All I can say is that I don’t understand why intelligence is relevant for whether you care about suffering.
Intelligence is relevant for the extent to which I expect alleviating suffering to have secondary positive effects. Since I expect most of the value of suffering alleviation to come through secondary effects on the far future, I care much more about human suffering than animal suffering.
As far as I can tell, animal suffering and human suffering are comparably important from a utility-function standpoint, but the difference in EV between alleviating human and animal suffering is huge—the difference in potential impact on the future between a suffering human vs a non-suffering human is massive compared to that between a suffering animal and a non-suffering animal.
Basically, it seems like alleviating one human’s suffering has more potential to help the far future than alleviating one animal’s suffering. A human who might be incapacitated to say, deal with x-risk might become helpful, while an animal is still not going to be consequential on that front.
So my opinion winds up being something like “We should help the animals, but not now, or even soon, because other issues are more important and more pressing”.
I agree with this point entirely—but at the same time, becoming vegetarian is such a cheap change in lifestyle (given an industrialized society) that you can have your cake and eat it too. Action—such as devoting time / money to animal rights groups—has to be ballanced against other action—helping humans—but that doesn’t apply very strongly to innaction—not eating meat.
You can come up with costs—social, personal, etc. to being vegetarian—but remember to weigh those costs on the right scale. And most of those costs disappear if you merely reduce meat consumption, rather than eliminate it outright.
You can come up with costs—social, personal, etc. to being vegetarian—but remember to weigh those costs on the right scale.
By saying this, yoiu’re trying to gloss over the very reason why becoming vegetarian is not a cheap change. Human beings are wired so as not to be able to ignore having to make many minor decisions or face many minor changes, and the fact that such things cannot be ignored means that being vegetarian actually has a high cost which involves being mentally nickel-and-dimed over and over again. It’s a cheap change in the sense that you can do it without paying lots of money or spending lots of time, but that isn’t sufficient to make the choice cheap in all meaningful senses.
Or to put it another way, being a vegetarian “just to try it” is like running a shareware program that pops up a nag screen every five minutes and occasionally forces you to type a random phrase in order to continue to run. Sure, it’s light on your pocketbook, doesn’t take much time, and reasding the nag screens and typing the phrases isn’t difficult, but that’s beside the point.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this conversation, that’s a fully general argument—it can be applied to every change one might possibly make in one’s behavior.
Let’s enumerate the costs, rather than just saying “there are costs.”
Money wise, you save or break even.
It has no time cost in much of the US (most restaurants have vegetarian options).
The social cost depends on your situation—if you have people who cook for you, then you have to explain the change to them (in Washington state, this cost is tiny—people are understanding. In Texas, it is expensive).
The mental cost is difficult to discuss in a universal way. I found them to be rather small in my own case. Other people claim them to be quite large. But “I don’t want to change my behavior because changing behavior is hard” is not terribly convincing.
Your discounting of non-human life has to be rather extreme for “I will have to remind myself to change my behavior” to out weigh an immediate, direct and calculable reduction in world suffering.
This is false. Unless you eat steak or other expensive meats on a regular basis, meat is quite cheap. For example, my meat consumption is mostly chicken, assorted processed meats (salamis, frankfurters, and other sorts of sausages, mainly, but also things like pelmeni), fish (not the expensive kind), and the occasional pork (canned) and beef (cheap cuts). None of these things are pricy; I am getting a lot of protein (and fat and other good/necessary stuff) for my money.
It has no time cost in much of the US (most restaurants have vegetarian options).
Do you eat at restaurants all the time? Learning how to cook the new things you’re now eating instead of meat is a time cost.
Also, there are costs you don’t mention: for instance, a sudden, radical change in diet may have unforeseen health consequences. If the transition causes me to feel hungry all the time, that would be disastrous; hunger has an extreme negative effect on my mental performance, and as a software engineer, that is not the slightest bit acceptable. Furthermore, for someone with food allergies, like me, trying new foods is not without risk.
it can be applied to every change one might possibly make in one’s behavior.
And it would be correct to deny that a change that would possibly be made to one’s behavior is “such a cheap change” that we don’t need to weigh the cost of the change very much.
Your discounting of non-human life has to be rather extreme for “I will have to remind myself to change my behavior” to out weigh an immediate, direct and calculable reduction in world suffering.
That only applies to someone who already agrees with you about animal suffering to a sufficient degree that he should just become a vegetarian immediately anyway. Otherwise it’s not all that calculable.
Intelligence is relevant for the extent to which I expect alleviating suffering to have secondary positive effects. Since I expect most of the value of suffering alleviation to come through secondary effects on the far future, I care much more about human suffering than animal suffering.
As far as I can tell, animal suffering and human suffering are comparably important from a utility-function standpoint, but the difference in EV between alleviating human and animal suffering is huge—the difference in potential impact on the future between a suffering human vs a non-suffering human is massive compared to that between a suffering animal and a non-suffering animal.
Basically, it seems like alleviating one human’s suffering has more potential to help the far future than alleviating one animal’s suffering. A human who might be incapacitated to say, deal with x-risk might become helpful, while an animal is still not going to be consequential on that front.
So my opinion winds up being something like “We should help the animals, but not now, or even soon, because other issues are more important and more pressing”.
I agree with this point entirely—but at the same time, becoming vegetarian is such a cheap change in lifestyle (given an industrialized society) that you can have your cake and eat it too. Action—such as devoting time / money to animal rights groups—has to be ballanced against other action—helping humans—but that doesn’t apply very strongly to innaction—not eating meat.
You can come up with costs—social, personal, etc. to being vegetarian—but remember to weigh those costs on the right scale. And most of those costs disappear if you merely reduce meat consumption, rather than eliminate it outright.
By saying this, yoiu’re trying to gloss over the very reason why becoming vegetarian is not a cheap change. Human beings are wired so as not to be able to ignore having to make many minor decisions or face many minor changes, and the fact that such things cannot be ignored means that being vegetarian actually has a high cost which involves being mentally nickel-and-dimed over and over again. It’s a cheap change in the sense that you can do it without paying lots of money or spending lots of time, but that isn’t sufficient to make the choice cheap in all meaningful senses.
Or to put it another way, being a vegetarian “just to try it” is like running a shareware program that pops up a nag screen every five minutes and occasionally forces you to type a random phrase in order to continue to run. Sure, it’s light on your pocketbook, doesn’t take much time, and reasding the nag screens and typing the phrases isn’t difficult, but that’s beside the point.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this conversation, that’s a fully general argument—it can be applied to every change one might possibly make in one’s behavior.
Let’s enumerate the costs, rather than just saying “there are costs.”
Money wise, you save or break even.
It has no time cost in much of the US (most restaurants have vegetarian options).
The social cost depends on your situation—if you have people who cook for you, then you have to explain the change to them (in Washington state, this cost is tiny—people are understanding. In Texas, it is expensive).
The mental cost is difficult to discuss in a universal way. I found them to be rather small in my own case. Other people claim them to be quite large. But “I don’t want to change my behavior because changing behavior is hard” is not terribly convincing.
Your discounting of non-human life has to be rather extreme for “I will have to remind myself to change my behavior” to out weigh an immediate, direct and calculable reduction in world suffering.
This is false. Unless you eat steak or other expensive meats on a regular basis, meat is quite cheap. For example, my meat consumption is mostly chicken, assorted processed meats (salamis, frankfurters, and other sorts of sausages, mainly, but also things like pelmeni), fish (not the expensive kind), and the occasional pork (canned) and beef (cheap cuts). None of these things are pricy; I am getting a lot of protein (and fat and other good/necessary stuff) for my money.
Do you eat at restaurants all the time? Learning how to cook the new things you’re now eating instead of meat is a time cost.
Also, there are costs you don’t mention: for instance, a sudden, radical change in diet may have unforeseen health consequences. If the transition causes me to feel hungry all the time, that would be disastrous; hunger has an extreme negative effect on my mental performance, and as a software engineer, that is not the slightest bit acceptable. Furthermore, for someone with food allergies, like me, trying new foods is not without risk.
And it would be correct to deny that a change that would possibly be made to one’s behavior is “such a cheap change” that we don’t need to weigh the cost of the change very much.
That only applies to someone who already agrees with you about animal suffering to a sufficient degree that he should just become a vegetarian immediately anyway. Otherwise it’s not all that calculable.