Thrustvectoring said:
I don’t think that some animals are capable of suffering
From what Thrust has said, I think it’s ambiguous between whether he cares he thinks animals can’t suffer and doesn’t care about them for that reason or he just doesn’t care about animal suffering as you describe. Or , more likely, he is in some middle state.
As to your second point, yes that’s the approach. And it seems largely that is what is happening when it comes up in the discussion here.
For animals that are R-selected or, in other words, having many offspring in the hopes that some will survive, the vast majority of the offspring die very quickly. Most species of Fish, Amphibians and many less complex animals do this. 99.9% of them dieing in before reaching adulthood might be a good approximation for some species. A painful death doesn’t seem worth a brief life as a wild animal.
It’s true that most people wouldn’t be functioning optimally if they were not somewhat happy and extrapolating this to other animals who seem to be similar to us in basic emotion, I would agree that an adult wild animal seem like they would live an alright life.
Most people believe that chickens suffer. They seem have all the right parts of the brain and the indicative behaviors and everything. What’s your theory that says that humans do but chickens don’t?
So just kill all the farm animals painlessly now? Sure that sounds good. But if there will still be farm animal being raised then it seems there still is a problem. Or if you are just talking about ways of making slaughter painless for continuing to factory farm, that sounds better than nothing.
Very interesting. What were they experts in? And how many people responded?
I mostly do it by thinking about what I would accept as evidence of pain in more complex animals and see if it is present in insects. Complex pain behavior and evolutionary and functional homology relating to pain are things to look for.
There is a quite a bit of research on complex pain behavior in crabs by Robert Elwood. I’d link his site but it doesn’t seem to be up right now. You should be able to find the articles, though. Crabs have 100,000 neurons which is around what many insects have.
Here is a pdf of a paper that find that a bunch of common human mind altering drugs affecting crawfish and fruit flies.
Yes. Bees and Cockroaches both have about a million neurons compared with maybe 100,000 for most insects.
I think there are good arguments for for suffering not being weighted by number of neurons and if you assign even a 10% to that being the case you end up with insects (and maybe nematodes and zooplankton) dominating the utility function because of their overwhelming numbers.
Having said that, ways on increasing the well being of these may be quite a bit different from increasing it for larger animals. In particular, because they so many of them die so within the first few days of life, their averaged life quality seems like it would be terrible. So reducing the populations looks like the current best option.
There may be good instrumental reasons for focusing on less controversial animals and hoping that they promote the kind of antispeciesism that spills over to concern about insects and does work for improving similar situations in the future.
Well if vegan/vegetarian outreach is particularly effective then it may do more to develope lab meat than just donating to lab meat causes themselves (because there would be more people interested in this and similar technologies). Additionally, making people vegan/vegetarian may have a stronger effect in promoting anti speciesism in general which seems like it will be of larger overall benefit than just ending factory farming. This seems like it would happen because thoughts follow actions.
Yeah, I would like a ride and it’s Max.
Wow, this sounds awesome. I hope you drive then, I’d come for sure.
There is a lot of diversity of opinions in philosophers and that may be true as a whole of the discipline, there is some good stuff to be found there. I’d recommend staying here for the most part rather than wading through philosophy elsewhere, though.
Also, many moral philosophers may have very different moral sentiments from you and that maybe that makes them seem like idiots more than they actually are. Different moral sentiments as to whether consequentialism rather than just within consequentialism among other things.
I think I am less productive when someone else is around. It seems like I am less effective at my current job when coworkers are around and certainly when I am being evaluated at work. This may be because I am socially anxious and socially maladjusted, though.
No, though I admit it has felt like that for me at some points in my life. Even if I did, there are a bunch of reasons why that I would not trust that intuition
I like certain things and dislike certain things, and in a certain sense I would be mistaken if I were doing things that reliably caused me pain. That certain sense is that if I were better informed I would not take that action. If, however, I liked pain, I would still take that action, and so I would not be mistaken. I could go through the same process to explain why an sadist is not mistaken.
I do not know what else to say except that this is just an appeal to intuition, and that specific intuitions are worthless unless they are proven to reliably point towards the truth.
I don’t directly apprehend anything as the being “good” or the “bad” in the moral realist sense and I don’t count other peoples’ accounts of directly apprehending such things as evidence (especially since schizophrenics and theists exist).
I’m curious to know whether there’s actually somebody who picks “Neither, both are good.”
I saw someone who answered that way, but it must have been as a joke. Not a good thing to do for matching purposes...
You could reduce human suffering to 0 by reducing the number of humans to 0, so there’s got to be another value greater than reducing suffering.
Almost all hedonistic utilitarians are concerned with maximizing happiness as well as minimizing suffering, including Brian. The reason that he talks about suffering so much is because, it is most people rank a unit of suffering as, say a −3 experience and a unit of suffering as, say, a −1 experience. And he thinks that there is much more suffering than happiness in the world and that it easier to prevent it.
(Sorry if I got any of this wrong Brian)
It seems to me that reducing suffering in a numbers game is the kind of thing you would say is your goal because it makes you sound like a good person
I am not sure that the hedonistic utilitarian agenda is high status. The most plausible cynical/psychological critique of the hedonistic utilitarian agenda, is that they are too worried about ethical consistency and about coherently extrapolating a simple principle from their values.
I tried briefly to find some similar books but couldn’t see any others.
I don’t think that very many people would except extreme harm to have these things, though. I used to think that I valued some non-experiential things very strongly, but I don’t think that I was taking seriously how strong my preference not to be tortured is. And for most people I don’t think there are peak levels of those three things that could outweigh torture.