This is quite a good post, thanks for taking the time to write it. You’ve said before that you think vegetarianism is the morally superior option. While you’ve done a good job here of defending the coherence or possibility of the moral significance of animal suffering, would you be willing to go so far as to defend such moral significance simpliciter?
I ask in part because I don’t think the claim that we ought to err on the side of disjunctivity as I think you construe it (where this involves something like a proportional distribution of moral worth on the basis of a variety of different merits and relationships) is morally safer than operating as if there were a hard and flat moral floor. Operating on your basis we might be less likely to exclude from moral consideration those that ought to be included, but we will be more likely to distribute moral value unevenly where it should be evenly distributed. We’ve historically had both problems, and I don’t know that one or the other is necessarily the more disastrous. Exclusion has led to some real moral abominations (the holocaust, I guess), but uneven distribution where even distribution is called for has led to some long-standing and terribly unjust political traditions (feudalism, say).
EDIT: I should add, and not at all by way of criticism, that for all the pejorative aimed at Aristotelian thinking in this last exchange, your conclusion (excluding the safety bit) is strikingly Aristotelian.
Thanks, hen! My primary argument is indeed that if animals suffer, that is morally significant — not that this thesis is coherent or possible, but that it’s true. My claim is that although humans are capable both of suffering and of socializing, and both of these have ethical import, the import of suffering is not completely dependent on the import of socializing, but has some valence in its own right. This allows us to generalize the undesirability of suffering both to sapient nonsocial sentient beings and to nonsapient nonsocial sentient beings, independent of whether they would be easy, hard, or impossible to modify into a social being.
Operating on your basis we might be less likely to exclude from moral consideration those that ought to be included, but we will be more likely to distribute moral value unevenly where it should be evenly distributed.
It’s hard to talk about this in the abstract, so maybe you should say more about what you’re worried about, and (ideally) about some alternative that avoids the problem. It sounds like you’re suggesting that if we assert that humans have a richer set of rights than non-humans — if we allow value to admit of many degrees and multiple kinds — then we may end up saying that some groups of humans intrinsically deserve more rights than others, in a non-meritocratic way. Is that your worry?
the import of suffering is not completely dependent on the import of socializing,
Thanks for filling that out. Could I ask you to continue with a defense of this premise in particular? (You may have done this already, and I may have missed it. If so, I’d be happy to be pointed in the right direction).
Then we may end up saying that some groups of humans deserve more rights than others, in a non-meritocratic way. Is that your worry?
My worry is with both meritocratic and non-meritocratic unevenness. You said earlier that Qiaochu’s motivation for excluding animals from moral consideration was based on a desire for simplicity. I think this is right, but could use a more positive formulation: I think on the whole people want this simplicity because they want to defend the extremely potent modern intuition that moral hierarchy is unqualifiedly wrong . At least part of this idea is to leave our moral view fully determined by our understanding of humanity: we owe to every human (or relevantly human-like thing) the moral consideration we take ourselves to be owed. Most vegetarians, I would think, deploy such a flat moral floor (at sentience) for defending the rights of animals.
So one view Qiaochu was attacking (I think) by talking about the complexity of value is the view that something so basic as sentience could be the foundation for our moral floor. Your response was not to argue for sentience as such a basis, but to deny the moral floor in favor of a moral stairway, thereby eliminating the absurdity of regarding chickens as full fledged people.
The reason this might be worrying is that our understanding of what it is to be human, or what kinds of things are morally valuable now fails to determine our ascription of moral worth. So we admit the possibility of distributing moral worth according to intelligence, strength, military power, wealth, health, beauty, etc. and thereby denying to many people who fall short in these ways the moral significance we generally think they’re owed. It was a view very much along these lines that led Aristotle to posit that some human beings, incapable of serious moral achievement for social or biological reasons, were natural slaves. He did not say they were morally insignificant, mind, just that given their capacities slavery was the best they could do.
I’m not saying you’re committed to any kind of moral oligarchy, only that because this kind of disjunctive strategy eschews the direct and solitary link between humanity and moral value, it cannot be called the safer option without further ado. A society in error could do as much damage proceeding by your disjunctive rule (by messing up the distributions) as they could proceeding with a conjunctive rule (by messing up who counts as ‘human’).
An alternative might be to say that there is moral value proper, that every human being (or relevantly human-like thing) has, and then there are a variety of defective or subordinate forms of moral significance depending on how something is related to that moral core. This way, you’d keep the hard moral floor, but you’d be able to argue for the (non-intrinsic) moral value of non-humans. (Unfortunately, this alternative also deploys an Aristotelian idea: core dependent homonomy.)
This is quite a good post, thanks for taking the time to write it. You’ve said before that you think vegetarianism is the morally superior option. While you’ve done a good job here of defending the coherence or possibility of the moral significance of animal suffering, would you be willing to go so far as to defend such moral significance simpliciter?
I ask in part because I don’t think the claim that we ought to err on the side of disjunctivity as I think you construe it (where this involves something like a proportional distribution of moral worth on the basis of a variety of different merits and relationships) is morally safer than operating as if there were a hard and flat moral floor. Operating on your basis we might be less likely to exclude from moral consideration those that ought to be included, but we will be more likely to distribute moral value unevenly where it should be evenly distributed. We’ve historically had both problems, and I don’t know that one or the other is necessarily the more disastrous. Exclusion has led to some real moral abominations (the holocaust, I guess), but uneven distribution where even distribution is called for has led to some long-standing and terribly unjust political traditions (feudalism, say).
EDIT: I should add, and not at all by way of criticism, that for all the pejorative aimed at Aristotelian thinking in this last exchange, your conclusion (excluding the safety bit) is strikingly Aristotelian.
Thanks, hen! My primary argument is indeed that if animals suffer, that is morally significant — not that this thesis is coherent or possible, but that it’s true. My claim is that although humans are capable both of suffering and of socializing, and both of these have ethical import, the import of suffering is not completely dependent on the import of socializing, but has some valence in its own right. This allows us to generalize the undesirability of suffering both to sapient nonsocial sentient beings and to nonsapient nonsocial sentient beings, independent of whether they would be easy, hard, or impossible to modify into a social being.
It’s hard to talk about this in the abstract, so maybe you should say more about what you’re worried about, and (ideally) about some alternative that avoids the problem. It sounds like you’re suggesting that if we assert that humans have a richer set of rights than non-humans — if we allow value to admit of many degrees and multiple kinds — then we may end up saying that some groups of humans intrinsically deserve more rights than others, in a non-meritocratic way. Is that your worry?
Thanks for filling that out. Could I ask you to continue with a defense of this premise in particular? (You may have done this already, and I may have missed it. If so, I’d be happy to be pointed in the right direction).
My worry is with both meritocratic and non-meritocratic unevenness. You said earlier that Qiaochu’s motivation for excluding animals from moral consideration was based on a desire for simplicity. I think this is right, but could use a more positive formulation: I think on the whole people want this simplicity because they want to defend the extremely potent modern intuition that moral hierarchy is unqualifiedly wrong . At least part of this idea is to leave our moral view fully determined by our understanding of humanity: we owe to every human (or relevantly human-like thing) the moral consideration we take ourselves to be owed. Most vegetarians, I would think, deploy such a flat moral floor (at sentience) for defending the rights of animals.
So one view Qiaochu was attacking (I think) by talking about the complexity of value is the view that something so basic as sentience could be the foundation for our moral floor. Your response was not to argue for sentience as such a basis, but to deny the moral floor in favor of a moral stairway, thereby eliminating the absurdity of regarding chickens as full fledged people.
The reason this might be worrying is that our understanding of what it is to be human, or what kinds of things are morally valuable now fails to determine our ascription of moral worth. So we admit the possibility of distributing moral worth according to intelligence, strength, military power, wealth, health, beauty, etc. and thereby denying to many people who fall short in these ways the moral significance we generally think they’re owed. It was a view very much along these lines that led Aristotle to posit that some human beings, incapable of serious moral achievement for social or biological reasons, were natural slaves. He did not say they were morally insignificant, mind, just that given their capacities slavery was the best they could do.
I’m not saying you’re committed to any kind of moral oligarchy, only that because this kind of disjunctive strategy eschews the direct and solitary link between humanity and moral value, it cannot be called the safer option without further ado. A society in error could do as much damage proceeding by your disjunctive rule (by messing up the distributions) as they could proceeding with a conjunctive rule (by messing up who counts as ‘human’).
An alternative might be to say that there is moral value proper, that every human being (or relevantly human-like thing) has, and then there are a variety of defective or subordinate forms of moral significance depending on how something is related to that moral core. This way, you’d keep the hard moral floor, but you’d be able to argue for the (non-intrinsic) moral value of non-humans. (Unfortunately, this alternative also deploys an Aristotelian idea: core dependent homonomy.)