When I look at factory-farmed animals, I feel awful for them. So coming into this, I have some expectation that my eventual understanding of consciousness, animal cognition, and morality (C/A/M) will add up to normalcy (i.e. not net positive for many animals).
But:
‘It all adds up to normality’ doesn’t mean ‘you should assume your initial intuitions and snap judgments are correct even in cases where there’s no evolutionary or physical reason for the intuition/judgment to be correct’. It means ‘reductive explanations generally have to recapture the phenomenon somehow’. Here, the phenomenon is a feeling of your brain, and ‘that feeling is just anthropomorphism’ recaptures the phenomenon perfectly, regardless of whether animals are conscious, what their inner life is like (if they’re conscious), etc.
I agree with the claim ‘my gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs suffer a lot’. I disagree with the claim ‘my gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs would be better off not existing’. I think that’s a super different claim, and builds in a lot more theory and deliberative reasoning (though it may feel obvious once it’s been cached long enough).
I do think that that gut reaction is important information
I just disagree. I think it’s not important at all, except insofar as it helps us notice the hypothesis that life might be terrible, net-negative, etc. for chickens in factory farms.
E.g., a lot of people seem to think that chickens are obviously conscious, but that ants aren’t obviously conscious (or even that they’re obviously not conscious). This seems like an obviously silly position to me, unless the person has a very detailed, well-supported, predictive model of consciousness that makes that prediction. In this case, I think that going through the imaginative exercise of anthropomorphizing ants could be quite epistemically useful, to make it more salient that this really is a live possibility.
But no, I don’t think the imaginative exercise actually gives us Bayesian evidence about what’s going on inside ants’ brains — it’s purely ‘helping correct for a bias that made us bizarrely neglect a hypothesis a superintelligence would never neglect’; the way the exercise plays out in one’s head doesn’t covary with ant consciousness across possible worlds. And exactly the same is true for chickens.
I’m confused why you wrote “It doesn’t mean ‘you should assume your initial intuitions and snap judgments are correct’” when in the very next sentence I said “But maybe my gut reaction isn’t that trustworthy—that’s often the case in ethical dilemmas.”?
I disagree with the claim ‘my gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs would be better off not existing’
OK, but do you disagree with the claim ‘Turntrout’s gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs would be better off not existing’? Because that’s true for me, at least on my first consideration of the issue.
[ETA: Removed superfluous reaction]
Attempted restatement of my point: My gut reaction is evidence about what my implicit C/A/M theories predict, which I should take seriously to the extent that I have been actually ingraining all the thought experiments I’ve considered. And just because the reaction isn’t subvocalized via a verbalized explicit theory, doesn’t mean it’s not important evidence.
Similarly: When considering an action, I may snap-judge it to be squidgy and bad, even though I didn’t yet run a full-blown game-theoretic analysis in my head.
(Let me know if I also seem to be sliding off of your point!)
I agree with the claim ‘my gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs suffer a lot’. I disagree with the claim ‘my gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs would be better off not existing’. I think that’s a super different claim, and builds in a lot more theory and deliberative reasoning (though it may feel obvious once it’s been cached long enough).
I avoid factory farmed pork because their existence seems net negative to me, but don’t do this for chickens. This is largely because I believe pigs have qualia similar enough to me that I don’t need to worry about the animal cognition part of c/a/m (I do want to note that you seem to be arguing from a perspective wherein pro-existence is the null, and so you need to reason yourself out of it to be anti-natalist for the animals). I find chickens difficult to model using the machinery I use for humans, but that machinery works okay on pigs (although this is largely through seeing videos of them instead of in person interaction, so it’s absolutely possible I’m mistaken).
I’m not sure how to handle the “consciousness” part, since they cannot advocate for themselves or express preferences for or against existence in ways that are legible to me.
But:
‘It all adds up to normality’ doesn’t mean ‘you should assume your initial intuitions and snap judgments are correct even in cases where there’s no evolutionary or physical reason for the intuition/judgment to be correct’. It means ‘reductive explanations generally have to recapture the phenomenon somehow’. Here, the phenomenon is a feeling of your brain, and ‘that feeling is just anthropomorphism’ recaptures the phenomenon perfectly, regardless of whether animals are conscious, what their inner life is like (if they’re conscious), etc.
I agree with the claim ‘my gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs suffer a lot’. I disagree with the claim ‘my gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs would be better off not existing’. I think that’s a super different claim, and builds in a lot more theory and deliberative reasoning (though it may feel obvious once it’s been cached long enough).
I just disagree. I think it’s not important at all, except insofar as it helps us notice the hypothesis that life might be terrible, net-negative, etc. for chickens in factory farms.
E.g., a lot of people seem to think that chickens are obviously conscious, but that ants aren’t obviously conscious (or even that they’re obviously not conscious). This seems like an obviously silly position to me, unless the person has a very detailed, well-supported, predictive model of consciousness that makes that prediction. In this case, I think that going through the imaginative exercise of anthropomorphizing ants could be quite epistemically useful, to make it more salient that this really is a live possibility.
But no, I don’t think the imaginative exercise actually gives us Bayesian evidence about what’s going on inside ants’ brains — it’s purely ‘helping correct for a bias that made us bizarrely neglect a hypothesis a superintelligence would never neglect’; the way the exercise plays out in one’s head doesn’t covary with ant consciousness across possible worlds. And exactly the same is true for chickens.
I’m confused why you wrote “It doesn’t mean ‘you should assume your initial intuitions and snap judgments are correct’” when in the very next sentence I said “But maybe my gut reaction isn’t that trustworthy—that’s often the case in ethical dilemmas.”?
OK, but do you disagree with the claim ‘Turntrout’s gut reaction is that factory-farmed pigs would be better off not existing’? Because that’s true for me, at least on my first consideration of the issue.
[ETA: Removed superfluous reaction]
Attempted restatement of my point: My gut reaction is evidence about what my implicit C/A/M theories predict, which I should take seriously to the extent that I have been actually ingraining all the thought experiments I’ve considered. And just because the reaction isn’t subvocalized via a verbalized explicit theory, doesn’t mean it’s not important evidence.
Similarly: When considering an action, I may snap-judge it to be squidgy and bad, even though I didn’t yet run a full-blown game-theoretic analysis in my head.
(Let me know if I also seem to be sliding off of your point!)
I avoid factory farmed pork because their existence seems net negative to me, but don’t do this for chickens. This is largely because I believe pigs have qualia similar enough to me that I don’t need to worry about the animal cognition part of c/a/m (I do want to note that you seem to be arguing from a perspective wherein pro-existence is the null, and so you need to reason yourself out of it to be anti-natalist for the animals). I find chickens difficult to model using the machinery I use for humans, but that machinery works okay on pigs (although this is largely through seeing videos of them instead of in person interaction, so it’s absolutely possible I’m mistaken).
I’m not sure how to handle the “consciousness” part, since they cannot advocate for themselves or express preferences for or against existence in ways that are legible to me.