Knowledge, Reality, and Value Book Club Replies, Part 5

Several thousand years from now, when aliens hundreds of times smarter than humans are factory farming humans, here is the graph that Alien Bryan Caplan will use to express his views on factory farming: https://imgur.com/a/MQQo4IU.

Actually, I believe I explicitly denied the view that pgbh ascribes to me.  I reproduced Huemer’s graph, and said, “Your graph accurately describes my view.”  B K says this is a “lame response,” but I don’t know any way to make it sound less lame.

The problem with denying that there is any alien sufficiently smarter than us so as to justify them factory farming us, while simultaneously holding that humans can factory farm any species less intelligent than primates, is that it implies that humans are basically the beginning and end of moral worth in the universe. Evolution on Earth, in its meandering path to creating morally significant species, just happened to go from 0 to 100 right before humans and there is no potential for it to create anything that is substantially more worthwhile than us. Other aliens might be equivalent to us if they’re as smart as chimps, but, conveniently, aliens billions of times smarter than us don’t have the right to torture us as they please, the way that we can do so to creatures less intelligent than us. Rather than “lame,” I think it just seems contrived and self-serving – the kind of thing that requires investigation, or a good candidate for a view that humans several hundred years from now might look back on and think “wow, those people had some crazy ideas.”

Yes, vegans should be anti-natalist.

The decision rule you’re describing with respect to the choice of whether or not to have a kid is basically “if the kid has any chance of harming an animal, I shouldn’t have the kid.” How does believing it’s wrong to cause animal suffering unless there’s a good reason to do so imply that one should adopt this rule? If someone says “I think it’s wrong to cause human suffering unless there is good reason to do so”, would you then say “why aren’t you an anti-natalist? Your kid might become a serial killer!”?

Furthermore, let’s not restrict ourselves to a simplistic assessment of the impact that a human life has on animals and the world. The vegan argument is that living a fully ethical life involves not causing animal suffering without good reason. That’s not the same as saying “all vegans have an overall positive effect on animal well being and all others have an overall negative effect on animal welfare.” Here are some examples of non-vegans who might have a positive impact on animal welfare:

someone who doesn’t follow a vegan diet but donates lots of money to animal welfare charities
a scientist who makes breakthroughs that have the unintended consequence of enabling the production of cheap, clean meat
a non-vegan writer who argues against veganism, but nevertheless is less “anti-vegan” than most people, thus softening peoples’ attitudes towards veganism and preparing them or their descendants to challenge their own beliefs about the ethics of eating animals in a way that is free of the anti-vegan bias they might have otherwise had
someone who improves the material well-being of humans, thereby freeing them to spend more time examining their own beliefs for inconsistencies

Of course, these people could have a greater positive impact on animal welfare if they made vegan consumer decisions. But a person’s impact is a lot greater than their diet or consumer choices. If you think humans could potentially relieve wild animal suffering, then you could probably view lots of things that people do to help society (a politician avoiding war, people trying to prepare for devastating pandemics, etc) as contributing to animal welfare in some sense.

I am puzzled by the big distinction many vegans make between killing and causing suffering. “It’s not morally wrong to kill X, even though he wants to live” strongly suggests that the well-being of X is morally of little importance.

My intuition is that pain and death are different things and are bad for different reasons. I would say that pain is bad in and of itself, in proportion to its intensity, regardless of who is experiencing it. I think you could dispute that killing animals is wrong by arguing that animals don’t “want to live” in the same way that we do, or to the same degree that we do. Animals might not be able to conceive of themselves and their wants as extending into the future in the same way that we do. Or you could argue that the desire to live is irrelevant because once an individual dies, it’s not around to suffer the regret of not existing anymore (of course that’s highly counterintuitive if you apply it to humans). I’m agnostic on the killing question but I think if you accept the suffering bit then the perspective on killing doesn’t have much practical importance as to what actions to actually take.

Just change the statement to “The suffering of Banthas, on the other hand, is no big deal, because they’re just alien animals,” and my claim works about as well.

I disagree – this doesn’t strike me as at all plausible. And my point wasn’t merely about banthas suffering in some abstract sense – it was about the moral permissibility of deliberately inflicting that suffering on them to gain some personal pleasure. Hence why I suggested the following as a description more relevant to the factory farming discussion:

“Torturing and mutilating Banthas while keeping them confined and in constant pain and suffering from birth until their death, even when doing so could be easily avoided, in order to gain a minor personal benefit is no big deal, since they’re just alien animals.” And to keep the Star Wars analogy going, I’d have to say, that sounds more like a Sith than a Jedi.

And as I reiterated later:

But if you asked me “Is it okay for Yoda to inflict a lifetime of severe pain and suffering on a bantha when doing so would give Yoda some personal pleasure, since Yoda is so much smarter and more human like than a bantha” the answer to that seems obvious to me: “No, of course not, that sounds like something Emperor Palpatine would do, not Yoda.”

I still contend that both of these examples are more relevant to the ethics of factory farming, and in each of them, the idea that inflicting suffering on banthas is okay because banthas aren’t very smart strikes me as obviously false. So I still don’t see your bantha example as serving your case very well.

I am puzzled by the big distinction many vegans make between killing and causing suffering.

Consider the case of two hunters. Hunter Bob is serving some venison – and when you ask him how he got it, he tells you how that morning he went out hunting, spotted a deer, shot it with his rifle, killing it instantly, and prepared it for dinner that night.

Meanwhile, Hunter Rob also serves some venison. He explains that in his case, he had actually caught the deer in a trap a few years earlier. However, he didn’t kill the deer straight away. Instead, he kept it locked in a tiny shed in his back yard. It was held in such a small space that it was unable to turn around or even lay down. It was never able to get out in the open air or sun. Because it was kept confined all these years, it was constantly covered in its own waste and it was frequently getting sick – Rob actually needed to heavily dose it with antibiotics on a regular basis just to keep it from dying of disease. (Don’t worry though, he thoroughly cleaned the meat before serving it!) Every now and then, he’d subject the deer to painful mutilations to limit its mobility to keep it from thrashing around it its pen too much so it didn’t accidentally kill itself before he was ready for it. After the deer spent a few years suffering like this, he finally decided he was ready to kill it because the perfect occasion to serve venison had finally presented itself.

I think it’s obvious that Rob has done something terrible. Indeed, I think most people would judge someone like Rob as very likely a psychopath of some kind. Maybe Caplan would still say “I’m puzzled by why you’d make such a big distinction between what Bob and Rob did,” but I think the difference in these two cases is extremely clear. And I think most people, even those who had no issues with what Bob did, would still find Rob’s actions to be horrific. If Rob tried to explain that it was no big deal because deer aren’t very smart, almost nobody would find that convincing. But as Stalin once said – one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic. In the same way – treat one animal like Rob did and you’re a psychopath, treat tens of billions of animals the same way each year, and that’s just the meat industry.