It's at this point you'd probably want to go read David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider The Lobster", an assignment he took from (I shit you not) Gourmet Magazine, which begins with a sort of Illinois Country Fair style travelogue from the Maine Lobster Festival and "ends", if you can call the back 2/3rds of an essay "ending", in a discussion of the meaning of pain and its applicability to the specific nervous system anatomy of crustaceans.
Suffice it to say: Wallace is not convinced that the knife through the head lets you off the hook so easily.
I will note that he seems to shrug, especially in footnote 19, as if to confess that whether lobsters feel pain or merely express reflexes is basically unknowable, not for any lack of humans trying to figure it out.
He seems genuinely conflicted, rather than firmly opinionated, certain only that people should take these questions more seriously. Or maybe he's being coy, to avoid alienating the gourmand.
I'm curious if he hesitates to kill spiders since writing this article. Spiders are similar to lobsters. Spiders exhibit preferences. Maybe we should all hesitate to kill them. Or maybe that's just crazy. I don't know.
Incidentally, if you want to feel incredibly confused about how you balance empathy towards human and nonhuman things, including arthropods, (and robots, and sociopaths, ...) you should read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It's a short novella, it's culturally relevant, it isn't really captured by the films, and it artfully messes with your head.
Fair, but that's a very different rubric than contemplated by the article.
If your take is strongly influenced by utility, you might not necessarily object to eating lobsters in the first place.
And maybe that's fine, just two distinct approaches to this question.
In fact, if you're concerned, like DFW is, about minimizing suffering for all things that "exhibit preferences," then maybe that's too broad. Maybe then you don't want spiders slaughtering a bunch of other insects, because they exhibit preferences in turn. And then... you become pro-killing spiders?
On the other hand, maybe other insects don't pass the sentience/sapience test, only spiders do, and everything's fine, and it just leads to Jainism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism
But if you use the "insects are dumb" out, you eventually hit a more general carnivore problem. If you believe you have a moral obligation to avoid causing the suffering of animals for food, then what obligation do you have to protect animals from natural predation? Does the fact it happens in the natural world make the suffering less meaningful? If one believes the death of rabbits for food is a grave tragedy, does that imply a preference for coyotes to go extinct?
This isn't preaching, I'm not really sure what the answer is to any of this. Honestly I think your rubric is simpler in some ways.
I think the person you were responding to was saying that he does not hesitate, because he does not kill spiders, because he is dead. Not necessarily bait of any kind.
When I was three my family lived in Hawaii where “Banana Spiders” (large tarantula looking things) used to get into our beds at night. They don’t just crawl, they kind of hop about (or so three year old me remembers). So, to answer your question I have a standing agreement with the arachnids that inhabit my abode: I know you’re here and that you eat bugs, which I appreciate, however if I see you, game over.
You probably don't live in a tropical country. If you left spiders in your house alone, then within a week the place is filled with cobwebs littered with dead insects. Also, many spiders give you rashes even if they don't bite you. And spiders tend to attract each other.
I'm desperately holding myself back from getting distracted from work with a deep dive through crustacean nervous system anatomy here, so I'll just ask: in what way are they different?
Having to do with the fact that lobsters (according to Wallace) have decentralized nervous systems consisting of ganglia wired in series, so that slicing through one of them might not disable the creature's nociception upon being immersed in boiling water. You might just be keeping it from flailing around, paralyzed but still "aware" in whatever sense a lobster is aware of anything.
Dave Arnold, another favorite writer of mine, has a solution to this problem: clove oil anesthetizes lobsters (and fish). Clove oil, knife through the head, then boil.
> paralyzed but still "aware" in whatever sense a lobster is aware of anything
Radiolab spin-off More Perfect recently discussed the “cosmetic” presence of a paralytic drug in lethal injection concoctions. I can’t help but see a parallel.
At least for the lobster, we're not really sure how they interpret pain. They don't have a brain in the same way the humans do. As a vegetarian, I personally would go back to meat if I just knew my meal had a good life and did not suffer needlessly in order for me to eat it. But for the prisoner, this seems like the worst combination: internalized suffering and externalized indifference... So minimize the the deturrence to crime while maximizing the suffering in society. Isn't this the opposite of how it should be?
The latest Hardcore History episode is called "Painfotainment", where Dan Carlin describes the history of executions and shows how they were not only a form of punishment but a large source of entertainment as well; from pre-history through very modern times. [0] It's not been a very easy episode to consume.
I've always been against the death-penalty because it is: permanent, subject to racial bias/applied un-evenly, performed by incompetent persons/botched, recommended by imperfect evidence, highly linked to religious sacrifice and does nothing to actually deter crime.
As for going back to meat, are you following the vat grown protein farmers?
Honest question: We don't treat dairy cows particularly well while they're alive (for example), so if you care about animal suffering why are you a vegetarian and not a vegan? I'm neither, for the record.
Humans would rapidly freeze to death in a lobster’s natural habitat. Humans are not lobsters, and we should be careful to remember that freezing to death is experienced differently by animals with different metabolisms. A good rule of thumb is that endotherms suffer horribly and experience pain in low temperatures, while cold-blooded animals experience torpor.
> Dave Arnold, another favorite writer of mine, has a solution to this problem: clove oil anesthetizes lobsters (and fish). Clove oil, knife through the head, then boil.
Or, you know, don’t kill them.
Not sure why this idea is still considered extreme. Why harm fellow creatures when it is simply unnecessary?
As Tolstoy wrote[1],
"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
It’s fairly difficult not to kill them, you know, when you plan to eat them.
If your Tolstoy quote is accurate, it seems fairly sloppy reasoning to me. Animal protein is an essential component of nourishing billions of people. Calling sustenance “appetite” is a rhetorical flourish which undermines the argument.
I think what would be immoral is telling billions of people they can’t eat meat.
There are many ways one could prescribe humans should act to minimize their impact on the flora and fauna of our world. But at the same time, humans are entitled to a certain degree of leeway in this regard. Sustainably eating the plants and animals beneath us on the food chain is one of those areas.
The OP provides no justification, so in his mind, yes. And when AI develops, or a new race of genetically engineered humans, they can eat us, too. But I'm sure the OP wasn't thinking about being boiled alive when he made his comment.
>humans are entitled to a certain degree of leeway in this regard. Sustainably eating the plants and animals beneath us on the food chain is one of those areas.
If we ever come into contact with extraterrestrial life, I hope that they don't share this view.
Thanks for the heads up on "What the Health". Sadly, I can no longer edit the submission.
For a meticulously documented presentation, see "How Not To Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXXygDRyBU
I‘m not convinced that killing plants is creating less suffering than killing simple animals like shrimps or insects for example. Listen to the latest radiolab episode for example. Given their capabilities I find it reasonable to assume that the level of consciousness is about the same (which includes the very likely possibility of them being not conscious at all).
Point is, if you want to just reduce suffering while staying healthy (e.g. no iron / B12 deficiency) there may be better answers than just to restrict oneself to the one half of living creatures that happens to generate its own food from CO2.
I think you got the setup of that radio lab episode and not the later points. The points was that:
a) plants are a lot cooler than you think
b) looking at things from a non-standard position can lead to new insights even if that position might be wrong
c) anthropomorphizing causes people to assign values to them that may or may not exist regardless of other evidence.
The turn was after hooking you on all of the feelings by anthropomorphizing the plants more to you, then went back to cold logical examination that there is no structure in the plant for pain or learning and literally pointed out the manipulation they did. Radiolab does this a lot, manipulates the listener to get you meta insight into yourself.
There are people who have averse reactions to almost every plant based food, and can largely only eat meat or suffer horrible mental and physical health problems.
Diet is not one-size-fits all, and we have basically no idea how complex diet is, or the specific long term effects of most dietary interventions on people. It is absolutely reprehensible to represent going vegan as an obvious way forward when it is unclear that it's even safe for a large majority of people.
Seems to be unstudied, but this person[0] reports has both severe mental and physical reactions currently to almost anything other than meat, though she was able to eat some vegetables safely before. Her father has similar reactions to many plant-based foods, and they both have had serious disorders activated seemingly by diet, especially severe depression.
In addition, many people are unable to eat yeast or yeast extracts, which are among the few commonly available non-flesh sources of the crucial vitamin B12.
While I still eat meat, etc, at times I do think about what kind of suffering animals, etc, go through. I often come to the conclusion that we should just let them be - their lives, much like ours, are short-lived, and they deserve their little piece happiness.
All this reminds me of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher - a great read.
I disagree because they're not smart enough to enjoy their short and simple lives, so the enjoyment our lives get via eating them takes precedence.
This is a very fascist position, though! I could say the same for a human on life support who's gone through brain death (really, a lobster's smarter, at that point). Although perhaps that's not really that bad, albeit macabre. Perhaps, one day, we'll lab-grow meat, maybe our own, to eat, just to see what we taste like. That's equivalent to consuming non-lab-grown but also unconscious human tissue, I think. BUT SCARIER, this same line of thinking might lead to much-vaster-than-human intelligences deciding we don't have rights and that it's okay to eat us!
Am I okay with being eaten by a hyperintelligent being to whom I have the status of a lobster or a cow? Maybe. Because I really admire a being like that. Maybe it could effortlessly convince me to surrendering to being eaten with arguments more creative and compelling than a million Shakespeares could pen up, effortlessly, like some Saruman-godthing[0], because that just goes with the territory of being that smart! But, short of that, I'd try to run away, and many people don't share my ambivalence...
I have no evidence that a lobster has consciousness, and it's consciousness (particularly intelligent consciousness, like yours and mine) that, to my very crude ethics, grants "personhood". With personhood comes the right to live and my thinking that it's immoral or some great loss to the Universe to kill you. That is why I think I can eat (and cause untold suffering) to lobsters with impunity for my benefit. :o (Not, to massage your image of me, that I would enjoy harming lobsters; I'd sooner keep one as a pet or release it if it materialized in my kitchen. I don't even like killing spiders or cockroaches, and I don't even eat those! BUT. If other people kill lobsters, I don't consider it immoral, and I'd gladly eat them served to me. But not the cockroaches or spiders.) Pain is bad, but it's bad to conscious beings. A computer can be programmed to react to keystrokes much the same as a creature "with no lights on" can be programmed to react to damaging stimuli, but that reaction brooks no rational response from me. It brooks emotional responses, but acting on reasonless emotion is silly.
Even if you accept my position, you could argue that maybe lobsters do have consciousness. Maybe they're even way more intelligent than we think they are. That'd be a problem. But, being scientific, you have to operate on what you have evidence for, not on what you don't. For the same reason, I don't think abortion is human murder (unless it's late term, after the brain's been thoroughly developed).
Another problem, of course, is where you draw the line. Lobsters aren't intelligent enough for personhood. What about dogs? What about chimps? What about severely mentally handicapped humans? Do you draw the line at doing calculus? (Because then you exclude a lot of normal humans!) That's the problem with fascism. :B I need to rethink my ways. But it's too difficult, and meat is calorically-dense and tasty!
If we could genetically engineer animals to be intelligent enough to have conscious desires, and also have an overwhelming desire to be killed and eaten, would it still be morally wrong to eat them? (This dilemma assumes that you share my belief that the demand for meat products causes a net increase in suffering.)
We're probably off-topic by now, but do you also believe that demand for meat products causes a net increase in joy/enjoyment (whatever you call the opposite of suffering)?
For instance, I keep chickens and let them free-pasture until the day I butcher them. I think they enjoy their time out there as much as any animal would. Depending who or what you believe, the end is very quick for them, so the suffering is minimal.
I realize this isn't the norm, though. I'm sure the "joy" experienced on many factory farms is some kind of dystopian thing, like being happy you got extra gruel last Tuesday.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Just something to think about.
Taken to an extreme, we could have those animals be humans that are somehow born masochists, desperate to get consumed by cannibals.
Hmm. I think it's morally dubious to make them in the first place. Past that, we're talking about fulfilling their desires. If someone wants to die (say they're suffering from some slow, terminal illness or maybe incurable depression), is it ethical to keep them alive and deny them euthanasia? That seems like the same scenario. I say no; you should have the right to die if you want to in the most painless way possible. I think the Universe suffers a loss with the loss of your consciousness because it's an amazing thing, but your subjective suffering is more salient. I make that call on absolutely no rational ground; it's just my silly emotions. Silly emotions from a silly consciousness. :3 And it's that element of silliness that makes my position on this itself, or anyone else's, PERHAPS EVEN ALL THOSE MEAT ANIMALS' SUFFERING, seem sickeningly irrelevant in the grand, inscrutable, uncaring scheme of things. But that's morality for you.
We've gotta be careful here.
I'm so close to bringing up how maybe the self is a lie and how moral relativism justifies the worst levels of suffering imaginable.
The Hitchhiker book "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" explores this concept somewhat (as do some other books in the series IIRC).
The cow in question repeatedly assures the protagonist that the entire process is very humane and that it desires nothing more than to be eaten and enjoyed by others. It's actually quite offended when Arthur only orders a salad.
We clearly eat far more meat than we need and produce/harvest meat in ways that create unnecessary damage and suffering.
However, not everyone is like you. Some people develop deficiencies when they exclude meat from their diet. I have witnessed an ex-vegan health/nutritional professional advise a vegetarian to start eating some meat due to chronic health issues and lab-tested nutritional deficiencies.
It was an hard journey for both of them.
I'm glad it works for you right now while providing a sense of moral superiority, but not everyone is the same.
A source that most people can live and be healthy without eating meat? I don't. I looked for one and I can't find one. I seriously think that it's too self-evident to have warranted much study. There are hundreds of millions of vegetarians and they seem to be doing okay.
I'm not arguing that it's healthier or you can live longer, just that most people can be healthy and live.
Do you have a source that most professionals believe that most people can't live and be healthy on a vegetarian diet?
[Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704/)** * It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.
[The British Nutrition Foundation](http://www.nutrition.org.uk/publications/briefingpapers/vege... * A well-planned, balanced vegetarian or vegan diet can be nutritionally adequate ... Studies of UK vegetarian and vegan children have revealed that their growth and development are within the normal range.
[The Dietitians Association of Australia](https://daa.asn.au/smart-eating-for-you/smart-eating-fast-fa... * Vegan diets are a type of vegetarian diet, where only plant-based foods are eaten. With good planning, those following a vegan diet can cover all their nutrient bases, but there are some extra things to consider.
[The United States Department of Agriculture](http://www.choosemyplate.gov/tips-vegetarians)** * Vegetarian diets (see context) can meet all the recommendations for nutrients. The key is to consume a variety of foods and the right amount of foods to meet your calorie needs. Follow the food group recommendations for your age, sex, and activity level to get the right amount of food and the variety of foods needed for nutrient adequacy. Nutrients that vegetarians may need to focus on include protein, iron, calcium, zinc, and vitamin B12.
[The National Health and Medical Research Council](https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/publications/n55_... * Appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthy and nutritionally adequate. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the lifecycle. Those following a strict vegetarian or vegan diet can meet nutrient requirements as long as energy needs are met and an appropriate variety of plant foods are eaten throughout the day
[The Mayo Clinic](http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healt... * A well-planned vegetarian diet (see context) can meet the needs of people of all ages, including children, teenagers, and pregnant or breast-feeding women. The key is to be aware of your nutritional needs so that you plan a diet that meets them.
[Harvard Medical School](http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/becoming-a-veg... * Traditionally, research into vegetarianism focused mainly on potential nutritional deficiencies, but in recent years, the pendulum has swung the other way, and studies are confirming the health benefits of meat-free eating. Nowadays, plant-based eating is recognized as not only nutritionally sufficient but also as a way to reduce the risk for many chronic illnesses.
[British Dietetic Association](https://www.bda.uk.com/foodfacts/vegetarianfoodfacts.pdf)** * Well planned vegetarian diets (see context) can be nutritious and healthy. They are associated with lower risks of heart disease, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, certain cancers and lower cholesterol levels. This could be because such diets are lower in saturated fat, contain fewer calories and more fiber and phytonutrients/phytochemicals (these can have protective properties) than non-vegetarian diets. (...) Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of life and have many benefits.
40% of India is vegetarian. Approx. half a billion people. It is very hard to believe that they suffer from deficiencies. However, the 'vegetarian' food in the west is mostly salad and potatoes, a far cry from the variety of veggies found in tropical countries.
> Some people develop deficiencies when they exclude meat from their diet.
I'm one of those people.
Personally, I think refraining from consuming animals is the morally superior option—nothing to do with health. In the longer history of humankind I hope that's the direction we take. I'd happily take an artificial steak made of a complex of vegetable proteins, fast, etc that tastes like prime beef over slaughtering an animal if it contains all the similar nutrients that are absorbed the same way...
My sister-in-law and brother—both former/current athletes—are vegan and vegetarian, respectively, and make great work of the diet. She runs a vegan recipe blog, and he keeps in great physical shape as a provincial police officer while restricting his animal consumption to eggs and dairy.
I unfortunately inherited deficiencies in B12, Iron, and other deficiencies from my mother's side. She, in her old age, has to resort to transfusions once every few years to live. Wouldn't wish it upon anybody. I like to think I can fare much better.
It got to the point in my own restricted diet where my doctor explicitly instructed me to eat a lot more red meat. After some time I've reduced my intake there, and increased my sublingual B12, but still need to keep up enough other nutrients (forgive my omitting details) to keep up.
The difference that appropriate nutrition has isn't limited to the physical, either.
> Personally, I think refraining from consuming animals is the morally superior option—nothing to do with health.
Personally, I can see zero moral difference between killing an animal for food, and killing a plant for food. If one is unacceptable, then so should be the other.
It's pretty off topic for the general discussion, but ideas surrounding this really interest me and I'd be happy to discuss them outside of this venue if you'd like.
The only animals that don't generally die mostly from predation are those on top of whatever food chain they're a part of (bears, big cats, etc.) And we don't tend to eat those.
For the rest, if we aren't eating them, something else is going to eat them. It's not a question of "taking an animal life"—the animal's life is going to get taken, in a messy, bloody, terrifying way.
It is considered by some to be an increase in marginal global utility, when a human eats an animal that would otherwise have been eaten by something else. Because we cause less suffering in the process of (killing and) eating the animal, than anything else would have.
(I don't personally know how I feel about this argument, but I feel like I should put it out here, because it's not very well-known and usually causes more interesting discussion than the usual responses.)
---
Also, as a bonus argument: if you're a positive utilitarian, then we increase global utility by a lot simply by raising livestock to eat them that would otherwise have never existed at all. (If you're a negative utilitarian, then all the good humanity has ever done is probably wiped out by the suffering of the great number of chickens we keep.)
Either way, though, it's indisputable that the life of e.g. a sheep kept by a shepherd, has higher total QALY than the life of a wild sheep. For some species, we're giving them a virtual garden-of-Eden to live in until they just, one day, die at our hands.
There's actually a part of the Effective Altruism movement that wants to reduce wild animal suffering—i.e. interject ourselves into nature in order to make more animal lives like that of the tended sheep (with or without the eventual culling.) I think they hope to use synthetic meat to solve the "how do you keep both the fox and the hen happy" problem.
I don't understand how your argument exists alongside the fact that we farm the animals that we eat.
The chicken that you buy at the grocer isn't one we swiped away just as a wolf was about it eat it. The chicken was grown indoors in a factory, likely hadn't even seen the light of day. Even a wolf-eaten wild chicken gets that courtesy.
As it happens, adult American lobsters have few predators other than man. They're big, well-armored, have immensely powerful claws and live in deep burrows. Juvenile lobsters are vulnerable to ground fish, but an adult lobster is only likely to be eaten by brave seals and humans.
True enough, for now. It seems climate change has created a lobster population boom, though (they love the warmer water), so I would say it's only a matter of time before evolution takes notice of this "free lunch" and adapts some of the neighbouring predators to better get at them.
Whether they suffer more or less when caught vs killed naturally in the ocean, I don't know, but there are other issues with fishing in the ocean, mainly that it is unsustainable.
The Philosophy around procreation is still much debated, but my understanding is that positive utilitarians generally do not believe that _creating_ more lives is necessarily morally good.
While death is often seen as vastly negative (or infinitely, depending on who you ask), positive utilitarians typically reject the idea that procreating more / having more children increases total utility.
Yeah, the simple act of creating the life doesn't have utility in any interpretation, I think; people just talk about the utility of procreation as a sort of Net Present Value on the projected utility that life will experience. Under positive utilitarianism, all lives either experience positive or zero utility, so it's never a net negative to have more of them.
Most positive utilitarians further posit that all [evolved, rather than maliciously-engineered-for-the-sake-of-cruelty] lives likely contain at least a little happiness/reward/satisfaction (positive utility), and since the unhappy moments just axiomatically have zero utility, rather than negative utility, all [evolved] lives should "sum up" to being worth creating from their own perspectives—though creating additional lives might make marginal global utility go down, for Malthusian reasons (ten starving wolves that each live for a year aren't don't have as much utility as one well-fed wolf that lives for ten years.)
Personally, I don't like positive utilitarianism very much—but it's important to understand, since it seems to be the intuitive stance a lot of (often religious, but not always) people have without realizing it.
> For the rest, if we aren't eating them, something else is going to eat them. It's not a question of "taking an animal life"—the animal's life is going to get taken, in a messy, bloody, terrifying way.
Not necessarily, the amount of ocean inhabitants people consume surely tops what would be taken naturally. I don't see how getting scooped from the ocean, hauled in trucks in small boxes, than kept alive in some aquarium beats living in ocean until any kind of death.
"man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food"
Most studies I read found that vegetarians were more healthy and lived longer than heavy meat eaters, but the once-in-a-while meat eaters were healthier. One of the reasons I stick with the last group.
Selfish?
Yes. But not only for appetite.
Besides, without predators, you probably would not have much forests ... and much more dessert.
It's my nature. Robbing me of my nature is like penning a fox indoors all day. Or robbing zoo cats of the freedom to hunt. Might call it inhumane.
Just playing the other side. I love meat but I don't take a stance on the matter.
It's also in your nature to murder other humans, steal things, and participate in all sorts of mischief. If you're of a certain disposition it's in your nature to rape children, maybe hang cats, or try to destroy the lives of other people in other ways. I personally do not eat meat but I also don't shun those who do - my goal is only to do my best to reduce suffering as much as I can - but I think that to argue that it's in your nature to do something is a very poor argument. Being human means we can largely overcome our nature, or at least make rational choices about it.
Most farm animals in the US are fed by commercial agriculture. Eating meat multiplies the amount of plant agriculture required by a significant factor (dependent on the animal).
Often I see the concept you pointed out presented in a way that implies meat has separate and distinct negative externalities from plants, and that it's roughly equivalent whether you choose set of negatives A or set of negatives B. In reality one is a superset of the other.
I always find claims of morality interesting, especially if they are of the non-norm-derivative kind, and presented without any ethical argument whatsoever. Very convincing indeed.
The gp is still pointing out that causing suffering to other creatures is a downside of eating meat. While all items you listed are not necessary, only one of them has that downside.
Unless one argues with the premise that the killing/pain of other creatures is harmful, we'll only be talking past one another.
Having sex without the intent to procreate can lead to having children whom you aren't prepared to take care of. Tourism fuels and is fueled by organizations that destroy ecosystems.
Everything humanity does destroys the planet and its inhabitants, including ourselves. A vegan thinks they're doing their small part, while texting up a storm on their iPhone, driving to work in their Camry, living in their downtown 1000 sqft apartment. Thinking your diet of all things makes the animals we share this place with feel any better is about as facetious as thinking a band-aid would help a man who just went headfirst into a woodchipper. You could go completely offgrid, live off the land, maximizing everything you can do to help this problem, and you wouldn't even begin to put a dent into it.
But if it helps you sleep at night, then by all means. At least you've some semblance of peace, which is more than most people on this planet have.
Not my point. My point is that the poster I was replying to is talking past the initial poster, rather than responding to them.
I don't think vegans/vegetarians do so because of their singular impact on the world. Worth saying that (presumably) you and I choose not to kill other people, knowing that our taxes might be funding wars, our gadgets might be built in sweatshops, etc.
Not sure about the meaning of your second paragraph, but in theory, animals bred for human consumption could live happy lives up to the point of a painless, instant death. The issue becomes whether they would be missed by other animals.
Some would consider this a dangerous way of thinking, but someone like Temple Grandin would agree, I think, that the correct thing to worry about is suffering, not 'harm' in some abstract sense.
Considering suffering alone seems like it could justify some counterintuitive conclusions. Would it be wrong to have a child, raise it happily to adolescence, and then give it a painless, instant death? If so, why?
That's a valid argument, but I think a more relevant question is: between the options of having a child, raising it happily to adolescence, and then killing it, vs. not having the child at all, which option is "better"? Which is more net positive in the world?
This is a closer scenario, since billions of e.g. cows would not be born and raised if not for our use for them as food. (Of course, in reality, they're mostly not raised happily).
When deciding the answer to the scenario, keep in mind that most parents who have children with e.g. terminally ill diseases, who die in adolescence, or even kids that die as teenagers from accidents, would probably not say it is better that they had not lived.
Also worth considering - we have children knowing that their lives will tragically end in death after 100 years at most. Why is that not wrong? Just cause we're used to 100 years being a lot, doesn't really change the fundamental argument does it?
I didn't mean that happiness wouldn't be considered, just that that appropriate thing to worry about is suffering (can we call it negative happiness?).
There is obviously not going to be a simple happiness score at each moment of life—it should at least be a vector of scores. Would make sense to integrate over time, but then there's the spectre of a "happiness maximizer" (like a paperclip maximizer) that might produce undesirable outcomes, whether it's average or aggregate happiness you consider. Ethics is difficult to formalize.
Adding happiness to the model solves some of its problems (suffering+happiness model doesn't advocate nuclear annihilation), but I don't see how suffering-vs-happiness utilitarianism reaches the conclusion that infanticide is wrong. It seems like we need to consider more than happiness vectors for infanticide not to be okay.
Well, the prohibition of infanticide is a norm that presumably derives from a perception that killing babies harms the person who does it or others with a relationship to the child (possibly in a very indirect, diffuse way). It is perceived as going against the natural order of things, I guess. Utilitarian ethics does flirt with accepting infanticide in many cases, which is something a lot of people undoubtedly find repugant. Like this story:
"On his faculty page, Mr. Singer argues: “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents."
if i remember correctly it has something to do with the nervous system being less central and more distributed. probably similar to limbs that continue to move once severed (in other species)
If we consider an extreme case of someone going through a horrible torture, but the next day waking up as healthy as before, and without some kind of mental illness, and without losing significant amount of his time, or opportunity, would it be any different than a game? Would most people try such a game, where they play for someone getting executed in middle ages?
My guess is they would, so fear of the pain is misplaced, and death is the horrible part. And therefore killing painlessly doesn't let one off the hook, since it is still killing. (And if one thinks killing is ok, then some amount of pain should be ok too.)
Wait, what? You mean most people would volunteer to be tortured horribly as long as any damage is 100% reversed the next day? Uh, I’m not sure whether your model of people is entirely accurate.
I agree. I'd do a heck of a lot more unsafe shit if I knew I could survive it without permanent damage. It's the permanent damage that keeps me from doing flagrantly unsafe stuff, not the pain. You wind up causing yourself pain in all sorts of avoidable but not terribly unsafe ways.
It's is amazing the pain and suffering a human can endure through shear force of will. In Ranger School in the US Army the primary thing you learn more then anything else is you mind can tell your body to shut up deal.
If you knew there would be no permanent damage would you do it for $10, $100, $1,000, some amount that assures you never have to work again, etc?
There's many cultures that have coming of age rituals that would be considered torture in the western world. People do those things because they're "part of a larger package" so to speak.
In a demonstration of devotion and offer of penance to the Hindu God Lord Murugan, devotees perform incredible (and sometimes gruesome!) feats. They pierce their body and face with skewers, drag chariots with hooks attached to their skin and carry uncomfortable metal frames called ‘kavadis’ through the streets and up the 272 steps to the shrine at the top of the cave. During the festival some participants enter trance-like states when their soul is believed to be cleansed of sins.
PHUKET VEGETARIAN FESTIVAL, THAILAND
By the name of this festival you may assume it to be a gentle affair where new-age vegetarian hippies share tofu recipes over yoga mats in Thailand. However, the Phuket Vegetarian festival is one of the craziest, most spectacular events in South East Asia. You’ll witness incredible acts of self-torture such as walking on hot coals, climbing bladed ladders and the piercing of cheeks with swords, shards of glass – even beach umbrellas.
Filipino fanatics re-enact crucifixion for Good Friday
In a bloody display of religious devotion Roman Catholic fanatics in the Philippines have had themselves nailed to the cross as the Christian world marks the day Jesus was crucified.
Read the link for quotes from people talking about the repeated nerve pain, blood, etc.:
I absolutely, 100% would not volunteer to go through a "horrible torture."
I certainly wouldn't do it for "a game." I don't think I would do it for any amount of money or other benefit, either. What you're proposing is (seemingly) no benefit beyond the experience of being tortured--which coincidentally you are going you erase when you delete the mental illness.
Anyway, you're wrong, nobody would sign up for that. People who are afraid of roller coasters don't ride them. Everyone's afraid of torture.
> I absolutely, 100% would not volunteer to go through a "horrible torture."
Even if it was to unlock a new level in a game, or to remove a tooth? :)
More seriously though seems like i didn't manage to express what i wanted to say in my comment.
My point was that people are afraid of torture, and many other things (like roller coasters) because there's a large chance to die in the end. And without that chance the whole thing is just some neurons being active, and is not a big deal.
Your point about needing to erase all memory of the experience to not get mental illness is very interesting. I'd expect the brain to be more stable, but we don't know enough about the brain to say for sure.
> Your point about needing to erase all memory of the experience to not get mental illness is very interesting.
I actually didn't express that very well. I kind of meant that if you were to erase the mental illness, you've effectively erased the whole experience. Horrible torture isn't something you just leave behind you the day after. The influence it has is almost necessarily mental illness in some form or fashion.
If anyone did go through horrible torture voluntarily, I would expect they would do it to know what it was like. And mental illness is part of what it's like.
> My point was that people are afraid of torture, and many other things (like roller coasters) because there's a large chance to die in the end. And without that chance the whole thing is just some neurons being active, and is not a big deal.
There are people afraid of bugs, dogs, cats, birds, balls etc... There are also people who experience anxiety for unknown reasons due to anxiety disorder. Moreover, there is no, quoting you, "large chance to die in the end" in roller coasters. I don't think any part of your argument makes sense, sorry.
Sure, but if you do not have the proper painkillers, it's
hell of a lot more painful than the pain it ends. You are trading long term nagging pain, for short intense one, which is totally worth it, but is a lot of pain.
People painfully remove perfectly good wisdom teeth all the time just because it's convenient to do them all at once and on the off chance that they're preventing some pain in the future.
Accidentally catching my hand on a table saw was bad enough, thank you very much. I knew very well I wouldn't die or suffer permanent damage and it still sucked like hell.
Same is true of many afflictions - stubbing your toe, mouth ulcers. Pain remains real even if you know it's for your own benefit and have the option of simply opting-out, see half of medicine.
No, your guess is absurd. Of course they wouldn't.
It's always been possible to quite reliably cause extreme pain with little long-term consequence. The pain remains real, and people remain motivated to avoid that pain.
This isn't even a thought experiment - you're just describing torture!
> killing painlessly doesn't let one off the hook, since it is still killing
If we're talking about human beings: obviously. No-one in their right mind would disagree with that. Most people treat non-human animals as categorically different.
> And if one thinks killing is ok, then some amount of pain should be ok too.
The killing in this case is a foregone conclusion, so it's really a question of, What is worse: causing a lot of pain before killing, or causing a little pain before killing? A bit easier to answer.
In Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovach novels, virtual torture typically drives victims insane. And for me, I fear prolonged illness and pain more than death.
> virtual torture typically drives victims insane.
Is that self evident though? It seems like the difference between pleasure and pain is that pain is a signal that is interpreted as "get out of here, or you may die". And brain is pretty flexible when it comes to reinterpretting the meaning of signals. E.g. with food taste, some tastes that induce revulsion on first try, become peculiar and interesting after a while.
Yes, and that's part of the strategy that Envoys (and presumably, real life counterparts) use in resisting torture. But with virtual torture, the victim can experience thousands of AI-driven sessions with a clock rate that's thousands of times faster than normal. So years of torture in hours.
Haven’t read the novels yet, but have watched half of Altered Carbon series on Netflix. This was the first thing that came to and a resounding ‘hell no.’
I recommend reading the novels! The Netflix series puzzles me. It's like they put everything from the novel in a box, and pulled it out in random order. Some of the changes were arguably necessary so viewers could follow the plot. And some were typical mass-media dumbing down.
But others just seemed pointless. For example, in the novels, the Envoys are not dissidents, but rather enforcers for the Protectorate. Quell was a dissident, and Takeshi did quote her frequently, but she died centuries before he was born. The Quell character in the video is actually Virginia Vidura, who was his trainer in the Envoys. And Reilieen was not his sister.
Also, the virtual torture sequence in the novel is far more extreme than depicted in the video. I doubt that it could be shown, even on Netflix.
Love that whole series of essays in the Consider the Lobster collection - you can also listen to several of them on YouTube and I have to say Wallace’s tone when reading the essays makes them more enjoyable
This is a reasonable thing. Prolonged harm is something that should be avoided. It is very likely that the need of these animals is not something that is well known. You are not trying to kill and eat your guinea pig.
You also get to choose your companions, or lack of them as the case may be. Given the choice, I suspect guinea pigs and parrots would choose the company of others. As pets they don't have that choice.
Please note that I'm not saying anything about the keeping of animals as pets, or the social instincts of parrots or guinea pigs, or even whether or not the regulation is a good one. Just that the analogy you present here doesn't hold.
I am a vegetarian, but I'm more troubled by these totalitarian laws. Yes, I know they 'are just helping animals,' but throughout history, too often tyrants strip your liberties in the name of of moral righteousness.
That's exactly the point. The first steps in the path to illegitimate authority is to start legitimizing it using these low-hanging fruits.
This is just textbook play calling. Removing net neutrality starts "we just want to help hospitals and police have faster internet, don't be ridiculous." Drug prohibition, the War on Terror, the TSA, police militarization. It all, every time, comes with "they're just trying to do something good and it doesn't seriously affect you." Except maybe thre TSA, because when someone starts searching you all of a sudden everyone is a civil libertarian.(1)
The problems 1) One can always make the argument that "those are just not worthwhile freedoms." 2) The idea that using the threat of violence from the government to solve every problem is the actual path to tyranny.
The concept is about 'what constitutes legitimate authority?' After all, consider your argument:
>'we already have laws about which people can get married. This is hardly an egregious extension of that power. The law is very plainly there to protect children.'
What you're advocating by disavowing the above, yet allowing the topic is to say you: "agree with authority when it happens to agree with my moral compass."
Sayinf "disagreeing with this is an extremely odd thing to argue," reveals the fact that the original intentions of the founders of this country (assuming you live in the States), as well as those of Enlightenment figures, that government is only legitimate whwn it is limited, is so odd and alienating to you makes me think that no wonder humanity always turns itself in to tyranny, over and over again.
You might consider that Switzerland is probably the most democratic country on earth and "legitimate authority" quite directly means "the will of the people". If it wouldn't, they could easily change it as everybody can submit a law change suggestion (sorry, I don't know the correct term) and with enough inital support everyone can vote on the issue. They vote on far-ranging things several times a year, there can be no tyranny in this context.
> If it wouldn't, they could easily change it as everybody can submit a law change suggestion (sorry, I don't know the correct term)
Referendum to kill an existing law, popular initiative to propose a new one.
They use different tricks when they're extending their power. This is definitely not one of them.
Laws they suspect could be overturned by voters they create 2 simular but separate ones shortly after each other, so people get tired of fighting it etc.
It's not that anyone ever sat around a board room with an evil plot involving the protection of guinea pigs. It's that it is so normal that the state act as your parents, which was never the intention of Western democracies, that nobody even thinks "should we really be letting ourselves hand over so many decisions to a monopoly on violence?"
I get the point you're trying to make, it's just that you have picked the perfect counter-example to make it against. Both with animal protection (no human will profit) and with Switzerland (we as citizens can force a popular vote against any law our elected government is about to pass, or even propose new laws).
You're right that Switzerland is just about the least concerning place in the world in terms of government tyranny. However, there are problems with only starting to be critical when the government starts confiscating your phone at the airport, reading your email, etc. At this point you've even set precedent that they should be allowed to do those things, just so long as it can be justified as good, or even "the will of the people." So in this case we have ourselves to blame for this being in this mess.
And this kind of government js actually quite a shift from the type of democracy that Enlightenment figures helped developed for us, which gave us so much in the world.
Governments are responsible for most of the evil in the 20th century. Culling that probably starts with thinking about what a legitimate government should be permitted to do in the first place.
I completely agree with you in general, even in Switzerland we're not safe[0]. You just picked a really shitty example, and in europe we're in general a bit more pro government than in the US.
Err, the "shittiness" of the example was deliberate. Of course I could point out violations that everyone would agree with, such as the TSA confiscating your electronics. That threat is personally threatening to people, so all of a sudden they're civil libertarians.
Consider another example: what benefit is there in the government spending so much time and money giving due process, health care and other rights to murderers, child predators or terrorists, while free, good people go without healthcare? It's not because the criminals deserve it. If I advocated human rights for these people when we didn't have them, you would say the same thing you are now: "I agree with human rights, but you just picked a really shitty example." The point is this: to consider what constitutes legitimate government.
> If I advocated human rights for these people when we didn't have them, you would say the same thing you are now: "I agree with human rights, but you just picked a really shitty example."
Nope, I wouldn't. In fact I got heavily downvoted on HN before because I advocated for freedom of speech even for terrorists.
I think you'll find that this kind of thing started with making slavery illegal, a.k.a the actual use of force by the government to take away people's freedom to own other humans. The idea that all authority is immoral because authority can be used for immoral purposes is a simplistic slippery slope, and frankly anyone arguing that is just arbitrarily picking one ingredient of tyranny and saying that it should be banned. Tyranny also requires people. Let's get rid of people!
Permitting private individuals to enact injustice such as slavery is advocating anarchy. You should read a little bit of Locke, Hume, JSM, Jefferson on democracy... The idea is very generally that we agree to a social contract to "give up some of our liberties to protect the remainder." Nobody has a right to remove the rights of another in this tradition, and it has always been that way going back, long before the Civil War. So the state using force to protect the liberties has always been just.
You're right, it didn't start with the Civil War. I just thought that slavery was a nice simple example of the legitimate use of force by the government that was decried as abridging the liberties of the Confederates. I get that you don't think 'the right to own other people' is, like, a real right like 'the right to kill animals however I want' and all the other ones you object to the government regulating away, but that's your personal and very subjective line and not some foundational precept.
The burden should not be on the people to justify every one of their liberties. Should a gay couple need justify to the state the merit, moral dignity, or in any way their choice to live as gay people to the state? No. It should never be that way. But to legitimize illegitimite authority you just need to win over the hearts and minds of the people that what you are doing is good, by first doing things that are, in isolation, good. Though its an awful path to go down.
Of course the burden is on the state to justify the intrusion of liberty, but providing they can do so (i.e. the proposed action in isolation is a good thing), I'm not seeing the issue - preventing the government from making good interventions because of hypothetical future bad laws seems like an even worse path to take. Ultimately, how can you govern if good actions are just treated as a means to legitimise unspecified abuses?
You're misunderstanding this. The issue is with regard to what constitutes legitimate authority. It's because the government has a monopoly on violence. The time to leash that is when it oversteps its legitimate authority. Not wait until something awful happens when they're locking up communists, reading your email, or killing minorities.
I'll go back to my first question: in this case, what legitimate authority is being overstepped? It seems widely accepted that governments have the ability to make laws for the protection of animal welfare, and we seem in agreement that the ends reached here are a good thing. To me, this seems like a legitimate and proportional use of governmental power.
I can't seem to find a way to communicate this. I do agree those laws achieve good ends. I suppose most people don't like being called ugly and stupid, should government ban that?
All I'm advocating is the ideals proposed during the Enlightenment and founding of America be taken more seriously.
Most of the evil in the world is done by governments. Once you set them up with the size, authority to do that, it will be done.
It's not a comment about that. It's about thinking of where we should draw the line with allowing Western democracies to do things they were never meant to do.
It is always good to think where to draw the line in terms of government interference.
But in this case the Swiss direct democracy is working exactly as expected by the people of the country. They voted decades ago that the government must be in charge and enforce the protection of the dignity and well-being of animals as well as update the law based on new findings. The new rules (which include the lobster stuff) going into effect are just the current iteration.
For example, from the first of March all devices that automatically punish dogs for barking will be outlawed. This is an intrusion in personal liberty, but the Swiss as a whole seem quite fine with valuing the well being of the animals higher than their owners liberty to use those devices on them.
If the Swiss are unhappy with the decisions made by the government here, we have the referendum as an quite often used instrument to stop it. You would need 55'000 signatures within 100 days if I remember correctly to trigger a vote on the national level.
The article does not do that good a job at explaining what the law going into affect first of March actually says.
The law extends compulsory stunning ("Betäubungspflicht") before killing, already in effect for vertebrates to certain types of crustaceans. So the lobsters will likely be still alive when thrown into boiling water but stunned with e.g. electric shock.
Also the media frenzy causing lobster issue is only a part of new legislation aiming to improve conditions of animals held as pets, for sport, in laboratories or to be eaten.
The common procedure I was taught when growing up was chilling the crayfish (stick it in the freezer until it goes to sleep) before killing it [1]. It really takes very little effort and make no discernible difference whatsoever to the end result.
It's interesting that this method wasn't one of those listed, because I was under the impression that it was quite effective.
The Swiss probably don't cook much live lobster or crayfish anyway, so chilling the live crustacean hasn't occured to the lawmakers. Yes, it's way easier than electrocuting, so thank you for sharing.
This has to do with the fact that we in Switzerland once voted (in the early 90s) to constitutionally recognize animals, and giving them dignity. The dignity of the creature it was called. This is the reason also why you are not allowed to own just one single guinea pig or a lovebird.
So you will crush a roach or swat a fly? I am all for humane chicken faming methods, et.al. However we are the top of the food chain and we eat everything below. That means it dies. My friends dogs will try to eat his chickens and it is not pretty (he trains the dogs not to of course.) I have a forest full of dear behind my house. I heard the very loud screaming of an animal the other day. One of the deer was lunch for a mountain lion. This is the way it works. If you have an issue with it then do not eat lobster or do not eat meat. I like lobster. If you told me I could do something simple to make their death more human I would, but it’s still going to die and I am still going to eat it.
This particular case isn't quite about eating meat or not, rather it's about defining the boundaries of cruelty. Surely most meat eaters would consider boiling a living chicken or cow to be unnecessarily cruel, and most would agree that it should be illegal to do so. This law is just saying that the same rules should apply to lobsters, based on some scientific research.
Thanks captain obvious, Although maybe a more insightful response would have been pointing out the contrast between the modern culture of switzerland and that of nature which lacks major intrusions by humans.
I think the contrast is between the modern culture of Switzerland and that of the US, where people feel that their right to kill animals inhumanely is too important to be legislated away.
That means cats must have a daily visual contact with other felines, and hamsters or guinea pigs must be kept in pairs. And anyone who flushes a pet goldfish down the toilet is breaking the law.
Say what? So in Switzerland I can go to jail for not making a play date for my cat, or buying a little friend for my hamster?
What's next, you can't kill a spider that's creeping around your house?
People need to understand that there's always intended or unintended consquences for all laws. And laws like this have a tendency to make nasty precedents for other stupid-ass laws.
This is just more anthropomorphic emotional immaturity.
Feel free to go to Switzerland and change the law if you think so. You are perfectly free to try and get the consitution changed, as long as you can convince 100'000 citizens to agree with you.
As it stands: yes, the laws do work. It's not common for private households to be inspected, but farms do get inspected, and eventually shut down for repeatedly flouting such laws. If someone were to report you (i.e. private household) for similar violations you would likely get a police+vet visit and your pets would be confiscated (and you would carry the costs of that, in addition to being fined). Do it often enough and there would eventually be a criminal case.
To me the law is probably well intended but likely ineffective. Beside, it's their country and having self-determination, let them do as they will.
That said, who is going to ensure no one breaks the law? I guess it mostly will affect commercial food preparers, but it's not like people at home will turn themselves in or they'll have embedded monitors on live lobsters who will rat out a cook. If they really meant it, just make sale of lobsters for eating illegal altogether.
Why not get companies like Amazon and Google involved? People are setting up microphones all around their houses and some even are adding cameras now. Hell even Amazon with their new stores could offer a lot in this field.
We can just have the algorithms work out who is breaking these kinds laws and then just add the fine to their amazon bill.
You can say people would be against this but im sure with enough conditioning and lobbying the populations will understand how this helps secure animal rights.
That's your perspective, but consider what was also said about the Women's rights movement in Victorian times: "Give them the right to own property? What next? The right to vote?!".
Venomous. Poisonous is when you die from eating it (like a pufferfish). Sorry if I come off as pedantic, I just see this very often and think it’s a pretty basic distinction.
Most venom isn’t poisonous, as your gastric juices denature the proteins and enzymes which make them dangerous. Big HOWEVER though, is that if you have a cut or any route to your bloodstream in your mouth or throat... then you can be envenomated that way. In addition some animals are both venemous and poisonous, such as tarantulas with urticating hairs.
My wife refuses to kill southern house spiders (harmless). She names them, usually some variant of “Charlotte.” Talks to them and drops off dead bugs for them to eat.
As a bonus, we don’t need to decorate for Halloween.
I catch all spiders at home with a wine glass and piece of paper and throw them out. I do the same with all the flies. No need to kill. Also, I am grossed out to see people smashing insects at home.
Do people not have Black Widows where they live? 90% of the spiders that I encounter in and around my home (mostly in my garage and my garden) are Black Widows and I thoughtlessly and indiscriminately kill them on sight. When I didn't kill them, they seemed to try to take ownership of different areas of the garden or garage. This happened where I lived in LA, in Goleta, CA, in north Santa Barbara county, and in Orange County. The only place I didn't experience this issue was when I spent a brief period in Riverside County. No spiders in that place, I always assumed it was because it was summer and > 100F highs every day. As if spiders give a shit about a heat wave, but it seemed to have some truth to it.
My thinking is: I don't want to risk my own or my wife or a guests personal health, and so I "deal" with them. Am I wrong?
Guess I'm lucky then... I've lived in LA for about 28 years and I don't think I've ever seen a black widow. Actually I remember when I was ~3, I was sitting (legs crossed) on the patio, my neighbor came over and smashed a scorpion near me with a hammer. Remember it vividly, mostly because I didn't understand why he killed it (at the time). As an adult, I don't recall seeing scorpions, brown recluses, or black widows..
I used to live in Michigan, and much of my extended family still lives there. We're used to black widows, and don't kill them (even though one of my cousins got bitten by a brown recluse and came out pretty badly, you're really in no danger so long as you exercise a few ounces of prudence).
The optimist in me says that the Swiss are erring on the side of doing as little harm as possible, and respecting the rights of creatures we understand far less completely than we like to think. The realist in me suspects that this is largely politicsl, driven by unfounded, but popular notions of universal animal welfare which ultimately come from a compassionate place.
The cynic in me thinks that this is some rank hypocrisy from the former bankers of the third reich, who still struggle when victims try to recover assets, as they eat an average of about 160lbs of meat per year.
> and Kunfermann said offenders could land in a lot of hot water
Is there serious journalism being made anywhere these days? I feel like these subtle puns everywhere detract from the reading experience - not everything is for entertainment.
Seems a bit overreacting dissing the whole of journalism for the odd pun seen in an article.
Eg: John Oliver’s late night show is, objectively, quite good journalism (even if he denies it) though it’s not very “serious”.
Eh.. I dunno. I've watched, and will continue to watch, every episode of Last Week Tonight, however, I don't consider it "objectively good" journalism at all. I enjoy it as a silly, biased take on current events from a funny guy.
The "Amnesia effect" applies equally well to Oliver:
>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
It’s something I’ve begun to notice in almost every piece, like it is now worth some kind of internet points. It pops up in texts that are otherwise completely ‘serious’, even more formal ones, which is unsettling. Not exactly what I’m looking for when reading news about a tragedy, business failure or science.
In my experience it is a uniquely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. Doesn't happen over here at all. The news tries to maintain a modicum of seriousness, even if the last few years it has also gone down the internet outrage and tumblr politics route.
This morning I looked out of my kitchen window and saw a falcon picking apart a small animal (bird I think). It took an incredibly long time for the animal to stop moving. That's death in nature. We can and should strive to do better.
Agreed. We should destroy an many animals in nature as possible to prevent them from reproducing and causing more suffering.
All animals should only be allowed to be raised in captivity and killed as humanely as possible.
And from there it follows that we must capture and enslave all humans, to prevent them from causing pain and hurting each other as they would given their own devices.
The weird part of all this is lobster was considered garbage only about a 100 years ago.
I live in a rural area and the farmers would use whole lobsters as fertilizer on their fields. This only after anyone bothered to collect them from the beaches, no fishermen were catching them.
Even when people did eat them anyone who did was poor. My mother in her mid 70s said to me kids at school who had lobster were mocked because everyone knew they were poor "Eww lobster".
I wonder what the Swiss law says about shellfish such as clams, mussels, quahogs, geoducks etc. all those are boiled. Compassion is one thing but outright lunacy is another.
I think the only logical solution is to learn to communicate with the lobsters. Then we can establish diplomatic relations, and learn of their ways. Only after we truly understand the lobster can we say what is a dignified way for them to go.
Who knows maybe one will even run for president one day.
Funny thing you should say this about lobsters in particular. In Charles Stross' novel "Accelerando" simulated (uploaded) lobster brains got smart enough to reach out for help and escape their experiment. They eventually become a superhuman being, living in space.
> That means cats must have a daily visual contact with other felines
Wow, really? Why? Cats are loners, they don't need to be around other cats. In fact, my cat hates other cats, giving her daily visual contact with other cats would basically be torture.
The law is actually far more sensible and says that "Cats kept on their own shall have daily contact with humans OR visual contact with members of their own species." Some people like harping on the Swiss animal protection laws as horrible tyranny but I feel really bad for any animals whose owners don't follow such basic standards of decency.
I'm with you there...we used to live in an apartment on the ground level and people nearby had outdoor cats that would regularly come to our windows and it would really stress my cat out. He's a lot easier going without the daily visual contact with other felines.
I had one cat like that (extreme agitation and threat displays through the window at stray cats).
I have another one who, after his cat companion died, started exhibiting play aggression and increased clingy behavior toward me. When I got him a new cat companion (taking care to choose one that enjoyed rough-and-tumble play with other cats), his behavior returned to normal. These two do seem to actually enjoy their daily contact.
The bar for infringing on people's freedom should be high. Laws should exit only to protect human interests. That can include things like preserving biodiversity. But to use the power of the state against people for the sole purpose of protecting animal interests is unjustified in my opinion.
I believe we have a moral duty to treat animals well, and certainly to avoid causing needless suffering. But not all moral duties justify state compulsion.
One of the strongest arguments for banning cock/dog fighting is that it inculcates moral depravity in its participants. To stand there and take pleasure in causing suffering in living things can only serve make you callous to human suffering as well. It seems justified to ban it, at least as an organized, large-scale enterprise.
I realize I've laid out a slippery slope. That's why I was hesitant. The strongest case is for banning organized, large-scale animal cruelty done for depraved enjoyment. But I don't think we should prosecute people because we don't like, for example, that they use electric shock collars to keep their dogs from running off.
I'd summarize my position as: 1) animal interests for their own sake are not a legitimate end of government coercion, and 2) the moral character of the people is a legitimate end, but we should be very hesitant to use coercion for social engineering.
You're not holding much water to be honest. Pick one:
a) animals are incapable of suffering
b) we shouldn't care if animals suffer
c) we should care and pass laws
Are you arguing that the solution to all controversy is to pass a law? You are proposing to solve all problems at gunpoint.
What space for different conceptions of the good, for diversity of values and preferences, could exist in such a society?
You must have limiting principles for when we should resort to the remedy of the law. Perhaps yours are different than mine, but I doubt that you have none at all.
So what, as long as humans win it's OK? Boy that sounds like a shitty philosophy, but we might quickly get into an argument over the semantics of "win".
Question: what is the maximum water temperature that a lobster can survive in?
If that maximum is less than the boiling point of water, then another question: how carefully is the law drafted?
If the law actually specifies boiling, is it just going to result in cooks bring the water to a boil, taking it off the heat, letting it drop to a little below the boiling point, and then inserting the lobster, where it still dies but not as fast?
>If the law actually specifies boiling, is it just going to result in cooks bring the water to a boil, taking it off the heat, letting it drop to a little below the boiling point, and then inserting the lobster, where it still dies but not as fast?
Yeah, make stupid rules, play stupid games. This seems like a feel-good law. I wonder how enforcement will be.
That is a worthy point. Some dog owners, particularly those getting their first dog, treat their dogs like humans, which is bad both for humans and dogs.
My first reaction was that this was silly, but I tried my best to follow along and have some empathy for the lobster. They had me right until electrocution...
As a Swiss person, I would say that I don't care either way. As least as long as they are dealing with this crap they have less budget for computer surveillance.
There's a Korean restaurant in Queens that serves live seafood (octopi chopped in front of you; hot pots with live scallops cooked at your table): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfu9MzeEMxo
I don't have a problem with chopping up an octopus at the dinner table, but I probably wouldn't want to see a chicken clubbed to death before it lands in plate.
On a different subject, I'm not sure that 'dignity' is a well-defined concept or that it applies to death in the first place. Is bleeding out from a cut throat as per the kosher slaughter method [1] less or more dignified than boiling alive in a pot?
Octopuses are some of the most intelligent creatures on earth. Eating or cutting them alive is nothing short of savage, and no better than serving live dog or chimpanzee.
I'm all for regulations that end unnecessary animal suffering, especially when the whole purpose of it is to do nothing more than add novelty to a meal. We evolved to eat meat. We didn't evolve to torture our meals.
There’s reason to believe that Octupus are as conscious or more so than chicken. Certainly among non-mammal seafood they have the most intelligent behavior.
You should have a problem with a live octopus being chopped up in front of you. Octopi are some of the most intelligent creatures around. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-oc.... They are undoubtedly delicious too, just like cows, and, in some cultures, dogs.
It boils down to empathy... the way you acquire empathy is bound to culture and education. Knowing and understanding what a octopus is: a being of high intelligence and skill, sitting here at the bleeding edge of deep time with the other survivors, aught to matter to a emphatic being, like yourself.
So some humans think they finally have the luxury of seriously considering animal ethics while some other humans would still kill for survival. Meanwhile, the earth or the universe continues to not care.
I agree that we should pay more attention to people that are suffering.
But I think the rationale of such laws is somewhat valid. Can you imagine a person who is totally emotionless when torturing an animal but is also very compassionate towards human beings?
I think in some ways human ethics and animal ethics are connected.
Though if you ask me whether Switzerland has gone too far, I'm still hesitant about yes/no.
Imagine grandpa gutting fish and shooting animals with a rifle all day to come back and give children a goodnight kiss. I am not the one lacking imagination.
That's not the kind of torture i meant. Rifle or knife should be acceptable to most people. (This process is simple. Experienced butchers even work fast and clean.) Switzerland law is also about killing the lobster instantly so it's the same.
"...dipping it into salt water and then thrusting a knife into its brain."
So for a few seconds it will think it's being released back into its natural habitat and then seconds later its brains are dripping down some chef's knife.
The article talks about "animal dignity", but how is that giving them any form of dignity? They are still being killed unnaturally.
NOTE: I'm not some animal rights person and I do eat meat without thinking, and no I've never seen the inside of a slaughter house (and yes I think that would probably scar me for life).
> Yes but dignity is usually related to respect and honor. When was the last time you killed and ate something out of respect?
I don't kill what I eat, but most communities and cultures where this is a regular occurrence have long traditions of respecting the animals being sacrificed. One form of respect is to minimize the animal's suffering (both when it's raised and when it's killed), another is to use all parts of it, another is to not have an unfair advantage when hunting it, and so on. It's not one dimensional.
One of my all-time favourite comments on HN deals with this beautifully:
I've been struggling with this recently as well. I don't need to kill animals in order to survive and so doing so is just for my pleasure. It's surprisingly easy to put this out of your mind when you're sitting down to a nice dinner, but I do doubt that I'd be able to kill animals if I needed to do it with my own hands. Yet I and most others decide all the time that ending the life of another animal can be justified by the pleasure we'll receive from it when we choose to eat meat. So yeah, I'm also having trouble coming to terms with caring enough to reduce some suffering but still being OK with taking a life.
Why do you, and many contemporaries with you, doubt you'd be able to kill animals?
Especially when apparently our ancestors had no such qualms.
I venture this is a matter of exposure, we rarely see animals butchered. In fact, most animals we see are pets, contant with wildlife is very minimal.
So we recoil at killing animals, because pets are like family, and most of our experience with animals are with pets. Thus, we see animals as much more human than our ancestors.
What then, does this say about the ethical status of animals. Certainly, it seems like our lack of exposure to butchering is why we now care much more about animals.
The issue would be much clearer if things had happened the other way around.
That is, things would be clearer if we stopped all butchering animals because we thought animals had rights.
That is not to say this means animals have no rights, it might well be that by no longer killing animals as a manner of habit we realized their ethical standing.
However, this is less evident than most other cases where we (the caucasian west) have given other groups more ethical standing.
With slavery, we first realized it was wrong, and then stopped having slaves.
The counter point might be that in this analogy we are still before the point of abolishment.
I think all I can conclude is that 'not being able to kill animals' is not a sufficient arguments for animals having more ethical standing.
In the end though, it might boil down to ethics not being absolute but instead being relative to culture.
> So we recoil at killing animals, because pets are like family, and most of our experience with animals are with pets. Thus, we see animals as much more human than our ancestors.
This also heavily depends on how human-like we perceive the animals, both in their behaviors and appearance. Most people would be horrified at seeing a dog slaughtered, but have no problem genociding away the fleas, ticks, and worms living with it.
Rights are fundamentally a social construct, or perhaps we should say a social compact. So far, animals have a much more limited ability to comprehend and reciprocate our social mores. I believe this may be related to the limits we place on animal rights.
Human meat consumption typically comes from hunting of prey animals or from domesticated livestock. In the former case, a .30-06 through the heart is a much nicer way to go than to be devoured alive by wolves or coyotes or to starve due to overpopulation. In the latter case, the animal is literally genetically predisposed to this life, and the entire lineage would die out if people did not eat them.
I mean, I get that you think your position is kinder to animals, and there's a certain intuitive value to that position. But ceasing consumption of livestock would, in effect, amount to genocide.
> When was the last time you killed and ate something out of respect?
Some indigenous American cultures do make sure to eat the things they've killed, out of respect. You could call that "animal dignity." (You could also consider it a superstitious belief that the animal's spirit will get after them if they disrespect its gifts.)
I also know that in many cultures (at least in previous eras†), if you killed the parents of a family (human or animal), it was seen as correct to kill their babies (i.e. children not yet of an age to fend for themselves) as well, to prevent them from just later succumbing to starvation or predation. That's a form of "animal dignity."
† This mostly came up for human babies in the context of soldiers from an army-on-the-march razing foreign villages. If these villages worshipped a different faith, the whole village would go. But if they worshipped the same faith as the attacking army, the army would likely refuse to burn down the temple of the faith they believed in—and so, rather than kill "innocents", they'd dump them into the hands of the priest of that temple. This was the de-facto invention of the orphanage. Later, orphanages would become formalized as an institution, and spread to the point that soldiers would just assume foreign cultures to have them as well, and so the killing-innocents part of razing villages generally stopped.
(And recently in Western culture, we've invented the equivalent of orphanages for animals as well: wildlife rescue habitats.)
Natural death of an animal in the nature can be quite long and very painful. The point is not to simulate natural kill, the point is to kill the animal without torturing it unnecessary.
Yes, sometimes when I hear people talk about how we kill animals inhumanely, I feel like they should watch a little bit of national geographic. Makes a sketchy slaughterhouse seem like a picnic.
I went on a tour through a slaughterhouse when I was a teen, as part of a school trip. Didn't want to go, but my stepfather decided that it would be "good for" me. I made it clear I didn't want to go and he laughed. He loved the power trip of forcing me to watch animals be killed.
It really messed me up. I won't eat red meat mostly as a result of this, but also because my family were also ridiculously poor cooks. (They were so bad that you wouldn't believe it.)
The smell of the animal fat has stuck with me for nearly thirty years, I can even smell it overpowering the fragrance of perfumed soap. Hand sanitizer, pump soap, and vegetable based soap are fine, but if I have to use ordinary animal soaps, the smell reminds me of what I saw.
I watched a cow be electrocuted, "stunned" they called it. The guide told me that it didn't feel anything because it was in a deep state of shock.
Ever been shocked by a cattle electric fence? When I was 9, I was. You can't move immediately afterward because of the shock of the event, and when the second blast hits you it hits really hard. I felt three of those, it was only when the third struck that I could move, and have no doubt that they were agonizing.
Shocking an animal to stun it, so you can slit its throat and let it die painfully while you dismember it, is no happy little picnic for the beast. This is no easy, painless death. I'm sure it would be agonizing and drawn out over several minutes, and by the time the animal recovers from the shock enough to express its suffering, it's already in pieces and can't.
Roll on lab-grown meat.
Side note: not completely relevant, but I have been attacked by a dog, and I was in shock through that as well. The worst injuries really hurt, but the adrenaline from the attack made me able to get away from the dog. The minor skin injuries I couldn't feel, because the pain centers were being overwhelmed by the worse ones. Between this, and the cattle electric fence, I'm sure they suffer.
I saw a video (which I won't link to you, as I'm certain you don't want to see it) of a phenomenal on-site butcher, he was incredibly precise, fast, etc.
Anyway, the video starts with a live cow, which is killed instantly with a small firearm and a well-placed bullet to the brain.
I butcher animals sometimes (I hunt and have a small homestead) and I would not dream to use any method which involved a death even as slow as bleeding out.
This is a dangerous route to take, because at that point you can start comparing yourself to animals. We spent a few centuries developing our world, so I think it's fair to assume higher standards. Animals kill other animals to solve their hunger and they do their best to end it quickly.
"Animals kill other animals to solve their hunger and they do their best to end it quickly." is not entirely true.
Many animals will start to eat others without bothering to kill them; non-carnivorous birds will peck each other (not particularly quickly) to death, dolphins do gang rape for fun while having the ability to understand what it means, they also kill things like porpoises for fun (they can't eat porpoises and they're neither a threat nor competition to dolphins); predators in good conditions do "surplus kill" i.e. kill just for practice/fun without attempting to eat the victim, apes have been observed to eat parts of other apes while they're still alive, etc, etc.
The main difference between animals is that while less intelligent animals will sometimes simply kill things "just because" even if they don't need to and the suffering will be an accidental side effect, the more intelligent animals will sometimes intentionally hurt/torture others. Morality is orthogonal to intelligence. Romanticizing nature as something pure, "taking only what they need" and beyond evil is ridiculous idealism that doesn't reflect reality.
Animals kill other animals to solve their hunger and they do their best to end it quickly.
Not always. Weasels and their relatives engage in surplus killing. Cats regularly play with their prey, clawing them and batting them around for fun, many times without even eating the dead prey animal.
Dolphins are known to devour a shark's liver and leave the rest of the animal to sink, dying a slow death.
Humans are animals. There's almost nothing we do that other predators don't. The difference is that we use technology as a force multiplier of overwhelming magnitude. There isn't much difference in kind, however.
Hardly. Again, watch some National Geographic. You will see plenty of animals struggling as they are devoured alive. We raise chickens for eggs. A few times, Opossums or racoons have gotten into the pen. They will kill every single chicken and eat maybe one or two at most. Sometimes, they will even chew off a hen's leg or both and leave it alive.
Right, if we can kill it within 30 seconds, that eliminates a lot of unnecessary torture compared to a natural death. But then if 30 seconds is the new normal, then it becomes outrageous again, and killing it in 10 seconds is now eliminating unnecessary torture, right? But then that becomes the new norm and we shave another second off? Do we end up disputing the transmission of pulses down their nervous systems and interrupting them before they're perceived, just to prepare food that's already acceptable to eat?
You talk about it as if it would be bad process. It is not. It is process that takes into account our natural need to eat, pleasure we have from eating and practicality of killing.
If civilization crushed and I would be suddenly living in the forest with family, I would kill the animal however I could - to eat. Probably painfully, because I know nothing else and probably am too exhausted to waste energy. I care more about me and kids not dying then about lobster pain.
On the other extreme, we have cheap pulses to kill them quick available, why not.
The same process happen with everything: legal systems, medicine and even child raising.
There are gradations of "dignity" - your formulation would demand vegetarianism, since all animals being killed for food are killed "unnaturally". Whereas I think there's a great deal more respect involved in reducing the animal's suffering (quick killing during a period of reduced stress).
Wtf. Should chopping the head off a chicken be illegal as well? How about shooting a cow in the back of the skull? What if it's suffering? Is it ok then?
Hahahaha this is too stupid. How can these be less cruel?
"Two methods are recommended: Electrocution or sedating the lobster by dipping it into salt water and then thrusting a knife into its brain."
Maybe the lobster actually feels a litle pleasure on the boiling water before going main-dish, like you reader on a jacuzzi, having an exoskeleton and all sure helps.
Stupid laws. Better fix that corrupted banking system first.
Suffice it to say: Wallace is not convinced that the knife through the head lets you off the hook so easily.