I’m telling you that I don’t care whether they suffer.
I don’t believe you. If you see someone torturing a cat, a dolphin or a monkey, would you feel nothing? (Suppose that they are not likely to switch to torturing humans, to avoid “gateway torture” complications.)
My problem with this question is that if I see video of someone torturing a cat when I am confident there was no actual cat-torturing involved in creating those images (e.g., I am confident it was all photoshopped), what I feel is pretty much indistinguishable from what I feel if I see video of someone torturing a cat when I am confident there was actual cat-torturing.
So I’m reluctant to treat what I feel in either case as expressing much of an opinion about suffering, since I feel it roughly equally when I believe suffering is present and when I don’t.
So if you can factor-out, so to speak, the actual animal suffering: If you had to choose between “watch that video, no animal was harmed” versus “watch that video, an animal was harmed, also you get a biscuit (not the food, the 100 squid (not the animals, the pounds (not the weight unit, the monetary unit)))”, which would you choose? (Your feelings would be the same, as you say, your decision probably wouldn’t be. Just checking.)
A biscuit provides the same number of calories as 100 SQUID, which stands for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, which weigh a pound apiece, which masses 453.6 grams, which converts to 4 10^16 joules, which can be converted into 1.13 10^10 kilowatt-hours, which are worth 12 cents per kW-hr, so around 136 billion dollars or so.
Reminds me of … Note the name of the website. She doesn’t look happy! “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Edit: Also, 1.13 * 10^10 kilowatt-hours at 12 cents each yields 1.36 billion dollars, not 136 billion dollars! An honest mistake (cents, not dollars per kWh), or a scam? And as soon as Dmitry is less active …
“squid” is slang for a GBP, i.e. Pound Sterling, although I’m more used to hearing the similar “quid.” One hundred of them can be referred to as a “biscuit,” apparently because of casino chips, similar to how people in America will sometimes refer to a hundred dollars as a “benjamin.”
That is, what are TheOtherDave’s preferences between watching an unsettling movie that does not correspond to reality and watching an unsettling movie that does correspond to reality, but they’re paid some cash.
In this case it seems to. It’s the first time I recall encountering it but I’m not British and my parsing of unfamiliar and ‘rough’ accents is such that if I happened to have heard someone say ‘squid’ I may have parsed it as ‘quid’, and discarded the ‘s’ as noise from people saying a familiar term in a weird way rather than a different term.
It amuses me that despite making neither head nor tail of the unpacking, I answered the right question. Well, to the extent that my noncommital response can be considered an answer to any question at all.
Well, I figured that much out from googling, but I was more reacting to what seems like a deliberate act of obfuscation on Kawoomba’s part that serves no real purpose.
So to be clear—you do some Googling and find two videos, one has realistic CGI animal harm, the other real animal harm; assume the CGI etc is so good that I wouldn’t be able to tell which was which if you hadn’t told me. You don’t pay for the animal harm video, or in any way give anyone an incentive to harm an animal in fetching it; just pick up a pre-existing one. I have a choice between watching the fake-harm video (and knowing it’s fake) or watching the real-harm video and receiving £100.
If the reward is £100, I’ll take the £100; if it’s an actual biscuit, I prefer to watch the fake-harm video.
I’m genuinely unsure, not least because of your perplexing unpacking of “biscuit”.
Both examples are unpleasant; I don’t have a reliable intuition as to which is more so if indeed either is.
I have some vague notion that if I watch the real-harm video that might somehow be interpreted as endorsing real-harm more strongly than if I watch the fake-harm vide, like through ratings or download monitoring or something, which inclines me to the fake-harm video. Though whether I’m motivated by the vague belief that such differential endorsement might cause more harm to animals, or by the vague belief that it might cause more harm to my status, I’m again genuinely unsure of. In the real world I usually assume that when I’m not sure it’s the latter, but this is such a contrived scenario that I’m not confident of that either.
If I assume the biscuit is a reward of some sort, then maybe that reward is enough to offset the differential endorsement above, and maybe it isn’t.
I don’t want to see animals get tortured because that would be an unpleasant thing to see, but there are lots of things I think are unpleasant things to see that don’t have moral valence (in another comment I gave the example of seeing corpses get raped).
I might also be willing to assign dolphins and monkeys moral value (I haven’t made up my mind about this), but not most animals.
Do you have another example besides the assault of corpses? I can easily see real moral repugnance from the effect it has on the offenders, who are victims of their own actions. If you find it unpleasant only when you see it, would not they find it horrific when they perform it?
Also in these situations, repugnance can leak due to uncertainty of other real moral outcomes, such as the (however small) likelihood of family members of the deceased learning of the activity, for whom these corpses have real moral value.
Seeing humans perform certain kinds of body modifications would also be deeply unpleasant to me, but it’s also not an act I assign moral valence to (I think people should be allowed to modify their bodies more or less arbitrarily).
I’ll chime in to comment that QiaochuYuan’s[1] views as expressed in this entire thread are quite similar to my own (with the caveat that for his “human” I would substitute something like “sapient, self-aware beings of approximately human-level intelligence and above” and possibly certain other qualifiers having to do with shared values, to account for Yoda/Spock/AIs/whatever; it seems like QiaochuYuan uses “approximately human” to mean roughly this).
So, please reconsider your disbelief.
[1] Sorry, the board software is doing weird things when I put in underscores...
If I did have a pet, it is possible that I would not care for it (assuming animal cruelty laws did not exist), although it is more likely that I would develop an attachment to it, and would come to care about its well-being. That is how humans work, in my experience. I don’t think this necessarily has any implications w.r.t. the moral status of nonhuman animals.
Do you consider young children and very low-intelligence people to be morally-relevant?
(If—in the case of children—you consider potential for later development to be a key factor, we can instead discuss only children who have terminal illnesses.)
Long answer: When I read Peter Singer, what I took away was not, as many people here apparently did, that we should value animals; what I took away is that we should not value fetuses, newborns, and infants (to a certain age, somewhere between 0 and 2 years [1]). That is, I think the cutoff for moral relevant is somewhere above, say, cats, dogs, newborns… where exactly? I’m not sure.
Humans who have a general intelligence so low that they are incapable of thinking about themselves as conscious individuals are also, in my view, not morally relevant. I don’t know whether such humans exist (most people with Down syndrome don’t quite seem to fit that criterion, for instance).
There are many caveats and edge cases, for instance: what if the low-intelligence condition is temporary, and will repair itself with time? Then I think we should consider the wishes of the self that the person was before the impairment, and the rights of their future, non-impaired, selves. But what if the impairment can be repaired using medical technology? Same deal. What if it can’t? Then I would consider this person morally irrelevant. What if the person was of extremely low intelligence, and had always been so, but we could apply some medical intervention to raise their intelligence to at least normal human level? I would consider that act morally equivalent to creating a new sapient being (whether that’s good or bad is a separate question).
So: it’s complicated. But to answer practical questions: I don’t consider infanticide the moral equivalent of murder (although it’s reasonable to outlaw it anyway, as birth is good Schelling point, but the penalty should surely be nowhere near as harsh as for killing an adult or older child). The rights of low-intelligence people is a harder issue partly because there are no obvious cutoffs or metrics.
I hope that answers your question; if not, I’ll be happy to elaborate further.
I don’t believe you. If you see someone torturing a cat, a dolphin or a monkey, would you feel nothing? (Suppose that they are not likely to switch to torturing humans, to avoid “gateway torture” complications.)
My problem with this question is that if I see video of someone torturing a cat when I am confident there was no actual cat-torturing involved in creating those images (e.g., I am confident it was all photoshopped), what I feel is pretty much indistinguishable from what I feel if I see video of someone torturing a cat when I am confident there was actual cat-torturing.
So I’m reluctant to treat what I feel in either case as expressing much of an opinion about suffering, since I feel it roughly equally when I believe suffering is present and when I don’t.
So if you can factor-out, so to speak, the actual animal suffering: If you had to choose between “watch that video, no animal was harmed” versus “watch that video, an animal was harmed, also you get a biscuit (not the food, the 100 squid (not the animals, the pounds (not the weight unit, the monetary unit)))”, which would you choose? (Your feelings would be the same, as you say, your decision probably wouldn’t be. Just checking.)
What?
A biscuit provides the same number of calories as 100 SQUID, which stands for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, which weigh a pound apiece, which masses 453.6 grams, which converts to 4 10^16 joules, which can be converted into 1.13 10^10 kilowatt-hours, which are worth 12 cents per kW-hr, so around 136 billion dollars or so.
...plus a constant.
Reminds me of … Note the name of the website. She doesn’t look happy! “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Edit: Also, 1.13 * 10^10 kilowatt-hours at 12 cents each yields 1.36 billion dollars, not 136 billion dollars! An honest mistake (cents, not dollars per kWh), or a scam? And as soon as Dmitry is less active …
“squid” is slang for a GBP, i.e. Pound Sterling, although I’m more used to hearing the similar “quid.” One hundred of them can be referred to as a “biscuit,” apparently because of casino chips, similar to how people in America will sometimes refer to a hundred dollars as a “benjamin.”
That is, what are TheOtherDave’s preferences between watching an unsettling movie that does not correspond to reality and watching an unsettling movie that does correspond to reality, but they’re paid some cash.
“Quid” is slang, “squid” is a commonly used jokey soundalike. There’s a joke that ends “here’s that sick squid I owe you”.
EDIT: also, never heard “biscuit” = £100 before; that’s a “ton”.
Does Cockney rhyming slang not count as slang?
In this case it seems to. It’s the first time I recall encountering it but I’m not British and my parsing of unfamiliar and ‘rough’ accents is such that if I happened to have heard someone say ‘squid’ I may have parsed it as ‘quid’, and discarded the ‘s’ as noise from people saying a familiar term in a weird way rather than a different term.
It amuses me that despite making neither head nor tail of the unpacking, I answered the right question.
Well, to the extent that my noncommital response can be considered an answer to any question at all.
Well, I figured that much out from googling, but I was more reacting to what seems like a deliberate act of obfuscation on Kawoomba’s part that serves no real purpose.
Nested parentheses are their own reward, perhaps?
In an interesting twist, in many social circles (not here) your use of the word “obfuscation” would be obfuscatin’ in itself.
To be very clear though: “Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.”
So to be clear—you do some Googling and find two videos, one has realistic CGI animal harm, the other real animal harm; assume the CGI etc is so good that I wouldn’t be able to tell which was which if you hadn’t told me. You don’t pay for the animal harm video, or in any way give anyone an incentive to harm an animal in fetching it; just pick up a pre-existing one. I have a choice between watching the fake-harm video (and knowing it’s fake) or watching the real-harm video and receiving £100.
If the reward is £100, I’ll take the £100; if it’s an actual biscuit, I prefer to watch the fake-harm video.
I’m genuinely unsure, not least because of your perplexing unpacking of “biscuit”.
Both examples are unpleasant; I don’t have a reliable intuition as to which is more so if indeed either is.
I have some vague notion that if I watch the real-harm video that might somehow be interpreted as endorsing real-harm more strongly than if I watch the fake-harm vide, like through ratings or download monitoring or something, which inclines me to the fake-harm video. Though whether I’m motivated by the vague belief that such differential endorsement might cause more harm to animals, or by the vague belief that it might cause more harm to my status, I’m again genuinely unsure of. In the real world I usually assume that when I’m not sure it’s the latter, but this is such a contrived scenario that I’m not confident of that either.
If I assume the biscuit is a reward of some sort, then maybe that reward is enough to offset the differential endorsement above, and maybe it isn’t.
I don’t want to see animals get tortured because that would be an unpleasant thing to see, but there are lots of things I think are unpleasant things to see that don’t have moral valence (in another comment I gave the example of seeing corpses get raped).
I might also be willing to assign dolphins and monkeys moral value (I haven’t made up my mind about this), but not most animals.
Do you have another example besides the assault of corpses? I can easily see real moral repugnance from the effect it has on the offenders, who are victims of their own actions. If you find it unpleasant only when you see it, would not they find it horrific when they perform it?
Also in these situations, repugnance can leak due to uncertainty of other real moral outcomes, such as the (however small) likelihood of family members of the deceased learning of the activity, for whom these corpses have real moral value.
Two Girls One Cup?
Seeing humans perform certain kinds of body modifications would also be deeply unpleasant to me, but it’s also not an act I assign moral valence to (I think people should be allowed to modify their bodies more or less arbitrarily).
I’ll chime in to comment that QiaochuYuan’s[1] views as expressed in this entire thread are quite similar to my own (with the caveat that for his “human” I would substitute something like “sapient, self-aware beings of approximately human-level intelligence and above” and possibly certain other qualifiers having to do with shared values, to account for Yoda/Spock/AIs/whatever; it seems like QiaochuYuan uses “approximately human” to mean roughly this).
So, please reconsider your disbelief.
[1] Sorry, the board software is doing weird things when I put in underscores...
So, presumably you don’t keep a pet, and if you did, you would not care for its well-being?
Indeed, I have no pets.
If I did have a pet, it is possible that I would not care for it (assuming animal cruelty laws did not exist), although it is more likely that I would develop an attachment to it, and would come to care about its well-being. That is how humans work, in my experience. I don’t think this necessarily has any implications w.r.t. the moral status of nonhuman animals.
Do you consider young children and very low-intelligence people to be morally-relevant?
(If—in the case of children—you consider potential for later development to be a key factor, we can instead discuss only children who have terminal illnesses.)
Good question. Short answer: no.
Long answer: When I read Peter Singer, what I took away was not, as many people here apparently did, that we should value animals; what I took away is that we should not value fetuses, newborns, and infants (to a certain age, somewhere between 0 and 2 years [1]). That is, I think the cutoff for moral relevant is somewhere above, say, cats, dogs, newborns… where exactly? I’m not sure.
Humans who have a general intelligence so low that they are incapable of thinking about themselves as conscious individuals are also, in my view, not morally relevant. I don’t know whether such humans exist (most people with Down syndrome don’t quite seem to fit that criterion, for instance).
There are many caveats and edge cases, for instance: what if the low-intelligence condition is temporary, and will repair itself with time? Then I think we should consider the wishes of the self that the person was before the impairment, and the rights of their future, non-impaired, selves. But what if the impairment can be repaired using medical technology? Same deal. What if it can’t? Then I would consider this person morally irrelevant. What if the person was of extremely low intelligence, and had always been so, but we could apply some medical intervention to raise their intelligence to at least normal human level? I would consider that act morally equivalent to creating a new sapient being (whether that’s good or bad is a separate question).
So: it’s complicated. But to answer practical questions: I don’t consider infanticide the moral equivalent of murder (although it’s reasonable to outlaw it anyway, as birth is good Schelling point, but the penalty should surely be nowhere near as harsh as for killing an adult or older child). The rights of low-intelligence people is a harder issue partly because there are no obvious cutoffs or metrics.
I hope that answers your question; if not, I’ll be happy to elaborate further.