The amount of suffering introduced by factory-farming is entirely negligible compared to the amount of wild-animal suffering that’s been taking place as long as life has existed, continues to take place, and will continue to take place unless we cause a wholesale extinction of the Earth’s biosphere.
Unless you’re prepared to eradicate animal life, no personal choice you ever make will have a meaningful impact on the amount of suffering in the universe.
Your second sentence doesn’t follow from the first. Just because there is an enormous amount of suffering in the world doesn’t mean that you can’t alleviate a meaningful amount. The only way this is true is if by “meaningful” you mean as a proportion of the total amount of suffering, which doesn’t really make sense—the fact that others are suffering doesn’t make a good act any less good.
I followed up on that link and found it extremely interesting and thorough.
But my first impression was that it was meant as a very sophisticated job to take the animal rights movement apart from the inside by using their own argument to drive it to its logical absurd conclusion. The longer I read the more I realized that it was meant dead serious. Someone really means to apply empathy (which after all is an evolved trait) to its utmost extreme. Kind of like an AI that had no other values would.
I posted something like this as a risk of Unfriendly Natural Intelligence earlier but wouldn’t have guessed at how far it really can be taken.
There are a few sentences where one could think that he should see the outside view:
we should also remember that many other humans value wilderness, and it’s good to avoid making enemies or tarnishing the suffering-reduction cause by pitting it too strongly opposed to other things people care about.
evolutionary pressure pushes prey species to avoid drawing attention to their suffering and to pretend as though nothing is wrong
But it doesn’t hit home. I can almost hear him answering the question “but you evolved to feel empathy too” with the UFAIs answer “yes I know, but nontheless the suffering must be reduced.” (and an actual suffering reducing UFAIs would probably go on to eradicate all life as that minimizes suffering because lower life forms have net negative lifes and dominate the sum so killing them is necessary—that the humans have to go too because of lack of food etc. is only a minor term).
If you assume that suffering is roughly proportional to number of neurons, then you should care disproportionately about mammal suffering, or even large animals in general; most animals are wild, but they are mostly insects which don’t necessarily experience as much suffering each.
The amount of suffering introduced by factory-farming is entirely negligible compared to the amount of wild-animal suffering that’s been taking place as long as life has existed, continues to take place, and will continue to take place unless we cause a wholesale extinction of the Earth’s biosphere.
Unless you’re prepared to eradicate animal life, no personal choice you ever make will have a meaningful impact on the amount of suffering in the universe.
Your second sentence doesn’t follow from the first. Just because there is an enormous amount of suffering in the world doesn’t mean that you can’t alleviate a meaningful amount. The only way this is true is if by “meaningful” you mean as a proportion of the total amount of suffering, which doesn’t really make sense—the fact that others are suffering doesn’t make a good act any less good.
That’s only the case if you care about individual animals, as opposed to animal suffering in general.
I followed up on that link and found it extremely interesting and thorough.
But my first impression was that it was meant as a very sophisticated job to take the animal rights movement apart from the inside by using their own argument to drive it to its logical absurd conclusion. The longer I read the more I realized that it was meant dead serious. Someone really means to apply empathy (which after all is an evolved trait) to its utmost extreme. Kind of like an AI that had no other values would.
I posted something like this as a risk of Unfriendly Natural Intelligence earlier but wouldn’t have guessed at how far it really can be taken.
There are a few sentences where one could think that he should see the outside view:
But it doesn’t hit home. I can almost hear him answering the question “but you evolved to feel empathy too” with the UFAIs answer “yes I know, but nontheless the suffering must be reduced.” (and an actual suffering reducing UFAIs would probably go on to eradicate all life as that minimizes suffering because lower life forms have net negative lifes and dominate the sum so killing them is necessary—that the humans have to go too because of lack of food etc. is only a minor term).
Not necessarily. https://xkcd.com/1338/
If you assume that suffering is roughly proportional to number of neurons, then you should care disproportionately about mammal suffering, or even large animals in general; most animals are wild, but they are mostly insects which don’t necessarily experience as much suffering each.