Tag Archives: Morality

Vegan Compromise

By Robin Hanson · November 13, 2009 2:40 pm · Comments (56)

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. …

How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.” …

“Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about ‘eating animals,’ they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism,” he says. “It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.”

More here.  She’s right: we will not tolerate folks watching animals tortured for entertainment, as in movies or cock-fights, but we will tolerate animals being tortured for food, for meds, or perhaps lipstick.  We care far more about our pets than our food, even if they are very similar creatures.  And we know deep down that the usual sorts of principles most folks endorse do not support this behavior.  We are hypocrites.

Those with strong self-images as principled intellectuals have two outs:

  1. Become vegetarians, to make our acts match our words.
  2. Change our principles, to make our words match our acts.

Rather than warring to the death for one side or the other to win such a conflict, I prefer to seek compromises between our near and far selves.  Let us seek principles that can account for most of our acts, then try to change the other acts to conform with such easier principles.  My tentative resolutions:

  • We don’t care much about most animals, even smart ones.
  • It is a bad sign about someone that they would be enjoy watching animals being tortured.  We prohibit such watching to make our society look “civilized” to other societies.
  • We are kind to our pets to show others we are loyal to those loyal to us.  Fido has always been there for us, so we will be there for him – up to a point at least.
  • We are willing to spend only modest sums to make food animal lives a bit more enjoyable.  We should spend such sums, but not go overboard.

More interesting quotes from that article: Continue Reading "Vegan Compromise" »

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Beware Far Ethics

By Robin Hanson · October 27, 2009 7:00 pm · Comments (39)

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it. Francois De La Rochefoucauld.
Katja Grace’s translation:  We nobly analyse distant things, and in the present do whatever the hell we want.

If you stopped an articulate person who had just passed a homeless bum, and asked why she did not help, she’d probably explain this isn’t a simple question.  She might mention ethics complexities, but she’d probably focus on the complex social context.  Is the bum mentally ill, sick, stupid, lazy, or faking?  Does the bum have family who should help first, did he arrive recently in this area, and who is best placed to know what he needs?

At my Georgetown lecture last night on our robot future, the smart econ students focused their questions almost entirely on ethics.  They seemed to assume they understood enough about the social situation, and were obsessed with the ethical ways for humans to treat robots, robots to treat humans, etc.  I’ll bet they’d also be quick to condemn Roman centurions’ ethics, also figuring they understood enough about their social situation.  But I think they’d need to learn lots more about either of these worlds before they could begin to offer useful ethics advice.

Some of my young idealistic friends like to talk about figuring out what they could do to most help the world, and might go to Burma to see how the really poor live.  I tell them one has to learn lots of details about a place to figure out how to improve it, and they’d do better to try this on a part of the world they understand better.  But that doesn’t sound nearly as fun as saving the whole world all at once.

Humans overwhelmed by the social complexities of helping a bum nearby think they know enough about societies far away, so that ethics becomes the main concern there.  I see the same thing in discussions of future biotech or nanotech – ethics becomes the main frame, even though we only have the faintest ideas of how future societies might integrate those techs.  Beware the easy confidence of advising worlds far from your knowledge or consequence.

Added 29Oct: The obvious way to help poor folk far away without relying on your poor understanding of their world is to rely on the one thing you know best about their world: it is poor.  Invite them to move to your rich world, to share in its riches.  If your neighbors hinder you, use what you know about them to change that.

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Could It Be That Easy?

By Robin Hanson · October 23, 2009 9:40 pm · Comments (24)

The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex. … [To appear in] a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. … “Could be that getting our kids to clean up their rooms might help them clean up their acts, too.”

The study titled “The Smell of Virtue” was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex. …

Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.  The average amount of cash given back by the people in the “normal” room was $2.81. But the people in the clean-scented room gave back an average of $5.33. …  Participants surveyed in a Windex-ed room were significantly more interested in volunteering (4.21 on a 7-point scale) than those in a normal room (3.29).  22 percent of Windex-ed room participants said they’d like to donate money, compared to only 6 percent of those in a normal room.

Follow-up questions confirmed that participants didn’t notice the scent in the room and that their mood at the time of the experiment didn’t affect the outcomes. … Their 2006 paper in Science reported that transgressions activated a desire to be physically cleansed.

More here and here.  Wow – these are big effects, via such a simple and easy treatment!

In my experience, the touchy-feely folks who talk the most about wanting to encourage more trust and charity do not get along that well with the anal folks who want everything to be very clean.  So I expect the first group will be reluctant to accept that this second group has been right all along – they want more charity their way, via folks feeling guilty, not via folks feeling clean.  So even if this study is confirmed by further research, I expect lots of resistance to its policy implications.  After all, politics is less about policy, and charity less about outcomes, than about who should be admired.

Hat tip to Bruce Bartlett.

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In Praise Of Blackmail

By Robin Hanson · October 2, 2009 5:10 pm · Comments (60)

Society – civilized society at least – is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. The Picture of Dorian Grey

On Wednesday I puzzled over areas of life where:

People seem to insist quite firmly that they do not want to hear lies, where the consequences of believing lies are substantial, where the costs to reliably determine if a lie happened could be low, and yet where lies are legal.

Today the Post reminded us that the puzzle is much bigger.  Not only don’t we use public law to punish many big lies, we actively prevent private parties from punishing them:

David Letterman … announced that he’d had sex with female “Late Show” staffers and that someone had tried to extort $2 million from him to keep quiet about the relationships. … The man who attempted to extort the money was … arrested Thursday on charges of attempted grand larceny in the first degree. … [He] had threatened to go public with the details if the late-night host did not pay …

Instead, Letterman said that he took the matter to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and that he was told by authorities to issue the person a phony check. That ruse reportedly led to the arrest … Letterman said on camera. “Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would.”  He added, however: “I feel like I need to protect these people. I need to certainly protect my family.”  Letterman and longtime girlfriend Regina Lasko married in March.

Yes, good thing the public-spirited Letterman risked himself to save us all from such horrid criminals, those who would seek financial gain by exposing celebrity sex lies.  Good thing we also have whistle blower laws giving large financial rewards to heroic citizens who expose drug companies who tell docs truths about drugs.  So many good things to be thankful for.  Sigh.

I would favor overturning anti-blackmail laws.  If we did this, these would be the main consequences:  Rich celebrities would lose money, do fewer illicit things, lie about them less, and trust their associates less.  They’d be more often exposed for lying about doing illicit things.  People would try a little less hard to become such rich celebrities.  The associates of rich celebrities would be a little richer, and people would try a little harder to become such folks.  Fans would not be able to idolize their celebrities quite as much, and would be less often offered roles as illicit activity partners.   Which of these consequences do we fear so much that we forbid blackmail?

Added 11:30a: These concerns expressed so far all apply to whistleblowers as well: privacy, info could be false, threatened folks could resort to murder, non-rich people may be effected, we don’t trust our rules to be reasonable, no wealth is created by the financial transfer, and most parties have done something that looks illicit.   So why promote whistleblowers but ban blackmail?

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Poor Folks Do Smile

By Robin Hanson · September 26, 2009 2:45 pm · Comments (28)

Responding to my saying:

As long as enough people are free to choose their fertility … income per capital must fall over the long run, a fall whose only fundamental limit is subsistence.

Peter McCluskey:

Robin Hanson’s Malthusian-sounding posts prompted me to wonder how we can create a future that is better than the repugnant conclusion. … A mind that barely has enough resources to live could be designed so that it is very happy with the cpu cycles or negentropy it gets even if those are negligible compared to other minds. … what I find repugnant … is … the cruelty of evolution which produces suffering in beings with fewer resources than they were evolved to use.

Bryan Caplan:

Robin’s sounding strangely like a doom-sayer* lately. … For flesh-and-blood lives, as opposed to vivid simulations, I actually agree with Robin.  But there are important – and heartening – caveats that I think (?) he accepts, but isn’t pushing: …

  1. “It has to stop sometime” was as true when our population was 10,000 as it is today.  As far as we can tell … “sometime” is a long way off. …
  2. If you don’t like your family’s per-capita income, you can unilaterally raise it by having fewer kids … and set up a trust on their behalf. …
  3. This “subsistence” regime could still have awesome entertainment, art, science, blogs, virtual reality …

Robin’s claim isn’t that our descendants will be “forced” to slave day and night to feed hungry mouths.  Rather, it’s that our descendants will care a lot more about kids than we do. …

* Robin cares about aggregate, not per-capita welfare.  So he would deny that he’s being a doom-sayer.

Bryan and Peter are both mostly right.  Bryan is even right that there is no population externality in the economist’s sense; free fertility choice and contract is usually economically efficient.

I don’t see our far future as a repugnant doom.  Yes, I doubt we can maintain current growth rates to have 103000 descendants in a million years, since only 1070 atoms are available by then.  But 1070 descendants is still is a grand and glorious future, far far beyond our current 1010. Continue Reading "Poor Folks Do Smile" »

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The Dark Side of Cooperation

By Robin Hanson · September 15, 2009 11:00 pm · Comments (26)

Cooperation is a popular topic these days.  For example, see this Science review article and this Nature book review of de Waal’s The Age of Empathy:

A repeated foil throughout is Gordon Gekko, from the 1987 movie Wall Street, who reiterates in various forms the basic credo that “greed is good”. … [de Waal's] main political message is that we should not continue to harp on about evolution justifying only the selfish side of human nature, although of course that exists. He urges that we must also capitalize on the empathetic and cooperative attitudes that evolution has equipped us with, writing: “A society that ignores these tendencies can’t be optimal”.

Here is a New Scientist book review:

Given all that we know about empathy in animals, why do so many persist in seeing ours as a dog-eat-dog world? De Waal chalks it up to what he calls “macho origin myths”, which insist that “our species has been waging war for as long as it has been around”. But humans have shown empathy for as long as we’ve been around too.

Many stories discuss recent research on how cooperation can be sustained by norms to punish non-cooperators, and punish those who don’t punish non-cooperators, etc.  For example, New Scientist:

The temptation to freeload – reap the rewards without contributing anything – often leads to rapidly disintegrating cooperation.  Previous research found that cooperation is promoted by allowing players to punish freeloaders: cooperative players would pay a small cost that enables them to inflict a loss on the offender.

The unstated moral behind most media stories on our biological instincts to cooperate seems to be that we would do better to empower and emphasize these instincts.  Such as, oh, taxing carbon, and shaming those who don’t tax carbon. Continue Reading "The Dark Side of Cooperation" »

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Painless Meat

By Robin Hanson · September 12, 2009 10:00 pm · Comments (29)

New Scientist:

Might “pain-free” be the next sticker slapped onto a rump roast? … Progress in neuroscience and genetics in recent years makes it a very real possibility. …  “If we can’t do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused,” says Adam Shriver, a philosopher. … [who] contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative. …

One objection to the idea of knocking out pain in livestock is that it could mean they put themselves in harm’s way. In 2006, researchers identified six children from three Pakistani families with mutations that inactivated one particular gene. None of the children had ever felt pain, though they appeared otherwise healthy. All the kids had bruises and cuts, and one, who was known to place knives through his hand and walk on coals, died after jumping off a roof.

There could be a way around that problem. Recent research indicates that the sensation of pain is distinct from the unpleasantness, or “affective pain”, connected with it. This suggests it might be possible to eliminate the suffering caused by pain without tampering with the physical sensation. … They have engineered mice that lack two enzymes … When the team injected a noxious, painful chemical into their paws, the mice licked them only briefly. In contrast, normal mice continued to do so for hours afterwards (Neuron, vol 36, p 713). This suggests that livestock could be spared persistent, nagging pain. ….

Alan Goldberg … contends that public attitudes may make pain-free livestock a non-starter. He and colleague Renee Gardner conducted an online survey on the use of pain-free animals in research and found little public support, even among researchers who experiment on animals (Alternatives to Animal Testing and Experimentation, vol 14, p 145).

This last result is striking.  (I can’t find the article to learn more – the journal is here).  Why not save farm animals from pain?  My guess: for most folks to be interested in reducing farm animal pain, they would have to believe farms animal suffer lots more pain than wild animals suffer.  And they don’t so believe.

But wild pain isn’t obviously the right standard.  If lives with farm pain are still better than not existing, it is still good to create farm animals even if they suffer more than wild animals.  But if reducing pain is cheap, it might well be good to reduce farm pain well below wild levels.

I really don’t know how much pain we cause farm animals.  So far I have given farms the benefit of the doubt, but I’d be interested in visiting typical meat farms in my area, if that could be arranged.

Added: Unnamed finds the survey article, which only considers pain-free animals in biological experiments, not farms:

Participants were evenly divided between agreeing and disagreeing with the practice, and scientists followed this trend. Participants who classified themselves as a member of an animal advocacy group or as a vegetarian were much more likely to disagree with the practice.

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Disgust Works

By Robin Hanson · September 1, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (4)

A feeling of disgust re contamination keeps people well:

Both disgust and contamination sensitivity likely evolved to protect us from infectious disease. Paradoxically, disgust may be reduced by frequent exposure to disgust-inducing cues — cues most likely to occur in disease-rich environments. In this study, we examined whether more frequent or recent illness might act to reverse this process. To test this, we surveyed 616 adults, obtaining illness frequency and recency data, disgust and contamination sensitivity, and a variety of control measures. Heightened contamination sensitivity was associated with more frequent infectious illness, but not with recency of infection. We also found that participants who had heightened contamination sensitivity and who were also more disgust sensitive had significantly fewer recent infections. These findings suggest that frequent illness may up-regulate contamination sensitivity potentially counteracting the effects of exposure on disgust. More importantly, these data provide the first direct evidence of a protective effect of contamination and disgust, against infectious disease.

People may over apply their disgust at times, but they probably also under apply it at other times.  Given what they know about what can infect them, they may well get their disgust level about right.

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Cash Shy

By Robin Hanson · August 29, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (17)

On Monday I did an interview for a TV show (to appear in 2010), and they put me up at a famous expensive hotel.  I’m sure others get extra value from this hotel, but it didn’t do much for me.  I asked the show manager about this and he said that they have ethical problems with paying cash to interviewees, but want to compensate them for their trouble.  I sighed, thinking: what exactly could go wrong with cash that couldn’t go wrong with generous travel compensation?

I suppose we could make sense of this by assuming that observers can’t be bothered to notice the amount of cash given or the quality of the travel provided, all they can tell is if you were given cash, travel expenses, or both.  But I’m kinda skeptical this is really what’s going on.

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A Test of Moral Progress

By Robin Hanson · August 18, 2009 2:00 pm · Comments (24)

We treat each other differently than our distant ancestors treated each other.  In particular we are “nicer”, at least by our lights, to a wider circle of associates.  For example, we enslave, rape, and murder each other less.  The two main explanations offered for this change are:

  1. Moral Progress – We have long wanted to act morally, and some of us have long pondered moral issues.  Relative to what we had thought, these experts have slowly discovered via reason that morality demands that we be nicer to a wider circle of others.  Experts told others, who believed them and wanted to act morally.   So we now more do what reason demands.
  2. Conditional Morality – Our evolved moral intuitions are context dependent.  We are built to be nicer to each other when times are good, to invest in an attractive reputation.  We are also built to form alliances with some in order to counter threats by others; the further in social distance are the threats we perceive, the wider a circle of allies we collect in response.  Since we are now richer and have interactions with more distant others, we are nicer to a wider range of allies.

These theories make different predictions about futures where we become poorer and our interactions become more local.  In their simplest forms, the moral progress theory predicts that we would continue to be as nice to as wide a circle of creatures in this situation, while the conditional morality theory predicts that the social circle to whom we are nice would narrow to the range of our ancestors with similar poverty and interaction locality.  Of course we might expect some inertial or momentum in moral attitudes; so it might take several generations of poverty and local interactions to really see the predicted difference.

My best guess is that cultural selection has produced real progress in institutions for keeping the peace, and perhaps in cultures to promote cooperation, but that any changes in our personal moral intuitions are due primarily due to an inherited conditional morality.   I expect we will actually see a future of much lower per-capita wealth, after the em transition, but it is hard to see a narrowing circle of interactions until there is substantial space colonization.

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