I value my children more than I value your children, but you will likely disagree with my assessment, even though it isn’t unexpected. And I would have to admit my assessment is not objective.
> Never mind the fact that we have consciousness and ego and complex nervous systems, whereas lobsters do not.
That’s how speciesism works: we try to find some kind of difference between us and other creatures, and then say, because they lack X they are not worthy of consideration. It’s okay if they suffer. This is precisely the same logic that was used to justify slavery, for example.
The other problem is that the line keeps moving, because we keep discovering how similar we are to other animals. There was a time when science claimed that animals did not have emotions, which any dog owner could tell you is nonsense.
The truth is that we do not really know exactly what a lobster experiences. Shouldn’t we therefore be cautious?
I honestly believe that at some point, the majority of humans will look at our system of factory farming and “harvesting” of wildlife in much the same way that today we view slavery, colonialism and other egregious examples of human disregard for other lives. I am not saying they are the same thing, but I do think that they are in the same category.
Animals on the other side really don't care:
Wowzers, this is the most strawmanny characterisation of this view I think I've seen outside of scifi villains in B movies. I don't think the most charitable view is that species "deserve to suffer." It's that they have different capacities for suffering, and that differences in the complexity of the nociceptive and the nervous systems are inputs into our understanding when we try to figure this stuff out. That leads to, say, jellyfish being treated with different moral urgency than mammals, or eggs being treated differently than hatched birds.
The B-Movie scifi villian characterization also is problematic not just because of it's anti-intellectual shallowness, but also because it considers moral assessment in it's negative sense but not it's positive. Namely, that this is about tending to the needs and moral well-being in cases where the urgency in protecting it is greatest, and we can make good choices to do the most good. We make choices that prioritize the well-being and safety of our children in ways that take their well-being seriously, and we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building. To treat them equally, or to prioritize the other way around, would find someone facing the moral condemnation of the community as well as legal consequences, and nobody would be convinced to withhold those judgments by speeches about speciesism.
To say it simply, there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do. There is much about our practices that absolutely reflects an absence of consideration - shouldn't we be working to improve that?
Saying that there is an inverse prioritization is not the matter at hand. We're not even on equal ground. It's just raising the bar for a thankfully growing number of different animals off the floor.
I maybe didn't grok your point of view on speciesism, though - could you try to reframe it?
I don't think that a statement about avoiding pitfalls of anti-intellectualism needs to be read as endorsing the opposite extreme, and I don't making that kind of assumption contributes to constructive conversation.
>To say it simply, there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do.
This response to the burning building example is fascinating and strange to me for a number of reasons. For one I started by providing a simple, clear cut, face value example of a case where doing good means considering how to prioritize wellbeing of different species. And as far as the example itself is concerned, you're just not engaging with it at all, and asking about a different example.
I mean, fair enough, we can get to your chosen example, but I already feel like we're a bit off kilter. If that were not already strange enough, you are saying "there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do." Well, maybe not in your chosen example, but in some other cases there is, quite literally as in the example I just mentioned. And to be clear, it's not just that I want my example to be seen because I think I'm special. It's that if someone says there is no such thing as that proverbial burning burning (e.g. no reason to treat species differently), and I show an example showing exactly that, it would seem important to engage with that example, not just to switch to consideration of other examples.
So I don't know what the disconnect is here. As to your example, well, sure. I think you are right, there is no proverbial burning building requiring harmful farming practices, and in my opinion those should be abolished, as you can argue there is no calculus in which they are neccessary Perfectly true, both in the literal sense, and as a matter of principle that it's a case where you don't have to think of it in terms of tradeoffs. But here again, I am wondering where this is coming from? Do you think "save humans from fire before mice" means ignore harmful farming practices? Where are you getting that?
>Saying that there is an inverse prioritization is not the matter at hand.
Again, very strange to me. I feel like my comments are anchored to reality by the fact that I try to stick closely to responding directly to specific things that someone else said. In this case, the commenter I was replying to was speaking generally about speciesm. I felt this was narrow, and that a more fair characterization about what drives this way of thinking is that it's how to make positive, morally good choices, in contrast to their one-sided view that only talked about it in the negative sense, in terms of inflicting harm.
For some reason, you have come in and decided that me responding directly to that is "not the matter at hand." But again, it very much was, because the subject was speciesm writ large, and I was speaking to that. So I just don't know what you are talking about, at least not without a bit more framing.
That's because I feel that it's a deliberate mischaracterization of reality and is being used to insulate a false equivalence against criticism.
I'm wondering a bit of the same that you are - when the topic of harmful farming practices is the primary focus, why did we deflect to "well, what about if a building was on fire?" Where are you getting that?
Indulge me - if we substitute the ideology of speciesism here with racism, do you engage with that topic in the same way - by saying "let's not focus so much on the negative reality of racism, but how to help racists make morally good choices"? I think it's fair to lump the abstraction of each together.
My statement about things being "not the matter at hand" were aimed at your conflation of giving animals a higher moral value than humans; that still stands.
As I already said before and explained at length, it's a hypothetical example intended to illustrate a principle pertinent to the question of speciesm, in direct response to a comment that was about speciesm. I am not sure what "reality" you feel is being mischaracterized by directly speaking to an issue raised by the commenter. I honestly can't make heads or tails of what you are trying to say is being mischaracterized here.
>when the topic of harmful farming practices is the primary focus, why did we deflect to "well, what about if a building was on fire?" Where are you getting that?
There was no "deflection" from one topic to another. "The topic" was not one thing, but a couple of different things that are intertwined: farming that segued into a monolog on speciesm, and I was responding to the latter piece, although my response has implications for both. In direct response to that, I have put forward a hypothetical that illustrates a case that runs contrary to the idea of speciesm as being about creatures "deserving suffering". All I can say is that I am sorry that something that speaks directly to that question confuses you.
I'll repeat my question to you: how did you read "save humans from fire before mice" and take that to mean something along the lines of "therefore, disregard harms of farming practices?"
>your conflation of giving animals a higher moral value than humans; that still stands.
This is pretty incoherent to me. I would love to at least be able to understand and express a disagreement here, but I don't know what conflation you think has occurred.
So yeah, you haven't engaged with the point I've raised despite it being perfectly relevant, and you've expressed surprise, feeling that my point is off topic, which I feel is spurious. And you're saying a few things are being "mischaracterized" or "conflated" and I'm not sure what specifically you are talking about.
I'm sorry I can't better help you understand which things I feel were mischaracterizations or conflated; it seems we're bound to be stuck at some lower levels of disagreement.
At least we can agree on not understanding each other! And, I suppose, that factory farms are a problem. Cheers!
So far as I can tell, what you are really objecting to is not my comment but to the idea of communicating through hypothetical examples.
The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.
You can live a full, healthy life while minimizing to as full extent as possible the suffering you directly or indirectly inflict on other sentient creatures.
The argument you present here against your characterization of the OPs point is akin to saying "my kid really loves McNuggets so I don't care about the horror 50 billion chickens suffer in a given year".
Again, the building isn't on fire; you don't have to choose one or the other.
At least humans kill our food before we eat it. That is minimising suffering.
No. Without farming, farm animals just wouldn't exist to live a miserable life. Farmers are not doing them any favors by bringing them into the world.
> Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares, operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35 percent of the world's food, according to a study published in World Development.
https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1395127/icode/
If you listen to vegan propaganda you may get the impression that all farming everywhere in the entire world means that animals must be tortured in factory farms, but that's a lie. There is nothing in small-scale farming to make animals' lives miserable.
"Vegan propaganda" ok Cheese Goddess. These animals not existing is preferable to the hell they endure on factory farms.
"If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a dirty lie that you said yourself and I never did. You put it in scare quotes to say that they're my words, but they're yours and you're the one who's outright lying. So much about "disingenuous" then.
And I don't support or defend factory farming, quite the contrary. I think it's a disaster and I'm very upset that it's taking over the world like a cancer spreading and displacing small-scale farming. And I'm very well aware of its horrors. It's you, and people who bundle all of farming with factory farming like you, who are clueless about farming.
Partly this is because the majority of people like you are natives of the countries that are at the heart of the cancer of factory farming, like the Americas or North and Western Europe, countries that consume, per capita, about double the amount of meat as anybody else. People who grew up thinking that "food" means "meat", who have probably never even seen a farm animal up close, who have no clue about how their food is made, or what's in it, even when they're not eating meat. And it's people like you, with strong opinions but weak knowledge, the people of nations who have destroyed their own food production and replaced it with an industry that feeds them shit, that want to tell the rest of the world, all of us other people, how to eat? That's just tragic and so stupid, and arrogant and conceited.
Btw, my username is because I make cheese and your comment makes you sound like a puerile idiot.
... yet earlier...
> Because without farming they'd live in the wild
Seems pretty cut and dry.
Friendly advice? Learn to have a discussion like an adult.
Well we're off to a bad start, because this is just literally incorrect. I remember way back in elementary school we had a fire chief come in and talk about fire safety, about having a plan, etc. Inevitably the question about saving pets comes up, and we heard them talk about how fire safety means prioritizing safety of humans. I just did a quick google about fire safety and pets and if you want to play the Google Stuff game, there are numerous sites with guidance on fire safety that reaffirm this.
Secondly, for goodness sake, it's a hypothetical intended to highlight an underlying principle. Because sure, of course you want to save everybody in all cases. But insisting that you don't even want to consider the premise of a hypothetical is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the hypothetical that is focused on precisely the situations where you don't have that luxury of avoiding all possible harms.
Despite your protestations to the contrary, our lives are entangled with the lives of animals in ways that present tradeoffs. Here on HN there was recently an article about the beneficial impact of wolves on ecosystems, in part because they hunt deer, and make driving safer for humans. Figuring out how to protect Atlantic Salmon in rivers depends upon "cover species" such as eels and other fish, so that predators don't just focus on salmon. Indigenous tribes support protections for Atlantic salmon in part because they personally benefit from having salmon available as a natural resource they can fish for.
Only in the context of an internet comment section would somebody seriously try to insist that we aren't interrelated in these ways, that we don't have to think about these choices, and expect it to be treated like a respectable position.
Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here (although I don’t feel you’re arguing in bad faith, for the record - I can see how my comments may be taken that way). I don’t believe species ought to be treated equally but rather that we ought to give all species consideration.
It’s curious that this view is considered so extreme by so many, while the treatment we inflict on living beings, which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than the way we treat the billions of mammals currently trapped in the dystopian hell of factory farming.
I mean, you certainly can go ahead and declare that that is how it works. Declaring that Its Not About Neurons is most definitely a statement you can make. That's step 1. Steps 2, 3, 4 etc are making arguments in support of that statement, explaining what the alternative basis for making moral judgments is based on, explaining why it's a better system, explaining how its meaningfully different and not just a restatement of what I said but with different words, etc.
You haven't done any of those things though. So this boils down to saying "no! it's not that! It's something else!" If we were using Graham's Argument Hierarchy[0], this would amount to DH3, which is Contradiction. It's one step better than DH2 (responding to tone), but it's one step worse than DH4 which is making a counterargument, which involves stating something else (contradiction) plus a layer of reasoning and/or evidence of some kind. In fact I would say this is barely even a contradiction, because contradiction means stating an alternative and I'm not even sure what the alternative is that you're stating.
>Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here
That was basically being put forward as a definition of speciesm that I was responding to, so I'm not sure how that's a straw man. If you can elaborate on what it means to value species differently but not have it count as speciesm, but not to it based on appealing to any biological information about species, but with something that is still a "moral judgment" differentiating species, I'm all ears. Let me remind you that you were using "deserve to suffer" as your idea of good faith characterization of the view you disagreed with, which is B-movie scifi villian, which to me qualifies it as a straw man.
>which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored. >As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than...
These are also beside the point. So the long and short of it is there's not really anything responsive here that I can respond to.
Do you believe that in our current world state we have some magical alternative we could use to feed the near 8 billion human beings that currently inhabit this planet?
If we skipped the animals and ate the crops directly it would be far more efficient in every dimension (calories/area, protein/area, environmental impact)
And while it's trut that we can't feed 10 billion people on cows, that's also true for the fewer billions we have today: the most commonly consumed kinds of meat are chicken and pork, not beef. Beef is the most commonly consumed kind of meat in affluent western countries that are also home to the most vocal vegan and animal rights movements, which goes a long way to explain why many of the discussions about what we eat say "meat" when they mean "beef".
In animal kingdom, animals kill each other ruthlessly. African dogs and other animals eat their prey from back-to-front while they are alive. Are all animals speciesists? Are all animals committing an act equivalent to slavery?
Humanity survived on hunting for tens of thousands of years. So the only reason we survived is because we were "speciesists"? If that's the case, then I am okay with being a speciesist.
We have to value our species over other species - if it ever came to choosing 1 human being or a million <insert animal>, we would always choose a human being (given that killing those animals won't destroy the ecosystem, thus harming human beings).
Not that long ago, humans routinely tortured, killed, raped other humans sometimes even just for fun (and in some places of the world very much still do).
Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question.
These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other property you deem worthy in a living being, thus making them inferior to another species.
I strongly disagree. We have more food than ever before. More clean water than ever before. More safety and prosperity than ever before. More innovation than ever before.
As for our ecosystem, humanity has solved any and every calamity ever before. And we will solve this one as well.
Don't get me wrong - we should not take climate change lightly just because of the belief that we will solve it. We should take it seriously and tackle it head-on, but with the belief in our ability in problem solving and innovation. We cannot solve a problem if we believe that humanity is going to destroy itself.
>These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other property you deem worthy in a living being, thus making them inferior to another species.
I don't understand this sentence. Can you clarify?
You’d be pretty dumb to saw off the branch you’re sitting on. Yet that’s what we’re doing. On the surface, we seem to be lacking any kind of self preservation instincts or « hive mind » to preserve our species. If, say, a bee was looking at humans trying to determine if we’re intelligent or not and they applied bee intelligence metrics, we’d miserably fail because every bee knows that the survival of the hive is what dictates their action and behavior, duh.
And yet we consider bees to be bug “automatons” but consider ourselves the most advanced life form around. But seen from a distance, without using human values as a framework for evaluating intelligence, we might be some of the dumbest species around.
We don't need a hive mind, we have intelligence. Bees act the way they do because they are genetically programmed to act that way, and they don't have the ability to think or reason for themselves. We do. We protect our species when we need to. Not out of genetics (maybe a little bec of evolution), but out of intelligence.
Humanity also probably only survived difficult conditions because many of our ancestors raped and killed each other over rare resources and lack of willing sexual partners. Hence by your logic we also should be okay with being killers and rapists, because they're the only reasons we're alive.
Or you know, we could use our brains and recognize that our ancestors lived in completely different environments than we do and we also have a much better understanding of the world than they did. Hence it would be incredibly stupid to use their actions, world view and ethics as a foundation for our belief system.
When we cannot give each other a decent life, we resort to mass killing (even today) - think of all the wars started due to hunger or ethnic reasons.
My point was that we are responsible for the safety and prosperity of each other, not any animal. We have no obligation towards the safety of some animal. Evolution tells us that we have to care about the survival of our species. And in certain cases, we will help animals but primarily where helping them helps us (for example, to maintain stable ecosystem).
As for dogs and cats, we use them for our benefit - we feed them, protect them, give them a good life for our own benefit - because they have evolved to make them seem cute and domesticating them makes us happy and gives us mental comfort. This makes them happy at the same time (but that's a side-effect, not the intended effect in most cases)
We can also afford to feed everyone without harming so many animals. In fact, reducing our reliance on animal products is likely the only and much more efficient way to feed everyone. And not only that, we're also destroying whole ecosystems because of our unnecessarily large demand on animal products, which in consequence causes huge problems for future generations.
So harming animals less is definitely in our interest.
> When we cannot give each other a decent life, we resort to mass killing (even today) - think of all the wars started due to hunger or ethnic reasons.
I'm also thinking of all the wars yet to come, because of the consequences of climate change or uninhabitable areas, which both were (among other things) caused by our ridiculously high meat consumption in a few wealthy countries.
> My point was that we are responsible for the safety and prosperity of each other, not any animal.
The fact that people even have to fight for children to not get abused for us having some luxuries (rare minerals for the latest smartwatch or phone, coffee beans, chocolate,...), should make it clear that we don't feel responsible for each other on a grand scale. There's a varying degree of responsibility and it quickly vanishes with greater physical distance to each other and the less we feel connected in one way or another.
And it's not uncommon to feel more responsible for animals than for humans. Like my neighbor's cat is treated better than those children working in some mines or farms, also because it's more beneficial to some of us to treat those children badly.
Or to put it differently, responsibility for other human beings which are outside of our closer groups is nothing that comes naturally or just is or is even necessary for our survival. It's something we had to come up with on our own with our ethics. So we have to fight for it and constantly remind ourselves about it or otherwise we keep doing all the horrors we still do to each other (e.g. slavery). It's no different than our ethical beliefs in other regards, e.g. animal suffering.