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Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

lse.ac.uk

561–570 of 704 posts

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#561

I’m a bit surprised by the number of comments here basically saying if we can’t logically prove that X feels pain, then it’s fine to do whatever with it, or that if we don’t know exactly where the line should be drawn, then there’s no line to be drawn at all. Do you all always behave according to well-defined rules within a consistent logical system? I don’t think you can prove to me that you or your pets feel pain,…

There is some overlap between this moral and philosophical line of thought and arguments for and against abortion.

I have ...complicated... feelings about the issues myself but find that trying to talk about such things in person tends to lead to very heated and emotional conversation.

The only thing I can be reasonably sure of is that we are very good at holding contradictory views and options about topics. Often without even realizing how contradictory our views are.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#562
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, intelligence entails understanding that suffering can take forms other than the immediately obvious ones, and taking steps to minimize it if possible.

I’m aware that it may feel pain either just like I do, or in a different way. My question is why should I be agitated by this thought, iow what is the reason to reduce it. I don’t relate its suffering to my “soul” or a mental state. Not talking about morals here, I wouldn’t boil a live crab in a presence of people who would react negatively. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29305117

It’s the relation between your own past/present suffering and Suffering as a concept. You know Suffering is bad because you’ve experienced it, so it makes sense to reduce it beyond the scope of just yourself.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly, since only about 9% of the food they eat is converted into edible flesh. So even if you take this argument seriously, the insects and field animals are better off if you grow fewer crops, which you accomplish by directly eating the crops you grow, not feeding them to livestock.

But you get 10 times the nutrition density from animal protein.

That sort of claim is going to require some numbers for what you define as "nutrition density". Picking at random 100g of steak vs 100g of kidney beans you get more calories, equal protein, far more potassium, vitamin c, iron, vitamin b, calcium, and magnesium from the beans. I enjoy a good steak too, but I know it's a luxury.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It simply boils down to this: We don’t need these animals to survive. Human beings can live long, happy, healthy lives without meat and cheese. Literally all nutrients we need to live and be healthy can be found in plants, or manufactured and added to foods (which is how livestock end up with B12, actually) So, with that in mind, really any amount of harm or violence done to these animals is unnecessary, and done for…

> We don’t need these animals to survive. But it's my culture to consume them. My people have lived this way for thousands of years and I intend on continuing it and teaching my children our traditions. It connects me to our shared history and it connects me to the Earth. I am a natural being on this planet and part of the lifecycle. Consumption of meat is a part of that. Cooking meat over open fire with smoke and th…

Culture is not a reason to justify harm or violence. Just because we've always done something doesn't mean we always should, otherwise anything that falls under the umbrella of culture can't be critiqued, like genital mutilation, or child brides.

Culture is important, but we can just as easily establish cultural practices that condemn violence and harm, rather than support them.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they could be, though the question usually arises about whether a living thing is sentient, and it's fairly natural and easy to define life such that robots are not living beings. Overall the point here is that sentience isn't a very useful measure of anything. If there were an explicit law recognizing the rights of all living things to a decent death, we would essentially be forced to become exclusive carnivore…

Fruits (as in from fruiting plants, not fruits in the culinary sense) I assume would still be fair game as they are designed to separate from the parent plant, often falling off without any intervention even.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, intelligence entails understanding that suffering can take forms other than the immediately obvious ones, and taking steps to minimize it if possible.

Intelligence is required for the first part. Compassion and empathy is what is required for the second.

As I explained below, that is implied.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#567
post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wouldn’t be willing to “experience” the same set of experiences and pains via a similar subset of your sensory system and brain in exchange for the benefit of a meal that could have been cruelty free, then you shouldn’t. The burden of proof should not be on others to prove to you via rationalization/ intellectualization that it’s not a nightmare of an end to a sentient creature’s life experience.

I find this line of thinking somewhat short sighted. Animals in the wild will almost certainly die more agonizing deaths than they would at the hands of humans. Would you rather a cannibal kill you with one cut to the throat or would you rather be killed by a polar bear that might even enjoy watching you writhe in pain for 10s of minutes before you ultimately pass out from either the excruciating pain or loss of bloo…

I like to pose this as not empathy for the animal but empathy for ourselves*

It is not nice to the kind of colture that inflict pain on an indutrial scale and we can empathise with the torture that is mutilation and being boiled alive, does not need to be about what an octupus feels during slaughter, it can be about how to approach the act itself.

I believe that buddhism teaches to pay respect or thank the lifes that died to become your food (plant of animal); in this context the question on my mind would be whether you can honestly pay your respects to something you boiled alive because it would have tasted worse cooked another way.

It feels disrespectful to the food.

Slaughter is natural, we should find a way to be ok with how we do it.

* I like to offer egotistical arguments for altruism, just my perspective

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#568
post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives. Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plumm…

> Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even…

Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance.

> You're acting like a whole country put everything to a side for a year, to figure out how lobsters won't get boiled alive, and due to it more important things got neglected.

Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter.

> But if you can't imagine such list yourself, then what is your solution for a society, which always works for the greater good in the most efficient way possible and who should decide what's the greater good even? Like how would it even work?

We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#569
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lobsters have essentially the same number of neurons in their entire nervous system (including the “brian”) as a fruit fly does. Complex yes? Interestingly complex? Not even close. A cockroach has 10x more.

Not sure what you mean by "interestingly complex". To say we are nowhere near understanding the nervous systems of fruit flies would be a massive understatement. Even for C.Elegans, for which we know the complete connectome and much more besides (and which has a thousandth of the number of neurons a fruit fly does), we're not close to explaining (or simulating) the behaviour of the animal in terms of the properties o…

Wasn't simulation done? https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the formula of progressivism. The process seems identical to majoritarianism.

It's the opposite actually. It's the dictatorship of the small minority. Nassim Taleb write an interesting article detailing it [1]. 1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

If you have convinced people to change their minds by dint of your ideas, how is that a dictatorship? No one's sending people with guns into lobster boil festivals or grocery stores.
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