[Edited to remove insensitive framing. Also, the possibility of reducing the misery in factory farming with such technology does not and would not justify factory farming.] I have spoken with a lot of people who are enthusiastic about the possibility that advanced genetic engineering technologies will improve animal welfare.
Domestication doesn't mean docility: it means a suite of traits such as much better social learning skills, neoteny, etc. Consider guard dogs or hunting dogs. A generalized 'docility' would defeat the point entirely - what we want are dogs which are extremely docile in some respects (not attacking a stranger its master is shaking hands with and letting into the house, or letting the owner's baby pull on its ears) and as aggressive as possible in others (against strangers towards which its master is exhibiting fear/aggression, or towards rabbits), and able to learn the difference such as by developing a better theory of mind, being able to understand eye gazes, having longer periods of mental plasticity etc.
This also doesn't address dynamics within the groups: there is not too much benefit to very docile chickens, and too-docile chickens may be at severe disadvantages inside the barn when competing/interacting with other 'domesticated' chickens. Not to mention the serious consequences that can attend reducing or eliminating pain entirely, as experienced by lepers, diabetics, or people with pain asymbolia.
That assumes that the utility we would gain from better evolutionary adaptiveness outweighs the disutility of ignoring how our desires extrapolate, which seems highly unlikely.
Remember, morality IS OUR GOALS. If extrapolated morality is maladaptive - and it probably is, to an extent - that doesn't mean it serves OUR goals to become more adaptive. Indeed, it almost by definition does not.
Sorry about the all-caps, I don't know how to do formatting here.
If you understand the biological function, it often can help you choose whether to respect it. If a trait serves a vital biological function that can't be otherwise served, knowing the biological function is decisive.
My claim is that "moral" principles of integrity serve a vital function for personal adaptation—which moral realism subverts— http://tinyurl.com/7dcbt7y
>What is more humane than placing the bullet straight through the heart? Never saw it coming. Painless. The deer lived a nice life in the woods, not a CAFO
Yup, hunting is totally humane. Same reason we don't prosecute serial killers, amirite?
Not enough to stop them from slaughtering them and eating them. Farmers have been raising livestock and killing them for food for millennia -- that doesn't smell like evidence of people caring about animal welfare.
I'm going to go ahead and say Yudkowsky is wrong there. People care less about flies having their legs pulled off than about foxes getting tortured than about chimps than about humans, but they do care AFAICT.
"Perhaps our default biological response is to feel cold when our core body temp falls significantly below normal, but affluence results in a shift from body temp to rate of heat loss, or from present temp to predicted temp..."
An equivalent mechanism for hunger would entail a shift in our internal (functional) concept from actual hunger (low nutrient levels, espec. blood suger) to predicted hunger, which might compare current energy consumption to unprocessed food levels. The shift works because calories are easy enough to obtain, so we feel hungry in advance of a calorie deficit, not when this actually occurs.
So widespread overeating might be due to a culture-wide phisiological shift from hunger-as-actual to hunger-as-predictive. I've actually experienced this shift myself - albiet from predictive to actual, not actual to predictive. Drawing inspiration from one of Ray Kurzweil's books, i semi-starved myself for a few days until sugar cravings had been conquered. My weight then gradually declined until i was quite thin (maybe too thin). What i noticed in this period was my perception of hunger changed from a craving or any sort of ravenousness, to a slight light-headedness and wobbly knees. This meant i really was hungry, in the "old-fashioned" sense, and that i should eat for safety and cognition reasons more than as a way of elliminating the hunger sensation.
"the paradox - to put it euphemistically - in arguing that "we ought not to use value judgements" is that this plea itself expresses a value-judgement. We can't have it both ways."
Is it for practical reasons we can't have it both ways, or because it is not acceptable to Western intellectual standards? Why can't i accept the paradox and live with it, if i'm otherwise happy with the not making value-judgements rule? I'm interested both regardless of and in the context of your reference to "arbitrary anthropocentric bias [of] Western species supremacists". I guess a cynical comment regarding a non-Western ethic must end my credibility, no matter how critical i am of Western ethics in general. I can't win and you can't lose. Presumably you're not missing the irony of how Western your political correctness is.
One thing interesting to me (and i am more interested in the interesting than in judgement), is the freedom of the ethicist to bind his/her evaluation of the good to prescriptions or instructions for ethical behavior, as opposed to outcomes of behavior. Ethics seems to me to be the conceptual opposite of the feedback mechanisms of a plant - we make judgments in advance. Ethics is feedforward, and most likely highly integrated with our conceptual ability to see into the future, to predict the future, and the ability to delay present gratification for the benefit of our future selves. Are cultures with a more precise concept of time also more ethical as a result? Is our capacity for waiting a strong proxy for our ability for prediction which in turn is built on our capacity for visualization? If yes, then what improves our visualization skills? Stories (by improving imagination)? Clocks (by improving our sense of time)? Mirrors (by helping us to build our self-image)?
I see the development of ethics as closely tracking our ability to predict the social outcomes of shared or partially shared behaviours, albiet hidden behind elaborate theories, required to make the whole endeavour acceptable to the Western mind (and possibly other types). If this prescriptive view of ethics is incorrect, then what justifies the seemingly arbitary binding of the good with behavioral advice and pre-judgement, rather than a trial and error determination of the good based on measuring behavioral outcomes? Do the domains of human activity that ethics seeks to instruct enjoy a similar freedom, or otherwise does this hint at the very point, namely that its power over us is mostly due to the lack of constraints we place on it - a possibility not available in other domains where some sense of separation of powers is in effect (voters-government, consumers-producers)?
Culture possibly uses this rebinding technique more generally. Reports from the carers of wild or feral children (those raised in part by non-human species) or children raised in extreme isolation (ex: Genie Wiley), indicate an unusual response to conditions almost all of us would perceive as very cold, such as frolicking naked in the snow, or getting into a cold water tap bath on a cold day. The sensation of cold is apparetly absent in these children in these cases, indicating that our sense of cold is partially culturally determined. Perhaps our default biological response is to feel cold when our core body temp falls significantly below normal, but affluence results in a shift from body temp to rate of heat loss, or from present temp to predicted temp, justified by the internalized knowledge that the rebinding of our concept of cold from a sensory to a more abstract basis results in the preferred outcome - we put on more clothes or increase the room temperature. A big stretch to be sure but i see parallels between this and the 'technology of ethics'.
srdiamond, I certainly wouldn't dismiss Moore's Open Question argument. Indeed, on the face of it, the argument is decisive. Whatever apparently dreadful or wonderful phenomenon-exists in the natural world, one can still ask if it's (dis)valuable. However, what is not an open question, at least for me, is whether my unbearable distress is disvaluable for me. And I'm arguing that it's only an epistemological limitation on my part, not some deep ontological truth about the world, that leads to any failure in my recognition that ( it is objectively the case that) your unbearable distress is disvaluable too. The badness of your agony is not an open question to a mirror-touch synaesthete - or a God-like superintelligence who could apprehend all possible first-person perspectives.
A counterargument might be that the existence of (dis)value in the world is inconsistent with the naturalistic third-person ontology of physical science. If eliminativist materialism were the case, this would be so. However, we're not zombies: first-person facts, not least the existence of (dis)valuable experiences, don't possess some sort of second-rate ontological status. If we assume Strawsonian physicalism, they are as much a part of the natural world as the rest mass of the electron. I can't define the normative aspect of disvaluable experience in terms of anything more semantically primitive. But if, for example, you try and hold your hand in ice-cold water for as long as you can, the experience is not motivationally inert. What property of the experience causes you to withdraw your hand?
Anyhow, this philosophising takes us a long way from the morally urgent question of nonhuman animal suffering. The worst source of severe and readily avoidable misery that exists in the world, today, i.e. factory-farming, is wholly manmade. Unless one is a complete moral nihilist, we have an obligation to stop it.
srdiamond, I certainly wouldn't dismiss Moore's Open Question argument. Indeed, on the face of it, the argument is decisive. Whatever apparently dreadful or wonderful phenomenon-exists in the natural world, one can still ask if it's (dis)valuable. However, what is not an open question, at least for me, is whether my unbearable distress is disvaluable for me. And I'm arguing that it's only an epistemological limitation on my part, not some deep ontological truth about the world, that leads to any failure in my recognition that ( it is objectively the case that) your unbearable distress is disvaluable too. The badness of your agony is not an open question to a mirror-touch synaesthete - or a God-like superintelligence who could apprehend all possible first-person perspectives.
A counterargument might be that the existence of (dis)value in the world is inconsistent with the naturalistic third-person ontology of physical science. If eliminativist materialism were the case, this would be so. However, we're not zombies: first-person facts, not least the existence of (dis)valuable experiences, don't possess some sort of second-rate ontological status. If we assume Strawsonian physicalism, they are as much a part of the natural world as the rest mass of the electron. I can't define the normative aspect of disvaluable experience in terms of anything more semantically primitive. But if, for example, you try and hold your hand in ice-cold water for as long as you can, the experience is not motivationally inert. What property of the experience causes you to withdraw your hand?
Anyhow, this philosophising takes us a long way from the morally urgent question of nonhuman animal suffering. The worst source of severe and readily avoidable misery that exists in the world, today, i.e. factory-farming, is wholly manmade. Unless one is a complete moral nihilist, we have an obligation to stop it.
srdiamond, I certainly wouldn't dismiss Moore's Open Question argument. Indeed, on the face of it, the argument is decisive. Whatever apparently dreadful or wonderful phenomenon-exists in the natural world, one can still ask if it's (dis)valuable. However, what is not an open question, at least for me, is whether my unbearable distress is disvaluable for me. And I'm arguing that it's only an epistemological limitation on my part, not some deep ontological truth about the world, that leads to any failure in my recognition that ( it is objectively the case that) your unbearable distress is disvaluable too. The badness of your agony is not an open question to a mirror-touch synaesthete - or a God-like superintelligence who could apprehend all possible first-person perspectives.
A counterargument might be that the existence of (dis)value in the world is inconsistent with the naturalistic third-person ontology of physical science. If eliminativist materialism were the case, this would be so. However, we're not zombies: first-person facts, not least the existence of (dis)valuable experiences, don't possess some sort of second-rate ontological status. If we assume Strawsonian physicalism, they are as much a part of the natural world as the rest mass of the electron. I can't define the normative aspect of disvaluable experience in terms of anything more semantically primitive. But if, for example, you try and hold your hand in ice-cold water for as long as you can, the experience is not motivationally inert. What property of the experience causes you to withdraw your hand?
Anyhow, this philosophising takes us a long way from the morally urgent question of nonhuman animal suffering. The worst source of severe and readily avoidable misery that exists in the world, today, i.e. factory-farming, is wholly manmade. Unless one is a complete moral nihilist, we have an obligation to stop it.
I'd argue that we may cheat Hume's Guillotine with the following argument. In a nutshell, my agony has a primitive, irreducible normative aspect.
That's exactly Moore's answer to his (often wrongly derided) "open question." (See my "Habit theory of morality: moral judgments are always false" — http://tinyurl.com/7dcbt7y )
The question is, What would prompt anyone to believe that there's such a thing as an irreducibly normative aspect?--except as an ad hoc move to save belief in objective morality/moral realism?
The whole direction of science is, as you say, toward an archimidean perspective, but it is also (or is it part of the same tendency?) away from infusing nature with norms.
Domestication doesn't mean docility: it means a suite of traits such as much better social learning skills, neoteny, etc. Consider guard dogs or hunting dogs. A generalized 'docility' would defeat the point entirely - what we want are dogs which are extremely docile in some respects (not attacking a stranger its master is shaking hands with and letting into the house, or letting the owner's baby pull on its ears) and as aggressive as possible in others (against strangers towards which its master is exhibiting fear/aggression, or towards rabbits), and able to learn the difference such as by developing a better theory of mind, being able to understand eye gazes, having longer periods of mental plasticity etc.
This also doesn't address dynamics within the groups: there is not too much benefit to very docile chickens, and too-docile chickens may be at severe disadvantages inside the barn when competing/interacting with other 'domesticated' chickens. Not to mention the serious consequences that can attend reducing or eliminating pain entirely, as experienced by lepers, diabetics, or people with pain asymbolia.
That assumes that the utility we would gain from better evolutionary adaptiveness outweighs the disutility of ignoring how our desires extrapolate, which seems highly unlikely.
Remember, morality IS OUR GOALS. If extrapolated morality is maladaptive - and it probably is, to an extent - that doesn't mean it serves OUR goals to become more adaptive. Indeed, it almost by definition does not.
Sorry about the all-caps, I don't know how to do formatting here.
If you understand the biological function, it often can help you choose whether to respect it. If a trait serves a vital biological function that can't be otherwise served, knowing the biological function is decisive.
My claim is that "moral" principles of integrity serve a vital function for personal adaptation—which moral realism subverts— http://tinyurl.com/7dcbt7y
>What is more humane than placing the bullet straight through the heart? Never saw it coming. Painless. The deer lived a nice life in the woods, not a CAFO
Yup, hunting is totally humane. Same reason we don't prosecute serial killers, amirite?
Why on earth should we try to follow evolution's "functions" for things?!
Relevant link:http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/...
And people kept slaves for millennia - proof that people don't care about humans?
Not enough to stop them from slaughtering them and eating them. Farmers have been raising livestock and killing them for food for millennia -- that doesn't smell like evidence of people caring about animal welfare.
I'd say the "main motivation for in vitro meat" depends a lot on whether or not you're already vegetarian.
I'm going to go ahead and say Yudkowsky is wrong there. People care less about flies having their legs pulled off than about foxes getting tortured than about chimps than about humans, but they do care AFAICT.
"Perhaps our default biological response is to feel cold when our core body temp falls significantly below normal, but affluence results in a shift from body temp to rate of heat loss, or from present temp to predicted temp..."
An equivalent mechanism for hunger would entail a shift in our internal (functional) concept from actual hunger (low nutrient levels, espec. blood suger) to predicted hunger, which might compare current energy consumption to unprocessed food levels. The shift works because calories are easy enough to obtain, so we feel hungry in advance of a calorie deficit, not when this actually occurs.
So widespread overeating might be due to a culture-wide phisiological shift from hunger-as-actual to hunger-as-predictive. I've actually experienced this shift myself - albiet from predictive to actual, not actual to predictive. Drawing inspiration from one of Ray Kurzweil's books, i semi-starved myself for a few days until sugar cravings had been conquered. My weight then gradually declined until i was quite thin (maybe too thin). What i noticed in this period was my perception of hunger changed from a craving or any sort of ravenousness, to a slight light-headedness and wobbly knees. This meant i really was hungry, in the "old-fashioned" sense, and that i should eat for safety and cognition reasons more than as a way of elliminating the hunger sensation.
"the paradox - to put it euphemistically - in arguing that "we ought not to use value judgements" is that this plea itself expresses a value-judgement. We can't have it both ways."
Is it for practical reasons we can't have it both ways, or because it is not acceptable to Western intellectual standards? Why can't i accept the paradox and live with it, if i'm otherwise happy with the not making value-judgements rule? I'm interested both regardless of and in the context of your reference to "arbitrary anthropocentric bias [of] Western species supremacists". I guess a cynical comment regarding a non-Western ethic must end my credibility, no matter how critical i am of Western ethics in general. I can't win and you can't lose. Presumably you're not missing the irony of how Western your political correctness is.
One thing interesting to me (and i am more interested in the interesting than in judgement), is the freedom of the ethicist to bind his/her evaluation of the good to prescriptions or instructions for ethical behavior, as opposed to outcomes of behavior. Ethics seems to me to be the conceptual opposite of the feedback mechanisms of a plant - we make judgments in advance. Ethics is feedforward, and most likely highly integrated with our conceptual ability to see into the future, to predict the future, and the ability to delay present gratification for the benefit of our future selves. Are cultures with a more precise concept of time also more ethical as a result? Is our capacity for waiting a strong proxy for our ability for prediction which in turn is built on our capacity for visualization? If yes, then what improves our visualization skills? Stories (by improving imagination)? Clocks (by improving our sense of time)? Mirrors (by helping us to build our self-image)?
I see the development of ethics as closely tracking our ability to predict the social outcomes of shared or partially shared behaviours, albiet hidden behind elaborate theories, required to make the whole endeavour acceptable to the Western mind (and possibly other types). If this prescriptive view of ethics is incorrect, then what justifies the seemingly arbitary binding of the good with behavioral advice and pre-judgement, rather than a trial and error determination of the good based on measuring behavioral outcomes? Do the domains of human activity that ethics seeks to instruct enjoy a similar freedom, or otherwise does this hint at the very point, namely that its power over us is mostly due to the lack of constraints we place on it - a possibility not available in other domains where some sense of separation of powers is in effect (voters-government, consumers-producers)?
Culture possibly uses this rebinding technique more generally. Reports from the carers of wild or feral children (those raised in part by non-human species) or children raised in extreme isolation (ex: Genie Wiley), indicate an unusual response to conditions almost all of us would perceive as very cold, such as frolicking naked in the snow, or getting into a cold water tap bath on a cold day. The sensation of cold is apparetly absent in these children in these cases, indicating that our sense of cold is partially culturally determined. Perhaps our default biological response is to feel cold when our core body temp falls significantly below normal, but affluence results in a shift from body temp to rate of heat loss, or from present temp to predicted temp, justified by the internalized knowledge that the rebinding of our concept of cold from a sensory to a more abstract basis results in the preferred outcome - we put on more clothes or increase the room temperature. A big stretch to be sure but i see parallels between this and the 'technology of ethics'.
srdiamond, I certainly wouldn't dismiss Moore's Open Question argument. Indeed, on the face of it, the argument is decisive. Whatever apparently dreadful or wonderful phenomenon-exists in the natural world, one can still ask if it's (dis)valuable. However, what is not an open question, at least for me, is whether my unbearable distress is disvaluable for me. And I'm arguing that it's only an epistemological limitation on my part, not some deep ontological truth about the world, that leads to any failure in my recognition that ( it is objectively the case that) your unbearable distress is disvaluable too. The badness of your agony is not an open question to a mirror-touch synaesthete - or a God-like superintelligence who could apprehend all possible first-person perspectives.
A counterargument might be that the existence of (dis)value in the world is inconsistent with the naturalistic third-person ontology of physical science. If eliminativist materialism were the case, this would be so. However, we're not zombies: first-person facts, not least the existence of (dis)valuable experiences, don't possess some sort of second-rate ontological status. If we assume Strawsonian physicalism, they are as much a part of the natural world as the rest mass of the electron. I can't define the normative aspect of disvaluable experience in terms of anything more semantically primitive. But if, for example, you try and hold your hand in ice-cold water for as long as you can, the experience is not motivationally inert. What property of the experience causes you to withdraw your hand?
Anyhow, this philosophising takes us a long way from the morally urgent question of nonhuman animal suffering. The worst source of severe and readily avoidable misery that exists in the world, today, i.e. factory-farming, is wholly manmade. Unless one is a complete moral nihilist, we have an obligation to stop it.
srdiamond, I certainly wouldn't dismiss Moore's Open Question argument. Indeed, on the face of it, the argument is decisive. Whatever apparently dreadful or wonderful phenomenon-exists in the natural world, one can still ask if it's (dis)valuable. However, what is not an open question, at least for me, is whether my unbearable distress is disvaluable for me. And I'm arguing that it's only an epistemological limitation on my part, not some deep ontological truth about the world, that leads to any failure in my recognition that ( it is objectively the case that) your unbearable distress is disvaluable too. The badness of your agony is not an open question to a mirror-touch synaesthete - or a God-like superintelligence who could apprehend all possible first-person perspectives.
A counterargument might be that the existence of (dis)value in the world is inconsistent with the naturalistic third-person ontology of physical science. If eliminativist materialism were the case, this would be so. However, we're not zombies: first-person facts, not least the existence of (dis)valuable experiences, don't possess some sort of second-rate ontological status. If we assume Strawsonian physicalism, they are as much a part of the natural world as the rest mass of the electron. I can't define the normative aspect of disvaluable experience in terms of anything more semantically primitive. But if, for example, you try and hold your hand in ice-cold water for as long as you can, the experience is not motivationally inert. What property of the experience causes you to withdraw your hand?
Anyhow, this philosophising takes us a long way from the morally urgent question of nonhuman animal suffering. The worst source of severe and readily avoidable misery that exists in the world, today, i.e. factory-farming, is wholly manmade. Unless one is a complete moral nihilist, we have an obligation to stop it.
srdiamond, I certainly wouldn't dismiss Moore's Open Question argument. Indeed, on the face of it, the argument is decisive. Whatever apparently dreadful or wonderful phenomenon-exists in the natural world, one can still ask if it's (dis)valuable. However, what is not an open question, at least for me, is whether my unbearable distress is disvaluable for me. And I'm arguing that it's only an epistemological limitation on my part, not some deep ontological truth about the world, that leads to any failure in my recognition that ( it is objectively the case that) your unbearable distress is disvaluable too. The badness of your agony is not an open question to a mirror-touch synaesthete - or a God-like superintelligence who could apprehend all possible first-person perspectives.
A counterargument might be that the existence of (dis)value in the world is inconsistent with the naturalistic third-person ontology of physical science. If eliminativist materialism were the case, this would be so. However, we're not zombies: first-person facts, not least the existence of (dis)valuable experiences, don't possess some sort of second-rate ontological status. If we assume Strawsonian physicalism, they are as much a part of the natural world as the rest mass of the electron. I can't define the normative aspect of disvaluable experience in terms of anything more semantically primitive. But if, for example, you try and hold your hand in ice-cold water for as long as you can, the experience is not motivationally inert. What property of the experience causes you to withdraw your hand?
Anyhow, this philosophising takes us a long way from the morally urgent question of nonhuman animal suffering. The worst source of severe and readily avoidable misery that exists in the world, today, i.e. factory-farming, is wholly manmade. Unless one is a complete moral nihilist, we have an obligation to stop it.
I'd argue that we may cheat Hume's Guillotine with the following argument. In a nutshell, my agony has a primitive, irreducible normative aspect.
That's exactly Moore's answer to his (often wrongly derided) "open question." (See my "Habit theory of morality: moral judgments are always false" — http://tinyurl.com/7dcbt7y )
The question is, What would prompt anyone to believe that there's such a thing as an irreducibly normative aspect?--except as an ad hoc move to save belief in objective morality/moral realism?
The whole direction of science is, as you say, toward an archimidean perspective, but it is also (or is it part of the same tendency?) away from infusing nature with norms.