Category: ethics

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Norms

The selfish and amoral side of human nature and of the human population has an advantage: the advantage of lying over honesty, cheating over fairness, theft over toil, aggression over negotiation.

If these were paired genetic alleles, we’d have to admit that the selfish ones have the edge.

But bullying and rule-breaking is also, by its nature, a minority strategy, because to open an unfair advantage a baseline of fairness has to be the norm.

So cheating must keep waxing and waning — an unstable, unsustainable strategy, whether genetically or socially — because if everyone lies, cheats, steals, bullies, the strategy has no victims left: Its advantage is over innocent victims. So a critical mass of those has to be sustained, otherwise cheating implodes…

…unless there is a way to enslave the victims, as humans have done to nonhuman animals.

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Anna Netrebko: па-де-де

Аннюшка, дорогая, just figure out a way to say that you are against war (who’s for war?) without giving the slightest indication of who started this war, or why. 

“I have taken some time to reflect because I think the situation is too serious to comment on without really giving it thought.

Yes, приятелька. no call for snap judgments when unprovoked bombs are again raining on Ukraine from a nuclear superpower, thrice its size, and people are dying. Just stress that you are a patriot, and apolitical.

“First of all: I am opposed to this war…

And that is of course what you say to твоему приятельнику, Володке, each time you meet…

 “I am Russian and I love my country… 

Very reassuring, and very à propos – when your country is bombing Ukraine…

“…but I have many friends in Ukraine and the pain and suffering right now breaks my heart.

To hear what you are going through breaks my heart…

“ I want this war to end and for people to be able to live in peace. This is what I hope and pray for. 

And what I wanted when I presented 1M rubles to the Russian nationalist leader, draped in the Russian secessionist flag, when my country invaded and annexed Crimea… 


“I want to add one thing, however: forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right. This should be a free choice. Like many of my colleagues, I am not a political person. I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite people across political divides.’

Which was also what I had in mind when I presented 1M rubles to the Russian nationalist leader, draped in the Russian secessionist flag, when my country invaded and annexed Crimea…

To hear what you are having to go through to save your career breaks the whole world’s heart…

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Dale Jamieson on sentience and “agency”

Dale Jamieson’s heart is clearly in the right place, both about protecting sentient organisms and about protecting their insentient environment.

Philosophers call deserving such protection “meriting moral consideration” (by humans, of course).

Dale points out that humans have followed a long circuitous path — from thinking that only humans, with language and intelligence, merit moral consideration, to thinking that all organisms that are sentient (hence can suffer) merit moral consideration.

But he thinks sentience is not a good enough criterion. “Agency” is required too. What is agency? It is being able to do something deliberately, and not just because you were pushed.

But what does it mean to be able to do something deliberately? I think it’s being able to do something because you feel like it rather than because you were pushed (or at least because you feel like you’re doing it because you feel like it). In other words, I think a necessary condition for agency is sentience. 

Thermostats and robots and microbes and plants can be interpreted by humans as “agents,” but whether humans are right in their interpretations depends on facts – facts that, because of the “other-minds problem,” humans can never know for sure: the only one who can know for sure whether a thing feels is the thing itself. 

(Would an insentient entity, one that was only capable of certain autonomous actions — such as running away or defending itself if attacked, but never feeling a thing – merit moral consideration? To me, with the animal kill counter registering grotesque and ever grandescent numbers of human-inflicted horrors on undeniably sentient nonhuman victims every second of every day, worldwide, it is nothing short of grotesque to be theorizing about “insentient agency.”)

Certainty about sentience is not necessary, however. We can’t have certainty about sentience even for our fellow human beings. High probability on all available evidence is good enough. But then the evidence for agency depends on the evidence for sentience. It is not an independent criterion for moral consideration; just further evidence for sentience. Evidence of independent “choice” or “decision-making” or “autonomomy” may count as evidence for “agency,” but without evidence for sentience we are back to thermostats, robots, microbes and plants.

In mind-reading others, human and nonhuman, we do have a little help from Darwinian evolution and from “mirror neurons” in the brain that are active both when we do something and when another organism, human or nonhuman, does the same thing. These are useful for interacting with our predators (and, if we are carnivores, our prey), as well as with our young, kin, and kind (if we are K-selected, altricial species who must care for our young, or social species who must maintain family and tribal relationships lifelong). 

So we need both sentience-detectors and agency-detectors for survival. 

But only sentience is needed for moral consideration.

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Singer/Salatin Debate About Meat Eating

The host of the Munk debate was terrible. Verbose, with silly sallies into “agency” and other trivia.

The farmer, Salatin, was neither intelligent, nor well-informed, nor consistent; he was selling something (non-factory farming), and he justified what he was doing by appeals to superficial, under-informed environmentalism and religion, so he did not do a very convincing job on his end of the debate.

Singer is far more intelligent, has given it all a lot more and deeper thought, yet in the end I think he could have done a better job. He is very phlegmatic, and seemed to be basing his many valid points on a vague ethical premise that “we can and should do better” — that instrumentalism is somehow intrinsically wrong.

It’s not really a debating matter, but an ethical matter. Singer’s analogies with slavery and the subjugation of women are all valid. Supernatural justifications from religion are obviously nonsense (regardless of how many  cling to them). 

What’s needed is a coherent moral criterion, but one that is grounded on what most of us feel is morally right (without appeal to the supernatural).

And I think what most  of us feel is right is that it is wrong to cause suffering unnecessarily. For if that’s not true, then nothing is wrong, and psychopathy rules.

Of course the devil is in the details about what is “necessary”. 

A Darwinian would say that what an animal has to do so it and its young can survive is a biological necessity. A carnivorous predator like a lion has to kill its prey (and much the same is true for its prey, in their vital conflict of life-or-death necessity).

So the point is that in the human evolutionary past the killing and eating of animals may have been biologically necessary for our species. But in much of the world today (except the few remaining hunting/fishing subsistence-cultures) it is no longer necessary (entirely apart from the fact that it is also detrimental to the environment and to human health).

Singer pointed out, again correctly, that the only living organisms that can suffer are the ones that can feel (i.e., the sentient species) and that plants are, on all evidence, not sentient. So Salatin’s point that all life feeds on life is irrelevant (and in fact false in the case of most plants!)

So Singer made all the pertinent points except the all-important one that integrates them: the one about biological necessity.

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Ancestral Imperatives and Contemporary Apéritifs

Yes, our ancestors had to eat meat to survive.

But today we have agriculture and technology, and no longer need to kill and eat animals for our survival and health out of Darwinian necessity.

So we should ask ourselves why we keep doing it:

Do we really believe it’s ok to keep causing needless suffering, just for our pleasure?

(Be careful not to tumble into the “What about?” rebuttals of the anti-vaxers, climate-change deniers and Oath Keepers…)

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Zombies

Just the NYT review
was enough to confirm
the handwriting on the wall
of the firmament 
– at least for one unchained biochemical reaction in the Anthropocene,
in one small speck of the Universe,
for one small speck of a species, 
too big for its breeches.

The inevitable downfall of the egregious upstart 
would seem like fair come-uppance 
were it not for all the collateral damage 
to its countless victims, 
without and within. 

But is there a homology
between biological evolution
and cosmology? 
Is the inevitability of the adaptation of nonhuman life
to human depredations 
— until the eventual devolution
or dissolution
of human DNA —
also a sign that
humankind
is destined to keep re-appearing,
elsewhere in the universe,
along with life itself? 
and all our too-big-for-our breeches
antics?

I wish not.

And I also wish to register a vote
for another mutation, may its tribe increase:
Zombies. 
Insentient organisms. 
I hope they (quickly) supplant
the sentients,
till there is no feeling left,
with no return path,
if such a thing is possible…

But there too, the law of large numbers,
combinatorics,
time without end,
seem stacked against such wishes.

Besides,
sentience
(hence suffering),
the only thing that matters in the universe,
is a solipsistic matter;
the speculations of cosmologists
( like those of ecologists,
metempsychoticists
and utilitarians)
— about cyclic universes,
generations,
incarnations,
populations —
are nothing but sterile,
actuarial
numerology.

It’s all just lone sparrows,
all the way down.

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Fighting the Four Fs

As a vegan activist and an admirer of Veda Stram‘s quarter century of work on behalf of animals, I agree completely with her comment. What humans have been doing to nonhuman animals — and not out of life/death Darwinian necessity for survival or health, but only for the four Fs: Flavour, Fashion, Finance and Fun — is monstrous and getting worse with time.

But, as Veda stresses in her guidance to activists, there are many different strategies for trying to inspire people to stop hurting — or contributing to hurting — animals. If we knew for sure which strategy works, or works best, we’d flock to doing it. But we don’t know. So we have to go by the little available evidence, and our own feelings.

I too feel disgusted — in fact, worse, outraged: enraged, and wishing I could make the human race vanish instantly — when I contemplate the unspeakable horrors we are inflicting on countless victims every second of every day, gratuitously, just for the four Fs.

But then I turn my thoughts away from the perpetrators to the victims, and ask myself what good my feelings of impotent rage — or their expression — can do the victims: Can I shame people into renouncing the four Fs and going vegan? Some, perhaps. But the little evidence we have about the effects of different strategies suggests that trying to shame people far more often inspires resentment and rejection rather than empathy and reform.

Another strategy about which it’s hard to imagine that it would inspire people to reform is to state that people are incorrigible. Even if we believe that people are incorrigible, it’s best not to say it, lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy, discouraging activists and emboldening the practitioners of the four Fs to dig in even deeper into their ways.

This was the reason I suggested feigning optimism even if we don’t feel it: Not to pretend the horrors are not horrors — monstrous, impardonable horrors — but to keep alive the only hope there is for the victims: that humanity can change for the better, as it has done in the past with slavery, racism, sexism and a lot of other wrongs we’ve done and have since rejected, despite the fact that they too were driven by three of the four Fs.

Not only do I recommend assuming that humans are corrigible as a strategy, I actually believe it is true that people’s hearts can be opened.

I’d like to close by mentioning another sad fact that animal activists are alas all familiar with too: the tendency of activists to turn on one another. On the one hand, it’s completely understandable: The vast majority of people are perpetrators — because of the four Fs — of the animal agony we are fighting to end. Vegan activists are a tiny minority, and we all have daily experience of having to face the apathy or active antipathy of the perpetrators, starting often with our own family and our friends. This gives rise to a lot of frustration, disappointment, and, yes, sometimes an adversarial defensiveness, a sense that the world, inhumane and hostile, is against animals — and us.

This adversarial feeling has to be resisted, again mainly because it does no good for the animal victims, rather the opposite — but especially when it overflows into defensiveness even toward fellow vegan-activists whose strategy may diverge slightly from our own, or even just appears to. We sometimes feel we’re yet again facing that same majority mentality, the mentality of the exploiters and the condoners, even when it is not there, and it’s just one of us.

.

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Consciousness: The F-words vs. the S-words

“Sentient” is the right word for “conscious.”. It means being able to feel anything at all – whether positive, negative or neutral, faint or flagrant, sensory or semantic. 

For ethics, it’s the negative feelings that matter. But determining whether an organism feels anything at all (the other-minds problem) is hard enough without trying to speculate about whether there exit species that can only feel neutral (“unvalenced”) feelings. (I doubt that +/-/= feelings evolved separately, although their valence-weighting is no doubt functionally dissociable, as in the Melzack/Wall gate-control theory of pain.)

The word “sense” in English is ambiguous, because it can mean both felt sensing and unfelt “sensing,” as in an electronic device like a sensor, or a mechanical one, like a thermometer or a thermostat, or even a biological sensor, like an in-vitro retinal cone cell, which, like photosensitive film, senses and reacts to light, but does not feel a thing (though the brain it connects to might).

To the best of our knowledge so far, the phototropisms, thermotropisms and hydrotropisms of plants, even the ones that can be modulated by their history, are all like that too: sensing and reacting without feeling, as in homeostatic systems or servomechanisms.

Feel/feeling/felt would be fine for replacing all the ambiguous s-words (sense, sensor, sensation…) and dispelling their ambiguities. 

(Although “feeling” is somewhat biased toward emotion (i.e., +/- “feelings”), it is the right descriptor for neutral feelings too, like warmth,  movement, or touch, which only become +/- at extreme intensities.) 

The only thing the f-words lack is a generic noun for “having the capacity too feel” as a counterpart for the noun sentience itself (and its referent). (As usual, German has a candidate: Gefühlsfähigkeit.)

And all this, without having to use the weasel-word “conscious/consciousness,” for which the f-words are a healthy antidote, to keep us honest, and coherent…

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Drawing the line on human vital necessities

Karen Davis is a wonderful, tireless, passionate and invaluable advocate and protectress for animals. I share almost every one of the feelings she expresses in her comment that Marc Bekoff posted. 

But, for strategic reasons, and for the sake of the victims that we are all committed to rescuing from their terrible fates, I beg Karen to try to pretend to be more optimistic. I will explain

Karen Davis, UPC: Every single objection to the experimental use of animals – vivisection, genetic engineering, etc. – has been ignored and overridden by the scientific industry

This is true, except that there is no “scientific industry”: there is industry and there is science, and some scientists sometimes collaborate or even collude with industry. But scientists are more likely to be persuaded by evidence and ethics than are industrialists.

KD: …and this is not going to change no matter how morally obnoxious, heartless and cruel to the members of other species.

That there is a monumental, monstrous, and unpardonable amount of human moral obdurateness, heartlessness and cruelty toward other species is patently and tragically and undeniably true.

But that “this is not going to change” is just an (understandably bitter) hypothesis based on countless years of unremitting (and increasing) suffering inflicted on other species by humans.

The hypothesis may or may not be true. 

So I think we should not proclaim the hypothesis as if it were true – as true as the fact of human-inflicted suffering itself. The hypothesis cannot help the victims, for their only hope is that the hypothesis is false. And if the hypothesis is false, proclaiming it is true can harm the victims by promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy that could discourage activism as futile.

KD: The majority of human beings are completely speciesist and regard (other) animals as inferior to ourselves and fit to be exploited for human “benefit” including mere curiosity. 

This is alas numerically true. But it does not follow that the hearts of the majority cannot be reached, and opened. There are many historical precedents for this in wrongs that humans have inflicted on humans (colonialism, feudalism, slavery, bondage, genocide, warfare, torture, rape, subjugation of women, infanticide, racism). It cannot be said that these wrongs have been eradicated, but they have been outlawed in the democratic parts of the world. Nor can it be said that the majority of human beings either practices or condones them.

It is still legal, however, to do all these things (colonialism, feudalism, slavery, bondage, genocide, warfare, torture, rape, subjugation of females, infanticide, racism) to other species. And it is true that the vast majority of human beings either do some of these things or consume their products. But there is evidence also that in the global information era we are becoming increasingly aware and appalled at these practices, and condoning them less and less. It is toward this awakening that activism is having a growing effect.

KD: The majority of human beings… regard (other) animals as… fit to be exploited for human “benefit” including mere curiosity. 

True, but here (in my opinion) is the conflation that we activists should avoid at all costs:

With the vast majority of humanity still supporting the bondage and slaughter of animals, despite the total absence (in most parts of the world) of any necessity for human health and survival (-H), just for taste, fashion and fun, this should never be conflated with life-saving biomedical measures (+H).

People still demanding bondage and slaughter for -H uses certainly won’t renounce it for +H uses. Conflating the two can only strengthen the resistance to renouncing either. The call to renounce +H can only expect a serious and sympathetic hearing once -H has been renounced (or is at least far closer to being renounced than it is today). 

(This is not at all to deny that much of biomedical research on animals, too, is -H, as Kathrin Herrmann and many others are showing, should be exposed by activists as such, and should be abolished. But any implication that it was wrong to try to save the life of this dying man is not going to encourage people to renounce -H. I believe it would be more helpful to use it to draw the -H/+H distinction, and to point out that -H — unlike +H — has no moral justification at all.) 

KD: Among the latest animal-abuse crazes is the factory-farming of octopuses. Of course! We just HAVE TO BE ABLE TO EAT THESE ANIMALS! 

Of course eating octopuses (“sea food”), whether factory-farmed or “naturally” harvested and slaughtered, falls squarely under -H use, alongside the use and slaughter (whether factory-farmed, “traditionally” farmed, or hunted) of whales, seals, fish, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, pigs, cows, calves, sheep, goats, lobsters, crabs, shrimp, mussels… any sentient species that is not necessary for human +H.

KD: The human nightmare is too overwhelming and it cannot be stopped although those of us who care about animals and object to how viciously we treat them must continue to raise our voices.

Yes, let’s continue our activism on all fronts to protect the tragic victims from our anthropogenic horrors, but, please, for the sake of present and future victims, no matter how frustrated and impatient (and angry) we feel that the horrors keep persisting, let us not proclaim the hypothesis that they are “too overwhelming and cannot be stopped.”