I challenge you to make any coherent argument for this. After a lifetime of studying brain function, I can’t justify eating factory farmed meat, because there’s no logical threshold between human brain function wrt suffering, and simpler animals. It’s on a spectrum of complexity, not a binary category.
You’re free to have whatever values you want, but not to claim consistency where it doesn’t exist. Saying you care about some suffering and not other suffering isn’t logically coherent—unless you really don’t care about any suffering, just keeping the right social loyalties. Most humans just haven’t bothered to work through a logically consistent ethical framework—they just care about what their ingroup cares about, since that is easy and pragmatically useful.
I’m not sure exactly what you want me to provide a “coherent argument for”, but I’ll take it as my decision to eat meat and fish (including factory-farmed. Including veal and foie gras. Excluding cetacians and endangered species for diversity-preservation reasons, and excluding humans, mostly for social-cost reasons, I think).
It’s quite consistent to say that I care about both pleasure/satisfaction and suffering (and other dimensions of experience), and that some pleasures outweigh some (or even most) suffering. It may mean that I’m a jerk or a utility monster, but it doesn’t mean that I’m incoherent. Note that part of my beliefs is that there a LOT of complexity which is hard to communicate, and things that may appear inconsistent to you are actually different situations to me.
It’s a complex topic, and I probably shouldn’t have jumped in on the comments section. You are of course welcome to your own preferences; I only take issue with claims of logical consistency. Fish either do or don’t suffer relative to the human suffering we care about; it’s a question of fact, not preference. It’s worth a whole post about the brain mechanisms underlying suffering. But I haven’t written that post, because alignment seems more important, and I might just put it off until the small matter of human survival is settled. I also prioritize humans drastically over other animals but I’m pretty sure my ethical behavior is logically inconsistent and only pragmatically useful.
I don’t claim to know whether fish suffer, nor really how much they suffer. I will say that I distinguish pain from suffering (in an imperfectly modeled way, but consistent with the saying “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”), and I’m suspicious that neurological studies I’ve seen seem to conflate the two.
The question of importance (how much weight to give such suffering) is, as you say, more important. I find it less important than the enjoyment of cheap, available seafood. You don’t have to. This is a valid difference of preference without either of us being wrong.
Saying you care about some suffering and not other suffering isn’t logically coherent
Why? What’s logically incoherent about it?
I care about the suffering of people, but not the suffering (or, perhaps more accurately, “suffering”) of non-people. This seems straightforward enough.
Is there some logical theorem that dictates that I should care about things other than that which I do, in fact, care about? How can there be such a thing?
I challenge you to make any coherent argument for this. After a lifetime of studying brain function, I can’t justify eating factory farmed meat, because there’s no logical threshold between human brain function wrt suffering, and simpler animals. It’s on a spectrum of complexity, not a binary category.
You’re free to have whatever values you want, but not to claim consistency where it doesn’t exist. Saying you care about some suffering and not other suffering isn’t logically coherent—unless you really don’t care about any suffering, just keeping the right social loyalties. Most humans just haven’t bothered to work through a logically consistent ethical framework—they just care about what their ingroup cares about, since that is easy and pragmatically useful.
I’m not sure exactly what you want me to provide a “coherent argument for”, but I’ll take it as my decision to eat meat and fish (including factory-farmed. Including veal and foie gras. Excluding cetacians and endangered species for diversity-preservation reasons, and excluding humans, mostly for social-cost reasons, I think).
It’s quite consistent to say that I care about both pleasure/satisfaction and suffering (and other dimensions of experience), and that some pleasures outweigh some (or even most) suffering. It may mean that I’m a jerk or a utility monster, but it doesn’t mean that I’m incoherent. Note that part of my beliefs is that there a LOT of complexity which is hard to communicate, and things that may appear inconsistent to you are actually different situations to me.
It’s a complex topic, and I probably shouldn’t have jumped in on the comments section. You are of course welcome to your own preferences; I only take issue with claims of logical consistency. Fish either do or don’t suffer relative to the human suffering we care about; it’s a question of fact, not preference. It’s worth a whole post about the brain mechanisms underlying suffering. But I haven’t written that post, because alignment seems more important, and I might just put it off until the small matter of human survival is settled. I also prioritize humans drastically over other animals but I’m pretty sure my ethical behavior is logically inconsistent and only pragmatically useful.
I don’t claim to know whether fish suffer, nor really how much they suffer. I will say that I distinguish pain from suffering (in an imperfectly modeled way, but consistent with the saying “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”), and I’m suspicious that neurological studies I’ve seen seem to conflate the two.
The question of importance (how much weight to give such suffering) is, as you say, more important. I find it less important than the enjoyment of cheap, available seafood. You don’t have to. This is a valid difference of preference without either of us being wrong.
Why? What’s logically incoherent about it?
I care about the suffering of people, but not the suffering (or, perhaps more accurately, “suffering”) of non-people. This seems straightforward enough.
Is there some logical theorem that dictates that I should care about things other than that which I do, in fact, care about? How can there be such a thing?