Now then, moral equivalence. Moral equivalence to whom? To me? Not morally equivalent. Problem solved. The paradoxical Polyanna bias of this otherwise rational blog notwithstanding, there IS no such thing as universal morality. There are only game-theoretical equilibria. Can animals sign a contract with you and be trusted to hold to it? Can an animal give informed consent? Will they ever mount an organized rebellion against you? Can you mate with an animal and have viable offspring?

Exactly. That’s why most of you eat them, why we wear them, and why I kill them in my experiments. We don’t mistreat them unnecessarily because it usually detracts from the benefit the animal provides to us, just like we respect each other’s rights because doing otherwise detracts from the benefit we can provide each other.

Oh, and the senile/retarded/brain-damaged? It’s a gray area, and society seems to have decided to give lip-service to their rights while simultaneously abridging them ‘for their own protection’. I’m sure this is the practical thing to do, but the line between human the human species and everything else is a lot less ambiguous than any such lines we are forced by necessity to draw within our species.

I should explain that my objection is to the position that causing an animal to suffer is intrinsically evil. (That avoiding doing so is morally good for its own sake.) I expressly leave open the possibility that it is evil for instrumental reasons. Experimenting on animals for example might harden the hearts of the experimenters with the result that they show less empathy for their fellow humans, which produces negative effects that outweigh the positive effects of the experimentation. Here the words “negative” and “positive” refer to some system of terminal values, which again I suggest should not contain a categorical ban on causing an animal to suffer.

Rebecca makes the argument that if it is evil to cause a human to suffer then it must also be evil to cause a non-human animal to suffer. I agree! Specifically, I agree that if it were intrinsically evil to cause a human to suffer, it would also be intrinsically evil to cause a non-human animal to suffer. So, logic dictates that I do not believe that it is intrinsically evil to cause a human to suffer. I admit that that is an unusual belief. And I must stress that there are almost always excellent instrumental reasons to avoid causing a human to suffer.

Most authors are much too ready to add to their set or list of intrinsic values. Although this readiness might not cause significant harm in ordinary life, it will lead to severe error when singularitarians and leaders of other projects to develop ultratechnologies indulge in it. It is them that I ask to question the reigning world ideology of progressivism.

If the reader has the ability to edit comments, won’t you please insert a double-quote character after blogspot.com/ in my previous post? I promise to exercise more care in the future to avoid that sort of mistake.

You seem to believe that saying arguments would “look weird” to certain people (17th century English people and mainland Chinese) is evidence that Rebecca’s arguments have little value and are simply ideological dogma.

If I could show that your argument would look weird to New Guinea aborigines and that 7th century denizens of inner Mongolia would find it unbelievable, does that refute you?

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The opinions and arguments of this post would be considered bizarre and extreme by most of the current residents of, say, mainland China. (Of course among mainland Chinese who decide to learn English and either to talk to Westerners or to travel to the West it would seem less bizarre.) It would likewise be considered bizarre and weird by most people of 17th-Century England, where the ideology originated (among Dissenting Protestant Christians) and by practically everyone living everywhere else in the world at the time.

Since I do not have time to explain more fully, I place those wanting more information in the competent hands of asked for opinions on what he and Robin should do with this blog after he and Robin reduce their posting rate. I wish they’d close the blog to new posts if the alternative is posts like this one. I’d like to be able to continue to recommend the blog without complicated instructions about posters or time periods to ignore.

P.S. I endorse the comment by jb right above mine.

I submit that Humans are the only species on this planet that, as of this date, has the potential capacity to save all the other species from certain annihilation (from asteroid, the Sun’s red giant expansion phase, failure of the magnetic field, etc). We do not have the technology yet to do this, but we will at some point in the future.

If you agree with this statement, then we have a simple base principle to look at:
a) If humans did not exist, animals would not suffer at human hands, but they would all go extinct at some point, many rather violently.

b) Once humans have the technology to deflect asteroids, colonize space, etc, then the Earth’s animals are effectively as immortal as we are.

c) To some extent, experimentation on animals is important to further the progress of human technology and knowledge, getting us closer to (b).

to my mind, this is why it is ethically ok to allow animals to suffer – because if we don’t get off this planet in time, it won’t matter how eden-like the planet is – everything on it will be dead. If they were capable of abstract reasoning, I suggest that the animals would recognize the importance of technological advance as a form of species-level self-preservation.

Or put into sci-fi parable form: let’s say we discover a black hole on a collision course with the Sun, in 5 years. We have no means of deflecting this black hole. Humanity is doomed. An alien shows up in his space craft and says “I can save you… well, half of you. I have technology that can eliminate this black hole. Alas, it requires approximately 3 billion human brains to be fed into my V23 Space Modulator machine in order to properly work… It’s highly advanced, but something about the brains of higher creatures capable of abstract reasoning just makes it work… There will be some suffering…

While there would be significant wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes, sackcloth and ashes, etc, the suffering of 3 billion humans is not as bad, ethnically and morally, as the complete destruction of the Earth and all the creatures on it. Those 3 billion can be replaced. The Earth, as of yet, cannot.

Thus, my belief that it is ethically sound to experiment on animals. Anything that gets us off this planet and colonizing space faster is morally good, because the alternative – that we fail to get off the planet in time – is so very, very, very double-plus ungood, both for humans and animals.

Such banal facts are not much more than accidental byproducts of human interaction with a very complex environment. But if you take these away, you do not have much left to build your ethics on. You have two options: 1. You embrace these, being aware that your ethics depends on such ad hoc, self-contradicting and obsolete stuff. 2. You try to build your ethics from “more basic” notions, such as suffering and reciprocity, and then it will not resemble anything an average human could find intuitive. (And you may even realize that these so called more basic notions are inherently intertwined with the ad hoc stuff.)

Boris: In response to my claim that the view that it is acceptable to inflict suffering on one type of being in order to spare another type is widely reviled, you said, ‘The thing is, that latter view is indeed perfectly acceptable in a large range of circumstances’, followed by some examples. With some qualification, you are quite right: my point was lazily expressed. I should have said something along the lines of, ‘The view that it is acceptable to inflict suffering on one type of being in order to spare another type, when there is no morally relevant reason to distinguish the members of one group from the members of the other, is widely reviled’. The qualification is this: it is far from clear that the examples you gave are cases in which suffering is inflicted. I addressed the issue (which you also mention) of different types of being experiencing different types of suffering in an earlier comment, and what exactly a full account of suffering might look like is a big issue to which I can’t do justice here, but as a place-holder I suggest that suffering might count as physical pain and/or psychological distress (and if anyone else has a better suggestion, please feel free to mention it!). I’m not sure that any of the examples you gave involve suffering based on that account: possibly the mosquitos and earthworms example, but I’m not qualified to assess how likely it is that those animals feel pain.
Of course, there are instances where the decision to inflict suffering on one type of being for the sake of another type is made on a case-by-case basis, as your example of the athlete cut from the team demonstrates. In that case, there is an ethically relevant reason to distinguish between the athlete and the rest of the team (i.e. presumably all members of the team recognise that the benefits of the team as a whole are important, and must accept when they join that their membership depends on their abilities being beneficial to the team). Your later comment, in which you say ‘The correct question is not “Is animal experimentation morally acceptable?” but, for each experiment to be performed, “Is this particular experiment on this particular kind of animal morally acceptable given these possible pieces of knowledge that could be derived from it?”’ suggests to me that we are probably in agreement on this point – I just ought to have made the initial distinction clearer.
You also said, ‘My gut feeling is that you’re defining “animal” in the colloquial “cute and fuzzy mammal” sense’. Absolutely not: I made it clear in my previous comment that the ‘cuteness’ of an animal is hardly relevant to its moral status.

Tom: ‘Can I ask for a clarification? Are we supposing that animals have certain inviolable rights, making it naturally a crime for humans to harm animals, or are we seeing this from a consequentialist perspective – that reducing harm to animals reduces suffering in general (which is good)?’
This is a really good question, and your follow-up is very interesting. I’ve already given these questions some thought, but I’m not yet entirely clear what I think about them, which is the main reason why I avoided mentioning rights in my post. I think it’s certainly true to say that animals have interests, but whether the language of rights is more likely to help than hinder the debate, I’m not sure at the moment. I will continue to think about this issue – thanks for raising it and for exploring some of the consequences.
On a related note, I did see a paper by someone that addressed the question of, if we assume that wild animals (i.e. ones that don’t have any contact with humans, and so who aren’t pets, etc) inflict certain harms on each other, whether we should be trying to prevent those harms. I can’t remember who wrote it now …

John: ‘I think you argument has the same basic weakness that all of Singer’s do, namely you start with some unexamined assumptions about what is not OK to do to humans, and then try to defeat distinctions. But you have no underlying argument about why, taking your example, it is wrong to kill Jews. You just say, whatever the reason, it applies to animals too. … What is your reason why we shouldn’t kill people? If you can articulate a decent one then I will consider adopting it. If you can’t explain why we shouldn’t kill people then I don’t think I’ll bother with your thoughts about why we shouldn’t kill animals.’
You are quite right that I haven’t provided an argument about why we shouldn’t kill/torture/oppress humans, and also right that I appeal to the assumption that we shouldn’t do so in my argument. I’m a little confused as to how strong a point you are trying to make. If you are suggesting that it is bad philosophy to appeal to any unargued assumptions when constructing an argument? That would make it impossible to do any philosophy at all. And, in ethics, it’s simply not possible to construct an ethical argument in a vacuum of values: unless we start out with some deeply-held value, there is no reason for us to adopt any other value. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t question that deeply-held value – just that if we had to do so before we argued for anything else, we’d never get on to the ‘anything else’ (plenty of philosophers spend their entire careers questioning deeply-held values, and still don’t finish answering all the important questions)! A famous quotation from Neurath is relevant here: ‘we are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom’.
In this case, I haven’t taken my own assumptions about what is acceptable treatment of humans as the starting point. I’ve tried to appeal only to assumptions that I think the vast majority of people would accept (or rather, the vast majority of people who have beliefs that they are willing to analyse, justify, and argue for).

It is of course clear that more vegetarians means less animals since there would be less of a domestication industry. But that’s hardly the point.

On paper I don’t think overpopulation of humans is bad either from a pure numbers game. Without contraceptives, I am pretty sure humans too could have the natural method of birth control working for them aka. starvation. I am quite certain that all of us prefer a world where the population is stable by way of contraceptives than one where it is stable by way of widespread starvation, though both are probably identical from a numbers/evolutionary perspective.

Likewise it could be argued that it is more humane to let animals breed/survive at their natural rate, than enable them to breed much faster and then kill them for meat.