I’ve got Good and Real on hold at the library. :) Currently working through Cialdini’s Influence, muahaha...
Drescher’s theory of ethics and decision making is, “You should do what you [self-interestedly] wish all similarly situated beings would do” on the basis that “if you would regard it as the optimal thing to do, then-counterfactually they would too”.
He claims it implies you should cast a wide net in terms of which beings you grant moral status, but not too wide: you draw the line at beings that don’t make choices (in the sense of evaluating alternatives and picking one for the sake of a goal), as that breaks a critical symmetry between you and them.
This sounds to me like a modernized version of Kantian deontology… interesting.
Where I really trip up with this argument is in the ‘granting moral status’ step. What does it mean if I decide to say ‘a fish has no moral status?’
Let’s do a reductio. Say fish have no moral status. Does that mean it’s permissible to torture them, say by superstimulating pain centres in their brains? I don’t think so, even if the torture achieved some small useful end.
I don’t think suffering should be taken out of the equation in favour of symmetries. The latter have no obvious moral weight.
I don’t have a good answer for the rest of your comment, but I can answer this:
Where I really trip up with this argument is in the ‘granting moral status’ step. What does it mean if I decide to say ‘a fish has no moral status?’
Drescher does a good job of making sure that nothing depends on choice of terminology. In this case, “a fish has no moral status” cashes out to “I should not count a fish’s disutility/pain/etc. against the optimality of actions I am considering.”
You can take “should” to mean anything under Drescher’s account, and, as long as you’re consistent with its usage, it has non-absurd implications. Under common parlance, you can take “should” to mean “the action that I will choose” or “the action I regard as optimal”. Then, you can see how this sense of the term applies:
“If I would regard it as optimal to kill weaker beings, then-counterfactually beings who are stronger than me would regard it as optimal to kill me, to the extent that their relation to me mirrors my relation to the weaker beings under consideration.”
I didn’t give a full exposition of how exactly you apply such reasoning to fish, but under this account, you would need to look at what is counterfactually entailed by your reasoning to cause pain to fish.
I’ve got Good and Real on hold at the library. :) Currently working through Cialdini’s Influence, muahaha...
This sounds to me like a modernized version of Kantian deontology… interesting.
Where I really trip up with this argument is in the ‘granting moral status’ step. What does it mean if I decide to say ‘a fish has no moral status?’
Let’s do a reductio. Say fish have no moral status. Does that mean it’s permissible to torture them, say by superstimulating pain centres in their brains? I don’t think so, even if the torture achieved some small useful end.
I don’t think suffering should be taken out of the equation in favour of symmetries. The latter have no obvious moral weight.
I don’t have a good answer for the rest of your comment, but I can answer this:
Drescher does a good job of making sure that nothing depends on choice of terminology. In this case, “a fish has no moral status” cashes out to “I should not count a fish’s disutility/pain/etc. against the optimality of actions I am considering.”
You can take “should” to mean anything under Drescher’s account, and, as long as you’re consistent with its usage, it has non-absurd implications. Under common parlance, you can take “should” to mean “the action that I will choose” or “the action I regard as optimal”. Then, you can see how this sense of the term applies:
“If I would regard it as optimal to kill weaker beings, then-counterfactually beings who are stronger than me would regard it as optimal to kill me, to the extent that their relation to me mirrors my relation to the weaker beings under consideration.”
I didn’t give a full exposition of how exactly you apply such reasoning to fish, but under this account, you would need to look at what is counterfactually entailed by your reasoning to cause pain to fish.