Realistically, I might eat the humans in this thought experiment, if this were as widely accepted as eating pigs and I’d been raised with the custom.
I’m sure you would, but this isn’t actually relevant. The point is that from your current standpoint—where you haven’t been raised to think eating humans is OK—you think the act is beyond the pale. This implies that when you are thinking clearly and without bias, you think eating other sentient beings is abhorrent. This in turn implies the only reason you eat meat now is that you’re not thinking clearly and without bias!
I don’t think eating human flesh is beyond the pale or abhorrent. Eating human flesh that was produced with, say, 10 hours of suffering seems basically morally equivalent to eating flesh from humans who consent and are treated well, plus buying clothes that took 10 hours of slave labor to produce. And doing these separately seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career. Current-me just wouldn’t do the first one because it’s disgusting and becomes more disgusting when associated with suffering.
It seems like there’s a taboo on eating human flesh, and also a harm, and the argument is conflating the disgust response from the taboo with the immorality of the harm. Disgust should not always be extended to general moral principles!
″...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.”
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the “positive” bin than the “negative” bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said “It’s annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and it’s easier for me, so I’ll just do that.”?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isn’t the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, it’s the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor
Is this true? I have heard the claim ‘there is more slavery going on than at any point in history’, but know very little about this and how it’s defined. I would guess it’s hard for me to avoid this if I’m going to a normal clothing store.
All my thought experiment is designed to do is to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. If we feel differently about the two that is likely to be due to various biases that are not morally relevant.
This might cause some people to rethink eating animals, as they wouldn’t eat the humans. If you would eat the humans however then this thought experiment is unlikely to have an affect on you—I wasn’t intending for this thought experiment to be relevant to everyone anyway.
On a consequentialist morality, feelings of moral outrage, horror or disgust are not what matters. (Instead, what matters on it is how to allocate attention/willpower/dedication to reduce the most suffering given one’s psychology, opportunity costs, etc.) In the original post, you say “These are just biases though, and all they show is that we don’t react badly enough to animal farming.” Consequentialist morality doesn’t have a concept for “reacting appropriately.” (This is why, in Thomas Kwa’s answer, he talks about what he’d do conditional on having a disgust response vs. what he’d do without the disgust response. Because the animal suffering in question isn’t quite bad enough to compete with alternative ways of using attention or willpower, going vegan isn’t thought to be worth it under all social and psychological circumstances – e.g., it isn’t thought to be worth it if it’s costly convenience-wise and/or health-wise, if there’s no disgust reaction, and if the social environment tolerates it.)
Since you’re primarily addressing consequentialists here, I recommend explaining why “reacting badly enough”/”reacting appropriately to moral horrors” is an important tenet of the morality that should matter to us (important enough that it can compete with things like optimizing one’s impact-oriented career).
Without those missing arguments, I think it’ll seem to people like you’re operating under some rigid framework and can’t understand it when other people don’t share your assumptions (prompting downvotes).
For what it’s worth, I do feel the force of your intuition pump (though I doubt it’s new to most people) and I think it’s true that consequentialist morality is uncanny here, and maybe that speaks in favor of going (more) vegan. Personally, I’ve been vegan in the past but currently at the stage where I mostly buy the consequentialist arguments against it (provided I am really trying to reduce a lot of suffering), but still feel like there’s some dissonance/a feeling like I’m doing something I don’t want to do. I don’t really endorse that on reflection, but the feeling doesn’t go away, either.
Consequentialist morality doesn’t have a concept for “reacting appropriately.”
My understanding is that it does have such a concept in that we should react similarly to different acts that are equally good/bad to each other in terms of their consequences. My thought experiment was simply designed to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. So however you react to one (whether it be with indifference, moral disgust causing you to abstain, or moral disgust that doesn’t cause you to abstain) you should react in the same way to the other. If one has the thought “eating the humans is beyond the pale” one should think “eating the animals is beyond the pale”.
It’s similar in flavour to Singer’s drowning child thought experiment—he draws parallels between walking past a drowning child and not donating to help those in severe poverty. If you think to yourself “I would save the child”, then you should probably donate more. If you think to yourself “I would walk past the child but would feel extreme guilt” then you should probably feel that same guilt not donating. Does that make sense?
My understanding is that it does have such a concept in that we should react similarly to different acts that are equally good/bad to each other in terms of their consequences.
This is only the case in an “all else equal” situation! It is very much not the case when changing one’s reactive attitudes comes at some cost and where that cost competes with other, bigger opportunities to do good.
It’s similar in flavour to Singer’s drowning child thought experiment—he draws parallels between walking past a drowning child and not donating to help those in severe poverty. If you think to yourself “I would save the child”, then you should probably donate more. If you think to yourself “I would walk past the child but would feel extreme guilt” then you should probably feel that same guilt not donating. Does that make sense?
Same reply here: Singer’s thought experiment only works in an “all else equal” situation. Depending on their circumstances, maybe someone should do EA direct work and not donate at all. Or maybe donate somewhere other than poverty reduction.
Yes. Isn’t it true that people who go vegan at one point in their life revert back to eating animal products? I remember this was the case based on data discussed in 2014 or so, when I last looked into it. Is it any different now? Those findings would strongly suggests that veganism isn’t cost-free. Since the way you ask makes me think you believe the costs to be low, consider the possibility that you’re committing the typical mind fallacy. (Similar to how a naturally skinny person might say “I don’t understand obese people; isn’t it easy to eat healthy.” Well, no, most Americans are overweight and probably not thrilled about it, so if they could change it at low cost, they would. So, for some people, it’ isn’t easy to stay skinny.)
Maybe we disagree on what to count as “low costs.” If their lives depended on it, I’d say almost everyone would be capable of going vegan. However, many people prefer prison to suicide, but that doesn’t mean it’s “low cost” to go to prison. Maybe you’re thinking the cost of going vegan is low compared to the suffering at stake for animals. And I basically agree with that – the suffering is horrible and our culinary pleasures or potential health benefits appear trivial by comparison. However, this applies only if we think about it as a direct comparison in an “all else equal” situation. If you compare the animal suffering you can reduce via personal veganism vs. the good you can do from focusing your daily work on having the biggest positive impact, it’s often the suffering from your food consumption that pales in comparison (though it may depend on a person’s situation). People have made estimates of this (e.g., here)! Again, the previous point relates to the same disagreement we discussed in the comment thread above. If someone does important altruistic work, everything that increases their productivity or priorization by 1% is vastly more important than going vegan. You might say, “Okay, but why not go vegan in addition to those things?” Sure, that would be the ideal, in theory. But in practice, there are dozens of things that a person isn’t currently doing that could improve their productivity or prioritization by 1%, and those 1%-improvements would be a bigger deal in terms of reducing suffering (or doing good in other ways). So, unless one first implements all those other things, it doesn’t make sense, on consequentialist morality, to prioritize personal veganism.
I admit I’m getting confused. I think you’ve moved into arguing that going vegan has low relative value or may not even make sense for a maximising consequentialist. In my thought experiment I was trying to be agnostic on these points and simply draw a parallel between eating mentally-challenged humans and animals.
If you want to say that going vegan doesn’t make consequentialist sense for ‘reason X’ that is fine. I’m just saying that you then also have to say “if I imagine myself in a world where it is mentally-challenged humans instead of animals, I would not stop eating the humans for the same reason X”. If you can say and mean this sentence (I expect many people can) then this thought experiment should not have an affect on your choices. To clarify I don’t really judge such people—they would be acting in a morally-consistent way which I think is one of the most important things in ethics.
I’m just saying that you then also have to say “if I imagine myself in a world where it is mentally-challenged humans instead of animals, I would not stop eating the humans for the same reason X.”
I agree with that. Some of your earlier comments seemed like they were setting up a slightly different argument.
Someone can have the following position: (1) They would continue to eat humans in the thought experiment world where one’s psychological dispositions treat it as not a big deal (e.g., because it’s normalized in that world and has become a habit) (2) They wouldn’t eat humans in the thought experiment world if they retained their psychological dispositions / reactive attitudes from the actual world – in that case, they’d finds the scenario abhorrent (3) When they think about (1) and (2), they don’t feel compelled to modify their dispositions / reactive attitudes toward not eating non-human animals (because of opportunity costs and because consequentialism doesn’t have the concept of “appropriate reactions” – or, at least, the consequentialist concept for “appropriate reactions” is more nuanced)
I think you were arguing against (3) at one point, while I and other commenters were arguing in favor of (3).
I’m sure you would, but this isn’t actually relevant. The point is that from your current standpoint—where you haven’t been raised to think eating humans is OK—you think the act is beyond the pale. This implies that when you are thinking clearly and without bias, you think eating other sentient beings is abhorrent. This in turn implies the only reason you eat meat now is that you’re not thinking clearly and without bias!
I don’t think eating human flesh is beyond the pale or abhorrent. Eating human flesh that was produced with, say, 10 hours of suffering seems basically morally equivalent to eating flesh from humans who consent and are treated well, plus buying clothes that took 10 hours of slave labor to produce. And doing these separately seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career. Current-me just wouldn’t do the first one because it’s disgusting and becomes more disgusting when associated with suffering.
It seems like there’s a taboo on eating human flesh, and also a harm, and the argument is conflating the disgust response from the taboo with the immorality of the harm. Disgust should not always be extended to general moral principles!
″...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.”
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the “positive” bin than the “negative” bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said “It’s annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and it’s easier for me, so I’ll just do that.”?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isn’t the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, it’s the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Is this true? I have heard the claim ‘there is more slavery going on than at any point in history’, but know very little about this and how it’s defined. I would guess it’s hard for me to avoid this if I’m going to a normal clothing store.
All my thought experiment is designed to do is to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. If we feel differently about the two that is likely to be due to various biases that are not morally relevant.
This might cause some people to rethink eating animals, as they wouldn’t eat the humans. If you would eat the humans however then this thought experiment is unlikely to have an affect on you—I wasn’t intending for this thought experiment to be relevant to everyone anyway.
Yikes, not a good lead/look!
On a consequentialist morality, feelings of moral outrage, horror or disgust are not what matters. (Instead, what matters on it is how to allocate attention/willpower/dedication to reduce the most suffering given one’s psychology, opportunity costs, etc.) In the original post, you say “These are just biases though, and all they show is that we don’t react badly enough to animal farming.” Consequentialist morality doesn’t have a concept for “reacting appropriately.” (This is why, in Thomas Kwa’s answer, he talks about what he’d do conditional on having a disgust response vs. what he’d do without the disgust response. Because the animal suffering in question isn’t quite bad enough to compete with alternative ways of using attention or willpower, going vegan isn’t thought to be worth it under all social and psychological circumstances – e.g., it isn’t thought to be worth it if it’s costly convenience-wise and/or health-wise, if there’s no disgust reaction, and if the social environment tolerates it.)
Since you’re primarily addressing consequentialists here, I recommend explaining why “reacting badly enough”/”reacting appropriately to moral horrors” is an important tenet of the morality that should matter to us (important enough that it can compete with things like optimizing one’s impact-oriented career).
Without those missing arguments, I think it’ll seem to people like you’re operating under some rigid framework and can’t understand it when other people don’t share your assumptions (prompting downvotes).
For what it’s worth, I do feel the force of your intuition pump (though I doubt it’s new to most people) and I think it’s true that consequentialist morality is uncanny here, and maybe that speaks in favor of going (more) vegan. Personally, I’ve been vegan in the past but currently at the stage where I mostly buy the consequentialist arguments against it (provided I am really trying to reduce a lot of suffering), but still feel like there’s some dissonance/a feeling like I’m doing something I don’t want to do. I don’t really endorse that on reflection, but the feeling doesn’t go away, either.
My understanding is that it does have such a concept in that we should react similarly to different acts that are equally good/bad to each other in terms of their consequences. My thought experiment was simply designed to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. So however you react to one (whether it be with indifference, moral disgust causing you to abstain, or moral disgust that doesn’t cause you to abstain) you should react in the same way to the other. If one has the thought “eating the humans is beyond the pale” one should think “eating the animals is beyond the pale”.
It’s similar in flavour to Singer’s drowning child thought experiment—he draws parallels between walking past a drowning child and not donating to help those in severe poverty. If you think to yourself “I would save the child”, then you should probably donate more. If you think to yourself “I would walk past the child but would feel extreme guilt” then you should probably feel that same guilt not donating. Does that make sense?
This is only the case in an “all else equal” situation! It is very much not the case when changing one’s reactive attitudes comes at some cost and where that cost competes with other, bigger opportunities to do good.
Same reply here: Singer’s thought experiment only works in an “all else equal” situation. Depending on their circumstances, maybe someone should do EA direct work and not donate at all. Or maybe donate somewhere other than poverty reduction.
I’m not sure what the cost of changing one’s reactive attitude is. Do you mean the cost of going vegan? If so what do you see as the main costs?
Yes. Isn’t it true that people who go vegan at one point in their life revert back to eating animal products? I remember this was the case based on data discussed in 2014 or so, when I last looked into it. Is it any different now? Those findings would strongly suggests that veganism isn’t cost-free. Since the way you ask makes me think you believe the costs to be low, consider the possibility that you’re committing the typical mind fallacy. (Similar to how a naturally skinny person might say “I don’t understand obese people; isn’t it easy to eat healthy.” Well, no, most Americans are overweight and probably not thrilled about it, so if they could change it at low cost, they would. So, for some people, it’ isn’t easy to stay skinny.)
Maybe we disagree on what to count as “low costs.” If their lives depended on it, I’d say almost everyone would be capable of going vegan. However, many people prefer prison to suicide, but that doesn’t mean it’s “low cost” to go to prison. Maybe you’re thinking the cost of going vegan is low compared to the suffering at stake for animals. And I basically agree with that – the suffering is horrible and our culinary pleasures or potential health benefits appear trivial by comparison. However, this applies only if we think about it as a direct comparison in an “all else equal” situation. If you compare the animal suffering you can reduce via personal veganism vs. the good you can do from focusing your daily work on having the biggest positive impact, it’s often the suffering from your food consumption that pales in comparison (though it may depend on a person’s situation). People have made estimates of this (e.g., here)! Again, the previous point relates to the same disagreement we discussed in the comment thread above. If someone does important altruistic work, everything that increases their productivity or priorization by 1% is vastly more important than going vegan. You might say, “Okay, but why not go vegan in addition to those things?” Sure, that would be the ideal, in theory. But in practice, there are dozens of things that a person isn’t currently doing that could improve their productivity or prioritization by 1%, and those 1%-improvements would be a bigger deal in terms of reducing suffering (or doing good in other ways). So, unless one first implements all those other things, it doesn’t make sense, on consequentialist morality, to prioritize personal veganism.
I admit I’m getting confused. I think you’ve moved into arguing that going vegan has low relative value or may not even make sense for a maximising consequentialist. In my thought experiment I was trying to be agnostic on these points and simply draw a parallel between eating mentally-challenged humans and animals.
If you want to say that going vegan doesn’t make consequentialist sense for ‘reason X’ that is fine. I’m just saying that you then also have to say “if I imagine myself in a world where it is mentally-challenged humans instead of animals, I would not stop eating the humans for the same reason X”. If you can say and mean this sentence (I expect many people can) then this thought experiment should not have an affect on your choices. To clarify I don’t really judge such people—they would be acting in a morally-consistent way which I think is one of the most important things in ethics.
I agree with that. Some of your earlier comments seemed like they were setting up a slightly different argument.
Someone can have the following position:
(1) They would continue to eat humans in the thought experiment world where one’s psychological dispositions treat it as not a big deal (e.g., because it’s normalized in that world and has become a habit)
(2) They wouldn’t eat humans in the thought experiment world if they retained their psychological dispositions / reactive attitudes from the actual world – in that case, they’d finds the scenario abhorrent
(3) When they think about (1) and (2), they don’t feel compelled to modify their dispositions / reactive attitudes toward not eating non-human animals (because of opportunity costs and because consequentialism doesn’t have the concept of “appropriate reactions” – or, at least, the consequentialist concept for “appropriate reactions” is more nuanced)
I think you were arguing against (3) at one point, while I and other commenters were arguing in favor of (3).