I don’t feel like getting into a debate about preferences. But this comes up so often that I want to state my preferences for what its worth.
I would deem it extremely tasteless if someone was going to eat a raven, parrot, orca or octopus if they could as well survive by eating other lower animals. There are other examples of animals that show a lot of signs of characteristics that we normally only associated with being human. I would further deem it extremely tasteless if someone was going to torture animals just for fun, animals that can feel pain but might not be aware of it in the same sense that humans are. And if people argue in favor of those acts by claiming that I am biased and that my preferences depend on anthropomorphizing those animals, then I can only say that I believe that they are overcompensating and that I won’t revisit my preferences until they can show me that a raven or parrot is no more affected by torture than Microsoft Word.
This is about preferences, about what we want. That’s why I signal mine. And if you share those preferences but fool yourself into believing that they don’t apply to animals because that’s “biased”, then you might be confused about what it means to be rational. Maybe some animals feel pain but are not aware of it and others don’t even feel pain but just act like they do. So what? What if your preferences are about the signaling of pain rather than some mysterious ethical property called “pain”? You still won’t enjoy watching animated cartoon animals being tortured even though they obviously don’t feel pain.
The question should be, how much fun does that person have torturing that animal, how much do I care about how much fun that person has, how much do I care about the possible disutility of the animal and how much does it bother me, how much disutility do I gain because of it happening at all? If the answer has negative utility then the person should (should according to you) fucking stop torturing that animal or fucking die.
This has nothing to do with some mysterious concept called ethics, its just about preferences and expected utility calculations.
I don’t feel like getting into a debate about preferences. But this comes up so often that I want to state my preferences for what its worth.
I would deem it extremely tasteless if someone was going to eat a raven, parrot, orca or octopus if they could as well survive by eating other lower animals. There are other examples of animals that show a lot of signs of characteristics that we normally only associated with being human. I would further deem it extremely tasteless if someone was going to torture animals just for fun, animals that can feel pain but might not be aware of it in the same sense that humans are. And if people argue in favor of those acts by claiming that I am biased and that my preferences depend on anthropomorphizing those animals, then I can only say that I believe that they are overcompensating and that I won’t revisit my preferences until they can show me that a raven or parrot is no more affected by torture than Microsoft Word.
This is about preferences, about what we want. That’s why I signal mine. And if you share those preferences but fool yourself into believing that they don’t apply to animals because that’s “biased”, then you might be confused about what it means to be rational. Maybe some animals feel pain but are not aware of it and others don’t even feel pain but just act like they do. So what? What if your preferences are about the signaling of pain rather than some mysterious ethical property called “pain”? You still won’t enjoy watching animated cartoon animals being tortured even though they obviously don’t feel pain.
The question should be, how much fun does that person have torturing that animal, how much do I care about how much fun that person has, how much do I care about the possible disutility of the animal and how much does it bother me, how much disutility do I gain because of it happening at all? If the answer has negative utility then the person should (should according to you) fucking stop torturing that animal or fucking die.
This has nothing to do with some mysterious concept called ethics, its just about preferences and expected utility calculations.
Well, it has to do with ethics insofar as ethics is about preferences and expected utility calculations.