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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

What's the SI unit for suffering? How do you calibrate your measurement instruments?

If you have a genuine ethical objection to causing suffering to other living creatures, you can be vegan, lacto-vegetarian, or you can eat meat certified as jhatka by a trusted authority. It is never necessary for you to compare suffering ratios.

If you truly want to minimize the pain you send out into the world, it's zero. That is an easily achievable number. Go vegan. Be kind to everyone. Good luck on your path to enlightenment. If you aren't going for zero, why would you bother half-assing it?

For the record, I don't care whether or not my meal has ever screamed in agony. I can still respect the beliefs of those who do care. But I also don't wish to hear any of them preach to me about it, or let them trick me into enduring some sort of ideological sales pitch.

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If you re-read the comment above, you will see that it is not preaching. It is careful to say "for people who try to ... minimize inflicting suffering" -- leaving room for those (like you) who don't care.

Further, I think you are creating an unhelpful dichotomy between zero and nonzero. This dichotomy is not necessary.

It is reasonable to try to reduce suffering, but not drive it to zero (whatever that might imply). Perhaps there's more to the cost function (e.g., endangered species), or perhaps one is skeptical (like you seem to be) that you can measure suffering precisely enough to drive it to zero.

You say zero is easily achievable, but I doubt this. One can argue that the migrant labor that picked your carrots suffered, or that tiny insects were harmed in harvesting your vegetables (not a strawman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism). I'm not advocating that position, but I do claim that "zero" is not easily achievable, if you look carefully.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/advanced-veganism

> I'm a sado-vegan. I only eat plants that have been proven to actively signal other plants when being killed.

I've never understood why moral vegetarians seem to think that hurting and killing plants is so much better than hurting and killing fleas. Plants are well-established to react to injuries and to communicate to other nearby plants when they're under attack. If you're going to argue that you have a moral obligation not to hurt chickens, you need to at least be ready to argue that you don't have the same obligation not to hurt onions, which feel strongly enough about being attacked that they actively fight back.

Continuing your reasoning, I don't understand why people abstain from rape or murder, if they are going to eat food anyway.

The vegetarians argue that the problem with eating animals is that they feel pain. We know that this is true of plants. They just don't care about plants. They need to make an argument on the premise "plants are morally worthless because they are plants", which would be true, not on the premise "plants are morally worthless because they don't feel pain", which is false.

People abstain from murder (and rape, though that's much less analogous to the dietary debate) because society sanctions murder and rape, and where it doesn't, because the victims and their families are likely to take exception. (Compare traditional Icelandic law, where killing a person was legal under a variety of circumstances, but concealing the fact that you'd done so was criminal. Consider that the United States fully criminalized rape within marriage in 1993.)

The second of those reasons does not, and will never, apply to food animals. They have no power to take retribution. The first one doesn't, but can; it is the reason Brahmins eat a strict vegetarian diet. But it is not particularly compelling; very few people are impressed by the argument "you should abstain from meat because it makes me happy when I can make other people obey my commands".

And that's what leaves moral vegetarians in the ridiculous position of arguing from known-false premises. It doesn't mean I can't laugh at them for trying.

If I look too carefully, I see a slightly contagious, very mild, and benign form of insanity.

If you see suffering everywhere you look, the real problem may be in your way of seeing things.

But since suffering (in this context) is an essentially subjective thing, you can't go mixing it with an objective measurement like kilograms and make it more objective. Drawing up a "suffering per kilogram ratio" is exactly as subjective as simply asking whether cows suffer more than fish in the process of becoming human food. It isn't useful to anyone, except possibly those who published the ratios, being little more than an organized expression of their opinions.

The implication I draw from the very existence of a suffering/kg ratio is that those who invented it must believe that there is an acceptable level of suffering that any one person may cause, and that ratio may be a useful tool for staying under that threshold. That's like starting every morning by swearing into the mirror that you won't make any more than two people cry today. If it really is valuable to you that you don't make people cry, why wouldn't you say you don't want to do that to anyone, ever? It may be inevitable that it happens, but a practically unachievable goal is still a goal.

"...those who invented it must believe that there is an acceptable level of suffering that any one person may cause..."

I'd suggest that quantity is one thing to put into the multi-objective optimization problem we all are unconsciously solving. If you choose to interpret it as a threshold, that's OK, but others might treat it differently.

In particular, your construction of "won't make any more than two people cry today" is pure straw man based on your invented threshold rule.

Here's a different analogy. The speed limit on my drive to work today is 65 mph. I drove 70 most of the way. I don't have a hard rule that I can go at most 5 mph over the speed limit, but I do look at [my_speed - limit] as a factor in my driving, and try to keep this difference reasonably small.

But do you consider "reasonably small" in relation to the magnitude of the posted limits? Do you drive 30 mph when the posted limit is 25? If not, you might be interested in "speeding ratios".

But in order to really fit the speeding analogy around animal suffering, you also have to live in a world where speedometers and radar measurement devices don't exist. You're speeding if anyone thinks you might be going faster than the limit, even if nobody can really know for certain.

We don't have any animal suffering meters, or posted limits. We know a limit exists, but we apparently don't know where exactly to draw the line. Clearly, a puppy mill that abuses its livestock and runs pit fights will get the operator thrown in jail. But a battery farm that slices the beaks off of chickens and crams them into cages too small for them to stand in will get ag-gag laws that protect the owners from both punishment and scrutiny. Dogs are cuter than chickens, and less marketable as food, you see. In that world--the world we live in--a suffering per kilogram ratio is just pissing into the wind.

> What's the SI unit for suffering?

Why, killohurts, of course.

> What's the SI unit for suffering?

You could go with millihitlers. https://www.reddit.com/comments/dlu96/new_si_unit_one_hitler...

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