Thanks for the continued dialogue, happy to jump back in :)
I think it’s very reasonable to take a “what would they consent to” perspective, and I do think this sort of set up would likely lead you to a world where humane executions and lives off the factory farm were approved of. But I guess I’d turn back to my originial point that this sort of relation seems apt to encourage a certain relation to the animal that I think will be naturally unstable and will naturally undermine a caring relationship with that animal.
Perhaps I just have a dash too much of deontology in me, but if you asked me to choose between a world where many people had kids but they ate them in the end, or a world of significantly fewer kids but where there was no such chowing down at the end of their life, I’d be apt to choose the latter. But deontology isn’t exactly the right frame because again, I think this will just sort of naturally encourage relationships that aren’t whole, relationships where you have to do the complicated emotional gymnastics of saying that you love an animal like their your friend one day and then chopping their head from their body the next and savoring the flavor of the flesh on the grill.
Maybe my view of love is limited, but I also think nearly every example you’d give me of people who’ve viewed animals as “sacred or people” but still ate them likely had deficient relationship to the animal. Take goats and the Islamic faith, for example. It’s not fully the “sacred” category like cows for Hindus, but this animal has come to take a ritualistic role in various celebrations of the relgion, and when I’ve talked to Muslims about what the reason for this treatment, or things being Halal are, they will normally point out that this is a more humane relation to have with the animal. The meat being “clean” is supposed to imply, to some degree, “moral”, but I think this relation isn’t quite there. I’ve seen throat cuttings from Eid which involve younger members of the family being brought into the fold by serving as axeman, often taking multiple strikes to severe the head in a way of slaughter that seems quite far from caring. One friend of mine, who grew up in India with his family raising a number of goats for this occassion, often saw the children loving the goats and having names for them and such. But on Eid this would stop, and I think what the tradition left my friend with is a far more friendly view to meat consumption than he would have developed otherwise.
My last stab at a response might be to bring up an analogy to slavery. I take the equivalent of your position here to be “look, if each slave can look at the potential life he will hold and prefer that life to no life at all, then isn’t that better than him not existing at all?” And to me it seems like I’d be again called to say “no”. We can create the life of a slave, we can create the life of a cow who we plan to eat in the end, but I’d rather just call off the suffering all together and refuse to create beings that will be shackled to such a life. It’s not a perfect analogy, but I hope it illustrates that we can deny the category entirely, and that that denial can open us up to a better future, one without slaves who prefer their life to not existing, but fellow citizens, one without farmed animals who prefer their life to not existing, but of pets we welcome happily into our families. That is the sort of world I hope for.
I wrote this post on and off over the course of a morning, and towards the end of it realized:
I’m reading you as saying “eating others is inherently not ok” but I would like it to be ok or not contingent on some other facts (like the absence of suffering, or hypothetical net preference, or the ability of people to not have their souls corrupted by carnivorism, or so on) and the generalization of that reasoning to not have terrible consequences elsewhere. (For example, if you think pleasure can’t outweigh suffering, then it seems like having kids at all is indefensible, which is a self-extinguishing moral position; if you think something that taken seriously implies it’s not even ok to eat plants, then that’s even more self-extinguishing.)
I’ll still post the rest of the comment I wrote, which responds to you in more detail, but that seems like the most important piece.
relationships where you have to do the complicated emotional gymnastics of saying that you love an animal like their your friend one day and then chopping their head from their body the next and savoring the flavor of the flesh on the grill.
There’s a tumblr post where someone talks about immediately feeling the shepherd impulse when interacting with sheep, a bunch of people like the post, someone points out “how many of you eat lamb”, and then the original poster responds with “The ancient shepherds I’m referencing also ate lamb lol”
My sense is that there’s a few ways to take this. One of them is “actually the emotional gymnastics is not that complicated!”, and another is “actually those ancient shepherds also probably abused their wives and thought slavery was fine when it happened to someone else and mistreated their animals, according to our standards; parents caring about their children / guardians caring about their wards is really not sufficient to guarantee good outcomes or license those relationships.” I infer your position is closer to the latter but it really feels like it should be possible to have gains from trade, here.
[And, like, one of the downsides of specialization is that it drives people both unusually interested and unusually disinterested in animal welfare into the ‘works with animals’ business, which is probably how we got into this factory farming mess in the first place.]
My last stab at a response might be to bring up an analogy to slavery. I take the equivalent of your position here to be “look, if each slave can look at the potential life he will hold and prefer that life to no life at all, then isn’t that better than him not existing at all?” And to me it seems like I’d be again called to say “no”.
I think one of the main ways my libertarian leanings show up is by being okay with people being able to pick worse things that are cheaper. Let people live in tiny houses and work low-paying jobs and sell their bodies and take high-interest loans if that’s the right tradeoff for them; removing their options generally isn’t helping them.
I think that could extend all the way to slavery, altho it’s hard to imagine situations where that actually makes sense. In general, I think children have only a little bit of debt to their parents (certainly not a lifetime of labor and ownership of all their descendants), which is the closest analogy. Probably more realistic is something like conservatorship, where someone is deemed incompetent to handle their financial or medical affairs, and someone else makes those decisions for them; should people be allowed to voluntarily enter a conservatorship?
A fictional version of this shows up in a video game called The Outer Worlds, where a star system is colonized by a group of corporations, where the colonists are a mixture of ‘people who put up the capital for the voyage’ and ‘people agreeing to come as indentured servants’, which leads to a very stratified society on the other side, which predictably starts to decay as the colonists have children with huge differences in inherited wealth. Even if Alice decided it was worth being a laborer somewhere new rather than being stuck on Earth, her daughter Carol might not feel like she’s bought into this situation and want to violently redistribute things, and it’s not obvious that Alice should be able to sell Carol’s compliance with society.
But you could imagine that, if Alice can’t bind Carol, the colony doesn’t go thru, and Carol never comes to exist, and on net Carol is sad about that outcome, and would have preferred having been born and bound. It feels like an actually thorny question to figure out what tradeoffs precisely make sense, especially because this is a collective bargaining issue (it’s not like existing societies get unanimous consent from their participants!) and the empirical tradeoffs are all hypothetical. [My actual expectation is that we get material abundance before we get any interstellar colonies, and so it’s not important to get this question right because it’ll never come up.]
That is the sort of world I hope for.
To be clear, this is a world without cats and snakes and other obligate carnivores, right? Or is the plan to first figure out synthetic sources of the various nutrients they need?
[It will also have many fewer other animals—I think on average something like a third of a cow is alive because of my beef consumption—but depending on what you think the limiting factors are, that may mean replacement with fractional vegan humans instead, which is probably an upgrade.]
Achilles in Vietnam has a thesis that ancient warriors had a lot of respect for their enemy, but modern armies tend to position enemies as weak and low-status. Those give death and losing a very different valence. Obviously you prefer winning, but if you lose, well at least some of you got to die gloriously. This is pretty much lost today, and makes losing or watching your friends die in battle feel much worse.
This attitude[1] seems really easy to transfer to hunting, which takes a lot of skill and some risk. I imagine that as you move from true hunting of dangerous animals, to pastoralism, to domesticated sheep, to factory farming you lose more and more respect for the animals, and this enables them to treat them worse.
So it seems plausible that ancient shepherd did have more respect for animals while killing them, and this showed up in material ways, although probably that representation is also romanticized.
Mmm okay a bit confused by the thrust of the first bit. Is it that you wish to set yourself apart from my view because you see it unavoidably leading to untenable positions (like self-extinguishing)?
Jumping to the rest of it, I liked how you put the latter option for the positioning of the shepard. I’m not sure the feeling out of the “shepard impulse” is something where the full sort of appreciation I think is important has come out.
But I think you’re right to point towards a general libertarian viewpoint as a crux here, because I’m relatively willing to reason through what’s good and bad for the community and work towards designing a world more in line with that vision, even if it’s more choice constrained.
But yeah, the society is a good example to help us figure out where to draw that line. It makes me most immediately wonder: is there anything so bad that you’d want to restrict people from doing it, even if they voluntarily entered into it? Is creating lives one of the key goods to you, such that most forms of lives will be worth just existing?
To answer your last question, it’s the latter, a world where synthetic alternatives and work on ecological stability yields a possibility of a future for predators who no longer must kill for survival. It would certainly mean a lot less cows and chickens exist, but my own conclusions from the above questions lead me to thinking this would be a better world.
Thanks for the continued dialogue, happy to jump back in :)
I think it’s very reasonable to take a “what would they consent to” perspective, and I do think this sort of set up would likely lead you to a world where humane executions and lives off the factory farm were approved of. But I guess I’d turn back to my originial point that this sort of relation seems apt to encourage a certain relation to the animal that I think will be naturally unstable and will naturally undermine a caring relationship with that animal.
Perhaps I just have a dash too much of deontology in me, but if you asked me to choose between a world where many people had kids but they ate them in the end, or a world of significantly fewer kids but where there was no such chowing down at the end of their life, I’d be apt to choose the latter. But deontology isn’t exactly the right frame because again, I think this will just sort of naturally encourage relationships that aren’t whole, relationships where you have to do the complicated emotional gymnastics of saying that you love an animal like their your friend one day and then chopping their head from their body the next and savoring the flavor of the flesh on the grill.
Maybe my view of love is limited, but I also think nearly every example you’d give me of people who’ve viewed animals as “sacred or people” but still ate them likely had deficient relationship to the animal. Take goats and the Islamic faith, for example. It’s not fully the “sacred” category like cows for Hindus, but this animal has come to take a ritualistic role in various celebrations of the relgion, and when I’ve talked to Muslims about what the reason for this treatment, or things being Halal are, they will normally point out that this is a more humane relation to have with the animal. The meat being “clean” is supposed to imply, to some degree, “moral”, but I think this relation isn’t quite there. I’ve seen throat cuttings from Eid which involve younger members of the family being brought into the fold by serving as axeman, often taking multiple strikes to severe the head in a way of slaughter that seems quite far from caring. One friend of mine, who grew up in India with his family raising a number of goats for this occassion, often saw the children loving the goats and having names for them and such. But on Eid this would stop, and I think what the tradition left my friend with is a far more friendly view to meat consumption than he would have developed otherwise.
My last stab at a response might be to bring up an analogy to slavery. I take the equivalent of your position here to be “look, if each slave can look at the potential life he will hold and prefer that life to no life at all, then isn’t that better than him not existing at all?” And to me it seems like I’d be again called to say “no”. We can create the life of a slave, we can create the life of a cow who we plan to eat in the end, but I’d rather just call off the suffering all together and refuse to create beings that will be shackled to such a life. It’s not a perfect analogy, but I hope it illustrates that we can deny the category entirely, and that that denial can open us up to a better future, one without slaves who prefer their life to not existing, but fellow citizens, one without farmed animals who prefer their life to not existing, but of pets we welcome happily into our families. That is the sort of world I hope for.
I wrote this post on and off over the course of a morning, and towards the end of it realized:
I’m reading you as saying “eating others is inherently not ok” but I would like it to be ok or not contingent on some other facts (like the absence of suffering, or hypothetical net preference, or the ability of people to not have their souls corrupted by carnivorism, or so on) and the generalization of that reasoning to not have terrible consequences elsewhere. (For example, if you think pleasure can’t outweigh suffering, then it seems like having kids at all is indefensible, which is a self-extinguishing moral position; if you think something that taken seriously implies it’s not even ok to eat plants, then that’s even more self-extinguishing.)
I’ll still post the rest of the comment I wrote, which responds to you in more detail, but that seems like the most important piece.
There’s a tumblr post where someone talks about immediately feeling the shepherd impulse when interacting with sheep, a bunch of people like the post, someone points out “how many of you eat lamb”, and then the original poster responds with “The ancient shepherds I’m referencing also ate lamb lol”
My sense is that there’s a few ways to take this. One of them is “actually the emotional gymnastics is not that complicated!”, and another is “actually those ancient shepherds also probably abused their wives and thought slavery was fine when it happened to someone else and mistreated their animals, according to our standards; parents caring about their children / guardians caring about their wards is really not sufficient to guarantee good outcomes or license those relationships.” I infer your position is closer to the latter but it really feels like it should be possible to have gains from trade, here.
[And, like, one of the downsides of specialization is that it drives people both unusually interested and unusually disinterested in animal welfare into the ‘works with animals’ business, which is probably how we got into this factory farming mess in the first place.]
I think one of the main ways my libertarian leanings show up is by being okay with people being able to pick worse things that are cheaper. Let people live in tiny houses and work low-paying jobs and sell their bodies and take high-interest loans if that’s the right tradeoff for them; removing their options generally isn’t helping them.
I think that could extend all the way to slavery, altho it’s hard to imagine situations where that actually makes sense. In general, I think children have only a little bit of debt to their parents (certainly not a lifetime of labor and ownership of all their descendants), which is the closest analogy. Probably more realistic is something like conservatorship, where someone is deemed incompetent to handle their financial or medical affairs, and someone else makes those decisions for them; should people be allowed to voluntarily enter a conservatorship?
A fictional version of this shows up in a video game called The Outer Worlds, where a star system is colonized by a group of corporations, where the colonists are a mixture of ‘people who put up the capital for the voyage’ and ‘people agreeing to come as indentured servants’, which leads to a very stratified society on the other side, which predictably starts to decay as the colonists have children with huge differences in inherited wealth. Even if Alice decided it was worth being a laborer somewhere new rather than being stuck on Earth, her daughter Carol might not feel like she’s bought into this situation and want to violently redistribute things, and it’s not obvious that Alice should be able to sell Carol’s compliance with society.
But you could imagine that, if Alice can’t bind Carol, the colony doesn’t go thru, and Carol never comes to exist, and on net Carol is sad about that outcome, and would have preferred having been born and bound. It feels like an actually thorny question to figure out what tradeoffs precisely make sense, especially because this is a collective bargaining issue (it’s not like existing societies get unanimous consent from their participants!) and the empirical tradeoffs are all hypothetical. [My actual expectation is that we get material abundance before we get any interstellar colonies, and so it’s not important to get this question right because it’ll never come up.]
To be clear, this is a world without cats and snakes and other obligate carnivores, right? Or is the plan to first figure out synthetic sources of the various nutrients they need?
[It will also have many fewer other animals—I think on average something like a third of a cow is alive because of my beef consumption—but depending on what you think the limiting factors are, that may mean replacement with fractional vegan humans instead, which is probably an upgrade.]
Re: ancient shepherds.
Achilles in Vietnam has a thesis that ancient warriors had a lot of respect for their enemy, but modern armies tend to position enemies as weak and low-status. Those give death and losing a very different valence. Obviously you prefer winning, but if you lose, well at least some of you got to die gloriously. This is pretty much lost today, and makes losing or watching your friends die in battle feel much worse.
This attitude[1] seems really easy to transfer to hunting, which takes a lot of skill and some risk. I imagine that as you move from true hunting of dangerous animals, to pastoralism, to domesticated sheep, to factory farming you lose more and more respect for the animals, and this enables them to treat them worse.
So it seems plausible that ancient shepherd did have more respect for animals while killing them, and this showed up in material ways, although probably that representation is also romanticized.
I don’t know if the book’s claims are true
Ancient warriors enslaved their captives.
And that was also viewed fairly differently than chattel slavery.
Mmm okay a bit confused by the thrust of the first bit. Is it that you wish to set yourself apart from my view because you see it unavoidably leading to untenable positions (like self-extinguishing)?
Jumping to the rest of it, I liked how you put the latter option for the positioning of the shepard. I’m not sure the feeling out of the “shepard impulse” is something where the full sort of appreciation I think is important has come out.
But I think you’re right to point towards a general libertarian viewpoint as a crux here, because I’m relatively willing to reason through what’s good and bad for the community and work towards designing a world more in line with that vision, even if it’s more choice constrained.
But yeah, the society is a good example to help us figure out where to draw that line. It makes me most immediately wonder: is there anything so bad that you’d want to restrict people from doing it, even if they voluntarily entered into it? Is creating lives one of the key goods to you, such that most forms of lives will be worth just existing?
To answer your last question, it’s the latter, a world where synthetic alternatives and work on ecological stability yields a possibility of a future for predators who no longer must kill for survival. It would certainly mean a lot less cows and chickens exist, but my own conclusions from the above questions lead me to thinking this would be a better world.