Hello! I usually read LessWrong posts, however, I’d never felt the need to create an account because I thought I needed to make some comment. However, when I read this one, I saw that, after so much time visiting LW without creating an account, I needed to create one to comment on it.
We have a strong bias in favor of human interests. But when we try to get rid of them we can see things in a different light. The magnitude of the harm humans cause to other animals really is significant and overwhelmingly bigger than the benefits humans obtain from it. It’s very likely that in the future we will increase this gap between the magnitude of the harms we inflict on animals and the significantly smaller benefits we obtain. Therefore, debunking speciesism is a very important task we need to engage in if we want a future with more wellbeing and less suffering.
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose. And banning chimp testing actually questions this idea. For this reason, we should welcome very much such a ban. Campaining against may have terrible effects. The gains that might be acquired by harming chimps would be greatly outweighed by the significantly negative effect that the promotion of a speciesist viewpoint has. All this, of course, setting aside considerations regarding whether all the harm entailed by chimp testing is really going to prove so beneficial.
Given all this, my recommendation is that those who read this write to Scientific American to show their support of the ban on chimp testing.
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose.
Why? I consider that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. What’s wrong with speciesism, beyond the superficial analogies to racism?
The theoretical problem with speciesism is that there is no such thing as a species. The traditional proposed equivalence relation of “ability to interbreed” doesn’t work because it isn’t transitive: every organism would satisfy this relation with respect to its parents, but we have common ancestors with a squid if you just go far enough back. Every animal (and plant, etc...) on Earth is basically part of a single ring species, except that the “rings” of our species are only clear if you picture them arcing through space-time instead of just space. While the ethical status of individuals must have something to do with their biology, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere we can put a bright non-arbitrary cutoff line for that status.
The practical problem with speciesism is that we may soon be getting a lot more “species” to worry about, and it would be good to have an appropriate ethical framework for that ahead of time. What kind of modifications can we give to ourselves or our kids before their “post-human interests” lose importance relative to the unmodified? How much more intelligence can we give to our domesticated animals before we should start feeling concern about treating them like slaves? What if general artificial intelligences start passing Turing tests without any underlying biology at all? Does it matter if their instructions are a priori vs emulations of copied biological brains?
From an intuitive perspective, it seems obvious that human interests are more important than chimp interests, which are more important than pig interests, which are more important than fish interests… but at that point I get stuck, because I don’t see how we quantify “how much more important”, robustly, as the categories start to proliferate and blur.
From an outside perspective, the non-superficial analogy to racism is simple: the human intuitive perspective on ethics is lousy, often leads us to atrocious behavior that we and our descendants regret for generations, and ought to be supplemented by something more reliable if possible.
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose.
I must? I reject any such obligation. You can oppose it if you wish. But as far as I’m concerned I’m free to support or oppose any combination of experimentation on human or non-human animal that I like.
I don’t buy the argument that we only favour humans because of ‘speciesism.’ There’s a qualitative difference between humans and other animals and that difference is due to language. Consider:
A doctor tells you that he’s going to do something that will cause you pain but that the pain will pass and it will improve your health.
You’re locked in a room and told you’ll never be allowed to leave. You’re told that your family will be killed and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
These scenarios are not available to other animals because they don’t have language. The quality and type of suffering in each scenario is dependent on what is said. We can’t reassure an animal that a pain will be short or for its own good but equally we can’t convince it that a pain will be prolonged or inform it of a harm that is not immediately apparent. These distinctions are simply not available to non-human animals. Morally, they are therefore in a qualitatively separate category from us.
There’s a qualitative difference between humans and other animals and that difference is due to language.
It isn’t due to language. The difference you describe is based on imagination and the ability to understand future consequences. We wouldn’t consider a moral difference between those examples and cases where the subject was able to arrive at the same understanding based off observation, reasoning or memories of past experiences. Language is relevant in only in as much as it is one of the ways that people can arrive at the models of reality and understanding of the future that we consider important.
My feelings are slightly mixed when it comes to medical advances, but basically this. Humans are not inherently special. I might sacrifice a chimp to save the life of a human, but it is a sacrifice, the lesser of two evils, no better than sacrificing a mentally handicapped human.
I might sacrifice a chimp to save the life of a human, but it is a sacrifice, the lesser of two evils, no better than sacrificing a mentally handicapped human.
I would consider it a sacrifice as well and I do care more about humans than other animals.
Much like if I have to choose who the trolley runs over I prefer it be a random cute young girl to my cute little young sister, I prefer it run over the chimp rather than the human.
We have a strong bias in favor of human interests.
Agreed. But there are many less-destructive ways of promoting this bias. Far better to become a vegetarian. If you aren’t, then I don’t think you’re entitled to write that letter to Scientific American on that basis.
Agreed. But there are many less-destructive ways of promoting this bias. Far better to become a vegetarian. If you aren’t, then I don’t think you’re entitled to write that letter to Scientific American on that basis.
It is not remotely reasonable to declare people not entitled to write letters discouraging abusive treatment of chimpanzees because they happen to eat meat. People are not obliged to care about all animals equally. Caring a lot about chimpanzees perhaps means you should be a non-chimp-eater, not a vegetarian. Even then it is not at all inconsistent to have a moral aversion to ongoing painful treatment of a creature while considering it ok to breed the same creature for food.
It is not remotely reasonable to declare people not entitled to write letters discouraging abusive treatment of chimpanzees because they happen to eat meat.
It is possible for some hypothetical person to have a well-worked out and consistent ethical system that allows them to eat the meat found in restaurants and supermarkets in the Western world on a regular basis, and also oppose experimentation on chimps. I have never met such a person. I therefore encourage all non-vegetarians to re-calibrate their attitudes towards chimp experimentation in light of their attitudes towards raising animals in much worse conditions and then slaughtering and eating them. And if I say that someone who eats meat and opposes chimp experimentation is inconsistent, I expect that statement to have many more true positives than false positives.
Even then it is not at all inconsistent to have a moral aversion to ongoing painful treatment of a creature while considering it ok to breed the same creature for food.
Enough of our current methods of raising animals for food cause them pain—I would guess greater pain than that caused by chimp experimentation—that I don’t buy this argument. If you claim that you can be ethically consistent in opposing chimp experimentation, yet eat pork without knowing where it came from and how it was raised, you have an unusual, and very finely-tuned ethical system.
The replies to the arguments opposing chimp testing haven’t tried to show why the defense of such testing is right from a nonspeciesist viewpoint. Rather, they’ve assumed that viewpoint.
Explaining all the arguments against the idea that speciesism is wrong would require lots of space. So I’ll just say here that if we are concerned with wellbeing it is arbitrary to take into account only some of them simply because they are possessed by certain individuals, rather than other ones. Of course many people are arbitrary, and found their moral views on such arbitrariness. But that isn’t really the approach that someone who’s aiming at getting rid of bias should accept.
The main argument that has been provided here in favour for this arbitrariness seems to be: “Don’t you eat animals too?”
I don’t eat animals, and I certainly agree that promoting vegetarianism is a crucial way to question speciesism. But asking whether one is vegetarian or not is not a reply to the problem we’re dealing here. I’ve met people who just didn’t have the willpower to change their food habits even though they agreed speciesism is wrong. I think it’s obvious that those who oppose speciesism should encourage those people to do things that reduce the impact speciesism has (such as writing a letter to Scientific American).
There are many people who do things I don’t consider right, that’s not a reason for me to say they aren’t entitled to do good things because that would contradict their previous wrong doing.
Explaining all the arguments against the idea that speciesism is wrong would require lots of space. So I’ll just say here that if we are concerned with wellbeing it is arbitrary to take into account only some of them simply because they are possessed by certain individuals, rather than other ones. Of course many people are arbitrary, and found their moral views on such arbitrariness. But that isn’t really the approach that someone who’s aiming at getting rid of bias should accept.
“It’s arbitrary” isn’t a sufficient reason to dismiss a preference or a social norm; for example the choice of which side of the road to drive on, and the rules governing right of way at intersections are arbitrary too, yet we’re better off with such “aribitrary” rules than without them.
I have a preference for humans over chimps, mostly because I’m a human myself, probably also because there is little use for a “social contract” or reciprocation between a human and a Chimp—I don’t need to be nice towards chimps in the expectation that it will make them nicer with me in the long run (if we shared earth with another species with our level of technology and knowledge and power, it would make sense to treat them as equals and care about them in the expectation that they’d do the same about us). People rarely spell out those reasons explicitly because doing so signals one is cold, calculating and selfish, but I suspect it mostly boils down to that.
Regarding what MinibearRex pointed out, I think some humans, because of their cognitive abilities, are more capable of making the universe a better place than either chimpanzees or other humans are. Many humans lack those cognitive capacities, others will use them in ways that will do more harm than good.
But an important question here is: What makes the universe a better place? In my view, to put it briefly, the universe becomes a better place if there is less suffering of sentient beings in it, and, additionally, more enjoyment of sentient beings in it.
So, given this, Emile, I have reasons to reject arbitrariness. I care for sentient beings. That’s not an arbitrary criterion, since they are the ones who can suffer and enjoy.
This is the key issue, in my view, underlying this debate. I have presented some reasons to reject the idea that promoting chimp testing will make the world a better place. The arguments I’ve been presented have opposed my view by implicitly or explicitly pointing out that what makes the world a better place is what makes it a better place for humans. But in my view, if in a universe A there is more suffering and less enjoyment of sentient beings than in universe B, A is worse than B. It is so even if some of those beings are better in A than in B. I don’t need to know who are those beings. They may be humans or cats, it doesn’t matter for me, I’d still consider A to be worse than B.
You are pattern-matching it onto the readily-available pattern of “Let’s do whatever the hell we want to to animals, because they are lesser beings and don’t matter, or at least can’t stop us.” This may map well onto many of the replies in this thread, but not to my original post.
The problem with banning chimp testing is that it prevents us from making morally correct decisions. If you want to make the universe a place where there is less suffering of sentient beings, then you should want to make it a place where people are allowed to decide what will cause less suffering to sentient beings. This means that either option A (do any and all conceivable experiments on non-humans), and option B (ban testing on chimps), are off the table. These are both immoral (or at least amoral) options, because they both avoid making decisions about whether a particular experiment will cause more or less suffering in the world.
Thank you for saving me the effort of saving exactly this.
My only caveat is that I’d place higher priority on universes that include some degree of abstract reasoning, imagination and ability to plan, because those universes have a higher probability of dramatically improving.
The replies to the arguments opposing chimp testing haven’t tried to show why the defense of such testing is right from a nonspeciesist viewpoint. Rather, they’ve assumed that viewpoint.
Explaining all the arguments against the idea that speciesism is wrong would require lots of space. So I’ll just say here that if we are concerned with wellbeing it is arbitrary to take into account only some of them simply because they are possessed by certain individuals, rather than other ones.
I do indeed hold what you call a “speciest” viewpoint. Chimpanzees are worthy of moral consideration, but a human does have moral worth than a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees, likewise, have a greater moral worth than a lizard, and I would willingly experiment on lizards in order to improve the lives of Chimpanzees.
Additionally, Humans aren’t treated as more special because of a completely arbitrary reason: they have more moral weight because a human, because of its intelligence, is more capable of making the universe a better place than a Chimpanzee is. Sacrificing a Chimpanzee to save a human is a similar ethical question to the trolley problem.
Hello! I usually read LessWrong posts, however, I’d never felt the need to create an account because I thought I needed to make some comment. However, when I read this one, I saw that, after so much time visiting LW without creating an account, I needed to create one to comment on it.
We have a strong bias in favor of human interests. But when we try to get rid of them we can see things in a different light. The magnitude of the harm humans cause to other animals really is significant and overwhelmingly bigger than the benefits humans obtain from it. It’s very likely that in the future we will increase this gap between the magnitude of the harms we inflict on animals and the significantly smaller benefits we obtain. Therefore, debunking speciesism is a very important task we need to engage in if we want a future with more wellbeing and less suffering.
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose. And banning chimp testing actually questions this idea. For this reason, we should welcome very much such a ban. Campaining against may have terrible effects. The gains that might be acquired by harming chimps would be greatly outweighed by the significantly negative effect that the promotion of a speciesist viewpoint has. All this, of course, setting aside considerations regarding whether all the harm entailed by chimp testing is really going to prove so beneficial.
Given all this, my recommendation is that those who read this write to Scientific American to show their support of the ban on chimp testing.
Why? I consider that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. What’s wrong with speciesism, beyond the superficial analogies to racism?
The theoretical problem with speciesism is that there is no such thing as a species. The traditional proposed equivalence relation of “ability to interbreed” doesn’t work because it isn’t transitive: every organism would satisfy this relation with respect to its parents, but we have common ancestors with a squid if you just go far enough back. Every animal (and plant, etc...) on Earth is basically part of a single ring species, except that the “rings” of our species are only clear if you picture them arcing through space-time instead of just space. While the ethical status of individuals must have something to do with their biology, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere we can put a bright non-arbitrary cutoff line for that status.
The practical problem with speciesism is that we may soon be getting a lot more “species” to worry about, and it would be good to have an appropriate ethical framework for that ahead of time. What kind of modifications can we give to ourselves or our kids before their “post-human interests” lose importance relative to the unmodified? How much more intelligence can we give to our domesticated animals before we should start feeling concern about treating them like slaves? What if general artificial intelligences start passing Turing tests without any underlying biology at all? Does it matter if their instructions are a priori vs emulations of copied biological brains?
From an intuitive perspective, it seems obvious that human interests are more important than chimp interests, which are more important than pig interests, which are more important than fish interests… but at that point I get stuck, because I don’t see how we quantify “how much more important”, robustly, as the categories start to proliferate and blur.
From an outside perspective, the non-superficial analogy to racism is simple: the human intuitive perspective on ethics is lousy, often leads us to atrocious behavior that we and our descendants regret for generations, and ought to be supplemented by something more reliable if possible.
I must? I reject any such obligation. You can oppose it if you wish. But as far as I’m concerned I’m free to support or oppose any combination of experimentation on human or non-human animal that I like.
I don’t buy the argument that we only favour humans because of ‘speciesism.’ There’s a qualitative difference between humans and other animals and that difference is due to language. Consider:
A doctor tells you that he’s going to do something that will cause you pain but that the pain will pass and it will improve your health.
You’re locked in a room and told you’ll never be allowed to leave. You’re told that your family will be killed and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
These scenarios are not available to other animals because they don’t have language. The quality and type of suffering in each scenario is dependent on what is said. We can’t reassure an animal that a pain will be short or for its own good but equally we can’t convince it that a pain will be prolonged or inform it of a harm that is not immediately apparent. These distinctions are simply not available to non-human animals. Morally, they are therefore in a qualitatively separate category from us.
It isn’t due to language. The difference you describe is based on imagination and the ability to understand future consequences. We wouldn’t consider a moral difference between those examples and cases where the subject was able to arrive at the same understanding based off observation, reasoning or memories of past experiences. Language is relevant in only in as much as it is one of the ways that people can arrive at the models of reality and understanding of the future that we consider important.
My feelings are slightly mixed when it comes to medical advances, but basically this. Humans are not inherently special. I might sacrifice a chimp to save the life of a human, but it is a sacrifice, the lesser of two evils, no better than sacrificing a mentally handicapped human.
I would consider it a sacrifice as well and I do care more about humans than other animals.
Much like if I have to choose who the trolley runs over I prefer it be a random cute young girl to my cute little young sister, I prefer it run over the chimp rather than the human.
Agreed. But there are many less-destructive ways of promoting this bias. Far better to become a vegetarian. If you aren’t, then I don’t think you’re entitled to write that letter to Scientific American on that basis.
It is not remotely reasonable to declare people not entitled to write letters discouraging abusive treatment of chimpanzees because they happen to eat meat. People are not obliged to care about all animals equally. Caring a lot about chimpanzees perhaps means you should be a non-chimp-eater, not a vegetarian. Even then it is not at all inconsistent to have a moral aversion to ongoing painful treatment of a creature while considering it ok to breed the same creature for food.
It is possible for some hypothetical person to have a well-worked out and consistent ethical system that allows them to eat the meat found in restaurants and supermarkets in the Western world on a regular basis, and also oppose experimentation on chimps. I have never met such a person. I therefore encourage all non-vegetarians to re-calibrate their attitudes towards chimp experimentation in light of their attitudes towards raising animals in much worse conditions and then slaughtering and eating them. And if I say that someone who eats meat and opposes chimp experimentation is inconsistent, I expect that statement to have many more true positives than false positives.
Enough of our current methods of raising animals for food cause them pain—I would guess greater pain than that caused by chimp experimentation—that I don’t buy this argument. If you claim that you can be ethically consistent in opposing chimp experimentation, yet eat pork without knowing where it came from and how it was raised, you have an unusual, and very finely-tuned ethical system.
The replies to the arguments opposing chimp testing haven’t tried to show why the defense of such testing is right from a nonspeciesist viewpoint. Rather, they’ve assumed that viewpoint.
Explaining all the arguments against the idea that speciesism is wrong would require lots of space. So I’ll just say here that if we are concerned with wellbeing it is arbitrary to take into account only some of them simply because they are possessed by certain individuals, rather than other ones. Of course many people are arbitrary, and found their moral views on such arbitrariness. But that isn’t really the approach that someone who’s aiming at getting rid of bias should accept.
The main argument that has been provided here in favour for this arbitrariness seems to be: “Don’t you eat animals too?”
I don’t eat animals, and I certainly agree that promoting vegetarianism is a crucial way to question speciesism. But asking whether one is vegetarian or not is not a reply to the problem we’re dealing here. I’ve met people who just didn’t have the willpower to change their food habits even though they agreed speciesism is wrong. I think it’s obvious that those who oppose speciesism should encourage those people to do things that reduce the impact speciesism has (such as writing a letter to Scientific American).
There are many people who do things I don’t consider right, that’s not a reason for me to say they aren’t entitled to do good things because that would contradict their previous wrong doing.
“It’s arbitrary” isn’t a sufficient reason to dismiss a preference or a social norm; for example the choice of which side of the road to drive on, and the rules governing right of way at intersections are arbitrary too, yet we’re better off with such “aribitrary” rules than without them.
I have a preference for humans over chimps, mostly because I’m a human myself, probably also because there is little use for a “social contract” or reciprocation between a human and a Chimp—I don’t need to be nice towards chimps in the expectation that it will make them nicer with me in the long run (if we shared earth with another species with our level of technology and knowledge and power, it would make sense to treat them as equals and care about them in the expectation that they’d do the same about us). People rarely spell out those reasons explicitly because doing so signals one is cold, calculating and selfish, but I suspect it mostly boils down to that.
Regarding what MinibearRex pointed out, I think some humans, because of their cognitive abilities, are more capable of making the universe a better place than either chimpanzees or other humans are. Many humans lack those cognitive capacities, others will use them in ways that will do more harm than good.
But an important question here is: What makes the universe a better place? In my view, to put it briefly, the universe becomes a better place if there is less suffering of sentient beings in it, and, additionally, more enjoyment of sentient beings in it.
So, given this, Emile, I have reasons to reject arbitrariness. I care for sentient beings. That’s not an arbitrary criterion, since they are the ones who can suffer and enjoy.
This is the key issue, in my view, underlying this debate. I have presented some reasons to reject the idea that promoting chimp testing will make the world a better place. The arguments I’ve been presented have opposed my view by implicitly or explicitly pointing out that what makes the world a better place is what makes it a better place for humans. But in my view, if in a universe A there is more suffering and less enjoyment of sentient beings than in universe B, A is worse than B. It is so even if some of those beings are better in A than in B. I don’t need to know who are those beings. They may be humans or cats, it doesn’t matter for me, I’d still consider A to be worse than B.
You are pattern-matching it onto the readily-available pattern of “Let’s do whatever the hell we want to to animals, because they are lesser beings and don’t matter, or at least can’t stop us.” This may map well onto many of the replies in this thread, but not to my original post.
The problem with banning chimp testing is that it prevents us from making morally correct decisions. If you want to make the universe a place where there is less suffering of sentient beings, then you should want to make it a place where people are allowed to decide what will cause less suffering to sentient beings. This means that either option A (do any and all conceivable experiments on non-humans), and option B (ban testing on chimps), are off the table. These are both immoral (or at least amoral) options, because they both avoid making decisions about whether a particular experiment will cause more or less suffering in the world.
Thank you for saving me the effort of saving exactly this.
My only caveat is that I’d place higher priority on universes that include some degree of abstract reasoning, imagination and ability to plan, because those universes have a higher probability of dramatically improving.
Welcome to LW!
I do indeed hold what you call a “speciest” viewpoint. Chimpanzees are worthy of moral consideration, but a human does have moral worth than a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees, likewise, have a greater moral worth than a lizard, and I would willingly experiment on lizards in order to improve the lives of Chimpanzees.
Additionally, Humans aren’t treated as more special because of a completely arbitrary reason: they have more moral weight because a human, because of its intelligence, is more capable of making the universe a better place than a Chimpanzee is. Sacrificing a Chimpanzee to save a human is a similar ethical question to the trolley problem.