4 ms·

The concept of "reasonably torturous" is pretty wild.

chrisfrantz 4y ago
Agreed, if you have to include the word torture in the descriptor of food production than there’s already an ethical problem to solve.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  What is the ethical problem? What kind of solution would there be? How would that philosophical thinking apply to other apex predators, such as spiders who poison and wrap their prey while they hopeless wriggle to death for minutes or snakes who suffocate their prey to death sometimes breaking major bones, or a cat killing a rodent for fun? Do we have a responsibility to intervene against other torturous predators, why or why not? I am curious about your philosophical reasoning on the topic, I am not asking rhetorically.
  - virgildotcodes 4y ago
    The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others. The philosophical thinking would apply to those who are capable of entertaining and acting upon it. The spiders are obligate carnivores, so have no choice in the matter, and likely no concept of the issue. That said, I think your point about responsibility to intervene is actually interesting. There's a whole ethical matter concerned with this question.[1] My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter. We have the power to control our own actions, but I don't see any way we could reasonably resolve the issue of wild animal suffering, at least in the near term with our current technological capacity. If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so. Were we the ones suffering we would hope others would do it for us. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering
    - hayst4ck 4y ago
      > The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others. What is a strong definition or test for necessity? > My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter. Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs? What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes). > If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so. What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure? What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do? If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention?
      - virgildotcodes 4y ago
        >What is a strong definition or test for necessity? In this context I'm defining it as whether we need to do it to survive. > Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs? What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes). If we're talking about the current state of the world, our interventions are actually resulting in the deaths of countless individuals as well as the extinction of the majority of nonhuman life on Earth. Arguably what comes after environmental collapse may very well be the death of a large number, if not the majority of humans as well. Animal industry is directly responsible for a lot of this in the form of the direct killing of wild animals for food and other products, as well as indirectly in the form of environmental destruction from farming animals. An argument to end animal industry is in fact an argument to allow the most nonhuman life to proliferate, which serves your hypothetical about allowing others to survive and evolve. If we're talking about my hypothetical of ending all suffering, that could go any which way. Are we ending suffering just by neurally neutering all creatures and allowing them to only experience pleasure, even as they're being devoured alive? Are we somehow genetically modifying all carnivores and omnivores to become herbivores, and then modifying plant life to be able to supply the global population, and then again ensuring that their fertility rates and lifespans are such that their populations remain static? Are we leaving everything as it is and then just segregating all herbivores from the carnivores and then airdropping in packages of Beyond Antelope to all those carnivores on a weekly basis? Who knows man, depending on how you choose to go about it you could still allow nonhuman life to go on existing and evolving. Although granted, the course of their evolution would be altered by our actions, just as the course of their evolution is inevitably being altered by our current actions, and as they will be regardless of what we do or don't do just based on our dominance of the planet and inevitable influence upon all life on it. My argument is simply that in the real world, we stop torturing and killing fellow sentient beings when we don't have to. I think it's not an unreasonable position to hold, and it seems as if it would benefit the majority of life on Earth, humans included, as opposed to harming it. > What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure? > What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do? > If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention? Fully automated luxury Earth dildos for all animals and insects, at work 24/7. Who knows? If we could ascertain consent that would probably be the guiding principle. Some people would want some sort of existence consisting of pure pleasure, some would not. If we really want to get into it I would argue that even those who would not have never experienced absolutely all encompassing drug induced euphoria, it's hard to not want something that every neuron in your brain is telling you is nirvana. I'm not arguing we should do this, I frankly don't know whether it's more dystopian to submit all living things to nonconsensual pleasure comas or to simply let them live out their lives with all the agony that may entail. However what I will say is that all this is pretty far off the rails, and unattached to the reality we currently inhabit and the abilities we currently possess within it. The reality we currently inhabit is one in which we are exterminating all nonhuman life on Earth, and torturing billions of animals to death per year in the most horrific ways imaginable, simultaneously destroying the environment which will result in unimaginable amounts of human suffering and death, just because we enjoy the taste. We can instead choose to be kind to those who share this world with us, they and we would be better off for it.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Other apex predators don't have the intellectual capacity to develop abstract ethics, so they can't be held responsible for the suffering they instictively cause. But we do have the capacity, we have used it to develop our ethics, and now we're responsible for the conclusions that stem from it. If you mean it in a sense of whether we're morally obligated to prevent predation in general - I actually think that we are in the (very, very, very) long term, but the limiting factor is the ability to do so without collapsing the ecosystem. If there were a magic wand that you could waive and make "the lion lie down with the lamb" - with full knowledge that both species would still do fine in this new arrangement - I think it would be highly unethical to not use it.
hayst4ck 4y ago
Quite literally wild. There is nothing quite like watching David Attenborough walking us through the absolute ruthlessness of the animal kingdom in his plummy staccato voicing. There is no doubt that had cows evolved differently they would be as torturous to their prey as any other animal. I think we can definitely do better, but I think it's equally clear that mother nature is not very opinionated on the topic.
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  This is an appeal to nature fallacy.[1] Every horrifying thing beyond imagination has happened in nature, including all sorts of rape, torture, murder, and infanticide, much of this by humans as a part of that nature. Does this justify humans in engaging in rape, torture, murder, and infanticide? This is a discussion of ethics, not what nature allows (which is everything possible within the laws of physics). [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    I don't think it is an appeal to nature fallacy because I have no implicit axiom that "what is natural is good." The statement I made seems, to me, closer to "what is natural is." without a strong opinion on it's level of good. Your argument is that we should re-write the the laws governing our reality, something we have only recently become able to accomplish, and something we can't necessarily predict the consequences of. In a discussion of ethics (and physics) our bodies desire amino acids that exist in animal flesh and will provide us with reproductive advantage for acquiring them, something we (up until recently) must have killed animals to acquire. If you want to have an ethical discussion (I do because they're interesting) the physics of the matter must be spoken to or accounted for. Pain is a physical concept. Social relationships are a physical concept (there are physical forces governing these relationships in our brains). There's research that plants can communicate damage or danger, is that a pain analogue? Is the fundemental ethical issue suffereing, suffering of those left behind (in social creatures), "theft" of future? Then there's the equally (to me) compelling question that an animal would eat me if it could, from an ethical point of view, I think that gives me a right to eat it. Why does that fail under your reasoning system? So far it seems like your axioms are that: We have power That power makes us responsibile I am not clear on what you think we are responsible for If we are responsible to minimize total suffering in a pragmatic way, why is it then not our responisbility to wipe out other creatures that cause torturous deaths?
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I mean... compared to other animals, of which some don't even kill you, before they start eating you... we're still better than a lot of "nature".
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  The thing is, there are a lot of horrible ways that people die. Cancer, alzheimer's, violence, crippling injuries, chronic pain and depression leading to suicide, war, etc. etc. Does this justify us enslaving people and torturing them (debatedly) less in a factory farm and slaughtering them at a young age?
  - nightski 4y ago
    You can get rid of factory farming without going vegan.
    - virgildotcodes 4y ago
      If you're talking about it from an animal rights angle, even animals raised on small idyllic farms have their throats slit at an early age. Would we want our throats slit? Would we want to be funneled down a chute with our family members, watching them disappear behind a metal sheet and then get shot in the head one by one in front of us, until our turn comes? If you're talking about it from an environmental angle, moving from CAFOs to grass-feeding small farms for e.g. cattle would necessitate more land, the animals would grow more slowly, they would produce more methane due to digestion of grass vs feed, we would subsequently have to raise larger herds of animals to supply the same amount of meat, and all of this would actually result in a worse impact on the environment. Factory farming is actually largely the result of the industry optimizing animal rearing to produce the most meat for the least amount of inputs.
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      If you look at the statistics, in the developed world factory farming makes up about 98% of all meat produced commercially. Before I stopped eating meat, I thought the meat I was buying came from good sources. The farms were nearby, conditions seemed okay, it was organic, etc. The reality is that all of these animals don’t have good lives. They don’t eat well. They live in bizarre conditions. The vast majority (nearly 100%, again) end up in feed lots if they’re cattle. They’re fattened and then killed essentially as adolescents of their species. Forcefully inseminated, taken from their mothers, killed as babies for veal, fed absurd amounts of antibiotics in some cases, many die in their pens, etc. This is normal. It’s how we farm. Industry is good at putting a smile on it, talking about values and generations of farmers and doing it right… But these animals are bred and killed for cash, no one gives much of a shit about them, and it’s all very grim. The excelsior pig farm near me in Abbotsford, British Columbia is a great example. This farm wasn’t exceptional. It’s just another pig farm. But pigs were dead in their pens, cannibalizing each other, dead in trash bins, dead in dumpsters, covered in feces, sores, and wounds. You’re not going to get rid of that. Meat as we know it doesn’t exist without this race to the bottom circus of torture. People are eager to believe their meat habit isn’t based around this or that something better is around the corner, but it’s simply not the case. These animals are here for profit, yet no one is willing to pay enough for them to live comfortably. So they will suffer.

Agreed, if you have to include the word torture in the descriptor of food production than there’s already an ethical problem to solve.

hayst4ck 4y ago
What is the ethical problem? What kind of solution would there be? How would that philosophical thinking apply to other apex predators, such as spiders who poison and wrap their prey while they hopeless wriggle to death for minutes or snakes who suffocate their prey to death sometimes breaking major bones, or a cat killing a rodent for fun? Do we have a responsibility to intervene against other torturous predators, why or why not? I am curious about your philosophical reasoning on the topic, I am not asking rhetorically.
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others. The philosophical thinking would apply to those who are capable of entertaining and acting upon it. The spiders are obligate carnivores, so have no choice in the matter, and likely no concept of the issue. That said, I think your point about responsibility to intervene is actually interesting. There's a whole ethical matter concerned with this question.[1] My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter. We have the power to control our own actions, but I don't see any way we could reasonably resolve the issue of wild animal suffering, at least in the near term with our current technological capacity. If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so. Were we the ones suffering we would hope others would do it for us. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    > The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others. What is a strong definition or test for necessity? > My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter. Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs? What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes). > If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so. What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure? What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do? If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention?
    - virgildotcodes 4y ago
      >What is a strong definition or test for necessity? In this context I'm defining it as whether we need to do it to survive. > Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs? What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes). If we're talking about the current state of the world, our interventions are actually resulting in the deaths of countless individuals as well as the extinction of the majority of nonhuman life on Earth. Arguably what comes after environmental collapse may very well be the death of a large number, if not the majority of humans as well. Animal industry is directly responsible for a lot of this in the form of the direct killing of wild animals for food and other products, as well as indirectly in the form of environmental destruction from farming animals. An argument to end animal industry is in fact an argument to allow the most nonhuman life to proliferate, which serves your hypothetical about allowing others to survive and evolve. If we're talking about my hypothetical of ending all suffering, that could go any which way. Are we ending suffering just by neurally neutering all creatures and allowing them to only experience pleasure, even as they're being devoured alive? Are we somehow genetically modifying all carnivores and omnivores to become herbivores, and then modifying plant life to be able to supply the global population, and then again ensuring that their fertility rates and lifespans are such that their populations remain static? Are we leaving everything as it is and then just segregating all herbivores from the carnivores and then airdropping in packages of Beyond Antelope to all those carnivores on a weekly basis? Who knows man, depending on how you choose to go about it you could still allow nonhuman life to go on existing and evolving. Although granted, the course of their evolution would be altered by our actions, just as the course of their evolution is inevitably being altered by our current actions, and as they will be regardless of what we do or don't do just based on our dominance of the planet and inevitable influence upon all life on it. My argument is simply that in the real world, we stop torturing and killing fellow sentient beings when we don't have to. I think it's not an unreasonable position to hold, and it seems as if it would benefit the majority of life on Earth, humans included, as opposed to harming it. > What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure? > What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do? > If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention? Fully automated luxury Earth dildos for all animals and insects, at work 24/7. Who knows? If we could ascertain consent that would probably be the guiding principle. Some people would want some sort of existence consisting of pure pleasure, some would not. If we really want to get into it I would argue that even those who would not have never experienced absolutely all encompassing drug induced euphoria, it's hard to not want something that every neuron in your brain is telling you is nirvana. I'm not arguing we should do this, I frankly don't know whether it's more dystopian to submit all living things to nonconsensual pleasure comas or to simply let them live out their lives with all the agony that may entail. However what I will say is that all this is pretty far off the rails, and unattached to the reality we currently inhabit and the abilities we currently possess within it. The reality we currently inhabit is one in which we are exterminating all nonhuman life on Earth, and torturing billions of animals to death per year in the most horrific ways imaginable, simultaneously destroying the environment which will result in unimaginable amounts of human suffering and death, just because we enjoy the taste. We can instead choose to be kind to those who share this world with us, they and we would be better off for it.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Other apex predators don't have the intellectual capacity to develop abstract ethics, so they can't be held responsible for the suffering they instictively cause. But we do have the capacity, we have used it to develop our ethics, and now we're responsible for the conclusions that stem from it. If you mean it in a sense of whether we're morally obligated to prevent predation in general - I actually think that we are in the (very, very, very) long term, but the limiting factor is the ability to do so without collapsing the ecosystem. If there were a magic wand that you could waive and make "the lion lie down with the lamb" - with full knowledge that both species would still do fine in this new arrangement - I think it would be highly unethical to not use it.

hayst4ck 4y ago

Quite literally wild. There is nothing quite like watching David Attenborough walking us through the absolute ruthlessness of the animal kingdom in his plummy staccato voicing. There is no doubt that had cows evolved differently they would be as torturous to their prey as any other animal. I think we can definitely do better, but I think it's equally clear that mother nature is not very opinionated on the topic.

virgildotcodes 4y ago
This is an appeal to nature fallacy.[1] Every horrifying thing beyond imagination has happened in nature, including all sorts of rape, torture, murder, and infanticide, much of this by humans as a part of that nature. Does this justify humans in engaging in rape, torture, murder, and infanticide? This is a discussion of ethics, not what nature allows (which is everything possible within the laws of physics). [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  I don't think it is an appeal to nature fallacy because I have no implicit axiom that "what is natural is good." The statement I made seems, to me, closer to "what is natural is." without a strong opinion on it's level of good. Your argument is that we should re-write the the laws governing our reality, something we have only recently become able to accomplish, and something we can't necessarily predict the consequences of. In a discussion of ethics (and physics) our bodies desire amino acids that exist in animal flesh and will provide us with reproductive advantage for acquiring them, something we (up until recently) must have killed animals to acquire. If you want to have an ethical discussion (I do because they're interesting) the physics of the matter must be spoken to or accounted for. Pain is a physical concept. Social relationships are a physical concept (there are physical forces governing these relationships in our brains). There's research that plants can communicate damage or danger, is that a pain analogue? Is the fundemental ethical issue suffereing, suffering of those left behind (in social creatures), "theft" of future? Then there's the equally (to me) compelling question that an animal would eat me if it could, from an ethical point of view, I think that gives me a right to eat it. Why does that fail under your reasoning system? So far it seems like your axioms are that: We have power That power makes us responsibile I am not clear on what you think we are responsible for If we are responsible to minimize total suffering in a pragmatic way, why is it then not our responisbility to wipe out other creatures that cause torturous deaths?

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

I mean... compared to other animals, of which some don't even kill you, before they start eating you... we're still better than a lot of "nature".

virgildotcodes 4y ago
The thing is, there are a lot of horrible ways that people die. Cancer, alzheimer's, violence, crippling injuries, chronic pain and depression leading to suicide, war, etc. etc. Does this justify us enslaving people and torturing them (debatedly) less in a factory farm and slaughtering them at a young age?
- nightski 4y ago
  You can get rid of factory farming without going vegan.
  - virgildotcodes 4y ago
    If you're talking about it from an animal rights angle, even animals raised on small idyllic farms have their throats slit at an early age. Would we want our throats slit? Would we want to be funneled down a chute with our family members, watching them disappear behind a metal sheet and then get shot in the head one by one in front of us, until our turn comes? If you're talking about it from an environmental angle, moving from CAFOs to grass-feeding small farms for e.g. cattle would necessitate more land, the animals would grow more slowly, they would produce more methane due to digestion of grass vs feed, we would subsequently have to raise larger herds of animals to supply the same amount of meat, and all of this would actually result in a worse impact on the environment. Factory farming is actually largely the result of the industry optimizing animal rearing to produce the most meat for the least amount of inputs.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    If you look at the statistics, in the developed world factory farming makes up about 98% of all meat produced commercially. Before I stopped eating meat, I thought the meat I was buying came from good sources. The farms were nearby, conditions seemed okay, it was organic, etc. The reality is that all of these animals don’t have good lives. They don’t eat well. They live in bizarre conditions. The vast majority (nearly 100%, again) end up in feed lots if they’re cattle. They’re fattened and then killed essentially as adolescents of their species. Forcefully inseminated, taken from their mothers, killed as babies for veal, fed absurd amounts of antibiotics in some cases, many die in their pens, etc. This is normal. It’s how we farm. Industry is good at putting a smile on it, talking about values and generations of farmers and doing it right… But these animals are bred and killed for cash, no one gives much of a shit about them, and it’s all very grim. The excelsior pig farm near me in Abbotsford, British Columbia is a great example. This farm wasn’t exceptional. It’s just another pig farm. But pigs were dead in their pens, cannibalizing each other, dead in trash bins, dead in dumpsters, covered in feces, sores, and wounds. You’re not going to get rid of that. Meat as we know it doesn’t exist without this race to the bottom circus of torture. People are eager to believe their meat habit isn’t based around this or that something better is around the corner, but it’s simply not the case. These animals are here for profit, yet no one is willing to pay enough for them to live comfortably. So they will suffer.