I’m a human and I care about humans. Animals only matter insofar as they affect the lives of humans.
Every human I know cares at least somewhat about animal suffering. We don’t like seeing chickens endlessly and horrifically tortured—and when we become vividly acquainted with such torture, our not-liking-it generally manifests as a desire for the torture to stop, not just as a desire to become ignorant that this is going on so it won’t disturb our peace of mind. I’ll need more information to see where the disanalogy is supposed to be between compassion for other species and compassion for other humans.
I’m not disagreeing that animals suffer. I’m telling you that I don’t care whether they suffer.
Are you certain you don’t care?
Are you certain that you won’t end up viewing this dispassion as a bias on your part, analogous to people in history who genuinely didn’t care at all about black people (but would regret and abandon this apathy if they knew all the facts)?
If you feel there’s any realistic chance you might discover that you do care in the future, you should again err strongly on the side of vegetarianism. Feeling a bit silly 20 years from now because you avoided torturing beings it turns out you don’t care about is a much smaller cost than learning 20 years from now you’re the hitler of cows. Vegetarianism accommodates meta-uncertainty about ethical systems better than its rivals do.
I’ll need more information to see where the disanalogy is supposed to be between compassion for other species and compassion for other humans.
I don’t feel psychologically similar to a chicken in the same way that I feel psychologically similar to other humans.
Are you certain you don’t care?
No, or else I wouldn’t be asking for arguments.
If you feel there’s any chance you might discover that you do care in the future, you should again err strongly on the side of vegetarianism. Feeling a bit silly 20 years from now because you avoided torturing beings it turns out you don’t care about is a much smaller cost than learning 20 years from now you’re the hitler of cows. Vegetarianism accommodates meta-uncertainty about ethical systems better than its rivals do.
I don’t feel psychologically similar to a chicken in the same way that I feel psychologically similar to other humans.
I don’t either, but unless I can come up with a sharp and universal criterion for distinguishing all chickens from all humans, chickens’ psychological alienness to me will seem a difference of degree more than of kind. It’s a lot easier to argue that chicken suffering matters less than human suffering (or to argue that chickens are zombies) than to argue that chicken suffering is completely morally irrelevant.
Some chickens may very well have more psychologically in common with me than I have in common with certain human infants or with certain brain-damaged humans; but I still find myself able to feel that sentient infants and disabled sentient humans oughtn’t be tortured. (And not just because I don’t want their cries to disturb my own peace of mind. Nor just because they could potentially become highly intelligent, through development or medical intervention. Those might enhance the moral standing of any of these organisms, but they don’t appear to exhaust it..)
That’s not a good point, that’s a variety of Pascal’s Mugging: you’re suggesting that the fact that the possible consequence is large (“I tortured beings” is a really negative thing) means that even fi the chance is small, you should act on that basis.
Every human I know cares at least somewhat about animal suffering. We don’t like seeing chickens endlessly and horrifically tortured—and when we become vividly acquainted with such torture, our not-liking-it generally manifests as a desire for the torture to stop, not just as a desire to become ignorant that this is going on so it won’t disturb our peace of mind. I’ll need more information to see where the disanalogy is supposed to be between compassion for other species and compassion for other humans.
Are you certain you don’t care?
Are you certain that you won’t end up viewing this dispassion as a bias on your part, analogous to people in history who genuinely didn’t care at all about black people (but would regret and abandon this apathy if they knew all the facts)?
If you feel there’s any realistic chance you might discover that you do care in the future, you should again err strongly on the side of vegetarianism. Feeling a bit silly 20 years from now because you avoided torturing beings it turns out you don’t care about is a much smaller cost than learning 20 years from now you’re the hitler of cows. Vegetarianism accommodates meta-uncertainty about ethical systems better than its rivals do.
I don’t feel psychologically similar to a chicken in the same way that I feel psychologically similar to other humans.
No, or else I wouldn’t be asking for arguments.
This is a good point.
I don’t either, but unless I can come up with a sharp and universal criterion for distinguishing all chickens from all humans, chickens’ psychological alienness to me will seem a difference of degree more than of kind. It’s a lot easier to argue that chicken suffering matters less than human suffering (or to argue that chickens are zombies) than to argue that chicken suffering is completely morally irrelevant.
Some chickens may very well have more psychologically in common with me than I have in common with certain human infants or with certain brain-damaged humans; but I still find myself able to feel that sentient infants and disabled sentient humans oughtn’t be tortured. (And not just because I don’t want their cries to disturb my own peace of mind. Nor just because they could potentially become highly intelligent, through development or medical intervention. Those might enhance the moral standing of any of these organisms, but they don’t appear to exhaust it..)
That’s not a good point, that’s a variety of Pascal’s Mugging: you’re suggesting that the fact that the possible consequence is large (“I tortured beings” is a really negative thing) means that even fi the chance is small, you should act on that basis.
It’s not a variant of Pascal’s Mugging, because the chances aren’t vanishingly small and the payoff isn’t nearly infinite.