Therefore there must exist some features besides the fact that they live that a human has and a bacterium has not, that divides living beings into things that I am willing to kill and things that I am not willing to kill.
If one gets out of the rationalization game, and looks at why you don't kill people, much of it is because other humans in a position to be a threat to you would object.
People aren't threats; they are too self-obsessed and small-minded to be a threat; rarely do they glance up from their own little worlds. We live in a society in which everybody is spending so much time worrying about what other people think of them that they don't notice that everybody else is too busy worrying about what other people think of them to form any kind of coherent thought about other people. Insofar as they form opinions, they are opinions of non-agent actors in a play revolving around their own personal motivations, not opinions of other people. Even, yes, lovers.
People aren't threats
People vote. They support government action. Government is a gun.
I agree with your complaints in general about people caring too much (for my tastes) about what other think, but to the extent that people are pointing that gun at you, you should care. If men with guns are going to show up at your door, you should care.
Meta note before actual content: I've been noticing of late how many comments on LW, including my own, are nitpicks or small criticisms. Contrarianism is probably the root of why our kind can't cooperate, and maybe even the reason so many people lurk and don't post. So, let me preface this by thanking you for the post, and saying that I'm sharing this just as an FYI and not as a critique. This certainly isn't a knock-down argument against anything you've said. Just something I thought was interesting, and might be helpful to keep in mind. :)
Clearly it was a moral error to assume that blacks had less moral weight than whites. The animal rights movement is basically just trying to make sure we don't repeat this mistake with non-human animals. (Hence the use of terms like "speciesism".) You use a couple reductio ad absurdum arguments with bacteria and video game characters, but it’s not entirely clear that we aren’t just socially biased there too. If the absurd turns out to be true, then the reductio ad absurdum fails. These arguments are valid ways of concluding "if A than B", but keep in mind that A isn't 100% certain.
There are actually some surprisingly intelligent arguments that insects, bacteria, some types of video game characters, and even fundamental particles might have non-zero moral weight. The question is what probability one gives to those propositions turning out to be true. IF one has reviewed the relevant arguments, and assigns them infinitesimally small credence, THEN one can safely apply the reductio ad absurdum. IF certain simple algorithms have no moral weight and the algorithms behind human brains have high moral weight, THEN algorithms almost as simple are unlikely to have whatever property gives humans value, while complex algorithms (like those running in dolphin brains) might still have intrinsic value.
trying to make sure we don't repeat this mistake
I disagree that there is a fact of the matter to be mistaken about here (rather than just some consensus opinion that may change over time).
An important part of promoting vegetarianism is to make the alternatives to meat more convenient.
For example, financial subventions to vegetarian restaurants could be an effective way of reducing meat consumption.
financial subventions to vegetarian restaurants could be an effective way of reducing meat consumption.
Citation needed.
If you think it's obvious, here is an obvious counter-point: if you subsidise my veggies, that will leave extra money in my budget to buy more meat.
Looking from utilitarian perspective, why don't you consider the pleasure of eating meat here at all?
Because the pleasure of eating meat is very small conpared to the pain of a factory farmed animal. And I find it very unlikely, that i end up in a state, where I do not fully discount animal utility (in which case i would. Just continue to eat meat out of habit, without deliberately conaidering pleasure) , but discount it so much, that my very small pleasure of eating meat compares to a livetime of pain for the animal.
What about lifetime of HUGE pleasure of eating those delicious ribs? It seems you underestimate the pleasure, most people get of eating meat and overestimate the suffering of animals living in the farm (assuming they do have consciousness and their pain matters). Yes it seems extremely bad when compared to the way we humans live in the age of technology, but you should compare it to things like living in the wilderness with predator always on your back or not living at all.
You suggest to draw the line at the border conscious/non-conscious. Or at least that seems a borderthat is kind of a shelling point and plausible for many. This is in the tradition of sizes of souls which I first saw suggested by Douglas Hofstadter (though this is probably much older). See e.g. here: http://roychristopher.com/quite-sick-mike-vick This actually shows one problem with this or at least a very common distinction that is routinely made but often lost in theoretical consideration: Why do we eat some mammals and some not despite comparable 'consciousness'.
What I see at work here is empathy. It is easier to have empathy with animals that match with (some) features of humans. And these don't need to be objective features but in practice are just what you have learned to recognize as human like. So you empathise with your pets whom you have a kind-of relationship with. But you eat e.g. pigs because you don't.
So you empathise with your pets whom you have a kind-of relationship with. But you eat e.g. pigs because you don't.
Counterpoint: in the UK, rabbits are fairly common pets and uncommon-but-not-taboo food. Chickens are sometimes kept as pets too, though I'm not sure whether that tends to be mostly for the eggs. Horses are accepted as both pets and food, though rare in both cases. I'd be surprised if dog-eating cultures don't also have pet dogs. I believe there are other cultures that commonly keep cows, goats and pigs as pets, and I'd be surprised if those cultures don't eat those animals.
(This isn't the same as someone eating their own pet, but no-eating-your-own-pet wouldn't explain cultural taboos against any forms of meat.)
I think you read my point too strongly. My point is not that a relationship to pets is the distinctive aspect. Nor that the cultural norm around this is relevant. What I mean is that empathy is the key and the subject of empathy is malleable. I don't know how empathy find its target but I assume that it is a process that involves pattern matching, preferrences and a lot of learning. This means that complex distinctions seem quite plausible to me. If you can learn to distinguish between dogs and pigs and between my pet and other persons pets you probably also can learn to distinguish between pet-rabbits and those in the supermarket.
So you empathise with your pets whom you have a kind-of relationship with. But you eat e.g. pigs because you don't.
People who live on farms (or, say, in the developing world) routinely butcher and eat animals they are very familiar with. Doesn't seem to be a problem for them.
Meat requires us to kill animals. Factory farmed animals are in a considerable amount of pain for most of their life.
Animals living in the wild are in a considerable amount of pain when they starve to death, freeze to death, are chased by predators, and are eaten by predators in many cases while they are still alive.
I'm not holding your arguments invalid. Indeed, they are valid arguments to be made. However, they are not without their counter-arguments.
Another problem not yet addressed is what to do with the excess domesticated animals in the theoretical case when meat eating dropped significantly. What to do with their species in the theoretical case meat eating disappeared? (Not that these are any strong arguments in favor of eating meat, but might be strong arguments against banning eating meat)
I believe that animals in the wild have a way better pain/pleasure ratio. As they are allowed to follow their natural instincts. Also there is nothing I can do againt the pain of wild animals without a huge risk to completely destroy our ecosystem. That risk does not exist with factory farmed animals.
Domesticated animals would mostly disappear. You can keep some in zoos maybe, but not many. I currently dont see the problem with that. They play no roll in the natural ecosystem and I dont see a reason, why keeping species alive is inherently good. I definitely dont have a preference for the existence of as many species as possible.
No role in natural ecosystems? Large herbivores certainly do, unless you would rather the woods and shrubbery cover vast expanses which are now grazed into meadowhood - but that would likely have lots of negative consequences, including wildlife loss from edge habitats (and even from quite transformed ones).
Now, chickens are different...
I am in favour of continuing to farm animals on places where you can't grow crops, simply because i value humans higjer than animals and this increases overall food supply. But today we are talking mainly about animals that are feedet with plants. If the grassland cant be used to grow eatable plants it can stay grassland and have cows on it.
But the places where you can grow crops are wide flat open spaces, which would get re(?)vegetated with woody plants when you take off the grazing pressure.
There's pretty small grassland which has not been converted to some kind of use in the developed world, and I think in the developing world, too.
But the places where you can grow crops are wide flat open spaces, which would get re(?)vegetated with woody plants when you take off the grazing pressure.
Depends on the climate. A semi-desert (e.g. a lot of Western US) is a wide flat open space, but it doesn't change over to a forest without the grazing pressure.
Some. However the areas with grazing (usually non-intensive and by cows, not goats or sheep) aren't much different from areas without grazing. You just won't get forests in sufficiently arid climates. Brush, yes, some trees along the usually dry creek beds, yes, forests, no.
I couldn't find 'nutrition' here. Was there a reason this part was ignored?
One last thing: what do you think about synthetic meat? I'm curious because I never see it mentioned - it's basically the 'everyone wins' situation.
FRIENDLY EDIT AND WARNING: I have a feeling this might be a sensitive topic so don't feel bad if a few people go at you or something. (Last guy that touched a sensitive issue didn't do well.)
Nutrition is something that I would cover in case I don't want to eat meat anymore, Andi really do not expect this to be a non solveable problem. most things I have seen (although i have not deliberatly looked into this topic) seem to indicate that vegitarias are jsut as healthy or even healthier than non vegitarians. Vegans migh have some issues (Vitamin b12 and Iron for women) but those can be easily fixed by taking pills.
There are definetly no major heath issues with vegitarism since lots of people live that way and have no obvious problems (and doctors who check their health don't find anything wrong) If there are minor drawbacks I would be willing to accept them in case I really come to the conclusion that aninals feel pain, because the huge amount of pain I prevent would outweight small drawbacks.
I have read it on countless sources, and I have read nothing against it. However as I said, it is a waste of time to do deliberate research on it at the Moment. If i come to the conclusion that i have no ethical concerns with eating meat, i will continue to so. And in this case I dont have to bother with the health issues of a vegitarian diet. So this is something I do after I have made the ethical decision.
There is the occasional anecdote about a woman becoming fertile after starting to eat meat.
I always felt that argument 1 is a bit hypocritical and not very rational. We kill animals constantly for many reasons - farming even for vegetables requires killing rodents and birds to prevent them eating the crops, we kill rats and other pests in our buildings to keep them from transmitting disease and damaging cables, we regularly kill animals by bumping into them when we drive a car or take a train or a plane, ... And of course, we massively take living space away from animals, leading them to die.
So why stop eating meat, and yet disregard all the other multiple cases in which our technological civilization massively kill animals ? I personally don't think most animals matter from an utilitarian point of view (they have no consciousness), but if they did, "not eating meat" wouldn't be enough, and eating meat from "dump" fish or chicken would be less a violation of ethics than killing "smart" rats for pest control.
Reason 2. would prevent eating factory-farmed meat, but it wouldn't prevent eating meat from less intensive forms of meat producing (or from wild game) which are usually available in supermarkets here in France, but a slightly higher price.
Reason 4. is just false taken in its absolute form - there are several studies showing that eating too much meat (especially processed meat) is harmful, but so far it seems some kind of meat (like chicken) is pretty harmless, and that eating a bit of meat is better health-wise than not eating any.
Reason 3. and 5. could justify eating less meat, but not no meat at all.
So with the available data, I would recommend eating perhaps less meat (for reasons 3., 4., 5.), less of the high-fat processed meat (like bacon) and try to buy food from more "humane" farms (for reasons 2), but not to stop eating meat completely.
Doesn't intent matter? I cannot control the entirety of society with my will, nor can I control what animals I unknowingly kill, but I can react to the things I know with my own actions.
It also seems irrational to let the "better be the enemy of the good". There is no rule that says that unless I solve all the problems at once, solving one problem is being hypocritical. The single decision doesn't get irrational just because I am not actually making 100% rational decisions all the time. That would only be hypocritical if I claimed that all my decisions are 100% rational when they are not.
farming even for vegetables requires killing rodents and birds
Killing birds? Really? I'd have thought keeping them away would be much more practical.
So why stop eating meat, and yet disregard all the other multiple cases in which our technological civilization massively kills animals?
You have more control over whether to eat meat than over those other things. And some of them are much smaller -- e.g., I guess the average driver kills at most one animal ever by bumping into them, whereas the average meat-eater may consume thousands of animals.
I guess the average driver kills at most one animal ever by bumping into them, whereas the average meat-eater may consume thousands of animals.
There we touch another problem with the "no meat eating" thing : where do you draw the line ? Would people who refuse to eat chicken and beef be ok with eating shrimps or insects ? What with fish, is it "meat" and unethical ? Because, whenever you drive, you kill hundred of flies and butterflies and the like, which are animals.
So where to draw the line, vertebrates ? Eating shrimps and insects would be fine ? But it's not like a chicken or a cow have lots of cognitive abilities, so feels quite arbitrary to me.
where do you draw the line?
Somewhere that's easy to evaluate and that generally gives results that match reasonably well with those of careful case-by-case deliberation. For most vegetarians, pigs will be on one side and spiders on the other; the exact location of the line will vary.
It doesn't need to give results that match perfectly in every case; no one has the time or mental energy to make every moral decision optimally. And it doesn't have to be deduced from universal general principles; the point of drawing a line is to provide an "easier" approximation to the results on gets by applying one's general principles carefully case by case.
So, e.g., the simplest vegetarian policy says something like: "Don't deliberately eat animals." This will surely be too restrictive for most vegetarians' actual values; e.g., I bet most vegetarians would have no moral objection to eating insects. But so what? It's a nice simple policy, easy to apply and easy to explain, and if it means you sometimes have to eat vegetables when you had the option of eating insects, well, that's not necessarily a problem.
Someone inclined towards vegetarianism who decides, after careful reflection, that most fish aren't sufficiently capable of suffering to worry much about (and/or just really likes eating fish) may choose a more permissive policy along the lines of "no animals other than fish" or "no animals other than seafood". That might be too permissive for their actual values in some cases -- e.g., they might not actually be willing to eat octopus. But, again, that's OK; if they see octopus on the menu they can decide not to eat it on the basis of actual thought rather than just applying their overall policy, much as a non-vegetarian might if they see monkey meat on a menu. Or they might just always defer to the overall policy and accept that sometimes it will lead them to eat something that overall they'd prefer not to have eaten. (I would expect the first of those options to be much more common.)
Another vegetarian, worried about broader harms than just being eaten, might adopt veganism: "Don't eat anything derived from animals." That's a really strict policy, strict enough to be really inconvenient and difficult for health in a way that ordinary vegetarianism isn't; that's probably one reason why few people are vegans. But, again, adopting such a policy isn't the same thing as claiming that eating something is morally acceptable if and only if it contains nothing derived from animals; it just means deciding that drawing the line there gives a good enough approximation with little enough cognitive load.
Do you think there's something wrong about all that? Because it seems obviously reasonable to me.
(Disclaimer: I am not myself a vegetarian, and my guesses about what "most vegetarians" think are only guesses.)
Do you think there's something wrong about all that? Because it seems obviously reasonable to me.
Well, perhaps it is a reason of "cognitive simplicity" but it really feels a very artificial line when someone refuses to eat meat in every situation, with all associated consequences, like they are invited to relatives for christmas eve dinner and they won't eat meat, putting extra burden on the person inviting him so they cook a secondary vegetarian meal for him, and yet not caring much about the rats that are killed regularly in the basement of his apartment by the pest control.
It feels more like a religious interdiction than an utilitarian decision. There are people who avoid eating meat, but do occasionally ("flexitarian" they are called I think). Those appear as much more reasonable than a strict "no meat" policy, if you admit that killing animals is something society has to do anyway, so you try to avoid it, but not in a strict manner.
I do myself have lots of "ethical behavior", like I try to buy fair trade products when I can for stuff like tea, coffee, chocolate, ..., because I want third world producers to be treated decently. But I know that my computer was probably assembled by workers in sweet shops, and if I'm offered a non-fair trade tea at a relative I won't refuse it.
It feels more like a religious interdiction than a utilitarian decision
There are reasons why religions tend to have rules, rather than e.g. just saying "whenever you have a decision to make, consider deeply which option seems like it would please the gods most and do that". One of those reasons is that while following the rules may be challenging, applying deep consideration to every single moral decision would be pretty much impossible. Another is that if you allow yourself flexibility then you will probably overuse it. Another is that if you are known to allow yourself flexibility then others won't know when you're ignoring the rules, reducing the power of social pressure to help you keep them.
If you happen to be (1) unusually smart (hence, better able to apply deep consideration to individual cases without getting overwhelmed) and (2) unusually principled (hence, better able to resist the temptation to abuse flexibility) then, indeed, you may well do better to be flexible about your rules. (But, of course, everyone likes to think they're unusually smart and unusually principled, especially when thinking so offers the prospect of more freedom to bend your moral rules.)
I agree with you that many vegetarians' values would be better maximized by being flexible about their non-meat-eating in some circumstances like the ones you mention, if we consider each occasion in isolation. But it may still be a better value-maximizing strategy to have a strict policy of not breaking the rules.
(For the particular cases you describe, where a vegetarian's self-imposed rules are inconvenient for other people, there's a further consideration: they may want their vegetarianism to be highly visible, in the hope of making other people consider imitating it. Their relatives may think "bah, how selfish of them" -- but they may also think "wow, they're really serious about this; perhaps they may actually have a point".)
Short of telepathy, we can only guess. Chicken do appear to be able to manifest visible signs of distress, whereas the nervous system of a shrimp is too simple for that.
Here is my attempt to convince you also of 1 (in your numbering):
I disagree with your: "From a preference utilitarian Perspective, only a self-conscious being can have preferences for the future, therefore you can only violate the preferences of a self-conscious being by killing it."
To the contrary, every agent which follows an optimization goal exhibits some preference (even if itself does not understand them). Namely that its optimization goal shall be reached. The ability to understand ones own optimization goal is not necessary for a preference to be morally relevant, otherwise babies and even unconscious people would not have moral weight. (And even non-sleeping people don't understand all their optimization goals.)
This leaves the problem of how to weight various agents. A solution which gives equal weight "per agent" has ugly consequences (because we should all immediately take immunosuppressants to save the bacteria) and is ill-defined, because many systems allow multiple ways to count "agents" (each cell has equal weight? each organ? each human? each family? each company? each species? each gene allele?).
A decent solution seems to be to take computing power (alternatively: the ability to reach the optimization goals) of the system exhibiting optimizing behavior as a "weight" (If only for game-theoretic reasions; it certainly makes sense to value preferences of extremly powerful optimizers strongly). Unfortunately, there is no clear scale of "computing power" one can calculate with. Extrapolating from intuition gives us a trivial weight for bacterias' goals and a weight near our own for the goals of other humans. In the concrete context of killing animals to obtain meat, it should be observed that animals are generally rather capable of reaching their goals in the wild (e.g. getting food, spawning offspring) - better than human children, I'd say.
I think it's pretty clear that animals can feel pain, distress, etc. So we should aim for practices that minimise those things. It's certainly possible - though harder on a mass scale like factory farming.
Also, from a utilitarian perspective, it's clear that eating plants is much more ecologically efficient than feeding plants to animals and then eating the animals. On the other hand, as Elo points out, there are crops and terrain that are not well suited to human food, and might more profitably be used to raise edible animals.
So I'd say that there could be an equilibrium, a point where our overall meat consumption is about right; less would be basically a wasted opportunity; more would be an inefficient use of resources and a risk of oppressive practices. And I'd say that that point is much lower than current overall consumption.
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only a self-conscious being can have preferences for the future
I think there is a different distinction between self-conscious and time-conscious beings. i.e. dogs who can see their reflection but don't process more than about an hour of time into the past.
I don't know how you want to factor that into your considerations.
- Meat requires us to kill animals.
- Factory farmed animals are in a considerable amount of pain for most of their life.
- Meat productions requires much more space than producing plants, and therefore might contribute to the world hunger
- Some Studies claim that meat, especially if factory farmed, is unhealthy.
- Meat production is bad for the environment (partly because of point 4, but also for other reasons)
I would challenge 2 on the idea that factory farming doesn't inherently Try to cause pain. In fact it's usually common knowledge that animals in pain don't usually produce good meat. (without going deep into this because it's a contentious topic)
I would challenge 3 on the idea that in Australia (and probably in other parts of the world) we have a lot of semi-arable land. which is not appropriate for food crops, but can be used for paddock cattle. also similarly high up and mountaneous rocky regions can be good fodder for goats but not viable for large-scale crops for other reasons (i.e. weather conditions). By all means; feed the world. but you can't do it by trying to use non-fertile land for the solution to growing more food.
4 is usually about it being less healthy than other meat.
and as said by others 1: vat meat would be a win-for-all.
i.e. dogs who can see their reflection but don't process more than about an hour of time into the past.
Are you talking about an actual example, or a hypothetical one? Taken literally, such a dog would be untrainable - is there a specific type of processing you had in mind, that we'd be able to verify how far back dogs are doing it?
(Also, I thought dogs failed the mirror test?)
failed the mirror test?
not sure which direction a fail is. I might have my details wrong.
don't process more than about an hour of time into the past.
talking about dogs that you can take away from their owner from an hour; a day; or a week and then return the owner and they act the same. have no concept of time that away.
I think this is a case where utilitarianism is misleading. Don't dash yourself against the problem of "what is the correct preference-elicitation and preference-aggregation algorithm for all living things." Just try to figure out what your own preferences say about animals dying vs. you eating meat.
In my own case, I am basically fine with killing chickens - suppose you gave me a button that paid me fifty cents and killed a chicken (somehow avoiding externalities). I would press this button all day. On the other hand, I would not press this button if it killed a pig - the payout would have to be much bigger ($50? $200?) before I'd do it.
Once I know about this preference of mine, I can let it affect my purchasing habits appropriately.
Downvoted, because this is far too deeply nested with identity politics. Should it be? Nothing should be. But a lot of things are, including diet.
ETA: Downvote retracted because things have so far gone better than I initially expected, so my objection was incorrect.
Moral arguments are generally full of all sorts of nonsense. Looks like an honest and more competent than usual attempt to get LessWrong.
Downvoted.
You're downvoting an explanation of a downvote because you don't like the reasons given? So am I to interpret this to mean that next time I shouldn't give an explanation, and should just downvote the post, rather than giving anybody an opportunity to voice disagreement and debate the relative merits of a given post?
Nice community norms, there. Shame if something were to... happen to them.
Downvoted for proposing a norm that can be trivially abused.
(Not actually downvoting, just being snarky because I don't have time to unpack my objection right now. I don't necessarily think you're wrong, but norms are hard.)
I'm not proposing a norm, I'm pointing out that this is the norm which is being enforced by this behavior.
I interpreted you as proposing a norm of "don't downvote downvote-explanations".
If that's not what you're going for, fair enough, but my point still seems relevant: one behaviour encourages bad norms, but the opposite behaviour also encourages bad norms, so we need to be careful.
Ah, yes, except I'd see it less as "proposing" and more "supporting a pre-existing norm".
Personally I don't think downvote explanations should be voted on at all, but that would be proposing a new norm.
I upvoted your first post despite disagreeing with it for this very reason. That being said, expecting people to not downvote posts they disagree with based on meta reasons isn't going to work. This is just another reason we should rework the karma system.
I don't mind the downvotes - most of my upvotes were for rubbish reasons, so downvotes for rubbish reasons are hardly anything to complain about - but I do care about the message sent to other users, that groupthink is more important than information.
You may not mind them, but the effects of upvotes and downvotes are not symmetric, particularly for newcomers.
but I do care about the message sent to other users, that groupthink is more important than information.
Did somebody send that message? The OP? Me? Western Union?
This brings to mind another reason for my response:
Downvoted, because this is far too deeply nested with identity politics. Should it be? Nothing should be. But a lot of things are, including diet.
What did that mean? You want to discourage topics that some people feel strongly about?
Did somebody send that message? The OP? Me? Western Union?
You.
What did that mean? You want to discourage topics that some people feel strongly about?
No, I desire to support the community norms against said topics, because Chesterton's Fence and also my early experiments into political discourse here, while they didn't go as badly as some people expected, also didn't go well, either.
You're downvoting an explanation of a downvote
I downvoted the down vote, not the explanation of it.
What you should do depends on what you are trying to accomplish. That's up to you to figure out.
Note that I didn't do what you suggested was the way to interpret my action either.
I didn't just downvote, I downvoted, and gave my reason for it. Which is similar to what you did. Are we having fun yet?
To the point, I thought you were being a dick with your downvote, and thought a downvote in response was the appropriate response. Retaliating against dickishness is not the same thing as initiating dickishness.
Looks like an honest and more competent than usual attempt to get LessWrong.
To me too. I upvoted the OP.
I have grown up in a family of meat-eaters and therefore have been eating meat all my life. I until recently I have never spent much time thinking about it. I justified my behaviour by saying that animal lives do not matter, because they are not self-conscious and animal pain does not matter, because they have no memory of pain and therefore, as soon as the actual pain is over it is like it has never happened.
In the recent weeks I have spent some time to properly think this through and form an informed believe about whether I can justify eating meat. I would like to hear your thoughts about my thought process and results, because this is a decision that I really don’t want to get wrong.
I have Identified 5 possible problems with meat consumption.
I have decided to ignore problems 4-5 at the beginning, because admitting that they are true would impose weaker restrictions on me. If I come to the conclusion, that I don’t want to eat meat for reason 1, I could no longer eat any meat and reason 2 would forbid me to eat factory farmed meat, which would essentially bring my meat consumption down to something close to zero.
Reasons 4 and 5 would limit my meat consumption far less, since I do lots of other things that are unhealthy (like eating candy and snacks) or harmful to the environment (like traveling by plane) and while I might come to the conclusion that I want to reduce my meat consumption for reasons 4-5, I expect to have many situations left, where eating meat gives me enough utility to still do it in spite of that reasons.
Reason 3 would also be important, but I am fairly sure, that the problem mostly lies with the lack of spending power in poorer countries, and that it will not lead to more food in Africa if I stop eating meat. For that reason I did not do further research on this.
So what I did was to think about problems 1 and 2 and decide to revisit 4 and 5 if I come to the conclusion that 1 and 2 still allow me to continue eating meat like I do now.
Is it justifiable to kill animals?
It is clear to me that it is wrong to kill a Human being with a not significantly damaged brain. It is also clear that I have absolutely no problems with killing bacteria or other very simple living beings. Therefore there must exist some features besides the fact that they live that a human has and a bacterium has not, that divides living beings into things that I am willing to kill and things that I am not willing to kill.
The criterion that I used up to know was self-consciousness, which is very convenient because it puts the line between humans (and likely great apes as well) on one side, and basically everything I want to eat on the other side.
There are quite a few things that justify this criterion such as:
There are however other Arguments against it.
I find the arguments against killing animals to be far weaker, since I do not follow the particular form of utilitarism that supports them and since I cannot really explain why the features I named under 1 should forbid me to kill animals. In addition to that I count the fact that Peter Singer, who is against all killing of animals and is arguably a pretty clever person has found no better way to justify his statement, that one should not kill animals at all, than the idea that this will lead us to continue to objectify them and ignore their pain. Since Singer has found no better reason and he probably spent a lot of time doing it, it is likely that there is none.
Although I am fairly confident, that killing Animals is in line with my ethical believes I still see some trouble. If I am wrong on this this might be an incredible harmful decision, since it will lead to the death of many animals (probably hundreds of them, if I don’t reduce my meat consumption for other reasons). Therefore I have to be incredibly confident that I have not overlooked something in order to continue to eat meat. And I have limited time and probably a strong motivation to come to the conclusion that meat eating is okay, which clouds my judgement. I feel that I need more evidence. As far as I know there are lots of meat eaters here and some of them will have thought about this. Why are you so confident that animal life’s do not matter? Is it that I overlooked major arguments or is the self-consciousness just a more of a knock down argument than I think?
Animals and Pain
It is relatively well established that animals show reactions that one could associate with pain and they have a nerve system that allows pain. Singer has proclaimed that in his 1975 book Animal Liberation for mammals and birds and cited research on it, and as far as I know no one has really corrected him on that. I also found papers that claim the same for fish and lobsters and I have not found any counterevidence. So the question that remains is, do animals get negative utility from pain, and do they have utility functions at all.
Eliezer Argues in this post https://m.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152588738904228 that they don’t have utility. I can understand his model, but I could also imagine that an animal mind works in other ways. I am no expert in evolutionary biology, but as far as I know, the mainstream opinion among scientists right now is that animals have pain.
There is for Example the Cambridge declaration of conciousness (http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf). It might have a different understanding of the word consciousness compared to the one which I think is most popular among the lesswrong community (Consciousness as being aware of its own existence), but it clearly states that animals have affective states and therefor utility. If animals can suffer pain, than factory farming is incredibly wrong. I would therefore have to be very certain (surely above 99% confidence) of the fact that they don’t or I cannot justify to eat factory farmed meat. The question is: How can I be so sure if a significant amount of experts are of a different opinion. Does anyone have any actual research on the topic that explains the reasons why animals do not have utility in more detail than Eliezer did? Basically I would need something that not only explains why this is a plausible hypothesis but something that explain why they could not possibly have evolved in a way that they feel pain. So basically, why a pig that feels pain makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective.
If my current believes don’t shift anymore I will stop eating factory farmed meat, but not stop to eat any meat at all. I would be happy about any additional evidence, or about oppinions on the conclusions I draw from my evidence.