At long last, here’s my final entry!
Rejoinder to Huemer’s Response, Part 4
Suppose A does not consent. A wants you to perform only the action that benefits him while harming B; he won’t consent to the action that harms him while benefitting B (not even conditional on your doing the other action simultaneously). Now what? It looks to me like we still have the original problem.
How is this different from a person who foolishly refuses to consent to a vaccination, even though he admits that the benefit of the vaccine greatly exceeds the pain of the needle? As you explain in The Problem of Political Authority, we have no right to benefit him given his explicit refusal to consent.
BC: If true, this is probably the best consequentialist argument against alleviating world poverty. After all, most poor people are happy to be alive. If saving the lives of the most miserable of the world’s poor causes their total population to greatly shrink, how is that a win?
Because the living standards will be higher.
That’s why I said “greatly” shrink. I see why a consequentialist would favor slightly lower population and massively higher happiness per person. But I’d also think a consequentialist would favor massively higher population and slightly lower happiness per person.
Consider: If you had the chance to go back in time and somehow sabotage the industrial revolution, so that Europe and America (etc.) would never have industrialized and never have become fabulously wealthy as we are today, would you do it? Before answering, note that our population today would probably be much larger, though also more miserable.
Unlikely. Without the Industrial Revolution, we couldn’t support a modern-size population.
Rejoinder to Huemer’s Response, Part 5
Bryan gives the example of building a swimming pool, and in the process causing a den of mice to “horribly suffer”. Why are the mice horribly suffering instead of just running away? I guess for some reason they can’t get away, and somehow they get tortured by the bulldozer rather than dying quickly. Apparently, we’re supposed to think that this would be fine. But, again, I think that’s obviously wrong. If I were building the pool, I would certainly take the trouble to move the mice first. No vegan would hesitate to say the same thing. None of them would answer as in Bryan’s imagined dialogue.
The scenario that I’m picturing is that the mice lose their home due to your pool construction, then slowly die of starvation and exposure while they hunt for another home. And it’s hard to “move the mice” because finding dens of mice on a pool-sized construction site is challenging. These seem like totally realistic premises to me. And unless you’re doing a “No True Vegan” thing, I really doubt that even many vegans would actually consider this a morally strong reason not to build a pool.
Bryan cites the permissibility of killing banthas and the impermissibility of killing Ewoks. But the issue I raised was about pain and suffering, not killing. So change it to “it’s okay to torture banthas.” All vegans would say that it is not permissible to torture banthas for minor reasons. Furthermore, I bet lots of other Star Wars fans would agree.
The word “torture” has strong negative connotations. But if people consider a creature OK to kill, they also normally consider it OK to cause it a lot of pain for minor benefits. And reasonably so. “Causing a healthy creature severe pain for a week is less bad than actually killing it” is highly intuitive.
BC: “The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent.” [emphasis Bryan’s]
This, again, strikes me as arbitrary and obviously false.
Gee, it makes perfect sense to me. Does it even slightly reduce your confidence to learn that only 10% of respondents to this survey say that I’m definitely wrong?
"The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent."
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) September 30, 2021
The way to philosophical truth does not start with impugning your interlocutor’s sincerity, or otherwise starting a debate about their psychology. Those things virtually never help.
As I think you’ll agree, almost nothing helps resolve deep-seated philosophical disagreements. And whenever there is a deep-seated philosophical disagreement, at least one side is not “on the way to philosophical truth.” What then is the least bad way to get moving in the right direction? Perhaps the psychological route is not so ineffective compared to the alternatives. Consider your chapter on “The Psychology of Authority” in The Problem of Political Authority. It’s one of the strongest parts of a very strong book.
Attacks on sincerity seem more futile, but how about a direct appeal to sincerity, a la my Argument from Conscience?
(7) Jefferson Caplan
We’re back in the slavery era. Thomas Jefferson is against slavery; Jefferson Caplan is pro-slavery. They talk about it:
As you might guess, I find this thought experiment unpersuasive. Since we’re at a severe impasse, let me switch from the futile goal of changing your mind to the more reasonable goal of helping you understand how things seem to me (and, I think, most non-vegans).
Imagine a conversation between you and someone who believes in the rights of plants. You tell him, “Plants don’t feel pain,” and he says, “That’s an arbitrary difference. Plants are still alive. They have interests, and we shouldn’t do immense harm to their interests to slightly advance our own.” You probably consider this an obtuse position – and I agree.
My point? To me – and virtually every non-vegan – the moral difference between humans (and Vulcans, Ewoks, etc.) and other animals seems almost as vast and blatant as the moral difference between animals and plants seems to you. I know that must be frustrating – if not horrifying – for you, but that’s where things stand.
It turns out that spontaneous abortion (where the embryo dies of natural causes, usually due to failure to implant in the womb) is much more common than medically induced abortion. In fact, that’s what happens to most embryos. But pro-life activists aren’t going around worrying about all the embryos that die in this way. They’re not, e.g., campaigning for medical research to figure out how to stop it. This proves that the pro-life people are lying: they don’t really think embryos are people, and they don’t really care about the lives of the unborn.
When I heard that, I thought it was terrible. I don’t find it plausible or helpful to suggest that pro-lifers don’t believe their position.
The argument is overstated, but still seems probative to me. If you really think that embryos are human, why aren’t you interested in saving them from accidental death?
READER COMMENTS
robc
Oct 5 2021 at 10:24am
“The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent.”
I think you answered your final question earlier.
Philo
Oct 5 2021 at 10:43am
“But I’d also think a consequentialist would favor massively higher population and slightly lower happiness per person.” This is headed in the direction of the Repugnant Conclusion, which—given that we’re all at least semi-consequentialist–seems not really so repugnant.
Sergio Adrian Martinez Garcia
Oct 5 2021 at 3:54pm
Just regarding the last point:
“If you really think that embryos are human, why aren’t you interested in saving them from accidental death?”.
I think we should not forget that pro-lifers are driven by religious beliefs of what constitutes a sin. They target voluntary abortions precisely because they view them as sinful, as opposed as accidents which lack any intentional purpose. And they target voluntary abortion because they think that legalized abortion would increase the rate of abortions. To think this in economic terms:
If you were to expect that a legalized practice entailed the killing of more future human lives than they now occur, would you not be motivated to stop the legalization of such killing? The trade-off is not between preventing accidents today versus stopping voluntary abortions today; the trade-off is between preventing accidents today versus stopping a higher rate of voluntary abortions in the future. In purely utilitarian terms, pro-lifers might be consequent with their beliefs.
Jose Pablo
Oct 12 2021 at 7:25pm
I don’t think you can call yourself pro-life just because of you are antiabortion. Although there is still a possibility that you can do that additional “justification” is required:
Imagine you (or say you) are a pro-life and have to decide which activity support with your donation (or devote your time to). Would you pick
a) financing an ongoing investigation on ways to reduce spontaneous abortion or
b) financing a campaign to make abortion illegal (before the 20-24th week or viability, since after that it is already illegal)?
If you are “pro-life” and rational you should calculate:
a) the probability of the ongoing investigations to be successful and the number of embryos the new procedure/drug will be saving if so
and
b) the probability of the anti-abortion campaign to be successful and the number of abortions that making it illegal would avoid (which would not be 100% of them)
If you are truly “pro-life” you should pick the one that saves more embryos (based on your ex-ante estimates).
If what you want is punishing a behavior (abortion) because you consider it highly immoral and a crime, then you should be contributing to the antiabortion campaign no matter the number of lives saved (it becames an irrelevant metric, or at least secondary in your decission).
You could still say that you are a “punisher of people killing embryos” first and a pro-life second, since this would be the position that your acts are revealing.
And you are, very likely, entitled to have the normative position of condemning abortion and doing every effort you can to ban it. But if you want to say that you are doing it because you are “pro-life” it would be irrational not picking a) instead of b) if a) is saving more embryos.
And of course, you have the right to be irrational but that makes any logical discussion totally useless. Using language as “propaganda” lead us to the “end of truth” (see Hayek).
Sergio Adrian Martinez Garcia
Oct 13 2021 at 11:50am
The point I’m trying to get across is that calling into question the importance that self-called pro-lifers place on life based on how much resources they devote to avoiding accidental abortions is… a futile exercise. You can conjure various reasons for why they ultimately are trying to stop illegal abortions which are pretty much consistent with how they value human life. There can be more ingenious arguments against their position.
PolishRight
Oct 5 2021 at 4:02pm
“The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent.”
So causing immense suffering for trivial reasons to severely mentally retarded humans who can’t talk is fine, because they are so stupid. And people who think that it would be a horrible offense are morally blind when it comes to the relevant distinctions – the difference between torturing a morally retarted human and a normal IQ one is almost as vast as the difference between cutting off a branch of a tree and cutting off a dog’s leg.
Bryan, these rationalizations are proposterous.
Liam
Oct 6 2021 at 2:52pm
I seriously doubt that most non-vegans think the way Caplan does. If the average person sees a dog being kicked, they will get angry and try to defend the dog. They don’t step in to ‘defend’ a tomato as it’s being cut up and put in a salad. Caplan’s position implies that there is nothing wrong with dousing a cat with petrol and then setting it alight for personal amusement. He thinks animals don’t matter at all. Frankly, the majority of people would regard that as callous. The case for veganism is powerful precisely because so many people implicitly recognise that animal welfare is at least somewhat important.
James
Oct 8 2021 at 12:08am
“If you really think that embryos are human, why aren’t you interested in saving them from accidental death?”
This packs an awful lot of fallacies into a small number of words.
Ad hominem: Rather than go after the pro-lifer’s argument, this attacks the pro-lifer’s motives.
Begging the question: The question assumes the pro-lifer is not interested in preventing the accidental death of the unborn.
Non sequitur: The case against abortion does not depend on the sincerity of the person making it.
Special pleading: We do not doubt anyone’s opposition to the intentional killing of babies, kids, teens, grownups, elderly, women, gays, etc., just because they show little interest in preventing accidental deaths of people in those groups. But when someone says they oppose the intentional killing of the unborn, suddenly we cannot take them at their word?
J. Goard
Oct 10 2021 at 1:10am
Gotta confess: I’m increasing confused by reference to “intelligence” on either side of vegan ethics debates. Bentham’s stance that
is historically important and rhetorically powerful, but I don’t think a purely hedonic standard for the consequentialist value of lives holds up to scrutiny. For one, there’s a solid body of research supporting the “hedonic treadmill” phenomenon, both after prima facie positive and negative life changes, like winning the lottery or becoming paralyzed. And yet I’m not for a moment tempted to deny that being quadriplegic is much worse than being completely able-bodied. How could someone find the hedonic standard more plausible than that?
For another, manifestly positive experiences in my life, such as hiking up a difficult mountain, aren’t obviously aggregates of more pleasures than pains. The notion that my relief and satisfaction at the top were so transcendent in their pleasure that the overrode a much greater time span of strain and ache, rings hollow. Nor do I find the hike’s instrumental value for health (or social status or whatever) to be necessary: were I to have been hit by a bus the following day, my having experienced the hike still would have been positive. Rather, what seems “epistemologically conservative” to me is that challenges like a tough hike have value as a sort of macroexperience, through their structure. Just as the value of a concerto isn’t an aggregate over the value of individual notes, positive and negative consequences at the macro level are very different from aggregates of low-level suffering and pleasure.
Even though I reject hedonic consequentialism, though, I also find it bizarre how many people seem to think that low-level suffering and pleasure exhaust the morally relevant experiences of nonhuman animals. Having grown up with plenty of dogs, I’d say they certainly appear to have macroexperiences like excitement, boredom, accomplishment, loneliness, shame, and love — and I don’t know of any evidence to make me doubt this. From just a few encounters with pigs and cows on rescue farms (and many more from videos), I’ve seen basically the same range I’ve seen from dogs.
SO when Bryan throws around the word “intelligent”, my hackles go up. Most humans — even very low-IQ ones — are verbal, and also show greater aptitude for social interactions with their conspecifics (e.g. me). And yet very many humans seem to be stunningly unintelligent in many ways. The gap between the smartest, most self-actualized humans and the least seems far greater to me in consequentialist terms than the gap between humans and the most psychologically complex nonhuman animals.
Jose Pablo
Oct 12 2021 at 7:44pm
I think that the idea that killing (or torturing) an ant in your back yard is radically different from the idea of killing a gorilla or a chimpanzee (not to talk about killing another human) is so widespread that it is difficult to believe that is not based on a human basic moral intuition.
Not so sure that it has anything to do with the difference in “intelligent” between the ant and the gorilla. I can stablish a clear scale (which basis I think many people will share) that is not based on intelligence, or the ability to develop it in the future.
My scale from “morally indifferent to its killing” to “very morally perturbate by that killing” (in my backyard):
1.- cockroaches
2.- ants
3.- fishes
4.- iguanas
(Entering the no-no zone)
5.- racoons
6.- cats
7.- dogs
8.- dolphins (somehow more for “mammal” that for “inteligent”)
9.- chimpanzees
10.- humans
Not sure about the “objective reasons” (the list seems pretty random to me now) but very sure about the “feeling”.
Certainly not sure about where “digging my pool” would land on this list. Very likely not below 3 and for sure not above 4/5 … I think
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