When pig farmers decide how many pigs to slaughter for bacon, they do so based on (among other things) current sales figures for bacon. When I buy bacon, I change those figures in such a way as to trigger a (negligibly) higher number of pigs being slaughtered. So, yeah, my current purchases of bacon contribute to the future death of pigs.
Of course, when pig farmers decide how many sows to impregnate, they do so based on (among other things) current sales figures for bacon. So my current purchases of bacon contribute to the future birth of pigs as well.
So if I want to judge the ethical costs of my purchasing bacon, I need to decide if I value pigs’ lives (in which case purchasing bacon might be a good thing, since it might lead to more pig-lives), as well as decide if I negatively value pigs’ deaths (in which case purchasing bacon might be a bad thing, since it leads to more pig-deaths). If it turns out that both are true, things get complicated, but basically I need to decide how much I value each of those things and run an expected value calculation on “eat bacon” and “don’t eat bacon” (as well as “eat more bacon than I did last month,” which might encourage pig farmers to always create more pigs than they kill, which I might want if I value pig lives more than I negatively value pig deaths).
Personally, I don’t seem to value pig lives in any particularly additive way… that is, I value there being some pigs rather than no pigs, but beyond some hazy threshold number of “some” (significantly fewer than the actual number of pigs in the world), I don’t seem to care how many there are. I don’t seem to negatively value pig deaths very much either, and again I don’t do so in any particularly additive way. (This is sometimes called “scope insensitivity” around here and labeled a sign of irrational thinking, though I’m not really clear what’s wrong with it in this case.)
You don’t need to value pig lives as such to conclude that eating pigs would be against your values. You just need to value (negatively) certain mental states that the pigs can experience, such as the state of being in agony.
I agree that I can conclude that eating pigs is against my values in various different ways, not all of which require that I value pig lives. (For example, I could value keeping kosher.)
But negatively valuing pig agony, period-full-stop, doesn’t get me there. All that does is lead me to conclude that if I’m going to eat pigs, I should do so in ways that don’t result in pigs experiencing agony. (It also leads me to conclude that if I’m going to refuse to eat pigs, I should do that in a way that doesn’t result in pigs experiencing agony.
If I’m at all efficient, it probably leads me to painlessly exterminate pigs… after all, that guarantees there won’t be any pigs-in-agony mental states. And, heck, now that there are all these dead pigs lying around, why not eat them?
More generally, valuing only one thing would lead me to behave in inhuman ways.
You claimed that you didn’t value pig lives presumably as a justification for your decision to eat pigs. You then acknowledged that, if you valued the absence of agony, this would provide you with a reason to abstain from eating pigs not raised humanely. Do you value the absence of agony? If so, what animal products do you eat?
First of all, I didn’t claim I don’t value pig lives. I claimed that the way I value pig lives doesn’t seem to be additive… that I don’t seem to value a thousand pig lives more than a hundred pig lives, for example. Second of all, the extent to which I value pig lives is almost completely unrelated to my decision to eat pigs. I didn’t eat pigs for the first fifteen years of my life or so, and then I started eating pigs, and the extent to which I value pig lives did not significantly change between those two periods of my life.
All of that said… I value the absence of agony. I value other things as well, including my own convenience and the flavor of yummy meat. Judging from my behavior, I seem to value those things more than I negatively value a few dozen suffering cows or a few thousand suffering chickens. (Or pigs, in principle, though I’m not sure I’ve actually eaten a whole pig in my life thus far… I don’t much care for pork.)
Anyway, to answer your question: I eat pretty much all the animal products that are conveniently available in my area. I also wear some, and use some for decoration.
If anyone is inclined to explain their downvotes here, either publicly or privately, I’d be appreciative… I’m not sure what I’m being asked to provide less of.
Hmm this business of valuing pig lives doesn’t sit right with me.
My idea of utilitarianism is that everybody gets an equal vote. So you can feel free to include your weak preferences for more pigs in your self-interested vote, the same way you can vote for the near super-stimulus of crisp, flavoursome bacon. But each individual pig, when casting their vote, is completely apathetic about the continuation of their line.
So if you follow a utilitarian definition of what’s ethical, you can’t use “it’s good that there are pigs” as an argument for eating them being ethical. It’s what you want to happen, not what everyone on average wants to happen. I want to be king of the world, but I can’t claim that everyone else is unethical for not crowning me.
Leaving label definitions aside, I agree with you that IF there’s a uniquely ethical choice that can somehow be derived by aggregating the preferences of some group of preference-havers, then I can’t derive that choice from what I happen to prefer, so in that case if I want to judge the ethical costs of purchasing bacon I need to identify what everybody else prefers as part of that judgment. (I also, in that case, need to know who “everybody else” is before I can make that determination.)
Can you say more about why you find that premise compelling?
I find that premise compelling because I have a psychological need to believe I’m motivated by more than self-interest, and my powers of self-deception are limited by my ability to check my beliefs for self-consistency.
What this amounts to is the need to ask not just what I want, but how to make the world “better” in some more impartial way. The most self-convincing way I’ve found to define “better” is that it improves the net lived experience of other minds.
In other words, if I maximise that measure, I very comfortably feel that I’m doing good.
Personally I reject that premise, though in some contexts I endorse behaving as though it were true for pragmatic social reasons. But I have no problem with you continuing to believe it if that makes you feel good… it seems like a relatively harmless form of self-gratification, and it probably won’t grow hair on your utility function.
Accidentally hit the comment button with a line of text written. Hit the retract button so i could start again. AND IT FUCKING JUST PUT LINES THROUGH IT WHAT THE FUCK.
That is to say, How do I unretract?
“When I buy bacon, I change those figures in such a way as to trigger a (negligibly) higher number of pigs being slaughtered.”
But is my buying bacon actually recorded? It’s possible that those calculations are done on sufficiently large scales that my personally eating meat causes no pig suffering. As in, were i to stop, would any fewer pigs suffer.
It’s not lives and deaths i’m particularly concerned with. The trade off I’m currently thinking about is pig suffering vs bacon. And if pig suffering is the same whether i eat already dead pigs I’ll probably feel better about it.
Scope insensitivity would be not taking into account personal impact on pig suffering I suppose. Seeing as there’s already vast amounts I’m tempted to label anything I could do about it “pointless” or similiar.
Which bypasses the actual utility calculation (otherwise known as actual thinking, shutting up and multiplying.)
The point is I need to have a think about the expected consequences of buying meat, eating meat someone else has bought, eating animals i find by the road etc. Do supermarkets record how much meat is eaten? How important is eating meat for my nutrition (and or convenience?) etc.
When pig farmers decide how many pigs to slaughter for bacon, they do so based on (among other things) current sales figures for bacon. When I buy bacon, I change those figures in such a way as to trigger a (negligibly) higher number of pigs being slaughtered. So, yeah, my current purchases of bacon contribute to the future death of pigs.
Of course, when pig farmers decide how many sows to impregnate, they do so based on (among other things) current sales figures for bacon. So my current purchases of bacon contribute to the future birth of pigs as well.
So if I want to judge the ethical costs of my purchasing bacon, I need to decide if I value pigs’ lives (in which case purchasing bacon might be a good thing, since it might lead to more pig-lives), as well as decide if I negatively value pigs’ deaths (in which case purchasing bacon might be a bad thing, since it leads to more pig-deaths). If it turns out that both are true, things get complicated, but basically I need to decide how much I value each of those things and run an expected value calculation on “eat bacon” and “don’t eat bacon” (as well as “eat more bacon than I did last month,” which might encourage pig farmers to always create more pigs than they kill, which I might want if I value pig lives more than I negatively value pig deaths).
Personally, I don’t seem to value pig lives in any particularly additive way… that is, I value there being some pigs rather than no pigs, but beyond some hazy threshold number of “some” (significantly fewer than the actual number of pigs in the world), I don’t seem to care how many there are. I don’t seem to negatively value pig deaths very much either, and again I don’t do so in any particularly additive way. (This is sometimes called “scope insensitivity” around here and labeled a sign of irrational thinking, though I’m not really clear what’s wrong with it in this case.)
You don’t need to value pig lives as such to conclude that eating pigs would be against your values. You just need to value (negatively) certain mental states that the pigs can experience, such as the state of being in agony.
I agree that I can conclude that eating pigs is against my values in various different ways, not all of which require that I value pig lives. (For example, I could value keeping kosher.)
But negatively valuing pig agony, period-full-stop, doesn’t get me there. All that does is lead me to conclude that if I’m going to eat pigs, I should do so in ways that don’t result in pigs experiencing agony. (It also leads me to conclude that if I’m going to refuse to eat pigs, I should do that in a way that doesn’t result in pigs experiencing agony.
If I’m at all efficient, it probably leads me to painlessly exterminate pigs… after all, that guarantees there won’t be any pigs-in-agony mental states. And, heck, now that there are all these dead pigs lying around, why not eat them?
More generally, valuing only one thing would lead me to behave in inhuman ways.
You claimed that you didn’t value pig lives presumably as a justification for your decision to eat pigs. You then acknowledged that, if you valued the absence of agony, this would provide you with a reason to abstain from eating pigs not raised humanely. Do you value the absence of agony? If so, what animal products do you eat?
First of all, I didn’t claim I don’t value pig lives. I claimed that the way I value pig lives doesn’t seem to be additive… that I don’t seem to value a thousand pig lives more than a hundred pig lives, for example. Second of all, the extent to which I value pig lives is almost completely unrelated to my decision to eat pigs. I didn’t eat pigs for the first fifteen years of my life or so, and then I started eating pigs, and the extent to which I value pig lives did not significantly change between those two periods of my life.
All of that said… I value the absence of agony. I value other things as well, including my own convenience and the flavor of yummy meat. Judging from my behavior, I seem to value those things more than I negatively value a few dozen suffering cows or a few thousand suffering chickens. (Or pigs, in principle, though I’m not sure I’ve actually eaten a whole pig in my life thus far… I don’t much care for pork.)
Anyway, to answer your question: I eat pretty much all the animal products that are conveniently available in my area. I also wear some, and use some for decoration.
If anyone is inclined to explain their downvotes here, either publicly or privately, I’d be appreciative… I’m not sure what I’m being asked to provide less of.
Hmm this business of valuing pig lives doesn’t sit right with me.
My idea of utilitarianism is that everybody gets an equal vote. So you can feel free to include your weak preferences for more pigs in your self-interested vote, the same way you can vote for the near super-stimulus of crisp, flavoursome bacon. But each individual pig, when casting their vote, is completely apathetic about the continuation of their line.
So if you follow a utilitarian definition of what’s ethical, you can’t use “it’s good that there are pigs” as an argument for eating them being ethical. It’s what you want to happen, not what everyone on average wants to happen. I want to be king of the world, but I can’t claim that everyone else is unethical for not crowning me.
Leaving label definitions aside, I agree with you that IF there’s a uniquely ethical choice that can somehow be derived by aggregating the preferences of some group of preference-havers, then I can’t derive that choice from what I happen to prefer, so in that case if I want to judge the ethical costs of purchasing bacon I need to identify what everybody else prefers as part of that judgment. (I also, in that case, need to know who “everybody else” is before I can make that determination.)
Can you say more about why you find that premise compelling?
I find that premise compelling because I have a psychological need to believe I’m motivated by more than self-interest, and my powers of self-deception are limited by my ability to check my beliefs for self-consistency.
What this amounts to is the need to ask not just what I want, but how to make the world “better” in some more impartial way. The most self-convincing way I’ve found to define “better” is that it improves the net lived experience of other minds.
In other words, if I maximise that measure, I very comfortably feel that I’m doing good.
Fair enough.
Personally I reject that premise, though in some contexts I endorse behaving as though it were true for pragmatic social reasons. But I have no problem with you continuing to believe it if that makes you feel good… it seems like a relatively harmless form of self-gratification, and it probably won’t grow hair on your utility function.
Accidentally hit the comment button with a line of text written. Hit the retract button so i could start again. AND IT FUCKING JUST PUT LINES THROUGH IT WHAT THE FUCK.
That is to say, How do I unretract?
“When I buy bacon, I change those figures in such a way as to trigger a (negligibly) higher number of pigs being slaughtered.”
But is my buying bacon actually recorded? It’s possible that those calculations are done on sufficiently large scales that my personally eating meat causes no pig suffering. As in, were i to stop, would any fewer pigs suffer.
It’s not lives and deaths i’m particularly concerned with. The trade off I’m currently thinking about is pig suffering vs bacon. And if pig suffering is the same whether i eat already dead pigs I’ll probably feel better about it.
Scope insensitivity would be not taking into account personal impact on pig suffering I suppose. Seeing as there’s already vast amounts I’m tempted to label anything I could do about it “pointless” or similiar.
Which bypasses the actual utility calculation (otherwise known as actual thinking, shutting up and multiplying.)
The point is I need to have a think about the expected consequences of buying meat, eating meat someone else has bought, eating animals i find by the road etc. Do supermarkets record how much meat is eaten? How important is eating meat for my nutrition (and or convenience?) etc.
You can edit the comment. Conversely, you can simply create a new comment.