Rats free each other from cages (2011)
nature.com
nature.com
> At issue is the definition of empathy. “This work is not evidence of empathy — defined as the ability to mentally put oneself into another being’s emotional shoes,” says Povinelli. “It’s good evidence for emotional contagion and that animals are motivated to coordinate their behaviour so that distress is reduced, but that is nothing new.”
(Emphasis mine)
How could this definition of empathy possibly be proven for non-humans? Or in fact, how could it be proven for anyone but yourself?
Additionally, they present an alternate hypothesis to explain the findings: That the captive rat was somehow causing distress to the free rat and the free rat was solely motivated to reduce that distress without any concern for the other rat. While that's a valid hypothesis, it doesn't seem to hold the occam's razor test for me - especially as they admit themselves that they don't know what this distress-causing mechanism could be. (They suggest alarm calls or pheromones but couldn't find any yet)
For your experiment, you could counter-argue in the same way: Maybe the free rat was just particularly tired of the torture screams and that's why it freed that rat first...
It can't be proven in the sense of mathematical proofs, but then, nothing in reality can.
Isn't that what empathy is, though? Distress caused by the perception of another creature's distress?
A small mammal doesn't have to have the exact same nuanced understanding as a human would in order to still be 'feeling empathy'.
What seems to be going on in recent decades is, through experimentation and arguments, the scientists are getting clearer on what are the various points on the spectrum.
> Food-caching corvids hide food, but such caches are susceptible to pilfering by other individuals. Consequently, the birds use several counter strategies to protect their caches from theft, e.g. hiding most of them out of sight. When observed by potential pilferers at the time of caching, experienced jays that have been thieves themselves, take further protective action. Once the potential pilferers have left, they move caches those birds have seen, re-hiding them in new places. Naive birds that had no thieving experience do not do so. By focusing on the counter strategies of the cacher when previously observed by a potential pilferer, these results raise the intriguing possibility that re-caching is based on a form of mental attribution, namely the simulation of another bird's viewpoint. Furthermore, the jays also keep track of the observer which was watching when they cached and take protective action accordingly, thus suggesting that they may also be aware of others' knowledge states.
The key to infering that the birds were "simulating" others' decisions was that their behaviour changed depending on whether the cache was spotted by another individual or not (it also depended on the birds' past experience of pilfering; but that only shows that the tactic is learned rather than innate).
Perhaps something similar could be done for empathy; for example, give the animals a mechanism to free themselves, which requires knowledge to operate (e.g. operating levers in a sequence). Replicate this experiment in the new setting, to ensure the animals, when shown the correct sequence, will reliably free themselves and others.
Now, go a little further; show the correct sequence to animals in pairs, where sometimes both can see the correct sequence, and other times only one can see (e.g. one can't see past a partition). Now those animals which know the sequence also know whether their partner knows or not. Once they've freed themselves, will they go on to help free the other? If they free those which could not see the sequence, but do not free those which could see the sequence, that would be evidence in favour of empathy, i.e. they're able to "put themselves into the other animal's shoes" in terms of knowledge/information ("he doesn't know how to escape, I'll help") and emotionally ("he could escape if he wanted to, so he must not want to").
This may require controlled behaviour, to engineer a situation where both animals could escape but only one does. Maybe a dummy/puppet/etc. could be used.
There is a correction issued for this paper, but the correction is paywalled so I can't tell whether it's substantive or a nitpick.
Also, please put a (2011) in the title.
Oberliessen et al., "Inequity aversion in rats" (2016)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347216...
Decety et al., "Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour" (2016)
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1686/2015...
“Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats” by I. B.-A. Bartal et al. (9 December 2011, p. 1427). On p. 1428, the last full paragraph of column 1 was incorrect. The paragraph should be replaced by this corrected text: “All female rats (6/6) and most male rats (17/24) in the trapped condition became door-openers. Female rats in the trapped condition opened the restrainer door at a shorter latency than males on days 7 to 12 (P < 0.01, MMA, Fig. 3A), consistent with suggestions that females are more empathic than males (7, 12, 13). Furthermore, female rats were also more active than males in the trapped condition (P < 0.001, ANOVA) but not in the empty condition (Fig. 3B).”
For example, there's a new-to-us model that we think might have differences between strains, sexes, and vendors. We ordered in 8 mice of each type to run a pilot.
If there are from opposites sexes, there is certainly an egoistical reason for the rat to free the other.
If they are not, rats are very sociable. They need close contact with other rats.
It also looks like the opener rat is also very curious and wants to enter the cage too to know how it feels inside.
My issue is not with the results of the study, but with interpretation. I think it's possible to explain the desire to free the other rat purely in selfish terms without any nods to altruistic or empathic behavior.
Reproduction is for gene survival. We are simply throw away machines our genes have developed in order to propagate themselves.
The source code (genes) propagation per se would be completely useless to the system, without the processes they express: living systems, the most efficient energy transforming machines the system has been able to incrementally arrange up so far starting out of random stuff.
Therefore reproduction is exactly for that, for allowing the continuation of this energy transforming processes (life processes) in the most efficient way.
There is a huge tendency to build up story around a single video, but this is a repeated experiment with far more evidence than shown.
There are exceptions that make the rule I'm sure of it but our ego always tells us "it's not purity", "they can't be better than us", "they have a plan" so it's hard to distinguish. My 2c.
It deeply fascinates me but seems like it's somewhat unexplored in general. I only remember some company working on VR for animals.
Boxxy aka Cathy Wayne has been at work for Animalist and does a review of a company called No More Woof.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUduoC7J6gA
No More Woof. What a fantastic name for a startup.
If the Internet was only created for one purpose and that purpose was talking pets, then it was all worth it. Technology!
E.g. Konrad Lorenz in "Das sogenannte Boese" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Aggression) had a whole chapter on rats and why they developed this behavior, which is often misleadingly labelled ethically. Like here.
How can you identify empathy if you don't even feel it?
I guess this is how humans progress but I can't help feeling something wrong with it.
I can detect wind (including its strength and direction) outside my house even if I can't feel it.
Call it empathy or whatever but I know I suffer under certain situations and can't see why a rat does not. They have 2 eyes and four limbs just like us maybe just a little bit less computing power.
Replace animals by "slaves" or whatever human race we considered inferior in the past and you could write the same thing about a couple of hundred years ago.
But the idea that humans are at the acme of evolution is going to be harder to kill.
I think that all this time, human beings have been watched by creatures whose perceptions and understanding have been so far in advance of anything we have been able to accept, because of our vanity, that we would be appalled if we were able to know, would be humiliated. We have been living with them as blundering, blind, callous, cruel murderers and torturers, and they have watched and known us. And this is the reason we refuse to acknowledge the intelligence of the creatures that surround us: the shock to our amour propre would be too much, the judgement we would have to make on ourselves too horrible: it is exactly the same process that can make someone go on and on committing a crime, or a cruelty, knowing it: the stopping and having to see what has been done would be too painful, one cannot face it. -- Doris Lessing
its beyond unlikely that we, as the human race, become vegetarian. as such, we'll never stop abusing other animals beside us. on that note: i'm not a vegetarian either, nor am i planning to become one.
I watched a video of a guy jabbing a cow with a pitchfork. It was pretty shitty. I think you could withhold any violence until the animal's final moments. That gets into realities of industrial efficiency and not the eating of meat. Things die. Should we cremate them? I realize going vegetarian solves the problem right now. That doesn't mean that eating meat is necessarily a part of the problem. I eat out a lot so I don't get all my meat from one source. But the meat I use at home I buy from a friend of my family. He raises the cows himself and "loves" them. My sister likes to go out there and feed them. It's a bit too mushy for me but I still like to think their happiness makes them taste better.
Humans and many other great apes are opportunistic carnivores. The idea that we should have moral compunctions about biological reality seems absurd to me, and I have yet heard any argument than "suffering is evil; animals experience suffering; killing animals necessitates their suffering; therefore eating animals is evil." I don't deny the second proposition, I deny the first, and my personal feeling is the reason some of us now feel differently has much to do with the enormously sheltered and privileged lives modernity has afforded us.
This 'herd instinct', by evolutionary necessity, will tend towards in-group altruism in any social animal, but the details, the bylaws, and everything else will be driven by accidents of history and by fashion. It may be that one day that the great human herd of western civilization will collectively decide that eating meat is evil; I sure hope not, I prefer our current fashions (but then I would, having grown up with them.)
In fact, I actually think that would be a very dangerous attitude to take, since I would believe that the only person who would be suffering by my taking any means necessary to change the world however I like it would be me, who would of course be perfectly willing to do so.
Even if morality was just herd instinct, what you were saying previously is that suffering for you is not immoral. And even though, many intelligent people saw absolutely nothing wrong with torture, what about you, right now?
What I'm getting at is that your original statement which basically said "suffering is OK" (you didn't indicate any restrictions or conditions) is just bullshit.
When someone says that something is not immoral (or evil), they can be arguing to things: either it is moral, or it is amoral (i.e. is not affected by qualifications of morality). The GP is arguing the latter: that, in the context of nature, suffering is an unavoidable consequence of competition for life. Is the lion evil for targeting the weakest wildebeest? Is toxoplasmosis evil for disrupting the fight-or-flight response of its host?
Now it seems the next argument that will come is that we as human beings are also animals and part of nature, and therefore we can also kill other animals as e.g. lions do.
Well, a female mantis occasionally decapitates its male mates after copulation. Does that mean that it is moral for women to do the same to men? Amezarak's original statement is just too broad.
No one is arguing that nature is moral.
Your argument as seen by me, ends on a cliff-hanger: Because great apes are omnivores they eat meat which is a biological reality. It is biological reality for humans to eat meat so it is okay to eat meat...
Question: Why does biological reality make things ok in a way that does not boil down to an appeal to nature?
I feel that there's nothing inherently wicked about eating meat, but it seems obvious that we should make an effort to avoid inflicting undue suffering in the process.
Done that on several occasions.
> Do you realize you pay people to do this every time you buy meat?
Yes.
> Are you cool with that?
Yes. Because, essentially, we are animals.
It is interesting that personally I find more disgusting the mutilation of animals (castration for example) than actually killing them for food.
The science is happening as we speak.
Where would we draw the line? Should we quit eating and die of starvation? It seems like there needs to be some acknowledgement that one form of life has to die in order that we may live. What gives us the right to declare that animals are the "higher" form of life simply because they're less alien than plants?
It is interesting to ponder what the nature of other animals is; discover what possibilities we have in common with them. That doesn't change that humans are capable of self examination and choosing between cruelty and tenderness, empathy and callousness.
There is no boundary between nature and other things, nature is all encompassing. There is nothing in nature that can be indifferent because nature can't be different from anything.
The point isn't how they treat each other necessarily, but how we treat them in light of the knowledge of their "individual" characteristics, not unlike human beings. So we humans then extend the gift of life to other species.
Those animals treat each other as a matter of survival, is it necessary for us to do the same?
Any cat owner has observed this behavior.
But, yes, animals often produce suffering. In fact, they've been doing it for a while before we got here. But animals are largely doing it out of instinct, not because they've reasoned out and concluded that it was the "right" thing to do.
a) that which justifies doing as their instincts say
and
b) that which justifies acting in their interest as determined by their instincts.
Humans are animals. We happen to possess an extraordinarily tool for abstract reasoning. That tool is mostly used for rationalization and not as an oracle of truth. We are all creatures of biology. Most everything we do is about getting food, shelter, performing sexual displays, and various forms of social signalling and jockeying.
We have all sorts of conmen that market it all sorts of bogus ideas, even the ideas of food is bogus, and entirely irrelevant to the survival of this body.
It is the attachment to the pleasure movements that motivate us, but more fundamentally the attachment to the thought structure, and demand the repetition of various kinds of thought that has produced the human being, and at a very basic sense our selves as we know it.
So it is the thought there that has demanded continuity, and in that continuity you have a plethora of varieties that add to the momentum of that thought, and this is the case with all things, from scientific, to the so called "artistic", to the religious.
What is religious thought other than the demand for ultimate pleasure without a moment of pain, to have compete happiness, bliss, without a moment of another, which is in itself a bogus idea.
So the ultimate question then isn't really a question at all it is really an answer, as then the only thing left is what we demand in thought.
So then what is it that you demand?
I personally see no reason to kill anything at all for the satisfaction of this body, nor do I see any motivation to purposefully torture animals, but if that is what you do then it is up to you, but basically it is not required, and is only demanded by that repetition of thought.
Sounds like we could use some rats
Until then it's just instinct.
And if the day ever arrives, it can just be seen as an evolutionary step for the species, and not as proof that they where intelligent all along.
I liked the experience vs awareness model presented in Stumbling Upon Happiness where people think about the future (awareness of what's happening to them/others) and animals simply operate in the moment based on instincts and being informed by memories (experience). I think that is a pretty good model for the difference.
The deaf and blind can communicate. And even in the case of a human vegetable, a broken table is still a table.
What your limitations seem to ignore is that not only does most of our day-to-day behaviour fall under what you consider instinctive, but also that you seem to be ignoring the fact that many animals communicate in languages you might not necessarily be able to understand (Dogs, for example, communicate mostly in body language, looks, etc.).
Can you state an example of a complex thought? I can think of a fair amount of thoughts I would use to denote intelligence that would fall under what you consider 'instinctual'.
I see this as the only plausible way to prevent the disappearance of Rhino, Elephant, Cheetah and many other animals that you had plastic toys of when you were a child. Those animals are going to be as extinct as the dinosaurs toys you played with in our lifetime.
We have very little biodiversity in Europe, outside of our domestic animals the typical country has nothing much larger than foxes or squirrels running around. Conservation is a patriotic planet wide duty for humans and it is one of the few things that ought to go over traditional rivalries. I do not accept for example, that Africans, South Americans or Southeast Asians have the right to demolish important species because they are within their political territories. There is no moral reason not to simply extract them from there using a combination of carrot and stick since they are clearly incapable of handling the problem themselves at this stage of development, just as Europeans were back in the 1700s not exactly looking out for the plight of endangered wolves, boars or bears.
Most major insights into biology and medicine come from having a variety of species around. So it is not as if we have no self interest. Ultimately any 'Arks' would be easily repaid for millions of times over in a variety of ways, even if just because you would ultimately be the only available source of rare biomaterials.
To be serious, there is no real plan to prevent the level of poaching from killing off most large land mammals. I've been helping the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre and the Pangolin Specialist Group but most people in the field don't really believe this is a sustainable long term objective for conservation. The scale of predation by humans is simply too high for anything less than drastic action to prevent the extinction of most large land mammals.
I think the vast majority of people are actually in the opposite situation. Animals have been humanized by cartoons. So when birds start pushing each other from nests, when Eagles start feeding cats to their eaglets, when Kangaroos attempt to mate on dead corpses...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/14/photos-griev...
People don't really believe it. Animals are vicious.
The narcissism is real.
Why? We seem to have plenty of moral compunctions about lots of other biological realities. Otherwise, why do anything at all?
As humans, we have so far not acted in a manner that implies we're completely OK with biological realities. We keep trying to change them. Hopefully, it will continue this way.
Most people agree that they do not want to suffer. That's what makes it evil. It's not a difficult concept.
Do we, in practice? Can you go into more detail?
> Most people agree that they do not want to suffer. That's what makes it evil. It's not a difficult concept.
Did we ask the animals too? Maybe the pig consensus is different.
If most people agree they do not want to pay taxes, do taxes become evil?
There is no objective reason to consider 'most people agree on x' as some kind of objective moral imperative. There is no moral quality to caring what people want. I don't think this is a very sound basis for an objective morality.
EDIT: What I'm trying to get at is basically this. You're saying that eating meat (at least meat that necessitates the killing of animals) is morally wrong. You're saying this because you want to persuade me and the rest of your audience that eating meat is morally wrong. But you are not a moral authority; I consult my conscience, which feels entirely guilt-free about the subject, and my appetite, which feels a positive obligation to eat meat. You're simply trying to exploit a "hack" in my social animal brain, which is that if you tell me that something is wrong, you are telling me that other members of the human herd will judge me unfavorably and perhaps ostracize me or otherwise punish me.
Some people, but not very many, will be swayed by your attempted brain-exploit. But I, again, observe that my conscious feels guilt-free, which is a very strong sign that the people I am surrounded by do not, in fact, disapprove of my eating meat, and also that the vast majority of people I know actually eat meat. So somewhere in my hindbrain, I realize that you are (from my perspective) lying to me, and it will make me instinctively resentful of you, because you have marked yourself as a member of The Other.
So your 'moral' argument is, objectively, amoral; and for your purposes, actually counterproductive, useful only when a person is surrounded overwhelmingly by vegans and vegetarians, who will be able to enforce a shared social norm. You could, instead, if you want to try an intellectual tack, try to show how my personal interests are served by becoming a vegetarian, but you will have to discover some interests and values that strongly outweigh my predilection for eating meat.
Or what you could do is abandon your moral arguments, temporarily, until a day when you're worried about punishing the wayward vegans rather than converting the meat-eaters. You want to make vegans cool, the social elite. You want to get into the media and fill as many TV shows and movies and podcasts and YouTube personalities with cool vegans. You want to make people want to be like you. While you're at it, make animals more important, anthropomorphize them as much as possible, try to generate as much empathy for animals as possible - to some degree, this is already being done. And then in a few decades, if you keep it up, most people will be vegetarians and you can then start talking about how killing animals for food is evil, and you can probably even pass a law to that effect. That'd be a way to get some moral feeling behind it.
Treating diseases, reducing violence, caring about the rights of the disenfranchised, sitting here on HN talking about how we treat animals.
> There is no objective reason to consider 'most people agree on x' as some kind of objective moral imperative.
I didn't say "most people agree" to imply that something is "objectively" true because most people agree with it. I said it because the definition of suffering as evil is fairly common sense, because it's an experience that anything conscious shares (given a developed enough nervous system), and nothing conscious wants, tautologically due to the definition of the word.
Morality is derived from subjective wants and non-wants, there's literally nothing else to derive it from.
> You're saying that eating meat (at least meat that necessitates the killing of animals) is morally wrong. You're saying this because you want to persuade me and the rest of your audience that eating meat is morally wrong.
I'm not a vegetarian and I'm not trying to convince you in particular of anything. My beliefs on eating meat and moral wrongs are more complex than that and my conclusions are far more negative.
Diseases are not regarded as a moral problem; violence considering morally acceptable in pursuit of the right socially-approved causes, the 'rights of the disenfranchised' have nothing to do with the intersection of morality and biological reality, and the same for HN.
> I didn't say "most people agree" to imply that something is "objectively" true because most people agree with it. I said it because the definition of suffering as evil is fairly common sense, because it's an experience that anything conscious shares (given a developed enough nervous system), and nothing conscious wants, tautologically due to the definition of the word.
It isn't tautologically true at all. Anyone can look around and see plenty of people that want to suffer. There are different reasons; some, to punish themselves, some, in pursuit of some other interest, some, for the sake of their religion, and so on and so forth. In fact, I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive who was not inflicting on themselves some amount of suffering for some reason.
If violence needs the right socially-approved causes, that is further evidence that we really don't like it at the end of the day.
Rights of the disenfranchised has nothing to do with it? It's related the same way diseases are - the disenfranchised should be mistreated and thrown out according to evolution. We seem to continually decide otherwise.
Discussions on HN relate to what people are considering and thinking. In a properly naturalistic society, nobody would ever worry about the feelings of animals, we would think this entire discussion is silly.
> It isn't tautologically true at all. Anyone can look around and see plenty of people that want to suffer.
Your examples and arguments here are so shallow I'm skeptical that you're actually arguing in good faith.
Surely there's a difference between someone undergoing a painful medical treatment that they believe will help them in the long run vs someone being tortured for another's enjoyment? And for the case of one undergoing painful medical treatment, is it really _wanting_ to suffer if they'd much rather have a non-painful version of the same treatment? Or is it more that they weren't really given a choice?
For example:
> We're keeping the "weak" a live, prolonging life, disturbing the natural order of things. In our society, we consider it pretty immoral to leave someone to die of a curable disease, and we work to cure more. Clearly we're more interested in keeping those around alive and happy than having them die so the next generation will become "stronger". That's very contrary to evolution's preference for everyone just being disposable fodder to make better and better organisms.
Keeping their own alive, even the weaker members, is something many social animals do. The 'naturalism' position might be that we should engage in some kind of eugenics. The biological reality is that evolution doesn't care how strong individual members of the herd are. There's nothing "anti-evolution" about protecting the weak.
> Rights of the disenfranchised has nothing to do with it? It's related the same way diseases are - the disenfranchised should be mistreated and thrown out according to evolution. We seem to continually decide otherwise.
This is, again, nothing to do with 'biological reality' but with the straw-man of naturalism. And it couldn't be any other way. Everything we do is 'according to evolution', ergo the disenfranchised being accorded rights is 'according to evolution,' not somehow contra to it. We are animals, not gods.
> Surely there's a difference between someone undergoing a painful medical treatment that they believe will help them in the long run vs someone being tortured for another's enjoyment?
Maybe, but we have moved the goalposts from 'suffering is evil' to 'suffering for another's enjoyment is evil.' And yet there are people who allow themselves to be subjected to physical pain gladly for the enjoyment of others, and in older times, even tortured and killed.
> I am claiming that amorality is reality
Is exactly what I consider naturalism. That's what nature wants you to think. Why is that statement even significant? Morality, as I've stated earlier, is derived from a subjective experience. It starts existing the moment someone has experiences they like and don't like. It's a simple place to begin, everyone shares it, everyone agrees on the good or the bad side of it. The only difference is that there are people who are OK with the bad happening, and those who are not. But both groups are aware of the bad.
I will say there is a big difference between a civilization where the bad is OK and one where it is not. I also know which one I'd prefer to live in. Which one pretty much everyone will prefer to live in. That's not a coincidence. Those who would prefer to live in the other civilization are also those who always expect to be on top. That seems quite a condition. Again, not a coincidence.
"fashionable social norms" are an approximation, that doesn't mean the thing they're trying to approximate doesn't exist. Just like physics don't cease to exist because our conclusions about it are not always correct.
> And it couldn't be any other way. Everything we do is 'according to evolution', ergo the disenfranchised being accorded rights is 'according to evolution,' not somehow contra to it. We are animals, not gods.
Are meteors hitting dinosaurs according to evolution, too? "Everything we do is according to evolution" is a rather tautological, unfalsifiable belief. At some point, we need to start distinguishing what evolution intended and what we do. The aforementioned fashionable social norms to me don't sound like evolution had it all figured out already. Caring for the weak and our own is a thing social animals do? To a very, very limited point... we didn't do that at all for quite a few members of society for a very long time. It seems to have taken us a lot of civilized development to even start thinking about such things. Natural fear of the other is still fighting us at every turn. Desire to eat meat is fighting us in this very topic. No, I don't think evolution has anything to do with this, unless it's evolution of thought itself. There are clearly forces in opposition to each other here.
If we are not gods, someone else is.
> Maybe, but we have moved the goalposts from 'suffering is evil' to 'suffering for another's enjoyment is evil.'
I haven't moved such goalposts, I made an example, and you should stop projecting your own conclusions when they were not at all present in the post you're responding to. The purpose of the example wasn't at all to say that suffering for another's enjoyment is evil (consensual BDSM is a thing), but to say that someone suffering due to things they didn't choose is very different from suffering due to things they chose. The difference here is obvious and I'm not going to explain it again.
> Resignation to intentions of nature, i.e., statements like these: ["]I am claiming that amorality is morality["] [i]s exactly what I consider naturalism.
I think we have an is-ought problem here.
I am describing what is. Biological reality is 'what is'. I am not describing what ought to be. What I am saying is that yes, morality is subjective, and people (inclusively, taking all peoples throughout history) very strongly disagree on what is moral and immoral.
> everyone agrees on the good or the bad side of it.
That's the thing. They don't, not even close.
> "fashionable social norms" are an approximation, that doesn't mean the thing they're trying to approximate doesn't exist. Just like physics don't cease to exist because our conclusions about it are not always correct.
Are you suggesting moral realism? That is, are you saying that there are, in fact, some kind of moral truths we can discover? How? Through experiment? Archaeology? Reason? I am guessing the latter; if I can be allowed to speculate as to your thought process, you seem to hold something like the Golden Rule as an axiom of moral truths. That is, murder is wrong because, as I do not want to be murdered, it would be wrong for me to murder someone.
But what I'm saying is there is no justification for that axiom (though I personally might prefer it). It's arbitrary. We can construct an elegant system of ethics upon it, but it would be founded in the sand. And thus we discover why, again, throughout human history, there were countless cultures who would have regarded it as the most silly nonsense they'd ever heard.
> I will say there is a big difference between a civilization where the bad is OK and one where it is not. I also know which one I'd prefer to live in. Which one pretty much everyone will prefer to live in.
Most people will prefer to live in the civilization most like their own. Naturally, you and I would most prefer to live in a modern Western society where everyone agrees with us on most points of right and wrong.
> Caring for the weak and our own is a thing social animals do? To a very, very limited point...
I think you would be surprised by animal behavior. They will risk their lives for others. A good example is elephants, who have been known to do everything they can for the injured, even if it's just wait in the same place for them to die, hold 'funerals', and even seek vengeance on those who hurt their fellow.
> At some point, we need to start distinguishing what evolution intended and what we do.
Evolution does not intend anything at all.
> we didn't do that at all for quite a few members of society for a very long time.
Plenty of other cultures did for long periods of history.
You can go ahead and spout off arguments about us being biological primal carnivores but that isn't very persuasive considering that the defining aspect of intellect has always been a higher sense of understanding of good and evil, and manipulating the environment to support the greater good.
And thus, inflicting pain on beings like us, for extra entropy on taste bud receptors, seems rather low class and savage. Its one thing to kill. Its an entirely different thing to buy products from a supermarket that come from a pipeline of some of the worst acts against a conscious entity one could imagine themselves waking up in. What separates you from those animals today? Merely luck. When it is luck that decides the outcome of rather uneven circumstances, people rally against it. Intelligence presupposes that consciousness is not a choice, so is punishing someone because they sprouted into the wrong mammal type something that should be deemed okay?
Do onto others as one would want done onto self. We are experiencers first, animals second, and humans third, lets not deny the absolute tragedy that is the conscious experience of millions of livestock. Death is not the enemy of moral virtue but cruel and unusual life surely is.
>Death is not the enemy of moral virtue but cruel and unusual life surely is.
Are you saying that it's ok to kill animals for food as long as they are not made to suffer in the process?
If so, I'd argue that depriving them of subjective experience - which is what death entails - is also morally wrong.
OK. Sounds great. Tell me more about this 'higher understanding of good and evil.' What is good? What is evil? Why? Where do they come from?
We don't have any 'higher understanding of good and evil', we simply have language and (most likely) a higher capacity for abstract thought which allow us to argue about our social instincts, which are not objective truths.
There's a reason why, for all of human history, 'morality' has differed wildly among cultures. The only real constant is some level of in-group altruism, because that is a biological necessity for social animals. The rest is all gravy. Some humans thought human sacrifice was good, and a moral obligation. Others, torture. Others, slavery. Others, rape. Others, pacifism.
There is no rationale, there is no higher truth, there is no higher power, that you could appeal to to convince the most enlightened and rational Aztec that human sacrifice was evil. That's because it doesn't exist.
That's why your whole moral argument is entirely unpersuasive to people who eat meat. You're like an Aztec come to tell us that we need to be committing human sacrifice; it's all nonsense without the cultural context and socialization and inoculation. You, based on a moral belief you did not come to through reason, are trying to convince people secure in their own moral beliefs that they are commiting evil. A simple check-in with their conscience confirms that you are wrong.
So you need something other than a moral argument.
The only thing that might change your mind is watching videos of the conditions that these animals are in, solely for hedonistic pleasure, extra information/nueron firing in the form of taste. Imagine yourself in their body -- a punishment from birth to death because of bad luck on the end of some humans' excessive want for neuropathic pleasure. Any way you shape it, excess is always going to be morally dubious. When one has no choice, some things like self defense make sense. But there are plenty of choices in our modern age. A vegetarian diet with good farm fresh eggs, cheese, and milk, is plenty enjoyable and easy to do healthy. And a grass-fed free-range steak is not the worst thing to have once in a while. It can be argued that death is not a terrible thing, since we all experience it. Rather, torture is. So eating sustainable and cruelty-free meat, is sound.
You seem to be bent on excusing torture and pain because no bullet-proof definition or argument can sway you. I don't know what to say, except that you are clearly in denial and lying to us and yourself.
"You can go ahead and spout off" and "You can play coy semantics" come across as personal jabs. Such phrases are a kind of elbowing. You may feel that you didn't mean them personally, but the person who gets the elbow typically doesn't agree. This is the path to degraded discourse, so please don't do it here.
RIP Douglas Adams.
Most mammals react to painful stimuli (which we can provide a baseline for by testing it on other humans, whom you luckily consider to be reliable enough) with aversion and fear. We 'ask' this question of many animals quite frequently, and have throughout history. The answers are reliable and consistent.
>If most people agree they do not want to pay taxes, do taxes become evil? There is no objective reason to consider 'most people agree on x' as some kind of objective moral imperative. There is no moral quality to caring what people want. I don't think this is a very sound basis for an objective morality
starts to construct argument
sees sophistry in re 'suffering' downthread
Equivocating physical and emotional and social 'suffering'? Nope!
As to your edit, your perspective on other people's perspective is familiar and disturbing. I think you should reexamine your eagerness to throw around the word 'objective', your penchant for jumping to conclusions regarding your interlocutors, and your self-described thresholds for othering members of your social circle. Or, because you're right and you know it, ignore the entirety of this post.
I was, but people also inflict physical suffering on themselves, from fasting to literal self-flagellation and mutilation. There have been people who offered themselves up for literal torture and sacrifice gladly.
> and your self-described thresholds for othering members of your social circle.
I was describing how people in general work, not 'othering members of my social circle.' People do not respond positively to being told something they do or like is evil. I don't think that is a controversial statement.
This behaviour you describe is usually mediated by some kind of non-biological impulse -- like the 'certain' 'knowledge' that the Hairy Thunderer/Cosmic Muffin will reward this suffering in some future-/afterlife. Those impulses are all related to the pointless social factors that you decry. These people suffering is still an evil, even if they ultimately inspire something that outweighs the evil of their suffering (religious revolution, buying time/forgiveness for their loved ones, etc). Plus, you're still splitting hairs because it's not like these individuals are feeling pleasure or not anticipating pain uncomfortably. Next up, BDSM!
>>>You're simply trying to exploit a "hack" in my social animal brain, which is that if you tell me that something is wrong, you are telling me that other members of the human herd will judge me unfavorably and perhaps ostracize me or otherwise punish me. Some people, but not very many, will be swayed by your attempted brain-exploit. But I, again, observe that my conscious feels guilt-free, which is a very strong sign that the people I am surrounded by do not, in fact, disapprove of my eating meat, and also that the vast majority of people I know actually eat meat. So somewhere in my hindbrain, I realize that you are (from my perspective) lying to me, and it will make me instinctively resentful of you, because you have marked yourself as a member of The Other
You typed this, right? Then you typed:
>> and your self-described thresholds for othering members of your social circle.
>I was describing how people in general work, not 'othering members of my social circle.' People do not respond positively to being told something they do or like is evil. I don't think that is a controversial statement
Is this how 'people in general work', or is this you Othering someone? Did your interlocutor turn out to be utilizing the technique you perceived him to be?
Yes.
> or is this you Othering someone?
Who would be othered by that statement?
> Did your interlocutor turn out to be utilizing the technique you perceived him to be?
That statement is about a fact, not anyone else in the conversation, so it doesn't matter.
>Yes.
Well, that was a quick 'discussion'! Glad you came along! Thanks for the downvote!
You're welcome! The discussion of how there is an impulse for people to get upset and defensive when told they're wrong, and how it impedes learning, is very well established. It's not worth wasting time on a weird side argument about it. The answer is just 'yes, that happens a lot'.
Edit:
> Thanks for the downvote!
Hey, feel free to continue with the rest of the conversation without me. I'm not going to judge. I'm only going to snip at weird unproductive semi-insulting tangents.
What the hell? I guess that's what I must have been talking about! Thanks for informing me of what I was talking about! I totally agree that "people to get upset and defensive when told they're wrong, and how it impedes learning"; I'm experiencing it right now! Of course, now that you've shaped the discussion toward your end, I won't even try to have a 'conversation' with you.
>Hey, feel free to continue with the rest of the conversation without me. I'm not going to judge. I'm only going to snip at weird unproductive semi-insulting tangents
With unproductive semi-insulting tangents; it's almost like-- ah, sorry, everything is suddenly illuminated. Carry on.
That's what the line you quoted said. If you were replying to something else, you screwed up quoting. I can't tell you what you meant, but I can tell you what you quoted and said 'is this true?' about.
I'm not trying to shape the discussion as a whole, I'm trying to say "that one line? don't do that"
I did reply to an off-topic line with an off-topic line. I wanted to be clear what I was downvoting, and that it wasn't your opinion.
Your thought experiment ignores a lot of established facts, like the neurological structural similarities between, say, pigs and humans. Both have amygdalae, both have periaqueductal grey, both have similar pain avoidance behaviours. Why not assume that pigs feel pain? If you're willing to ignore structural (same hardware) and behavioural (same software) similarities between pigs and humans, how can you tell that I feel pain? If my similarities to you in both physicality and reaction are not enough to convince you I feel pain, why are my words enough? And if they are, if I build a deep belief network which says "ouch, fuck" every time it encounters a penalty in its stimuli and says "awesome" every time it maximizes its reward function, does it follow that we now have to treat it as if it's human? I'd say no.
>Well, since humans are conscious and are able to communicate with each other clearly, we can tell pretty well what it means for a human to feel pain
Why is this? Why not assume other humans are philosophical zombies[0]? Again, if I can build some dumb machine to say "ouch", lacking all other known physiological correlates to pain (like structures involved in processing pain, withdrawing from 'painful' stimuli, vocalizing sharply when in 'pain'), why isn't it in pain?
>what justification can you have to eat pigs and cause them that pain that you think they feel?
I don't care enough. I eat meat because it's tasty! That doesn't mean I can't try to ensure the things I eat live mildly fulfilling lives before their mostly pain-free deaths. I try to buy meat from places like this [1] because while I want to eat meat and see nothing wrong with it, there's a huge difference between a chicken who has been able to wander about and have a chickeny social network and eat bugs (even if its world is a big open-air warehouse barn) and a chicken who has spent most of its short fat life in a small dark cage. I don't follow this principle all the time, or I'd be restricted from fast food, eating out with friends, etc. I imagine anyone who buys cheap clothes but abhors sweatshops, or who buys consumer electronics but is made uncomfortable by rare-earth mining practices and Foxconn working conditions, or who pays taxes but objects to some horror the government perpetrates with the money, knows what I'm talking about.
I also don't think the parallel with cheap clothes or mining practices works. I mean with meat you can simply stop eating it with relatively little effort on your part. With clothes or products it is simply not realistic to try to avoid all poorly produced products on the shelf
> Most mammals react to painful stimuli <snip>
Which didn't really address the parent's point.
Since we can't ask the animals we can't know, so perhaps the pig consensus is:
"Yeah, look, we know you're killing us and eating us, but we really don't care. In fact, we like it, prefer. Put it this way, if we were our there in the wild we'd have to fend for ourselves, and either get eaten by our predators, or die of disease or old age. At least you kill us quickly. You don't even extend that dignity to your own kind, nope, you let each other, sometimes even force each other, to suffer till the very last breath and extract as much economic value out of each other as you can via the 'health care system' and 'palliative care', and then you don't even have the dignity to eat, or otherwise recycle, the carcass, no you just bury it in cemeteries where you don't grow food, or worse yet burn them, whereby the worms can't even eat them, and worsen your carbon pollution problem."
And there ya go, absurd isn't it. I certainly think so.
I live near pasture, we walk the dogs through it, the cows that hang out there are protective of their young, and definitely appear to have something going on between their eyes, they're quite adorable, both the young and old, and recently they're no longer there. Perhaps they got moved, perhaps we've eaten them. They could very well have ended up on my plate and I wouldn't know. But at least their lives had meaning and purpose, which is more than I can say for my life at times. The only reason I won't eat my dogs is through some quirt of culture that causes me think doing so is weird.
> Or, because you're right and you know it, ignore the entirety of this post.
Absolutely. If all we have is opinion, let's go with mine, because I guarantee it's stronger than yours. I'm even willing to go to war over it. Well, not me personally, I prefer baths and hot cups of tea, but we do seem quite eager to send each others children off to war.
I'm trying to be facetious here, because I don't really understand why people bother to keep having these arguments over differences of opinion. It generally doesn't work, unless someone is almost already there but hasn't quite accepted that they agree with you.
As Amezarak suggest in the last paragraph, perhaps the best way to go about changing culture is to attempt to gradually shift the Overton window[1], because right now the idea of Vegetarian or Vegan as policy or law is very much in the 'Unthinkable' stage.
And the article says "where the rat has nothing to gain". Might want to reevaluate that.