Hacker News Reader

Just because something is evolved behavior doesn't make it moral: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-traged...

Natural selection doesn't have morality as a goal, only passing on genetic material.

> "The suffering of an animal is not the suffering of a human; and if suffering is our primary concern, there's plenty of human suffering that still needs dealt with before we worry about animals."

I think it's possible to care about both and not eating meat is a relatively easy way to reduce one.

> "They're simply _not human_ and so as someone who doesn't anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care whatsoever about their emotional state."

This just puts humans in a special reference class by themselves. It makes it easy then, but I just don't find this that compelling.

> "I think there are a lot of oversocialized people who watched too many anthropomorphic movies and cartoons as kids."

If you have spent any time with animals you learn more about them, fear, suffering, varied emotional states are not uniquely human.

> I think it's possible to care about both and not eating meat is a relatively easy way to reduce one.

The downsides make it considerably less than "easy". Easy is continuing with the status quo; and as that is certainly likely to be the case for billions of people who have no interest in your uber-rationalist argumentation, I can happily just continue as is, with zero impact to my life until some vociferous person tries to actually make it harder for us to get meat. Then you'll see some real pushback.

Go ahead and live in the pod and eat bugs; the rest of us who are interested in living well and reproducing won't miss you.

I did say “relatively” easy. Not just easy. It’s hard, I like eating and would rather eat meat than not.

Sometimes doing something you think is the right thing is harder than doing the status quo easy thing.

Humanity has changed over time though, and left behind other practices we now regret having done at all. I think that might be possible here too.

>> I don't have to resort to dreams and plans. They're simply _not human_ and so as someone who doesn't anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care whatsoever about their emotional state. It doesn't noticeably impact the quality of the meat.

I don't understand this. Why not care about the emotional state of the animal? You're going to kill it to eat it, there's no reason to cause it suffering too.

In any case, it's impossible to not care about the emotional state of an animal you grow and care for, including the ones you grow for food. But this is not something one learns living away from farmed animals and leaving someone else do all the dirty work of growing them and the bloody work of slaughtering them.

I think the above is at the root of both opinions like yours, and the other extreme, of abstaining from eating meat for nebulous ethical reasons. People eat other animals for very good reasons, but there is no good reason to make them suffer, or ignore their suffering, or not try to alleviate and minimise their suffering beyond what is absolutely necessary.

> Why not care about the emotional state of the animal?

I don't need to. What benefit does it have for me, or for anyone, to sit around crying about the poor cow that became my prime rib dinner? It's utterly pointless. The cows will still be dying tomorrow, and my children will still be hungry like every other day.

I am not advocating for _more suffering_, man. Humane killing where possible. Free range when affordable. Organic when it makes sense. Ultimately, I'm advocating for cost effective, large scale agriculture that gets us the protein we need to survive. I don't have a huge pile of care to spare for the emotional feelings of chickens and pigs, sorry to say.

Who said anything about "sitting around crying"? Also, I don't understand why you agree that animals should be killed humanely where possible if you don't care about their emotional state.

>> I don't have a huge pile of care to spare for the emotional feelings of chickens and pigs, sorry to say.

I get it. Most people are way far removed from the animals we eat to feel any emotional attachment to them and even most people who work with animals, because of the scale of farming today, can't really think of them as anythng but things we cut up and eat. But this is only one more symptom of the disease of industrially produced food that is making us sick, depdenent on bloated corporations and destroys the environment.

That's not to say that if we cared more about the animals we eat everything would fix itself, but the fact that there is now considerable backlash against the inhumane killing of animals that is part and parcel of industrial farming, is nothing but the birds of our mass-production dependent way of life coming home to roost.

People have lost the balance necessary to raise animals for feed. Their relationship with those animals is broken and is lying in pieces, two pieces, opposite extremes, equally mad: one that meat is murder, the other that all we should care about is how much meat costs.

> Also, I don't understand why you agree that animals should be killed humanely where possible if you don't care about their emotional state.

I'll break that down for you.

I recognize animals can feel pain, and that they don't like it. I have pets, I don't want them to feel pain; but I also won't shell out thousands for vet care like some folks do if the worst should happen. In other words, I'm realistic about it while not being overly emotional. I think there's a curve function where we can choose the optimal level of reducing suffering while also maximizing the availability of protein for consumption; I think there's room on that curve for humane killing of livestock. No problem.

> nothing but the birds of our mass-production dependent way of life coming home to roost.

You sound like Ted Kaczynski. Mass-production is why you and I are here talking to each other; we owe our very lives to it.

> one that meat is murder, the other that all we should care about is how much meat costs.

At least with the latter philosophy we don't starve.

> as someone who doesn't anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care whatsoever about their emotional state. It doesn't noticeably impact the quality of the meat

You haven’t kill much, didn’t you? Otherwise you will know that stress and the way you kill the creature change it’s taste. Depending on what you are killing, it can be a dramatic change.

> You haven’t kill much, didn’t you?

A few things. Mostly fish. Mostly from lack of opportunity. I'm all for humane killing where possible, of course!

>humane killing

Please explain how taking away another living, breathing creatures life can be humane.

Is picking a flower or harvesting wheat inhumane? If not, is there something special about the process of breathing that makes animals more worthy of protection than plants?

I’d argue it’s the presence of neurons, brains, nervous systems that make the difference.

Sure. We can estimate the level of pain caused, and minimize it. That's the definition of humane; it's totally arbitrary and it's up to us to define. Nobody said zero pain or suffering is on the table; it's not like it is an option in our own lives, either.

This is an extremely uncharitable reply. Where did anyone try and equate the suffering of animals and humans? Accusing your opponents of anthropomorphizing because of concern about non-human suffering is a ridiculous response. The fact that farm animals would not exist without our intervention has no bearing on what we owe them morally. Finally, one can work to alleviate the suffering of both humans and non-humans. Not only does one not preclude the other, but I find more often than not those working towards ending one are working towards ending the other.

> accusing your opponents of anthropomorphizing because of concern about non-human suffering is a ridiculous response.

No, it's actually incredibly reasonable. Anthropomorphizing is the process of imparting human qualities onto non-human things, like animals. This is literally the exact thing that anyone who says we need to alleviate their suffering by not eating them is doing.

> Finally, one can work to alleviate the suffering of both humans and non-humans

Sure, I am 100% in favour of that, as long as they still end up neatly packaged in a store for a price that everyone can afford. As it stands it's already becoming more expensive than it should be, necessitating further logistics and efficiency improvements.

If it ends up being the case that people who make less money can no longer afford meat, then you've simply moved the suffering from animals onto people, which should elicit serious pushback. After all, we're responsible for the existence of these breeds of animals in agriculturally-significant numbers; in short, we made them. They're ours to eat. Prioritizing the anthropomorphized feelings of animals above the nutrition of the economically marginalized is a typically bourgeois conceit. The poor can just eat cake (or in this case, bugs) instead, right?

“Why help people in other countries when we have homeless?

Why help homeless when we don’t help our veterans?

Why help our veterans...”

False equivocation. And yes, I'd help veterans first.