The essay "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace came to my mind. In that essay he describes how extraordinary the nervous system of a lobster is and how mindlessly and cruelly we boil them live. If David were still alive, he would definitely welcome this development. I really miss David. I am awestruck by his other essay "This is Water". I am amazed at his deep insights into human nature and how well he describes it, kindly.
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 of the nervous system.
No, I squish flies all the time. However, as an empathetic human you should probably feel a bit squeamish about inflicting unnecessary suffering on them.
You should maybe feel bad about how much time you are wasting squishing them, compared to using one of those electric tennis racket bug zappers. They clear a kitchen of fruit flies in minutes, while giving you a most satisfying sound as you send them to the great fruit fly beyond.
That's a simulation based on the connectome and a trivially simple body, producing a very small piece of behaviour. I don't mean to minimise it, it's very cool and I'm not an expert. The video itself says that it is limited.
As I understand it, C. Elegans displays a surprisingly large and complex set of behaviours given its (relatively) extremely simple nervous system. A database of thousands of these "behavioural phenotypes" has been built and provides a well-defined goal for attempts to reproduce the behaviours in simulations. Very few of these behaviours have been replicated. To solve the problem will apparently require a lot more than the connectome, which has been known for a long time. It's not enough to know that neuron A connects to neuron B, or even the full 3D structure of that connection. You need to know how that connection influences the behaviour of the connected neurons. People refer to this as "knowing the weights" but AFAIK it's still an open question whether a model based on "weights" is sufficient.
That model's phase space is about 2000 bits, realistically speaking its behavior never repeats. It can't be searched either, our computational limit today is about 70 bits.
I'm not clear what you're saying there. You shouldn't need to exhaust the phase space to check if the model exhibits a particular behaviour, but perhaps you're not claiming that?
The simulation derives behavior from the state of neural network, in order to produce desired behavior the state should be known first, in general case you need to search it if you don't have a reliable method to reach it from any other state.
More broadly the issue here is that crabs and lobsters (and in East Asia often fish and all seafood) are sold alive because of freshness and quality considerations.
So, IMHO the only way to enforce a ban on boiling lobsters alive is to ban selling lobsters alive and to create a whole raft of requirements similar to the slaughter of animals. In the article that's the proposal:
"It recommends against ... the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers"
Interestingly, and maybe I'm wrong, I don't think that the sale of live animals to random people is currently banned in the UK (i.e. I can buy a live sheep if I want to, as far as I know). It's the slaughter that is controlled. If so this proposal goes further.
Practically speaking, most people buying a lobster for home cooking treat it as "ready to cook" the same as they would a mutton steak from that same grocer. So I think the different treatment makes sense.
Please define "feel".
They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no.
The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.
> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.
This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental gymnastics to convince yourself dropping a lobster in a boiling pot doesn’t cause it to “feel” pain when you could just not do that? Lentils are so damn good.
The thing is - lobsters are an easy problem. We can (theoretically) collectively decide that lobsters shouldn't be touched at all and nobody will be hurt (some fishers maybe?). But the same logic about "feeling" pain is applicable to practically anything as is demonstrated in the comments below. And then it becomes a humanity problem - can we kill living organisms for ANY reason?
There is no easy, or even hard answer at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.
Killing is one thing, Killing by boiling alive is on a whole another level of cruelty, like unit 731 level, nazi level cruelty. I don’t eat meat, so I don’t know why only lobsters are boiled alive and not other sea food. Whatever the reason, it is hard to justify.
If we are going to kill something, the least we could do is kill it painlessly. At the beginning of COVID-19, some farm in the Midwest killed hundreds of pigs by steaming. Could you imagine the suffering?
Serious question here... but, are you sure that's a cruel method of killing lobsters? (I'm 100% with you on the pigs but here me out on the lobsters.)
I think when you're evaluating killing methods based on how humane they are, one thing to keep in mind is that how something looks to the executioner is NOT a good metric. As an example: Consider the oft repeated anecdote about how being hanged is only "humane" if you break someones neck during the hanging. If you don't, the subject with jerk and spasm wildly. HOWEVER... I have been choked out in jiu-jitsu.... it's like going to sleep. However, I can only imagine the uncommunicateable horror of having my neck broken and then having to endure 2 minutes of consciousness before I succumb to not breathing and pass out. One looks distressing but is suffering-free. One looks great, but is probably terrifying.
For a lobster, there are a couple of metrics I'd be concerned with:
- time experiencing a sense of alarm
- time experiencing what is likely pain
If I take a lobster, and I suddenly plunge them into fully boiling water, full submerged, how long do you think it is before they succumb? Keep in mind, that movement isn't necessarily a good cue here, because the physical structures will move in response to heat even if consciousness is long gone. Smaller animals have a high surface area to volume ratio. The heat transfer is likely pretty fast. I have experience cooking dungeness crabs, and I can say from experience, the time between putting them in the water and when they stop moving entirely is quite quick... I'd say no more than ~5-10 seconds. The last part of that movement seems uncoordinated as well so may not represent conscious effort.
For lobsters, would you prefer they be decapitated first? There's likely some consciousness that will remain for a similar time period in the head, so you should probably behead them, AND plunge the head into boiling water. BUT... then you also have to consider the "time experiencing alarm"... Wrestling them still to behead them will undoubtedly be alarming.
This is a good question. I don't have an answer. I don't eat meat, never have, never killed anything in my life, other than mosquitoes. I assumed that boiling alive is a horrific way to die.
I’d be happy if we started at simply not killing lobsters and other animals for food (or for any other industrial purpose). You’re right that we could spend a lot of time debating the finer points of it but as you said: lobsters are easy. By that logic I would imagine so are chickens and cows and baby sheep (lamb) and pigs. So let’s start with the “easy” stuff. Whether or not we allow ourselves to harm insects or something while harvesting grains is another question. We could ponder whether it’s ethical to kill bacteria, but we’d die if we didn’t do that so let’s not fret about that.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing? If you really mean to say that deciding not to eat lobsters is easy then let’s go with that logic and stop eating all the bigger animals too. Seems an easy place to start.
>A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing?
I don't think this is the most generous take. I think what most people are trying to find is the underlying principles. Consider the following potential first principles:
1) Minimize suffering
2) Minimize animal death
3) Minimize charismatic mega fauna death
4) Minimize climate impacts
5) Maximize human health
6) Maximize human performance
7) Maximize human longevity (healthspan or lifespan)
Each of those can lead down different, sometimes competing tracts. Can vegan/vegetarianism be compatible with any of those? Sure. Can it optimize all of them at the same time? I'm doubtful. It's certainly possible that in the rush to do something we end up on the wrong trade-off. That's why it's import to drill down on exactly what one is claiming is ultimately important.
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.
>Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly
This applies to industrial meat production. Do your thoughts change in regards to hunting/fishing which doesn't (necessarily*) rely on industrial crop agriculture?
(I realize a lot of species population numbers - especially deer in the Midwest - are inflated due to the availability of crops for them to feed upon. But there are other species where this isn't necessarily the case.)
Yes, I'd say hunting and fishing don't have this problem. I have other ethical issues with eating animals, but hunting wildlife is orders of magnitude better than industrial agriculture.
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.
> Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.
I'm not a vegan but from my perspective if minimizing harm is your goal then veganism is the only valid choice.
Any meat consumption will unquestionably increase the misery and pain the consumed animals had. Both while alive and at their final end. You're lying to yourself if you cannot admit to that.
Your argument wrt the insects and land animals is super strange too... What do you think the animals are going to eat until they're butchered? Love and good feelings?
In my opnion focusing on ethical farming is more promising (under an utilitarian perspective).
If the focus is to reduce suffering and exploitation of animals the best action is to ban the most cruel practices by law pushing stricter ethical standards.
People will continue to eat meat everywhere they can afford it (maybe less, maybe more) veganism is not going to change that.
People love to ask me this. One guy said deer are being run over by tractors so as a vegan I’m killing deer.
I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals).
I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we don’t have to use harmful chemicals to do farming.
But in my mind there is a clear distinction between accidentally harming insects while harvesting lentils and intentionally breeding animals in cages for slaughter.
If you think that line is arbitrary and you can’t understand it, I’m not sure I can help.
I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but some people adhere to a consequentialist worldview, where intent does not matter (or matters relatively little). It's the same outlook that creates the need for good Samaritan laws. I don't agree with it in whole form, but it should be recognized as a valid philosophical framework.
I understand that, but I have a hard time believing a vegan diet could possibly harm animals more than an omnivore diet. Like it just sound so absurd and I run in to a lot of people online that just seem to want to bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason. Like the guy that said I was killing deer by eating only plants because it means more tractors and tractors can run over deer… that seems to me to be a shoddy leap of logic, not a genuine point I should consider.
>bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason
I think this is also the most likely reason because humans try to rationalize cognitive dissonance. But in the nature of the HN guidelines to try and take the strongest possible interpretation of someone's comments, I'll try to reframe it.
Suppose someone has a foundational principle that all animal life is sacred. Also suppose that person is a consequentialist. Following the first point, the life of an insect is every bit as valuable as the life of an elk*. It's easily conceivable to me that farming, in the current form that most of use get our food, kills many more animal lives per calorie than eating the elk. If one is a consequentialist, it doesn't matter if there was the specific intent to kill those thousands of insects (and fawns, and fish from runoff etc.), it only matters that my choice led to their deaths. Compare that to the hunting of the elk, where it's conceivable that only one life was lost. From that perspective, a vegetarian/vegan diet could be considered more detrimental to animal life.
(I specifically chose elk to avoid the complication of how much farming goes into livestock feed, but hopefully you understood the point)
If you're like me and don't necessarily agree with the above framework, it still highlights that most of us have unarticulated assumptions that may not hold as we go about our daily choices. E.g., even if people claim that they think all animal life is sacred, their actions display an assumption of a hierarchy to that value.
I don't know if this is helpful, but this 2003 research estimates about 6 animal deaths per acre of agricultural harvest, or about 7.3 million animals.[1] That puts it about on par with industrial animal consumption. But granted it seems much more difficult to have accurate estimates.
I think part of the problem is that most people in industrialized economies are extremely far removed from the food supply. I don't think it's super common, but also not unheard of for deer (especially fawns) to be killed by harvesting machinery as they bed down in fields. Considering hunting a deer may yield 60-70 lbs of meat, it might be possible to claim that reduces total animal deaths. Now I don't know how you'd arrive at a final number because most people are omnivores and still eat plants, but I don't know if I'd immediately dismiss their claim as absurd.
I see from your profile that you work in the farming machinery business so I'd be curious if there are any specific mitigations you would consider to alleviate this problem?
Figs are technically not vegan (nor vegetarian) as during the (highly complex) pollination process some fig-wasps have a wild time in the fruit, where eventually some of the wasps die and get absorbed by the fruit.
"Feeling pain" has never been a particularly intellectual experience to me. Pain isn't some sort of abstract thought, it's a raw sensation that the harmed flesh itself seems to feel. When I step on a lego I feel it and flinch away from it before I even realize it. I guess that sort of reflex is what you're calling "experience structural damage" but I say it feels like pain.
Except we can suppress those nerves higher up and you'll never actually feel the pain. And you can trigger similar flinching reflexes with a focused tap to the right spot, which is clearly painless in every way.
It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs.
Listen, I'm no vegan, I eat meat and I don't condemn others who do the same. But "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
> It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs.
Look, I'm just saying that a flinch isn't proof of pain. I'm not saying they don't feel pain, but if you want to prove it then you need better evidence than a flinch.
> "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
My policy is to go for a quick maximally-humane kill if you're not sure. But that doesn't mean every single animal definitely feels pain.
So again, it's complicated. For example, naked mole rats famously don't feel many kinds of pain, and those are mammals!
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 blood.
This isn't a moral argument for me, it's simply giving a fair comparison as to what the likely choices are for these animals. The choices are not pain from humans or some pain-free experience in nature.
I will say that being boiled alive is likely one of the worst ways to go though - luckily there are nearly painless alternatives to killing lobster that many people employ.
“…might enjoy watching you writhe…” I’ve seen no evidence that polar bears enjoy watching their prey suffer.
Since you are broadening the scope of the argument then let’s talk about how we raise almost all animals that make it to our plates. The process is meant to be economically efficient and has the minimum legal required considerations for the animals welfare between birth and death. It’s not just about their suffering when killed. It’s about the suffering from birth to death.
Let’s broaden it further. Human’s system for producing meat has an insane amount of harmful externalities. The polar bear fits into an ecosystem that generally find balance.
Not to mention, straw man. You can’t sidestep the question as to whether it is moral to kill an animal a certain way by making a weak argument as to how they might have had it worse.
I would suggest for most all animals being raised with constant supply of food and having your health maintained by intelligent actors is far better a life than the brutality found in nature. Caveats apply I'm sure, but in general a farm animal is raised intentionally to eat as much as it can with as little stress as possible. I'd be curious what criteria you could give that would rank animals in nature as suffering less than animals specifically raised in captivity with a specific goal of reducing stressors.
> Human’s system for producing meat has an insane amount of harmful externalities. The polar bear fits into an ecosystem that generally find balance.
harmful to what? to the world ecosystem? You mean the ecosystem that we generally believe has had 5 mass extinction events prior to humans ranging from 75 to 95% of species being wiped out in each of those events? Is that what you call "balance"?
> Not to mention, straw man. You can’t sidestep the question as to whether it is moral to kill an animal a certain way by making a weak argument as to how they might have had it worse.
Well this isn't a strawman at all. I'm not building up some weak argument as you suggest. It's a documented and understood that most animals have predators and of prey species, predation is the most common way to die. Have you ever seen an animal kill another animal gracefully? It does exist, but it is not common.
also, yes I can bypass the moral question and I will do so gladly - completely subjective arguments are pointless, I feel very comfortable in accepting a different moral code than you and I'm fine with your moral code being different than mine.
“Caveats apply I'm sure…” “harmful to what?” You’re living with blinders on. Willfully or not, idk. We can’t have a conversation if you don’t at a minimum gather some basic, widely and easily available information. Enjoy your life of ignorant bliss.
Animals in the wild are free, yes there are many dangers lurking around, but mostly they are free.
Animals in factory farms are not free and grow up suffering and the slaughter isn't humane at all.
So taking your mode of thinking, which one would you choose:
A) Mostly a free life out in nature with a potential painful death
B) Miserable life in factory farms where you go crazy with a painful death
Also, if there wouldn't be this insane level of demand for animal meat, we wouldn't have to breed animals.
And we are worse than the polar bear. Animals are being abused, mutilated tortured on a regular basis. Plus all the other damage our meat addiction causes, i.e. destruction of our biosphere and degrading working conditions for people having to work in those factory farms or slaughter houses.
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
I would suggest lobster tastes worse when boiled alive. Any animal that has an endocrine system is likely to taste worse when boiled alive. My understanding is that adrenaline rush caused by immense stress eat up the glycogen stores in muscles which in turn prevents the production of lactic acid to tenderize the meat postmortem. I can't imagine this would be any different in lobsters than basically every other animal.
That stress / lactic acid / meat quality relationship only really applies to meat that's going to be aged, and it's as much about preventing microbial spoilage as anything.
There's no time for it to be a factor for lobster, which is going to be alive or frozen until right before you cook it.
Your premise may hold true in the general sense but not in the specific. I don't think lobsters produce adrenaline. There may be some other hormone that has a comparable effect though
"Experience" is the tough part to define here. Granted, it's not an easy answer but there are some smart thinkers who've tried. Here's an interesting take from the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran
"your withdrawal from a hot kettle is a different pain from the pain that you then contemplate. In the first case, the pain from withdrawal from a kettle, there is no qualia, no meta-representation."
From his framework, to truly "experience" pain, there needs to be a sense of self. You need higher levels of cognition for the "meta-representation" that causes suffering in our human conceptualization of the term. (There's some interesting brain lesion studies about people who lack this sense of self. They can witness their own body interacting with the environment but have no actual "experience" of the action; it's as if they are watching someone else perform it.) Everything more primitive to that higher cognitive function is just stimulus-response. For example, Gerald Engelman draws the line at lobsters in terms of what "experiences" pain and suffering. The implication being anything below that from a neural perspective would be cruelty-free to consume.
Different sets of neurons fire for different people on the same stimulus. Does that mean you don't feel pain in the same way another person feels pain?
That's an open question. But if we would assume that answer is "no", then all alive beings can "experience pain" because it' the same mechanism in all of them. Jellyfish can "feel the pain" if we will assume such answer, and I imagine a single boat travel cutting and tearing thousands of jellyfish will easily beat this whole lobster conundrum in the severity of the problem :)
PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.
does one need to feel pain in the same way for it to be classified as pain. pain is pain. one of the things that unites us as humans is our ability to feel it and empathize with another.
if an animal can feel pain it doesn't matter if it is the same pain. Also I recall that Nirvana once sang "It's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings". For generations people thought that is true.
Some in my family call themselves Pescaterean because they for some reason don't want to inflict pain on animals (that look like us).
my point is pain is pain - the rest is just mental gymnastics that allow us to justify our own behavior.
That's the problem - I don't know a strict and correct definition for it, not even close one. At minimum there are two polar possibilities - 1) any neuron firing due to damage is a "feeling of pain", or 2) only conscious brain can "feel pain". But there can be other definitions, multiple ones.
First option is possible but not productive for the discussion because then almost everything can feel pain, including some single cell organisms I think.
Second option is anthropocentric and at least at a glance looks incorrect.
The thing is the word "feel" itself is anthropocentric, basically we make analogue with our understanding of pain and project it on other living organisms.
I'm not sure if he would care. I'll need to dig it up the source, but in an interview a friend of his said that DFW actually went and ate two lobsters that evening after writing the essay.
I had never read "This is Water" and somehow (and I'm sure I see that because I know the outcome) you can really feel the depression lurking in his words, and maybe even his internal battle against it. The back and forth one can have between seeing the world as a playground and seeing it as a prison.
I think some (very often smart) people are cursed by the ability to see the absurdity of life and not being able to do anything against it.
Very pleased to see this comment here :). I would definitely recommend his essays and especially his book infinite jest, if you have the stomach for it.
Recommendations relating to specific commercial practices
- Declawing. We have high confidence that declawing (removing one or both of the claws from a crab before returning it back to the water) causes suffering in crabs.
- Nicking. We also have high confidence that the practice of nicking (cutting the tendon of a crab’s claw) causes suffering and is a health risk to the animals.
- Wholesale and retail. We recommend a ban on the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers.
- Stunning. Current evidence indicates that electrical stunning with appropriate parameters for the species can induce a seizure-like state in relatively large decapods, and that stunning diminishes, without wholly abolishing, the nervous system’s response to boiling water. We interpret this as evidence that electrical stunning is better than nothing.
- Slaughter (decapods). We recommend that the following slaughter methods are banned in all cases in which a more humane slaughter method is available, unless preceded by effective electrical stunning: boiling alive, slowly raising the temperature of water, tailing (separation of the abdomen from the thorax, or separation of the head from the thorax), any other form of live dismemberment, and freshwater immersion (osmotic shock). On current evidence, the most reasonable slaughter methods are double spiking (crabs), whole-body splitting (lobsters), and electrocution using a specialist device on a setting that is designed and validated to kill the animal quickly after initially stunning it.
- Slaughter (cephalopods). Various different slaughter methods are currently used on fishing vessels in European waters, including clubbing, slicing the brain, reversing the mantle and asphyxiation in a suspended net bag. We are not able to recommend any of these methods as humane. On current evidence, there is no slaughter method for cephalopods that is both humane and commercially viable on a large scale.
Octopi I understand, but lobsters? They have less than half the nervous system of an ant [1]. Are individual ants sentient and worthy of legislating over?
The line for sentience is a very low bar to hurdle. Trees may demonstrate sentience [0].
The larger problem is that people are generally thinking of sapience, but sapience tends to be defined in axiomatic terms, so we don't have a clear understanding of what it requires or means.
Well, the bar for sentience is actually so low I am quite sure bacteria and even individual cells in multi-cellular organisms pass it - almost every living cell detects aspects of and reacts to its environment.
It is indeed incredibly low. Slime molds [0] can pass it. There is a memory component, which would prevent single cells from passing it, but it's not a metric that is all that useful in determining the intelligence of a species.
Plastic has memory, but not feeling/sensation nor interaction with the environment. It is also not living by other standards (self-sustaining, reproductive).
Disclaimer: i don’t have a dog in the fight…or a branch on a tree, in this context.
Sentient is defined as able to perceive or feel things.
The paper linked discusses how trees can “communicate” and “feel” based on release of specific chemicals.
An exert from the introduction: “Recent research has revealed that plants can sense their neighbours without direct physical contact; mechanisms for this include detection of a reduced ratio of red to far-red in light reflected from neighbouring foliage…”
This was also a plot of a terrible M. Night Shyamalan movie.
That’s the connection the poster suggested, as the bar for sentience is quite low.
Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience.
Calling trees sentient is just nonsense. And I mean that literally. I try not to dismiss people's work out of hand, but there's a certain line of philosophical thought whose best rebuttal is to ignore it.
It is very common for Science Fiction to use "sentient" where "sapient" is the correct word. Star Trek is no exception. Calling trees sentient isn't nonsense; your understanding of what the word means is simply incorrect.
Is it really incorrect or does the term just happen to be a homonymous collision of more than one semantic concept?
I don't know (it's an actual question I ask myself, not some rhetoric vehicle), but the concept you declare as incorrect is so widespread it makes me wonder... (obviously, the meaning in the legal context we are talking about it's clearly on one side)
Incorrect in the specific context of a scientific or legal discussion which operates using a formalized definition. In normal conversation it is sort of nonsensical to say that the widespread usage of a word is incorrect, as correctness is defined by widespread usage.
The usage in SF stories stands out because often the writer was _intending_ for the word to be using the formalized definition used in science.
Traditionally, "sentience" includes consciousness, though. The OED defines it as "The condition or quality of being sentient, consciousness, susceptibility to sensation". It's actually science fiction that invented the concept of "sapient" in the sense you mean it -- the OED just refers to it as an old word for "wise" like Milton writing of "a sapient prince"
Well, that definition, like most dictionary definitions of complex philosophical or scientific concepts, is circular or too vague. The quality of being sentient is obviously circular, Consciousness is even more vague a concept than sentience, and Susceptibility to sensation is either circular (if we seek to define sensation narrowly) or too vague (if we define sensation broadly - after all, rocks are susceptible to sensation in some sense, as they immediately move when you kick them). This is not a critique of the OED: dictionaries are meant to explain to humans what other humans mean when they use a word, not give an exhaustive understanding of its deeper meanings and implications (encyclopedias aim for that).
When actually trying to rigorously define the word "sentience" we currently have settled on a very basic but measurable criterion: does the living thing we are discussing react to stimuli in its environment, and does it do so in a manner which suggests some kind of memory or other information processing power?
Conversely, consciousness has no similar even slightly rigorous definition, but it is still used as a "higher level" of sentience, sentience + some other stuff that bring you closer to how humans experience the world. Sapience seems to fit somewhere in between.
There are many plants that clearly respond to stimuli (Mimosa pudica(shy plant) as well as the Venus flytrap). As well as almost any plant following the light to grow, as well as plants that send out tendrils to anchor.
> "The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy"
I'll agree with you that we have no knowledge of plants being conscious.
> "sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions."
> Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience.
That would be _sapience_, not _sentience_. Which is the point. Sentience is a ridiculously low bar to clear.
As I understand it, the problem is that you need to define “sentient” somehow, and whatever definition you come up with should be applied consistently to all organisms. If you want to capture all the organisms you think should be called sentient, trees are sentient according to that definition.
I can't really answer you clearly without knowing what definition of sentience you expect to be correct. Especially as I've already noted most people think of sentience as sapience, which it isn't.
Trees respond to both negative and positive stimuli, and relay that information to other plants around them, exchanging information about them. They take both reactive and proactive stances in regards to both negative and positive stimuli - which may be sentience.
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 carnivores, as its almost impossible to euthanize a plant or fungus.
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.
Well, given that seeds inside the fruit sense their environment and start germinating only in specific conditions, even this would be debatable. Hopefully, if the cells of the fruit body itself are not sentient (if they do not react to their environment in some meaningful way), then eating the fruiting body is probably ok, provided you euthanize the seeds or let them live on.
Yes. The bar for sentience is quite low. It only means that one is capable of feeling sensations. (For example, Wikipedia gives the definition, "Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations.")
Does an arduino have sentience? It can certainly sense stuff via its gpio pins. As for "feelings", I don't know, would having a state machine that transitions between "happy" and "sad" based on gpio inputs count?
That's an interesting question, or at least it might be in the future, as it cuts right to the heart of what it means to be alive.
Right now no, an Arduino can't be sentient because it's not alive. If at some future point an Arduino could tick all the "is alive" boxes [0]:
- homeostasis
- organisation
- metabolism
- growth
- adaptation
- response
- reproduction
Then yes, there would be a good case for the Arduino being sentient.
However if you take a look at the list you'll see response is listed, that's because anything that is alive is sentient by definition.
Sentient by definition is really the point, sentient and sapient were defined specifically to codify the uniqueness of humanity.
All these other this are sentient, but only us, humans, and sapient.
The definitions although seemingly scientific are simply a re-enforcement of the biblical idea that the world was created for us, and that we can essentially do as we please, you can see this is the test for sapience, which is, is the specimen a member of the homo sapiens species.
Just for completeness, and to also touch on why this might become an important question; you'll also see organisation on that list.
Organisation is usually defined as being made up of one or more cells, which suggests that an Arduino, or any machine, will always fail to pass that test.
Essentially humans have defined life in terms of itself. This makes sense, we only have a single reference and as such we can't even begin to imagine what other forms of life may exist.
However, as we create ever more complex nondeterministic machines, or if we ever get serious about finding extraterrestrial life, this definition is going to have to change to allow for other possibilities.
> The definitions although seemingly scientific are simply a re-enforcement of the biblical idea that the world was created for us, and that we can essentially do as we please . . .
That's a historic misinterpretation of biblical teaching on the place of people on the world. Genesis 1 gives humanity dominion over the creation, but given that Genesis 2 parallels that command with the twin verbs, "tend and keep" (or sometimes "guard and defend"), the idea can't permit wanton destruction[1]. Rather, humans, made in the image of God the King, have a royal calling to work for the flourishing of life in all the earth.
We're called, not to do as we please, but to do what pleases the Creator. Thus, Proverbs speaks of the tender mercy of a righteous person towards his or her animals, and contrasts it with the cruelty of the wicked. Deuteronomy's rules for warfare forbid destroying fruit trees, for they're the means of sustaining life.
Historically speaking, many of the evangelical Christians who joined Wilberforce to campaign against British slavery also started the first humaine societies, anti-child-labor groups, and the first women's rights organizations.
The Bible calls humanity to compassionate care for all life, including plants, animals and unborn humans.
[1] Lynn White's essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis (1967. Science 155: 1203-1207), contributed to this idea that Christianity caused our ecological crisis. However, Francis Schaeffer's 1970 book in responce to White's essay, Pollution and the Death of Man, explains the Bible's actual teaching on humanity's calling to steward creation for God's glory.
"Aliveness" isn't anywhere in the definition of sentience. I can perfectly well imagine a sentient system that does not grow, metabolize or reproduce.
And "responds to input" isn't really the same thing at all as "capable of feeling sensations" (though, like many definitions, the line between the two is fuzzy, hard to pin down, and possibly context dependent.)
Life itself is a notoriously tricky thing to define definitively.
Sometimes it is necessary. Pest control is inherent. We cannot allow mice, rats, etc to live in urban environments unchecked.
Mice are sentient, does that mean we should only use no-kill traps and then release the mice somewhere far away? Many urban pests have population numbers that are 50-100X higher per square mile in the city than they could sustain in the countryside. So if we could even theoretically capture them and release them in the countryside, most would die due lack of sufficient food, which also seems unethical. And simply releasing a pest on the other side of the city so it isn't bothering your house clearly isn't solving the problem.
Killing animals, particularly pests, seems like an inherent part of urban living. Is this unethical? I don't think so.
To make it simpler: consider the lobster. It's not a pest yet still isn't considered above being boiled alive for no reason other than "that's what paw deid".
There is some thought backed neuroscience that lobsters can't feel pain in the human conception of it because of the lack of a neocortex. I don't know how well that can be tested, but it goes beyond justifying it because "that's what paw deid"
A lobster being boiled behaves the same way a cow or dog or human behaves when being boiled. Seems strange to make the cutoff for acceptable treatment based around a wishy-washy ill-defined notion of "Can this thing that is very different than me feel pain? I promise I am not biased by the fact that I have vertebrae."
I do a lot of hunting, fishing, etc....there are a lot of misconceptions in this thread. The head of a snapping turtle will still try to bite things up to an hour after it is separated from its body. Its body will still grasp and wriggle and flinch and react to stimuli 30 minutes or longer even after it is decapitated. It reacts as if it was alive and I was to poke it or stab it or scald it.
Hopefully most people can agree that when the turtle is flinching 30 minutes after death, it is not actually "feeling pain", despite reacting the same way that a cow or a dog or does. The argument that "it behaves the same as a cow/dog/human" is flawed. Anybody who's butchered a chicken or a fish can tell you that they can react as if in pain even after they are reasonably considered to be dead.
I assume lobsters are capable of suffering because that’s low cost for myself and has the potential to be correct, but “they respond to harm like a human would” is surprisingly weak evidence given my own reflexes will respond to pain well before the sensation reaches my brain, let alone passes through enough of my brain to reach the level of conscious awareness — if it was otherwise, I wouldn’t e.g. remove my hand from scalding water or stream fast enough to avoid injury.
How is being derived from current understanding of biology wishy-washy? Reaction to stimuli and pain are different phenomena. If you’re stance is “we just don’t know for certain so it’s better to be conservative” that’s fine, but that uncertainty shouldn’t be conflated with actual reason when it’s just based on wishy-washy anthropomorphism.
Your claim of lobsters not being able to feel pain is wishy-washy because it's a convenient assumption based off of an oversimplification. "Invertebrates don't feel pain because they lack the specific machinery mammals use to experience pain". If you just stop there then yes, it does seem silly to worry about a thing that doesn't exist. However, what I've seen of the models suggests that we are far away from being able to confidently say we have a complete model of a lobster's nervous system.
We can’t yet even define consciousness so of course we don’t have a “good” model. But using our current understanding of the “machinery” makes more sense to me than basing the decision on whatever it is you’re vaguely referring to, otherwise I don’t see what stops one from going to full Jainism. If our understanding of that machinery changes so will my opinion.
You haven't really given much rationale beyond "they seem to react to stimuli". At best, your position that they have consciousness or feel pain analogous to humans appears based on intuition; at worst, on dogma. Neither is a particularly reasoned stance.
No, I've already stated that is a completely reasonable position. It was the main reason behind my decision to become vegetarian. I don't think it's no cost to everybody though and some people's health deteriorates, particularly on vegan diets. However, being conservative in the face of uncertainty is a different stance than claiming they experiencing pain. It also doesn't address how you avoid the slippery-slope argument. For example, we haven't proved plants are not conscious so how do you reconcile a vegetarian/vegan diet with that? For me, that's why I rely on the biological argument that started this discussion. I have a feeling many people just resort to their intuition. Meaning it's just the same position of convenience you railed against masquerading as principled, reasoned stance.
My personal choices aside, there are also reasonable arguments against it that I don't think we should immediately dismiss with hand-wavy anthropomorphic arguments.
Because we can only wager hazy guesses as to what it means to experience. If a line is to be drawn, than it must be drawn in seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary ways.
There is a mimosa in a garden near me that will close its leaves when you touch it. Is it experiencing the sensation of touch?
(Edit: mimosa pudica, sometimes also called the shameful plant on account of how tenderly it seems to fold itself)
I mean, my tendon in my knee can "react" to "negative stimuli" when a doctor strikes it with a rubber hammer.
I guess the question is about how these words are being used, and whether they're referring to automatic biological reflexes or something like a conscious experience, sentience, or sapience, depending on how you use the terms.
Sentience always requires more than just reaction, but a memory component. That is, it can take a proactive response to avoid that negative stimuli in the future. However, measuring both of those is generally very difficult, and so determining if something is sentient can be difficult.
The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that there be consciousness.
>However, measuring both of those is generally very difficult, and so determining if something is sentient can be difficult.
That makes sense. So then, we should probably be very cautious about statements that openly entertain such possibilities given that they may be hard to substantiate meaningfully.
>The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that there be consciousness.
Huh, every definition I've seen when I read about this stuff in college, and that I currently see when I google, explicitly relates in some way to consciousness. And anything that means "reaction" "sense" "detect" in a sense pertinent to sentience meant some kind of conscious sensing, conscious reacting. Did the definition change at some point?
> Huh, every definition I've seen when I read about this stuff in college, and that I currently see when I google, explicitly relates in some way to consciousness. And anything that means "reaction" "sense" "detect" in a sense pertinent to sentience meant some kind of conscious sensing, conscious reacting. Did the definition change at some point?
You're sort of there, and sort of not. Sentience does require feeling, yes. But feeling doesn't require consciousness, no.
Sentience requires that the subject can desire pleasure, and desire to avoid pain, but neither of those things explicitly requires conscious thought. They are feeling, which you'll find in every definition of sentience, but desire doesn't have any need of a conscious mind. Collective behaviours, like in trees, can exhibit desire and can show pain, without the need for a consciousness to exist.
Claiming sentience requires mere feeling and that such cases fall into a different category than consciousness is an interesting intellectual exercise, and I'm quite familiar with that exercise, but as I said in a different comment, I don't think that's actually as consistent with normal definitions as you appear to believe.
>Sentience requires that the subject can desire pleasure, and desire to avoid pain, but neither of those things explicitly requires conscious thought.
I understand this as a recently popular argument that exists in the ether, and at best I can say I think there are numerous problems with it, although it's a legitimate and interesting idea. Whatever it is though, it's certainly not accepted mainstream usage of the term in normal circumstances, it's more a position in an argument seeking to draw distinctions between biological reflexes at one extreme and full blown consciousness at the other.
>Collective behaviours, like in trees, can exhibit desire and can show pain, without the need for a consciousness to exist.
I think that is only the case if you water down the meaning of words like desire and pain in such away that estranges them from sentience, which of course, makes it problematic to invoke the words, used in that way, to illustrate case examples of sentience.
I also have to note that I'm finding it pretty condescending of you to declare that I'm "sort of there, sort of not," and then repeating back to me some pretty bog standard material I'm perfectly familiar with as if its new information, and concluding by endorsing a fringey-at-best definition that is not, despite your protestations to the contrary, the usual or accepted meaning of the term.
I don't think the definition has changed philosophically, but using consciousness as a definition makes decision making very hard. We have no way to prove what animals are and aren't conscious, and what evidence we do have either way is extremely hazy. Using a line like "is more than automatic" to define what we think is probably sapient is pretty reasonable. Maybe it catches some things that are just complex machines with minor learning capabilities, but if you're more worried about excluding sapient beings than including non-sapient it's a reasonable heuristic for decision making.
I do personally think the line can be pulled back a bit to include creatures that's learning ability is extremely inflexible, but in the end it comes down to one's philosophical stance on what is likely to indicate a conscious creature.
Okay, I think this is entirely a different discussion than I was trying to have.
We had one person pretty confidently claiming that "sentience" meant XYZ, which was a definition I had never heard before.
Now we have this, which acknowledges that it's a non standard definition, but suggests we should proceed to use it anyway because, gee, it's hard to get evidence, and what if your objective is [insert objective] and you don't want [insert inconvenience due to strict definition] to happen, so let's use a definition that blurs the lines between speculation and evidence. I have a number of problems with that, but it's a different conversation anyway and it loses sight of what I was asking about.
About six comments up this thread, if anyone can remember that far, we had people putting octopuses, lobsters and even amoeba in the same category. At the bottom, the reason for doing that boiled down to people deciding it was okay to redefine sentience in a way that lowers the bar to include them all.
Trying to get to the end of what was driving that conversation leads to things like this, that aren't quite focused answers, but are just invitations to detour in any number of directions.
I agree, my thought is less that I think an amoeba feels pain (I don't) but that I don't personally believe things with insect-level complexity feel pain. That they react to negative stimuli definitely doesn't prove sentience, and I personally find the totality of how insects interact with the world to be too extremely mechanistic to believe they feel at all. This is true of crabs as well, I've never really looked into lobsters enough to have an opinion on them.
I've enjoyed the Journey into the Microcosmos Youtube channel - This one is Titled "Making Decisions Without a Brain" (subtitled poking protists) https://youtu.be/1LyeWQZ7ZR0
>depending on who you ask and how they define sentience
Natsu was assuming for the sake of argument that the definition of sentience is the one moeris gave, namely "that one is capable of feeling sensations".
That is the well established definition; no need to assume it for the sake of argument.
However, "capable of feeling sensations" is defined in different ways and thus leads to the large differences in when people say a fetus is capable of feeling pain.
Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?
All of those thresholds are crossed at different stages of fetal development so which threshold you use will change the answer you give for "when does a fetus become sentient?"
Well, I don't think so. I like to think I've studied enough philosophy to be at least somewhat reasonably acquainted with the term, and it wasn't striking me as "well established." And I did a bit of googling yesterday that also seemed to suggest the "well established definition" being used here is not consistent with any of the normal definitions. And just now I consulted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and now I'm convinced it's not even remotely close to well established.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't seen anything cited here to back that up, or even just an appeal to any informal, working understanding of the concept that makes me think "oh, of course, that's the definition." And normally I wouldn't ask for such a thing, except for the fact that, to me at least, a lot of people seem to be confidently wrong about what it is.
>Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?
I can't find a single source that doesn't align with the definition provided by moeris. It can be phrased in many ways but the underlying concept is well established. People who are unfamiliar with the words may confuse sentience with sapience, but they are quite distinct concepts and not interchangeable.
That last one makes some big assumptions given the adaptability and complexity of the brain, combined with our still limited understanding of it's inner workings. If I were to pick one, I would lean closer to the "capable of responding to pain" but really all of those criteria have flaws and serve more as heuristics than rigorous criteria. I purposly didn't take a stance in my original comment to avoid descending into uninteresting partisan bickering.
I think I agree with you that the definition provided by moeris is basically on track, and it accords with everything in the links you shared. I would also recommend you review the term as it exists in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
So that's all good. However, you said something along the lines of "doesn't even require that there be consciousness" and merely "more than automatic" which struck me as not being quite right, and that is the idea that I wanted to challenge. I think all the links you shared make some reference or another to consciousness, which to me makes them different from "not requiring consciousness." So I'm not sure how you are looking at those links and seeing something that comports with "not requiring consciousness" and I'm also not seeing how your version of sentience comports either with those or what moeris said. I'm surprised you would look up and post all those links without noticing this, especially in a conversation where that's exactly the thing at issue.
At best, I think you could say, the heartland, normal, well established definition makes reference to some amount of conscious experience, and it is certain fringe definitions could maybe be read as not requiring that. And I think even that would be an exceptionally generous interpretation of the thing you are spuriously claiming is a "well established definition."
>That last one makes some big assumptions
I really don't think it does. It's not making any assumptions about brains, it's taking a position on what sentience means. Maybe brains do a lot of stuff, some of which falls within our idea of sentience, and some of which doesn't. Again, all the definitions you link to are about sensation against the backdrop of consciousness. Meanwhile, only the last of the three of your proposed options was clearly suggesting consciousness. So I don't understand what assumption you think I am or am not making about brains. I don't think the other two options agree with the dictionary definitions you linked to, so I'm not really sure you should be in a position of confidently declaring that those are a "well established definition."
30 weeks?? Obviously these people never experienced pregnancy. It's ridiculous that we argue about lobster intelligence when most people don't even know the basic facts about their own human biology.
(Another common and ridiculous meme is the "pregnancy after having sex once" idea.)
There's only (approximately) two days a month when a human female can get pregnant. It's not about frequency or intensity, rather it's mostly timing. (And sperm quality, but that's another thing people have no clue about.)
Sperm can hang around in the fallopian tube for almost a week. It's also possible to ovulate without a visible period, and it's possible to ovulate in-between "normal" periods.
Don't assume any hard-and-fast rules when it comes to fertility, and definitely don't assume that somebody can only get pregnant two days out of the month. Our species would never have survived if that was really true.
Biology is messy, imprecise, and very subject to external effects.
I was going to say three days, but it doesn’t matter. That’s 7% then turn it into a birthday problem (the world’s full of people having unprotected sex for the first time with someone at any given time) and there you go. Deduct points for bad form or bad sperm and it’s still a crazy number. It’s only a talking point when it’s the case, so it’s bound to sound like it’s happening to everyone.
> Obviously these people never experienced pregnancy.
It's the high end, so that's the threshold if you're using a particularly picky definition of 'sentience'. It seems like a defensible position to me, that if you stopped brain development around 30 weeks you wouldn't see much self-awareness.
By this logic, humans should be given only half the consideration we give to orcas, which according to the resource you posted, have twice the neurons we do.
That’s not really the argument monkeybutton is making, the point is lobsters’ neural complexity is similar to ants, and orcas are comparable to humans.
It’s still a gradation, “as complex” is obviously a stretch. The whole argument is silly, soon turning off my Deep Learning algorithms because they are more complex than lobster.
The ratio of neuron count to body size is the important measurement. An orca might have twice the neurons, but those extra neurons go toward motor control, not experiencing suffering and contemplating mortality.
Even something small as jumping spiders can be quite smart. They certainly deserve some respect. And live boiling is common for crustaceans. Terrible practice, sentient or not.
I don't go out of my way to kill insects, but if someone wants to boil insects for food, I'm not going to have any moral qualms with it. I don't see how crustaceans are much different.
The anecdote is specific to frogs (and animals with similar sensory systems), and specific to boiling by increasing the temperature in small increments.
I have just heard about Seneca dying in a stem bath, but that was more by accident (he committed suicide by cutting his wrists but that was taking too long so he wanted the heat to speed up blood extraction. He however died of suffocation)
How was that suicide supposed to work? (suffocation like Seneca did?)
Yes and no. Yes they are more of the same size. Visually ants are little dots on the ground. Lobsters also have something that looks more like hands than ants do.
There is no dramatic difference in the quality or
volume of evidence regarding cephalopods as
opposed to decapods. There is more evidence for
sentience in octopods than in true crabs, but the
difference is not vast, and the evidence for
sentience in true crabs is slightly more substantial
than the evidence for sentience in other, less-
studied cephalopods. This leads us to recommend
that, if cephalopods are to be included in the scope
of animal welfare laws, decapods should also be
included.
Octopi is not the correct plural. Octopus is of greek origin, not latin. Thus, its greek plural is octopodes. And thus, since we don't tend to use greek plurals in english, the other proper plural is octopuses.
Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection. "A hypercorrection is non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal."[1]
Now, you will find octopi in the dictionary, but only because so many people have engaged in this hypercorrection that it has become widespread and dictionaries reflect common usage.
Octopus entered English from scientific Latin. In which the Greek plural was not used. (Lots of words in English fron languages other than their language of origin and have irregular English forms from their immediate source rather than their remote origin.)
“Octopi” appears to be the earliest English plural of octopus.
> Thus, its greek plural is octopodes.
“Thus” is incorrect there, but, yes, that is its Greek plural.
> And thus, since we don't tend to use greek plurals in english
But we do. Just not, until comparatively recently and never dominantly, in the case of “octopodes”.
> the other proper plural is octopuses.
That is the most common English plural, and you don't really need a (false) historical narrative to support that it is “proper” except coming from a broken prescriptivist framework.
> Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection
Since its the oldest attested English plural, its not a hypercorrection, just (arguably) dated. Though its probably the most common incorrect example of hypercorrection.
> Octopus entered English from scientific Latin. In which the Greek plural was not used
The Latin (nominative) plural is octōpodēs, the Greek (nominative non-neuter) plural is ὀκτώποδες. Almost identical. octopi is not used in Latin, it only appears to occur in English texts.
Most Romance languages get their primary word for "octopus" from an alternative Latin word for it, polypus (plural polypī), which comes from Greek πολύπους (plural πολύποδα). polypus is also an alternative word for octopus in English, albeit it is rather archaic. The English plural polypi cannot be accused of being a hypercorrection, but (for octopuses) polypuses is much more common. polypus is also medical terminology for a type of blood clot, and the polypi plural is often preferred when the word is used in that medical sense.
The usual Dutch word for "octopus", octopus, is pluralised by the standard Dutch rules, octopussen. English appears to be the only language in which this hypercorrect pseudo-Latin plural has any popularity.
This is fascinating and instead of replying I've been reading about this and looking up words like cacti. For what it's worth, both plural forms for Octopus are in my phone's autocomplete dictionary.
I’m not sure if it is real hypercorrection (or even attempted correction) or a conscious adoption of an available model pronunciation of plural nouns with similar spelling as a tool to distinguish the plural noun from the verb.
Though, in either case, it has the danger of suggesting the plural form of the hypothetical word “processee” (from processor, and by analogy to pairs like lessor/lessee), so, “things that are processed”.
This is English, not Latin or Greek. There’s no such thing as “correct” in language as long as you can be understood, especially for silly details like how to make a plural. You’ll find octopi in the dictionary because it is commonly used. Remember all words are made up anyway.
If you’re not the editor of a publication making local standards for how you want to use language, it’s better not to correct people when they’re perfectly well understood.
Personally I don’t believe in “plural”. If there’s more than one of something I just say it: “I went to the aquarium and saw octopus octopus octopus. I’d tell you what I saw around the anthill outside, but I’m not sure you have the time.” :)
I know this is a joke, but this is an actual thing in linguistics called reduplication. For example, hito (人) in Japanese means person, and hitobito (人人) means people, more or less. Japanese isn't the best example since they don't have "real" plurals but I think it's a fascinating phenomenon.
dic·tion·ar·y
/ˈdikSHəˌnerē/
noun
a book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language (typically in alphabetical order) and gives their meaning, or gives the equivalent words in a different language, often also providing information about pronunciation, origin, and usage.
Many dictionaries aim to be descriptive, not prescriptive, as doctor_eval said. That definition doesn't change that:
OED: "The Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a subjective collection of usage 'dos' and 'don'ts'. However, it does include information on which usages are, or have been, popularly regarded as 'incorrect'."[1]
Merriam-Webster: "Merriam-Webster is a descriptive dictionary in that it aims to describe and indicate how words are actually used by English speakers and writers. Generally, the descriptive approach to lexicography does not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of "correctness," unlike the prescriptive approach."[2]
OUP: "All of Oxford Languages' content aims to describe, rather than prescribe, the way languages are used by people around the world."[3]
I believe your definition comes from one of the Oxford dictionaries - iOS lists it as coming from the Oxford Dictionary of English, and Lexico (a partnership with Oxford, whose About page links to [3]) includes it[4].
I wonder if the trend of using the 'Latinx' term falls under the hypercorrection definition or there's something else to describe it.
I'm not passing judgement on the inclusiveness intention, but the English word for Latino and Latina is just Latin, which doesn't have gender. There's no need to mix linguistics with algebra and add a gender variable to the latin word.
Coming from gendered languages, most Hispanics either don’t know about Latinx at all and the ones that do, most of them think it’s inappropriate. It is a bit strange to try to remove gender from a word for people who mostly speak a gendered language. It seems mostly to be a virtue signaling thing among a rather small almost exclusively American, english as first language subculture.
A bit like the bathroom I saw in a coffee shop that listed all the different kinds of people that were acceptable to use the single occupancy one toilet one sink room. Trying too hard to be inclusive can be an insult to the actual issues at hand.
There is a Swedish expression: nobody is named, and nobody is forgotten.
Usually you hear it in a workplace setting when people (often, a subset of the correct group) are being acknowleged for an acheivement of some kind.
As soon as you try to enumerate all of those groups you will undoubtedly forget someone, who will then take offense at the omission. So the saying is a reminder to not single out anyone.
“Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection” might also be overcorrection (meta-hypercorrection?) now that octopi is an understood plural with enough usage that it’s in some dictionaries.
Eric Weinstein says some crazy stuff, but I remember hearing him once say that the best debate strategy for Republicans would be to mention the "noo-kyoo-lar" family, and let them correct you to "nuclear". Then you win because the other side looks like pedants and elitists. This "octopi" is definitely such a word.
Side note: all this off-topic pedantry about octopi vs octopuses is an old discussion already resolved. It is clouding discussion about what the full implications of what it actually means to treat octopus (ha!) as sentient.
I realize they are being cheeky but the ironic thing is "ignorance of N languages" is one of the primary drivers of linguistic cross-pollenation and drift. Taking loanwords, shoehorning them into your phonology, writing, and grammar is just how these things work.
For that to render _"octopi"_ incorrect, you'll also have to convincingly argue that a centuries-old etymology mishap supersedes its common usage since then— the far more common measure to define correctness in English grammar. Sociolinguists aim to study and describe the effect of society and culture on the formation of grammar. They don't present their findings as rules, and we shouldn't interpret them that way.
What does this mean in practice? By this definition, surely normal farm animals are sentient, but they are eaten, experimented on and frightfully frequently abused, so... what’s the change?
Seriously, you cannot see the difference between a person who delivers a single killing blow and then eats the animal and one who watches it boil to death over 20m or so?
"Getting joy from inflicting pain" is very different to "killing for food".
Lobsters & crabs are risky to eat unless they are very fresh (i.e. they have not been dead for too long). If you buy a dead lobster and then cook it, you have much less assurance about when it died hence the freshness than with a live lobster.
If you buy a live lobster, how are you going to practically kill it before boiling it? Try to penetrate the hard shell to impale the brain using a layperson's skills and equipment and risk slicing off a digit?
Perhaps it would be best if the fishmonger or grocery store seafood department worker were to pith it for you at time of sale. They can have proper training and safety equipment (a sharp knife and a cut-resistant glove), and you get an assurance of time of death.
Also very insulting to cultures around the world that depend on this for their source of food and livelihood.
I'm from Maryland where watermen in the Chesapeake watershed have been crabbing for generations. The cost of fishing licences and proactive regulatory restrictions have also contributed to the sustainability of the fishery here.
As Marylander's most of us have grown up eating crabs from a young age.
When you prepare crabs you must cook them fresh, because dead crustacea release a chemical which immediately turns the meat. It also the easiest and most effective way to know you are eating safe crabs and not diseased or unhealthy crabs.
Please stop projecting your morals on to us. Militant vegetarianism is no different than religious fundamentalism. Your are projecting your morals onto the rest of us. Please stop.
I don't think many people are "getting joy" from boiling a lobster. Even amongst those who do, I would guess that it's often out of morbid curiosity rather than from inflicting pain.
I like to eat crab and lobster, but I never understood how anyone could boil one of them alive - even if it hasn't (or hadn't) been 100% proven they can feel pain, it seems such a horrible, horrible thing to do!
I'm not any kind of animal rights activist, but it makes me feel upset just thinking about it :shudder:
The theory I hear from people who do it is that the animals die instantly in thermal shock. Would be great if someone in the know could comment; I'm certainly not endorsing this view!
I have boiled a lot of lobster and crab live. In my experience, they stop twitching in 5 seconds or so. I find this method faster more humane than chopping through their carapace and rooting around their head with a knife looking to scramble their brain while they struggle.
The latter is not a task I expect many home cooks to be good at.
They key is to have the water at a rolling boil and have enough volume that it doesn't cool when you add a 2 lb lobster head first.
I suspect a lot of the horror stories are from people who added lobster to a pot with too little water.
I was around as a kid when my aunt boiled some crayfish alive. The way they run in the pot and the sound they make still haunts me to this day whenever I see these little animals. I don't need science to tell me if something feels pain or not when being boiled alive...
the issue is that killing lobster without boiling them is not clear cut either. The animal happens to have numerous brains all over its body, so when is it actually dead ?
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, so what would be the logical consequence of that?
How to define "feel pain"? It is quite difficult and varies from person to person. I have some memories when I'm 1~3 years old. I can not "feel" any physical and mental pain at all but I might response to that pain event by crying. There is no specific meaning for crying. Maybe just like breathing?
One memory is that I hit my head on a rough rock when I was at the age of learning walking and little blood flowed through my forehead. In that time, I didn't feel any pain and was curious on why adults and old sister were so "nervous". In my view, they spoke loudly than usual and rushed to me. I didn't know what they were talking about but I could feel they feared for something.
Another memory is that I shot myself on breast by gas gun, and got bruise (I didn't notice that after I grew up and my parents told me). The age might be 2~4 years old. The same as first one, I did not feel any pain but the fear in adults.
ps: When I was 6~7 years old, I shot myself with air gun on arm again. This time I felt the pain. That was fucking hurt.
Do you have any source to back up your first claim? My understanding is that general anesthetic has been fairly well understood for some time and relatively free of long-term side-effects.
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.
Even as a meat eater I’m pretty shocked that this recognises them as sentient and yet does not ban their slaughter (aside from boiling them alive etc). Maybe I’ve read too much science fiction, but eating sentient beings seems Bad.
>> For during the Hellenistic era, Greek replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca
in the Levant, and the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek.
But it was not the Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean –Alexander
(himself not Greek but Macedonian and spoke a different dialect of Greek) did
not lead to an immediate deep cultural Hellenization.
Right. And the Spartans weren't Greek but Spartan and spoke a different dialect
of Greek, the Laconic dialect. And the Athenians weren't Greek but Athenian and
spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Attic dialect. And so on.
But I wonder, which is the one true Greek language that all those dialects were
dialects of? And who were the true Greeks who spoke it?
Or should I ask, is every bit of information in the article just as dodgy as the
bit I quote above?
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.
You're probably thinking of "sapient" which generally implies higher reasoning. "Sentient" means able to feel things, and it's pretty obvious that animals can feel pain.
I have stepped on a dogs foot. It made a “Yipe!” noise and leapt back. Then it approached me “submissively”, with it’s head held low and tail down.
It seems rather “obvious” to me that the animal felt pain, reacted suddenly to the sensation, and then completely changed it’s demeanour towards me.
Yes, something like this. For all we know, everything else might just be a big chemical reaction, with no pain involved. The dog reaction might just be like a reflex.
The only reason why we know it own pain exist is, well, because it hurts :)
(But once again, I think the theory that other people and animals also feel pain is reasonable and probably the truth)
Sentience is the capacity to experience sensations like pain or emotions. Insects have a nervous system and consequently feel pain, which makes them sentient. That doesn't appear to be the key metric we consider when culling/killing things, in the end. It's not clear that they have the capacity for "anguish", let alone understand it.
The old practice of cooking crab and lobsters was to subject them to pain for a needlessly lengthy period of time which I think is what the statuses is meant to curb. On the other hand, pesticide use is probably painful, albeit necessary. Seems rather arbitrary not to consider insects sentient, because they exhibit the same things. Intelligence is necessary for suffering, however. We're not good at measuring this capacity for suffering, we just know that certain animals exhibit it and for that reason we (should) take care to avoid it. Are there different levels of it? I would intuit that a bee slaughtered by a wasp suffers, but is that a level of suffering that should matter to us?
No easy answer but in the end I understand playing it safe in broadstrokes fashion
> Insects have a nervous system and consequently feel pain, which makes them sentient.
I'm not so sure about this. To feel pain requires consciousness. Behavior is not consciousness. It often indicates it in animals like humans with complex nervous systems. But it's very unclear when we get to something with a few thousand neurons. They likely won't any of the neural correlates of consciousness that we do. If insects or crustaceans are conscious of anything, it's not the kind of consciousness we have.
I don’t think that pain requires consciousness, but not in a way you probably think I am right now. I think that we don’t feel pain either. It’s a combination of a prediction and a sensation that assembles to pain. And when you split pain into parts, interesting things happen.
First, it is a unconditional limb/muscle reaction that is hard-coded. It’s uncomfortable but doesn’t constitute “suffering”. Then there is a sensation: burning, broken, cold, etc that makes you do something in the range of acting to reduce the damage to screaming (message danger to others and maybe get help) and kicking erratically (to counteract a predator). It’s more close to “suffer”, but short episodes don’t really add up to long-term or intensive “anguish”. Some people have high pain tolerance, but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it, they simply don’t change their state of minds so much. And then may come the understanding that you’re going to unfair die or become disabled for life, and these feelings and thoughts may be comparable to a situation of no physical pain at all, e.g. if you end up with an unfair life sentence. So basically my idea is that dying in pain is just a very negative sum of these negative components, but consciousness is not the key. It only helps to see your fate, whatever it is.
Which parts of “pain” we are trying to reduce by these laws is unclear.
This is why I'm making a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is physiological, insects have the neurological capacity for it. Whether that translates to "anguish" in a conscious sense, that is unclear. So too would it be for lobster and crab. The problem is it's not possible to have an accurate gauge of consciousness, capacity for which. We ballpark either a lot or a little, you can't really say there's "nil". So how much does it take before it matters? Really we just intuitively approach insects differently.
Not the person you're replying to, but according to this site here [0], crustaceans make up $262M or 0.64% of the agricultural export for the UK. Not small, but certainly smaller than other agriculture sectors.
I don't know if using exports is anywhere near the industry totals.
According to NOAA, in regards to US totals[1]:
"Overall, the highest value U.S. commercial species were salmon ($688 million), crabs ($610 million), lobsters ($594 million), shrimp ($531 million), scallops ($512 million), and Alaska pollock ($413 million)."
Most trawlers are owned by small businesses. They have very little lobbying power compared to the massive multinational agricultural conglomerates that control pork and poultry. JBS in particular is enormous, it owns almost a third of global pork processing through it's subsidiaries.
> Even as a meat eater I’m pretty shocked that this recognises them as sentient and yet does not ban their slaughter (aside from boiling them alive etc). Maybe I’ve read too much science fiction, but eating sentient beings seems Bad.
Sentient is not the same as sapient. You probably eat a lot of sentient animals, after all.
The definition of sentient used for this article includes plenty of other animals that we keep in often tortuous conditions (most agribusiness level animal raising) and then kill for food or even sport (think foxes).
I disagree. So long as we don’t torture them I see no problem in consuming other creatures. “One bad day” is a good guideline for how animals should be harvested for food.
So long as they aren’t in physical pain during their life, I don’t think animals really care or even understand their situation. For instance, a bunch of cattle don’t wonder about how their lives would be better if they were free range. They just live in the moment with no concept of “a better life” or “freedom”. We project our feelings on them which they don’t have the ability to reason about.
Physically hurting them during their short lives is wrong because they do feel physical pain. We shouldn’t scare them. But they wouldn’t even exist if they weren’t made for food.
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 pleasure (taste) only.
People who disagree tend to think that we somehow need to consume animals, but that has been debunked many times. Or, folks often convince themselves that violence and suffering of a sentient being for the reason of pleasure is somehow not simply evil.
That’s generally the viewpoint of folks who oppose eating and hurting animals.
Even the “one bad day” argument doesn’t hold up well, because folks would still raise hell if I painlessly killed my dog as soon as it became inconvenient to have one, no? Or they’d still raise hell if someone was unknowingly molested in their sleep.
There is more to deciding if we are treating a sentient being well beyond simply “did I treat it okay before I killed it?”, and the only reason that’s hard to see is because most people on this planet grow up being told that for some reason, some animals are different. For some reason, we can bludgeon a pig to death with a hammer (thumping), or boil a living lobster alive, but we can’t do the same to a dog or a cat.
We have been lied to. Doing any of these things to animals is wrong because we don’t need to eat them, except in very rare cases.
If you’re ever on a desert island, we can have a different conversation.
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 the aromas filling my lungs means something to me.
I don't want to change my culture to another way of living that I am disconnected from. I understand there are many cultures that don't eat meat and I respect that and wouldn't try and change them to eat meat. But it isn't mine and I intend on living the way I believe that god, or the universe, intended me to live.
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.
How about all the creatures that are killed by harvesting machines when wheat, corn, or soy is being harvested... I imagine probably the number of small creatures that are destroyed are probably on par with the number of crustacea harvested each year.
Sure, there are absolutely deaths there. But the problem though is that the majority of crops we grow are grown to feed the livestock.
So you’ll still minimize the number of crop deaths by going vegan.
Even if you believe that plants are just as sentient as animals (which some people have argued to me…) then going vegan still reduces that suffering the most.
The idea that they wouldn't exist if not 'made for food' sounds like a pretty anthropocentric view, what do you base that view on? Aren't cows competing in the same genetic race for survival every other species is? They certainly aren't like a fruit that's designed to be appealing for consumption - except perhaps for the selective breeding we've done since domestication.
Because dairy and meat cows literally would not exist if not for human consumption, their evolution and continued existence is not natural. Their wild cousins is a different story though.
Why does this matter? They still feel and suffer just as much as their “natural” cousins, so it’s not like we should pretend we are granting them anything good.
Livestock raised for commercial meat and dairy consumption live horrible lives. Watch Dominion for free on youtube if you don’t believe me.
We should stop breeding these animals into existence.
Pigs are known to pretty commonly work out why they're being raised (to the point that they get distressed as other pigs get taken away and work out when it's their turn).
That said, I don't particularly think we need to stop besides for environmental reasons. The ideal solution will be when we can grow "test tube" meat of comparable quality to existing meat.
This is easily refuted by the myriad instances of animals escaping their captors, strategizing, and even empathizing. For academic writing on exactly that, I suggest reading "Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era" by Sarat Colling.
Some pigs register test for higher intelligence than dogs, but yet we eat those. Cows and chickens seem to feel pain as well. Where should we draw the line about which animals we eat and which we don't?
Do you think most city dwelling office workers in the first world would eat steak if they had to kill and butcher a cow themselves? I hazard a guess that half would faint at the sight of blood.
We have this meat industry that gides away all the nasty bits and we just get ouece of meat iwrapped in plastic. I have. No accusations against farmers doing what they have to do, but in the first world cities we have one grand hypocrisy
As opposed to a villager going to a butcher to get their meat? Are we going to argue it's only moral to eat meat if you kill and butcher it yourself? Even the butcher probably isn't killing the animal. They're getting the carcass delivered to them.
Millions of people draw the line at animals in general: vegans.
We don't need to gerrymander the tree of life into edible and non-edible animals and pretend we have rational for the delineations if we just stop eating animals. Folks in developed countries don't need to eat animals to survive, so why bother? In the best case it allows us to eat some foods that taste unique and different, worst case it propagates unbelievable suffering amongst those we choose to eat.
I eat shrimp and fish because I genuinely believe they are about as intelligent and sentient as a carrot. Octopuseses seem obviously intelligent. Lobsters I do not know. Likely not intelligent and I would stir fry ants. The question for me is how much pain they feel being boiled alive. I am being won over to the viewpoint that there is enough possibility that they feel pain similarly enough to how mammals do that boiling them alive because they taste good with garlic butter is not a good enough reason.
I have never seen a carrot flee in terror from a threat, or flock eagerly towards a person that regularly feeds it, or curiously investigate a new structure in its habitat.
How not causing pain to animals when cooking them relates to intelligence? I suspect that my comment can sound blunt to you, so let me explain. When a human wants to eat something, their goal is not only to eat, but to do that without harming their emotional state. E.g. if I (or anyone) wanted to eat badly and catched an animal, I wouldn’t boil it alive, because it would scream of pain and hurt my mental state. But if it doesn’t show any signs of it under the lid, like a crab or a lobster, then what’s the deal? Why go to lengths cutting specific nerves behind a hard carapace, if it does zero harm to me? I see that it may do harm to you, but animals suffer all the time, everywhere in the nature. I don’t understand how to think this way and not burst in tears every minute of my life. Isn’t it more intelligent to accept the fact that the nature sucks and you can’t do much to it? I’m not writing it to bother you, I genuinely don’t understand the logic of said relation.
I suppose we are intelligent enough to understand that our actions may provoke pain, and that we are also intelligent enough to know that someone/something might feel pain even if it's not evident.
You don't have to burst in tears, it's enough to be aware of some facts and deal with them. You deal with them by "not seeing, not hearing" (or not wanting to). It's fine.
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
Your line of questioning gives me the shivers, because it applies equally to humans. You might be intellectually aware that you're causing someone to suffer, but - unless someone else is watching - why should you care?
You say you're "not talking about morals" - what, then, are morals?
(I'm not the person you were replying to but I am very interested in this conversation)
There's a specific carnal aspect to eating meat that I imagine is lost on a lot of people, especially when they don't have firsthand experience butchering animals. For me, it was when I was gutting the first deer I killed. There's this weird thing where you become incredibly conscious of the movement of your internal organs when you are holding another animal's warm entrails. It's almost entirely physical rather than mental, like what it feels like when you meditate on your breathing, except instead of breathing it's the pressure of food sludge sliding down your intestines.
I realized that me and the deer are both just slightly differently-arranged sacks of meat. I always thought I'd have some revelation about the sanctity of life when I killed a deer, but instead I felt an immediate detachment from it, like how I'm just part of an uncaring physical system ("nature") and that system doesn't care about my "morals" or lack thereof.
Sorry for the weird pretentious rambling. My response is that humans are part of nature, not apart from it, that nature has no morals or good or bad. Morals are just this weird thing human brains do to cooperate as individual members of a species to increase our fitness and individually to feel better or worse. I care about other humans because I care about them. I don't care about crabs because I don't care about them. They are two separate, non-intersecting roads in my brain. I don't mind if you think I'm a heartless psycho for articulating it this way, in fact the main drawback of this way of mental mapping is literally the social stigma of being considered heartless and cruel, which is why I am less likely to phrase it this way in IRL conversation. But I feel nothing when I crush a house fly (rather, I feel great satisfaction at getting rid of such a nuisance, and I think most others would feel the same), and feel nothing when I boil a crab alive except the pleasant anticipation of a delicious meal.
I think the answer is most people will suffer negative mental effects if they believe they have caused more suffering to an animal than is necessary to achieve the same outcome (i.e. feeding oneself) and also that they believe that boiling an animal could cause it more suffering than to kill it by an alternative method.
Most people don’t wish to cause undue harm to others, human or animal, because it causes them anguish. We are capable of abstract thought and understand persistence of objects.
I think those two facts are sufficient to understand why intelligent beings are agitated even by indirect expressions of suffering.
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.
That is both true and an incredibly lame argument when I write it out. I have strong feelings about octopuseses and the people who eat them for entertainment. I wish we knew how sentient and pain-aware lobsters are.
Parent said "don't cook them alive," not "don't cook them."
It's not hard to kill a lobster before you drop it in the pot - slip a knife into its neck above its carapace. This was a test on one of those Gordon Ramsay shows, so if he can kill them first and still make tasty food, I think we all can.
But really, if there were an animal that I could only eat by inflicting pain on it first (i.e. causing pain and not striving to minimize its suffering), I wouldn't eat it.
David Foster Wallace once wrote an essay called "Consider the Lobster." He argued for the merciful eating of lobsters; rather than boil them alive, make their death instantaneous.
How will the legal recognition change their treatment?
I catch lobsters and crabs as a hobby, and this is something I started at a young age (5, small crabs).
I killed and cooked countless of those creatures.
There is absolutely no doubt that they experience pain and fear, like all animals and probably also many plants.
From my experience, I don't think they suffer that much when boiled alive, they die in less than two seconds, it is very quick because of their low volume and good thermal conductivity.
I think they suffer much more during transport.
Alas, like many seafood they deteriorate extremely quickly when dead.
A lobster that has been dead for even one hour has a very different and unpleasant taste.
It's an open question whether prescribing emotions to plant-life is appropriate, but it is a common model used to explain plant behavior. You could argue botanists are anthropomorphizing their subjects...or you could fixate on the overlap of plant and animal behaviors in response to similar conditions.
It is actually insane that there is so much violence in nature. Every minute, there are millions of living things dying – many with unimaginable pain. The evolutionary engine is absolutely merciless. If I want to be terrified, I think what if we, instead of at the top of the food chain, were just second. It terrifies me to no end.
Extending it further – what are the things that we currently do not understand well but its understanding would lead to panic of the scale we've never seen?
I think most animals are aware of their predators even if they don't have some complex understanding of ecosystems. Anything that may once have considered humans a part of its natural diet has long since been hunted to extinction, save for maybe some remote patches of wild at the various edges of the human inhabited world.
I get more freaked out about thinking of falling into the atmosphere of Jupiter, just falling and falling and falling, eventually getting crushed. Or maybe a giant tentacle grabbing me, being pulled into some unthinking Cyclopean maw lurking just under the big red spot...
The entire rest of the universe is even more terrifying if only because it's so much more inhospitable to life.
> [...] Or maybe a giant tentacle grabbing me, being pulled into some unthinking Cyclopean maw lurking just under the big red spot...
Any tentacle or maw belonging to a jovian lifeform would be about as substantial as a... well, let's just say that the image of a jellyfish trying to eat a crab comes to mind. The jellyfish doesn't fare too well.
I read an interesting article about squid once. Squid have super soft bodies but hard beaks, and they catch and devour prey that is similar to or even tougher than themselves in texture. Why don’t their beaks rip off?
Long story short, there is a gradient in flesh texture from their bodies to their beaks- there’s no clear line where the body ends and the beak begins.
Venturing into the wild without good weapon is not a smartest thing to do. The problem I'd that weapons that can quickly and effortlessly kill the bear are often unavailable to general public.
Not trying to argue it's OK to subject animals to unnecessary pain (it shouldn't be!), but from a pure logical consistency standpoint, are there many non-sentient animals? Why is it OK to not recognize mosquitos, rats, termites, deers, ants, etc etc which meet painful demise by humans as sentient animals while making exceptions for a few?
According to the Buddha, one should not kill any sentient being, sentient being defined as made up of the five skandhas: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness.
I had a very easy time following this rule until my houseplants were attacked by spider mites and almost simultaneously my rats attacked by a different species of mites. How does one watch the beings (I don't apply "being" to the plants but do to my rats) they love be drained of their vitality by other beings and refuse to intervene? Is it right?
My wife, who is not a Buddhist, intervened, and both rats and plants survived but this experience deeply shook me. One might say I am experiencing a crisis of faith.
I'm a strong atheist but Buddhism has always been the religion I've respected the most. At least the philosophical aspect of it.
I used to struggle with this too. To this day I use a box to pick up spiders or mosquitoes and take then outside instead of killing them. But I wouldn't doubt killing termites to save my plants.
We kill everyday. When we walk, or drive the car. We're powerful giants. But we can be respectful giants.
It doesn't absolve us from our "sins", but it's far better than nothing.
I think it can be narrowed down to "be respectful". Letting your rats die would be disrespectful to them. Killing a spider that isn't harming you is disrespectful to them. Walking on top of ants you know are there is disrespectful to them.
This is correct; the "no kill" rule is something you aim for, it doesn't mean you necessarily achieve it. In Mahayana Buddhism there's a story about the Buddha's prior lives, where he decided to kill someone out of compassion: the victim wanted to murder a lot of people, but the future-Buddha killed him to avoid his suffering [1]. Likewise, the Buddhist precepts are training rules, not necessarily commandments that will take you to hell if you break them.
> Evil men will do evil deeds but to get a good man to do evil deeds takes religion.
I'm kind of surprised that this is a dillema for you. I.e. that you would rather watch the pets under your care, potentially in a confinement you placed them in get eaten up by mites, than intervene.
And that the driving force for that inaction is somehow compassion. It sounds more like confusion.
This is uncharitable. I wouldn't rather. I (myself, as I am now) would rather save them from suffering.
There are thousands of years of analysis by Buddhist theologians on these and other subjects. One critique against intervention is by denying or cutting short the acute suffering of another one denies that being's opportunity to learn the truth of their experience: that what is suffering is independent of a lasting self and temporal.
I do not subscribe wholesale to beliefs because they are believed. The Buddha himself encouraged such critical analysis for oneself. And other religions do the same, though they are often passed over for what is easier: unthinking adherence. From the Quran, "reflect; you have vision."
I am not perfect and I am not blameless. My conflict is a thing I must clarify. Its resolution is wisdom.
I admire the jainist (?) philosophy of not killing, but it does seem incredibly impractical, to the point of being stupid even. How do you avoid killing mites on the ground when you go out for a walk?
I agree that the Jainist philosophy is impractical: the essential difference between the Jainist philosophy of non-harm and the Buddhist is one of intention.
Which obviously does nothing but rearrange the mites on the ground before they’re stepped on, and makes me think they’re hypocrites for adopting a useless measure to make it seem like they actually care. If it is true.
The monks had a kind of sieve to filter out small animals from drinking water. There is a famous story when some of them developed extrasensory perception and realized the water they had been drinking contains millions of tiny beings invisible to the naked eye. They went to the Buddha and asked what they should do. The Buddha answered, if you cannot see them, that is fine.
I like this story because it shows there are some limits to how much we can avoid taking life, otherwise we couldn't live at all.
Thank you for this story. I wasn't able to find it myself. Do you have a link?
I did find the story of Thera Cakkhupala, a blind monk who was observed treading on insects [1] but because he was blind and could not see them was blameless. Could this be the story you were thinking of?
No, it was definitely another one, and it mentioned Arhats. I heard it from a Tibetan teacher in the context of clarification of the origin of some Vinaya rules all monks should obey, so I assume the story comes from a sutra from the Kanjur, but I was unable to locate it in any of the sutras I've read so far (very few, actually).
Sorry I wasn't clear. If you can see them with your physical eyes, you should take reasonable care not to kill them. If you can't see them with your physical eyes but with extrasensory perception, it does not matter in the context of this particular precept (of taking life).
You are trying to find an answer through logical means.
This means you need to find a framework with a clearly defined set of axioms and clear reduction rules that bring you to the correct answer.
The world does not work like this. All concepts that seem well-defined break when you look at them too close or too far.
Does the dog has the Buddha nature? The answer to that is neither 'yes' or 'no', because neither will lead you where you want.
All attachments, yes. But I am neither a Bodhisattva or fully enlightened. In addition, the core crisis I am experiencing is whether it is ok to watch a being suffer greatly in its torment by other beings without intervention. If the only act which may stop the other being from their act of torment is an act that results in their death (medicine to the afflicted), is it blameworthy?
There are definitely tiers to experience. I would expect that a rat can suffer far more significantly than a mite, or even a thousand mites.
Beyond that, your rat depends on you as a pet. I’m afraid that, if you can’t adequately look after your pets because of your beliefs, then you shouldn’t have pets.
The way I learned is that you try not to meddle unless you have wisdom (meaning you have some kind of enlightenment). My opinion is that unless I was the one tormenting other beings, I wouldn't meddle in other person's affairs, specially by killing. This is a good example on the importance of finding a teacher, a Good Knowing Advisor, someone that can dispel these doubts for you.
There's the obvious self-defense exceptions, if a lion or a person would attack me or my family I would shoot him, but an enlightened being may act differently because they may understand something we don't.
Any system of beliefs is going to have a few internal inconsistencies. Speaking from cheerful ignorance of what Buddhists actually believe, from my understanding the "don't kill things" is something in the nature of really good advice grafted on top of a philosophy that really an acknowledgement of impermanence and a set of guidelines around how to live with that. There is no sustainable belief system that stops its people from becoming soldiers.
If everything dies, at some level killing isn't such a sin. There are real practical populations if people use that as a serious philosophical starting point though.
My interpretation of the teaching is let love exist along with fear etc but don’t cling to love for fear it will pass and don’t cling to fear for fear it will not pass. He wasn’t telling people not to love but to allow it to exist without superimposing your neuroses on top of it.
Attachment (upadana) which arises immediately from desire (tanha). "The desire, adherence, attraction, and attachment for these five grasping aggregates is the origin of suffering."
I agree and should have agreed differently that an absence of attachment does not mean an absence of love.
If an enemy waged war, will you let them kill you or your creatures? this how I view this matter. these creatures are under my care, and I'm under an obligation to protect them. this obligation overrides any other feelings or beliefs I have.
of course, I'm no Buddhist, and I'm sure you have another point of view about the matter.
It is hard enough (impossible?) to discriminate between living and dead matter. Counciousness does not simplify things. When choosing the correct action in our daily life requires solving harder problems than whether P=NP I think the only requirement is that we try.
As a Buddhist myself... The Buddha did not have pets. That doesn't mean we can't have them, but having them implies that sometimes we can't act according to our values.
Of course your immune system (and Buddha's one) is constantly killing bacteria to keep you alive. Is there a self defense exception? There should be a line somewhere but it's difficult to draw it when we don't even agree what consciousness is. It could also be totally impractical. Probably a Buddhist alive is better than a Buddhist dead because it's necessary to kill smaller beings to be alive.
Its very logical. The current definition of sentience being proposed in the bill requires that an animal be able to perceive pain to be within scope (I'm not entirely convinced this should be a necessary condition, but that's what they've settled on) . When existing animal rights legislation was written lobsters, cephalapods etc. were considered incapable of doing this. The evidence now shows that they are capable of perceiving pain so they are being included in the bill (along with rats, deer and other mammals but not insects). Hence logical consistency is preserved. Perhaps the next time they revise animal rights legislation they will have evidence that insects can feel pain and so they will also be included.
> Why is it OK to not recognize mosquitos, rats, termites, deers, ants, etc etc which meet painful demise by humans as sentient animals while making exceptions for a few?
It is not generally seen as morally acceptable to crush/kill a dog under the same circumstances that you would crush/swat a mosquito, so there needs to be some differentiation between these two in law. Both have protections, but the dog has more protections because it has been put in the category of sentient creatures.
It’s worth noting that both rats and deers on your list are already classed as sentient in the existing legislation passed in May (at least as far as I can tell, as it covered all vertebrates), and it’s clear that from a practical standpoint ants, termites and mosquitos need to be treated differently.
Above all else though it’s a legal definition rather than a social or biological distinction.
Not really. We simply classify animals by how much we can relate to them. Seals, sheep, dogs, etc. are cute. Lobsters, not so much. Most insects even less so. To the point where we are reluctant to eat them even though they are perfectly nutritious. They all have nervous systems, pain reflexes, etc.
A counter argument is that absolutely everything in nature at some point dies and it tends to be unpleasant. Dying of old age, surrounded by and cared for by loved ones is kind of really unusual for most things that live. Being mauled to death by some inconsiderate predator is much more common. Whether that's us or some other predator does not really matter all that much. The end result is the same.
Lobsters don't generally die of old age; they get nibbled on by predators as soon as they stop being able to defend themselves against that sort of thing (hence the claws). Same with most other things we eat. Most grazing cattle descends from animals that move around in herds that will have the weaker/older animals picked off by predators. Nature can be cruel and we're part of nature.
So, my admittedly simplistic reasoning is that if you eat meat and have some respect for what you are eating and how it lived and was killed, it's fine. The animal you are eating would have died no matter what at some point and probably not in a way that is appreciably better and potentially much worse. Additionally with most farm animals you can make the point that it would not even have existed if it wasn't for the fact that we were going to eat the animal. We've literally created species and subspecies of animals that are optimal for breeding and farming that would not stand much chance surviving in the wild. These species would likely go extinct if we'd stop breeding them. A consequence of us being less cruel by not eating certain animals might cause that entire species to stop existing. There's some food for thought.
So catching a lobster in the wild and then eating it is fine. But maybe give it a quick stab with a knife through the brain stem before you throw them in the boiling water. Also, keeping them in the fridge shuts down a lot of their brain activity. It's a decent thing to do. A quick death and a tasty meal. Nothing wrong with that.
But we (humans) do exclude ourselves from being part of nature like that. If you believe that this is morally correct, how would you define the general criteria for this exclusion?
I don't actually believe that; but I can't speak for everyone of course and obviously many of us think we're pretty special. I think the distinction is not that helpful though. I think the issue is actually us projecting our own subjective morals and values rather selectively, very subjectively and a bit inconsistently.
This is a good step. I am a meat eater and I love eating meat, including all kinds of seafood. Even though I agree with all the ethical arguments against meat eating, I cannot bring myself to stop eating meat: it’s something I both grew up with and have a taste for.
Recently I’ve been switching my diet to eat more seafood when I crave meat (rather than land animals). Things like this will at least let me be better informed and nudge myself to eat less of the sentient beings. Lobsters are unfortunately too tasty to give up completely but it’s also not something I would eat daily anyways; most of my diet is salmon and sardines.
while crabs and others will receive more welfare protections, people (as citizens, workers and consumers) are getting your protections slowly removed, one by one, bill after bill, staying at the mercy of corrupt politicians, ruthless employers and greedy corporations.
How long to a human being is worth less than an animal?
It already is in the eyes of some extremist vegans.
(see the "never touch anything animal related for whatever reason" crowd but who then go on and drink gallons of cashew milk from farms of abused workers)
Context: I'm not a hypocrite. I eat a lot of meat.
I would put very strong money down that by the time most people reading these comments are in an old folks home with their grandchildren, the vast majority of the population will consider consumption of all meat unethical.
I don't think it will be illegal yet (just extremely regulated, and expensive - not the least bit because the carbon footprint of meat production will be fully factored into the price).
But to most people under 30 they will consider it as ridiculous as smoking.
And they'll ask us uncomfortable questions we won't have good answers for. Didn't you know about the health risks at the amounts you were consuming? Didn't you know about the carbon footprint? Most importantly, didn't you have ample evidence of consciousness, personality, and sentience in every way that is reasonable to us? We didn't eat dogs but considered pigs and cows different? Why?
And we won't have answers.
A few more decades and people will look back, note the high numbers of vegetarians and vegans in the public sphere, and ask the people of that present to stop venerating historical figures from our time because of pictures of them eating steaks. They'll say "even by the moral standards of the time, they were criticized. The information was all out there."
I don't say any of the above as a value judgement that I think it's good or bad. Just that I think it's inevitable.
Eating meat is something natural, which be benefited from through our evolution, and which I think cannot be unethical in absolute terms. I think the term 'ethical' is being abused a lot these days. People do have opinions and beliefs and are free to decide that they do not want to eat meat as an personal ethical stance.
The rights and wrongs of industrial meat production and high consumption can indeed be discussed.
> We didn't eat dogs but considered pigs and cows different? Why?
As a species we do eat dogs and many other animals. Herbivores are much better suited for breeding and cultural (that includes religion) constructs mean that some animals are taboo (pigs and cows are both taboo in some societies as well).
It all comes down to energy. Each time energy gets converted as it goes through the food chain, most of it is lost. We simply can't afford to eat things that ate things that ate things that ate things; there's not enough energy left after all that.
You should go vegan. I can help if, if you’re interested and want to try it, or don’t know where to start.
Because you’re right, about everything you said. And you obviously wrestle with a lot of the ethical inconsistencies with eating animals.
Let me just say this, though: you lose nothing by trying to be vegan for a month or two. If you hate it, you hate it. But if you find you enjoy it, it could change your life!
When I was wrestling with the same questions and feelings as you, I ended up trying to be vegan so I could sleep easier at night and haven’t looked back 6 years later, healthier and happier than ever, with no real special access to food or crazy changes to my life.
Go ahead and go vegan... you can tell your kids you were decades ahead of most of your peers. Even if you don't particularly care what future generations think of you, the environment, or your personal health, going vegan can still be fun if you have enough buffer in your life to turn it into a hobby!
I will suggest some tasks to get started... what is the best vegan ice cream in your area? Ready to level up? What is the tastiest edible mushroom you can find in your city? If you've been going to a traditional grocery store for omnivores, you may have only ever been exposed to three different ages or strains of Agaricus bisporus (white vs. brown little mushrooms are just different strains... "Portobello" is just a bigger/older Agaricus bisporus). There's literally an entire Kingdom of life that the mainstream western food production system hasn't been making available for you to eat. Imagine if your grocery store only had one shelf labeled "Plants" that just had three colors of potato!
>>>And they'll ask us uncomfortable questions we won't have good answers for. Didn't you know about the health risks at the amounts you were consuming?
Yup. Didn't care. Bacon-wrapped filet mignon tastes THAT good. Some things are worth the risk. Like driving too fast, riding motorcycles, or skydiving.
>>>Didn't you know about the carbon footprint?
Same answer here...
>>>Most importantly, didn't you have ample evidence of consciousness, personality, and sentience in every way that is reasonable to us?
And here too.
>>>We didn't eat dogs but considered pigs and cows different? Why?
I actually HAVE eaten dog. It's a specialty delicacy in Korea.
I think most of the world isn't anywhere close to taking the conscientious Western approach to animal flesh.
How so? The fight for animal liberation is the same as any other rights movement. It’s easy to see how those aren’t very destructive.
Also, you misunderstand: you shouldn’t care because I do. You should care because it’s right. Whether or not I personally believe it is irrelevant to anyone else’s moral obligations.
I think it's a lot more likely that in 50 years, per capita animal consumption will be higher than today, simply because the subgroups that tend to favor vegetarianism are shrinking as a share of the overall global population (and tend not to have as many children), whereas global income is increasing.
There is no reason to expect this trend to reverse. I do think that in North America, per capita meat consumption will decline a bit since in the U.S. we really eat too much of everything and there will be more pressure to switch to more humane meat production that is more expensive per kilogram. I think this is a positive development, but humanely raised beef is not that much more expensive - maybe 20% more expensive, so not at all "caviar".
Pro-tip: Check out butcherbox and other services for free range beef, chicken, and pork. Lots of services like this are springing up.
OTOH, world population will level out soon, and may even start shrinking, so total meat consumption in 50 years may be lower than today. Per-capita consumption will be higher. I don't see vegetarians increasing as a share of global population, the majority of the world loves to eat meat and will continue to do so.
In terms of climate change, this promotes more beef consumption because beef is the best way to turn a large portion of the earth's dry arable land into food production (at least unless humans evolve to eat grass and shrub). A large part of the planet simply doesn't have the fresh water supply to support growth of food crops, and this is where cattle graze. If you believe the earth is going to get drier, then this means the global diet will shift even more towards beef consumption as farms that used to grow corn exhaust water tables and revert back to pasture.
This will continue to be the case as the earth warms, and such warming will advantage beef over other forms of food production more dependent on wet areas with steady rains.
It's interesting to note that despite the best efforts of the animal rights movement and the increased numbers of people choosing vegetarian or vegan options in recent years (so it seems, I've read many articles that say so) meat production and consumption has continued to increase steadily over the years:
Bacon-wrapped filet mignon is worth sacrificing the only planet we have? You don't care about your carbon emissions at all? We are introducing such big amounts of greenhouse gasses just from our consumerism lifestyle and the convenience of it all is big enough to just "[not] care".
And then you brag about having eating dogs like this post couldn't get any worse. When this is the mindset and opinion of average people, which I'm pretty sure it is then we're at a loss for fixing this mess we're in.
>>>You don't care about your carbon emissions at all? We are introducing such big amounts of greenhouse gasses just from our consumerism lifestyle and the convenience of it all is big enough to just "[not] care".
Who determines what types of energy consumption are just, and which are immoral and wrong? How much electricity and natural resources are burnt up in popular endeavors such as alcohol and marijuana production?
We've got "climate activists" that fly in private jets to conferences just to chide the rest of us about "consumerism". Meanwhile I'm maintaining my physical fitness with an Army-surplus ammo can full of dirt, stuffed in a 30-year old backpack. I've had the same rugged Android phone for over 5 years. My two cars were manufactured in 2007 and 1994. Back when I still lived in the US, 2 of my 3 firearms were Communist surplus weapons from the ~1970s (SKSes). I wear mostly custom tailored shirts that I had made 9 years ago. I'm confident that my overall carbon footprint for the past 10 years or so is reasonably small. So No I don't stress out over said footprint. I just live frugally and buy stuff that lasts. I happen to like driving things with internal combustion engines and I like the taste of cow flesh.
Maybe there will come a time when climate change forces us all to no-shit fight each other for competition of scarce habitable land and food resources. If the planet melts....I'll fight to survive and thrive. If we are forced into Fallout-style vaults, I'll fight to survive and thrive. I'll teach my kids the same. My assessment is that I, and those I care about, have a higher probability of coming out on top in such a cataclysm than the people who tell me not to eat meat.
Climate alarmists/Polliver: "You lived your life for progress. You want to die for some chickens?"
Omnivores/Clegane: "Someone is." https://youtu.be/LeYwkeX6xNI
If you want people to "care", be careful what you wish for. We could drastically reduce our human carbon emissions by feeding all the first-world vegans to pigs, and improve our signal-to-noise ratio on the Internet as well. /sarc
>>>And then you brag about having eating dogs like this post couldn't get any worse.
It's not a "brag", just a statement of factual reality: some major developed economies eat dog. It should cause people to reflect on their own positions. Who is "we" in the statement "we don't eat dog"? Isn't the whole point to reflect on the human integration with the ecosystem as a whole? In which case, global mores are important to consider.
> If you want people to "care", be careful what you wish for. We could drastically
reduce our human carbon emissions by feeding all the first-world vegans to pigs,
and improve our signal-to-noise ratio on the Internet as well. /sarc
Why is this marked as sarcasm? The greatest personal contribution to the
reduction of carbon gas emissions that a person can possibly make is to stop
breathing, although that's true for non-vegans as well.
Meanwhile, almost 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from power production and
so from burning fossil fuels:
It's burning fossil fuels that's causing climate change, not eating cows and
certainly not eating pigs and chickens (who are the most widely consumed meat
animals). We've had farming for more than 10 thousand years but the
greenhouse effect causing climate change started only in the last couple hundred
years, along with the Industrial Revolution. Why? Because the carbon gasses
released by farming are part of the carbon cycle that circulates carbon gasses
between the atmosphere and the biosphere, and that is relatively stable and has
never caused a greenhouse effect in the billion years of life on the planet.
While burning fossil fuels releases carbon gasses at rates and amounts that the
natural mechanisms in the environment that normally bind carbon can't cope with:
The idea that eating cows causes climate change is the dirty lie of vegan
propaganda, spread by people who, in truth, don't know anything about the
environment and don't really care about the environment or climate change and
only care about whether other people eat meat. It is a lie because it's false
and it's a dirty lie because it's obscuring the real cause of climate change.
And it's the dirtiest of dirty lies because it tells people that they can save
the environment if they have a soy burger now and then, rather than giving up on
their cars (hear that OP?) not buying a new iphone twice a year, not flying to
their Instagrammable holiday destinations, not stuffing their houses with
useless houseould appliances and generally stopping their incredibly wasteful
use of energy produced by the burning of fossil fuels.
After reading the title, what came to my mind was: Either UK is paradise and legislators have the resources to elbow Plato, Kant, Nietzsche and the rest, or the British population is becoming as religious as the vedic hindu population (for whom cows are sacred)
But after the brief surprise, I assume someone is pushing to sell certified lobster stunners, and maybe provide installation and servicing for them. Mandated by law.
Random thought: Give every child one as a pet so they get emotionally attached and over time, society will grow to associate these creatures as man's friend.
My grandma lived on a farm and loved playing with the cows. Once she was old enough to connect the dots on what happened to them, and later saw the butchering process, she became vegetarian for life. The layer of separation 99% of the population has between the dark evils of the mass livestock industry and eating meat is an issue.
Nearly everyone has recent ancestors that lived on a farm and loved playing with the animals. Once they were old enough to connect the dots and later saw the butchering process, they remained omnivores for the rest of their lives.
Like my Gran tells us, when she was a girl her mother asked her if she'd like some chicken for dinner. "Oh yes" my gran said enthusiastically; she pointed out the window and said "which one"?
I don't think so. People used to be a lot closer to the slaughter of their meat, much more aware of what was involved. And obviously they loved meat.
My uncle took me through his slaughterhouse when I was about 5. It was like a horror movie of screaming pigs, blood everywhere, heat, stench. Probably thought it would be fun for me to see, I don't know. I still love pork.
People have been eating meat for thousands of years but mass-scale meat production has only existed for maybe a hundred years or so. I don't think what you say makes sense. If a majority of people were upset about the fact that animals have to die for us to eat their flesh, we woul have stopped eating meat very early in our history.
It's not about "not caring", but most understand that a value system that assumes we must eliminate suffering whenever possible leads to terrible, dysfunctional, hedonistic societies that create a lot of harm.
In the same way, creating unnecessary suffering also creates sadistic societies that lead to a lot of harm.
So there is a golden mean in which a natural amount of suffering is recognized as the price of life - we will all suffer and die, but in exchange we can also live -- and people have historically been mature enough to accept that and decide the combo of life+suffering as better than the combo no-life+no-suffering.
Specifically for the case of livestock, none of those animals would have been born if they were not going to be eaten, so for humanely raised animals, the suffering imposed on the animal when the farmer sends it to slaughter is not so great as to outweigh the life given to the animal by the same farmer. This can be viewed as the definition of humane animal husbandry.
Of course there is a lot of animal husbandry that is not humane and this type of animal husbandry is unethical. That's why there is a big movement for full pasture-raised beef and grass fed beef without hormones, as well as pasture-raised chicken, etc.
Similarly for the hunter, killing the octopus or salmon or deer is not worse than some other animal doing the same or the animal dying of some other cause, so there is not a net increase in suffering for the animal's life simply because a human eats it as opposed to some other animal eating it.
This of course depends on the ecological system being in balance. Killing an animal takes away one meal from its predators but also saves the lives of its prey. An ecological system is in a steady state when everything eaten is replaced so again suffering is the price of life within a balanced ecology, and that ecology includes human hunters.
By the same token, overfishing or overhunting that drives animals to extinction is also not humane, while hunting and fishing that does not is humane.
By the way this is why vegetarianism in western societies is primarily practiced by younger people who feel as if they are immortal and aren't really faced with the understanding that everything in life must be paid for with suffering and death. They view suffering as strange.
Others do not, and that's the dividing line. It's not that people don't care, they just aren't convinced that hedonism is a basis for a healthy society and they look for a wiser, more balanced ethical system that values life with suffering, and that includes the life of animals hunted or raised for food.
My grandma lived on a farm and loved playing with the cows. Once she was old enough to connect the dots on what happened to them, and later saw the butchering process.
To the day she died, she would thank the amimal (cow) by name, for the cow skin rug on the floor and give thanks by name again to the cow whos steak we were eating that day.
I think the question is more who can kill an animal?
Humans are animals too. But ordinarily one human is not allowed to kill another, except the state of course in countries with death penalty.
So if humans can kill humans it makes sense that humans can also kill (other) animals. But you can not kill someone else's animal because it is not your property.
Now if it is ok to kill somebody I don't see why it would be any bigger sin to eat their dead body, is it?
(I'm not saying it is ok to kill but our society seems to allow it in many cases)
For me it was a gamble gone bad.
But based on a deeper shift in global power politics, also regarding the relationship of the USA and Europe.
Great Britain had to decide between a deeper loyalty to the USA or the EU.
I don't think the Brexit was planned to be successful.
It may have been planned to be a tool to recalibrate the relations to the EU and got out of hand, Wizard's Apprentice.
They probably thought they could deepen the relationship with the USA in the coming Cold War with China and still reap the benefits of the EU without the annoying parts.
Ok so let's say this passes... surely we can't boil them alive anymore and social media platforms will delete the strange 'muckbang' videos. Right? RIGHT?
About time. Anyone that has seen a video of an octopus solving puzzles should realize they are sentient. I have a hope that the U.S. will follow suit with a similar law.
I don't know, I'm not a huge fan of government overreach but banning the boiling alive of animals that can demonstrably feel the pain and distress of it purely because its either easier or it marginally improves the taste (truth be told I have no idea why we do it, I assume its one of those two) is something Im willing to let slide
Crabs and lobsters are basically bugs, whereas an octopus is a creative, playful, intelligent creature with amazing capabilities. It seems strange to group them together.
I assume that Dr Jonathan Birch, Associate Professor at LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, and his team of scientists didn’t encounter this insightful perspective when they reviewed “over 300 scientific studies” in order to arrive at their conclusions…
In seriousness though, this comment is a prime example of speciesism. Even if it were true that these crustaceans were “basically bugs” how does it follow that no regard should be given to their suffering? Does being a “bug” justify being boiled alive?
They are only being “grouped together” in that they are being granted the most basic consideration: that they have “the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm”.
The fact this is somehow just dawning on modern society is a sad indictment of our blinkered and callous disregard for other species. A child could tell you that other living creatures experience pain and distress through simple observation or even based upon, dare I say, the innate understanding we all have about our fellow animals.
It's weird how use of the word "speciesism" implies that some place humans above other animals as a result of some kind of fallacy or irrational thinking, and not because we are humans and therefore more valuable to each other. Never mind the fact that we have consciousness and ego and complex nervous systems, whereas lobsters do not.
> not because we are humans and therefore more valuable to each other
I value my children more than I value your children, but you will likely disagree with my assessment, even though it isn’t unexpected. And I would have to admit my assessment is not objective.
> Never mind the fact that we have consciousness and ego and complex nervous systems, whereas lobsters do not.
That’s how speciesism works: we try to find some kind of difference between us and other creatures, and then say, because they lack X they are not worthy of consideration. It’s okay if they suffer. This is precisely the same logic that was used to justify slavery, for example.
The other problem is that the line keeps moving, because we keep discovering how similar we are to other animals. There was a time when science claimed that animals did not have emotions, which any dog owner could tell you is nonsense.
The truth is that we do not really know exactly what a lobster experiences. Shouldn’t we therefore be cautious?
I honestly believe that at some point, the majority of humans will look at our system of factory farming and “harvesting” of wildlife in much the same way that today we view slavery, colonialism and other egregious examples of human disregard for other lives. I am not saying they are the same thing, but I do think that they are in the same category.
In your definition of speciesism, you are doing exactly what you accuse your-defined "speciesists" of. You are manufacturing ("try to find some") a definition of speciesism to paint other-people as the bad guy. Your comparison of their actions with slavery is just to demotivate any response.
In animal kingdom, animals kill each other ruthlessly. African dogs and other animals eat their prey from back-to-front while they are alive. Are all animals speciesists? Are all animals committing an act equivalent to slavery?
Humanity survived on hunting for tens of thousands of years. So the only reason we survived is because we were "speciesists"? If that's the case, then I am okay with being a speciesist.
We have to value our species over other species - if it ever came to choosing 1 human being or a million <insert animal>, we would always choose a human being (given that killing those animals won't destroy the ecosystem, thus harming human beings).
>Humanity survived on hunting for tens of thousands of years. So the only reason we survived is because we were "speciesists"? If that's the case, then I am okay with being a speciesist.
Humanity also probably only survived difficult conditions because many of our ancestors raped and killed each other over rare resources and lack of willing sexual partners. Hence by your logic we also should be okay with being killers and rapists, because they're the only reasons we're alive.
Or you know, we could use our brains and recognize that our ancestors lived in completely different environments than we do and we also have a much better understanding of the world than they did. Hence it would be incredibly stupid to use their actions, world view and ethics as a foundation for our belief system.
Good point. But I would argue that we refrain from killing each others because it's no longer in our best interest to do so. We can afford to feed everyone and give everyone a decent life without killing each other. Also saving people gives us a bigger pool of talented people and diverse genetics.
When we cannot give each other a decent life, we resort to mass killing (even today) - think of all the wars started due to hunger or ethnic reasons.
My point was that we are responsible for the safety and prosperity of each other, not any animal. We have no obligation towards the safety of some animal. Evolution tells us that we have to care about the survival of our species. And in certain cases, we will help animals but primarily where helping them helps us (for example, to maintain stable ecosystem).
As for dogs and cats, we use them for our benefit - we feed them, protect them, give them a good life for our own benefit - because they have evolved to make them seem cute and domesticating them makes us happy and gives us mental comfort. This makes them happy at the same time (but that's a side-effect, not the intended effect in most cases)
> We can afford to feed everyone and give everyone a decent life without killing each other. Also saving people gives us a bigger pool of talented people and diverse genetics.
We can also afford to feed everyone without harming so many animals. In fact, reducing our reliance on animal products is likely the only and much more efficient way to feed everyone. And not only that, we're also destroying whole ecosystems because of our unnecessarily large demand on animal products, which in consequence causes huge problems for future generations.
So harming animals less is definitely in our interest.
> When we cannot give each other a decent life, we resort to mass killing (even today) - think of all the wars started due to hunger or ethnic reasons.
I'm also thinking of all the wars yet to come, because of the consequences of climate change or uninhabitable areas, which both were (among other things) caused by our ridiculously high meat consumption in a few wealthy countries.
> My point was that we are responsible for the safety and prosperity of each other, not any animal.
The fact that people even have to fight for children to not get abused for us having some luxuries (rare minerals for the latest smartwatch or phone, coffee beans, chocolate,...), should make it clear that we don't feel responsible for each other on a grand scale. There's a varying degree of responsibility and it quickly vanishes with greater physical distance to each other and the less we feel connected in one way or another.
And it's not uncommon to feel more responsible for animals than for humans. Like my neighbor's cat is treated better than those children working in some mines or farms, also because it's more beneficial to some of us to treat those children badly.
Or to put it differently, responsibility for other human beings which are outside of our closer groups is nothing that comes naturally or just is or is even necessary for our survival. It's something we had to come up with on our own with our ethics. So we have to fight for it and constantly remind ourselves about it or otherwise we keep doing all the horrors we still do to each other (e.g. slavery). It's no different than our ethical beliefs in other regards, e.g. animal suffering.
> In animal kingdom, animals kill each other ruthlessly
Not that long ago, humans routinely tortured, killed, raped other humans sometimes even just for fun (and in some places of the world very much still do).
Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question.
These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other property you deem worthy in a living being, thus making them inferior to another species.
> Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question.
I strongly disagree. We have more food than ever before. More clean water than ever before. More safety and prosperity than ever before. More innovation than ever before.
As for our ecosystem, humanity has solved any and every calamity ever before. And we will solve this one as well.
Don't get me wrong - we should not take climate change lightly just because of the belief that we will solve it. We should take it seriously and tackle it head-on, but with the belief in our ability in problem solving and innovation. We cannot solve a problem if we believe that humanity is going to destroy itself.
>These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other property you deem worthy in a living being, thus making them inferior to another species.
I don't understand this sentence. Can you clarify?
> I don't understand this sentence. Can you clarify?
You’d be pretty dumb to saw off the branch you’re sitting on. Yet that’s what we’re doing. On the surface, we seem to be lacking any kind of self preservation instincts or « hive mind » to preserve our species. If, say, a bee was looking at humans trying to determine if we’re intelligent or not and they applied bee intelligence metrics, we’d miserably fail because every bee knows that the survival of the hive is what dictates their action and behavior, duh.
And yet we consider bees to be bug “automatons” but consider ourselves the most advanced life form around. But seen from a distance, without using human values as a framework for evaluating intelligence, we might be some of the dumbest species around.
according to animal metrics for intelligence, sure we are stupid. But we have strong evidence why our metrics are more effective than animal metrics :
1) human death rate is lowest among almost all species
2) human comfort + happiness rate is highest among all species
3) our accomplishments and understanding of the world is a million times that of any other species
4) all other species survive because we allow them to. We can (and have) eradicated entire species.
etc. etc.
We don't need a hive mind, we have intelligence. Bees act the way they do because they are genetically programmed to act that way, and they don't have the ability to think or reason for themselves. We do. We protect our species when we need to. Not out of genetics (maybe a little bec of evolution), but out of intelligence.
>because they lack X they are not worthy of consideration. It’s okay if they suffer. This is precisely the same logic that was used to justify slavery, for example.
Wowzers, this is the most strawmanny characterisation of this view I think I've seen outside of scifi villains in B movies. I don't think the most charitable view is that species "deserve to suffer." It's that they have different capacities for suffering, and that differences in the complexity of the nociceptive and the nervous systems are inputs into our understanding when we try to figure this stuff out. That leads to, say, jellyfish being treated with different moral urgency than mammals, or eggs being treated differently than hatched birds.
The B-Movie scifi villian characterization also is problematic not just because of it's anti-intellectual shallowness, but also because it considers moral assessment in it's negative sense but not it's positive. Namely, that this is about tending to the needs and moral well-being in cases where the urgency in protecting it is greatest, and we can make good choices to do the most good. We make choices that prioritize the well-being and safety of our children in ways that take their well-being seriously, and we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building. To treat them equally, or to prioritize the other way around, would find someone facing the moral condemnation of the community as well as legal consequences, and nobody would be convinced to withhold those judgments by speeches about speciesism.
> ... we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building
The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.
You can live a full, healthy life while minimizing to as full extent as possible the suffering you directly or indirectly inflict on other sentient creatures.
The argument you present here against your characterization of the OPs point is akin to saying "my kid really loves McNuggets so I don't care about the horror 50 billion chickens suffer in a given year".
Again, the building isn't on fire; you don't have to choose one or the other.
>The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.
Well we're off to a bad start, because this is just literally incorrect. I remember way back in elementary school we had a fire chief come in and talk about fire safety, about having a plan, etc. Inevitably the question about saving pets comes up, and we heard them talk about how fire safety means prioritizing safety of humans. I just did a quick google about fire safety and pets and if you want to play the Google Stuff game, there are numerous sites with guidance on fire safety that reaffirm this.
Secondly, for goodness sake, it's a hypothetical intended to highlight an underlying principle. Because sure, of course you want to save everybody in all cases. But insisting that you don't even want to consider the premise of a hypothetical is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the hypothetical that is focused on precisely the situations where you don't have that luxury of avoiding all possible harms.
Despite your protestations to the contrary, our lives are entangled with the lives of animals in ways that present tradeoffs. Here on HN there was recently an article about the beneficial impact of wolves on ecosystems, in part because they hunt deer, and make driving safer for humans. Figuring out how to protect Atlantic Salmon in rivers depends upon "cover species" such as eels and other fish, so that predators don't just focus on salmon. Indigenous tribes support protections for Atlantic salmon in part because they personally benefit from having salmon available as a natural resource they can fish for.
Only in the context of an internet comment section would somebody seriously try to insist that we aren't interrelated in these ways, that we don't have to think about these choices, and expect it to be treated like a respectable position.
You don't minimise suffering by not eating meat. You're maximising your bragging
rights about your superior ethics. What minimises the suffering of farm animals
is... farming. Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd
suffer from disease, parasites and bad weather and they'd be eaten by predators. Each and
every one of them. And most of the time, they'd die while being eaten alive.
At least humans kill our food before we eat it. That is minimising suffering.
Farm animals dont' live miserable lives. Animals in large scale, factory farms are mistreated, but they are still better off than in the wild. The majority of farms in the world are small-sale family farms were animals are treated at least as good as humans:
> Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares, operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35 percent of the world's food, according to a study published in World Development.
If you listen to vegan propaganda you may get the impression that all farming everywhere in the entire world means that animals must be tortured in factory farms, but that's a lie. There is nothing in small-scale farming to make animals' lives miserable.
"If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a hilarious misrepresentation of the cause and effect of how farmed animals come to be, and I assume you know that and are being disingenuous.
"Vegan propaganda" ok Cheese Goddess. These animals not existing is preferable to the hell they endure on factory farms.
> "If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a hilarious
misrepresentation of the cause and effect of how farmed animals come to be, and
I assume you know that and are being disingenuous.
"If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a dirty lie that you
said yourself and I never did. You put it in scare quotes to say that they're my
words, but they're yours and you're the one who's outright lying. So much about
"disingenuous" then.
And I don't support or defend factory farming, quite the contrary. I think it's
a disaster and I'm very upset that it's taking over the world like a cancer
spreading and displacing small-scale farming. And I'm very well aware of its
horrors. It's you, and people who bundle all of farming with factory farming
like you, who are clueless about farming.
Partly this is because the majority of people like you are natives of the
countries that are at the heart of the cancer of factory farming, like the
Americas or North and Western Europe, countries that consume, per capita, about
double the amount of meat as anybody else. People who grew up thinking that
"food" means "meat", who have probably never even seen a farm animal up close,
who have no clue about how their food is made, or what's in it, even when
they're not eating meat. And it's people like you, with strong opinions but weak
knowledge, the people of nations who have destroyed their own food production
and replaced it with an industry that feeds them shit, that want to tell the
rest of the world, all of us other people, how to eat? That's just tragic and so
stupid, and arrogant and conceited.
Btw, my username is because I make cheese and your comment makes you sound like
a puerile idiot.
It’s one thing to prioritize saving children from a burning building but not mice, and another to justify one’s decision to do so based on the neural complexity of children compared to mice. I don’t think killing a mouse is the moral equivalent of killing a child, but that’s me making a value judgment. I don’t need to cite a scientific (objective) criterion for this, such as how many neurons a child has, or whether or not it is conscious or has an ego (if such a thing is even scientific).
Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here (although I don’t feel you’re arguing in bad faith, for the record - I can see how my comments may be taken that way). I don’t believe species ought to be treated equally but rather that we ought to give all species consideration.
It’s curious that this view is considered so extreme by so many, while the treatment we inflict on living beings, which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than the way we treat the billions of mammals currently trapped in the dystopian hell of factory farming.
>It’s one thing to prioritize saving children from a burning building but not mice, and another to justify one’s decision to do so based on the neural complexity of children compared to mice. I don’t think killing a mouse is the moral equivalent of killing a child, but that’s me making a value judgment. I don’t need to cite a scientific (objective) criterion for this, such as how many neurons a child has, or whether or not it is conscious or has an ego (if such a thing is even scientific).
I mean, you certainly can go ahead and declare that that is how it works. Declaring that Its Not About Neurons is most definitely a statement you can make. That's step 1. Steps 2, 3, 4 etc are making arguments in support of that statement, explaining what the alternative basis for making moral judgments is based on, explaining why it's a better system, explaining how its meaningfully different and not just a restatement of what I said but with different words, etc.
You haven't done any of those things though. So this boils down to saying "no! it's not that! It's something else!" If we were using Graham's Argument Hierarchy[0], this would amount to DH3, which is Contradiction. It's one step better than DH2 (responding to tone), but it's one step worse than DH4 which is making a counterargument, which involves stating something else (contradiction) plus a layer of reasoning and/or evidence of some kind. In fact I would say this is barely even a contradiction, because contradiction means stating an alternative and I'm not even sure what the alternative is that you're stating.
>Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here
That was basically being put forward as a definition of speciesm that I was responding to, so I'm not sure how that's a straw man. If you can elaborate on what it means to value species differently but not have it count as speciesm, but not to it based on appealing to any biological information about species, but with something that is still a "moral judgment" differentiating species, I'm all ears. Let me remind you that you were using "deserve to suffer" as your idea of good faith characterization of the view you disagreed with, which is B-movie scifi villian, which to me qualifies it as a straw man.
>which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
>As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than...
These are also beside the point. So the long and short of it is there's not really anything responsive here that I can respond to.
Morality doesn't necessarily require deep intellectualism, I think. Much of the urgency in the vignettes of moral assessment isn't realistic, either.
To say it simply, there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do. There is much about our practices that absolutely reflects an absence of consideration - shouldn't we be working to improve that?
Saying that there is an inverse prioritization is not the matter at hand. We're not even on equal ground. It's just raising the bar for a thankfully growing number of different animals off the floor.
I maybe didn't grok your point of view on speciesism, though - could you try to reframe it?
>Morality doesn't necessarily require deep intellectualism
I don't think that a statement about avoiding pitfalls of anti-intellectualism needs to be read as endorsing the opposite extreme, and I don't making that kind of assumption contributes to constructive conversation.
>To say it simply, there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do.
This response to the burning building example is fascinating and strange to me for a number of reasons. For one I started by providing a simple, clear cut, face value example of a case where doing good means considering how to prioritize wellbeing of different species. And as far as the example itself is concerned, you're just not engaging with it at all, and asking about a different example.
I mean, fair enough, we can get to your chosen example, but I already feel like we're a bit off kilter. If that were not already strange enough, you are saying "there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do." Well, maybe not in your chosen example, but in some other cases there is, quite literally as in the example I just mentioned. And to be clear, it's not just that I want my example to be seen because I think I'm special. It's that if someone says there is no such thing as that proverbial burning burning (e.g. no reason to treat species differently), and I show an example showing exactly that, it would seem important to engage with that example, not just to switch to consideration of other examples.
So I don't know what the disconnect is here. As to your example, well, sure. I think you are right, there is no proverbial burning building requiring harmful farming practices, and in my opinion those should be abolished, as you can argue there is no calculus in which they are neccessary Perfectly true, both in the literal sense, and as a matter of principle that it's a case where you don't have to think of it in terms of tradeoffs. But here again, I am wondering where this is coming from? Do you think "save humans from fire before mice" means ignore harmful farming practices? Where are you getting that?
>Saying that there is an inverse prioritization is not the matter at hand.
Again, very strange to me. I feel like my comments are anchored to reality by the fact that I try to stick closely to responding directly to specific things that someone else said. In this case, the commenter I was replying to was speaking generally about speciesm. I felt this was narrow, and that a more fair characterization about what drives this way of thinking is that it's how to make positive, morally good choices, in contrast to their one-sided view that only talked about it in the negative sense, in terms of inflicting harm.
For some reason, you have come in and decided that me responding directly to that is "not the matter at hand." But again, it very much was, because the subject was speciesm writ large, and I was speaking to that. So I just don't know what you are talking about, at least not without a bit more framing.
> as far as the example itself is concerned, you're just not engaging with it at all
That's because I feel that it's a deliberate mischaracterization of reality and is being used to insulate a false equivalence against criticism.
I'm wondering a bit of the same that you are - when the topic of harmful farming practices is the primary focus, why did we deflect to "well, what about if a building was on fire?" Where are you getting that?
Indulge me - if we substitute the ideology of speciesism here with racism, do you engage with that topic in the same way - by saying "let's not focus so much on the negative reality of racism, but how to help racists make morally good choices"? I think it's fair to lump the abstraction of each together.
My statement about things being "not the matter at hand" were aimed at your conflation of giving animals a higher moral value than humans; that still stands.
>That's because I feel that it's a deliberate mischaracterization of reality
As I already said before and explained at length, it's a hypothetical example intended to illustrate a principle pertinent to the question of speciesm, in direct response to a comment that was about speciesm. I am not sure what "reality" you feel is being mischaracterized by directly speaking to an issue raised by the commenter. I honestly can't make heads or tails of what you are trying to say is being mischaracterized here.
>when the topic of harmful farming practices is the primary focus, why did we deflect to "well, what about if a building was on fire?" Where are you getting that?
There was no "deflection" from one topic to another. "The topic" was not one thing, but a couple of different things that are intertwined: farming that segued into a monolog on speciesm, and I was responding to the latter piece, although my response has implications for both. In direct response to that, I have put forward a hypothetical that illustrates a case that runs contrary to the idea of speciesm as being about creatures "deserving suffering". All I can say is that I am sorry that something that speaks directly to that question confuses you.
I'll repeat my question to you: how did you read "save humans from fire before mice" and take that to mean something along the lines of "therefore, disregard harms of farming practices?"
>your conflation of giving animals a higher moral value than humans; that still stands.
This is pretty incoherent to me. I would love to at least be able to understand and express a disagreement here, but I don't know what conflation you think has occurred.
So yeah, you haven't engaged with the point I've raised despite it being perfectly relevant, and you've expressed surprise, feeling that my point is off topic, which I feel is spurious. And you're saying a few things are being "mischaracterized" or "conflated" and I'm not sure what specifically you are talking about.
Again, I don't think your point was perfectly relevant. I believe that's why multiple people were picking on that particular nit.
I'm sorry I can't better help you understand which things I feel were mischaracterizations or conflated; it seems we're bound to be stuck at some lower levels of disagreement.
At least we can agree on not understanding each other! And, I suppose, that factory farms are a problem. Cheers!
And again, I'm sorry but I find that to be spurious, for reason's I've explained at length. You seem to feel there's too much conceptual distance between the hypothetical about speciesm and a comment about speciesm it was replying to.
So far as I can tell, what you are really objecting to is not my comment but to the idea of communicating through hypothetical examples.
That's why we try to deal with killings in a most humane way possible (basically a bullet to the head for larger animals, and cutting the neck for smaller ones).... not always, not everywhere, but we try, and we point the fingers at those who don't.
"I honestly believe that at some point, the majority of humans will look at our system of factory farming and “harvesting” of wildlife in much the same way that today we view slavery, colonialism and other egregious examples of human disregard for other lives. I am not saying they are the same thing, but I do think that they are in the same category.'
Do you believe that in our current world state we have some magical alternative we could use to feed the near 8 billion human beings that currently inhabit this planet?
We apparently won’t be able to feed 10 billion in the near future. Because using 40% of the worlds landmass to grow plants to feed animals to feed humans is as inefficient as it gets.
If we skipped the animals and ate the crops directly it would be far more efficient in every dimension (calories/area, protein/area, environmental impact)
You're not talking about animals in general though. You're talking about cows. Because every other animal we eat, eats something we can't eat. Sheep and goats eat hay, pigs and chicken eat garbage basically and fish eat ... ocean garbage.
And while it's trut that we can't feed 10 billion people on cows, that's also true for the fewer billions we have today: the most commonly consumed kinds of meat are chicken and pork, not beef. Beef is the most commonly consumed kind of meat in affluent western countries that are also home to the most vocal vegan and animal rights movements, which goes a long way to explain why many of the discussions about what we eat say "meat" when they mean "beef".
This is not at all the same logic that was used to justify slavery, unless you're trying to claim that actually lobsters are people? But it seems like you are just grandstanding and not trying to address the actual point here.
> The fact this is somehow just dawning on modern society is a sad indictment of our blinkered and callous disregard for other species
Well, lobsters eat fish and fish, as any child could explain to you, can experience distress and probably also pain. As far as animals go, both humans and lobsters are quite actually quite nice - there are species out there that poison their prey and eat it alive [0]. So this is not really a "disregard for other species", no more than it's disregard of a fox to eat a deer. Now, of course, by now we could be better than this, I fully agree with you here - but the fact that other species experience pain and distress when ending up as food was basically an universal truth until some very recent human inventions.
[0] I know some humans do that, too, but that's far from the general case.
At this point, I find it remarkable that people use the term “found studies” as anything but self selection. You can prove anything including that the earth is flat and that video footage in the moon landing is fake.
Don’t forget that the ancient alien theory is a phd research with published papers
Ah yes, the theory that since bad papers exist all papers are bad. Reading one study is not the same as reading (and then citing) many studies. Common sense is frequently wrong, for a lot of well-studied reasons.
There's also a large difference between one lone study which finds a thing using dubious methods and a cohort of studies which independently replicate the same results.
There is no shortcut for actually reading and understanding studies if you want to learn what a study does and doesn't show, but discounting science because some history is paper are bad is... tenuous.
Part of the challenge is that must people lack the education to differentiate between a good study and a bad one, so we just throw our hands up in the air and cede to confirmation bias.
I'm picking on your language choices rather than the overall point of your argument, but have you ever boiled a live crustacean before (and by this, I specifically mean fully submerging the animal under water that is under a rolling boil on a high-temperature flame)?
They don't writhe in agony and try to escape; they die pretty much instantaneously (I'm talking no movement in less than 2 seconds) and have no idea what's coming.
Again, this isn't a comment on the sentience or lack thereof of crustaceans, but boiling them alive isn't nearly as cruel as people make it out to be. What we do to pigs, chickens or cows is far worse.
What's done to pigs, chickens, and cows is a terribly low bar to clear. I suppose lighting an ant on fire with a magnifying glass isn't cruel because it happens quickly.
Personally how quickly an innocent being capable of suffering and happiness is killed doesn't factor into whether I call it cruel. Morality might be subjective, but the alternative requires accepting that needless, preventable death and suffering is ethical
The vegan argument is definitely a legitimate one, and not something I was trying to refute.
A lot of meat eaters have these strange ideas about what is and isn't cruel (the classic being "hunting is evil but eating farmed meat is totally OK"), ostensibly based on reducing unnecessary suffering but also completely devoid of hands-on understanding of what actually happens.
I will disagree with you on this point, though:
>innocent being
I've kept yabbies in a tank before as pets. They're absolutely metal creatures and will do things like rip the legs off of live rivals one by one, then slowly tear them apart over the course of hours. I saw one spear a fish wish its claw and pull its guts out too (as if unreeling a spool), just because it could. They're supposed to be herbivorous but damn can they be cold-hearted killers.
(Crabs are far more social, apparently, but I've not seen them interacting before).
As someone who grew up on a small beef farm in the UK but is also very picky about the source of the meat he eats, my personal anecdotal experience is that vegan or meat eater, the problem is that the vast majority of people have never been within 100m of livestock, and have zero comprehension of where their food actually comes from or how it arrives in their nice refrigerated trays.
The cows on my dad's farm probably had a better life than the dogs. There's a definite argument to made that they had a better life than me, and I was from a very happy and loving household. The same could not be said for the large scale conglomerate farm up the road. It's a distinction most people are simply incapable of making, because they just aren't exposed to it.
Quality of life isn't the whole story though. Longevity matters too. When I was a child if someone had asked me "Would you like to live a life of opulent luxury but be killed when you're 20?" I'd have said no.
There is no doubt that a good farm is better than a bad farm, but neither is particularly great if you're a cow.
I think it really depends what the alternative is. If it's that vs living in the wilderness in a small family and no other support against the elements or vicious predators, that's not such as easy decision. Cows don't have a support system, society, government, or social welfare in their non-farm state. They just try to survive the elements and the environment.
That seems like a false dichotomy considering farmers aren't going out and rescuing cows from the wilderness and giving them the roof and food they didn't have on their own. An alternative is to not breed them in the first place.
Yes, farmers do go out and rescue cows (and sheep, and goats, and pigs, and chickens) from the wilderness all the time.
More so, they protect those animals "from the wilderness" every single day. For example, in the farm I stay, we had some ten goats eaten by wild dogs in the last five years. The first time seven goats were attacked when they were alone in their enclosure. Now there's a guardian dog with them. The second time, a goat and her two kids were in another part of the farm, where the dog couldn't guard them and the wild dogs dug under the fence and killed them.
I say "killed", not "ate" because they didn't eat them. They savaged them and let them dying with their guts spilled all over the place.
Btw, what happens if we stop breeding farm animals? What's the plan at that point? Are we going to euthanise them all, release them into the wild to be eaten alive, keep them until they're all extinct? What does it mean to not breed them anymore, in practice?
> Yes, farmers do go out and rescue cows (and sheep, and goats, and pigs, and chickens) from the wilderness all the time.
Really? How many of the 70 billion land animals per year slaughtered for food were rescued from the wilderness, as opposed to bred in captivity?
> Btw, what happens if we stop breeding farm animals? What's the plan at that point [for the ones alive]?
The ones currently alive will be eaten by omnivores. Because we're not going to all switch over to veganism over night. Ideally there would be less demand as people stop buying animal products, so fewer are bred over time and livestock numbers dwindle. All the farm animals currently alive are goners, unfortunately. I'm suggesting stopping the cycle for the future ones.
Btw I hear this argument all the time and it's really silly if you think about it honestly. "If we stop we'd have to euthanize all the farm animals. Better keep doing what we're doing, which is kill them anyway plus countless more each year forever."
> Really? How many of the 70 billion land animals per year slaughtered for food
were rescued from the wilderness, as opposed to bred in captivity?
How should I know? There's no statistics about that kind of thing. And yet it
happens all the time: that's why farm animals have bells around the neck so
that when they wander off and fall into a ravine or get stuck on a tree (goats,
for you) the farmer can find them.
But aren't you moving the goalposts? First you said "farmers aren't going out
and rescuing cows from the wildernes". Now you're asking how many do.
I have to ask, other than the horror youtube videos of vegan propaganda, is
there anything else you know about farming?
> Btw I hear this argument all the time and it's really silly if you think about
it honestly.
So you mean to say I'm either silly, or dishonest? And that's not meant to shut
me up and end conversation with a "win"?
Well I won't beat about the bush as you do. I think what you propose is
demented. You're suggesting that, to avoid killing animals we should genocide
them instead. As if extinction is a better option than living a healthy and
happy life and dying at the end and in a better way than the animal would die
anyway, except it's now humans killing the animal, which seems to be the only
problem with the current status quo.
Hey, I know. Maybe we should genocide all the wild animals also, so that they
stop killing each other in horrible ways and dying half-eaten by something.
It's a rhetorical question, I don't actually care what the number is because it's diminishingly small. Farmers breed their animals, they're not filling the ranks of their livestock by going out and rescuing wild animals. I'm not talking about livestock that wander off the farm.
And you're not silly. I said the argument is silly. We all can make silly arguments from time to time when we don't really think a line of reasoning through or consider what the other person is saying. It wasn't my intention to attack your intelligence or integrity, sorry to have created this unpleasant interaction.
We obviously disagree on how rewarding the "gift of life" is. I know I wouldn't want to be a farm animal, and would prefer not to exist in the first place rather than live their life. With all due respect, I think it's you who doesn't have a clear mental model of farming at scale. You paint farming like it's your uncle's happy farm down the road. That's not how most people are getting their food. That doesn't scale to 70 billion land animals per year.
> Well I won't beat about the bush as you do. I think what you propose is demented. You're suggesting that, to avoid killing animals we should genocide them instead.
They are already being "genocided" though. That's what happens when they slow down their milk or egg production, or reach slaughter weight. I'm suggesting we stop breeding them just to be killed. This results in less killing.
Alright, thank you for your honesty and for making an effort to have a sensible
discussion.
Yes, farmers don't populate their herds with wild animals. I didn't understand
then what you meant by "rescue". Without using the word "rescue" though, it is
the case that humans did take in those animals and protected them and nurtured
and cared for them, when they first domesticated them. Entire subspecies of
animals are living in our care and with our support and don't have to survive on
their own in the wild.
You're wrong that I don't understand the evil of factory farming. It's actually
something that I have very strong opinions about: I believe it is an atrocity
that harms both animals and humans, both physically, mentally and ethically, and
that we will do well as modern societies to eliminate it. I don't believe it's
possible to raise healthy and happy animals at such mad scales. And I'm pretty
sure, though I've never worked in a factory farm (and I never would) that taking
part in that industry stains one's soul forever, at least for those people who
do have a conscience.
I guess I don't have to say that I believe small scale farming is a different
matter. That should be obvious that I think so.
But I also think you're wrong to say that small scale farming is not how most
people are getting their food. It absolutelyl is! I posted this link earlier, in
another thread, as a reply to another comment you made:
> Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares,
operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35
percent of the world's food, according to a study published in World
Development.
Most farming and agriculture in the world _is_ small-scale farming. And while
the food produced in such small scale farms is 35% of all food produced in the
world, that's partly because 2/3s of the world eat much less food than the other
third and it's also true that a third of all the food produced in the world is
thrown out:
And I probably don't have to give you any links to convince you that certain
people in the world eat way, way too much meat (as well as everything else!).
This is particularly true for the people in the Americas and Western Europeans
who eat about twice as much meat as the next people down the line. I believe
this is a matter of production, rather than demand, that the Americans
particlarly eat so much meat just because that's where most of the world's
factory farms are located, and I'm pretty sure we could feed all those
meat-lovers just fine without CAFOs if they could be convinced to at least halve
their meat consumption. I believe so for the reasons I gave above: that most of
the world already does fine without factory farms, most of the world eats a
small fraction of the meat eaten in the Americas and because there is so much
food waste that we could eliminate and that would help us feed everyone.
I think it should be obvious that some parts of the world consume many times
more than they need and many times more than the environment and the economy
even can sustain and that those people really need to slow down. But that's not
true of everyone everywhere in the world. Perhaps we disagree then because we
are looking at things from a different place in the world?
I'm glad we can find common ground about the evils of factory farming. You're right, my perspective comes from America where 99% of animals are factory farmed. I do take less issue with the small scale sort of farming you describe (although personally I still wouldn't consume it, because I think food can be healthy and delicious without it).
My worry is the trend is not going in the right direction. The world is eating more and more meat, the rest of the world adopting the Standard American Diet. This level of consumption can only continue by expanding factory farming. Especially as we add a couple of billion more people over the coming decades and they want to eat meat like the rich countries do. Most people just don't care where their food comes from (not all, I take it you are among the few who do care). So the way I see it, the only way out is for people to really change how they see food and whether we should be eating animals at all. Because they're not going to take the effort to figure out where and how their meat/dairy came to be every time they eat it.
I agree that the trend is in a worrying direction. It's certainly worrying me.
I think though it'd be much harder to convince most people to give up on meat and dairy than it would be to convince them to take responsibility for their food, where it comes from and how it's grown or raised. And I think it's the people who aren't vegans who have to have this discussion. I don't mean that as an attack on vegans, but I don't think that continuing to eat meat, even in a sustainable manner, is something that agrees with vegan ideals. So it's going to have to be meat eaters who change things. Or else things won't change.
I guess I agree that most people take their food for granted. I don't know how that changes. Maybe we need a popular movement of activism from meat eaters :) I guess that sounds like a joke but there's small things like that, like the Slow Food movement. They're just not very popular...
The thing is, crabs and lobsters don't live in buckets naturally.
If you took two wild mammals and forced them to cohabit in a small area it would also very likely end in bloodshed.
Lobsters are known for having seasons in which they migrate. Even sources that say that crabs don't move a lot will describe that lack of movement as "will not exit a one mile area".
The important difference between hunting and farming is that hunting is done for sport and the people killing the animals derive pleasure from killign them. Farmed animals are killed to be eaten and no farmer derives pleasure from killing the animals they raised from babies.
So when people say they ind hunting "evil" but farming not, that's the general idea.
A quick search shows a lot of sites saying it takes about 3 minutes for death, though I don't know what the original source is. But that makes sense to me. I mean, how would boiling water cause instant death? Do you think if you were dunked in boiling water you would instantly die? Granted we don't have the same physiology as lobsters, but, what exactly is the physical mechanism that would cause instant death from 100°C water?
Brains are mostly fat... so it could be the time for enough heat to transfer into the brain for it to melt and all the neurons short out. Getting too hot is way more dangerous for your brain than getting too cold.
Some brains can also rapidly shut down consciousness in response to overwhelming pain, but I suspect that's not relevant for lobsters... getting their limbs torn off and re-growing them is a thing. If a bigger lobster rips your arm off, you'd better remember where it happened and respect their territory.
That's also what I figured does them in but I would think it'd take longer to conduct enough heat to do that. Considering cooking directions are 10+ minutes to cook through.
I find the idea that pain is something profound and not just the reception of a signal strange and based in non-scientific beliefs.
Your CPU has a temperature sensor, does that mean if you hold a flame to it and it can detect its own impending destruction, it deserves protection under the law?
Just because something has sensors somehow makes it our contemporary?
So according to your philosophy; you wouldn't object to being tortured, after all, it's just signals being registered by a biological computer in your head.
That's not their philosophy, it's the opposite of it. Their point is more in line with something like "the ability to sense pain is not related to sentience and is not special", not "if something can sense pain, it is therefore not sentient and is not special".
Billions of years of evolutionary survival instinct would have my body grasping at all straws, releasing chemicals and likely having negative affects on my physiology and mental state for the rest of my life. Clearly that isn’t anything anyone wants.
If I had no memories of the experience, and it had no long term physical affects on me, I would be indifferent, obviously, because I don't know about it.
If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death, other than for those around me. I will have no memory of the incident.
By this logic that no suffering is actionable in any fashion because all who suffer suffer temporarily. This is trivially truth in a nothing actually matters in a long enough run sort of way but not philosophically meaningful.
>> If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death...
Those minutes/hours/days spent experiencing pain do count. You speak as of the after-effects but make it seem that an advantage in living the process itself doesn't count.
That's like saying that we're all going to die anyway and there's no advantage to how we live our lives. So why bother with anything?
What reason do you have to believe otherwise. What does it count towards?
What counts is in missed opportunity. Missed abilities to affect the world around you before you leave. Pain at the very end doesn't alter that much at all.
For all you know, the whole world around you might be a figment of your big and complex imagination, and nothing you do would, in the end, affect it. So what actually matters, (in fact the only thing that matters) is your perception of the world around you (and that includes pain).
If your criteria is sentience and not ability to feel pain, then what are your thoughts on a newborn baby? Or someone with severe brain trauma? Is euthenasia ok for those born with the brain capacity of a cow or lobster? Or are you just being speciesist?
I think that pain is different from suffering. To suffer is to hold an abstract mental model of a world that could be and a world that is and experience discomfort at what is rather than merely processing a pain signal and responding with a reflex action. To suffer requires a modestly complex brain while having a reflexive response to a signal doesn't require any sort of central nervous system at all.
For context some approximations insofar as number of neurons for a rough and imperfect estimate of brain complexity
The apparent divergence of the first 2 entries whereas ants and roaches seem very stupid singly makes one wonder how many neurons exactly are needed to have a complex internal life. One would be hard pressed to imagine the single ant, roach, or bee suffers but the relatively complex behavior of the jumping spider makes it easier to imagine it suffering.
It is however easy to see there is little similarity between lobster and octopus when the latter has 500 x as many brain cells.
I was speaking against reductionism but while we are there, as your examples alude to, counting neurons to determine sentience is like counting GHz to determine computational power.
It's really not. Frequency is nearly meaningless as you can have as many computational elements as you like operating at a given frequency meaning it tells you nearly nothing. It's like counting transistors which actually DOES work even if imperfectly.
But neurons are like compitational elements. There are different sorts with different power. In fact some human neurons have features that no other neurons have.
I didn’t propose criteria, and certainly not those criteria. I don’t see sentience as anything more than highly evolved self preservation software. It’s not magic.
The fact that this is just dawning on modern society is evidence that up until just a few generations ago, people were mainly occupied with not starving to death. Indeed, some ridiculously huge number of people worries about that today as well. The fact that we're able to even contemplate not harming animals is a sign of our enormous privilege.
Does being an “antelope” somehow justify being torn apart and eaten by a lion? Yeah actually, it does because lions eat antelopes and humans eat lobsters. Nature doesn’t owe any being an existence devoid of suffering.
Lions don't boil antelopes alive, nor do they reportedly tear them apart while they're alive, instead they suffocate or sever their necks before eating them [1].
(Note: I had a lobster role for lunch two days ago, and I love them. However, these findings give me pause on eating them further.)
That’s kind of beside the point. I’m sure the process of being killed and eaten by a lion nevertheless causes “pain, distress, and harm”. These things are a part of life.
Yes, but Lions lack - for want of a better term - options, whereas we humans have plenty of options. We decide to boil living creatures alive, their feelings be damned because we like their taste better that way. But that's a very conscious choice to inflict harm. In the court of ethics the Lion was just eating, the human being was inflicting unnecessary pain.
Who decides what's necessary? It's not really "necessary" to eat a lobster at all. Maybe we should just live in mud huts, eating the bare minimum amount of soybeans and rice to keep us just alive. That would inflict the minimal amount of "unnecessary" suffering. But then, why is it even necessary that we should be alive?
All living things suffer at one point or another, whether it was necessary or not. There is no grand cosmic register that tallies up all the suffering and is going to cause something bad to happen if it gets too high. Suffering, in and of itself, is just a subjective experience that exists solely in a mind.
Empathy is that thing which makes suffering exist in your mind when it exists in others. And even among the non-sentient animals, it can extend to other species. The reason why we have to take it further than they do is because we have the mental capacity to construct a self-consistent system of ethics out of it.
We have to take it as far as emphathy combined with reason (which extends our ability to empathize) will take us, precisely because this is the only self-consistent approach other than sociopathy. If you're advocating the latter, then I'll admit that it is also fully self-consistent, and rejecting it is really just an ethical axiom that I subscribe to.
We don't need to live in mud huts, I'm pretty sure houses can be vegan. Also it doesn't need to be all or nothing, we can simply reduce suffering. I don't understand the logic of "we can't eliminate suffering, so might as well maximize suffering by boiling animals to death."
If someone actually cared about reducing suffering, there are far more egregious sources of it in the world that could be addressed. Worrying about lobsters suffering in boiling water for 2 seconds before they die is the plastic straw ban of reducing suffering.
If you don't want to boil lobsters, then don't boil lobsters. Just don't kid yourself into thinking that introducing a ban on it is some kind of great victory for reducing suffering in the world.
This is a fallacy of thinking that many people suffer from: because you are taking care of one bad thing doesn't mean you are immediately responsible for taking all bad things, conversely, that you are not able to take care of all bad things does not mean that you can ignore the one bad thing that you can take care of.
I'm surprised this is so persistent, it seems pretty obvious. If five houses are on fire and you decide to take care of one of them that's fine, even if one or two of the others are bigger and a couple are smaller. At least you're doing something rather than nothing.
It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact.
If five houses are on fire, and you decide to go organize your sock drawer... Hey, you're doing something. An organized sock drawer is surely better than a disorganized one. But you could still be rightly criticized for wasting time on something unimportant when there are bigger problems you could be attending to.
Sure, but 'lobster or no lobster' and 'boiling the lobster alive or not' is an ethical question that stands on its own, there is no need to point out that there are bigger problems than that to be able to arrive at the right answer.
Usually when people make the arguments that you make it is because they are trying to justify something in their lives, not because they are so busy to solve things that are more important. In other words: unless you are working on a plan to solve world hunger/disease/whatever you probably have no excuse to also spend some cycles on the decision of whether you want your food killed in the most cruel way that you can think of or something at least a little bit more humane.
And if you're talking about an individual making a decision to eat a lobster or not, or to kill it by jabbing a knife in its brain instead of boiling it alive sure. The cost of doing one of the other is virtually nothing, so why not do the one that involves less suffering.
But when you're talking about directing government agencies to police an entire country and inspect places to make sure they aren't boiling lobsters alive and levying and collecting fines if they are, now maybe there's something better we could be doing with that effort.
Food and safety inspections as well as animal well-being are already a thing, this would be a minor item added to a list and issuing the edict and making the public aware of it should be enough to curb the bulk of it immediately.
> It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact.
By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives. For every dollar we spend there on helping a single cancer patient etc. we could probably safe dozens of people elsewhere from dying or suffering due to lack of clean water, food, shelter, drugs, ...
So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources?
> 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 plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not.
I'm sure there's an optimal split between keeping prosperous countries prosperous and advancing the current frontiers of human knowledge vs. sending aid to less prosperous countries. I doubt we are at the optimum. I'm also certain the optimum is not "loot absolutely everything from prosperous places and send it to less prosperous ones".
> So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources?
Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it.
> 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 worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not.
And that's exactly the reason why I asked you the follow up question: What is the list of things we should put our resources into then? Because I can guarantee you, that such a list would either lead to chaos, because it can't possibly consider every dependency chain and it wouldn't work with free democracies (like you'd had to forbid parties which care about seemingly less important things), or by the time you or some team of experts found the perfect solution, we could have already solved so many small and big issues.
> Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it.
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.
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?
I mean people care about seemingly unimportant things, people also like to spend their time how they see fit and vote for the stuff they care about and I can't imagine a system where my local town is not allowed to care about the position of a park bench, because there's slavery going on elsewhere or the same town also has a virus outbreak in a school.
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.
> 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.
No, we do the things people think are worth solving. In this case a team of scientists regarded a bill to be inconsistent with modern findings, hence they asked the government to keep up with modern science. The government, which was elected by the people, now did exactly that and made the bill more consistent with science.
And you still don't get it, no matter which problem you think is really important and really worth solving, someone will always be able to think of an even larger problem, which could be solved more efficiently. By this logic you're never going to do anything.
> 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.
So what exactly are you asking for? Should those scientist, not work on the stuff they care about, but something more important instead? Should the government not listen to science? Or should the government not make their bills consistent? Should the government not introduce any bill at all for an issue, when someone can think of an even larger issue and who should that be?
> 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.
What costs does this action have and what would you have the people involved rather be doing?
Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action? Like the number of scientific findings alone, which first no one thought to be of any meaningful use and later revolutionized our lives in so many ways, is endless and none of them would have happened if you simply fund science by the most promising outcome.
> Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action?
And yet, we all must choose at some point to do one thing or another thing. Do you sit at home motionless all day, paralyzed by the inability to do choose the exactly most optimal action? Probably not. You make a choice based on some criteria. Is that criteria “will this make a lobster suffer for two seconds less”? I’m guessing probably not.
First of all I'm wondering where you got the two seconds from? The numbers I find online are usually around 30 seconds or more for a lobster to die in boiling water.
Since I never had to kill a lobster I obviously never had to make that decision. However most of my decisions every day are much less important and don't require much attention, like what movie will I watch that night, what will I eat, how do I name that variable, what album do I listen to next,...
But I had used a similar criteria in the past when I had to do a rather important choice: The way we treat male chicks, like whether it's ok to kill them and how, was among other things one criteria which influenced how I placed my vote (and if I should buy eggs at all and if so, which ones) .
Science is not a measuring contest where you sum up the volume of evidence. On any subject of import, it's equally easy to find 3,000 completely wrong studies as it is to find 10 valuable ones.
It's quite a leap to go from "crabs and lobsters are basically bugs" to "being a bug justify being boiled alive."
No. Please don't boil your arthropods alive. Kill your crabs and lobsters, swiftly, before cooking them. Be thankful for their sacrifice. I promise you it doesn't change the flavor or texture or nutrition.
I don't know about crabs but there's something called "high pressure lobster" where the animal is killed very swiftly through very high pressure soon on the boat. While I am not sure about this is being more humane than throwing it in boiling water (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301843) there's also the question of keeping lobsters alive for a long time all the way from catch through the market while keeping their claws tied etc.
>> the most basic consideration: that they have “the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm”.
Those crabs can dish out some pain with those pincers. They eat their prey alive too. That's not an argument for or against treating them some way, just that they aren't some poor innocent animals either.
They seem innocent to me. They’re very likely not aware of the pain they cause. They don’t weigh up moral dilemmas and discuss them. They also have no ability to choose. They can’t code for a living, can’t play piano and be vegan. They just do what instinct and physical ability does. Evolution chose what they do and they can’t interrogate it.
Experiments could probably be set up to test this but I’m not sure it’s worth it.
Yes, they are in fact innocent: they are of course “free from legal guilt or fault” but it’s the second definition from Merriam-Webster that really sums it up, “free from guilt or sin especially through lack of knowledge of evil”.
I'll go further: there are no poor innocent carnivores or omnivores. All are brutal killers without regard for the suffering of others. Nature is struggle, awful, awful struggle.
I don’t think crustaceans or insects have the capacity to suffer as a result of their extremely simple neurology and behavior. I do think octopus deserve the benefit of the doubt that they might, and if they had longer lifespans and different reproduction behaviors that there’s a good chance there would be octopus civilization.
My philosophy is humans are special because I'm human. Other animals are not the same but I'd rather not hurt them without good reason. I'm not sure it's a rational part of me, I suspect a more instinctual part that doesn't like to see an animal suffer.
Sometimes the good reason to hurt an animal is to eat them.
I've come to peace with hunting for food.
Within the realm of what many people consider “bugs”, intelligence also exists. For example, jumping spiders have intelligence similar to mammals or birds. Research is ongoing with bees and they’re seeming similarly advanced, with some having the capacity to suffer depression.
In all likelihood, there exist insects with reasonably high levels intelligence that we’ve simply overlooked for centuries. Basically everyone today knows crows and octopuses are very intelligent animals, but that definitely was not a common sentiment when I was a kid. But nobody was really paying attention to animals then beyond “pest”, “edible”, “pet”, and “looks cool.”
I really doubt a spider is as smart as me. Perhaps a contrived problem solving test proves a certain kind of spider is good at solving a certain kind of problem, but I really doubt I’d be the same with a brain as complex as a spider.
Of course they aren't comparable to humans, but some spiders are amazingly clever. For example, Portia spiders, which hunt other spiders, will apparently try different ways of manipulating the target's web, observe the target's behavior, and then adapt their manipulations to trick the target.
The link below has a giant picture of a spider, so although it is an adorable Portia, if anyone has arachnophobia they shouldn't click it:
They describe a bunch of different experiments. An interesting one was: the scientists put one type of prey in view of the spider. Then, they blocked view and either swapped they prey with something else, or left it there. Then they revealed the view again. The spiders pay more attention if the prey is a new type, which is interpreted as 'surprise' and an indication that the spider has some mental model of the world.
I mean it is a spider, so bit of a low bar to clear for intelligence, but still interesting that they are thinking about the world.
We tend to measure intelligence by human metrics so of course humans will be the most intelligent at being humans.
Taking spiders for example: humans cant spin spiderwebs for shit while this is a core skill to being a spider. From a spider centric worldview, humans must just be dumb meat factories then.
> The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill already recognises all animals with a backbone (vertebrates) as sentient beings. However, unlike some other invertebrates (animals without a backbone ), decapod crustaceans and cephalopods have complex central nervous systems, one of the key hallmarks of sentience.
It’s not that lobsters are being lumped in with octopuses, it’s that they are both being given the same treatment as anything with a backbone. That’s a pretty diverse group.
I think one is conflating superset/subset privilege granting. Humans, a subset of things with backbones, are given the privilege of describing what is considered something capable of feeling and then extended it to all creatures with a backbone. This does not mean they've extended the privilege of labeling to all things with a backbone, only that they've ascribed a certain label to all things with a backbone. Similarly, humans labeling certain non-backboned creatures in this way does not ascribe those creatures the privilege of being considered human.
Crab and lobster porn isn't really a thing, while Octopoda have a significant, lasting and ancient presence in Japanese lore, James Bond movies and whatnot.
The James Bond character was actually named after a real octopus that Ian Flemming met in Jamaica[1]. Flemming wanted to befriend it, but before he could, it was eaten by his housemaid. (Credit for this knowledge to the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast.)
"Bug," in its most common usage, is a large category that includes spiders, insects, and other arthropods. Crustaceans (which includes pill bugs a.k.a. roly polies) are arthropods.
It's not so black and white. Bug is not a scientific term (well, not in its common usage), so it has blurry boundaries. Some definitions say "insect-like", some say "small arthropod", and so on. Lobsters etc are clearly in the gray area. So "basically bugs" is pretty spot on.... it is similar to bugs in the ways that matter to the conversation.
And it isn't circular or superfluous in that conversation, since the point that they are similar to other arthropods (which we tend to not give a lot of concern to the pain they might experience), is relevant and seemed to have been missed by those passing the law.
That is absolutely not comparable and equates to FUD. In a healthy and normally operating ecosystem hierarchies of animals exist and make sure the ecosystem stays in balance. Yes, there are predators killing octopuses and crabs out there in the wild, but it's not to sell them in underwater restaurants and boutiques for a hefty markup to finance the underwater economy. Every animal that kills other animals, apart from humans, does so either for nutritional or recreational reasons. If it's the latter, it is never out of proportion. You don't see a wolf population completely eliminating a population of [animal in a lower hierarchy], they will reduce their population but never endanger the species themselves. What humans are doing is exactly that: we are killing such huge amounts of different species, tagt we are often enda
Hold it. Apparently, the motivation here is to acknowledge that these animals are somehow sentient; in other words, if any law is passed, it will be to prohibit practices that make these animals suffer. Nothing is said here about depredation of these animals populations. So, IMO, a lobster boiled alive will suffer just as much as a lobster crushed by the jaws of a hungry seal. So, do we need to legally protect them from seals and its horrific hunting practices?
You seem to be conflating two very different issues. Sustainable harvest and humane practices.
Having humane handling laws doesn't do anything to ensure a sustainable fishery. Conversely, having a sustainable fishery doesn't mean that the animals are handled humanely.
Can you be more explicit? What you hint at sounds really interesting.
I think you are suggesting that the Animal Welfare Bill has an intended side effect of tipping the balance of cross channel cooked shellfish trade in favour of the UK?
There's no reason to boil these creatures alive. Insert the knife into one key brain region and it's lights out, no more suffering instantly. Chefs can take 3 seconds to end their life with mercy, or they can throw a living creature into boiling water.
yeah that was surprising but a lot of people in different fields tend to trust what pamphlets say over what an experienced addict has been through until they realize that the addict and them are a long more similar than they are different. regardless, I got into drugs because I had low self esteem thinking it would “open my mind” enough to jar me out of anxiety. what I did not know is that I was treating the symptoms thinking it would solve the underlying issue of getting my stuff together.
If anyone with publically published material has demonstrated that they do everything for a specific purpose, it is Jordan Peterson. His body of work is plenty to demonstrate that he would not do something recklessly or without specific focus and purpose. We desperately want to derive causation from correlation, but that particular approach has created some incredibly negative movement in popular culture and society at large.
The man doesn't need to explain himself to overly left left wing redditors looking to try to take him down a notch or prove him wrong. I only metion redditors as your comment on benzos is the single most popular item to bring up in a discusson about him. His years of work and masses of public statements and appearances get dismissed with a single, ill informed snarky one-liner. The man is a treasure.
I don't really understand what you mean by that. They're completely different families of drugs used to treat different diseases, and have different side effect profiles. Opioids are typically used to treat pain, while Benzodiazepines treat anxiety disorders.
Addictive profiles was my meaning, Benzodiazepines (apparently using the abreviated form is offensive for some) making opiates look like a walk in the park when it comes to addiction.
Additionally there is a large boxy of work for prescribing Benzodiazepines to treat pain, as well as pairing the two for chronic pain, which seems to be an absolute recipie for disaster if used for anything but the shortest periods of time.
My mistake he was hooked on benzodiazepines (lie corrected for you).
Which I have just discovered are like opiates on steroids. I am shocked that as a clinical psychologist, he was unaware that it was such powerful medication.
Benzodiazepines work on entirely different receptors than opioids. They work on GABA receptors which opioida mostly act on mu-opioid receptors. Please do not lie on the internet in order to attack people, it makes you a bad person.
It's used routinely in clinical psychiatry and psychology. And you listen to your psychiatrist, even as a psychiatrist and especially as a psychologist.
Actually yes, when I was at psychiatry clinic the psychiatrist of the day dispensed all medication - including medication for stomach problems. Keep in mind that every medical doctor (including psychiatrists, but not psychologists) is trained in the entire field of medicine; they have specializations but that doesn't mean they can't solve other problems.
I don't like to bring politics to HN but I wonder if the LSE would also agree the same about Jewish people and students? Absolutely terrible conduct from the LSE recently in this regard.
There are a lot of comments asking for vegans to explain themselves and their choices. Vegans are not doing something. If I sit in a chair quietly in a room and another person in the room is running around breaking stuff because “it’s enjoyable” and “the stuff can’t feel any pain” I doubt you’d ask me, the person sitting quietly in their chair, to explain myself. Meat eaters with no concern for animal welfare or environmental concerns need to be doing the explaining.
This isn't a vegan issue. Making it one, along with a smug characterization, doesn't help to convert more people over to your cause.
Mature plants nurse their young, providing carbon to younger plants through a mycelial network[0]. They communicate with each other [1]. They generate compounds in response to pain, and might even have vision demonstrated by vines mimicking plastic plants they were grown on [2].
Give it 50 years until we recognize our cruel treatment of plants. Until then I'd recommend compassion, including for those who have different values and beliefs than you.
If you read the comments you’ll see there is a conversation going on about vegan / non vegan issues. The conversion is happening in the comments. Regardless what the article’s issues are.
You’ve grossly misused the word “nurse”. And “communicate”. Besides I, as a vegan, do not take issue with the taking of life for the purpose of sustaining life. Zero problem with that. That is how nature works. I only take issue with unnecessary pain / cruelty, at global, industrial scales no less.
When people ask me to explain myself for not causing harm or pain or eating a creature when I didn’t have to, over and over and over again, and at the same are indignant if I ask them to explain their reasoning for supporting and participating in industrialized animal raising and slaughter, then yeah I lose patience with the process. It’s not smugness. I just no longer have patience for it.
Like I have no patience for people equating fungi harvesting and the US industrialized beef production system.
You can have different values than me. And most of the time I’d celebrate it. Unless your “values” are used to justify causing pain or harm to other beings or the environment. But if you are employing faulty logic, that’s on you. Faulty logic don’t not “values” make.
