Is it ethical to eat a cow with human level intelligence that wanted to be eaten?
To avoid convenient worlds, assume the cow not only wants to be eaten, but also likes and approves of being eaten.
[Edited to clarify that this is an intelligent cow we’re talking about.]
Well. The default answer is yes, because we like fulfilling preferences.
If the cow was genetically engineered to want to be eaten by a farmer who wanted to sell meat to vegetarians, then we may want to not buy the meat, just to discourage the farmer from doing that in the first place.
We can already “grow” meat in a lab. I can’t imagine that we would have the technology to genetically engineer an intelligent cow that wants to be eaten, but NOT be able to grow whatever meat we want of an extremely high quality.
Even more than that, I would bet the grown meat is more economical in terms of resource usage. ie with grown meat, we are only growing the parts we want, whereas with a cow, all the less-edible meat pieces are probably being wasted.
In light of how people process answers to such detailed questions, and how the answers are incorporated into the thought patterns—which might end up used in the real world—is it not in fact most rational not to address that kind of question exactly as specified, but to point out [other options in the hypothetical]?
I am in fact, rather happy that I read something on LW, and applied the thought to a different question a couple days later. It makes me feel like an a growing aspiring rationalist who Learns Things.
As I said in that thread, fighting the hypo is not polite behavior.
On the first day of a physics class, you can ask the professor to justify learning physics given the problem of Cartesian skepticism. The professor might have an interesting answer if she decided to engage you. But what would actually happen is that the professor will ask you to leave, because the conversation will not be a physics conversation, and the social norm is that physics classes are for physics conversations.
In short, the practical conversation you are trying to start is not the same as the theoretical one that was started.
The problem is that it doesn’t answer the point of the question. In the least convenient possible world, where we can make the cows but can’t just grow their meat, how would you answer the question?
The Ameglian Major Cow — which not only wants to be eaten, but is capable of saying so, clearly and distinctly — seems to be in the same family of ethically problematic artificial intelligences as the house-elf — which wants to serve you, suffers if it cannot do so, and has no defenses against mistreatment.
In both cases, if the creature already exists, you may as well exploit it, since doing so fulfills the creature’s own intentions. But it seems to have been created for just the purpose of turning a vice into a virtue: of creating an artificial setup in which doing something that would normally be wrong (killing and eating other sapient beings; keeping slaves and benefiting from their labor) is rendered not-wrong by exceptional circumstances.
And this, in turn, seems calculated to degrade our moral intuitions. I suspect I would not want to meet a person who had grown up around house-elves and Ameglian Major Cows, and therefore expected that all intelligences were similarly eager for exploitation.
This reminds me of how, when I was about 18 and craved sexual excitement (more than I do now), I correctly guessed that shock, shame and guilt would make great aphrodisiacs for a mind like mine (although they wear off quickly). So I started looking for extreme and transgressive porn on the net. What I found to my liking was guro hentai and written extreme, to the point of lethality (“snuff”) BDSM stories. However, I realized that descriptions of blatant non-consent turned on some defense mechanisms that gave me a measure of disgust and anger, not arousal, so I turned to “consensual” extreme material.
I was, back then, amazed to discover that there was a large number of stories featuring entirely willing torture, sexualized killings, and, yes, cannibalism. So, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of descriptions of humans desiring, eroticizing and actively seeking out being cooked and eaten. Some were quite competently written.
Soon enough, however, the novelty and the psychological effects wore off, and now I prefer much more mild BDSM porn; I feel neither shocked by nor drawn to the stuff I described.
Not really sure if all that is acceptable to disclose on LW, but I suspect that most of you folks won’t be outraged or creeped out.
I don’t have much beef with thatguy who killed and ate a few kilograms of a human volunteer he found on the Internet; eating a cow with human smarts that wants to be eaten doesn’t seem qualitatively worse.
Probably not. I take it as uncontroversial that some people are insane or mentally unstable and their wants/desires should not be fulfilled. The way to probe this possibility is to ask for a justification of the want/desire. So I’d ask the cow to give reasons for wanting to be eaten. It’s hard for me to see how those reasons could be convincing. Certainly “because I’m a cow” wouldn’t convince me. I can imagine that an intelligent cow might long for death and seek assisted suicide, since being an intelligent cow would be rather like being a severely disabled human being, but the part where he or she wants to be eaten is alarming.
So I’d ask the cow to give reasons for wanting to be eaten. It’s hard for me to see how those reasons could be convincing. Certainly “because I’m a cow” wouldn’t convince me.
“Why do you want to be eaten?”
“It seems nice. Why do you want to have sex with attractive members of your species?”
“Because it gives me pleasure.”
“But you’re not having that pleasure right now. You’re just anticipating it. Your anticipation is something happening in your brain now, irrespective of whether a particular sex act would actually turn out to be pleasurable. Similarly, my desire to be eaten is happening in my brain now, fully aware of the fact that I won’t be around to notice it if it happens. Not that different.”
“So? I know where my desire to have sex comes from — it comes from my evolutionary past; members of my ancestors’ generations who didn’t want sex are much less likely to have had kids. They died alone, or became monks or something.”
“And I know where my desire to be eaten comes from — it comes from my genetically-engineered past; members of my ancestors’ generations who didn’t want to be eaten were discarded. Their bodies ended up being destroyed without being eaten! (And, of course, without having their DNA cloned and propagated.)”
“But that’s artificial! You were manipulated!”
“No, I wasn’t. My ancestral environment and my ancestors’ genes were manipulated; just as yours were manipulated by sexual selection. I’ve personally never met a genetic engineer in my life! My experience of it is just that ever since puberty, I’ve really wanted someone to eat me. It’s just the sort of organism I am. Human gets horny; cow gets tasty.”
“So what you’re saying is, you want to be eaten because …”
I think that in some extreme forms the ability to consent is called into question. That’s what I’m claiming with the cow: The cow’s desire is extreme enough to call into question its sanity, which would render it unable to consent, which would make the act unethical. I would say the same about any form of BDSM that results in death.
The cow’s desire is extreme enough to call into question its sanity, which would render it unable to consent, which would make the act unethical. I would say the same about any form of BDSM that results in death.
The cow goes to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist notes that she shows none of the typical signs of insanity: delusional beliefs, poor self-control, emotional distress. The cow simply values being eaten.
If that wouldn’t convince you that the cow was sane, what would?
Let me make sure I understand this: the fact that the cow consents to death is sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that the cow is unable to meaningfully consent to death?
No, absolutely not. The fact that the cow consents to being eaten is potentially evidence that the cow in unable to meaningfully consent to death. Again, the cow might have good reasons to want to die—it might even have good reasons to not care about whether you eat it or not after it’s dead—but what I’m disputing is whether it can have good reasons to want to be eaten. These are all extremely different things. Likewise, there may be good reasons for a person to want to die but sexual gratification is not a good reason and it’s highly likely to signify mental derangement.
So, I’ve asked this elsewhere, but… why is “well, geez, it’s more useful than just having me rot in the ground” not a good enough reason to prefer (and not just be indifferent to) being eaten after I’m dead?
Conversely, what makes wanting to be buried underground after I die not evidence that I’m unable to consent? (Many people in the real world seem to have this desire.)
(I don’t mean to collide with the cryonics conversation here; we can assume my brain has been cryopreserved in all of these cases if we like. Or not. It has nothing to do with my question.)
There’s a difference between wanting to be eaten and wanting to die in addition to either being indifferent to being eaten afterwards or preferring it. The difference is that in the former case dying is a consequence of the desire to be eaten whereas in the latter case presumably the cow would have a reason to want to die in addition to its preference to want to be eaten afterwards.
The cow that wants to be eaten does not necessarily want to die at all. Death is a consequence of fulfilling its desire to be eaten and to want to be eaten implies that it finds dying an acceptable consequence of being eaten but no more. The cow could say “I don’t want to die, I love living, but I want to be eaten and I’m willing to accept the consequences.” It could simply value being eaten over living without necessarily wanting to die.
Likewise, I can say, “I don’t want to die, but if I do, I’d like to be buried afterwards” and this is obviously a very different thing that saying “I want to be buried and if I have to die in order to be buried I’m willing to accept that consequence.”
Ah, OK. When you said “it might even have good reasons to not care about whether you eat it or not after it’s dead—but what I’m disputing is whether it can have good reasons to want to be eaten” I thought you were contrasting indifference with active desire.
Sure, I agree that there’s a relevant difference between wanting X after I die and wanting X now, especially when X will kill me.
So, OK, revising… is the fact that the cow desires being eaten enough to accept death as a consequence of satisfying that desire sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that the cow is unable to meaningfully consent to death?
That last part seems backward to me. If I’m going to die anyway, why shouldn’t I want to be eaten? My corpse has nutritional value; I generally prefer that valuable things be used rather than discarded.
Understand, I don’t want to be eaten when I die, but it seems clear to me that I’m the irrational one here, not the cow. It’s just that my irrationality on the matter is conventional.
The UK supposedly has a rule where you can take home and eat roadkill that you find, but not roadkill that you yourself were responsible for killing. The theoretical incentive problem is fairly obvious, even though enforcability is not.
The blanket prohibition on eating people whether or not they want to be eaten after they die may make sense in terms of not incentivizing other people to terminate them ahead of schedule.
Sure, I agree that it may be in our collective best interests to prevent individuals from eating one another, whether they want to be eaten or not. It may even be in our best interests to force individuals to assert that they don’t want to be eaten, and if so, it’s probably best for them to do so sincerely rather than lie, since sincere belief is a much reliable source of such assertions.
I just deny that their desire to be eaten, should they have it, is irrational.
Probably not. I take it as uncontroversial that some people are insane or mentally unstable and their wants/desires should not be fulfilled. The way to probe this possibility is to ask for a justification of the want/desire.
I agree. I think there is no difference between creating an intelligent cow that wants to be eaten vs. creating a human that tastes good, and wants to be eaten.
Depends on what you mean by “ethical,” as many things do.
For me personally, it doesn’t seem that bad. However, I don’t think it’s the optimal outcome—maybe we could encourage the cow to take up some other interests?
Is it ethical to eat a cow with human level intelligence that wanted to be eaten? To avoid convenient worlds, assume the cow not only wants to be eaten, but also likes and approves of being eaten. [Edited to clarify that this is an intelligent cow we’re talking about.]
Well. The default answer is yes, because we like fulfilling preferences.
If the cow was genetically engineered to want to be eaten by a farmer who wanted to sell meat to vegetarians, then we may want to not buy the meat, just to discourage the farmer from doing that in the first place.
That’s what I think, anyway.
We can already “grow” meat in a lab. I can’t imagine that we would have the technology to genetically engineer an intelligent cow that wants to be eaten, but NOT be able to grow whatever meat we want of an extremely high quality.
Even more than that, I would bet the grown meat is more economical in terms of resource usage. ie with grown meat, we are only growing the parts we want, whereas with a cow, all the less-edible meat pieces are probably being wasted.
Isn’t that kind of missing the point of the question?
There was a recent discussion, Rationality of sometimes missing the point of the stated question, and of certain type of defensive reasoning, that contemplated the idea that sometimes it is useful to miss the point of the question. When I read the Eat Smart Cow question, it seemed like the type of question that requires said “missing of point”. Quote below:
I am in fact, rather happy that I read something on LW, and applied the thought to a different question a couple days later. It makes me feel like an a growing aspiring rationalist who Learns Things.
As I said in that thread, fighting the hypo is not polite behavior.
On the first day of a physics class, you can ask the professor to justify learning physics given the problem of Cartesian skepticism. The professor might have an interesting answer if she decided to engage you. But what would actually happen is that the professor will ask you to leave, because the conversation will not be a physics conversation, and the social norm is that physics classes are for physics conversations.
In short, the practical conversation you are trying to start is not the same as the theoretical one that was started.
The problem is that it doesn’t answer the point of the question. In the least convenient possible world, where we can make the cows but can’t just grow their meat, how would you answer the question?
I eat cows that emphatically don’t want to be eaten all the time. I don’t have an ethical problem with it.
Sorry, I was talking about the cow that wanted to be eaten in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That cow was as intelligent as a human adult.
At a first guess I’d say it is ethical to eat that cow but potentially not ethical to create him in the first place.
The Ameglian Major Cow — which not only wants to be eaten, but is capable of saying so, clearly and distinctly — seems to be in the same family of ethically problematic artificial intelligences as the house-elf — which wants to serve you, suffers if it cannot do so, and has no defenses against mistreatment.
In both cases, if the creature already exists, you may as well exploit it, since doing so fulfills the creature’s own intentions. But it seems to have been created for just the purpose of turning a vice into a virtue: of creating an artificial setup in which doing something that would normally be wrong (killing and eating other sapient beings; keeping slaves and benefiting from their labor) is rendered not-wrong by exceptional circumstances.
And this, in turn, seems calculated to degrade our moral intuitions. I suspect I would not want to meet a person who had grown up around house-elves and Ameglian Major Cows, and therefore expected that all intelligences were similarly eager for exploitation.
I assume that it’s not the “eating” that’s the ethical problem, but the killing?
So, can’t we boil the question to its essentials of “is it ethical to kill creatures that want to be killed (and like and approve it)”?
Oops.
(here’s another one of my crap confessions)
This reminds me of how, when I was about 18 and craved sexual excitement (more than I do now), I correctly guessed that shock, shame and guilt would make great aphrodisiacs for a mind like mine (although they wear off quickly). So I started looking for extreme and transgressive porn on the net. What I found to my liking was guro hentai and written extreme, to the point of lethality (“snuff”) BDSM stories. However, I realized that descriptions of blatant non-consent turned on some defense mechanisms that gave me a measure of disgust and anger, not arousal, so I turned to “consensual” extreme material.
I was, back then, amazed to discover that there was a large number of stories featuring entirely willing torture, sexualized killings, and, yes, cannibalism. So, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of descriptions of humans desiring, eroticizing and actively seeking out being cooked and eaten. Some were quite competently written.
Soon enough, however, the novelty and the psychological effects wore off, and now I prefer much more mild BDSM porn; I feel neither shocked by nor drawn to the stuff I described.
Not really sure if all that is acceptable to disclose on LW, but I suspect that most of you folks won’t be outraged or creeped out.
I don’t have much beef with that guy who killed and ate a few kilograms of a human volunteer he found on the Internet; eating a cow with human smarts that wants to be eaten doesn’t seem qualitatively worse.
I would not want that guy in my neighborhood. I want to live around people who will not eat me, even if I go crazy.
Yes.
Probably not. I take it as uncontroversial that some people are insane or mentally unstable and their wants/desires should not be fulfilled. The way to probe this possibility is to ask for a justification of the want/desire. So I’d ask the cow to give reasons for wanting to be eaten. It’s hard for me to see how those reasons could be convincing. Certainly “because I’m a cow” wouldn’t convince me. I can imagine that an intelligent cow might long for death and seek assisted suicide, since being an intelligent cow would be rather like being a severely disabled human being, but the part where he or she wants to be eaten is alarming.
“Why do you want to be eaten?”
“It seems nice. Why do you want to have sex with attractive members of your species?”
“Because it gives me pleasure.”
“But you’re not having that pleasure right now. You’re just anticipating it. Your anticipation is something happening in your brain now, irrespective of whether a particular sex act would actually turn out to be pleasurable. Similarly, my desire to be eaten is happening in my brain now, fully aware of the fact that I won’t be around to notice it if it happens. Not that different.”
“So? I know where my desire to have sex comes from — it comes from my evolutionary past; members of my ancestors’ generations who didn’t want sex are much less likely to have had kids. They died alone, or became monks or something.”
“And I know where my desire to be eaten comes from — it comes from my genetically-engineered past; members of my ancestors’ generations who didn’t want to be eaten were discarded. Their bodies ended up being destroyed without being eaten! (And, of course, without having their DNA cloned and propagated.)”
“But that’s artificial! You were manipulated!”
“No, I wasn’t. My ancestral environment and my ancestors’ genes were manipulated; just as yours were manipulated by sexual selection. I’ve personally never met a genetic engineer in my life! My experience of it is just that ever since puberty, I’ve really wanted someone to eat me. It’s just the sort of organism I am. Human gets horny; cow gets tasty.”
“So what you’re saying is, you want to be eaten because …”
″… because I’m a cow, pretty much. So … steak?”
This whole thread puts me in mind of this for some reason.
Do you think consensual BDSM is unethical?
I think that in some extreme forms the ability to consent is called into question. That’s what I’m claiming with the cow: The cow’s desire is extreme enough to call into question its sanity, which would render it unable to consent, which would make the act unethical. I would say the same about any form of BDSM that results in death.
The cow goes to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist notes that she shows none of the typical signs of insanity: delusional beliefs, poor self-control, emotional distress. The cow simply values being eaten.
If that wouldn’t convince you that the cow was sane, what would?
Let me make sure I understand this: the fact that the cow consents to death is sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that the cow is unable to meaningfully consent to death?
No, absolutely not. The fact that the cow consents to being eaten is potentially evidence that the cow in unable to meaningfully consent to death. Again, the cow might have good reasons to want to die—it might even have good reasons to not care about whether you eat it or not after it’s dead—but what I’m disputing is whether it can have good reasons to want to be eaten. These are all extremely different things. Likewise, there may be good reasons for a person to want to die but sexual gratification is not a good reason and it’s highly likely to signify mental derangement.
So, I’ve asked this elsewhere, but… why is “well, geez, it’s more useful than just having me rot in the ground” not a good enough reason to prefer (and not just be indifferent to) being eaten after I’m dead?
Conversely, what makes wanting to be buried underground after I die not evidence that I’m unable to consent? (Many people in the real world seem to have this desire.)
(I don’t mean to collide with the cryonics conversation here; we can assume my brain has been cryopreserved in all of these cases if we like. Or not. It has nothing to do with my question.)
There’s a difference between wanting to be eaten and wanting to die in addition to either being indifferent to being eaten afterwards or preferring it. The difference is that in the former case dying is a consequence of the desire to be eaten whereas in the latter case presumably the cow would have a reason to want to die in addition to its preference to want to be eaten afterwards.
The cow that wants to be eaten does not necessarily want to die at all. Death is a consequence of fulfilling its desire to be eaten and to want to be eaten implies that it finds dying an acceptable consequence of being eaten but no more. The cow could say “I don’t want to die, I love living, but I want to be eaten and I’m willing to accept the consequences.” It could simply value being eaten over living without necessarily wanting to die.
Likewise, I can say, “I don’t want to die, but if I do, I’d like to be buried afterwards” and this is obviously a very different thing that saying “I want to be buried and if I have to die in order to be buried I’m willing to accept that consequence.”
Ah, OK. When you said “it might even have good reasons to not care about whether you eat it or not after it’s dead—but what I’m disputing is whether it can have good reasons to want to be eaten” I thought you were contrasting indifference with active desire.
Sure, I agree that there’s a relevant difference between wanting X after I die and wanting X now, especially when X will kill me.
So, OK, revising… is the fact that the cow desires being eaten enough to accept death as a consequence of satisfying that desire sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that the cow is unable to meaningfully consent to death?
So, any suicide attempt must be prevented?
That last part seems backward to me. If I’m going to die anyway, why shouldn’t I want to be eaten? My corpse has nutritional value; I generally prefer that valuable things be used rather than discarded.
Understand, I don’t want to be eaten when I die, but it seems clear to me that I’m the irrational one here, not the cow. It’s just that my irrationality on the matter is conventional.
The UK supposedly has a rule where you can take home and eat roadkill that you find, but not roadkill that you yourself were responsible for killing. The theoretical incentive problem is fairly obvious, even though enforcability is not.
The blanket prohibition on eating people whether or not they want to be eaten after they die may make sense in terms of not incentivizing other people to terminate them ahead of schedule.
Sure, I agree that it may be in our collective best interests to prevent individuals from eating one another, whether they want to be eaten or not. It may even be in our best interests to force individuals to assert that they don’t want to be eaten, and if so, it’s probably best for them to do so sincerely rather than lie, since sincere belief is a much reliable source of such assertions.
I just deny that their desire to be eaten, should they have it, is irrational.
So, you’d ask the cow to derive ought from is?
I would definitely be OK with it if the cow was also uploaded before death (though that’s far from the least convenient word).
Yes, provided it was ethical to breed it.
I’m not sure there’s a causal relationship. If you met a cow in the wild that wanted to be eaten, I think it would be ethical to eat it.
But I strongly believe that creating such a cow would be unethical.
I agree. I think there is no difference between creating an intelligent cow that wants to be eaten vs. creating a human that tastes good, and wants to be eaten.
Depends on what you mean by “ethical,” as many things do.
For me personally, it doesn’t seem that bad. However, I don’t think it’s the optimal outcome—maybe we could encourage the cow to take up some other interests?