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.
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.