I agree it's worth trying out vegetarianism/veganism to find out how it goes, but it may strongly depend on the individual. The nice thing about vegetarianism is you can count over time how many lives you saved by substituting other foods. I was vegetarian for about 10 years and saved a few cows, pigs, and lambs, a couple hundred chickens, fish and shrimp, etc. Definitely enough animals to fill up my house, which I'm proud of.
However, I craved meat just about every day, and the craving never went away. Eventually I gave up a few years after having kids because my willpower ran out, and I wanted them to eat a "normal" diet to reduce risk of any diet-related deficiencies (probably somewhat a rationalization on my part).
Now I try to eat mostly beef because of a weird utilitarian calculation that (approximately) killing larger farm animals causes the least suffering. Back of the envelope: it would take an average American about 2 years to eat a whole cow, and closer to 2 weeks to eat a chicken, and I doubt that cows have >50x the moral weight of a chicken. Shrimp is a tougher one to put on the scale, but I eat them occasionally because they're delicious. Regardless, every few times you don't eat an animal you're saving its life, so eating fewer is better (e.g. meatless Mondays).
I haven't eaten any animal products for many years, but I fully agree with your reasoning behind switching from chickens to cattle. In addition to the huge difference in deaths per calorie, there's pretty clearly a huge difference in the degree of suffering faced by the vast majority of farmed chickens versus cattle prior to slaughter time. Broiler chickens live in constant Hieronymus Bosch hell on Earth. People who are motivationally unable to go vegan but able to cut out chicken should absolutely do so.
Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway because you can't restrain your animalistic desires is a pathetic weakness of character. There is nothing Nietzschean about it.
I don’t know it’s wrong. I reject the idea that shrimps have moral rights. The only non human animals that i think can make moral claims are the Great Apes, dolphins, orcas, and elephants. For different reasons, I’d include dogs, cats, and horses.
If you want to keep your taxes simple, just take the standard deduction. The standard deduction requires zero work on your part, and there's a good chance that you won't gain by itemizing anyways.
A $1K donation will probably not make itemizing worthwhile. The standard deduction is like $15-30K.
If you're a serious philanthropist donating well above $30K, it could be worthwhile to itemize. Pretty sure I did it once in the past, and it took just a few minutes of extra work with Turbotax. I love getting paid thousands of dollars per minute.
Shrimp have about as many neurons as ants (low 100ks), and might be dumber (ants sometimes pass the mirror test). I weigh their suffering at ~zero. If it's substantively higher, them all such ethical frameworks are broken anyway.
I don’t know what to think about these arguments, best I can do is put a probability on these things. I doubt that anyone could show the probability of shrimp being able to significantly suffer is anywhere close to zero.
We could do that if we figure out consciousness/qualia. The problem is that we are to it what alchemists were to chemistry in the Middle Ages. It could be that it's just an intractable problem, but it could also be that almost nobody seriously studies it.
If you worry about shrimp welfare, then you should worry about the welfare of field mice and insects disturbed by growing wheat. The only way to eliminate animal suffering is to wipe out all life on Earth. The only way to avoid complicity is suicide.
If you set up a series of nociceptors and transmission pathways in a lab would it be unethical to fire it?
What if you tied it to some muscle with a reflexive response?
I say no, there's no moral agent wronged by just firing a nerve ending.
What purpose does the absent moral agent serve? It brings the ability to contextualize pain within an ongoing sense of a self. That self which is harmed is what vests the wrongfulness of any harm.
It's weird but not unethical to stab a rock or a doll principally because the doll is not an agent that can be wronged.
So the question becomes, what level of complexity is required before an animal has an ability to contextualize pain?
I reject that this is a spectrum and is instead a threshold question. We know from LLMs many capabilities are absent until a certain threshold, when they suddenly emerge. Threshold for sense of self could be lots of places, but you probably at least need something like a limbic system and prefrontal cortex, responsible for the emotional response and subjective interpretation of pain in humans.
This seems reducible to "what causes our subjective experience of pain and do they have any equivalent systems" which gets me close to 0.
Does a baby have more of a sense of self than a pig? It seems doubtful. But both of them react with distress to being harmed. I think the subjective experience of harm, not the ability to contextualize it, is what separates a sentient animal from a rock or a doll.
Yeah just shrimp, there are still difficult questions about where to draw the line for vertebrates. Pigs are very intelligent and often kept as pets and represent a very strong case for caution.
Newborns and people who happen to be sleeping are good case studies, could pose challenges for the contextualize threshold, except I believe there are separate reasons not to harm people in similar situations.
(A) What vividness and depth of suffering do you figure can be supported by a nervous system with half the neurons of an ant, although it is unknown;
(B) The heuristic of how much concern you give to ants. People may worry more about a shrimp because it is bigger, but the size and complexity of the nervous system is what's indicative.
I doubt anyone worries this much about ants. One could bite the bullet and try, though.
Capacity to suffer doesn’t necessarily require very high intelligence or large complex brains. Pain/suffering is a very simple and primitive feeling. You don’t have to be a genius to experience pain.
You’re comparing shrimp to ants as a reductio, but it’s not implausible to me that ants are also conscious and capable of suffering. I would weigh them much less than humans or chickens, but not at 0.
I'm glad to see you moving in the direction of intellectual honesty on this front. Acknowledging that torture of animals is wrong and doing it anyway is a deep weakness of will; an inability of one's intellect to overcome their immediate impulses.
Killing shrimp is amoral but killing an unborn fetus is totally fine. I cannot understand people who fret about the death of crustaceans but view a 25 week old fetus as unworthy of saving from death.
Most humans, when confronted with extreme pain, don’t actually choose death. John McCain and other Vietnam POWs, for example, were brutalized for years, but few chose suicide.
You don't know what amoral means. When it refers to actions, it means "laying outside the sphere of morality". Such as taking a walk, it is neither moral or immoral, it's not relevant to morality.
Caplan’s argument is valid. If any nervous system that feels pain matters, the Bug Lives Matter, and we should keep both eating and walking around to a minimum. And driving is right out.
It seems wrong to cause extreme amounts of pain and suffering for the sake of minor benefits to oneself. But eating and walking around—at a minimum—are not minor benefits. And killing bugs while driving is not analogous to factory farming, as Humer argued. Killing bugs while driving produces vastly less suffering than insect farming, and it's even better for bugs to be dead.
Bryan Caplan endorses child labor and thinks that alcohol addiction is a revealed preference. I think he lives in a wonderful reality that is not terribly similar to the actual world I live in.
Considering that Caplan's argument seems to be all about dismissing arguments based on *who* says them, rather than the actual content of the argument... I think the response from Forrest is rather appropriate.
This was a nice and funny read. Also, don't let tax deductibility paperwork prevent you from donating. You can always donate and choose not to tax deduct!
It seems to me that your relationship with the anti-meat cause is an excellent example of the feebleness of trying to have morality without religion.
You've written repeatedly about how horrible it is to raise amd/or catch animals for meat amd how we should all be paying way more attention to their suffering than we actually do... and yet your beliefs haven't actually impelled you to stop eating meat.
Meanwhile there are somewhere like a billion devout Hindus and Buddhists in the world who are actually vegetarians... and whose ancestors in the faith have been vegetarians for thousands of years... who suffering don't have anywhere near as much intellectual knowledge about animal suffering as you do, but who avoid eating animals anyway because it's what their religious tradition teaches them to do. (Nor is this attitude wholly absent in the West - just read Pythagoras' speech in Book XV of the Metamorphoses - Pythagoras was of course a very religious man who believed in the immortality of the soul).
Perhaps what you really need to do is exchange your feeble intellectual objections to harming shrimp for a robust metaphysical belief that, if you're not careful about your karma, you might be reborn as one.
Hmph, shrimp reparations. They’re just going to spend that money on new rims for their pereiopods.
I think you'd be surprised how quickly you go off meat once you stop eating it. Might be worth giving Veganism a try for a month!
I agree it's worth trying out vegetarianism/veganism to find out how it goes, but it may strongly depend on the individual. The nice thing about vegetarianism is you can count over time how many lives you saved by substituting other foods. I was vegetarian for about 10 years and saved a few cows, pigs, and lambs, a couple hundred chickens, fish and shrimp, etc. Definitely enough animals to fill up my house, which I'm proud of.
However, I craved meat just about every day, and the craving never went away. Eventually I gave up a few years after having kids because my willpower ran out, and I wanted them to eat a "normal" diet to reduce risk of any diet-related deficiencies (probably somewhat a rationalization on my part).
Now I try to eat mostly beef because of a weird utilitarian calculation that (approximately) killing larger farm animals causes the least suffering. Back of the envelope: it would take an average American about 2 years to eat a whole cow, and closer to 2 weeks to eat a chicken, and I doubt that cows have >50x the moral weight of a chicken. Shrimp is a tougher one to put on the scale, but I eat them occasionally because they're delicious. Regardless, every few times you don't eat an animal you're saving its life, so eating fewer is better (e.g. meatless Mondays).
I haven't eaten any animal products for many years, but I fully agree with your reasoning behind switching from chickens to cattle. In addition to the huge difference in deaths per calorie, there's pretty clearly a huge difference in the degree of suffering faced by the vast majority of farmed chickens versus cattle prior to slaughter time. Broiler chickens live in constant Hieronymus Bosch hell on Earth. People who are motivationally unable to go vegan but able to cut out chicken should absolutely do so.
Red meat is very bad for your health and longevity, you should just go vegan.
Incisors and canines there for a reason. I am what I am. I support ethical treatment of animals, however.
Be sure to get plenty of iron:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rRkhATuztvfMLFhT8/vegan-nutrition-testing-project-interim-report
I take it you’re a vegan? What was your transition like?
I just changed overnight and didn't really experience any issues (only notable thing was I farted a lot for like two weeks lol)
As far as muscle is concerned, it didn't seem to negatively impact my gym progress https://substack.com/@connorj22/note/c-68801335?r=2i9hn5
You seem to be doing ok. Every Vegan I know is scrawny and weak. It’s the way to bet.
But even if there were health benefits, as a Nieitzxchean, I support expressing evolutionary dominance over the animals we hunt or enslave.
Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway because you can't restrain your animalistic desires is a pathetic weakness of character. There is nothing Nietzschean about it.
I don’t know it’s wrong. I reject the idea that shrimps have moral rights. The only non human animals that i think can make moral claims are the Great Apes, dolphins, orcas, and elephants. For different reasons, I’d include dogs, cats, and horses.
Do you have any argument for that, or is it pure motivated reasoning? As far as I can tell it's a completely indefensible position.
There’s everything Nietzschean about it. I say that as someone who disagrees with Nietzsche. Nietzsche wasn’t moral and don’t try to whitewash him.
Callousness is weak
So is blubbering about shrimps.
Yikes
He can now lose to a twelve year old girl in arm wrestling.
Didn't he try?
"The fear of paperwork exerts a stronger pressure on my psyche than ... the thought of losing money" I've never felt so seen.
Even if it’s tax deductible, there’s no law that says you have to deduct it.
If you want to keep your taxes simple, just take the standard deduction. The standard deduction requires zero work on your part, and there's a good chance that you won't gain by itemizing anyways.
A $1K donation will probably not make itemizing worthwhile. The standard deduction is like $15-30K.
If you're a serious philanthropist donating well above $30K, it could be worthwhile to itemize. Pretty sure I did it once in the past, and it took just a few minutes of extra work with Turbotax. I love getting paid thousands of dollars per minute.
Shrimp have about as many neurons as ants (low 100ks), and might be dumber (ants sometimes pass the mirror test). I weigh their suffering at ~zero. If it's substantively higher, them all such ethical frameworks are broken anyway.
I don’t know what to think about these arguments, best I can do is put a probability on these things. I doubt that anyone could show the probability of shrimp being able to significantly suffer is anywhere close to zero.
We could do that if we figure out consciousness/qualia. The problem is that we are to it what alchemists were to chemistry in the Middle Ages. It could be that it's just an intractable problem, but it could also be that almost nobody seriously studies it.
If you worry about shrimp welfare, then you should worry about the welfare of field mice and insects disturbed by growing wheat. The only way to eliminate animal suffering is to wipe out all life on Earth. The only way to avoid complicity is suicide.
All or nothing thinking is a classic cognitive distortion.
If you set up a series of nociceptors and transmission pathways in a lab would it be unethical to fire it?
What if you tied it to some muscle with a reflexive response?
I say no, there's no moral agent wronged by just firing a nerve ending.
What purpose does the absent moral agent serve? It brings the ability to contextualize pain within an ongoing sense of a self. That self which is harmed is what vests the wrongfulness of any harm.
It's weird but not unethical to stab a rock or a doll principally because the doll is not an agent that can be wronged.
So the question becomes, what level of complexity is required before an animal has an ability to contextualize pain?
I reject that this is a spectrum and is instead a threshold question. We know from LLMs many capabilities are absent until a certain threshold, when they suddenly emerge. Threshold for sense of self could be lots of places, but you probably at least need something like a limbic system and prefrontal cortex, responsible for the emotional response and subjective interpretation of pain in humans.
This seems reducible to "what causes our subjective experience of pain and do they have any equivalent systems" which gets me close to 0.
Does a baby have more of a sense of self than a pig? It seems doubtful. But both of them react with distress to being harmed. I think the subjective experience of harm, not the ability to contextualize it, is what separates a sentient animal from a rock or a doll.
On reflection I think you were talking about shrimp, not animals generally, in which case sorry for misunderstanding you.
Yeah just shrimp, there are still difficult questions about where to draw the line for vertebrates. Pigs are very intelligent and often kept as pets and represent a very strong case for caution.
Newborns and people who happen to be sleeping are good case studies, could pose challenges for the contextualize threshold, except I believe there are separate reasons not to harm people in similar situations.
It's more like:
(A) What vividness and depth of suffering do you figure can be supported by a nervous system with half the neurons of an ant, although it is unknown;
(B) The heuristic of how much concern you give to ants. People may worry more about a shrimp because it is bigger, but the size and complexity of the nervous system is what's indicative.
I doubt anyone worries this much about ants. One could bite the bullet and try, though.
Neuron counts are a bad proxy https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/why-neuron-counts-shouldnt-be-used-as-proxies-for-moral-weight/
Sure - I wrote about those considerations 5 years ago: https://akarlin.com/animals
But number of neurons is nonetheless the most readily and rigorously quantifiable approach to proxying moral weight.
I think the RP report is much, much better and that you should have high uncertainty about how to measure worth and thus give shrimp decent weight.
Want to come on the pod to argue about this?
Capacity to suffer doesn’t necessarily require very high intelligence or large complex brains. Pain/suffering is a very simple and primitive feeling. You don’t have to be a genius to experience pain.
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/what-is-it-like-for-animals-to-suffer
You’re comparing shrimp to ants as a reductio, but it’s not implausible to me that ants are also conscious and capable of suffering. I would weigh them much less than humans or chickens, but not at 0.
https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think?r=2k84i&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=77331789
Why not donate this money to humans? We’re more important.
I'm glad to see you moving in the direction of intellectual honesty on this front. Acknowledging that torture of animals is wrong and doing it anyway is a deep weakness of will; an inability of one's intellect to overcome their immediate impulses.
Killing shrimp is amoral but killing an unborn fetus is totally fine. I cannot understand people who fret about the death of crustaceans but view a 25 week old fetus as unworthy of saving from death.
Killing neither one is a big deal, I’m just against the torture.
If you had to choose between torture and death for yourself, which would you choose?
Most humans, when confronted with extreme pain, don’t actually choose death. John McCain and other Vietnam POWs, for example, were brutalized for years, but few chose suicide.
I haven’t seen any anti-torture tirades from the abortion supporters crowd.
You don't know what amoral means. When it refers to actions, it means "laying outside the sphere of morality". Such as taking a walk, it is neither moral or immoral, it's not relevant to morality.
Indeed, most people are hypocrites. What’s new?
I missed Richard Hanania the troll. More like this, please!
I had no idea that cutting off a shrimp’s eyestalks resulted in faster breeding. An educational tidbit!
There are a lot more 10s with the lights off, eh?
What do you think about Bryan Caplan's "Bug Argument" against the (dis)value of animal pain?
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/10/bugs.html
(his exchange with Heumer about this argument is great)
Caplan's arguments are total nonsense. I wish he would reconsider them.
Caplan’s argument is valid. If any nervous system that feels pain matters, the Bug Lives Matter, and we should keep both eating and walking around to a minimum. And driving is right out.
It seems wrong to cause extreme amounts of pain and suffering for the sake of minor benefits to oneself. But eating and walking around—at a minimum—are not minor benefits. And killing bugs while driving is not analogous to factory farming, as Humer argued. Killing bugs while driving produces vastly less suffering than insect farming, and it's even better for bugs to be dead.
All or nothing thinking, my man.
Bryan Caplan endorses child labor and thinks that alcohol addiction is a revealed preference. I think he lives in a wonderful reality that is not terribly similar to the actual world I live in.
It is not terribly dissimilar either, literally every great thinker has a few out there ideas as perceived by the populace at large.
maybe, but you should read the actual argument
Considering that Caplan's argument seems to be all about dismissing arguments based on *who* says them, rather than the actual content of the argument... I think the response from Forrest is rather appropriate.
BB has a good response to it:
https://benthams.substack.com/p/taboo-morality
This was a nice and funny read. Also, don't let tax deductibility paperwork prevent you from donating. You can always donate and choose not to tax deduct!
It seems to me that your relationship with the anti-meat cause is an excellent example of the feebleness of trying to have morality without religion.
You've written repeatedly about how horrible it is to raise amd/or catch animals for meat amd how we should all be paying way more attention to their suffering than we actually do... and yet your beliefs haven't actually impelled you to stop eating meat.
Meanwhile there are somewhere like a billion devout Hindus and Buddhists in the world who are actually vegetarians... and whose ancestors in the faith have been vegetarians for thousands of years... who suffering don't have anywhere near as much intellectual knowledge about animal suffering as you do, but who avoid eating animals anyway because it's what their religious tradition teaches them to do. (Nor is this attitude wholly absent in the West - just read Pythagoras' speech in Book XV of the Metamorphoses - Pythagoras was of course a very religious man who believed in the immortality of the soul).
Perhaps what you really need to do is exchange your feeble intellectual objections to harming shrimp for a robust metaphysical belief that, if you're not careful about your karma, you might be reborn as one.
Great decision, Richard. I can only assume that each of those 1,500,000 shrimp considers you to be a gentleman and scholar.
You're one of the good ones, Hanania. No doubt, come the shrimp revolution, you and your loved ones will be spared!
Can a utilitarian explain why you care about the 1000th shrimp suffering as much as you care about the 1st shrimp?
Intuitively, how much I value each shrimp's welfare drops exponentially with the number of shrimps.
Congrats!