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Comment by Retra | Hacker News Reader

>This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different

The argument that humans have any sort of ethical duty at all assumes that humans and animals are fundamentally different. Animals don't have any ethical duty to prevent their food from suffering.

EDIT: Furthermore, human suffering is categorically different from animal suffering because human suffering can be inter-generational and have very long-term consequences. Animals don't transfer their suffering and their morality between generations, and that fact does make human suffering much worse than animal suffering, because human suffering can lead to arbitrarily catastrophic consequences. A tiger biting a human can lead directly to the complete extinction of the tiger. The emotional content of the suffering my be similar, but the consequences are not.

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That doesn't logically follow. My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer. If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.

EDIT: So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?

>My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer.

I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).

>If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.

If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.

>So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?

What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.

> I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).

I'm making a claim about what humans should and shouldn't do to cows, namely that we shouldn't torture them. The behavior of some kind of predator does towards its prey is not relevant.

> If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.

You found a loophole in thousands of years of logical reasoning! Hypotheticals aren't real or useful in thinking and communicating, who knew!!

> What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.

By your reasoning, then, it's actually the torture victims writing about it who are causing the reverberating suffering. If they didn't opt to communicate and teach, their suffering would be fine. Maybe after you've finished convincing everyone to torture animals you can start to shame the writing of memoirs by torture victims?

I don't think you've honestly tried to understand what I'm saying, and I don't think your attitude reflects the maturity I expect of someone seriously attempting to discuss ethics.

>> The behavior of some kind of predator does towards its prey is not relevant.

It should be. Nonhuman animals can be absolutely ghastly to each other. See for example surplus killing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing

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