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Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals
- muninn_ 10y agoVegetarianism is not about making sure animals have good lives, it's about not eating them or participating in the intentional destruction of them by humans as much as possible. Stopping nature from taking its course in the world outside of human action is not a concern of vegetarians. Moving them to farms seems to be something very much against what a vegetarian would do.
- cjbprime 10y agoIt's specifically talking about ethical consequentalism, which is related to utilitarianism -- the idea that you should act in a way to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. Some vegetarians are not consequentialists, and so they can reject this argument for the reason you describe, but I know many who are.
- TillE 10y agoI've been around a lot of hardcore vegans, and literally none of them would subscribe to the bizarre abstract philosophy of "minimizing suffering" in the wild. It's an absurdity. The idea is to remove human causes of destruction, not to intervene in nature to manufacture some kind of utopia. Again, absurd. Essentially nobody would actually believe this, aside from philosophical masturbation.
- schoen 10y agoI am a vegan and I believe there's an important qualitative distinction between the suffering that we cause and the suffering that we fail to prevent, but I still think the suffering in nature is bad and would like to see a way that we could reduce it. There must be different cultures and views within veganism. :-)
- cjbprime 10y agoThat's the point of the paper, though, right? The paper compels them to explain why they find it okay to dismiss the idea as absurd, if they want to consider themselves as being ethically consistent regarding animal suffering.
- dwils098 10y agoThis article explicitly states that it only applies to a subset of Vegetarianism, namely Ethical Consequentialist Vegetarianism. Ipso facto, it does not apply to the entirety of Vegetarianism, hence the explicit disclaimer in the introduction.
- muninn_ 10y agoI reject that as an appropriate or meaningful subset of what it means to be vegetarian, hence my comment. It's basically nonsense as far as I'm concerned. Do you have any supporting view of ethical consequentialist vegetarianism as a sound philosophical position or argument?
- cgh 10y agoNobody moves animals to farms. Farm animals were specifically created by humans and could not exist outside that context. I eat farmed meat but I also go hunting and try to take down a deer each year and maybe some grouse. Since this is just nature taking its course, I assume vegetarians won't care much about this.
- magic_beans 10y ago> From the abstract: "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." This article assumes that people are vegetarians because they are sad for farm animals... Absolutely untrue. The largest concentrated majority of vegetarians in the world are vegetarians for religious reasons, under the belief that eating animals is an act of violence we have a moral responsibility to avoid.
- cjbprime 10y agoIt doesn't assume that. Those religious vegetarians are not "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians". Consequentialism is an ethical framework, so consequentalist vegetarians are vegetarian for ethical reasons.
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago"Avoding voilence" is not an ethical reason?
- dwils098 10y agoIt is, especially if they are avoiding violence out of moral responsibility...
- magic_beans 10y agoDid YOU read the paper?
- magic_beans 10y agoThe paper assumes that people are vegetarians because they believe farm animals have worse lives than wild animals... which is a heftily false assumption to begin with.
- afandian 10y agoThe abstract is necessarily shorter than the paper. If you read as far as the second sentence of the paper you will see your point addressed.
- bykovich 10y agoI'm the guy who thinks that suffering and pleasure are additive inverses.
- musha68k 10y agoMost elaborate troll post I've read in a while, I upvoted it.
- danhak 10y ago> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
- kneath 10y ago"Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here."
- afandian 10y agoDid you read it? Literally the second sentence points this out.
- danhak 10y agoI did read it. The author makes an arbitrary distinction between "consequentialist" and "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians and implies the second category is comprised entirely of those concerned with animal welfare.
- afandian 10y agoOk. Well I read > Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here. as acknowledging that there are other kinds of consequentialists, those that have other ethical reasons for not eating meat, but that he's not talking about them.
- schoen 10y agoI think "ethical vegetarian" in academic philosophy has specifically been used to refer to people motivated by animal rights or welfare, and that's still what academic philosophers themselves talk about most in connection with vegetarianism.
- elif 10y agoHis comparison of very low estimates of livestock population (a 2004 estimate of 17B chicken compared to the 2009 estimate of 50B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#World_chicken_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#World_chicken_... ) to the entire wild animal population is a particularly negligent simplification, and the cherry-picked stats and inexplicable use of scientific notation for 60B and common notation for 17B show his motive for it. The fact is, chickens would not exist if not for human captivity/breeding, so it is irrelevant to compare 17 or 50 Billion to 60 billion wild "land bird" populations. The comparison should be to zero chickens. These chickens would not spontaneously be wild fowl of another species under any circumstances.
- DominikPeters 10y agoI think the two estimates you mention are different things: 17B is the population of chickens alive in a single moment, 50B for number slaughtered in a year. (Broiler chickens live much less than a year.) The comparison of farm and wild population sizes is relevant, because humans have control over both the size of the chicken population (through choice of eating habits) and the size of wild animal populations (through habitat reduction or conversion).
- schoen 10y agoI took this xkcd https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ at the time as an argument that people's decisions about farming may affect a lot of the overall animal suffering in the world, but I guess if you include even some non-mammals the direction of the comparison will reverse!
- elif 10y agoHow do I have control over wild animal population? Hunting? Is the implication that hunting a wild bird whose individual suffering I have ascertained is somehow a preferable alternative to picking a box from the shelf that says chikn nuggets instead of one which says chicken nuggets? Or am I to believe that all wild animals suffer equivalently because of some hand wavey quantification of an academic in some no name journal?
- glibgil 10y agoWhat a stupid paper. The whole point of "ethical consequentialist vegetarianism" is to allow for an untouched wild domain where animals can suffer in a way consistent with environment and evolution. Becoming a human vegetarian is, after all, consistent with environment and evolution. We can be vegetarian from an evolutionary position and we maybe should be vegetarian from an environmental position (i.e. our high population)
- schoen 10y ago"Nature" and "natural" are very culturally salient in vegetarianism over all (when I travel, I look for a "natural foods" store, where I might then buy highly processed foods like Daiya...!), but I think in philosophical debates "suffering" has been more controversial. I don't think the significance of "natural" suffering has been accepted by western philosophy, or at least people would then have a significant debate about what it means for something to be natural! Consequentialism in particular I think is very averse to arguments that natural things are good or OK. Quite a few philosophical consequentialists are interested in radically anti-nature views like transhumanism because of the idea that we can do much better than nature has.
- glibgil 10y agoI didn't mention nature, but rather domain, environment, and evolution. The goodness of the action of vegetarianism is that one species limits interference of other species in their own domain, consistent with their environment and evolution.
- schoen 10y agoI'm a long-term vegetarian animal rights supporter and I support the publication of work like this, even though many people take it as a sort of anti-vegetarian propaganda, because I think this is how we make progress in understanding issues! Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides possible evidence against X, possible evidence in favor of Y, or an opportunity to think about why the implication might be unsound. That helps clarify how we think about things. (Toby Ord wrote a similar paper about opposition to abortion where he pointed out that spontaneous abortion, especially before people are aware of the pregnancy, is much more common than induced abortion, so maybe many abortion opponents should be concerned with medical research on how to prevent it. While Ord seemingly thought the modus tollens side of this argument was stronger, ... maybe they should!) Although I don't embrace the act/omissions symmetry that the theory here is based on, I support the modus ponens side of the argument that wild animals' suffering is a horrific thing that it would be good to find a way to mitigate. This has led to some pretty long flamewars in the past; I remember a particular incident when the "Tetrapod Zoology" blog discovered David Pearce, a transhumanist who sees it as urgent (and feasible) to re-engineer nature to eliminate all suffering. Fireworks ensued. Overall, I don't think this argument is particularly new. I heard substantially the same point presented as an anti-vegetarian argument at least 15 years ago. At the time I thought "predators aren't moral agents, accidents aren't moral agents, there's no wrongdoing here, there's no problem". But now I think there is a problem after all, even if it isn't our "responsibility" or "obligation" to solve it.
- cjbprime 10y agoHi Seth! I'm reminded of an Aaron Swartz story that I suppose we could share: == During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics, technology, and ethics. I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from hurting each other? As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed. The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in the process, I suppose we should.” That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always thinking about the greater good. -- Benjamin Mako Hill, https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-aaron_swartz_memorial_remarks.html https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-aaron_swartz_memorial_rem...
- holri 10y agoIf some bird is killed by a crocodile it is not my concern. If I eat a chicken it is.
- cjbprime 10y agoMany people have ethics like yours, but these are not consequentialist ethics, which is what the article is discussing. In consequentialism, an act's rightness is determined by the goodness of what happens, not other factors.
- glibgil 10y agoYou and the paper miss the mark by not imagining the position that leaving something wild is good
- schoen 10y agoAs I said above, I don't think that view is associated with the "ethical consequentialist vegetarianism" questioned here and often defended in academic philosophy. In fact part of the point of the consequentialist idea here is that maybe it doesn't matter who or what was responsible for something (e.g., a human or an ecosystem) in order to decide if the thing itself was good or bad. Although not all consequentialists afford any moral status to animals, I think consequentialists would find it super congenitally difficult to say "oh, but that's OK -- nature did it!".
- themaninthedark 10y agoBut what is 'wild'? If I as an animal follow my instincts and hunt a deer is that unacceptable in your eyes?
- glibgil 10y agoWhy would a human hunting deer be a problem at all? As long as the numbers are right you should be able to hunt. Meat, as it is consumed by most people, is probably not sustainable. Hunting exists outside that system
- jstewartmobile 10y agoThis is the kind of argument your anti-social prick brother gives at Christmas dinner for attention, and they gave him a prize for it? Really!?
- exratione 10y agoI've made a similar argument here. The goal of elimination of suffering leads to a future very different from the world we inhabit today, but definitely better for it. A world of limited beings who all suffer is amenable to improvement on many levels. https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-followed-to-the-ends-of-paradise-engineering/ https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-... Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation. Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required. At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done. Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to other projects.
- deontologizt 10y agoThis is a great reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. However, I find it very worrying that the so-called "effective altruism" movement takes this kind of thing seriously. Look up the EA-affiliated "Foundational Research Institute" -- it's an entire pseudo think tank whose philosophy is based on negative utilitarianism, the idea that all that matters is minimizing suffering, and we should do so by any means necessary (not excluding the extinction of all life). There are other organizations that support habitat destruction on utilitarian grounds, such as "Sentience Politics" and "Animal Ethics", but FRI is the brains of the operation, so to speak. (Animal Ethics is the propaganda wing, and Sentience Politics is trying to make it policy.) Brian Tomasik, who is cited in the OP, is the founder of FRI and has written a lot about "wild animal suffering" on his blog. His conclusions are very counter-intuitive; for example, he thinks forest fires are good because they reduce the number of suffering animals in existence. That said, his articles on the possibility of sentience in reinforcement learning algorithms are pretty interesting!
- antisthenes 10y agoThis can't possibly have anything to do with utilitarianism as it is impossible for us to understand domesticated animal utility preference curves beyond "being fed and warm = good". If one is being pedantic, I'm sure one could find many wild species which fare will in confinement, and make a case that it is cruel to contain wild animals in cases where utility from our entertainment does not outweigh their dis-utility from being imprisoned (such as zoos). I'm not convinced that such an argument could be made for domesticated or feral animals. Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with. Negative utilitarianism separated from the general concept of utilitarianism is, of course, a nonsense concept in and of itself, since its end goal is non-existence, which makes utility unable to exist. I'm not familiar with other pseudo-think tanks, so I'll defer to you on that one.
- deontologizt 10y ago> Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with. Actually, utilitarianism is about maximizing the welfare (i.e., happiness minus suffering) of all beings that can be said to have a "welfare". This goes back to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who argued that any being capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. (more extensive discussion can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism) More recently, the most prominent living utilitarian philosopher is Peter Singer, who has argued extensively for the moral consideration of animals. Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense is distinct from the anthropocentric economic interpretation.
- spraak 10y agoIs this a big troll? The author moves directly from > "reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers" to > "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation" WHY at all would that make sense? It's a giant IF they believe reducing harm is better than non-existence. So... er, ok... the author is saying (to put it succinctly) that IF an existence of suffering as a farmed animal is better than non-existence, then clearly vegetarians should want to > "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation" It doesn't follow logically at all.
- motherfucker2 10y agoThis follows from the assumption "If wild animals’ well-being is indeed below the threshold for a life worth living", which is argued in the passage: > One reason to suspect that on average this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.
- DominikPeters 10y agoThe "giant if" you mention is stated explicitly in the section you quote: "More precisely then, ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives so bad they are not worth living, so that it is better for them not to come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. [...] I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, the suffering of wild animals would dominate their concerns, and would plausibly lead them to support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation."
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- the_gastropod 10y agoIsn't this effectively the same argument pro-slavery advocates used? "(Slaves|Animals) would live brutal, worse off lives if they weren't owned by their masters. Therefore (vegetarians|abolitionists) want more suffering in the world."
- exodust 10y agoNice trolling. Wild animals don't experience 24/7 discomfort from a confined, crowded unnatural space before ultimately marched to a mechanized execution. The last possible confused thought the numb animal has: "well that fucking sucked". Suffering in the wild is not sustained or imposed to support a cheap-ass burger industry. Vegetarians want animal welfare taken seriously, and environmental concerns guiding the regulations around animal agriculture. In response to the point about animal non-existence, the vegetarian could argue that favoring non-existence might motivate the livestock industry to address environmental and animal welfare concerns. Respect is earned and more meat sold to the "mostly vegetarian" crowd as a result, and less young people flocking to vegetarianism after watching the latest meat-bad doco. A means to an end for the vegetarian rather than a fixed philosophical position.
- anotheryou 10y agoWrong title if you base your argument on something "compared to free range live stock". I read just a little further and also have to nitpick, that good times can be experienced before reaching adolescence. it is still an interesting argument.
- marojejian 10y agoThe argument he makes hinges on the empirical suffering of wild animals vs. domestic. As he admits, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that wild suffering is indeed greater, so the case is not strong. That said, I do happen to identify with the sort of vegetarian logic here. If there were strong evidence that wild animal suffering were much greater than domestic, that would be very important to me. So I agree with his conclusion that more research into the lives of wild (and domestic) animals should be a priority. However, given what I know of the literal sausage factory that is industrialized food production, I fear the suffering of domestic animals is very great, and unlikely to be topped.