Thanks to everyone, again, for the excellent discussion. Some selected replies to “Book Club, Part 5”:
Bryan’s Comments
(1) Abstract Principles vs. Concrete Judgments
In earlier work, I said philosophers have often mistakenly started from general, abstract principles and deduced implausible conclusions about particular cases, when they should instead have started from the apparent facts about particular cases and generalized from there.
Bryan thinks that I just made the mistake that I’ve criticized in other philosophers. I started from the general principle that you shouldn’t cause enormous suffering for the sake of minor benefits, then (with some background empirical facts) deduced the supposedly implausible conclusion that we should stop buying meat from factory farms.
Two comments:
- There’s no difference in my intuitions depending on whether I start from general principles or concrete judgments. If I consider a particular case of someone torturing an animal, it seems obviously awful. When I read section 1 of Stuart Rachels’ paper on “Vegetarianism” (http://jamesrachels.org/stuart/veg.pdf), all the things it describes happening on factory farms immediately strike me as horrific. Here’s a video that shows some of the same things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFO34lmAoMQ. Again, they seem horrible. And lots of people have similar reactions, which is why animal activists use things like that to recruit people to their cause.
I find it horrifying that there are some people who have no negative reaction to cases of severe animal cruelty. When I think about that, I feel approximately the same way that you probably feel when you hear about psychopaths who have no negative reaction to human suffering, and there’s simply no way to convince them that they shouldn’t torture other people for fun.
- Sometimes, you should revise a specific judgement in light of a theoretical principle. E.g., it seems to you that interacting with foreigners is bad and harmful; then some economist comes along and gives some clever theoretical arguments about how importing foreign goods helps us, bringing more immigrants into the country helps us, etc. You should not say, “Intuitively, foreign imports are bad, so the law of comparative advantage is false” or “Intuitively, immigration is bad, so one or more of the economist’s premises must be false”.
To take another example, say you’ve committed the conjunction fallacy in probabilistic reasoning – you judged Linda to be more likely to be a feminist bank teller than to be a bank teller. Someone gives you a proof that this is impossible, from the axioms of probability theory. You should not respond by saying that the axioms must be wrong, since intuitively, “Linda is a feminist bank teller” sounds more likely than “Linda is a bank teller.”
What is the difference between the good cases and the bad cases of revising particular judgments in light of general principles? Three thoughts:
- In the bad cases that I had in mind, the starting principle simply wasn’t self-evident; it was at most sort of vaguely plausible. E.g.: David Hume starts from the premise “All ideas are copies of impressions”, and winds up inferring that we have no concept of causation.
- In some cases, you can see that a principle would have to be known by generalizing from particular cases. E.g., “all ideas are copies of impressions.” But in other cases, you can directly see the truth of a principle, because it holds in virtue of the nature of the abstract objects that the principle is about. E.g., “7 is larger than 5”, or “suffering is pro tanto bad”.
iii. Sometimes, our concrete judgments are biased, and more abstract generalizations avoid bias and can be used to correct the bias. (See my paper “Revisionary Intuitionism”, https://philarchive.org/archive/HUERIv1.) E.g., we’re biased against foreigners, but the general principles of economics are relatively unbiased, so we can use them to overcome our bias. It is similarly plausible, given everything we know about humans, that we’re biased against other species. But we can correct that bias using general ethical principles.
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.
(2) Is it like Political Authority?
Bryan agrees with me about political authority being an illusion. But given what he says in his last post, I don’t understand why. Bryan writes, “the case against government pits ubiquitous concrete, particular views about the ethical treatment of humans against sweeping moral generalizations about government authority.” Why would the authority-monger start from sweeping generalizations? Why wouldn’t they just start with “Taxing Jeff Bezos is fine”?
Now, why don’t I defer to other people’s political intuitions? That’s a longer story than I can detail here. A big part of it is about how people’s attitudes toward government are affected by a host of biases, which are discussed in chapter 6 of The Problem of Political Authority. There’s also some arguments in section 1.6 in the same book.
There’s a strong parallel with people’s attitudes toward non-human animal species. Some of the same biases apply (e.g., status quo bias, social proof, self-interest, cognitive dissonance). Even the form of argument is the same in the two cases: In the political case, I argue by debunking the various theories that are supposed to explain what is special about the government. They turn out to be pretty terrible. In the animal ethics case, I argue by debunking the theories that are supposed to explain what is special about humans. They turn out to be pretty terrible too.
(3) Is Pain Bad Because You’re Smart?
BC: “This is not supposed to be a deductive argument, so it makes no sense to call it a ‘non sequitur.’ Instead, it is a moral premise – ‘The suffering of intelligent beings is much more morally important than the suffering of less-intelligent beings.’ And this premise strikes most of us as highly intuitive.
The “non sequitur” I referred to was the inference, “animals are not smart; therefore, their suffering doesn’t matter.” Of course, you could make that valid by adding the premise “if a being isn’t smart, then its suffering doesn’t matter”. In that case, I’d just say that that’s an arbitrary premise. What on earth does your intelligence have to do with how bad your suffering is? To me, that’s like saying that pain is only bad when the person in pain is able to solve differential equations. The badness of pain just doesn’t on its face have anything to do with that. Does the claim make more sense if you add a bunch of other intellectual tasks that a person could do?
Bryan says that intelligence is the ability to learn. So pain is only bad if you have a lot of learning ability? Imagine putting your hand on a hot stove. Imagine the intense pain. You can just see that that is a bad experience. Now, is part of what makes it bad the fact that you are able to learn a lot of stuff in general? Again, that just seems obviously not true.
Here’s a hypothetical that my former colleague David Barnett used to give. There are two people who have headaches, and you only have one aspirin (and you can’t divide it). One of those people scored higher on an IQ test. True or false: “You should give the aspirin to that person, because his pain is worse, because he’s smarter”? False. I have no idea why someone would think that.
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.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that many people, when actually made aware of the sort of extreme cruelty that occurs on factory farms, do in fact have an intuitive reaction that that is wrong. Hardly anyone says, “Oh yeah, that sounds fine.” Other cases: Michael Vick was sent to jail for running a dog-fighting ring, and many people regarded him as a bad person for that. If someone sees you beating the crap out of your dog, or lighting your cat on fire, they’ll judge you to be a terrible person. So I don’t think it’s at all intuitive to think “animal cruelty is fine”.
It’s only clever intellectuals who wind up claiming that animal cruelty is fine, because they see that they’re going to have to say that in order to justify continuing their current practices.
(4) Is it Fine to Torture Babies?
I don’t think it’s controversial that newborn babies are dumb. If you give them problems to solve, they’re extremely bad at it. Rats can solve a new maze a lot faster than a baby can, etc. So I don’t see why Bryan shouldn’t favor baby torture.
Bryan could just alter his theory, as in this suggestion:
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. It’s even more implausible than the previous idea, because of two new features of this principle: (a) It makes the intrinsic badness of your current pain dependent on something in the future. So if you’re going to be intelligent in 10 years, that future development retroactively makes your current suffering bad. (b) Actually, the principle makes the intrinsic badness of your current pain dependent, not on your actual characteristics, but on what normally happens with beings like you. This is about maximally implausible. The intrinsic badness of an experience you’re having obviously does not depend on the intelligence of other beings, or anyone’s intelligence at another time.
Caplan notes that this leads to a “moderately anti-abortion view”. Why “moderately”? I assume that the above principle would also apply to death, as well as suffering, right? Since fetuses will normally develop intelligence later, shouldn’t Bryan take a very strong stance against virtually all abortion?
(5) Is it Fine to Torture Retarded Humans?
BC: “Most mentally retarded humans are still much more intelligent than almost any animal…”
I think that’s just false. Many animals are smarter than many retarded humans. Here are some videos showing some striking behavior:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04 (crow solves problems using water displacement)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYMRlvPxMPU (man drops phone, beluga whale retrieves)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6XuVlcEO4 (parrot answers questions requiring abstraction)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHjDiDQqNec (squirrel gets a man to save her baby)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tauiZGIMfk (hippos save a wildebeest from crocodiles)
BC: “In the rare cases where humans are reduced to the mental level of an animal, we routinely consider options like euthanasia…”
So let’s take a case of a severely retarded human. True story: Another professor once introduced me to her severely mentally disabled sister. The sister could not talk. She just occasionally made random, inarticulate noises. She appeared less competent than a typical adult animal. It seems as if Bryan is suggesting here that it would be okay to kill such a person for trivial reasons. Is that right?
And would it have been permissible for me to torture my colleague’s sister for the sake of some minor benefit for myself?
Bryan’s remark about being “reduced” to the level of an animal suggests that perhaps he is thinking of people who have suffered brain damage or some other mental deterioration. So let’s suppose that happens: a person has suffered severe brain damage such that he is left with about the abilities of a normal cow. Like a cow, he’s still able to walk around, eat, and experience pleasure or pain. Would it be okay to torture this person, if doing so would get you some little temporary pleasure?
Maybe Bryan would say “yes” to all these. But virtually everyone else would say “no”.
(6) Is It Obvious?
BC: “While Huemer concludes that – in light of their terrible arguments – meat-eaters are desperately trying to rationalize obviously evil behavior, I have an alternative explanation. Namely: The moral unimportance of animal welfare is so obvious to almost everyone that asking them for arguments confuses them.”
You could say that. But notice how unfalsifiable Bryan’s views are. If the arguments for view X are terrible, that doesn’t count against X; instead, it just means that X is even more obviously right than the positions that have good arguments for them! We don’t have to give any justification for X, because we can say it’s just obvious. (Even if many other smart people consider it obviously false.) If someone gives counter-examples to our principle, we can always modify the principle ad hoc to exclude them. Our principle and the modifications don’t have to be plausible on their own, and there doesn’t have to be any explanation of why they would be true, because we can just say it’s a brute fact, and we can just appeal to X itself. These strategies could be used to defend any awful practice, and no one could talk you out of it.
To illustrate, I turn to two hypothetical characters, Jefferson Caplan and Statist Caplan.
(7) Jefferson Caplan
We’re back in the slavery era. Thomas Jefferson is against slavery; Jefferson Caplan is pro-slavery. They talk about it:
TJ: Slavery is an abomination.
JC: You own slaves! And you hang out with other slave masters, like George Washington. That shows that deep down, you really know that slavery is cool.
I don’t know what TJ says after that. But I know that JC is not helping the two of them get at ethical truth. Maybe JC will succeed in getting TJ to endorse slavery because TJ doesn’t like being called a hypocrite, he doesn’t like cognitive dissonance, etc. But he won’t induce any rational belief change, since JC isn’t providing any significant amount of relevant evidence.
There are many cases where a society had some horrible practice, and some people in the society said that it was wrong but didn’t fully dissociate themselves from the practice and its practitioners – in fact, I bet that pretty much always happens. Why? I don’t know, but talking about that is not going to help us understand our actual ethical obligations. 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.
Let’s imagine that, contrary to JC’s wishes, they manage to avoid that trap.
TJ: Look, you agree that white people have rights and shouldn’t be enslaved. What’s so different about blacks?
JC: Whites are smarter.
TJ: So what? How does being smarter than someone mean you get to oppress and exploit them? [“But whatever may be the degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henri Gregoire]
JC: It’s just a brute fact, with no explanation needed.
TJ: Why should anyone believe that?
JC: Intuition. I just beat one of my slaves today, and that seemed fine to me. Lots of people do it, and they don’t feel bad about it either. But it’s of course wrong to beat other white people. The best explanation is that greater racial average IQ gives us the right to beat the shit out of people of another race.
Today, Bryan Caplan doesn’t share Jefferson Caplan’s intuitions. But plenty of people in the slavery era did.
(8) Statist Caplan
Statist Caplan is philosopher who reasons similarly to Bryan Caplan except that he supports conventional, statist political views. Regular Caplan talks to Statist Caplan about it:
RC: Government is violating our rights. Taxation is theft. War is mass murder. Etc. We should have anarcho-capitalism.
SC: You’re friendly with some government employees! And you certainly don’t react to veterans like mass murderers. That proves that you really know, deep down, that government is cool.
Again, I don’t think RC and SC should proceed to have a debate about RC’s psychology. I think that’s just obviously going to deteriorate the discourse and lead them away from understanding the truth about the main subject. So let’s say they avoid that trap, again.
RC: What’s so special about the government?
SC: Democratic governments have the right to rule.
RC: Really? Why is that?
SC: Brute fact; no explanation needed.
RC: Well, why should we believe this?
SC: Intuition. It’s obviously fine to tax people’s income, throw drug users in jail, and bar Mexican migrants from crossing the border. The best explanation of all this is that democratic governments really have authority.
RC: What about a case in which four friends at a table vote to steal money from the fifth? It’s democratic, but it’s still wrong.
SC: Oh yeah, that’s because they’re not a government. The principle is that democratic governments have authority. Again, best explanation of the obvious fact that taxing people is fine, etc.
RC is never going to convince SC. SC simply has built up an impregnable belief system defense. Even if RC comes up with some counter-example to the principle about democratic authority, SC will just modify his principle to exclude that example, then justify the modified principle by appealing to his intuitions about how taxation, drug prohibition, etc., are fine.
Again, Bryan Caplan does not share Statist Caplan’s political intuitions. But Statist Caplan’s intuitions are actually way more common than Bryan’s. So I don’t see how Bryan has any answer to Statist Caplan. One more exchange:
RC: Most of the arguments for political authority are terrible. So they’re probably trying to rationalize a bias.
SC: No, that just shows how truly self-evident political authority is! It’s just so obvious that when you ask people about it, it confuses them.
Fortunately, most people do not argue like the Caplans. Even though most people tend to assume the government has authority, they can easily be brought to see that this needs an explanation. Most can see that it would be odd and unsatisfying and just false to claim that there’s some brute, self-evident principle about democratic government authority. So they don’t say that. And so you can reason with them.
Likewise, most people, when confronted about the issue, see the intrinsic oddness of the idea that only the pain of smart beings matters. People other than Bryan don’t claim this as a brute, self-evident axiom, because they can see that it would need an explanation. Not everything needs an explanation, but “Pain is only bad if you’re smart” definitely needs one. Clever intellectuals, though, see that they’re not going to be able to give the explanation, but they also see that no one can logically prove that it isn’t a self-evident, fundamental axiom, so that’s what they say.
(9) Digression About Abortion
Here’s something that I’ve heard a couple of times from pro-choice people:
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. And that’s not because I’m some kind of ideological pro-lifer. I’m in fact agnostic about whether and when fetuses have rights. So I have an open mind on the ethics of abortion, as much as anyone does. But the above doesn’t move me one inch toward the pro-choice position. I think it’s obvious that thinking about the above is not going to help me figure out the morality of abortion.
(10) The Caplan Alternative to Anesthetic
Imagine that you’re about to go in for surgery. The anesthesiologist comes and tells you that, unfortunately, they’ve just run out of their usual pain-blocking drug. They have a plan, though. They can strap you down really tightly so you can’t move, and administer a different drug instead of the pain-blocker. This other drug will simply addle your mind so that you can’t reason clearly and your IQ will temporarily drastically decline. Of course, you’ll still feel extremely intense pain and suffering as the doctors cut you open and such, but you’ll be so stupid that the pain won’t be bad. What say you? Are you ready to proceed with the surgery?
Reader Comments
(1) What if vastly super-intelligent aliens tortured humans for mild amusement? It can even be the case that, like modern factory farming, the torture of humanity wasn’t the direct goal of those aliens, but rather just the predictable side effect (a side effect the aliens don’t care about) of achieving their goal of getting mild amusement.
Good point. Btw, I discussed this in my Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, p. 7.
(2) “A vegetarian could respond “sure, but chickens are only killing each other because they are confined in these factory farms”. And that may be true, but chickens are not humans. You would first have to prove that chickens have a right to not be constrained.”
I don’t have to prove that, because my argument was not that factory farms violate animals’ rights. The claim was that they cause a lot of suffering. You said, “But we have to inflict the suffering, because otherwise they would peck each other to death” (my paraphrase). You imagine someone saying, “That’s only because we’re confining them in tiny spaces; we could stop doing that.” You then say, “You haven’t proved that confining them is intrinsically bad.” That last remark just forgets the original point and leaves no reason why inflicting the pain would be okay. (If confining them in tiny spaces causes you to have to inflict severe pain on them, then don’t confine them.)
(3) “Most humans like the taste of meat. The price of steak at your local grocery store should be at least some indication to the truth of this statement. It seems weird to only say this is a minor benefit.”
Imagine that you heard about someone who was recently arrested for torturing and killing people. Suppose the guy explained that he did it to make money; he got paid $200 for each person that he tortured and murdered. I think it would be completely fair and not weird at all to describe this as torturing and killing “for the sake of a minor benefit.” And I bet that’s more than the amount of money most people would pay for the meat from an entire animal.
(4) [KevinDC] “I was among those who followed the initial debate between Huemer and Caplan years ago…”
Thanks, KevinDC, for your comments. All good points.
(5) “But it turns out that taste buds are remarkably adaptable – when you make a permanent change to the way you eat, the kinds of food which appeal to you also change quickly.”
My experience is the same. It was only the transition period that was difficult. After the transition, it’s been easy to remain vegan for the last few decades. I have plenty of great meals. We vegans also have lower risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.
(6) “It’s not at all clear to me that murdering 100 cows is worse than murdering 100 mice.”
I assume cows are more intelligent than mice (larger brains), so even on Bryan’s view, it’s plausible that harming cows would be worse than harming mice.
(7) “Almost nobody is a vegan, and almost nobody feels bad about this or considers it weird in any way.”
This is similar to how most human societies in history have accepted slavery, and they didn’t feel bad about that either. Most people suck.
“Whenever I discussed the issue with others, I got pretty much the same response; we pretty quickly reached a point where they admitted that my arguments were sound, but they just weren’t going to change their behavior. That’s not what I would expect from people who strongly intuited that causing suffering was wrong.”
That happens to me a lot too. This is what I would expect if your arguments were in fact sound, and the other people were immoral.
“Theory two: People are just behaving as evolutionary biology would predict.”
That’s right, most people are. Most people are selfish and have minimal moral motivation. There are many other pieces of evidence that show this. E.g., the fact that most people will electrocute an innocent person if told to do so by a man in a white lab coat. I have a post coming up on my blog about how most people are amoral (http://fakenous.net). The most plausible explanation is not that electrocuting innocent people is morally okay, nor that torturing other creatures for trivial reasons is fine.
(8) “I don’t have evidence at hand for the following claim, but it seems very common that people solve health issues with meat-related diets…”
I couldn’t address all related issues, since this was just one chapter in a book that’s meant as an introduction to philosophy in general (not an animal ethics book, or even an ethics book). That being said, if you adopt a vegan or nearly-vegan diet, I recommend taking supplements. You should take B12 supplements (alternately, there is a lot of B12 in clams and other bivalves, which are perfectly ethical to eat). I also take a calcium/vitamin D supplement, and taurine. You can find supplements for pretty much any nutrient you want.
READER COMMENTS
Joe Denver
Jul 20 2021 at 11:16am
Suppose you can’t move the mice. Would you honestly not build a pool simply for a den of mice?
Premise 1. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is perfectly moral to constrain chickens with others chickens.
Premise 2. Further suppose, chickens are brutal killers and cannibals, and kill each-other when confined.
It seems, in this situation, that it is justified to cause chickens some suffering in order to preserve their lives.
In order for it to be unjustified. You would either need to show that premise 2 is incorrect (which, to my knowledge, it is not), or that premise 1 is incorrect.
If we confined humans in such a manner, and for some reason this caused humans to kill each-other. Then yes, this would be a bad situation, and you should stop confining them. But that’s because humans have a right to be free, ergo premise 1 is invalidated.
KevinDC
Jul 20 2021 at 1:48pm
I don’t understand how this is meant to respond to what Mike said. Does your first premise assume it to be “perfectly moral to constrain chickens with others chickens” no matter what, i.e., regardless of the pain and suffering the constraints causes, etc? Because if you don’t have those qualifiers built into your first premise, then your argument, as you presented it, is deductively invalid. The conclusion you reach does not follow from the premises given. But if you do include those qualifiers in your first premise, then your response just begs the question against the argument from suffering. If you’re trying to demonstrate it’s okay to cause chickens even when doing so will cause lots of suffering, then you can’t have a premise in the argument stating it’s okay to confine chickens even when doing so causes lots of suffering.
KevinDC
Jul 20 2021 at 2:07pm
Typo alert! That last statement should read:
Ugh, Kevin. Learn to proofread.
Joe Denver
Jul 20 2021 at 5:20pm
No. The premise is read as stated.
It seems quite obvious to me how my conclusion follows from premise 1 and 2.
If confining X causes Y amount of harm to X. It seems morally permissible to harm X an amount equal to Z, where Z < Y, if doing so stops Y.
KevinDC
Jul 20 2021 at 6:09pm
Here’s why it doesn’t follow. You clarify that your premise 1 doesn’t contend that it’s morally acceptable to keep chickens confined no matter what or regardless of conditions. So your premises and conclusion would look like this:
P1: It is morally acceptable to keep chickens confined, in at least some circumstances, but not in any and all circumstances.
P2: The only way to keep conditions confined in this particular circumstance is to subject them to painful mutilations.
C: Therefore, subjecting chickens to painful mutilations is justified, in order to keep then confined in this particular circumstance.
The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. Nor do the premises, as stated, imply that it’s okay to inflict some lesser amount of pain Z to prevent the greater pain Y that a particular method of confinement would inflict. The premises are also consistent with the conclusion that we therefore shouldn’t confine chickens when doing so would inflict the lesser level of suffering Z on them, and therefore chickens shouldn’t be confined in a way that causes either Y or Z levels of suffering. Simply saying “by inflicting Y pain I can prevent greater Z pain” doesn’t cut any ice, because nothing in your premises demonstrates that it’s okay to inflict any level of pain, let alone pain level Y, for the sake of confinement.
Joe Denver
Jul 20 2021 at 8:00pm
Why?
How so? This implication seems obvious to me.
Perhaps you are confusing the validity and soundness of the conclusion. Just because the conclusion follows from the premises doesn’t mean the conclusion is true.
A: factory farming causes chickens a lot of suffering.
B: that suffering is to prevent chickens from hurting themselves.
A: but you could just let them go free?
B: do chickens have a right to be free?
A: “I don’t have to prove that.” Your remark “just forgets the original point and leaves no reason why inflicting the pain would be okay.”
B: inflicting the pain is okay, because it alleviates the suffering chickens commit to themselves.
C: that’s “consistent with the conclusion that we therefore shouldn’t confine chickens”.
B: do chickens have a right to not be confined?
In some sense, it makes much more sense to argue that animals do have rights. Because then you could say that chickens do have a right to be free, and deny my first premise. Instead of trying to deny the obvious.
KevinDC
Jul 20 2021 at 9:58pm
You ask why I say the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. It’s not because of a confusion on my part between the meaning of validity and soundness, I promise. Short version – because of how the rules of logical inference work when making a deductive argument.
Long version – your first premise only stipulates that it’s acceptable to keep chickens confined in some (but not all) circumstances. This premise, therefore, leave logical space open as to which circumstances are, or are not, acceptable. And your second premise is just a stipulated description of how much suffering a particular mode of constraint will cause, possibly paired with a claim that it prevents some other higher level of suffering. That premise, too, doesn’t say anything to establish the specific conditions which make confinement acceptable or not, nor does it demonstrate that the amount of suffering it creates it falls within the (undefined) “acceptable” category. In both of your premises, therefore, what circumstances make confinement acceptable, or what amount of suffering is necessary to make confinement unacceptable, is logically still open. There’s logical space that is consistent with the conclusion that the method of confinement you describe isn’t acceptable – nothing about your premises makes that conclusion logically impossible. Hence, by definition, the conclusion you reach doesn’t follow from the premises you offered. It’s still logically possible for the conclusion to be false, even if the premises were true.
To put it another way, if I was to say “It’s unjustified to keep chickens in conditions which cause Z amount of suffering,” neither of your two premises, together or jointly, logically contradict that assertion. Premise one just says that it’s sometimes the case that keeping chickens confined is justified, in some circumstances. And premise two just stipulates that keeping them confined will, in fact, cause Z amount of suffering, which is lower than some other amount of suffering. Neither of those premises precludes the possibility that causing Z amount of suffering is still not acceptable. Indeed, towards the end of your comment, you seem to acknowledge that your premises are at least “consistent with the conclusion that we therefore shouldn’t confine chickens” – and, again, if the premises you offered are consistent with the “confinement is wrong” conclusion, by definition, the conclusion that “confinement is not wrong” doesn’t follow from the premises. A conclusion only follows from the premises when no other possible conclusion is logically consistent with those premises. It’s incoherent to say “my conclusion follows from the premises, but other conclusions are also consistent with those premises.” That’s just a blatant logical contradiction, given how “follows from the premises” is defined. So in a way, you answered your own question.
I also don’t see what “rights not to be confined” has to do with it – but this seems very important to you for some reason. Saying “X doesn’t have a right not to be confined” doesn’t compel the conclusion “It’s acceptable to cause X massive pain while confining them.” Saying “chickens don’t have a right not to be confined by farmers” does not entail the conclusion “it’s acceptable for farmers to torture chickens while confining them.” That’s just an obvious non sequitur. You’d need additional premises to bridge that gap. Let’s just stipulate that chickens have no right not to be confined (whatever that means). The argument you’re making seems to be:
P1: Chickens don’t have a right to not be confined.
P2: If something doesn’t have a right not to be confined, then it’s morally acceptable to confine them in any conditions, regardless of the amount of suffering that confinement causes.
C: Therefore, it’s acceptable to confine chickens in the conditions found on factory farms.
This argument is logically valid as stated – the conclusion here is necessarily entailed by the premises. But premise 2 is false, so the argument is still unsound. Nothing about the badness of experiencing suffering, or the wrongness of inflicting it, depends on the sufferer being in possession a “right to not be confined” by the one inflicting the suffering on them, so nothing about having or lacking such a right is relevant to the badness of experiencing that suffering or the moral acceptability of inflicting it. If we stipulate “chickens have no right not to be confined” then it’s trivially true that confining them is not in and of itself bad. But so what? That’s a trivial point, and totally irrelevant as a reply to Huemer’s arguments.
KevinDC
Jul 20 2021 at 2:06pm
I too am struck by the implausibility of this line of argument. The thinking usually goes that humans have some capacity X (high intelligence, rationality, learning capacity, various things in that ballpark) which other animals lack. Of course, some humans also lack X, however you want to classify X. And the response to that is to suggest that even humans who lack X still deserve the same consideration as those who have it, because they’ll develop X later, or because most other humans still have X, or something like that.
This is very perplexing. The assertion is that X is a quality of such great significance that lacking it makes it okay for a being to be tortured or killed for the sake of bringing some pleasure to other beings who have it, but at the same time, the presence or absence of X in any particular case isn’t all that important. This is such an obviously ad hoc claim that I actually get embarrassed hearing someone make it.
blacktrance
Jul 20 2021 at 7:21pm
I assume we’re supposed to think it’d be wrong for aliens to torture humans here, but far from that being obvious, I think it’s quite plausible that they should. Sure, we wouldn’t like it if they did it, but why would they care? If we’re not a threat to them, and they can gain more by treating us poorly than by cooperating and trading with us, I couldn’t give then any honest arguments for why they shouldn’t disregard our welfare as they see fit.
Shawn
Jul 20 2021 at 7:30pm
Much like with the question of democracy, we’re constrained as a species by biological bodies which cannot keep up with the ethical or technological constructs we’re capable of creating; democracy is the least bad system of government currently devised to ensure maximal liberty and security for the greatest number of humans. Greatest number does not mean “all.”
We are forced to construct society such that our laws have bite on the tenth or lower percentile of most behavioral characteristics because to insist that we could all live as libertarians (specifically ancaps) ignores the fundamental reality that half of humanity is below average and average is no great compliment. Even in a society of Caplans we would probably still end up with a government and system of laws it enforces because some number of individuals will always transgress some norm to such a great extent as to draw sanction from other people.
And on the question of meat: humans being obligate carnivores in our current form implies that we can eat meat as a biological imperative, but more importantly: the visceral enjoyment of eating is one of the things that actually makes life worth living, and the pleasure of eating a juicy steak to my sentient brain is so great that the ethical consideration of how the Wagyu steer from which it came was treated in life comes in at or near the bottom of my priority list… and if humans are ill-suited on average to self government, they’re probably even worse suited to considering the the thing that it’s like to be an incredibly stupid and bred-to-be-meat chicken in a factory farm.
Telling them that they’re bad people for enjoying wings or thighs (or mass murderers… you know, like of people) is simply non-sequitur itself.
Nobody cares about the huge number of prey animals a successful lion chokes to death and devours over the course of its life, which, incidentally involves a massive amount of suffering after a life of living in privation, suffering the extremes of temperature, weather and injury that defines the life of a wild animal.
I concede that it would be better if animals we ate lived in marginally better conditions, but this is a thing we do to make ourselves feel better only, because animals can’t. Further, I am disinclined to go along with such a program because extremists annoy me. They’re incapable of detecting nuance and insist ridiculous things like “eating meat is the ethical equivalent of murdering babies” or something, which is sure to get you many converts… and ignores that human society is the only one capable of producing thoughts complex enough to rise to the level of contemplating mass murder and noting that something might be wrong with it. Animals don’t have such strong ethical capabilities for the reasons we all know.
Why is eating animals OK? By inspection. Animal society doesn’t exist – at least not in the way that it does for us. Ants are a real nuisance and require constant destruction to keep them from overrunning your yard; not for eating but because they’re pests, and anyone who disagrees has never felt the righteous anger of getting bitten from stepping in an unseen fire and mound and decided to commit insecticide on a vast scale.
Eating animals and killing them is part of what humans do. I frequently say the same thing to pacifists that I say to vegetarians: your position is immoral, because you are able to maintain your pacifism only because others will carry out violence in your name, with or without your consent, and you are free riding on their commission of violence. The vegan lifestyle involves the killing of innumerable pests and other animals that try to eat your plants, which requires pesticides, harvesting equipment and the destruction of vast quantities of natural habitat that is displaced to grow food. By contrast, factory farms produce vastly higher quantities of calories per acre. Far from being an abomination, they are among the most moral things we do as humans, for other humans.
robc
Jul 22 2021 at 10:01am
Stepping in?
Try sitting on an unseen fire ant mound.
Joe Denver
Jul 20 2021 at 7:58pm
Why?
How so? This implication seems obvious to me.
Perhaps you are confusing the validity and soundness of the conclusion. Just because the conclusion follows from the premises doesn’t mean the conclusion is true.
A: factory farming causes chickens a lot of suffering.
B: that suffering is to prevent chickens from hurting themselves.
A: but you could just let them go free?
B: do chickens have a right to be free?
A: “I don’t have to prove that.” Your remark “just forgets the original point and leaves no reason why inflicting the pain would be okay.”
B: inflicting the pain is okay, because it alleviates the suffering chickens commit to themselves.
C: that’s “consistent with the conclusion that we therefore shouldn’t confine chickens”.
B: do chickens have a right to not be confined?
In some sense, it makes much more sense to argue that animals do have rights. Because then you could say that chickens do have a right to be free, and deny my first premise. Instead of trying to deny the obvious.
TGGP
Jul 21 2021 at 10:33am
In the Milgram experiment, the people delivering that high shock mostly thought (correctly) that it was fake.
Hellestal
Jul 22 2021 at 6:43am
In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the subjects knew it was fake.
The original Milgram subjects had no substantive reason to doubt what they were doing. And in fact, they reacted with extreme stress responses. If any claimed, afterward, that they knew it was fake all along, then that was a psychological defense mechanism to avoid facing the truth about their own character.
Michael Huemer
Jul 24 2021 at 12:20pm
This claim forced me to add the following footnote in my most recent book (Justice Before the Law):
“Unfortunately, it has recently become popular, when the Milgram study is mentioned, for lay people to claim that the study has been debunked, referring to Perry et al. (2020). Perry et al.’s paper is sometimes misreported as showing that the obedient subjects “did not believe” that they were really electrocuting the learner. In fact, what Perry et al. report is that most subjects, after the fact, claimed to have been less than fully certain that they were really electrocuting the learner, and that the people who had fully complied reported lower certainty on average than the people who had disobeyed the experimenter. Nevertheless, 74% of the fully obedient subjects reported that they had either fully believed that the shocks were real or had some doubts but still thought the shocks were probably real. Only 4% claimed to have fully disbelieved in the reality of the shocks (Perry et al. 2020, table 3). Note also that the obedient subjects may have lied after the fact about their earlier belief state, with the aim of making their behavior appear less reprehensible. If one genuinely thought that the shocks were not real, then one would have no reason for continuing the charade of pretending to shock the learner.”
A Country Farmer
Jul 21 2021 at 1:23pm
Doesn’t the fact that veganism is inherently nutritionally deficient make you wonder if diet is an entirely different dimension to this debate? I continue to be surprised you haven’t become an expert in the (unfortunately wildly contradictory and unsatisfactory) details of the science of human nutrition (and evolution of human omnivorism) and devote a large part of your arguments to steelmanning this.
Avrey Lanini
Jul 21 2021 at 6:23pm
Hello, Dr. Huemer,
I am extremely excited to have discovered your work and I love your breakdown of the social contract theory, something that has felt so incorrect my entire life and I simply didn’t know how to articulate it or have the necessary knowledge to refute it’s defenses. But now I do! So thanks.
Flattery aside, I do have an important dilemma I am now presented with in slightly discovering the ethics against eating meat. I wish I wouldn’t have read this worldview changing perception! JK of course, I do value truth as an intensely important and high ideal in life. I simply don’t want to be evil (of course) and so my immediate bias and prejudice is taking over in attempts to continue eating greasy and harmful burgers. I really hope that I do in fact have better discipline to not simply say, “I agree, but I will still eat meat”, although I will carry guilt going forward and probably stop eating meat eventually if that ends up the case.
A simple and single contention that I am contemplating with:
Say a person is in a coma, is it ok to kill them if you get some benefit from it?
They will not feel pain and they may be as smart or dumb as you theoretically wish them to be. I can’t think of some small benefit to receive from such an action so it may not follow logically.
Maybe a different scenario is a better example:
Suppose you can shoot a tranquilizer into an animal before killing it, effectively taking away the pain and suffering aspect of murdering animals for food, except the assumed minimal pain cause by the shot of the tranquilizer (I will not pretend that this is even remotely close to how I get access to such sustenance now). Maybe even better, imagine you can simply use the cow killing nail gun they use that simply ends their life as quick as possible, even though it may be an excruciating amount of pain for a split-second. Does that present an ethical manner in which to eat meat according to you?
The reason I am curious is because a contention I have when thinking whether eating meat is morally wrong or not is, what’s the alternative? It seems the only logical alternative is to eat vegetables, but I then want to know whether even that is unethical. I think we are all lifeforms consuming and effectively killing other lifeforms all of the time, right? Whether it be bacteria and viruses or full on organisms from a bug up to a cow, we are all at war to survive. The distinction between humans and everything else that I always refer to is that we have an ability to reason therefore we do not have to resort to conflict or fleeing whenever we interact with each other. Animals can be gentle and generally passive as well, but they cannot reason. For example: I cannot ask a cow if he wants to enter a contract to graze my land and in exchange allow me to milk it. Now I can assume there is no consent on the part of the cow, but I do come back to what is an alternative for obtaining sustenance? In my very limited and not researched understanding, you do not advocate against all sustenance from animals, only the meat eating aspect that inevitably leads to their deaths and most often, suffering. Although, I also think I saw that you mentioned you are a vegan, not simply a vegetarian so in that case I would guess you do have a case to be made against all animal sustenance as well?
The only alternative is plants, correct? I am still killing, though, so that isn’t the reason one would be against eating meat. It seems to be solely and crucially fixed on the pain and suffering aspect of animals. With that, if there are ways to eliminate pain and suffering for animals, would that then become an ethical manner in which to consume meat?
I also grabbed a quick confirmation bias link to help my prejudice as I now journey through a conflicting endeavor whenever I eat, and a complicated one at that. The link claims plants can feel because they send distress signals whenever their branches or leaves are cut, or whenever they are deprived of water. Immediately, I have no idea how to confirm the legitimacy of their claims, nor do I understand how plants can even emit sound, but it’s interesting nonetheless and I’m curious about your input. Thank you!
Can plants feel pain? https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/24473/20191218/a-group-of-scientists-suggest-that-plants-feel-pain.htm
PS – Sorry this doesn’t really have anything to do with the book. I simply was reading through some comments and your responses and I thought, well, this is certainly challenging to my current lifestyle.
pgbh
Jul 22 2021 at 4:01am
Dr Huemer,
I made the post you reply to under point 7). Thanks for taking the trouble to reply to me.
The reason I made that comment was that you claim it’s wrong to cause a lot of suffering for little benefit, and you know this through intuition. My point is that most people don’t share this intuition. I don’t think this proves that you’re wrong — it could be that your intuitions are right, and everyone else’s are wrong. I do think that if your theory is supposed to be based on intuition, it’s a strike against it that it contradicts the moral intuitions that most people actually have.
Although to be honest, I’m not even sure that people have such intuitions. I know for a fact that I would feel terrible if I killed and ate a cute animal, say, my pet cat. In the past, I was for some reason a moral realist, so I would perhaps have interpreted this feeling of discomfort as an “intuition” that doing that would be “wrong”. Now I’m a moral anti-realist, so I would say it’s just the result of my personal psychological traits. Either way, it seems like only the feeling of discomfort is observable; the idea that it represents a “moral intuition” functions at the level of interpretation.
By the way, I checked out your blog post. It seems like you want to make two claims:
-The correct morality is based on intuition.
-Most people have no intuitions about moral behavior; their only strong intuition is to do whatever’s socially acceptable.
Like I said, this isn’t actually a contradiction. I just don’t find it very plausible that your intuitive ideas about what’s right and wrong are that much better than everyone else’s.
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