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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

You're not the only one

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

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Suppose that we discover tomorrow that animals are not alone in feeling pain. Are plants then deserving of such consideration? What about bacteria? Fungi?

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?

hah, as if the abuse would stop with that acknowledgement.

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'm curious, could you kill an animal and cut it up? Do you realize you pay people to do this every time you buy meat? Are you cool with that?

No, I couldn't do it. Too disgusting. Yes, I do realize that's what I'm paying for. It's expensive but then I don't have to do the icky part. I'm cool with it.

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.

I have, and it's not really a big deal.

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.

So if suffering isn't ethically inacceptable, then torture of human beings is also OK for you? To me it seems that what you're saying essentially means that you just don't have any morality at all.

I take the view that morality is herd instinct in the individual, and that it is more productive to look at it as a sociological phenomenon instead of resurrecting platonic idealism. Whatever the herd deems good is Good, whatever the herd deems evil is Evil. There is no objective morality written on stone tablets that we can consult to determine that torture is Evil or that killing animals is wrong. That's why we have plentiful examples of cultures throughout human history, composed of intelligent, thoughtful people, who saw absolutely nothing wrong with torture.

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.)

Suppose the "subject", the one who experiences all your perceptions, all your qualia, is the same subject who experiences all qualia of every entity (see open-individualism). If this is true, then all suffering is YOU suffering. Would this change your opinion?

No. My personal attitude is something approximating this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_fati

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.

You gave an interesting explanation of what morality is and where it originates (in your opinion). However, that's besides the point.

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.

You seem to be constructing an argument like "if suffering is not immoral, then you must also think that torture is moral". That's a straw-man argument. It is a perfectly valid position to assert that inflicting suffering is morally wrong while at the same time rejecting that all suffering is morally wrong.

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?

That just suffering by itself is not immoral is quite obvious. We were talking about _inflicting suffering_ the whole time. And, to be even more precise, about knowingly inflicting suffering by human beings. Therefore all the questions you stated are besides the point.

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.

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?

No one is arguing that nature is moral.

I perceive you argument to be incomplete. It takes for granted that simply because something is biological reality it is not worth going against.

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?

The notion that animal suffering is real, and that food animals should at the very least be killed humanely out of respect for their pain, is more than a thousand years old at the very least.

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.

> I'm curious, could you kill an animal and cut it up?

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.

Yes, I done it. It is a question of where you were born and the culture in which you were born. Don't extrapolate your own feelings and cultural idiosyncrasies to everyone. People live in wildly different circumstances even today.

It is interesting that personally I find more disgusting the mutilation of animals (castration for example) than actually killing them for food.

Our primate cousins tend to eat a lot of insects. We (except for those with belief systems like Jainism) have no innate moral compunction about killing insects, yet people in western societies rarely eat them, preferring to eat stuff that we do have moral compunctions about killing. For some reason, the western high-tech solution to this is to focus on developing lab-grown mammal meat (and then no doubt seafood and fowl). Is there any chance this vat-grown meat will be cheaper or more sustainable than raising mealworms and crickets?

I'm not an idiot; I know where meat comes from. I just don't care at all. You can have a holier than thou attitude about being a vegetarian than me all you want, but the reality is that I'm not a carnivore out of ignorance. I eat meat because I like it. A hundred thousand cows could die for a single hamburger and I'd still eat it. If you want me to not eat meat, give me something cheaper, tastier, and easier to prepare. Until then, I'll lick clean the blood on my hands.

I know where meat comes from too and eat it but if I had to shoot a cow and cut it up to get beef I'd probably pass and have cheese fries instead. Too much hassle.

Slaughter is a hassle, but so is harvesting berries. And you get a lot of burgers from a single cow; you'd have to do it significantly less than once a year. I'm not sure if that's a very strong argument against a food.

You spend a weekend butchering and you're set for the year, assuming a large enough freezer. No more trips to the store for meat, just walk to the freezer. The equipment to make the job tolerable is a large initial expense, but it'll probably last you the remainder of your life. In the end, the fries are probably more hassle because you're less likely to have a year's supply of cheese fry ingredients lying around. Source: I haven't always been a vegetarian.

I believe that the development of synthetic meats that are both cheaper and of a more homogeneously high quality will supplant butchered meat, and eventually enable us to outlaw it.

The science is happening as we speak.

And meanwhile, you can help by consuming from pastured animals in preference to factory-farmed ones (if you're not vegetarian). This seems to be a trend, though one with a long way to go.

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