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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

>For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering on this planet, would we not find the only ethical solution to provide said cure?

When we slaughter other animals by the millions (often in very painful ways) though it can be avoided, are we in a position to ask such questions?

We're basically a cruel species lacking empathy.

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You personally have the luxury of reflecting on food ethics. That doesn't make the whole of humanity "cruel" and "lacking empathy".

Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.

Almost every one in America has the "luxury" of examining food ethics, when 95% of people in this country actively consume a product made through what amounts to a holocaust.

Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.

>what amounts to a holocaust.

Hyperbole aside, I think we can all agree that farming and killing animals isn't as bad as mass executions of people.

Of course. The Armenian Holocaust also wasn't as bad as the Jewish Holocaust, by numbers. I'd still consider all three a kind of holocaust.

I still think the Armenian Holocaust was worse than farming. In fact I would go so far as to say every human genocide was worse than farming.

It depends what value you attribute to a life. For example, is the life of one adult human more valuable than the life of one hundred million adult chimpanzees? These things are very hard to quantify.

It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.

Why is it hyperbole? We slaughter 25 million animals a day in the United States. That amounts to over 9 billion animals a year. Do you attribute 0 consciousness to those animals, a complete and total unawareness of their suffering? Almost every single one of those animals goes through torture and standards of living no one would deign as humane if they were done on their pets.

8 billion of those are chickens. Not gonna get excited about a chicken. Used to take care of them as a kid.

Its not even apples-to-oranges to compare humans to chickens. Its apples-to-something-that-isn't-even-a-fruit. Apples-to-French-poetry...

Would you voluntarily clip the beaks of a chicken, pump them full of growth hormones, and pack them so tight they live on top of mounds of their own feces and degraded corpses of other chickens for a fraction of their natural lifespan before having their throats cut, often while not stunned?

Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that.

What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?

Some people don't put any weight at all on animal suffering as long as a human benefits. You can't really prove that killing a pig isn't worth the ham you get, how would you even begin to make that objective?

Ultimately it's up to each and every human to make that moral judgement. I don't have a problem with meat eating in the abstract, our species have done it for years, but I do take issue with the idea that it's 1) a luxury to examine food ethics for the first world, when most people commenting on this website live in a land of plenty in terms of food availability and 2) an animal's suffering means absolutely nothing, when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done. Does our perceived superiority of consciousness entitle us to the vile exploitation of billions of life forms? Would an aliens superior technology visiting Earth entitle them to enslave us, since we'd be nothing more than animals to them?

> when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done.

I bet 100% of people visiting farms in the third world would be absolutely reviled by the "modern" human condition with how crop farming is currently done. And 99% of vegans/vegetarians disregard the human violence and food shortage behind that quinoa in their plates.

I agree, there's many problems in the world that need to be fixed. Food should be more sustainable. We should make smarter, more conscientious choices behind how we choose our food. I don't see why being plant based, a more sustainable and ultimately less cruel way of consuming food, should be rejected because there's cruelty to how we grow crops like quinoa. The amount of grain we feed to livestock would be enough to feed 800 million people -- we would consume less objectively if we were a plant based society.

The more I read this comment, the less I understand it. Following your train of thought, there'd be LESS people enduring that misery and LESS strain on the world's environments if we ate less meat -- we would need less land to grow mankind's food, and would require less imports from third world countries in doing so.

> I don't see why being plant based, a more sustainable and ultimately less cruel way of consuming food, should be rejected because there's cruelty to how we grow crops like quinoa.

less cruel to whom? I made it very clear that for me, your plant based, "more sustainable" way of consuming cause misery to lots of human-beings, and for me this is more vile and cruel than raise animals to eat nutritious and healthy food.

No one has ever been convinced to eat less meat by being compared to a Nazi.

I didn't say consuming meat products made by the modern factory farming system/methodology makes anyone a Nazi. I'm saying that consuming those products means you're consuming the products made by a system that actively commits genocide and torture at the scale of billions of lifeforms. That doesn't make everyone doing it evil, and I hope that as people come to read more and become more aware of what's going on they choose to stop their consumption of animal products. Individual agency is all we can have.

I think the point was that if aliens are to us as we are to cows, then... well... you can draw your own conclusions.

And we might already be :) The same way the cow doesn't know it is going to be eaten.

That's a stretch...cows know of humans, they know specific humans, they fear the slaughterhouse in many cases. They may not understand their ultimate destiny, but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.

> but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.

That is exactly what I mean. We, the not ultra intelligent specie might not have even a clue about how they could benefit from raising and harvesting us :) Maybe that is what some people call faith/religion. Some believe it, some disregard it as low level primitive behavior.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(novel)

I think one could make a good argument that in fact, humans are the species with the most empathy, out of all other species.

The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom.

I would say the rest of the natural world is very ruthless. Humans have empathy for other species, nothing else in nature seems to.

I think there are a few counter examples. Many pet owners have posted videos of their dogs and cats being protective of their (human) babies. In fact, Koko the gorilla was very affectionate towards her kittens.

Sure, but those situations probably wouldn't arise without human guidance.

Perhaps for those situations I mentioned one could argue that human guidance had a hand. However, there many other examples of cross species altruism where humans play no role (other than observational).

I believe similar situations have been observed rarely in nature, although I wonder if they were indirectly influenced by humans.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha...

I don't think empathy is uniquely human. That would be very unusual for a trait to have emerged fully formed for only one species in all animal kingdom--I think most things are on a gradient.

Would you call torture human guidance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcs-H5p-MYw

It's an extreme situation that created this, but I think if you take species in which empathy has been observed, and put them in a secure environment, where they are all well fed, I don't think it's crazy to imagine that they too will have the luxury of inter species empathy, without any human involve in that regard. In general, "That's actually why people keeps mammals in the home and not turtles or snake or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy." (Moral Behaviors in animals | Franz de Waal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk)

And yet my dog would also regularly show up at the back door with a freshly caught bird’s legs sticking out of her mouth even though she was provided with ample and a wide variety of food.

Does your dog understand that another animal can suffer, and that the bird it has is suffering?

It's a complex problem. Would it matter?

While I do think that the human species is the one with the most empathy, we are definitely not the only species to take care of another species.

I'm not sure humans have the most empathy. In fact, there's a good chance that even when other species have empathy to other creatures, we don't necessarily recognize it.

> The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom.

A quick youtube search would provide you countless counterexamples to this.

Individually there are counter examples, but does any other species display empathy at the scale of another species? I doubt it. And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.

Humpback whales appear to show empathy towards other species. We have 115 documented cases of them doing so (and it is a lot given how hard it is to observe them).

http://oceanwildthings.com/2018/06/what-humpback-whales-can-...

They also have mirror neurons that have been an important component in theory of mind.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.h...

How many other species can afford the time to express empathy as much as humans do? Most of them are just struggling to survive, so it's not like we get a lot of opportunities to observe that behavior.

So two examples come to mind where it wasn't just survival. One, a wolf pack in Yellowstone invades another wolf pack's territory, chases them away from their dens, forcing their cubs to starve to death. And two, the brutal Chimpanzee war Jane Goodall observed between two tribes. A third example could be any ant conflict between two colonies where they could in theory both survive but instead choose to try and wipe each other out. In fact, some ants form super colonies instead of fighting one another.

How do you distinguish between individual acts of empathy and "empathy at the scale of another species?"

> And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.

Sounds like that applies equally to humans. There are cultures where cruelty towards dogs and cats is more common that empathy, and even in places where empathy is more common, individuals can still be cruel.

A "Save the Whales" campaign may seem like empathy towards another species, but it only exists because humans hunted whales so vigorously, and are also in the midsts of ruining their environments, so neither of those sound like examples of true empathy towards another species.

> How do you distinguish between individual acts of empathy and "empathy at the scale of another species?"

An invasive species (or if an imbalance occurs such as predators become scarce and prey population explodes) will just outcompete other species for resources with no empathy. Humans can certainly do that, but we also sometimes worry about preserving species and habitats.

Since we've caused more species to go extinct than any other invasive species in history, that's a remarkably ineffectual case of empathy.

In any case, I'd argue that this isn't real "empathy." We feel intellectually that we've done something wrong, and we even feel sadness about it (although possibly in a similar way that we'd feel towards abiotic ruin, like destroying all the arches in arches national park), but I don't think we truly empathize with the, say, beetles who are going extinct, as we cannot comprehend their minds in any way.

Since this whole discussion is about theory of mind, we should use empathy correctly: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another."

Humanity doesn't exactly display empathy on a species scale either.

Elephants and cetaceans may show empathy towards humans without cultivating a relationship with one first.

Do you have citations for that? I'm interested and couldn't find convincing sources

No, unfortunately I made this assertion based on unscientific anecdotes I've read previously.

Humans are also the species with the most intelligence and the most wisdom. That doesn't mean we still may not be very low on an absolute scale of intelligence and wisdom. Saying we're better relative to other species is pretty meaningless.

I think it's a mammalian thing, not just a human thing. It's right in the word: mammal, "of the breast." Animals which suckle their young. Some level of empathy for things other than oneself is required, and this spills over to other individuals and species. And for social animals, having a broader net of empathy that encompasses non-directly-related individuals, empathy also enhances survival. And I think you could make the case that animals sometimes help each other out when facing a common threat, i.e. warning of predators, etc. As humans, we can perhaps see the importance of spreading the net of empathy ever-wider.

Robert D. Hare (known for Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised PCL-R) has described psychopath as intraspecies predators. Psychopaths relation to other humans is similar to how humans relation to other animals. Humans have pets they like, but they still put down or abandon their best friend if something else comes along.

If you reverse this line of thought, we are psychopaths in our relation to animals. Our relation to animals is selfish, callous, and remorseless use (interpersonal-affective factor) and chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle in or relation to pets (social deviance factor).

Humans have also tendency to act like predators towards our outgroup. Maybe this ability selfish, callous, and remorseless behavior is important part of being a human.

That's a rather extreme generalization, isn't it? Not all humans are equally remorseless and prone to carelessly harm others, whatever the entities they interact with and the acculturated categorizations they project on them.

Now we can certainly come with statistics of tendencies, but to my mind they seem to be condemned with cultural biases. Not only the human brain plasticity is molded by the culture where it is immersed, so any data will tell us more about the result of such a culture than about "human inherent tendencies", but even the way we will decide to analyze them and consider/interpret the outcomes will depend on our culture (and our current mood or other more "local" psychological factors).

With that in mind, it's hard to categorically conclude that humans are fundamentally "psychopaths in [their] relation to animals". Dominant cultures, offspring of predatory cultures, surely help to foster such a behavior. That doesn't require it to be an intractable instinctive trait.

> We're basically a cruel species lacking empathy.

I don't think that's the case. It's just ignorance that can lead to cruel behavior, which is just amplified the bigger our society is. That's more actionable than simply judging our species as cruel (call me naive, but I honestly think most of us want to be good).

Most people already think they're good.

Ignorance plays a large role, but even when people are overwhelmed with (accurate) information, I'd say over 90% of people still take the cruel but easier path.

IMHO there's different kinds of ignorance. There's a difference between the absence of knowledge and misperception of reality. The first is an intellectual type of ignorance: the lack of information. The latter is the lack of wisdom/insight and leads to superimposing a view of reality onto reality itself, which leads to cruel behavior and suffering.

Except that we 'invented' the empathy. Or the concept of it.

I'm all for acting ethically. And mostly because we are the creature to compose the concept of ethics.

Nature is an idea; a human idea... or a bucket of ideas. One that different people or cultures put different things into. One needs to be highly suspicious of anybody who appeals to nature for some value in itself, or as a source of natural laws. People tend to see in 'nature' what they already believe.

And I think a similar principle holds for how we apply ethics in relation to the not-human, natural world. Careful.

Putting a name on something isn't enough to make one it's inventor

Pretty sure empathetic behaviors existed before anyone identified and conceptualized them.

Roses, names and all that.

Yes and I hope some day that practice goes the way of common human slavery. Perhaps some day we will stop killing our fellow earth creatures. For now we still kill even other humans at will.

We're far from a cruel species lacking empathy. We need to eat, we're omnivores and it's more like our "production methods" have not yet caught up with our magnitude. We act like any other similar animal would do, except on an unprecedented scale. To reduce mankind through your favourite moral grievance also precludes any capacity for evolutionary change.

We’re a cruel species because we have empathy.

As an alien observer from a far one might wonder how humans might want to exploit my knowledge, technology or even the flavour of my flesh (if I have any). That's assuming that alien has mostly inquisitive intentions.

Alternatively, aliens with more exploitative intentions might be just as bad as some humans are. Perhaps, because we are still in our technological infancy we have little to take advantage of for now. Even less to warrant the work/energy expenditure required to plan a visit to our neck of the galaxy.

You're afforded the luxury of not doing that now, if you like. For the entirety of our evolution we did not have that luxury. Every primitive culture pre agriculture ate meat whenever they were successful at the hunt.

I can't believe someone downvoted this. Show me one counter example, I dare you.

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