On my second reread, I figured out what was supposed to be going on in the events, if not the meaning of the story. But while I considered factory farming as one possibility for the thing it was supposed to be equivalent to, I felt the analogy whiff, and so decided it probably wasn’t what you intended.
The reason is, the story depends on your initial belief that animal suffering (specifically the suffering of chickens) is fundamentally important. But what it’s trying to convince you of is that animal suffering is fundamentally important. So it’s a closed loop. If you aren’t a vegetarian and are a consequentialist (hi), it’s saying “you know the thing you know a little about and don’t really like, but don’t have strong enough opinions about to change your behavior over? What if we had more of that, and less of lots of other things you DO feel strongly are bad?” My general attitude isn’t that the narrator is wrong, it’s that people don’t talk like he does. He’s talking as if he has some kind of dark and terrible secret to hide, but the secret is only dark and terrible if you start out believing he’s wrong, and then his secret isn’t dark and terrible, because he’s admitting it openly, so it isn’t a secret.
I feel as if, in order to write a story to make someone emotionally feel the importance of vegetarianism, you would need to say “X, which you already condemn is morally equivalent to eating meat” in such manner that people who read it actually agreed with you that X was morally equivalent to eating meat and that since they condemn X, they should stop eating meat, without instead having them say “But X isn’t equivalent at all!” or—the trap I found this story to fall into—“why should I care about X?”
Because, conditional on chickens not haveing qualia, I don’t care if they do have fear. The evil done in the story could be evil if we are supposed to believe that the fact that chickens do have fear proves they do have qualia, but I didn’t get that idea from anywhere—so we’re back to the closed loop, where you need to be a vegetarian to be convinced by the story of vegetarianism.
I feel like eating meat but not being willing to torture animals is the best and most common example of facilitating evil that you wouldn’t directly perform purely because of your distance from it.
Probably the most famous example of this is illustrated by Peter Singer:
To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.
I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child?
Now, you can bite the bullet and say “Oh, a Nigerian child? No way, their lives are valueless!” And indeed, Peter doesn’t have an answer for that. But most people don’t give that answer, rather they gesture at distance, uncertainty, and the fact that the task is seemingly intractable. By removing that distance we make the dilemma salient.
In short, this isn’t directed at people who are certain that chickens (or Nigerians) don’t have moral worth. It’s aimed at the majority that would never torture an animal but gladly feast on tortured animals.
I mean, I see these as totally different things (preventing suffering in Nigeria—well, and other third-world countries—is why I’m here), but that’s probably moving outside the question as posed. I wouldn’t be willing to be a butcher, but that’s squeamishness, not a moral decision; I wouldn’t want to be a plumber, either.
But… actually no I think I’m going to move my actual advice to the ‘do you have recommendations’ thread just above. See you there!
On my second reread, I figured out what was supposed to be going on in the events, if not the meaning of the story. But while I considered factory farming as one possibility for the thing it was supposed to be equivalent to, I felt the analogy whiff, and so decided it probably wasn’t what you intended.
The reason is, the story depends on your initial belief that animal suffering (specifically the suffering of chickens) is fundamentally important. But what it’s trying to convince you of is that animal suffering is fundamentally important. So it’s a closed loop. If you aren’t a vegetarian and are a consequentialist (hi), it’s saying “you know the thing you know a little about and don’t really like, but don’t have strong enough opinions about to change your behavior over? What if we had more of that, and less of lots of other things you DO feel strongly are bad?” My general attitude isn’t that the narrator is wrong, it’s that people don’t talk like he does. He’s talking as if he has some kind of dark and terrible secret to hide, but the secret is only dark and terrible if you start out believing he’s wrong, and then his secret isn’t dark and terrible, because he’s admitting it openly, so it isn’t a secret.
I feel as if, in order to write a story to make someone emotionally feel the importance of vegetarianism, you would need to say “X, which you already condemn is morally equivalent to eating meat” in such manner that people who read it actually agreed with you that X was morally equivalent to eating meat and that since they condemn X, they should stop eating meat, without instead having them say “But X isn’t equivalent at all!” or—the trap I found this story to fall into—“why should I care about X?”
Because, conditional on chickens not haveing qualia, I don’t care if they do have fear. The evil done in the story could be evil if we are supposed to believe that the fact that chickens do have fear proves they do have qualia, but I didn’t get that idea from anywhere—so we’re back to the closed loop, where you need to be a vegetarian to be convinced by the story of vegetarianism.
I feel like eating meat but not being willing to torture animals is the best and most common example of facilitating evil that you wouldn’t directly perform purely because of your distance from it.
Probably the most famous example of this is illustrated by Peter Singer:
Now, you can bite the bullet and say “Oh, a Nigerian child? No way, their lives are valueless!” And indeed, Peter doesn’t have an answer for that. But most people don’t give that answer, rather they gesture at distance, uncertainty, and the fact that the task is seemingly intractable. By removing that distance we make the dilemma salient.
In short, this isn’t directed at people who are certain that chickens (or Nigerians) don’t have moral worth. It’s aimed at the majority that would never torture an animal but gladly feast on tortured animals.
I mean, I see these as totally different things (preventing suffering in Nigeria—well, and other third-world countries—is why I’m here), but that’s probably moving outside the question as posed. I wouldn’t be willing to be a butcher, but that’s squeamishness, not a moral decision; I wouldn’t want to be a plumber, either.
But… actually no I think I’m going to move my actual advice to the ‘do you have recommendations’ thread just above. See you there!