If you want to examine for logical consistency, note I spelled out 3 requirements:
-you forget the pain
-it does not currently affect you
-it’s not present in other memories
#3 implies that you have to have other memories, and #2 implies that you have to currently be alive (because once you’re not longer alive, you’re not “you,” which is a different philosophical branch). Take away alive and the calculus no longer applies.
Date rape drugs have long-lasting effects on other aspects of your consciousness, so it fails the test as well.
#3 doesn’t imply you have other memories. It’s a vacuous truth. You could stipulate having at least one memory, but why?
#2 doesn’t imply you’re still alive. I can make true statements about dead people, like “my grandmother never liked peas”, “Lincoln was shot in the head”, or even just “Genghis Khan is dead”.
My line was “avoid causing animals to suffer as much as is reasonably possible”. The response I got was “people cannot be blamed at all for any of their consumer decisions, unless they eat at Chick-fil-A”.
Contrary to media portrayal, it’s actually possible to be vegan without eating quinoa and avocado. But issues like this are why I originally made this thread so broad. I didn’t expect I’d need to defend the idea that it’s bad when cows feel pain.
I liked this thread better when it was just about a lack ethical consumption under capitalism. My favourite thing to eat remains popcorn chicken. I now feel bad about this
I already am vegetarian (well pescatarian anyway, cant have a southern Italian family and not eat fish) 3 days a week. I’ve been weaning myself off delicious meat slowly but surely over the course of years.
Not because I feel bad for animals. I mostly agree, I don’t feel the same level of empathy for most animals simply because I don’t but because of the ridiculous amount of land it takes to keep most of them fed.
I fully believe everyone should try eating vegan or at the bare minimum eating vegetarian for a few meals. There’s probably lots of vegetables and meat/dairy substitutes that you’ve never had prepared or seasoned in the right way or a way that works for your palate.
I think a lot of eco-ethical agriculture (animal & vegetable product) issues are significantly lessened by local (evidence-based) sustainable practices. For example – in response to one of @Apreche 's earlier comments, instead of extensive pesticide use, one can use co-planting, local cultivars, & other symbiotic systems. However, that pretty much rules out the industrial ag practices, which additionally make local systems less viable (insert capitalism discussion here). Location & price availability impact access – changing that is (imo) an honorable goal, with interim step including subsidies & community gardens/outreach in food deserts & low-income areas (see the Southside Community Land Trust in Providence). But realistically, this approach is still broadly inaccessible, long term implementation would require a significant infrastructural overhaul, improved efficiency of current systems/expectations, & global co-operation (without imperialism ); in other words: fuck capitalism.
We are animals in an indifferent universe. In a healthy eco-system, survival is messy & amoral, but not unilateral, and that defines my personal rubric for agricultural practices.
I’ve been avoiding this thread because I know how complicated this subject gets.
I just want to make the joke about where “I” arrived at years ago as a joke. I resolved that the only ethical consumption was that you had to kill it yourself. At first you might say, that’s trivial. Kill a rich man maybe, you can take what’s his. Or kill a steer with a rifle, you earned it. This conjecture wasn’t that. It was from birth you need to just kill and eat your way up unarmed and unprepared. Is that a joke? It seemed that way at the time in context. But that is the case for a lot of fish, insects, plants. You just are.
Obviously having gone through at least logic and ethics in philosophy I see “some” semblance of argument for otherwise, but it never fully metes out. Property rights are always a little bit questionable.
Predation is natural, you cant deny it. Whether predation is moral is up for debate, morals are a human construct and there is no requirement that what is natural be what is right. You’re hitting philosophical bedrock at this point; when is hurting another thing for your own benefit justified?
Oh it super duper is not trivial. But like you, I think it’s probably the strongest ethical choice you can make as a meat-eater.
It’s not the right choice for everyone, though, and as was discussed way up above, a model that has everybody doing that is unsustainable.
I also feel that way about growing your own fruits and vegetables, because capitalism necessarily requires exploitation of labor - so if you can buy it at a store, rest assured that somewhere down the line someone’s life has been exploited for your convenience.
But also, not everybody has the space to grow their own food, and it’s a wildly inefficient use of land to ask that, so uuuuuuugh.
Socially-responsible capitalism could fix this to an extent. I’ve long wondered about the functionality of a fully-contrived capitalist economy - use UBI to guarantee an acceptable standard of living, regardless of the cost (estimates I’ve read are like 40% of the US’s GDP), and then operate a capitalist economy in a world where Maslow’s hierarchy is fulfilled by default.
That removes most of the issues of exploitation, although top earners could still be viewed as exploitative in a relative fashion - like, why should you have 10,000x the personal resources as this other person? What do you do that makes you worth that much?
So I can only see raising the bottom and cutting off the top as a way to level the field, remove exploitation, and greatly reduce the ethical quandries presented.
Yeah, that’s a fair cop. Mostly, my initial assertion was written as a compact statement; the actual calculus is larger, and assumes the things I’ve written above (i.e. still alive and thriving, without impaired memory). Put that together and I believe it excludes all the obvious cases like date rape and so forth.
Empathy is a useful and positive tool, but by itself without an additional argument it’s a poor justification for your position. Empathy exhibits some highly problematic biases, most notably intergroup bias and scope insensitivity, as well as being skewed by physical and temporal distance. If you’re basing your position on the “empathy gap” of which you speak you are quite vulnerable to those biases.
Consider, hypothetically, a version of you that spent a lot of time interacting with chickens (in non-desensitizing ways, e.g. as pets). Wouldn’t that version of you have significantly more empathy for chickens than the one I’m talking to? Isn’t that potential for greater empathy of more moral significance than your current level of empathy, which has to a great extent been determined by circumstantial factors?
Taken literally I’d say this is either vacuous or wrong, but I think I understand the basic point you’re getting at. Suffering is worse than pain alone, due to the additional psychological components involved, and long-term psychological trauma is worse than normal suffering—primarily because it involves additional suffering (and often suffering of a worse kind) over a prolonged period of time. But unless these are already bad things when they occur for a short moment, I don’t see why a longer period would suddenly shift the moral relevance from zero to non-zero.
I think you can achieve quite a lot with this kind of shift, especially if we’re talking about a UBI that applies globally and not just within any one country.
Exploitation is indeed a fundamental issue with capitalism, in that it’s a system that is ostensibly based on freedom of choice, but fails to supply crucial prerequisites for freedom of choice such as people being fully informed or having enough resources to make a genuine choice. If you can ensure those things then that is indeed a major step towards fixing core problems with capitalism.
That said, I think you would also need significant elements of regulation, or perhaps more so a bunch of Pigouvian taxes on a variety of negative externalities such as long-term climate impact and animal suffering. Sure, ethical consumer choice can play a significant role, but if you’re relying on market systems I think those tend to work a lot better when the negative impacts of a particular product are actually priced into the cost of that product.
The other issue you’d have to fix is the dangerous and corrupting ways in which capitalist systems interact with political systems and government power, not only because this is important in itself but also because you can’t really fix the other problems without fixing this one.
I think I’ve identified an area where I’m not using sufficiently clear language. Let me attempt to clarify.
When I talk about “empathy” here, I am referring to emotional empathy and, more specifically, empathic concern. This is an emotional response, and I am not in the business of judging any emotional response as invalid unless there’s some kind of pathology evident. I possess plenty of cognitive empathy, and exhibit this towards animals - but I don’t feel it the same way I feel empathy towards humans.
I am less espousing a particular view, and more describing my state. I’m not saying I’m “right” for any value of “right,” but rather that I am in a different place because I have different emotions, and those emotions are valid and must be considered.
Sure, a hypothetical version of me could have much greater emotional empathy towards chickens - but I don’t, because I am talking about the real world and not the hypothetical. The mere fact that empathic response is often a byproduct of circumstance means that morality cannot enter the equation - do we hold people morally responsible for circumstances which are beyond their control? Am I morally inferior because I was not raised with chickens, which is not a decision I could control?
This argument could definitely lead to a call for a greater need to focus on the development of cognitive empathy towards animals, but I’d argue that exists. For example, we have standards of living and care for livestock - this is a reflection of the notion that some empathy must exist or we are monstrous, but also we have a purpose and must prioritize.
Where I am consistently failing to follow is in the apparent underlying assertion of the moral superiority of greater emotional empathy towards animals. This assertion involves 1) judging someone else’s emotional response as somehow less good than another and 2) holding people accountable for circumstances that they did not create.
You answered it already: prolonged suffering begets additional short-term suffering, and can also spawn other long-term suffering. Damage is cumulative. If you sprain your ankle and try to walk on it anyway, you can wind up re-injuring the ankle AND making your knee worse.
Absolutely. I think a system with UBI would have to be, effectively, an almost fully state-controlled economy, in order to make sure that the system actually runs. It’s essentially creating an entirely artificial economy, rather than allowing the “natural order” or whatever other nonsense capitalists espouse.
This could work, provided we solve the problem of incredibly inequitable resource distribution. In theory, that exists right now. Fines are an example of an economic penalty being applied to an unethical business practice, but at a certain level of success capitalism allows you to effectively buy your way out of ethical concerns by obviating the threat of a fine.
This is why I come back to regulations from a central authority - because left to their own devices, people will try to break the rules.
See also: the entire history of the United States.
“SEE? SOCIALISM DOESN’T WORK BECAUSE WE KEEP INTERFERING TO MAKE SURE SOCIALIST STATES DON’T SUCCEED!”
Well, it’s a good sign if you’re failing to follow me there, since that wasn’t where I intended to go at all.
In the interests of continuing clarity, I’d rather cut out the term “morality”; my intent pertains more accurately to questions of “normative ethics”. To 1) I don’t think it makes much sense to judge emotional responses; what makes sense is to evaluate actions and try to take better courses of action rather than worse ones. To 2) accountability isn’t really at issue here; it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a necessary pre-requisite of acting ethically. It doesn’t matter whether you created the system or not; what matters is the positive or negative effects that your actions can have within that system (and/or your capacity to help change that system).
The thrust of my point about the circumstantial nature of empathic concern is that it should be a cause for skepticism re. actions you take that are significantly impacted by that circumstantial nature. The possibility of a hypothetical you who has a great deal more empathy for chickens is an indicator for a possibility that you should weight the welfare of chickens more highly in your decision-making than you would solely on the basis of your level of empathic concern.
It’s not a matter of judging emotional responses as “invalid” or “inferior” or “less good”, it’s a matter of being appropriately skeptical of actions taken on the basis of those emotions (and especially the absence thereof), given their circumstantial nature. The reason I put forward the “if circumstances were different” idea is that it’s a useful cognitive shortcut to attaining a degree of cognitive empathy even if the emotional response isn’t the same.
I’m glad we agree that the argument makes a case for developing cognitive empathy, but even if some exists there are still important questions as to how much one should aim for, and what actions are entailed (or at least recommended) by a greater degree of cognitive empathy. While it’s a good thing that standards of living and care exist for livestock, I don’t think those standards are at all good enough.
Agreed, though to me that means short-term suffering also matters, though significantly less. I think we’re on the same page here; quite a lot of actions that cause some amount of suffering are justifiable, but it takes a lot more to justify more serious longer-term suffering.
As for “socially-responsible capitalism” it seems we’re pretty much on the same page, though there’s one point I’d expound on.
I think the issue here is actually a little more subtle than that. If the social costs of an action were indeed “priced in” and yet some particular unethical business practice still continued, then an economist would say that this is a chance at a Pareto improvement, i.e. it’s an economic signal that society as a whole is better off if the practice continues to happen, and the economic resources saved by the greater efficiency of that practice can (and should) be redirected to make greater social goods elsewhere.
The issue with fines is that, as a general rule, they do not in fact price in the social costs of actions. Even if the magnitude of the fine were to genuinely reflect the overall harm done, the economic incentive created would only reflect the true costs if the chance of getting caught and convicted was 100%. If you only get caught 10% of the time, and of those times your lawyers get you off half the time, then the fine needs to be 20 times as big to make up for it or the incentive will be off, and then you might run into the fact that the possibility of bankruptcy places an upper limit on how big that fine can be.
It all comes back to the original title of the thread. It doesn’t matter if you don’t eat chicken because it causes suffering to the chicken… if you then eat fruit sourced from farms that under-pay workers and/or contribute to environmental harm.
In our capitalist system, you don’t have the information, opportunity or funds to opt out of a system that causes harm to humans, animals or the environment. The only way to know for sure is to opt out of the system, but that isn’t possible either.
Despite agreeing intellectually with all vegan and vegetarian, I’m not going to judge anyone else, including myself, for just existing the best they can and getting by in a way that causes themselves the least stress.
Layering food choice rules onto most people’s stress is a form of cruelty and suffering I’m not comfortable with. I’d rather a thousand chickens die than nobody but the elite having opportunity for the joy of tasty and satisfying food.
I broadly agree with you, Luke, though I take something of a middle ground between your stance and a more “judgmental” one.
I think it’s a cop-out to say that simply because every choice you make in a capitalist system has indirect harms then your choices don’t matter at all; some choices are still more or less harmful than others. Granted, choices where the consequences are diffuse and indirect are choices that human brains are, frankly, terrible at handling, and they’re made almost continuously throughout the course of a day, so I’m not saying you can (or should) try to accurately weigh those harms in each and every choice.
I don’t think there’s any real case for judging people, especially not vocally, for these kinds of choices; not least because being overly judgmental is often a terrible communication strategy. I also think concerns such as the joy of tasty and satisfying food, and the stress of considering the ethical weight of your decisions, are concerns that are ethically relevant, and deserve to be weighed alongside factors like animal suffering and human exploitation.
The ethical case to be made is one for seeking to be more informed and inform others, especially on issues where the choice is made repeatedly and has a greater overall level of impact. It’s unreasonable to expect anyone to assess the moral weight of each and every individual decision, but there are much more practical possibilities to develop (and spread) heuristics that are usable on a day-to-day basis and can better account for indirect harms.
I think ethical consumption as a concept is useful, but not as a self-contained solution—by itself it’s nowhere near enough. Rather, the idea is to make people aware that their choices have ethical consequences, so that (1) they can understand that the various harms are a result of the system they operate in, and are thus more amenable to improving the system; and (2) they are more open to alternative possibilities.
Notions of ethical consumption are rarely going to stop someone from eating, say, beef burgers altogether, but they might increase their support for regulations that improve the beef industry, and might make them more likely to try vegetarian or vegan alternatives (especially as those continue to get better).
This goes back to something I heard once. We know capitalism is a failure because the goal of an individual in a capitalist system is to get enough money that they can escape capitalism.
Yes, you absolutely do. And when we make decisions, we weight the consequences against our moral precepts - i.e. “it is more important for a human to eat than an animal to not suffer.”
So, again, my question goes back to why: why do you believe others should employ aspects of your moral precepts? The only explanation I can see is that you believe your moral precepts to be superior to those that would see animals used as food.
Ethics emanate from morals (well, ethics is the study of morality, but we generally use “ethics” to refer to applied morality), so we can’t discuss the ethics of a situation without figuring out what our moral priorities are.
I know it’s beside the point, but being involved with chickens made me less empathetic towards them, those petty dinosaurites.
(also, the whole dichotomy of animals as either friends or food is so weird to me. I can really only imagine it arising in cultures heavily divorced from food production.)
I was in 4H as a kid and caught a piglet in a greased-pig contest. I love pigs. They are beautiful and smart and sweet. Her name was Sally and when she grew to full size, she became food.
You can both love a thing and understand its place in your own food world.
); in other words: fuck capitalism.