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) .
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.