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Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

jpe.ox.ac.uk

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Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#21

Post by cgh »

muninn_ wrote: post #2

Vegetarianism is not about making sure animals have good lives, it's about not eating them or participating in the intentional destruction of them by humans as much as possible. Stopping nature from taking its course in the world outside of human action is not a concern of vegetarians. Moving them to farms seems to be something very much against what a vegetarian would do.

Nobody moves animals to farms. Farm animals were specifically created by humans and could not exist outside that context.

I eat farmed meat but I also go hunting and try to take down a deer each year and maybe some grouse. Since this is just nature taking its course, I assume vegetarians won't care much about this.

Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#22

Post by glibgil »

What a stupid paper. The whole point of "ethical consequentialist vegetarianism" is to allow for an untouched wild domain where animals can suffer in a way consistent with environment and evolution. Becoming a human vegetarian is, after all, consistent with environment and evolution. We can be vegetarian from an evolutionary position and we maybe should be vegetarian from an environmental position (i.e. our high population)

Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#23

Post by schoen »

I'm a long-term vegetarian animal rights supporter and I support the publication of work like this, even though many people take it as a sort of anti-vegetarian propaganda, because I think this is how we make progress in understanding issues!

Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides possible evidence against X, possible evidence in favor of Y, or an opportunity to think about why the implication might be unsound. That helps clarify how we think about things. (Toby Ord wrote a similar paper about opposition to abortion where he pointed out that spontaneous abortion, especially before people are aware of the pregnancy, is much more common than induced abortion, so maybe many abortion opponents should be concerned with medical research on how to prevent it. While Ord seemingly thought the modus tollens side of this argument was stronger, ... maybe they should!)

Although I don't embrace the act/omissions symmetry that the theory here is based on, I support the modus ponens side of the argument that wild animals' suffering is a horrific thing that it would be good to find a way to mitigate. This has led to some pretty long flamewars in the past; I remember a particular incident when the "Tetrapod Zoology" blog discovered David Pearce, a transhumanist who sees it as urgent (and feasible) to re-engineer nature to eliminate all suffering. Fireworks ensued.

Overall, I don't think this argument is particularly new. I heard substantially the same point presented as an anti-vegetarian argument at least 15 years ago. At the time I thought "predators aren't moral agents, accidents aren't moral agents, there's no wrongdoing here, there's no problem". But now I think there is a problem after all, even if it isn't our "responsibility" or "obligation" to solve it.

Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#24

Post by greglindahl »

danhak wrote: post #17
schoen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "ethical vegetarian" in academic philosophy has specifically been used to refer to people motivated by animal rights or welfare, and that's still what academic philosophers themselves talk about most in connection with vegetarianism.

Isn't that effectively a straw man fallacy, then?

It's a definition. Philosophers label stuff all of the time.

Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#26

Post by schoen »

danhak wrote: post #17
schoen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "ethical vegetarian" in academic philosophy has specifically been used to refer to people motivated by animal rights or welfare, and that's still what academic philosophers themselves talk about most in connection with vegetarianism.

Isn't that effectively a straw man fallacy, then?

Animal rights might be a more philosophically interesting motivation than concern with, say, climate change both because it's more controversial and because it's harder to sort of trade off with other interventions/solutions. Like with climate change, maybe a random person could, in practice, focus their efforts elsewhere more productively. (I'm a vegan but I fly a lot, so my carbon footprint is far larger than even the developed world average; I could make a bigger impact in that regard by just flying less than I do by being vegan.)

With animal rights or welfare, not engaging in or supporting specific uses of animals seems like the most obvious thing that one can do to promote or respect these values (but if papers like this are right, maybe that's an illusion!).

Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#27

Post by cjbprime »

john61 wrote: post #25

If some bird is killed by a crocodile it is not my concern. If I eat a chicken it is.

Many people have ethics like yours, but these are not consequentialist ethics, which is what the article is discussing. In consequentialism, an act's rightness is determined by the goodness of what happens, not other factors.

Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#29

Post by cjbprime »

schoen wrote: post #23

I'm a long-term vegetarian animal rights supporter and I support the publication of work like this, even though many people take it as a sort of anti-vegetarian propaganda, because I think this is how we make progress in understanding issues! Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides possible evidence agains…

Hi Seth! I'm reminded of an Aaron Swartz story that I suppose we could share:

==

During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics, technology, and ethics.

I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from hurting each other?

As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed. The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in the process, I suppose we should.”

That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always thinking about the greater good.

-- Benjamin Mako Hill, https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-aaron_swartz_memorial_rem...

Re: Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals

#30

Post by schoen »

glibgil wrote: post #22

What a stupid paper. The whole point of "ethical consequentialist vegetarianism" is to allow for an untouched wild domain where animals can suffer in a way consistent with environment and evolution. Becoming a human vegetarian is, after all, consistent with environment and evolution. We can be vegetarian from an evolutionary position and we maybe should be vegetarian from an environmental position (i.e. our high popu…

"Nature" and "natural" are very culturally salient in vegetarianism over all (when I travel, I look for a "natural foods" store, where I might then buy highly processed foods like Daiya...!), but I think in philosophical debates "suffering" has been more controversial. I don't think the significance of "natural" suffering has been accepted by western philosophy, or at least people would then have a significant debate about what it means for something to be natural!

Consequentialism in particular I think is very averse to arguments that natural things are good or OK. Quite a few philosophical consequentialists are interested in radically anti-nature views like transhumanism because of the idea that we can do much better than nature has.

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