I think you have failed to address the issue of why these solutions are acceptable for chickens and not for humans. The obvious explanation for why people disagree with you on this point is not that they don’t care about animal suffering, any more than people who don’t want to amputate the non-essential body parts that might give humans discomfort later in life don’t care about human suffering. It is that they think those actions are unethical for animals, just like they are for humans.
This seems like an irrelevant objection, given that the OP is explicitly arguing about a conditional (IF mundane improvements in factory farming is a good intervention point for aggregate welfare reasons, THEN wireheading chickens is an even better intervention on those grounds), not unconditionally favoring the latter policy over the former.
For EA to make any sense at all as a way of organizing to do good, it needs to be able to clearly distinguish a rank-ordering of interventions on the basis of merit in a strictly utilitarian or other aggregative analysis with some particular defined outcome, from the question of which interventions have additional sources of support such as other moral considerations.
It also needs to be possible to have a discussion of whether a position is coherent separately from the question of whether it’s the position we in fact hold, if that position is a claimed justification for demanding resources.
That’s not a proxy for suffering; it is caring about more than just suffering. You might oppose making animals’ brains smaller because it also reduces their ability to feel pleasure, and you value pleasure in addition to pain. You might oppose amputating non-essential body parts because that reduces the animal’s capacity for pleasurable experiences of the sort the species tends to experience. You might oppose breeding animals that enjoy pain because of the predictable injuries and shorter lifespan that would result: physical health and fitness is conventionally included in many definitions of animal welfare. You might also be a deontologist who is opposed to certain interventions as a violation of the animal’s rights or dignity.
That’s not a proxy for suffering; it is caring about more than just suffering
Yes, I agree with all that! I am not advocating that one approach is right and all the others are wrong. I have no prescriptive intentions about animals. I am advocating being honest with oneself about your preferences. If you proclaim to care about the reduction of animal suffering yet really care about many other metrics just as much, spend time reflecting on what your real values are, instead of doing motte-and-bailey when pressed. (This is a generic “you”, not you personally.)
It seems like you are the one doing some kind of motte-and-bailey, given you made a post called “Wirehead your Chickens” arguing for wireheading chickens and having a rather dismissive tone towards the opposing side, and now you’re saying the real point was that negative utilitarian rhetoric is too emphasized compared to the moral systems which are actually used by EAs. (By the way, the prominence of negative utilitarian rhetoric is one of My Issues With EA Let Me Show You Them.)
Sorry about the miscommunication. Disengaging, since I do not find focusing on form over substance all that productive. I have accepted your criticism about the tone as valid.
I’m surprised that you’re mentioning only non-negative utilitarianism and deontology, rather than the capability utilitarianism you recently signal-boosted, which I think is a more psychologically realistic explanation of people’s reactions to the idea of wireheading.
People have values other than suffering/non-suffering, such as autonomy. You may say “animals don’t suffer from lack of autonomy” or “I don’t care about animal autonomy” but you need to make that case rather than saying people are just being dumb.
But you make it sound as though these people are objectively “wrong”, as if they’re *trying* to actually reduce animal suffering in the absolute but end up working on the human proxy because of a bias. That may be true of some, but surely not all. What ozymandias was, I believe, trying to express, is that some of the people who’d reject your solutions consciously find them ethically unacceptable, not merely recoil from them because they’d *instinctively* be against their being used on humans.
I think you have failed to address the issue of why these solutions are acceptable for chickens and not for humans. The obvious explanation for why people disagree with you on this point is not that they don’t care about animal suffering, any more than people who don’t want to amputate the non-essential body parts that might give humans discomfort later in life don’t care about human suffering. It is that they think those actions are unethical for animals, just like they are for humans.
This seems like an irrelevant objection, given that the OP is explicitly arguing about a conditional (IF mundane improvements in factory farming is a good intervention point for aggregate welfare reasons, THEN wireheading chickens is an even better intervention on those grounds), not unconditionally favoring the latter policy over the former.
For EA to make any sense at all as a way of organizing to do good, it needs to be able to clearly distinguish a rank-ordering of interventions on the basis of merit in a strictly utilitarian or other aggregative analysis with some particular defined outcome, from the question of which interventions have additional sources of support such as other moral considerations.
It also needs to be possible to have a discussion of whether a position is coherent separately from the question of whether it’s the position we in fact hold, if that position is a claimed justification for demanding resources.
And this is precisely my point. We optimize a human proxy, not actual suffering.
That’s not a proxy for suffering; it is caring about more than just suffering. You might oppose making animals’ brains smaller because it also reduces their ability to feel pleasure, and you value pleasure in addition to pain. You might oppose amputating non-essential body parts because that reduces the animal’s capacity for pleasurable experiences of the sort the species tends to experience. You might oppose breeding animals that enjoy pain because of the predictable injuries and shorter lifespan that would result: physical health and fitness is conventionally included in many definitions of animal welfare. You might also be a deontologist who is opposed to certain interventions as a violation of the animal’s rights or dignity.
Not being a negative utilitarian is not a bias.
Yes, I agree with all that! I am not advocating that one approach is right and all the others are wrong. I have no prescriptive intentions about animals. I am advocating being honest with oneself about your preferences. If you proclaim to care about the reduction of animal suffering yet really care about many other metrics just as much, spend time reflecting on what your real values are, instead of doing motte-and-bailey when pressed. (This is a generic “you”, not you personally.)
It seems like you are the one doing some kind of motte-and-bailey, given you made a post called “Wirehead your Chickens” arguing for wireheading chickens and having a rather dismissive tone towards the opposing side, and now you’re saying the real point was that negative utilitarian rhetoric is too emphasized compared to the moral systems which are actually used by EAs. (By the way, the prominence of negative utilitarian rhetoric is one of My Issues With EA Let Me Show You Them.)
Sorry about the miscommunication. Disengaging, since I do not find focusing on form over substance all that productive. I have accepted your criticism about the tone as valid.
I’m surprised that you’re mentioning only non-negative utilitarianism and deontology, rather than the capability utilitarianism you recently signal-boosted, which I think is a more psychologically realistic explanation of people’s reactions to the idea of wireheading.
People have values other than suffering/non-suffering, such as autonomy. You may say “animals don’t suffer from lack of autonomy” or “I don’t care about animal autonomy” but you need to make that case rather than saying people are just being dumb.
See my reply to ozy.
But you make it sound as though these people are objectively “wrong”, as if they’re *trying* to actually reduce animal suffering in the absolute but end up working on the human proxy because of a bias. That may be true of some, but surely not all. What ozymandias was, I believe, trying to express, is that some of the people who’d reject your solutions consciously find them ethically unacceptable, not merely recoil from them because they’d *instinctively* be against their being used on humans.
Clearly I have not phrased it well in my post. See my reply to ozy. I am advocating self-honesty about your values, not a particular action.