4 ms·
One of my favorite questions to ask people is something like: "Imagine a button appears in front of you. Pressing it will snap all human beings painlessly out o
by abound 7mo ago
One of my favorite questions to ask people is something like: "Imagine a button appears in front of you. Pressing it will snap all human beings painlessly out of existence. Do you push the button?"
Some people get caught in minutiae about downstream effects, I tell them it can go however they want (house pets are free or gone too, planes land harmlessly, etc)
In my circles, I've found it's about 50/50 button pushers to non-button pushers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vegetarians are more likely to be button pushers.
- mock-possum 7mo agoGod what an awful prospect. How about when you push the button it only removes the button pushers, so the rest of us are free to continue enjoying our existence.
- itsanaccount 7mo agoBecause that line of "enjoying your existence" making no mention of the monumental harm we cause to every biome on the planet is exactly the kind of selfishness that the button pushers would like to eradicate.
- greygoo222 7mo agoBiomes are not moral subjects and don't deserve consideration. (Pigs are).
- Capricorn2481 7mo ago> Biomes are not moral subjects and don't deserve consideration. (Pigs are). Where do you think animals live?
- greygoo222 7mo agoCausing harm to biomes is not the same thing as causing net harm to animals inside biomes. The base rate of harm done to animals inside biomes is immense and horrific.
- Capricorn2481 7mo agoYou're doing crazy gymnastics right now. Eliminating biomes drives animals to extinction. In what world could you argue that doesn't deserve even a little moral consideration? I'm not going to argue with someone who works this hard to be a contrarian.
- greygoo222 7mo agoIt's not gymnastics, you just have no background on this topic. Species are not moral subjects. Individuals are. Killing an individual animal that could live a worthwhile life for longer is an individually bad act. Insofar as this happens in the process of species going extinct, that's bad. But it's also the default state of nature. Does replacing a forest with a city cause net harm to non-human animals? That's not clear. It might even be net good. Does that mean we should destroy wilderness on purpose to prevent wild animal suffering? Not yet, we don't have the technology to mitigate knock-on effects, and it should be done a way that does not harm individuals. But I can't get behind viewing biome destruction as some kind of atrocity against the animals within them, at least not as a whole. (Some species have better lives than others).
- itsanaccount 7mo agoI think this is a monstrous thought that will never be explained to you.
- greygoo222 6mo agoWhat is monstrous is the confusion of the natural with the just.
- Capricorn2481 6mo ago> It's not gymnastics, you just have no background on this topic > But I can't get behind viewing biome destruction as some kind of atrocity against the animals within them, at least not as a whole. Well good luck with the doctorate I guess.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- namero999 7mo agoBiome is just a fancy term that encompasses a set of moral subjects.
- wincy 7mo agoAnd I’d call entertaining thought experiments such as this “having such an open mind your brain falls out of the back of your head”.
- stouset 7mo agoThe point is that continuing to enjoy your existence is inflicting a massive toll of suffering around the world, to both others humans as well as non-humans. I’m not saying I’d be one to push the button, but I think it’s worth trying to understand the mindset of someone who would. It’s very arguable that pushing it would be the ethical thing to do.
- trylfthsk 7mo agoNot entirely convinced that outside the torment nexuses used in industrial meat farming, natural suffering is any lesser sans humanity.
- aziaziazi 7mo agoEstimated scale of the torment nexuses: https://considerveganism.com/counter/ https://considerveganism.com/counter/
- stouset 7mo agoThe fish counter is horrifying, I had no idea.
- aziaziazi 7mo agoThe fish counter comes from here https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-welfare/article/estimating-global-numbers-of-fishes-caught-from-the-wild-annually-from-2000-to-2019/83F1B933E8691F3A552636620E8C7A01 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-welfare/artic... One could argue there's a double count: about one-fifth of fish are caught to feed other animals (mainly fish, but also terrestrial animals). But I don't think one kill offsets another. > around half of wild-caught finfish numbers are destined for reduction to fishmeal and oil, of which, respectively, 70 and 73% are used for aquaculture feeds
- SoftTalker 7mo agoWhat if the suffering is the point?
- jancsika 7mo agoYou should definitely watch the Black Mirror episode about the robot bees!
- hypeatei 7mo agoWell, some people do choose suicide but I have a feeling that you'd be uncomfortable discussing assisted suicide. These conversations around humanity and suffering typically end in thought terminating takes such as yours. Why even respond if you're effectively throwing your hands up in the air and ignoring nuance?
- greygoo222 7mo agoThe person you're responding to is explicitly saying they would be fine with suicide.
- hypeatei 7mo ago> is explicitly saying I don't think it's explicit, that's why I put the quip in there about assisted suicide. This thread is showing me that perhaps a lot of people would be okay with the "complainers" offing themselves but I'm not sure... my gut feeling is that a lot of optimists hold conflicting beliefs around this.
- greygoo222 7mo agoAs a card-carrying optimist, I am strongly in favor of universal right to die. Maybe you should wait for the people in this thread to report their opinions before making assumptions? I don't want most "complainers" to kill themselves, nor would I recommend them to, but I support their right to. And if they showed me convincing evidence their life contains too much suffering to be worthwhile, I would agree with their decision.
- NoGravitas 7mo ago“optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind” ― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
- wincy 7mo agoThat’s wild to me. I’d hazard a guess that 0% of my friends would push the button (okay, lizardman tax, I’m sure I could find someone I know who would say yes). I think they’d also feel a need to go find whoever made said button and lock them in a cell for safekeeping.
- moribvndvs 7mo agoMy first serious programming job was at a start up and the owner asked me this question. I was caught off guard, of course I wouldn’t! I couldn’t really explain why at the time, but it essentially revolved around the fact that I was young and optimistic. 25 years later, I’m not so sure. Now, said optimism has almost vanished and there are days pushing seems like the path to least suffering, but I also feel it’s unethical for one person to decide for everyone else.
- greygoo222 7mo agoI mean this sincerely, not as an insult: consider that the problem is with your mind or personal life, not with the world, and you should look for a way to address that if you haven't already.
- moribvndvs 7mo agoSuggesting that the wholesale suffering wrought by humanity unto itself and all other life on this planet throughout its entire history is merely in my mind or a problem with my personal life is actually incredibly insulting on top of being willfully ignorant.
- greygoo222 7mo agoThat's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting your attitude towards it might be.
- NoGravitas 7mo ago“For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have a unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings” ― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
- glenstein 7mo agoIt's impossible to refute anecdotes purporting to represent populations based on what they might do in a hypothetical, and the people being described fade further out of tangible existence at every next layer of abstraction. But Most Vegans I Know (tm) regard human life as valuabe, speak in terms of harm reduction, and tend not to fantasize about making Vault Tec real.
- bayarearefugee 7mo agoFWIW I wouldn't push the button. I just think we are going to absolutely deserve the outcome as we collectively and metaphorically push that button... which we continue to do and are regressing on stopping ourselves from doing so a handful of super wealthy can watch gamified number go up.
- gowld 7mo agoWhat makes you think that we we collectively and metaphorically are pushing the painless button?
- bayarearefugee 7mo agoWell you're right, the real world isn't so simple and the button we are pushing certainly isn't going to be painless.
- hrimfaxi 7mo agoAre you in silicon valley by any chance?
- relaxing 7mo agoEven more, Xoogler.
- pmarreck 7mo agoIf I were to implement such a button, I'd make it so that only the people who said "yes" would disappear. Life is a gift. A painless life has no value. In fact, if you are genetically immune to pain, your lifetime survival rate is something like the teens.
- pmarreck 7mo agoWe have examples of how that actually plays out (in a limited form). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
- tengbretson 7mo agoEhhh no they wouldn't.
- diacritical 7mo agoLook up on negative utilitarianism and the Benevolent World Exploder if you want to find more info on the button idea. Basically the idea is that if minimizing suffering is more important than maximizing pleasure, a world with no life would have no suffering whatsoever. Regardless of whether you believe that, removing humans only would still leave the unfathomably huge amount of suffering of wild animals and after a while someone else will evolve and take the role of humans. However, if we leave humans exist, they could either destroy everything anyway (like with nukes or AI) or eliminate suffering like David Pearce and others imagine.
- squibonpig 7mo agoIf you've ever flown in an airplane and looked down at a town, it's outskirts and interface with nature, and the natural environment that surrounds it, you'll probably know the feeling. Our species, if it's even right to lay some kind of claim to the species or to the amalgam of biological, social, technical processes that we lump under that label, is a great colonial organism pervading a larger body. But like the bacteria that inhabit our bodies, even in the cases of bacterial infestations that are unhealthy for us, there's no ontological distinction between the bacteria and the body. The body is eating itself or burning itself up always like the body of a starving person; in doing so it produces beautiful and complex arrangements and unknowable futures, it produces itself anew and becomes somebody else. When we take moral judgements, which are no more than functional elements at work within the body, and attempt to apply them to the body at large, or to our representational, projected image of it, all we're doing is helping along the same process of self consumption (or immolation) that the body is already undertaking. Whether you press the button or don't press the button, the process, its beauty and its horror, continues along uninterrupted.