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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this more like teaching the crows commerce? If we controlled their food 100% and did not give it to them unless they did the work, I agree that would be slavery. This is just paying for a service.

I feel like there would be bigger ethical problems over the proper amount to "pay" them than whether or not the act of paying them for a service is ethical

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I think a systemic misconception in this thread is that we're teaching crows anything other than how to get food from a device we designed.

They are not rational actors in this situation. They are never on the same playing field as we are. We would be taking advantage of their limited intelligence to do our bidding.

Ah. That's why it's not ethical to train a crow to do this, but it is ethical to pay a person to do this.

(Yes? I was genuinely wondering about this)

Yeah, pretty much, although if we keep going in this direction we'll end up talking about drugs, slot machines, human slavery, and what really is willpower and choice. Bioethics is incredibly interesting and underrated for dinner conversation.

How do you feel about the ethics of keeping animals as pets? Despite my ethical concerns, I have a cat as a roommate, but I generally think that pet ownership is unethical for precisely the reasons you discussed in the thread above.

My two cents: if you treat it as a proper responsibility and as essentially a furry child, you have no moral or ethical qualms. If you can satisfy its needs and help it lead a pleasant life free, that's enough.

On a related note, I had a professor in college who was a Buddhist and considered his living situation as involving a "cat who lived with me" and not "his cat" per se. I think that's a much healthier way to look at it. It preserves the cat's agency and rejects possession of another living being.

I think there is certainly a strong case against those that breed pets. But until the shelters are empty, I’ll always have a dog or two around.

And I’m not “keeping” them, they’re roommates. Lazy, unemployed, helpless roommates that can’t even feed themselves properly. They’re welcome to leave any time they like. But, though they’re dogs, they’re not idiots.

I have not done a paper on this or given it nearly as much thought as OP. That being said, my 2 cents is that paying a person to do it should also be considered unethical, because it's encouraging the reduction of human abilities to something very menial.

But if there were like, an ethics ranking, then it's probably more ethical than going the crow route.

A hundred years from now, when crows run all the major tobacco companies, it will be too late to do anything about this.

If we're both still alive in 100 years, I know which avian you'll be eating.

Crows have multiple ways to get food, and choose the ones they like. Is that not sufficiently rational?

What if their population expands beyond what's sustainable on conventional food and they become dependent on the "butts" food?

Replace “crows” with “humans”. Does your opinion change?

I find the interesting question to be the hypothetical one where they are rational actors. Crows are smart, relatively, so how does the conversation change if we apply that they are not just rational but also have agency?

Crows have demonstrated enough intelligence in experiments, that I am not willing to write them off as irrational actors.

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