Octopuses, crabs and lobsters recognised as sentient beings under UK law (2021)
lse.ac.uk
lse.ac.uk
https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/News-Assets/PDFs/2021/Sentience-i...
I was a bit dismissive of the idea that they can define sentience in a useful way, but their framework is right there on page 7 and it makes a lot of sense:
> 1) possession of nociceptors; > 2) possession of integrative brain regions; > 3) connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions; > 4) responses affected by potential local anaesthetics or analgesics; > 5) motivational trade-offs that show a balancing of threat against opportunity for reward; > 6) flexible self-protective behaviours in response to injury and threat; > 7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation; > 8) behaviour that shows the animal values local anaesthetics or analgesics when injured.
I'd be very curious what they'd find if they tested fish and even insects. Surely certain predatory fishes would exhibit thought provoking behaviour.
I don't know why I bother asking these questions. The next meaningful attempt I see to answer them will be the first, but who knows, maybe you'll pleasantly surprise me. I won't lie, I could use that a lot these days.
For the same reason, a common response of non-vegans to meeting a vegan is a sudden compulsion to list all the "reasons" why that would be impossible for them - "Oh I could never be vegan because I like $FOOD too much / I require $NUTRIENT / I am biologically incompatible for $REASON." These excuses invariably collapse under the mildest scrutiny, but applying that scrutiny causes an emotional response and therein reveals the real reason - the mere presence of a vegan causes cognitive dissonance. To avoid feeling like a bad person, they must double down.
The difference with wasps is that their threshold for attacking me is basically me standing still and doing nothing. I have a right to defend myself from wasps and the virtual guarantee they will at one point attack me if I left them live right outside my front door. I will not pay to relocate wasp nests because killing them is an act of self defense, whereas with honey bees it's an act of convenience that I don't want them around.
> The difference with wasps is that their threshold for attacking me is basically me standing still and doing nothing.
you give yourself the lie in this statement:
> I have compassion for wasps as living beings.
Late last fall I relocated a wasp nest, myself, by hand and with no more protective gear than a pair of thin gloves, into my kitchen, where I looked after them over the course of about a week until the unseasonable early chill broke and we had a day warm enough for them to disperse and find hibernation sites.
This spring, four foundresses began nests on my house, three on the front porch and one on the power junction box around back. One of them was quite literally right outside my front door, directly above the porch light. That nest isn't there any longer, I think because of sparrows, but while it was here I walked past it most often while its foundress was present and looking me square in the face, most days at least twice: once going out to sit on the porch and read, and again going back inside.
I regret that the birds turned out cleverer, if no less vicious, than I gave them credit for; her first daughters were nearly grown, and I was looking very much forward to meeting them. This winter I mean to mount purpose-designed nest boxes with anti-pigeon spikes and whatever other such structural defenses I can devise, in hopes that next spring's foundresses will find in them a safer place to make a home where I'll again have the chance to enjoy their company.
Last year, too, I photographed a European hornet half drunk on rotting fig, with flash, from a distance of about twelve inches. I do that sort of thing as often as I can find the chance, usually from about that close if not closer.
The year before that, I climbed into the middle of the same fig tree hunting bindweed before I noticed the hundred or so bald-faced yellowjackets feasting on rotting fruit, and getting likewise intoxicated. Earlier in the year, again before realizing they were there, I had my head within a foot of a nest that bald-faced yellowjackets had built under the eave of my side porch.
The last time a wasp stung me was around 2010. My fault; she'd been blown in the car window and landed in my lap, and I put my hand on her without having realized she was there. Since then, despite taking so close an interest in their lives as I've just been at pains to describe, no wasp has yet stung me for it. No wasp has yet even tried.
I'm not really trying to change your mind here, because I am familiar enough with rationalizations such as yours to know how well that never works. But if nothing else, I suppose at least you'll never again be able to say you haven't been told.
For context, I am vegetarian (no dairy but I eat pasture raised eggs) because I believe in treating animals that have a "life experience" compassionately and reducing my impact to them as much as reasonably possible. But there are limits to what I want to give mental effort to in my life because if I spent an hour a day thinking about this it would be a net negative to the world in the other ways I could be productively spending that time. And I am not convinced wasps have deep enough of a "life experience" that I am depriving them of anything meaningfully when I kill them.
I go out of my way to not kill insects whenever it's not horribly inconvenient. I always let them outside instead of killing them in the home. I'll avoid stepping on ones outside if I see them. I have saved honey bees a few times when I see them immobile and give them a drop of water so they can recover and fly off. I'm not mindlessly cruel to animals or the environment.
For example, what if chickens suddenly went off the food market?
(many bird species exhibit really intelligent behavior - would they fit the bill?)
It doesn't stop us eating them. Just tries to stop being pointlessly cruel while they're alive.
Cows are sentient, does that mean the guy who artificially inseminates them is raping them?
The purpose of introducing this kind of law is to continue to expand the legal recognition of what we now consider to be ethical, based on our continually expanding understanding of the world.
The cows aren’t in a position to protest in some animal rights movement, so some interested (and compassionate) humans are working on their behalf.
In those same places it is likely illegal to toss a live cat into a fire.
In this context sentience is about "should I care about how this clump of atom _feels_" and/or "it is possible to be unduly cruel to this clump of atoms".
In farming it mostly means that you cannot cause unnecessary suffering too much outside of the Overton window; not about recognizing bodily autonomy to cattle.
Yes
Look at any thread on any social media platform featuring bestiality, esp. regarding dogs or cats. The vast majority of people will explicitly use the word rape, and also call for all kinds of horrible punishments for the perpetrator.
I can think of no sensible, morally relevant difference between these instances and what happens to female animals through artificial insemination. "It doesnt hurt" isn't an excuse, because you can certainly think of bestiality that doesn't hurt the animal (or features physical pain to the same degree as artificial insemination).
Duck, yes. Chicken, no.
> This is an excellent report which argues that the cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans should be included in the UK animal welfare law in an explicit way, based on a detailed and important scientific and philosophical framework and evaluation, coupled with extremely helpful suggestions for improving best practice and welfare, and for regulating existing practices that currently raise widespread concerns about the welfare of these animals.
Edit: personally feel researcher could observe sentience by the standards defined in above post
Hmm, not a fan of this reasoning. The solution is to improve regulation of wholesale and retail, and educate consumers how to store and slaughter a crab or lobster. The same page even lists multiple ways to slaughter crustaceans, none of which require a high level of expertise and so requiring a ban on the practice is just excessive.
Eating something alive is wrong for it’s own reasons. The majority of religions consider it a sin too!
The only exceptions are parasitic wasps and blood suckers like mosquitos.
So for dogs and wolves, starting to eat as soon as possible takes precedence over making sure the prey is really dead.
Also, canines are not as strong as felines like the Tiger and the Leopard, so, it is not as easy for them to kill big prey by crushing the windpipe with their jaws like the cats do.
On the other side, they may be weaker than the cats but have far more endurance, so, a maimed prey escaping is not much of a big deal, as they are able to pursue the escaping prey for as long as they need without having to stop to rest.
Lions are somewhat of a muddy middle ground. Usually, their prey is dead when they start eating, but when the prey is really big, like elephants, they start eating it alive as it is not as easy to kill such big prey.
Crocodiles on the other hand will either swallow their prey at once or eat big chunks. It is not really a choice for them.
Of course, we must remember that animals don't really have this concept of their prey suffering. They need to eat, and that's all that matters to them.
And it may take quite a while for them to kill it. There are frankly horrifying national geographic videos of this happening, but that's just a lesson that Nature in general is quite cruel. As often as people lament about human nature, we've come quite a long way.
> The review also evaluated the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals. It recommends against declawing, nicking, eyestalk ablation, the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers, and extreme slaughter methods such as live boiling without stunning. It also includes suggestions for best practices for transport, stunning and slaughter.
But this reads more like additional recommendations than required by law under the new classification.
This seems pretty extreme and like it would increase the cost dramatically.
There'll probably also be some weirdos campaigning the idea of not harming humans unnecessarily, but that's probably too extreme.
Still seems barbarous to me but ...
Hey, I guess if I was going to be boiled alive, I'd rather be knocked unconscious first too.
> Eating something alive is wrong for it’s own reasons.
Whilst I agree in principle, there's a fuzzy line in what we consider to be alive. Bacteria certainly seem to be fair game with yoghurts being specifically sold as "live".
I don't know if animal welfare laws currently cover eating animals whilst they're still alive, though it sounds feasible.
Well, cows can't decide 'this transport is going to be uncomfortable or possibly dangerous, but I really want to go to the other place, so I'll deal with it'. Would you rather have uncomfortable, possibly dangerous transport or no transport? Yes, you'd rather have comfortable, unlikely to be dangerous transport, but that doesn't seem to be something the transportation network is able to offer.
The employment industry in our prevailing economic structure demands punctuality, often through crowded, uncomfortable and frankly, degrading means of transportation. This perceived "choice" is not a luxury but an enforced necessity, much like the bovine passenger being shipped off to slaughter, with the only distinction being, we humans "chose" this.
One could argue that the transportation network isn't able to offer comfortable and safe transit, yet it is more a matter of priorities than abilities. The ability to provide such transport exists, but the political and economic will, sadly is not in abundance.
Is it not curious that a society which can show empathy for the transportation of its livestock struggles to extend the same basic courtesy to its own kind? After all, are we not more than just cattle to the abattoir of capitalism?
The steel box for humans is allowed to be hotter and more crowded than the steel box for cows.
Slaughter doesn't have to be involved. The same rules apply if you're transporting a cow from one field to another field.
I mean, that's all well and good, but if you take the "sentience" part seriously, then surely we should also consider in scope:
- bottom-trawling, dredging or other fishing practices which can casually kill large numbers of individuals
- ocean pollution
- warming oceans that may put whole populations at risk
Like, if the suffering of individuals is acknowledged, then surely reducing that suffering is important whether it's in a restaurant kitchen or on the sea-floor beneath a fishing boat. You don't get to ignore the harms your actions cause just because the effects are out of line-of-sight.
Definitely glad to see this being the direction we move though
Gassing of pigs with high concentrations of CO2 is pretty cruel.
Cruel enough that CO2 was expected to be replaced with inert gasses like nitrogen in the early naughties.
It takes them minutes to die and they do not go easy.
If you want to eat animals that one thing but the least you can do is give them a quiet death.
CO2 is cheap though and people like cheap more than they like humane. So now CO2 is used for 80% of UK pigs.
If anyone wants to watch there’s a video attached:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/02/sufferin...
Let's start somewhere and build on it rather than throwing a perfectly actionable plan away just because it doesn't solve literally all problems.
one would be nice. But I'm ignorant on how many untrained experts are de-humanaizing (de-crustationizing?) crabs to begin with.
Did that really need to be said?
But then again, by then we'll be the metaphorical boomers, and a lot of our generation eats meat very casually. We may not see such reform in our lifetime as zoomers/millennials start to become the main body forming law. But probably some shifts in that direction.
any metric you use other than the selfish “but it tastes good” shows that this is an absurdly negative thing we keep on doing casually and defending.
Stops grocery stores from selling live crabs to home cooks. That is one.
Stops kitchens from boiling lobsters alive without stunning. That is two.
Stops the practice of destroying the eyestalks of female shrimp. That is three.
If you belive that they can experience pain any of these is terrible.
I've quite a bit of experience on the subject. I've caught and cooked crabs and lobsters since I was a teen.
I generally don't trust the quality of pre-cooked crustaceans.
And while I agree that it is best to reduce the overall suffering of animals, I don't think that boiling is the worst part. They die in less than two seconds.
The humane way would be to avoid eating crabs and lobsters off-season.
Killing with a knife or boiling water really is quick, unless you really don't know what you're doing.
Certainly, that is worse.
There seems to be some uncertainty over the speed at which boiling will kill. From [1]:
> Scientists have found that it can take lobsters between 35 – 45 seconds to die when plunged into a pot of boiling water — and if they are dismembered their nervous system can still function for up to an hour.
This wasn't the only one, another claimed hours (and it wasn't an animal welfare page either). Difficult to track down the source of any claims though.
[1] https://cookchefgirl.com/boil/how-long-does-it-take-for-a-lo...
For usual crabs and lobsters the volume is low enough and the contact surface quite large, their bodies are not sealed, boiling water enter directly inside.
I think it can take a few seconds longer for huge crabs, especially if the water volume is not so large.
If you cut the head of a lobster, I think it can suffer for an extended time before dying, but not if you cut it in half longitudinally, as this is usually done when cooking them grilled.
I've carefully observed the process, and there is no question about it.
Sure, I believe they experience pain. I don't see these as major issues, however.
- who cares if it's the butcher or the home cook who kills the crab? I imagine the kinds of cooks buying live seafood care about that freshness (I have never bought live seafood). If they torture the food afterwards, that's on the cook, not the vendor.
- I don't have strong feelings about how the metaphoical sausage is made out back. I am aware that I am eating a once living being. As long as it's dead and properly cooked to not make me sick, what a chef in the backrooms does what they need to do.
- Same as above. They are being killed, they probably do need to take out the face before serving. I'd rather do it quick and painlessly, but I'm not on that side of the industry.
So yea, not strongly convinced here.
Interesting argument. It's kinda Main Character Syndrome though. There is a counter-argument which goes: "Bad things happen even when you're not around to witness them. We should probably do something about them".
no, it's more along the lines of "I don't see the larger impact being imparted here". the counterarguments here haven't given me reason as of now to see it either. I just see it as some way to pretend to be nice to animals while proceeding to mass fish them to extiction regardless.
Implementing radical change overnight without the mechanism to enforce it will guarantee failure.
It's possible that vested interests will try to twist the narrative once it begins to turn against them: "Do your part to sort plastics into bins, not the trash! Pay no attention to the single-use packaging manufacturers generating all that difficult-to-sort, difficult-to-process waste." "Freshwater is a resource that needs to be conserved! Turn the 1 gpm tap off while brushing your teeth. Ignore the 1000 gpm center-pivot industrial farm growing alfalfa in the California desert." etc. but that's risky.
I think that recognizing that invertebrates on the ocean floor can be victims of animal cruelty is step 1 in reducing trawling, pollution, and global warming that harms those animals.
Should we just release them back to nature and possibly let them die out there?
Some of those animals you would need to force to leave.
I had a dog growing up and like you can leave the front door open and occasionally she'd go out it but come meal time she was going back in that door.
This lobbies simply hide or ignore that they don't have alternatives to the problems that are creating and will soon hit hard.
Outside of practical considerations wrt. biodiversity, why should we care? I mean, if you don't think individual members of a species are entitled to a good life, or at least life free of needless cruelty - then why would you care about their species? Conversely, if you think the species should be saved for reasons other than entertainment or practicality, then I think it only makes sense if you think individuals of that species deserve better conditions.
> Why should we care
This is exactly the problem, that animalist evangelists don't care. They do it just for the dopamine rush and the sweet money while avoiding carefully to notice the negative consequences of their acts.
Animalists have a tunnel vision focused in individuals and about not activating a particular random type of receptors (that evolved as a life-saving mechanism). They are blind or cynical about everything else. When we scratch the surface there is a lot of cargo cult ideas, tons of magical thinking and very outdated XVII century scientific knowledge. With luck we can see a thin and unstable crust of real knowledge on life sciences at most.
On the contrary, most of philosophical BS starts from a mistaken belief that categories are a thing. They're not. They're just fuzzy selectors. A "species" is a technical term, and so is a "chair" or a "rivet". Good enough, as long as you don't zoom in on it too closely. If you do, you'll find the boundary of the category is fuzzy (and if you ask another person to zoom in with you, you'll discover your fuzzy boundaries don't fully overlap).
The "basis of life sciences" you refer to is a historical artifact. People like to categorize and give names to things. They did so according to their practical needs and tools they had. We have better tools now - particularly ones that let us see how life ticks. Genetics is pretty much upending the old taxonomy "that is the basis of all live sciences", because up until ~100 years ago, we had no first clue what's actually going on.
And if you look at what the modern life sciences discover, you'll see that organisms indeed break the usual definition of "species" in every possible way.
In a way, species not being a thing is also fundamental to evolution - after all, how would one species evolve into another, if not through intermediary forms that are kinda both, and kinda neither?
> Is also the product of millions years of evolution so when lost, is irreplaceable.
Well, yes. But that doesn't immediately make it valuable. Random googling says the estimate is of about 8 million different species of plants and animals on Earth, with barely a million classified so far. That's a lot of diversity, but losing any one of them hardly matters. Something else will take its place. It may not be exactly the same, but similar enough.
If you disagree, then ask yourself why. Why value "the product of millions years of evolution"? Could it be a practical reason (e.g. it may have evolutionary adaptations or genetic patterns useful for us)? Could it be aesthetic reasons (it's pretty)? Something else? It's good to name it.
(Personally, I mostly care about biodiversity for practical reasons - primarily ecosystem stability, and secondarily medical and biotech research applications.)
There is no sensible answer, because your emotional attachment to the consumption of dead animals, and the very understandable resistance to the idea that you may have supported (and continue to support) needless cruelty of immense proportions has made you blind to "the negative consequences of [your] acts".
On the practical side, since you supposedly care so much about species: Have you ever put any thought to the idea that all the ecological destruction we cause, just to feed the 7 billion animals of a handful of species, has destroyed far far far more species than it has "saved"?
If we stop breeding pigs and cows we won't have the huge amount we do now. The pigs and cows don't care if their species go extinct.
Letting them go into the wild would be cruel since they aren't prepared to exist out there, but letting them die in the wild vs die in a factory farm isn't much worse of a fate.
In reality, we should stop breeding them, send existing aninals to sanctuarys (which we should fund) and be done with it. Within 20 years, all of the existing farm animals will die out from natural causes.
The real moral question is: how do we support the farmers?
We should ensure that they get their wages replaced and get assistance in moving to a less cruel industry than animal farming. There are already groups that help with this, but they'd need funds to scale their work.
Do current cows care about being alive? I'd say yes, but then never being born or being killed should seem about equally bad from their perspective. If anything not existing is worse.
The whole topic becomes a straight farce once we realize that our "conservation" of these species costs us thousands of other, far more ecologically useful species. Like in the rainforest, for example, where we grow feed for cows, and pasture cows.
I’ve never heard (or thought of) this proposal before.
It makes sense from a harm-minimizing perspective, but in practice, even as a vegetarian who thinks the world would be better off if people didn’t eat meat, I’d be okay with the current crop of animals being eaten as the end to factory farming.
IMHO, not my field.
Most of the wild animals that live a time in captivity needs to learn again with human help where obtain again food before to completely return to the wild.
If domesticated species were going to be released, by extrapolation I deduce the matter would be to know to what extent did they lost their instincts (due human selection), and how they could be guided along N generations to recover it (this plant smell is poisonous), or if the above is to much to learn at least were to find the food, for what an habitat would be needed first, in companion of a high number of animals for to keep a high genetic diversity, with migration paths (climate, group mixing, etc).
Well-cared for dogs seem pretty happy, for example. They're in captivity but not suffering, and can live lives with social bonds, play, etc. Being separated from their humans can make dogs distressed. When one gets sick enough, euthanizing it, though sad, is probably the merciful thing to do.
If a small fish is in a large, well-maintained aquarium, is it in pain or distress because of its captivity? I've seen some very well-run aquariums, and if the fish are all suffering, it doesn't seem obvious.
I think the point is if you take their ability to suffer seriously, you don't take actions which subject it to pain or distress. But captivity doesn't strictly necessitate suffering.
But yeah, we could stop eating animals, or penning them in feedlots.
Your outrage comes several years too late.
The UK's recognition that fish can suffer doesn't seem to have forced the elimination of the UK's fishing industry. That industry intentionally catches and kills large numbers of fish but incidentally kills plenty of other kinds of animals, including cephalopods and decapods, through the extremely untargeted practices.
My understanding is that bottom-trawling is still a permitted in UK waters, and as of a couple years ago, was even still allowed in most marine protected areas.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/17/uk-fishi...
Pollution is already illegal (but poorly enforced) and global warming should be illegal but enforcement is evem more tricky.
I don't believe these techniques are used for lobsters, crabs or octopuses
This isn't to say I think killing lobsters is wrong, I just think the moral reasoning is fatally inconsistent.
On the other hand the proposed large-scale farming of Octopus in the Canary Islands is a step in the wrong direction: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781
What does this mean practically in day-to-day? Will they be banned as food items or have to be killed in specific ways only, or something else?
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/22/enacted#section...
I don't think it's clear that any concrete policy will be set as a result of this, but it will hopefully ensure that animal wellbeing is considered appropriately in the development of the United Kingdom's society.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_slaughter
Such is the cycle of civilization.
Most farm animals are also considered sentient, but obviously still eaten throughout the country, but unlike with a lobster or octopus you currently can't just start hacking at a cow or pig with a knife while it is still alive to cut off a part to eat.
It's an improvement, but if you're a vegan you'd likely want to go much further.
Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
https://cookingissues.com/2012/07/04/how-to-become-a-seafood...
"The consensus among eminent philosophers with respect to David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" is that it is a thought-provoking and challenging essay that raises important questions about the ethics of eating animals. The essay has been praised for its intelligence, wit, and originality, and it has been cited as an important contribution to the debate about animal rights.
Some philosophers have argued that Wallace's essay provides a strong case for vegetarianism or veganism. They argue that lobsters are sentient creatures who can experience pain and suffering, and that it is therefore wrong to kill them for food. Others have argued that Wallace's essay does not go far enough, and that we should also consider the ethics of eating other animals, such as cows, pigs, and chickens.
Still others have argued that Wallace's essay is not primarily about animal rights, but is instead about the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life. They argue that Wallace's essay raises important questions about what it means to be a conscious being, and about the relationship between humans and other animals.
Whatever one's views on the ethics of eating animals, "Consider the Lobster" is a powerful and thought-provoking essay that deserves to be read and discussed.
Here are some specific examples of how eminent philosophers have responded to "Consider the Lobster":
Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, has praised the essay for its "beautiful and moving" exploration of the "moral status of nonhuman animals." Peter Singer, a philosopher at Princeton University, has called the essay a "powerful and important" contribution to the debate about animal rights. Cora Diamond, a philosopher at the University of Virginia, has argued that the essay "challenges us to think more deeply about the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life." Overall, the consensus among eminent philosophers is that "Consider the Lobster" is a valuable and important work that deserves to be read and discussed."
So if the AI thinks eminent philosopher's have consensus on DFW's lobster points, who is it that you are referring to with respect to your phenomenological comment without any empirical evidence? I can't say that bard is perfect empirically but my speculative intuition is that the quoted references are correct without taking time to verify them.
thus, the logical end of the sentence "So if the AI thinks eminent philosopher's have consensus on DFW's lobster points..." is "then we can make no conclusions solely based on that AI output, because of the aforementioned reasons"
It's not meant as an exhaustive source that is correct about everything - we're talking about philosophy, such a source doesn't exist in the first place. Therefore, decrying something on the grounds that it is possibly not correct is the worst kind of response: If that is the bar, nobody may respond.
this statement is prima facie untrue, and quite ridiculous sounding
it is certainly the case that humans can sometimes not tell without checking, which is it's important to verify the output is correct rather than relying on our own sometimes faulty wrongness detection capabilities
the AI output could have been completely made up, hence why it can't be relied upon for factual claims like you relied upon it for factual claims
If it sounds ridiculous to you, I invite you to speak to some actual human beings. They believe so many things that are patently ridiculous (and frequently contradict) it's like stepping into an ocean of lies. I'm honestly surprised that this specific part of my statement is that weird to you.
> it's important to verify the output is correct rather than relying on our own sometimes faulty wrongness detection capabilities
This is a step you must take with both AI and people. Given that this is the case, I do not see a difference in value in terms of the reliability of facts. If anything, you could make a case that human imagination is more valuable (because the AI is just a mathematical reproduction of whatever imagination went into it). That said, I can't think of why it would be the case outside of a human superiority angle, which is tedious.
> the AI output could have been completely made up
Hence why I called it a springboard for further discussion and not an encyclopedia of absolute fact.
> you relied upon it for factual claims
I did not. That post isn't mine.
sure, I will speak to you
below are 10 propositions, each either fantasy or reality. I invite you to try to determine which is which, then we can find out whether the comment about the average is true:
A. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=0
B. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=1
C. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=2
D. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=3
E. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=4
F. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=5
G. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=6
H. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=7
I. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=8
J. In elementary mathematics, 1+1=9
I find myself frequently at an inflection point between the tyranny of time and the need for correctness in communication. The role technology plays and the toll it takes in return is particularly troubling as humans have been overwhelmed by the broad and deep flood of information coming at them in increasingly asymptotic time-scales since the publication of Infinite Jest nearly 3 decades ago, which is roughly where the time scales in Peter Pirolli's research start. See the slides linked below.
That's the phenomenological n-of-1 take. For a more empirical treatement, see Peter Piroli's slide deck here:
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/event/180918-...
The self-reflective point that you make is good, but it hides the fact that what we are missing is a set of meta tools around emergent AI that allow us to build scalable collaborations of human-computer sensemaking teams - the kind Pirolli implies.
At this point, even the ability to do that batch mode overnight meaning-making, sense-making, validation and verification feedback loops would be an improvement from where we are since our accusations of scientism vs. anthropo-robotic models of mental disorders could be rendered mute by agents that could actually resolve complex models of evolutionary epistemology.
I feel like we all want the same thing: Truth. However, some of us are more tolerant of what we have now: prototypes, proxies, and n-of-1, back of the envelope verification, validation, fact-checking, if you will.
points only to your post for me.
I'd also hasten to add that Nussbaum and Singer aren't exactly known for doing philosophy for philosophers. They're both public intellectuals with political axes to grind.
Protozoa, aka "one-celled animals"?
Jellyfish which only have a vague "net" of nerves, vs. any real central nervous system?
Corals?
What's the reason for this? I'm am home cook and learned to kill a lobster the way many chefs do it, the knife method. Would even that be banned?
There must be an emotional starting point where suggestions like this must have come from. I… wonder if somebody had a moment of life experience with stale lobsters.
> professionals who investigate the mysterious outbreak of violent animal attacks upon humans all over the world.
https://www.vox.com/2017/9/27/16360684/zoo-cbs-season-3-revi...
> Zoo is an entirely ridiculous show. So in the interest of maintaining some level of professional dignity, I will be upfront and say Zoo probably won’t blow your mind so far as thematic nuance goes. But let me be clear when I say Zoo will definitely blow your mind with a chaotic swarm of kamikaze bats, telepathic lions, 70-foot invisible snakes, and so very much more.
Having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and perception.And then we try to get an animal half that age to prove to us the same thing, for our own inconsequential hubris
It is pretty ridiculous
The animal rights question has been lurking on my mind for many years, and I couldn't stand to ignore the problem any longer. I am currently reading Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer. There's a chapter on the various experiments that scientists have been doing on animals, and it's heart-wrenching (see, for instance, the documentary Unnecessary Fuss [1]).
Our treatment of animals is a moral problem that cannot be ignored.
Are we trying to make reality fit our wholesome romanced version of reality?
Not that I could stomach it myself, but I don’t really see this as much of a moral issue.
Devour to survive. So it is, so it’s always been…
I'm no vegetarian, and I like to indulge myself with some 'pulpo a la gallega', But one thing is killing an animal because we are at the top of the food chain, and another thing is killing in the name of sport or culture.
Meanwhile, humans have a huge empathy problem in regard to animals (and other types of species) - perhaps its most categorical failing, and the driver for the most pressing crises of our time, in fact.
those can only happen within the same species
But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think honoring prey is even in the top 100 issues in terms of impacts humans have on marine ecosystems. Sorry if I sound belittling, but it does sound like this whole thing is more of a symbolic gesure than a means to really resolve the issues we have caused. That's why I don't take it quite as seriously.
I so wish people would think of dog or cat meat in these supposedly difficult questions. What's the difference between killing and eating a dog for survival and doing it for fun, or because it tastes good?
Whenever people are doing too well they invent hardships for themselves. No one who is struggled find food will come up with random rules about should and shouldn't be eaten.
That tells us little on our moral obligations towards them and, for that matter, towards our fellow humans. Animals also murder other members of their own species, is murder hence ok?
I think you mean kill. Murder involves intent. Animals do not have intent. Usually murder involves malice. Animals don't have malice.
Killing can be in self-defense or self-preservation. Most animals don't simply kill other animals unless provoked or they are hungry.
Animals kill. Humans are the only beings capable of murder.
Only if you believe they're automata. Which raises the question, are humans not automata as well? If we are, then we also don't murder as we also don't have intent. But if we have intent, what's the line that separates us (other than the obvious "not the same species") from other animals that renders them mere unintentional automata and us intentional non-automata?
Also, spend a few days with any animal, you'll see they have intentions. They're just harder to discern.
> Animals don't have malice.
Likewise some do have malice. It's just harder to discern as we lack the ability to communicate with them and they lack the ability to articulate to us what their feelings are.
“If we can all have this conversation together, it’s clearly a choice for us.”
I (am not being cute when I say I) truly wish I could talk _with_ my cat. I would ask if she murdered that bug or was operating on instinct. Did she kill for sport, defense, or hunger? Was she just pissed off? I don’t know and she can’t tell me, so I can only assume she’s just doing what cats do.
Among our own species I don’t think that “benefit of the doubt” (?) is defacto transferable.
I hope this makes sense. I am enjoying this conversation in an odd kind of way. I’ve been waiting for news like this for a long time.
Though the article and UKGOV articles are from 2021?
Edit: today my main job was typos
Dogs have owners, cats have staff. :-)
But when it comes to basic things like eating, the fact that non-human omnivores eat animals is a good indicator that we should be doing the same.
Or an orca declaring "I'm Donny Rocksville and this is rock the boat!!" before him and all his friends capsize a ship off of Spain.
In Blackfish one of the most interesting attacks was against a trainer, Ken Peters, who was also a trained diver. The orca seemed to know the limits of the trainer and how long she could keep him underwater. When she brought him up she gave him time to breathe and compose himself before dunking him under again. She could have easily killed him if that was her intent but it didn't seem to be.
Most animals eat other animals in such cruel ways because they don't have better means available to them and because if they didn't use the teeth and claws they have to catch prey they'd starve. Humans don't have to be needlessly cruel in order to eat an animal. For us, it's a choice.
I'd prefer that every hamburger I eat comes from a cow who lived a long happy cow life then died suddenly and without pain. There's no section in the meat department at my grocery store for "happy cows that died painlessly" though, so I'm left with what's available. I can accept that, but there's zero reason for me to torture a live cow and excuses like "well, a lion would have ripped it apart while it was alive" wouldn't justify my actions if I did.
By all means, eat animals! They're delicious! At a minimum though, we shouldn't go out of our way to make a living thing suffer.
Yes, it's your choice, and your choice to consider it "cruel". Don't force your choices onto others.
Even if morality is only about answering the question, "how should I conduct myself", and not directly about how anyone else should conduct themselves, if one of my values is alleviating the suffering of others, I will need to recognize when other feeling things are being hurt. If you're the one causing the hurt, I suppose you could say that I'm not making a "moral judgment" about your actions (but rather some other kind of assessment), but regardless I will feel a duty to intervene.
TBH I just see it as false platitudes since there's it's very likely the burger I'm eating wasn't some ethically raised and slaughtered cow. Sure, I didn't do it, so clearly I'm absolved of all fault there.
When I have the option of choosing meat from a cow raised and slaughtered ethically I'll take that one every time, but usually I have no idea of the provenance of a particular hamburger patty and that likely does wonders for my peace of mind.
Kobe and Wagyu beef are raised happily and slaughtered ethically in order to be the quality that they are, in theory.
I believe economics certainly plays a role here.
A pound of Wagyu Chuck costs $160 at a nearby grocery store but I can get Prime Chuck from the local big chain grocery store for just $12 (a 13x price difference).
I find most "happy" beef is nothing more than an illusion for lazy rich people to pretend they're not doing a bad thing, but why not AT THE LEAST choose to eat that or not eat meat?
Don't forget the thousands/millions of bugs, small mammals, birds, and reptiles that are killed as part of vegetable and fruit agriculture.
For a long time I’ve wrestled with a deep-seated but welcome, albeit persistent, unease with food.
As a species we have and continue to inflict dramatic suffering and harm upon the non-human species on our planet. We do this variably to our own enrichment, or sometimes entertainment, but a lot of it is also to our own long-term detriment.
Even making the “good choice” comes with “bad points”. I tend not to go to seafood restaurants because I don’t want to give them money. I accept an invitation to Red Lobster because a family member wants to get a bite. I order a salad, horrified by my surroundings, and find it has shrimp in it.
I love the taste of shrimp, but I no longer eat it because I don’t know how it was handled. Humanely? Did the shrimp this shrimp came from suffer eyestalk ablation? I don’t know.
So I could pick it off to the side and waste it, or I could eat it so it didn’t die in vein.
'Man at top of heap says situation basically acceptable'
Don't mistake this for moralizing, I just think your position is weak.
Err some of us.
At least at reputable institutes and companies, it's for a clear goal, that could not be achieved otherwise, and governed by a review board. It's trading animal harm for human harm. Furthermore, it's few animals for much good.
Simply killing an animal to eat it seems far less ethical: there are other things we can eat, and animal deaths must scale linearly with human population.
IMHO, one shouldn't eat meat unless one can look into a live animal's eyes and murder it. I eat meat, and I feel bad about it -- but we should all be honest about what it means, even if it shows up in colorfully-wrapped, no-blood, sanitized-of-sentience form.
... And at the bottom of the ethical gradient is just killing an animal without any purpose, for which I hope there's a special place in hell.
I did not know (maybe I didn't want to) the ineffable amount of suffering we subject animals in vastly useless "scientific" experiments (see Singer, Animal Liberation, Chapter 2: Tools for research).
This is an excellent article on the subject, written by somebody who worked in a testing lab.
https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1676-5-horrifyi...
But we spend worm lives so that we can spare fly lives. And we spend fly lives so that we can spare rodent lives. And we spend rodent lives so that we can spare rabbit lives. And we spend rabbit lives so that we can spare pig lives. And we spend pig lives so that we can spare primate lives. And we spend primate lives so that we can spare human lives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Rs_(animal_research)
The only thing worse than deliberately infecting or genetically engineering animal models... is allowing disease to rampage unsolved, when you might have done something.
The world we live in is built on a mountain of rodent skulls, and while I'm uncomfortable with that, I'm more comfortable than if it were built atop a mountain of human skulls.
Experimentation on animals should quite simply not happen. When you torture something that you have absolute power over, this is ethically similar to torturing a child in my opinion. They have the same amount of proximate agency, and are similarly helpless.
Often, the people making the video placed the animal in very dangerous or painful situations/positions, and then "help" the animal for the views... and of course all the comments are about how great the person is for being kind hearted and helping - it's really sick.
These people glue things onto animals then rip them off, mutilate appendages, etc. Those videos of people "freeing" animals stuck in bear traps... how do you think they got into the trap?
So while lab testing on animals can be inhumane, it's not being done just for funsies like these videos are. The people making these videos are on an entirely different level of cruel.
I don’t know what is worse, living a somewhat free life in the Savannah and then one day being cruelly and viciously eaten alive by a predator or to live your life on a farm in a small pen with no freedom and then blinking out of existence at the hands of a sledgehammer to the head.
Vegan moral arguments almost entirely rely on empathy. "The animal suffers therefore it's wrong".
And they miss the mark almost every time because they're literally thinking emotionally instead of logically. Human suffering has actual consequences and we're basically always worse of if we don't reduce it. Where that isn't true such as in times of war we happy promote it.
Those arguments are far weaker than you would expect because empathy doesn't actually weigh as heavily as you would expect on real social level decision making. Instead, practicality always wins and animal products are far far more valuable than the nearly non-existent harms of animal suffering.
This isn't an appeal to empathy, it's a rational argument based on the mental capacity of the animal and our existing standards for ethics. An empathetic appeal would be to say, "when the octopus suffers, you feel sad, therefore because you feel sad you shouldn't cause it harm". That's not the vegan moral case. Your feelings don't matter. Speciesism is illogical and requires empathy or lack thereof. You don't feel bad when you cause the octopus harm instead of a human, therefore the octopus doesn't matter. Logically, the vegan is on perfectly solid ground.
You have it the exact wrong way around. In social decisions empathy weighs very highly and logic counts for very little, which is why tribalism is such a huge driver of human behavior, even when it causes many more living beings harm than it helps, as it does during war.
Placing suffering as the absolute centerpiece of morality and then basing all your conclusions on that.
Or an argument to "common sense" in that most people will tell you causing suffering is bad. Therefore it's bad.
I don't see either of these as being great arguments.
> In fact speciesism is illogical
Why? Most of it is perfectly logical. Pigs aren't humans. It's not illogical to treat them differently from humans in very substantial ways.
Also basically nobody says "we can kill pigs because I don't feel bad when I kill them". It's almost always "I do it for the meat".
And if you watch how we treat animals we largely differentiate them based on their functional differences. Even where you get weird cultural things like India not wanting to eat meat - that originated from the need for milk, fertilizer, etc.
The only weirdness you'll see is if you challenge people on it from an empathetic standpoint. People are socially wired to say there "good people who never would made an animal suffer" so you're running into social norms more than anything there.
That is specifically NOT what speciesism is. Speciesism is about making moral decisions based SOLELY on a morally irrelevant (and arbitrary) category, species. This is very similar to sexism: Noone would claim men and women are literally identical, but we are against making moral distinction solely based on sex.
> Also basically nobody says "we can kill pigs because I don't feel bad when I kill them". It's almost always "I do it for the meat".
And most people say you can't kill dogs for meat. And the dog fight leader also only does it "to survive". Just because you can make up a justification does not make it morally valid or relevant.
Finally, to appeal to how "we've always done it" in a moral context is just obviously wrong.
To make it more practical: - do you genuinely think that animals cannot suffer? - Yes, then I hope you are morally ok with ANY and ALL things done to ANY animal, including dogs and cats. Things like bestiality - No, then the practical question for 99.9% of people reading this is whether temporary taste pleasure is morally more important than that suffering - Yes, then we come back around to dog fighting rings, and legal bestiality etc. Anything and everything that causes comparable suffering must be considered moral by you
Looking at land animals btw, the fewest are carnivores (e.g. look at predator vs herbivores rates) - they evolved to fill a niche, and they lack the body and intelligence (while they have a lot) to develop tools and reflect on ethics and moral that would allow them to do differently. How can one argue with animals eating other animals in comparison to our great "master species" /s at all?
They don't have an even remotely similar conception of being to you.
Well, that is: there's two different ways a video like this might be horrifying. There's a kind of visceral horror: blood, guts, and also a kind of instinctive empathy for the suffering that the creature getting killed might be going through (great time to point out that octopuses are much more intelligent than mice and, depending on how you feel about a bunch of tricky philosophical questions, there's probably more "there there" to be suffering). Like I said, I think most people would be pretty horrified, in this sense, by a video like that.
The other kind of horror is a moral horror. And in that case...well, a cat is a cat, not a human, I don't expect them to act humanely. So in that particular moral sense the "cat eats mouse" video isn't horrifying. Whereas: I do have a moral expectations that humans should act humanely, which a Youtube video featuring people eating a live octopus violates, triggering moral horror.
Those with "animal rights" fetishes never made any sense to me, and the discussion here is just more of the same nonsense.
Anything with a spine is sentient by this law. Can you rephrase your answer while keeping that in mind?
Humans absolutely know. There is no excuse for that kind of cruelty.
Some of these videos especially with small animals like hamsters have millions of views, so I guess there is a monetary incentive for them to keep such videos.
Watch some wildlife videos (also plenty on YouTube) and you'll see animals being eaten alive by other animals.
Yes, it's possible for humans to work on multiple things at one time, but the intrinsic (and terribly sad) joke is that that list of problems will _never_ get fixed, unless the social and political atmosphere experiences incredible change. And, well, humans are resistant to change, it's built into every biological species.
Nothing beats lobster with warm butter.
When you apply that reasoning it’s hard to argue that any living animal is not sentient.
This is a great start to recognising the obvious, that we are limiting our definition of sentience by our own inability to understand other animals.
I love eating meat, and would love to continue doing so without ethical qualms or anxieties.
Unfortunately the more we learn about sentience, sapience, and the horrors of animal farming (both from their treatment, and the climate impact of raising them), it's impossible to ignore that the line between "Human" and "All other animals" is not as thick and clear as we'd prefer it to be.
Vegetarians and vegans will roll their eyes, because this is table stakes for so many of them, but I personally would love to find a way to continue consuming animal protein without worries that a sentient species felt pain, harm, or fear that was unnecessary. And that the climate impact of this is somehow managed or offset, and is SUSTAINABLE.
This is both a logistical and a philosophical challenge for humanity. I'm well aware of the arguments that billions of people depend on animal protein not to starve.
But it's shocking to me to see how angry some folks in the comments are about being prompted to stop and consider the ethical impact of these choices. Some are acting as if a deep-seated religious belief is being challenged.
Animals like Octopuses are in another category entirely than crabs and lobsters, it's honestly weird to group them together.
Lobsters liberated by Manfred!
---------------
Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?"
"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted – part of their contract – that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?"
There's no sane way to acknowledge that these animal are sentient and should therefore not suffer and still be ok with farming and eating them. In practice, the vast majority of animal products come from conditions that definitely cause suffering.
BUT, even a close to perfect farm would still cause unnecessary suffering, because eating animals is unnecessary. The same unnecessary as dog fighting, bestiality or eating cats, just for reference.
(This lack of answers also applies to AI, and that is also worrying).
i didnt need to read that
Good grief. I wish we could skip the incrementalism for once and just put an end to all animal slaughter, extreme or not.
What specific reaction are you referring to? Fire isn't the only natural source of heat. Why is evolutionary pressure from fire required for animals to evolve a sense of "something is too hot"? Why is it not sufficient for animals to evolve this due to e.g. exposure to sunlight, with the same mechanism being triggered through fire?
So the lobster feeling that they should ideally move to cooler water makes sense. Evolutionarily it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t feel like they are in an emergency situation in the same way that a human would if they are standing in a fire.
Is there a "dangerous heat" environmental candidate for lobsters that we can speculate could be sensory-cross-triggered by boiling water? Underwater lava?
http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
Lobsters definitely feel pain at least as a stimulus responding to extreme heat.
Lobsters have nociceptors, special pain-receptors that are “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substanceswhich are released when body tissues are damaged.”
Humans have similar receptors. Consider if you touch an extremely hot stove and remove your hand before you even realized what happened. That (temperature) pain stimulus is sent to your spinal cord (not your cortex) and then responds by moving your hand before you are consciously aware (through the cortex) of what is going on.
Lobsters do not have anything like the cortex which is involved in pain interpreation for humans (and also pain supression like in extremely traumatic events where a person doesn't feel any pain immediately after losing a limb).
The lack of a pain suppression mechanism is a little scary to think about in the context of being boiled alive, but this could potentially be because lobsters' experience of pain is so radically different from our own that they may not even have use of a pain supressor.
There are interesting anecdotes about people who received frontal lobotomies experiencing pain as a neutral experience that is neither bad or good. As in they feel pain from, but it is not perceived or interpreted as "bad" by them.
Also in general, lobsters are unusually sensitive to temperature among invertebrates, responding to temperature changes in lab studies as small as 1°, and their seasonal migratory patterns also seem to highly motivated by finding their preferred temperatures.
If you drop a lobster in a container of room temperature sea-water, the lobster just kind of sits at the bottom looking for the darkest most isolated space if there is one (normal behaviour) vs boiling sea-water you will notice lobsters trying to use their claws to not be fully submerged, push off the lid, etc... in the 35-45 seconds it takes for boiling water to kill them.
p.s. I hope this response is useful, I wrote it partially to let the mentioned article I just read sink in for myself.
Nature has a lot of horrible deaths, don't get me wrong.
But boiling sensory wise (at least for humans) is similar to immolation (being burned alive) and it unfortunately takes longer to actually kill the person than burning them alive.
Tigers naturally kill prey quickly to avoid injury, often going for the neck.
We hold ourselves to a higher ethical standard in other cases, and maybe we should here too?
... the difference is we can choose not to.
That choice is more important to some people, less important to others.
This depends on which animals people consider to be moral subjects and therefore worthy of moral consideration, rights, and protections.
Some people (vegans) consider all animals as moral subjects. Some people (pescatarians) may consider most animals as moral subjects, but not certain ones like fish.
Most people consider some animals like dogs, cats, and horses, as moral subjects, and not others like cows, chickens, and pigs.
These definitions are unconsciously arrived at by sociocultural factors, but some people consciously arrive at them.
As an aside: this is a gotcha question and doesn't fundamentally address the position that animal slaughter is cruel. It relies on an obviously false rhetoric that something performed by non-sapient creatures in an environment where the only way to survive for some creatures is largely through the personal killing of other creatures is morally equivalent to an environment where sapient creatures who have wide dietary availability make the choice to consume the flesh of another creature that has been usually killed for them.
How do you grow crops without killing insects?
It would be really interesting if you could.
>As an aside: this is a gotcha question and doesn't fundamentally address the position that animal slaughter is cruel.
I don't think so. If you think killing animals is cruel in itself, then you have only two logically consistent options: you either a) change your lifestyle to ensure you don't kill any animals whatsoever, or b) accept that some cruelty is inevitable and set some standard of acceptable cruelty for yourself. Anything else is a symptom of cognitive dissonance.
Neither of these are addressed by equivocating this to wild animals predating.
> I don't understand. You're saying the problem with eating animal meat is not that an animal has to die, but in who does the killing? So it'd be better if each person had to kill their own food, even though it would almost surely result in a lot more waste, and thus a lot more killing?
I don't know if it's better if each person had to kill their own food. I'm not making a prescription on what people should do. I am only pointing out that there are real consequences to the current way we consume meat in a way that damages people and communities in a way that could be described as cruelty.
Yes, because the question is about how "cruelty" is defined. You can either say killing in the wild is cruel or not cruel. If it's not cruel, then how is industrial slaughter cruel? If it is cruel, then one can pose the question of whether it's possible to slaughter industrially humanely.
>I am only pointing out that there are real consequences to the current way we consume meat in a way that damages people and communities in a way that could be described as cruelty.
Umm... Sure, but I think avalys was asking about cruelty to the prey, not to the predator.
That's only true assuming people would keep up their meat consumption levels, which I seriously doubt.
Though even before getting that far, humans are participants in one of your scenarios and not the other. What other animal behaviors justify your human behaviors? Can any of them? Does another intelligence have moral justification in farming humans on the same basis?
There are some absurd reductios here that you’d have to sign off on.
A nice example of this is omega 3 and similar: it is actually synthesised in kelp and works its way through the food chain to us with fish as an intermediary. It doesn't have to be that way, it just is right now. B vitamins are a similar story.
So, I checked my cam for the next couple nights, and found a fox strolling across the property with a chicken in its mouth. I figured they'd eat one, but nope... 7. And he's been back for more since.
If you consider yourself better than other animals then stop comparing your behaviour to theirs and be better.
Animals in the wild obviously do not have any such choice.
2. Necessity: Lions have no supermarkets. 95% of the people reading this can most definitely go vegan (and 99% vegetarian). Just like how self defense and murder are different.
3. Non-existence: 99% of the animals we slaughter we also artificially bred into existence. It's a false equivalence, because those animals wouldn't even exist
4. Practicality: Regulating wild animal feeding behaviour would be stupendously difficult. A vegan world on the other hand is not just possible, but also better for everyone. In zoos, where we can control "wild" animals, we already reduce suffering by not feeding live prey.
[0] while the question "what even is this sentience thing anyway?" remains open, animals-as-food is not environmentally sustainable for 8e9 humans, so ending that is still good even when the ethics has a layer of indirection from suffering
> It's not, but I find it distasteful when people are feeling sad for the crab being boiled, while children are dying of hunger in Yemen because of politicians and their enablers.
The issue why I'm "missing the point" is pretty simple: you say we can only pay attention to one of the two things, but you haven't shown that to be the case. You're just saying that's how it is.
I know you believe that attempting these things sequentially will save more human lives. But until you've shown me that we really can only pay attention to one of the two, sequential attempts will only prolong animal suffering, not shorten human suffering!
But just so you realize, your argument sounds EXACTLY like all the right wingers that suddenly care about all the poor americans once immigrants enter the discussion. Most people that make these arguments care about neither, all they care about is not having to actually do anything and still feel moral.
You are aware, you are implying things. (By the same means I could suppose you want the invasion to succeed a 500K dead later, since you weren't ruling out this chance explicitly.)
Back to the conversation that was happening, it was about hypothetical peace treaties. Are you going to answer the question about your suggested treaty? It was a reasonable question based on your phrasing and you're deflecting. It wasn't some kind of made up gotcha, like your deflection was. And if you won't answer it then you've gone from conversation to trolling.
However, I'm not here to discuss specific politics, just principles of reasoning.
(Isn't this even more at random? How does this contribute to the articulation of the will of the people? Isn't this, why we have such a thing as a political process in the first place? The only thing guaranteed will be slaughtering en mass. Also, if "peace" is just exhaustion, the next round of the conflict will be just around the corner, probably at an even larger scale, compare WWII following WWI. Where is any answer in this? Enforcing treaties – there had been the Minsk agreements, there had been Turkish diplomacy early on – and armistices and following through on this, is, however, at least some answer to the problem. On the other hand, if you reserve for strategic action "beyond politics", this is what you will get eventually. The answer, if there is any, is in removing the strategic option from any armed conflict.)
Funny you should mention the Minsk agreements. Why did Russia not keep to them? Why should we trust them with an armistice considering they already broke the Minsk agreements?
The kicker is: We know that appeasement doesn't work. We know that if Russia gains any territory, they will attack again, and that if they don't the chance of another attack is massively smaller (since the population will not see the current war as a victory, making it political - and most likely literal - suicide). But somehow that doesn't matter to you, just like it doesn't matter to you what happens after the armistice.
But I really don't want to discuss particulars. We may keep in mind, for there being a conflict, there must be several, incompatible perspectives on the subject in question, there have to be "contested concepts". This question of concepts has to be addressed and to be resolved, and this is a political agenda. The question is really, do we want to address the underlying conflict or just the armed escalation, or just a particular of several steps of escalation? However, it must be made clear, beyond any doubt, that armed conflict doesn't resolve anything.
BTW, a story from my own backyard: Austria and Italy were in a state of conflict over the question of South Tyrol for decades. Even with basic treaties (Gruber–De Gasperi agreement), minority protections and autonomy in place, things were escalating steadily. Austria handed out passports, there were dedicated news segments in public broadcasting on a regular basis, and this eventually escalated in tolerated (or even sponsored) terrorism in the late 1960s, which wasn't especially unwelcome on the Italian side in the name of the "strategy of tensions". This was going nowhere. However, in order for Austria joining the EU, this conflict had to be dissimulated and eventually resolved, and both sides managed to crack down on the structures supporting the conflict. And, voila, nowadays, this isn't even a topic. In hindsight, it's just a ridiculous episode. The younger generation probably isn't even aware of this having been a thing.
At some point - we have to eat something that is alive. Even plants react to being damaged in intentional and measurable ways (including trying to repair themselves, signaling neighbors of the damage, and passing nutrients to each other in response). I think it's impossible to ditch incrementalism, because EVERYTHING we eat is already somewhere on that sliding scale of "something alive that is trying to stay that way".
I am in favor of reducing the harm I am able to, while still acknowledging that simply existing requires that I consume resources (And those resources have to be a living thing, because humans are consumers... not producers). Those resources could have gone to keep another living thing alive, but I am using them. At some point, I expect to die, and it will be something else's turn.
---
Also - It would be really, really cool if we could get the whole "KloraDerm" thing going from "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi.
I would LOVE to be able to do photosynthesis.
Bio-engineering is one route (KloraDerm), but I could see alternative routes that are essentially just chemical/material sciences.
I think it's probably an incredibly complicated supply chain we'd have to really work through to make sure you can synthesize all the required components without going through something living, but we know that producers exist - so there's hope.
Probably not realistic on industrial scale. And then how do you get to the clean starting point...
E-fuel plants do this for synthetic aviation fuel.
You can also do it slightly more indirectly via acetate: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x.pdf
Alive and sentient aren't the same thing. You can eat non-sentient beings that are alive (like plants) and they won't suffer.
Define suffer?
It's all very stimulus-response for a plant. If things responding to inputs means they can feel or think, then I suppose single cell organisms and computer programs and doorbells count.
Also - almost every plant out there is capable of repairing damage to itself, which I would take as fairly strong evidence that it prefers to not die. That repair is a complicated and involved process as well, and often includes adaptations that attempt to prevent further damage (ex: Lots of plants signal neighbors when eaten, and those neighbors chemically adjust to change how they taste to the animal eating them).
I'm just saying...
I can vividly picture the alien farting out a cloud of pheromones that essentially say "It's all very stimulus-response for a human - they just begin emitting auditory response to a wide range of stimuli" before he eats them.
There is nothing in plants that should make us believe they can do anything like thinking, certainly short of sentience. They have no neurons, or anything resembling neurons, only cells locked into a grid that behave in deterministic ways. It's not impossible to imagine a system that thinks using chemical signaling alone, but what makes you think plants have this quality?
They respond, for example, to light. The cells can detect light, and this induces chemical signaling that directs the plant on internodal length and direction. We could make a robot or something that does this. Could we say such a thing "wants" light? Probably not, except as a convenience of explanation out of personification.
Or, to summarize, these simple stimulus-response effects are not sufficient to justify a belief that there is intelligence. I suppose it's argumentum ad absurdum.
Let me counter: I do not believe you have sufficiently proven that we ourselves are anything more than chemical signaling mechanisms.
We happen to not understand the signals that the plants are making (we really are only just barely scratching that surface - but we KNOW plants use VOCs to communicate both among themselves as well as much more distinct species like insects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405699/)
We just don't have nearly as much empathy available because that experience is so foreign to our understanding.
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To follow - I find it particularly interesting that people still cling so dearly to your argument as we watch machine learning tackle and overcome many behaviors we considered uniquely human. Those machines can talk just like us, their signals mirror the complexity of our own (and are much more complex than those we currently understand from plants). Does that signaling complexity now mean that it's alive?
I certainly don't think so - I would still call a plant more alive than that machine (at least right now, things are shifting fast here). Yet that machine is using a fairly simple system to process, internalize, and then create complexity that mirrors your own.
I guess I'm saying that I, personally, don't find your moral argument nearly so clear as you seem to be implying that it is. There is no easy out. We are dealing with shades of grey.
This is especially important in developing children.
It isn't at all evident that forcing kids onto a meat-free diet is the best path forward for society as a whole.
Not necessarily as we could wait for living things to die naturally and then consume them (maybe becoming fungus-like in the process). For livestock, that could possibly create a loophole of farms having conditions that cause a premature death.
With plants, there's the option of following fruitarianism and just eating plant material that falls off such as fruit. (Fruit is unusual when it comes to being consumed as it arguably "wants" to be eaten so that the parent plant can better distribute its seeds). There's problems with following such a fruit heavy diet though and I don't think it's a good idea by itself.
Alternatively, we could go the Soylent Green route?
I guess this is why it's so complicated (and you can't get off the scale). From the perspective of the fruiting plant - I agree with you, it doesn't mind if you eat some fruit. From the perspective of each seed, they'd probably rather you didn't.
And interestingly - if we're willing to go multi-body (since we're admitting that eating fruit is bad for some seeds, but possible advantageous to the species as a whole) I think you'd have to make the same argument for herd animals: It might be bad for a single deer to be eaten, but it's pretty good for the herd if someone happens to remove the weakest single member every now and then.
Anyways... I'm rambling at this point. Not sure why you're getting downvoted but long story short: I hope people acknowledge and respect the things they eat (plants, animals, or other), I'd love to see us move back a step from the automated and industrial production methods we're using right now (Both animals and plants - monoculture crops are a real ecosystem killer) and work to make food something that is local and folks can connect with.
I recall that some seeds are designed to pass through the mammalian digestive system and thus get deposited with some fresh manure in which to grow. Maybe they enjoy the experience.
> you'd have to make the same argument for herd animals: It might be bad for a single deer to be eaten, but it's pretty good for the herd if someone happens to remove the weakest single member every now and then.
That's a good argument for free ranging or wild animals, but it's more complicated with farmed animals. If we breed animals just to eat them and select for the traits we desire, then it could be considered bad for that species although it certainly increases their numbers.
I just think attempting to apply a moral imperative to how species happen to have adapted to their niche is hard.
Rabbits work around their prey status by rote production - which means if nothing eats them, eventually they go through a large starvation event once they hit the carrying capacity of their habitat.
Chickens are arguably one of the most successful species on the planet right now.
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I am in favor of free ranging animals, I agree that breeding animals moves them more into a niche that requires humans to exist - but I'm not convinced that's bad for them as a species (at least not as long as humans exist, and as a human that's my current preference with some admitted bias).
I think globally - monoculture crops are often also a huge risk, and find that they are destroying other animals indirectly (decimating the population of insects, small mammals, and birds in the area).
So I think the problem is hard, and that responsible stewardship likely means less industrialization in agriculture across the board (both plant and animal) and more local production of food. Intentional hunting grounds reserved for wild populations like turkey and deer (at least in my area) are very much a part of that, so I'm also with you on wild animals when it makes sense.
The dinosaurs didn't die out, they just got a lot smaller.
I also agree that minimizing that pain is a reasonable goal, and worth taking steps to do at most every point we can afford to (and realistically - we are fairly rich as a species, we could be doing better).
I don't particularly agree that forgoing meat consumption entirely is the right call - although reducing it likely is (especially if you live in the US).
I also don't think that just because you happen to be eating a plant, you're off the hook - I think monoculture production and certain farming practices (see: palm oil) are causing suffering on similar scales.
In my opinion - we should be trusting large conglomerates less with our foods (whether they're plant or animal) and doing more production locally. Acknowledging and respecting where the food you eat comes from is a huge step up from where many folks are right now.
Secondly, this is utterly IRRELEVANT IN PRACTICE! Your consumption of animals causes far, far, far more plant "deaths" than if you actually just ate plants. BY YOUR OWN LOGIC you should be vegan. Of course, you can also use your logic to go the other way. If it's all the same morally, might as well start eating humans. Us white people have got some experience with that.
> I am in favor of reducing the harm I am able to
Wonderful, that makes you vegan. As in, that is the actual (common) definition of veganism: Reduce suffering and death as far as practicable and possible.
I wish I could stop having to hear people complain about slaughtering delicious animals, so it looks like neither of us is getting what we want.
Concentration depends on what you eat, and iirc you don't need that much protein anyways, if you aren't training/body building.
Tofu has about half the amount of protein per gram then ground beef, tempeh about 85%.
If you really crave protein tvp has between 50 and 70% per gram (absolute, not relative to ground beef) protein depending on the brand. You still need to hydrate it and cook it properly with a good marinade, but then it can pretty easily beat ground beef or even chicken breast in protein by weight.
For quality see the other reply.
Amino Acid Profile: Proteins are composed of amino acids, and the composition of amino acids can vary between animal and plant sources. Animal proteins tend to be "complete proteins" because they contain all the essential amino acids that the body cannot produce on its own. Plant proteins, on the other hand, may be "incomplete proteins" as they may lack or have lower levels of certain essential amino acids. However, by combining different plant protein sources (e.g., legumes with grains or seeds), vegans and vegetarians can achieve a complete amino acid profile.
Digestibility: Animal proteins are generally more easily digested and absorbed by the body compared to plant proteins. This is primarily because animal proteins have a higher biological value, meaning they contain all the essential amino acids in the proportions needed by the human body. Plant proteins, especially those from whole food sources, may be slightly less digestible, but this can be improved by cooking, soaking, fermenting, or sprouting certain plant foods.
Fat Content: Animal proteins often come with varying amounts of saturated fats and cholesterol, depending on the source. Plant proteins, on the other hand, are typically lower in saturated fats and devoid of cholesterol. Plant-based protein sources, such as legumes, tofu, tempeh, and certain nuts and seeds, can be particularly beneficial for individuals seeking lower fat and cholesterol intake.
Fiber and Phytonutrients: Plant proteins are often accompanied by dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients present in the whole plant foods. These components offer additional health benefits and can help support digestive health, cardiovascular health, and overall well-being. Animal proteins, particularly those from lean sources, tend to have less fiber and fewer plant-based nutrients.
Health Implications: Research suggests that the source of protein, whether from animal or plant sources, can have varying effects on health outcomes. High intake of animal protein, especially from processed or red meats, has been associated with increased risks of certain diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and some cancers. Plant protein, when part of a well-balanced diet, has been linked to lower risks of chronic diseases and overall improved health outcomes.A quick anecdote about "combining different plant protein sources": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35917066#35918941
The world is much more continuous than discrete, and any hard boundary is going to be arbitrary. I would guess the current median line (meaning 50% of people would be okay with vs against killing) is somewhere around small rodent, and unlikely to deviate far from that in the near future.
How would you handle animals that are occupying land that you intend to plant crops in?
This is just silly.
Presumably including us. So are we also not sentient?
> 7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation
square with "evolutionarily habituated survival instincts"?
What definition would you use instead?
But LLMs (today) don't fulfill criterion #7: After training is completed, the model is fixed, so there is no more learning going on. #6 would also be hard to map to an LLM.
The legal draft did not in any way either specify an AUTONOMOUS process, nor did it even specify any type of localized "learning" in terms of memory aggregation.
A discerning reader might notice that this begins to wade into very challenging philosophical questions.
Ding, ding, ding! You figured it out!
Isn't it our job as a sentient, evolved species, to ensure we do no harm to other sentient species?
And the only way we can begin to consider doing that is if we figure out a way to classify them?