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> What would you say to someone who’s only qualm is the animals humane treatment? The typical response to this would be a game of Name The Trait. For example,

> What would you say to someone who’s only qualm is the animals humane treatment? The typical response to this would be a game of Name The Trait. For example, what would be wrong about farming humans as long as we treat them humanely? Or more generally, what's true of animals that if made true of humans would make it okay to farm humans? And then when you come up with a symmetry breaker, we apply it to humans and see if you're okay with the reductio. If so, you bite the bullet on a crazy human atrocity, and if not, then it's not the trait that actually matters to you.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
That's trivially solved with shared culture. Simply by both being human, we share a level of shared experience that would make me uncomfortable eating you. To a lesser extent, we have a shared experience with our domesticated pets, which is why we find it repugnant to eat them, but unlike with Grandma it's okay to give them the Old Yeller' treatment when need be. Most edge cases you could come up with are covered by "it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare."
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  You're putting forth multiple traits, btw, but I don't think it's as trivial as you think it is. One trait seems to be "shared culture" whatever that means. What about humans with cultures we don't share? What about humans with downright alien cultures we can hardly understand nor agree with? What does "shared experience" with a dog mean? What about brain-dead humans that we don't share an experience with? Another trait seems to be "being a human". What about Santa's elves or any hypothetical sentient being that's not a human? Does any alien race that discovers us have the ethical justification to farm us? > it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare. Would it be okay to farm or enslave humans if we simply didn't have that taboo? Or in a hypothetical world where it wasn't taboo: would it be okay then? These aren't edge cases btw, these are reductios that test for position's consistency and dispel the sort of "I'll know it when I see it" hand-waving we like to do. Any coherent position has a coherent answer to hypotheticals. There is a trivial answer that does nip it easily in the bud: we agree to value sentience thus we stop farming sentient beings whether they're human, cows, or Santa's elves. Finally, I was just offering a potential response to your question. HN is a poor place for this kind of discussion, but I hope you at least see that there is conversational meat on the bone, pun not intended.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    The less "like us" they are, they more justified we are in killing them. "Like us" is tied around shared culture and experience. If you asked me to choose between saving the life of an elf and the life of a human being, I'd choose the human damn near every time (barring cases where the human deserves death regardless of the dilemma). "Shared experience" in this case is a basic history of doing stuff together, or in a sympathetically similar way. Dogs have been shaped to serve side-by-side with humans as companions, sharing in our experiences. So eating them is wrong. There are no humans that are less like us than than the animals we eat. Brain-dead humans are an example of just following taboo: We don't kill and eat other humans, because of the whole "we are more alike than we are different" thing, and incidentally extend the same courtesy to things that take complex explanations for not being us. If we ran into other conscious, sapient species, we'd probably be hesitant about killing them due to the shared experience of sentience making them a lot more like us than a cow. But on the other hand, killing an alien would be a hell of a lot more permissible than killing a human. And I apply the same kind of logic to people. My friends and family are significantly more valuable than random strangers. In a trolley scenario with one of my friends on one track and 3 strangers on another, I'd save my friend, every time, and I wouldn't trust anybody who would answer otherwise.
somenameforme 3y ago
There's a philosophical problem you run into here. A man who has no hair is obviously bald, and so is a man with exactly 1 hair. But how many hairs does it take for this man to suddenly no longer be bald? Not only is there no "real" answer; the practical answers will vary in subjective and inconsistent ways from person to person. It's an abstract and largely subjective value judgement. And I think the same is true here. There's no single binary value where something goes from A to B. Take mosquitoes. Even in areas where mosquitoes rarely if ever carry diseases, people are perfectly cool with widescale genocide. Why? Because half of those animals can, on occasion, give us a little itchy that's mildly inconvenient for a few moments. Roaches are another example. In their case, their life itself is often worth less than our mild annoyance or discomfort at seeing them. And so on. In practice, most people are perfectly fine with killing the overwhelming majority of species of animals. And so too here. I simply do not see any problem with killing a e.g. chicken for food. Oddly enough I have a strong suspicion that the more one is around animals, the more this becomes true. Which is paradoxical, because contrary to what you might think, even chickens can be awesome little affectionate critters. It's probably because you see the cycle of life itself more regularly. Foxes are cute, clever, and awesome critters - until one makes its way into your chicken coop, kills every hen, and takes exactly 1 away. At the same time, that's just the nature of life. It's all as natural and normal as the fact that you and I too will be wormfood soon enough.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

That's trivially solved with shared culture. Simply by both being human, we share a level of shared experience that would make me uncomfortable eating you. To a lesser extent, we have a shared experience with our domesticated pets, which is why we find it repugnant to eat them, but unlike with Grandma it's okay to give them the Old Yeller' treatment when need be. Most edge cases you could come up with are covered by "it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare."

hombre_fatal 3y ago
You're putting forth multiple traits, btw, but I don't think it's as trivial as you think it is. One trait seems to be "shared culture" whatever that means. What about humans with cultures we don't share? What about humans with downright alien cultures we can hardly understand nor agree with? What does "shared experience" with a dog mean? What about brain-dead humans that we don't share an experience with? Another trait seems to be "being a human". What about Santa's elves or any hypothetical sentient being that's not a human? Does any alien race that discovers us have the ethical justification to farm us? > it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare. Would it be okay to farm or enslave humans if we simply didn't have that taboo? Or in a hypothetical world where it wasn't taboo: would it be okay then? These aren't edge cases btw, these are reductios that test for position's consistency and dispel the sort of "I'll know it when I see it" hand-waving we like to do. Any coherent position has a coherent answer to hypotheticals. There is a trivial answer that does nip it easily in the bud: we agree to value sentience thus we stop farming sentient beings whether they're human, cows, or Santa's elves. Finally, I was just offering a potential response to your question. HN is a poor place for this kind of discussion, but I hope you at least see that there is conversational meat on the bone, pun not intended.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  The less "like us" they are, they more justified we are in killing them. "Like us" is tied around shared culture and experience. If you asked me to choose between saving the life of an elf and the life of a human being, I'd choose the human damn near every time (barring cases where the human deserves death regardless of the dilemma). "Shared experience" in this case is a basic history of doing stuff together, or in a sympathetically similar way. Dogs have been shaped to serve side-by-side with humans as companions, sharing in our experiences. So eating them is wrong. There are no humans that are less like us than than the animals we eat. Brain-dead humans are an example of just following taboo: We don't kill and eat other humans, because of the whole "we are more alike than we are different" thing, and incidentally extend the same courtesy to things that take complex explanations for not being us. If we ran into other conscious, sapient species, we'd probably be hesitant about killing them due to the shared experience of sentience making them a lot more like us than a cow. But on the other hand, killing an alien would be a hell of a lot more permissible than killing a human. And I apply the same kind of logic to people. My friends and family are significantly more valuable than random strangers. In a trolley scenario with one of my friends on one track and 3 strangers on another, I'd save my friend, every time, and I wouldn't trust anybody who would answer otherwise.

somenameforme 3y ago

There's a philosophical problem you run into here. A man who has no hair is obviously bald, and so is a man with exactly 1 hair. But how many hairs does it take for this man to suddenly no longer be bald? Not only is there no "real" answer; the practical answers will vary in subjective and inconsistent ways from person to person. It's an abstract and largely subjective value judgement. And I think the same is true here. There's no single binary value where something goes from A to B. Take mosquitoes. Even in areas where mosquitoes rarely if ever carry diseases, people are perfectly cool with widescale genocide. Why? Because half of those animals can, on occasion, give us a little itchy that's mildly inconvenient for a few moments. Roaches are another example. In their case, their life itself is often worth less than our mild annoyance or discomfort at seeing them. And so on. In practice, most people are perfectly fine with killing the overwhelming majority of species of animals. And so too here. I simply do not see any problem with killing a e.g. chicken for food. Oddly enough I have a strong suspicion that the more one is around animals, the more this becomes true. Which is paradoxical, because contrary to what you might think, even chickens can be awesome little affectionate critters. It's probably because you see the cycle of life itself more regularly. Foxes are cute, clever, and awesome critters - until one makes its way into your chicken coop, kills every hen, and takes exactly 1 away. At the same time, that's just the nature of life. It's all as natural and normal as the fact that you and I too will be wormfood soon enough.