising the great and powerful no matter what they do while still condemning Leopold and Loeb as monsters is a very convenient stance to take.
I recommend you read taboo your words.
This doesn’t help. What do you mean by pain? For that matter what kind of entities can have experience?
Could you clarify what moral system you use without using pain, suffering or related words? (I honestly cannot think of a way to do so for mine, but that may just be me being new to the Taboo concept).
If your moral system doesn’t care about suffering at all (human or otherwise) than there is no contradiction.
Not at all. It would more sense to taboo ‘morality’ than ‘pain’, expressing everything in respect to preferences. “Pain” is fairly clear.
The thrust of my reply to these questions is that we don’t need to have fully general answers to them in order to be pretty sure—i.e., sure enough to stop doing it—that killing animals and eating them is wrong. All you need to know is that (a) you and your fellow humans experience the thing we call pain, (b) that it is wrong to cause other humans needless pain, and (c) that other animals are not sufficiently neurologically different from humans that you can be sure that killing them doesn’t cause them the same pain that it would be wrong to cause a human.
Your conclusion does not actually follow from the listed premises.
Then I’m either missing something or have explained inadequately. Please elaborate.
It is hard to explain a non sequitur. And the worse the reasoning used the harder it is to give an explanation more precise than “WTF? Um, no.”. Fortunately your argument is not that bad—it is just missing a premise “it is wrong to cause pain to animals”.
That’s the premise I am trying not to use, because I don’t think there is a supportable reason to draw a distinction between humans and animals when it comes to the acceptability of causing them pain and suffering. Let me rephrase.
I think it’s wrong to needlessly cause the-thing-we-know-as-pain to any creature capable of experiencing it. We know this includes humans, because we ourselves feel pain and can communicate that fact to others. We have every reason to think this includes a whole lot of non-human animals, because their physiology and behavior are similar enough to ours that it is very likely.
While we can’t live up to this moral guideline in every respect, some things—like not killing animals to eat them—are low-hanging fruit.
What’s the “same pain”? The same degree of pain? The same type? I think this might be a sticking point in your argument, along with the one wedrifrid has pointed out (unless it turns out that the answer to my question also clears up wedrifid’s objection).
I don’t have a perfect reply to that suggestion, but here’s a start, which perhaps is good enough for the case at hand. I loosely paraphrase Peter Singer.
Let’s suppose we know what it means for ourselves (humans) to suffer—we could get really specific about what that means, but we seem to have a kind of intersubjective consensus that suffices for the moment. Now, unless we believe we have immortal souls or something that enables us uniquely to suffer, our suffering (if, say, someone decided to kill and eat us) is due to our neurological makeup and is demonstrated externally by various kinds of observable behaviors.
So, when we see that other organisms have neurological systems that are rather similar to ours (as most vertebrates do), and exhibit similar behaviors when injured or killed, a good hypothesis is that they are experiencing something like we are when we suffer.
This is another case where, it seems to me, rather tortured reasoning is required to argue that other animals aren’t really suffering even when we have every reason to think they are. Surely we want to err on the side of not causing the kind of suffering we ourselves would feel if injured or killed?
How far up the evolutionary tree do you believe suffering extends? Primates? Mammals? Vertebrates? Any animal with a nervous system? What about plant suffering? Does an overworked computer suffer as it frantically swaps memory between RAM and disk? Are you sure you’re not committing the mind projection fallacy.
Also, while we’re on the subject why should suffering be the basis of morality, as opposed to something like subjective experience?
I suspect your definition of “tortured reasoning” amounts to any complex reasoning that leads to conclusions you don’t like.
I’m doing my best not to commit these fallacies, though of course not claiming to be infallible.
I mean, we know a fair bit about what causes pain for humans in the physiological/neurological sense—we know about nociceptors and how they work—and we also know what kinds of behavior we expect to see when a human is in pain. We also know that mammals have the same kinds of physiological mechanisms that humans do for pain, and we know they respond to injury with the same kinds of external behavior that humans do when injured.
(All this could not be said of plants, computers, or even quite likely non-vertebrate animals (although I do err on the side of caution with those and don’t eat them either).)
So, yes, I am claiming that there is a lot of evidence that pain and suffering for non-human mammals is a similar kind of thing to the pain and suffering that humans experience. And I am suggesting that when we cannot possibly know another being’s subjective experience as if from the inside, but everything we do know about that experience (the neurology and the behavior) is consistent with it being the kind of thing we would normally hold ourselves ethically obligated to avoid, then we are ethically obligated to avoid it.
(Disclaimer: although it’s still under development, my current moral system is based on satisfying the preferences as many entities as possible.)
I believe it is possible that any of the above experience suffering. But I recognize that attempting to consider every possible source of suffering is impossible. So I’m using my best judgment based on how I know that I personally experience suffering, and how other creatures are likely to be similar to me. I am assuming that suffering requires a fairly complex nervous system, and that it is unlikely to have developed in lifeforms that don’t respond much to stimuli.
I eat clams, because as far as I can tell there is no reason for them to have developed the ability to suffer. They also (as far as I know, although it is possible I am wrong here) usually farmed in a manner that’s most independent of the rest of the ecosystem. (Whereas I’d be okay with eating shrimp, but they are harvested from the ocean, not only catching other animals in the process but disrupting the food chain of creatures that eat them).
When it stops being under development, will you describe it in a top-level post?
It is not clear what you mean by this statement. Are you suggesting subjective experience is a better alternative or that both are equally absurd?
It has already been interpreted to be the former at least once.
Replace “suffer” with “experience negative pleasure”.
How’s that?
I think Nietzsche has put forward some rather tempting justifications for ignoring that. I don’t think he’s put forward convincing reasons for ignoring the pain of others, and so I don’t know whether or not to call that a convincing rebuttal.
Essentially, Singer’s view strikes me as unconvincing because it’s tautological. We should care about suffering because we should care about suffering.
No. We should care about suffering because suffering is bad. We care about the suffering of our fellow humans (surely you don’t dispute that we are correct to do so?), and Singer’s view is that most of the animals we eat are sufficiently close to humans neurologically that we should care about their suffering too. There’s no tautology there.
This is where the tautology resides. (Perhaps it would be clearer to call it “defining your conclusion” or “circularity”?)
I am ambivalent that we should categorically seek to reduce the suffering of our fellow humans (and ourselves). I am personally moved by most suffering I see, but I recognize that as an emotional response. I am aware of many situations in which suffering is a dramatically positive force, and many in which it is not. I don’t like calling things bad, I like calling them bad at X.
I also don’t think our justifications for working to minimize the pain of our fellow humans are neurological- and so the biological similarity does not strike me as relevant for many valid approaches to the situation.
The idea that suffering can have positive effects is in no way mutually exclusive with the idea that it is itself bad.
Is there any reason why the suffering of factory-farmed animals would be worth it?
Here we’re discussing definitions, I think. If you assume suffering is bad a priori, that seems to me to preclude there being (worthwhile) benefits from suffering. I find that difficult to swallow.
And this isn’t just “surgery is worth it, even with the pain, but it would be more worth it without the pain”- this is looking at “no pain no gain” situations. Do they exist? I strongly suspect so. (I think many people overestimate how many there are, but that doesn’t mean something things aren’t better with a sting.)
Bacon.
This is to say economics says yes. People’s observable behavior indicates that they do consider the process worth it.
It shows that the benefit to the people is greater than the pain to the people. The pain of the pig is ignored. Considering the vast majority of the pain is to the pig, that’s a pretty big oversight.
No, it doesn’t say anything about pain to humans. It shows that people collectively consider it worth it. That information is valuable when considering questions like:
But, if you could pith the pig painlessly (or engineer pigs that did not suffer while their meat is grown / harvested), then the quality of the bacon would not alter (unless you’re a sadist).
The question was ‘worth it?’, not intrinsically desirable.
I’m sure there is an obligatory link in there somewhere. ;)
Our justifications for working to minimize the pain of our fellow humans aren’t neurological. Our justifications for thinking that our fellow humans do experience pain are, in part, neurological (and in part based on our observations of their behavior). Once we have good reason to think that some action of ours does cause our fellow humans pain, then we have a moral reason to avoid that action. That moral reason may or may not be an insurmountable one, but causing a fellow human pain at least requires some appeal to some good that outweighs the pain.
I had assumed that the leap here for most people would be extending moral consideration to non-humans. I’m surprised to see that the leap in this case appears to be extending moral consideration to beings other than oneself.
I don’t buy this. There may be situations in which suffering motivates some other positive action, but I can’t see in what sense suffering itself could be positive—as in, ceteris paribus, better to have suffering than not to.
I’m sorry, I’m being unclear. I’m not arguing that person X should maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain and not care about anyone else. I’m arguing that person X should find a different utility function than pleasure minus pain (and that includes their own).
I’m very glad you included this phrase, because that’s where our disagreement lies. I don’t think ceteris paribus is an option in most of the cases I’m considering. For example, the positive effect of a rite of passage scales with the amount of suffering undergone during it.
My favorite pieces of art are mostly very sad. If you could somehow preserve everything else about them while taking away only the tragedy, I’d value them much less. Ceteris paribus, I prefer to live in a world where I can be driven to tears by stories of heroic self-sacrifice (for example).
This is totally irrelevant to the question of animal suffering, though.
“Can it suffer” is relevant when the decision is about its suffering. “How much is its potential future life valued” (by humans, and by itself if it has a concept of the future) is more relevant to killing in particular. Arguably you could weigh the suffering involved in an immanent death more than the suffering in a much later death.