I find this completely and utterly ridiculous. From a relative outsider perspective, letting an ant problem get out of hand because you have moral reservations about killing them is the sort of thing that’s the problem with people in this community. For one, letting the problem foster means that they probably had time to reproduce, meaning you ended up killing more than if you had just killed them at the beginning. Second, I think that most of the moral value of ants is in the fact that humans appreciate them, by far the greatest moral suffering here is your suffering at having killed them. The time spent thinking about this could have been spent making money and donating to save the ants, or any of the other things that are more valuable than they are. Considering the inevitability of suffering in our world is something that makes sense to do once a year, when you make sure that your life plan is right, the opportunity cost in thinking about the ant’s suffering is bigger than the moral cost of their suffering.
I’m perplexed by the appeal to opportunity cost because it seems unlikely that in the world where OP decided not to care about the ants, he would have used the time to make money to donate to effective charities instead. More broadly, I worry that it’s easy to appeal to opportunity cost without demanding sufficient rigor of the alternative. For instance, people often say that avoiding causing animal harm through poultry and egg consumption is inefficient without seriously investigating the counterfactual. At least some of these people are wrong about how much suffering their decisions could avert and how little the changes would cost them.
It seems to me much safer to lay the burden of proof on the moral indulgence—at very least, the burden of proof shouldn’t always rest on the demands of conscience.
>It seems to me much safer to lay the burden of proof on the moral indulgence—at very least, the burden of proof shouldn’t always rest on the demands of conscience.
I think I disagree. It seems to me that moral claims don’t exist in a vacuum, they require a combination of asserted values and contextualizing facts. If the contextualizing facts are not established, the asserted value is irrelevant. For instance, I might claim that we have a moral duty not to brush our hair because it produces static electricity, and static electricity is a painful experience for electrons. The asserted value is preventing suffering, which you might agree with, but my contextualizing facts are highly disputable, so you’re unlikely to shave your head and never wear another wool sweater just to be on the safe side.
It seems to me the burden of proof lies with the side making a claim further away from the socially established starting point, not necessarily either the conscience claimer or the indulgence claimer. In the case of animal welfare, I think most people already believe all the facts they need to conclude that harming chickens is morally bad and thus it makes more sense to ask them to justify the special pleading on behalf of the poultry industry.
It seems to me that a great many problems that we humans have come from this type of moral ‘arrogance?‘. That is, assuming ourselves to be the most important moral agents on this planet and disregarding the preferences of any other beings. It’s easy to ignore whichever being is right there in front of you, and conjure up a story about how you are doing a more important thing somewhere else. But actually, that specific being is the only agent you can reasonably have any hope of morally impacting at that moment in time.
E.g., this type of attitude lets you to do things like ignore your family because you are trying so hard to ‘save the world’. Furthermore, the type of mental state that makes Jospeh reflect like this is inherently wholesome I would say. If we’d all continuously gave as much thought to ants as Joseph has done here, that would at least mean we’d all have much more compassionate states of mind as a baseline and the world would be in a much better place overall.
Personally, I do go out of my way to save insects. Sometimes when I want to shower there is a spider in the shower basin which would die if I turn on the water. I do tend to pick them up and set them outside. I’m a completely moral prick in other ways, but this type of behaviour and thinking comes from a state of mind that finds the wellbeing of other beings important, i.e., compassion, and I hope to become a more compassionate person.
I completely agree about compassion, and I regularly dedicate a part of my meditation practice to metta, but there is a tension here between cultivating a compassionate mind-state and being effective enough in the world to act on that compassion, I think OP’s situation is firmly in the “too compassionate” camp. The mind-states of Tibetan monks in Himalayan caves might be sublime beyond belief, their minds containing gigantic amounts of compassion, yet they have no meaningful effect on the world outside their cave. Saving insects to cultivate compassion in yourself does make sense, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that saving them is the best thing to do from a moral stand-point.
One human’s moral arrogance is another human’s Occam’s razor. The evidence suggests to me, on grounds of both observation (very small organisms demonstrate very simple behaviour not consistent with a high level awareness) and theory (very small organisms have extremely minimal sensory/nervous architecture to contain qualia) that dust-mites are morally irrelevant, and the chance that I am mistaken in my opinion amounts to a Pascal’s Mugging.
I find this completely and utterly ridiculous. From a relative outsider perspective, letting an ant problem get out of hand because you have moral reservations about killing them is the sort of thing that’s the problem with people in this community. For one, letting the problem foster means that they probably had time to reproduce, meaning you ended up killing more than if you had just killed them at the beginning. Second, I think that most of the moral value of ants is in the fact that humans appreciate them, by far the greatest moral suffering here is your suffering at having killed them. The time spent thinking about this could have been spent making money and donating to save the ants, or any of the other things that are more valuable than they are. Considering the inevitability of suffering in our world is something that makes sense to do once a year, when you make sure that your life plan is right, the opportunity cost in thinking about the ant’s suffering is bigger than the moral cost of their suffering.
I’m perplexed by the appeal to opportunity cost because it seems unlikely that in the world where OP decided not to care about the ants, he would have used the time to make money to donate to effective charities instead. More broadly, I worry that it’s easy to appeal to opportunity cost without demanding sufficient rigor of the alternative. For instance, people often say that avoiding causing animal harm through poultry and egg consumption is inefficient without seriously investigating the counterfactual. At least some of these people are wrong about how much suffering their decisions could avert and how little the changes would cost them.
It seems to me much safer to lay the burden of proof on the moral indulgence—at very least, the burden of proof shouldn’t always rest on the demands of conscience.
>It seems to me much safer to lay the burden of proof on the moral indulgence—at very least, the burden of proof shouldn’t always rest on the demands of conscience.
I think I disagree. It seems to me that moral claims don’t exist in a vacuum, they require a combination of asserted values and contextualizing facts. If the contextualizing facts are not established, the asserted value is irrelevant. For instance, I might claim that we have a moral duty not to brush our hair because it produces static electricity, and static electricity is a painful experience for electrons. The asserted value is preventing suffering, which you might agree with, but my contextualizing facts are highly disputable, so you’re unlikely to shave your head and never wear another wool sweater just to be on the safe side.
It seems to me the burden of proof lies with the side making a claim further away from the socially established starting point, not necessarily either the conscience claimer or the indulgence claimer. In the case of animal welfare, I think most people already believe all the facts they need to conclude that harming chickens is morally bad and thus it makes more sense to ask them to justify the special pleading on behalf of the poultry industry.
It seems to me that a great many problems that we humans have come from this type of moral ‘arrogance?‘. That is, assuming ourselves to be the most important moral agents on this planet and disregarding the preferences of any other beings. It’s easy to ignore whichever being is right there in front of you, and conjure up a story about how you are doing a more important thing somewhere else. But actually, that specific being is the only agent you can reasonably have any hope of morally impacting at that moment in time.
E.g., this type of attitude lets you to do things like ignore your family because you are trying so hard to ‘save the world’. Furthermore, the type of mental state that makes Jospeh reflect like this is inherently wholesome I would say. If we’d all continuously gave as much thought to ants as Joseph has done here, that would at least mean we’d all have much more compassionate states of mind as a baseline and the world would be in a much better place overall.
Personally, I do go out of my way to save insects. Sometimes when I want to shower there is a spider in the shower basin which would die if I turn on the water. I do tend to pick them up and set them outside. I’m a completely moral prick in other ways, but this type of behaviour and thinking comes from a state of mind that finds the wellbeing of other beings important, i.e., compassion, and I hope to become a more compassionate person.
I completely agree about compassion, and I regularly dedicate a part of my meditation practice to metta, but there is a tension here between cultivating a compassionate mind-state and being effective enough in the world to act on that compassion, I think OP’s situation is firmly in the “too compassionate” camp. The mind-states of Tibetan monks in Himalayan caves might be sublime beyond belief, their minds containing gigantic amounts of compassion, yet they have no meaningful effect on the world outside their cave. Saving insects to cultivate compassion in yourself does make sense, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that saving them is the best thing to do from a moral stand-point.
One human’s moral arrogance is another human’s Occam’s razor. The evidence suggests to me, on grounds of both observation (very small organisms demonstrate very simple behaviour not consistent with a high level awareness) and theory (very small organisms have extremely minimal sensory/nervous architecture to contain qualia) that dust-mites are morally irrelevant, and the chance that I am mistaken in my opinion amounts to a Pascal’s Mugging.