Here’s my last round of response to reader comments. I’m on vacation now, but in early September I’ll post one last reply to Huemer’s replies to me, then give the author the last word.
Even if we assign very low probability that insects feel pain and they feel significantly less pain, there are something like 10^18 insects so insect suffering is a massive problem. Nematodes have nociceptors and there are 4*10^19, which is 57 billion for every human. I do not know exactly how but I imagine human beings could be causing massive amounts of suffering to these tiny creatures for trivial reasons all the time.
Plausible.
Having children is not trivial but it would seem there is a moral obligation not to reproduce if there is a risk your child may not be a vegan. It would be the same as the obligation not to reproduce if your children would have a decent chance of being mass murderer. Even vegan children would cause animal suffering as noted above.
Yes, vegans should be anti-natalist.
If you turn the dial of animal concern up too high then saving lives may be unethical. Imagine saving the life of a mass murderer. If I give money to help those in developing countries by giving them malaria nets or vaccines, they could be meat eaters or at least start eating meat 20 years from now when their country is more developed. Turn up the dial more and it might be morally praiseworthy to kill meat eaters. Turn the dial up higher and all human life is inflicting too much suffering on animals; if we were provided the chance, we should kill all human life.
Harsh but fair.
It seems like vegans keep the dial turned pretty high but not quite high enough to start doing really crazy stuff. Where is the line between “trivial”, “moderately trivial” and “unnecessary” or “not completely necessary.” I can’t stomach the idea of having no concern for animals but I can’t see good reason to exclude possibly insects, nematodes, fish, vermin and so forth. And their suffering accumulates. However, doing so seems really really counter intuitive.
Which is why I’m so baffled that the world’s greatest ethical intuitionist would be so sympathetic to vegan premises.
Since intelligence doesn’t appear to be binary but rather a continuous gradient, and if, as a matter of physics and computer science, there is no hard upper ceiling on intelligence, or if the ceiling is arbitrarily high, those aliens might be hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, or trillions of times smarter than we are. The intelligence difference between them and us could in principle be much greater than the difference between us and cows, pigs, chimpanzees etc.
From the perspective of ‘intelligence is what makes suffering morally bad’ premise, it seems like the only way to say that the aliens above are morally wrong is to posit some threshold of intelligence above which no matter how much more intelligent the aliens are, it is wrong for them to cause great suffering for trivial reasons on those who are merely above the threshold.
I looked at the prior debate, and he actually did bite the bullet which you suggest in your second-to-last paragraph; i.e., he agreed that moral worth is proportional to intelligence, and hence there could (theoretically) be a creature which is so intelligent that it would be entitled to torture and kill us to avoid so much as a stubbed toe.
Actually, I believe I explicitly denied the view that pgbh acribes 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.
Killing Banthas, on the other hand, is no big deal, because they’re just alien animals.
This is a bit of a shift in goal posts. Huemer isn’t talking about merely “killing” animals, he’s talking about keeping them in conditions of constant suffering for their entire existence, so responding with examples of animals being killed after living normal lives is a red herring.
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 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.
Because “intelligence” is roughly synonymous with “learning ability.” And since human babies go from knowing zero languages to one language in a couple of years, one can plausible say that they are in fact highly intelligent.
That doesn’t follow. This demonstrates that babies later gain learning ability, and will thus later become intelligent, but that doesn’t entail that babies therefore are highly intelligent in the present sense. That makes no more sense that saying that since babies will go from being almost completely immobile to walking and running within a couple years, it’s plausible to say babies are in fact highly mobile.
It’s possible, of course, that babies have very low intelligence for months 0-6, and then become highly intelligent, which allows them to learning language. But a creature that quickly goes from knowing zero languages to one language must have had high learning ability before the language acquisition occurred. I suppose you could experimentally test this by seeing if babies who hear no language for their first six months acquire language as quickly as babies who hear language from birth. But my general sound is sound.
Brian, you say that animal welfare has moral import, though a lot less than human welfare. However, your arguments suggest that concerns for animal welfare place no moral constrains on human behavior. What activity involving animals do you think it is morally wrong, if any, and why?
I morally oppose the factory farming of primates, if such exists.
Thanks to everyone for your comments!
READER COMMENTS
pgbh
Jul 22 2021 at 1:44pm
I apologize for misrepresenting your view. I based that on the following quote:
I see now on re-reading it that I somehow got your claim backwards.
David Godofsky
Jul 22 2021 at 5:47pm
The focus on the moral issues of animal suffering seems to me to fail if you carry it too far. So humans inevitably cause animal suffering (if you include insect). Even vegans are going to kill insects to grow corn. So, the only solution is to let all humans die? Is there any evidence that the world had less animal suffering 1 million years ago before modern humans? Animals eating other animals alive is not morally bad because the animals lack the intelligence to be morally culpable. But they torture each other. In fact, plants torture animals as well. So, to minimize suffering, we should just turn the Earth into a lifeless moonscape. Somehow, I do not think that view will gain much traction, now or ever. I fall in between Huemer and Caplin. I think intelligence matters but is just one of several criteria that most humans use to judge the moral importance of animals. Most of those criteria relate to the relationship between the animals and humans. Babies, having a closer relationship to humans than dogs, are more important by my criteria, and virtually everyone would agree with my conclusion (torturing a baby is worse than torturing an ant, cow, pig, or dog).
Kris
Jul 22 2021 at 6:05pm
Interesting. Doesn’t this imply that you & Huemer are closer than you think?
You both agree that causing suffering to insects is OK.
You both agree that causing suffering to orangutans is not OK.
You are divided about causing suffering to pigs.
So it’s really just a question of where to draw the line about moral importance / unimportance.
IMO, a pig (~200M neurons) is closer to an orangutan (3B neurons) than an ant (250K neurons). Not just in brain mass, but also behavior.
(Also, if your sons decided to buy a pig, just to torture for fun, how would you react?)
Would you say that Huemer has at least a 20% chance of being right? Given that you reject the torture of primates, a 20% chance for rejecting the torture of pigs seems warranted, no? And if you grant him a 20% chance of being right, how should that modify your behavior?
KevinDC
Jul 23 2021 at 11:34am
A quick nitpick. Your estimate on the neurons in the brain of a pig appears to be off by an order of magnitude – the current estimate for the number of neurons in a pigs brain is estimated to be about 2.2 billion, rather than 200 million.
ricky
Jul 22 2021 at 7:57pm
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Jasper
Jul 22 2021 at 10:45pm
I’m not sure how Bryan believes literally anything done to a non-primate animal would be morally okay, but that belief is so far off from my own intuition that it almost leads me to discount his opinion on veganism entirely. Bryan, do you treat your pets well?
KevinDC
Jul 23 2021 at 12:16pm
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:
And as I reiterated later:
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.
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.
Alan R
Jul 25 2021 at 3:05pm
This is a topic where it helps to start with some reality before moving onto discussion. Bryan, and other meat-eaters, please watch this short 11-minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykTH_b-cXyE
Now, after watching it, can you really say with a straight face and a clean conscience: “There is nothing morally wrong here.” I ask this as a genuine question. What is your reaction to watching this? Do you say, “Well, this is bad, yeah, but I really enjoy eating cheeseburgers, and that justifies this suffering.” What, in all honestly, is your response, specifically to this video?
I genuinely think that most of the “intuitions” from people like Bryan exist because they haven’t exposed themselves to the reality of how barbaric and cruel our factory farming practices are. Most people today can spend their whole lives without ever seeing what’s going on to these animals, so they don’t have to think about it, and their moral intuitions aren’t ever challenged.
When I teach this topic in PHIL 101 classes, I always start with this video. It’s very important for people to absorb the reality of what they’re arguing about before they jump into abstract reasoning about it.
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