I am not a vegan, but his consciousness cone is something I seem to bring up frequently with people. Usually by the end of the conversation I don't quite know why I'm not vegan aside from habit. Last time I brought it up I was eating sushi and talking about how I had decided to quit eating cephalopods because they might be smarter than humans... But then ate pork belly and just didn't really know what I stood for anymore. Pigs don't have a complex skin pattern language, but they are smarter than my cats who I would never eat. Other people's cats might be smarter than a pig, mine are pretty dumb.
I need to double down on meal planning and just really quit it.
I think he’s simply saying that a subset are not able to even understand that there is a choice to be made, and that the logic then would be that you can eat people from that subset.
Yeah, but I'm a weird thing that has to do very little to get food. A lot of time my meals come from a car window. I don't quite live the same oceanic experience that a pack of humboldt squid get to traverse. I guess the place that I get to with it is that I have a choice and that is a unique privilage. I have no problem with people eating animals. It's a bizarre luxury of the type of thing I am, where I don't have to kill to live and nothing is trying to kill me that I know of and/or worry about.
If I have that knowledge, potentially I have moral imperative to use it. Compassion for things that I don't have to have it for might be something I'm supposed to do with my time piloting this homunculus.
Pigs are awesome and most of them (all except for wild boar) would not be around if not for us eating them. We should strive for avoiding unnecessary hardship and unsustainably high numbers, not for extermination through total disuse.
I agree with you we should strive to avoid unnecessary hardship. Everything dies, and a life that ends with humane[0] slaughter is not necessarily one that wasn't worth living.
However I suspect we agree some lives are so filled with suffering that the compassionate choice is to not breed a sentient being into that life. Imagine choosing to get pregnant if you had certain evidence it'd damn your future child to a life of physical and mental anguish -- you'd refuse. That's the life of pigs and chickens on modern farms: too much suffering[1], below the threshold of "worth living."
Moreover, the state of the animal welfare movement is bleak[2] compared to the scope. Farm animal advocacy is a niche and regularly ridiculed. Progress is constantly on shaky ground: recent initiatives in MA and CA prohibiting animal products from animals raised in cages too small to turn around in is at serious risk of being overturned by the federal government's "King amendment," which would prevent any state-based welfare reforms. I'm passionately in support of this work, but under no delusion we're near the end of it.
Given that, the strategy I advocate for is both improved treatment of farm animals and reduced breeding of them -- at least until farm animal treatment improves. Hoping that treatment will catch up soon so that it'll obviate the need for dietary change is unrealistic today, though I sincerely hope (and will support those trying) to get there[3].
[0] Caveat that slaughter today is not always humane, in particular for chickens and fish.
[1] E.g. gestation crates and lifetime of small cages, genetic breeding that causes chickens to grow so fast they break their own legs, debeaking practices, and more.
[2] Progress is happening, and in fact the wins we've had are hugely beneficial to animals -- but I suspect decades before we're at "enough" of an improvement. Within that time billions of animals will be raised and slaughtered for food; the scale is hard to fathom.
[3] And frankly, I expect cultured meat and sophisticated plant-based meats like Beyond Burger to gain wide adoption before that.
Is it such a great thing to be born that we are doing something good for our children by causing them to come into existence?
I mean, c'mon. The only way for there to be something good, or great, from a first-person experience, is for there to be a first person to actually do the experiencing.
Caveat, of course, bringing something into an existence that is only suffering is probably not so great. This is why we need to treat our food animals well (not to mention our kids!)
Edit: though several weaker views are more common in animal rights advocacy, for instance that being born in order to be raised for food is not a benefit to an animal, that being born in order to be raised for food in a factory farm is not a benefit to an animal, or that being born is a benefit but that conferring a benefit on an animal doesn't make conferring harms on the same animal legitimate or appropriate even if the benefits and harms are structured as a "package deal".
This is such a patently ridiculous, self-defeating viewpoint. Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
As for the animals - hey, I said I want them treated decently. I don't extend them the same courtesies as I extend to humans because they're not human, and I don't shed a tear for their deaths because to do so is to anthropomorphize them, a quintessentially childish way of viewing the world.
> being born in order to be raised for food in a factory farm is not a benefit to an animal
Said animal wouldn't exist otherwise, and could not benefit from not existing, so the potential for benefit is always higher on the existence side, even if the probability is very low - it's still higher than a guaranteed 0.
I don't feel like you're really engaging with any of these ideas.
> Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
The same reasoning would seem to suggest that religions that successfully encourage people to have many children are most likely to be correct because they provide one method for spreading their views (that is, having children and then teaching them to believe in the religions' doctrines). This is one way that religious views do get spread in the world and one demographic factor in religious belief, but it's hard to see the connection between this and the correctness of each belief as we might otherwise understand correctness.
> Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
This is very silly, it plainly conflates truth and popularity.
> As for the animals - hey, I said I want them treated decently.
Suggests "decent" treatment of animals is preferable to "indecent" treatment; this is broadly accepted.
> I don't extend them the same courtesies as I extend to humans because they're not human
Suggests animals/animal suffering are/is of less moral importance than humans/human suffering. This is also broadly accepted.
> I don't shed a tear for their deaths because to do so is to anthropomorphize them, a quintessentially childish way of viewing the world.
Suggests anthropomorphisation of animals is undesirable because it is stereotypically childish; childishness is bad. Seems like quite a silly argument, kids are also fond of breathing etc.
> Said animal wouldn't exist otherwise, and could not benefit from not existing, so the potential for benefit is always higher on the existence side, even if the probability is very low - it's still higher than a guaranteed 0.
You care about the expectation, not the "potential for benefit".
In any case, the way in which you've presented these ideas suggests that you're a consequentialist maximiser (eg think that it's the outcomes of actions/choices/rules that matter, and that there exists some partial order of the desirability of possible worlds). I'd suggest that if you keep thinking about animal welfare and how to balance the lives and living conditions of animals against your own social and dietary needs, you may well decide that you want to reduce your meat intake. Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" is fairly classic, "The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe
"[0] is much more general but pretty great.
Based on this logic raising kids to eat 9/10 of them after roasting them alive would be better than declining to have kids because you disregard the suffering in some sort of interesting moral arithmetic.
The bigger issue is not that nature of the math but the notion that you believe you can subject the matter to it like what is the answer to 42 + banana.
The simpler answer is that we ought to do less immoral things not to find interesting justifications for doing so.
We also need to treat our food animals well, because eating poorly treated animals is unhealthy. Both physically, and spiritually. Bad chemicals, and bad karma.
My intuition is that suffering dominates our lives. This is especially true for animals. So I don’t believe we are doing pigs any favours by giving them life.
> My intuition is that suffering dominates our lives
Maybe your life. I feel pretty good. Have you considered doing things to reduce your suffering? There are a lot of great options. Take a few deep breaths and consider whether it's really as bad as all that.
Suffering in the human context is also very relative to tolerance. Experiencing the occasional great suffering (whether physical or emotional) puts your daily aches and pains and disappointments into proper contrast so you can tell that you should learn how to not take them very seriously.
Ending all life would end all suffering, it's one of those dangerous philosophical ideas we prefer not to think about to often. The other extreme would be "every sperm is sacred" and I firmly believe that both should be avoided, but only for pigs.
i live with my own temptations in this realm, so i'm not coming from a "i've done it" POV, but from a "this is where i lean when i'm pretty sure i need to give it a real go" one.
I need to double down on meal planning and just really quit it.