RSS
Most normal, civilized people living today would agree that reducing animal suffering is a worthy goal. But how do we to go about it?
We can at least all agree, at a minimum, that plants don’t have sentience, so veganism is one philosophically and logically consistent option. The problem is that while there are some almost entirely carnivorous cultures on the planet (Inuit), as well as some almost completely vegetarian ones (Indian Brahmins), there are no vegan ones. This suggests that humans are not evolved for veganism. Interestingly, some genomic studies suggest that Indians may be unusually well adapted to vegetarianism; this wouldn’t surprise me, as they seem to be the one people who have figured out how to make vegetarian food really delicious. This might not apply to other peoples. For instance, a study of German vegetarians found them to have significantly higher than average rates of mental disorders.
Another “absolute” solution to animal suffering may lie in technology, such as artificially grown meat, or fully chemical production of nutritionally optimized foods[1]. There is already work on lab grown meat, though a burger produced using these hi-tech methods costs thousands of dollars. There are even more exotic suggestions, such as David Pearce’s famous argument for genetically editing carnivorous animals to make them vegetarian and usher in a glorious era of peace between the lion and the antelope.
However, realistically speaking, vegetarianism – let alone veganism – is not going to be widely adapted anytime soon. Even in the WEIRDest countries, no more than 10-15% of the population say they are vegetarians, while vegans are in the low single digits. Meanwhile, any technological solutions are likely still decades away.
***
Approaches to Animal Rights
Consequently, most of us will still have to grapple with the consequences of destroying living, conscious entities for our own sustenance. There are a number of ways we can approach this.
1. There is the Biblical idea that animals were created to serve man, a purely functional approach that large nullifies any consideration of animal welfare. The philosopher Descartes argued that animals have no souls; under Cartesianism, they can be tortured and vivisected alive for any reason or none, as they are nothing more than automatons, or p-zombies. The most charitable thing one can say of these ethical systems is that they reflect the values of a world that was much harsher and crueler, and is now thankfully long gone.
2. There is the “speciesist” argument that treats each human as a more or less equivalent ethical unit, and places them cardinally above any animal. This is a reasonable evolutionary adaptation, and can be easily justified based on the cognitive considerations that we will consider later in this article. There are of course some edge cases, such as the extremely intellectually disabled, or babies, who may be equivalent to chimps to intelligence. However, it makes sense to ignore these – the former because of their rarity, the former because we are so evolutionarily hardwired to protect infants that we often even privilege them them over human adults. The question of exactly how much we value humans will become central should we ever create a conscious machine superintelligence, or “uplift” animals, or meet up with friendly aliens, but this isn’t an issue yet and probably won’t be for quite some time to come.
3.There is what Peter Singer called the “expanding circle of empathy” – a concept popularized by Steven Pinker – in which history consists of humanity extending empathy and associated legal privileges to more and more marginalized groups: From the family to the band, the tribe, the nation, lower classes, women, children, sexual minorities. While this concept may have been inadvertently lampooned by contemporary SJWs with their microaggressions and ever expanding categories of victimhood, there is no doubt that over the long-term, expanding empathy represented an unalloyed good in the grand scheme of things (at least assuming that one prefers not to be killed, raped, robbed, etc. by all and sundry). Indeed, as Peter Turchin argues, large civilizations would hardly have been possible without it.
Since at least the Enlightenment, this has come to encompass animals. People in medieval France revelled in cat burning, where you roasted a bunch of screaming cats over a bonfire. But the practice died out in the 18th century. Today, cat burning would be viewed as barbarous in all developed countries and most developing ones. Today, civilized countries have various laws against gratuitous animal cruelty. In most countries, people who roast cats for fun will go to jail. An Austrian acquaintance even told me her country has laws against keeping lone rabbits. Since they are social creatures, you are required by law to provide your rabbit with a companion.
However, let’s not imagine that the existence of laws like these means everything is just hunky dory. Approximately 1.2 million of America’s ~90 million dogs are put down every single year because animal shelters can’t find a home for them; this translates into a 20% chance of the average US dog meeting such a fate during its lifetime. How many tens of millions of canines have frozen to death on the streets, or been put to sleep on a vet’s operating table, when a child’s demand to get a dog for his/her birthday turned to indifference several weeks later? Perhaps it might be worth considering requiring aspiring pet owners to get a certificate of competence and making them legally responsible for their pet’s welfare (within reason).
Factory farming of animals remains a gruesome enterprise. I suspect that it is the main moral failing of the present day that people of the 22nd century will look back at in horror. Unfortunately, there is no real alternative to providing cheap animal protein, unless one is wealthy or altruistic enough to source free-range produce[2]. Public policy to penalize factory farming will raise the cost of staples, and will be wildly unpopular amongst the poor and already marginalized and economically beset blue-collar workers who have spearheaded the rise of populism in the West. Subsidies to companies or farmers that raise animals ethically could make the latter more competitive, but it creates potential for massive corruption. Perhaps when we eventually transition to universal basic income – an idea that has migrated from marginal discussion groups to mainstream politics in just the past couple of years – we could directly compensate people affected by the higher prices. Though who would have opted for ethically farmed animals, or are vegetarians anyway, would just take the savings.
4. Another view of animal rights is based on the idea of what one might call a primeval social contract, a concept that has been eloquently made on this blog by commenter AP. The basic idea is that by signing up to the human endeavour, wolves offered their loyal service (guardianship, herding flocks, companionship, etc.) in exchange for a warm hearth and the reasonable expectation that they would die in their sleep, not end up on the dinner table – at least outside extreme circumstances, such as getting stranded in the Arctic, when the calories a dog can provide would constitute an ultimate form of self-sacrificing service. Meanwhile, even though they are about as intelligent as dogs, pigs were only ever invited into the human enterprise as a source of food, not as companions. Slitting their throats and roasting them over a spit breaks no covenant.
I am personally sympathetic to this view – even though the cognitive and emotional capacities of pigs are similar to those of dogs, I would still privilege dogs over pigs, as dogs are much closer to us – “man’s best friend” and all that. It is also a viewpoint that I imagine the vast majority of Americans and Europeans – if not Chinese and Koreans – will agree with. However, I don’t think this should be used as a licence to wantonly disregard porcine suffering. At a minimum, while one could argue that they also forged a primeval contract with humans in which they got the promise of safety and sustenance until their appointed day, they certainly didn’t sign up for a conveyor belt existence from artificial insemination through life imprisonment to industrial slaughter. The same goes for other livestock animals, though in their case the horror of their existence might be mitigated by lower cognitive capacity.
***
The Cognitive Chain of Being
5. Finally, there is the standard “Effective Altruism” approach[3] – attempting to quantify the suffering experienced by any one animal during the course of its life, and dividing that number by the kilograms of meat, protein/fat calories, and nutritional benefits its meat provides. I am a big fan of quantification, because even if it’s not perfect, you can at least narrow down the debate and identify the most prospective areas for moral progress that are within the range of affordability at both the individual and social level.
Here’s one typical example of this approach: “How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods?” by Brian Tomasik.
This is a very reasonable start, even if one can quibble with columns 4-6. But the beauty of it is that you can adjust those numbers based on your own values.
Column 5 – Suffering per day of life (beef cows = 1).
The German philosopher Schopenhauer, who argued that it would be morally better were “the surface of the earth were still as crystalline as that of the moon,” justified his assertions with the idea that there is no hedonic balance: “The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don’t believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”
But is this really true? Sure, the deer getting ripped apart by a pack of wolves – or getting shot by a hunter – might not enjoy its last moments of sentience. But it would have had a few years of presumably mostly happy grazing behind it. I do not think existence per se constitutes net suffering, at least so long as it is not a dystopian existence. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of most factory farming, which really is rather horrific so far as most of its subjects are concerned.
The ultimate aim of mitigating or abolishing factory farming would turn the positive numbers in this column to zeros, or even negative ones, i.e. from net suffering into net satisfaction. That way, even if livestock still has to be killed in not too pleasant ways at the end so that we may have our daily pound of flesh, at least their fleeting ribbons of consciousness would not have experienced their short existence as a hell on earth.
Column 6 – Number of days of life equivalent to pain of death.
I would imagine that pain of death is correlated to the animal’s natural lifespan, as well as whether it is a social or solitary creature via knock on effects on survivors (even cows have been observed to mope for days after the deaths of relatives).
This would also be of direct relevance to the halal/kosher debate. Getting your throat slit in the open air is not the best, but neither the worst, way to go. In factory farming, the hope is that pigs – hurried along amidst the stench of fear, blood, faeces, and imminent death – are successfully electrocuted into unconsciousness, to then have their throats slit and thrown in a vat of boiling water. Does this happen rarely enough to justify condemnation of halal meat?
Column 4 – Sentience multiplier for the species (max value = 1).
This is, in my opinion, by far the most important consideration; and it is also the one on which I imagine that EA “consensus” opinion is the most profoundly mistaken on.
For instance, Tomasik’s table gives catfish – one of the more primitive creatures on the planet – a sentience multiplier of 0.5 relative to pigs! This implies that killing two catfish is as bad as killing a pig, and that eating catfish produces 200 times as much suffering as eating pork. Other, perhaps most, effective altruists don’t even think it’s worth adjusting for brain size at all, regarding it as a poor or irrelevant proxy for sentience.
this piece takes into account animal suffering https://t.co/J28wATZGXZ brain size not good proxy for sentience
— Diana S. Fleischman (@sentientist) February 22, 2017
This happens to be a cardinal assumption, and one that I disagree with entirely.
First, there is the obvious argumentum ad absurdum here: Based on such negligible differences in sentience multipliers, we might well argue that eating gorilla meat (a delicacy in parts of Africa) is “better” than the equivalent mass in salmon. And if one is willing to part entirely with “speciesist” prejudices, then one can even make an argument for the moral superiority of “humanitarianism” over entomophagy.
My second, less whimsical point, is that the latest serious academic theories of consciousness revolve around the concept of “information integration.” Information integration is tightly coupled to intelligence, and which in turn is correlated with biological indicators such as brain size and neuronal density.
Here is what philosopher Michael Johnson wrote about this in Principia Qualia (2016):
Furthermore, under simulations of problem-solving agents, [integrated information] seems to increases as evolved complexity and problem-solving capacity increases: (Albantakis et al. 2014)” found that “The more difficult the task, the higher integrated information in the fittest animats” and concluded “Integrating information is potentially valuable in environments with complex causal structures.” From here, it’s not a terrible stretch to say that the integrated information and the potential for adaptive (intelligent) behavior of a system are usually highly coupled. This matches the common intuition that intelligence and consciousness go together.
This makes intuitive sense. While even the simplest automatons such as insects – ants, spiders, even the 302 neuron c. elegans worm – can feel pain, experiencing or comprehending the associated feelings of fear, anguish, desperation, despair, and existential terror that usually accompany pain in humans is likely far beyond the capacities of their blessedly small brains.
A cognitive approach to bioethics effectively creates an updated version of the “great chain of being“, the medieval notion that there is a God-sanctioned hierarchy to Creation, starting with God Himself and progressing downwards to kings (His representatives on Earth), nobles, commoners, animals, and inanimate matter. This may not sit well with more egalitarian minded readers. However, at the end of the day, one cannot plausibly deny its self-evident reality – or, more importantly, the cruelties and unneeded suffering that would be created by ignoring them (e.g. killing gorillas vs. 100,000 neuron lobsters).
Nor does it call for any sort of IQ reductionism: While the Middle Ages actually did see a sort of cognitive supremacism (e.g. the literate could plead “benefit of clergy” and receive far lighter sentences), I am not arguing that the Cognitive Chain of Being should be used to differentiate between humans. While the question of whether human sentience is correlated with IQ is a very interesting one, and one that researchers should be free to investigate, given that the vast majority of human intellects are clustered within a few S.D.’s of each other doing so would not just be unethical but also useless.
This may not be the case forever. As I mentioned above, should subgroups of humans launch a “biosingularity” that massively augments their intelligence, in effect creating a new species, or should a machine superintelligence be created, or should we meet up with aliens or “uplift” animals, then the contradictions between speciesism and cognitive ethics – contradictions that are currently dormant – will come to the forefront of all philosophical debates.
But with this approach, we will at least have the tools to conduct such a debate.
***
Constructing the Chain I
Here are some considerations that might go into any serious attempt to construct an index of sentience:
1. The encephalization quotient
This is a “relative brain size measure that is defined as the ratio between observed to predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size.” The larger the animal, the greater the amount of brainpower it needs to devote to subconscious motor and metabolic functions. This narrows down its effective space for cognition, and presumably, sentience. While most very intelligent animals tend to be relatively large, this does not appear to be an absolute requirement.
2. Comparative estimates of animal intelligence.
Rather pathetically, in so far as it indicates the embryonic state of any research on this question, the best attempt I have seen to date on this (and I searched quite a lot) is a Quora answer by effective altruist Alex K. Chen: What is a good list of animals ordered by intelligence?
There is no quantification, apart from sorting them into about seven Tiers of intelligence:
- The Great Apes, many types of whales and dolphins, elephants, a few corvids.
- Smarter monkeys, bears, wild boar (>pigs), Gray African parrot, kea, manta rays.
- Owls, baboons, racoons, hyenas, wolves, smarter dogs.
- Emperor penguins, cats, octopus, naked mole rats.
- Stupid mammals: Quail, chickens, pigeons; smarter lower vertebrates.
- Most reptiles and fish.
- Salamanders, lungfishes.
I mostly agree with this list, though I might quibble with one or two of the rankings.
3. Numbers of neurons by animal.
Are good biological correlates of cognitive capability. There is a good list at Wikipedia.
4. Neurons in the cerebral cortex.
These seem to play an especially important role, so perhaps more weight should be placed on them. Incidentally, these also happen to be strongly associated with longevity.
5. Vocabulary size
This is limited to animals that can be taught human vocabulary, or something close to it:
- The average human masters ~30,000 words (geniuses can reach up to ~100,000).
- Koko the gorilla knew 1,000 hand signs and understood 2,000 words.
- Chaser the border collie understood 1,000+ words and simple grammar; admittedly, the border collie is a cognitive elite amongst dogs, and Chaser is a genius amongst them.
- Alex the Gray African parrot knew 100+ words and had some conception of grammar.
6. Mirror tests
This a test of whether an animal has self-recognition. There are only a few cognitively elite species that consistently pass the mirror test: The Great Apes, dolphins, whales, elephants, magpies, maybe manta rays… and ants (!?).
But that one crazy insect exception aside, there seems to be an excellent correlation with Tier 1/Tier 2 animals.
7. Human IQ tests
The blogger Pumpkin Person has estimated chimps have an IQ of around 14 relative to American white norms (average = 100; S.D. = 15):
In 2007 there was a fascinating study that compared human 2.5 year-olds to chimps and other apes on a battery of intelligence tests. With the exception of social intelligence, where the human toddlers were way ahead, the apes and toddlers had the same intelligence. In other words, chimps have the same intelligence as a 2.5 year old (white) human. …
Indeed based on the intercorrelation of WAIS-IV subtests, someone who is 4.18 SD below average on the average subtest, would be 5.73 standard deviations (86 IQ points) below average on the composite score, thus my best guess for the average IQ of chimps is 14 (white norms).
Consequently, we can take chimps to be at the lowest range of the normal, “healthy” range of human intelligence. (By bell curve logic, the average chimp’s IQ will be equalled about once every 200 millionth white American; that is, there should be about one normal, healthy white American who is at the level of the average chimp).
***
Constructing the Chain II
I believe that a great deal more serious work needs to be done on this topic, instead of taking the easy way out and dismissing animal IQ as a pseudoscientific concept that is a priori impenetrable to measurement, quantification, and comparison. This may have been semi-defensible a decade ago, but since then, a g factor for intelligence has been found in chimps, monkeys, dogs, and even rodents. There was even a paper on “individual differences in cognition among teleost fishes” in 2017. IQ denialism is now almost as intellectually bankrupt with respect to animals as it is with respect to humans.
This is serious work that needs to go well beyond a blog post on a popular blog. That said, I will attempt to make a preliminary stab at this.
The chimp IQ test suggests that we may set up a distinct barrier between human and chimps (and by extension, other Tier 1 animals); while one may be able to find humans duller than the average chimp, they will be nothing more than statistical curiosities. Moreover, chimps lack a whole set of cognitives suites that humans have. Relative to us, they largely lack self-awareness, altruism, intuitive psychology, and the capacity to ask questions (though many of these capacities will be likewise strongly inhibited in ultra-low IQ humans). This may well drag the “true” IQ of chimps relative to humans even lower. That said, Alex K. Chen notes that orangutans, bonobos, and many dolphins are brighter than chimps, so at least some of the very brightest Tier 1 animals should still at least brush up against our very dullest fellow humans.
There is consequently a strong moral case to be made for extending substantial legal protections to Tier 1 animals. There is already strong sentimental support for protecting the Great Apes (as our nearest relatives), the elephants[4] (see the outrage generated by poachers), and whales (see the campaigns against Japanese, Norwegian, and Icelandic whaling). Admittedly, this might be less practical for corvids, but we should still recognize that crows and ravens[5] – at 8 S.D. above the avian mean in terms of innovations, and with a phenomenal, human-competitive capacity for facial recognition – are the cognitive elites of the avian world.
One of the smartest dogs, a border collie named Chaser, mastered over 1,000 words, which is considerably more impressive than Alex, the famous Gray African parrot (who is in Tier 2). While Chaser is exceptional, and there aren’t many border collies, it’s worth pointing out that lists of most popular dog breeds (German Shepherds, golden retrievers, Labradors, poodles, Rottweilers) are dominated by the more intelligent dogs (border collies, poodles, German Shepherds, golden retrievers, Dobermans, Labradors, Rottweilers); the main exceptions are Yorkies (moderate intelligence) and bulldogs (dumb as a box of bricks)[6]. They also have very well developed and complex personalities, as any dog owner would know. Consequently, as the most popular dogs tend to be the most intelligent dogs, it makes sense to put them firmly into Tier 2. By extension, wolves would be in Tier 2 as well. If dogs and boar are in Tier 2, then certainly it would make sense for pigs to be likewise included.
There is a case to be made that animals in this Tier deserve to have substantial protections as well, perhaps on the level of what dogs have today through their primeval contract with us. I want to return to Austria’s laws about rabbit welfare. While I don’t harbor any ill will towards rabbits, their neurobiological stats, extreme r-selected status, stereotypes, and my own limited experiences with them (relative to dogs, pigs, and even cats) all suggest that they are rather simple creatures. This is clearly legislation based on the cuteness factor, though – presumably – with rather glaring exceptions for rabbit farms. However, if even rabbits have attained this level of legal protections, certainly it would make sense to do likewise for all other Tier 2 animals.
***
Constructing the Chain III
One general observation I have made is that – allowing for the occasional exception, outlier, and unknown – there seems to be a more or less consistent intellectual distance between these Tiers.
Assuming that humans are Tier o, as one goes down by Tier we see:
- Halving of encephalization ratio
- … which may be equivalent to ~10 million years of evolution[7]
- Number of neurons falls tenfold[8]
- Vocabulary size falls tenfold
- IQ falls by ~100 points/~7 S.D. (or at least between humans and chimps)
A much harder question is what unit of sentience, ethical value, or capacity for suffering these Tiers represent. Is the the relationship between intelligence, sentience, and capacity for suffering linear? While the latter two seem to be intuitively very similar, the link between them and intelligence is much more contentious, as we have seen above.
Now honestly, this is something that people more intelligent and committed to EA should look into more seriously themselves. My intuition is that there is a linear relationship between intelligence and information integration/sentience, and my own ethical choices follow from that assumption. Obviously, different ethical choices will follow from other assumptions. If you consider that sentience “explodes” only at some sufficiently high level of intelligence, e.g. the human one, then one should not have major quibbles with fullbore carnivorism. If on the other hand you believe that even intellectual minnows such as… minnows? experience a substantial internal life relative to that of humanity, then choosing vegetarianism or veganism would be the ethically consistent choice.
***
Maximizing Protein Calories/Suffering
I redid Tomasik’s table, but resetting the sentience multiplier to correlate with intelligence. With Tier 2 pigs set to the default maximum of “1”, I then set cows to 0.1, chickens and turkeys to 0.01, and salmon and catfish to 0.0001.
Consequently, we get the following list of dieting philosophies (from “best” to “worst” in terms of animal suffering):
Veganism: Self-explanatory.
Vegetarianism: Only eggs and milk. As we can see, drinking milk and eating free range eggs – in which the chickens get to live more or less normal lives – produces almost no animal suffering.
Pescetarianism: While before you were worrying about the salmonocide, it now emerges that you can eat fish with wild abandon (just not the manta rays!).
Pollo-pescetarianism: Next one can eat chicken and turkeys, both of them rather primitive creatures with intelligence at best similar to rats. Many other rodents would fall into this category[9]. This is also in sync with popular assessments of these animals’ sentience levels; the next stage after pescetarianism is
Omnivorism: I believe that cows are firmly in Tier 3, so together with their large mass, that might plausibly make beef an even more ethical food than poultry. The relative advantage can be pushed further by making sure that the beef is grass-fed, which happens to be healthier than grain-fed beef anyway. Now yes, it is possible that I underestimate cow sentience. However, I would have to be wrong by a factor of about 4 before beef becomes merely as “bad” as chicken, even if the individual slaughtered cow suffers far more than a chicken.
In any case, this is where I have drawn my personal line since the early 2010s.
Personally, I follow a cognitive ethics on vegetarian/meat debate. I abstain from pork, as pigs =~ dogs; but do eat beef, chicken, fish.
— ak (@akarlin88) November 18, 2014
Sheep provide much less meat, as do goats.
Moreover, goats in particular have distinct personalities and I suspect that they are also smarter than cows. This makes mutton, lamb, and especially goat significantly closer to pork than to beef.
Pork, I try to avoid entirely[10].
***
A Thought Experiment
Near the beginning of this post, I speculated that if there is one moral failing that future generations will condemn us for, it is killing animals for meat[11].
This is not to imply that I agree with this assessment, but then again, the average US citizen of a Southern state in the early 19th century presumably had few qualms with slavery either. Opinion can change quickly. Outside a few pockets such as the Netherlands or the SF Bay Area, someone who supported gay civil unions, but not gay marriage, would have been seen as a hardcore progressive in 1999; in 2019, most of the US would consider that same person regressive, if not a moral troglodyte. Alternatively, consider the trend in support for interracial marriage: 1959 – only 4%; early 2010s – high 80%’s. Your grandfather who stormed the beaches of Normandy to “punch Nazis” was himself a fascist (by the standards of modern liberal discourse).
In 2014, the US killed 112 million Tier 2 pigs, 32.5 million Tier 3 cattle, and 8.5 billion Tier 4 chickens. Roughly setting the suffering deriving from that at 1, 0.1, and 0.01 respectively:
- Pigs: 112 million units of suffering
- Cattle: 3.25 million units of suffering
- Chicken: 85 million units of suffering
That’s 200 million units of suffering. (Turkeys would also add 10-20 million units).
Assuming as per above that Tier 0 humans are 100x as sentient as pigs, this translates to the imprisonment/genocide of 2 million humans annually in the US alone.
Today, there are Biblical, Cartesian, speciesist, and primeval social contract biases against making this equivalence. Now note that I am not saying they are bad biases; they have made it with us this far, so they must have been evolutionarily adaptive, at the very least. Nor is there yet much of a circle of empathy towards livestock, aside from the 5%-10% of the population that is vegetarian in the developed world. However, should these biases continue to break down, should the circle of empathy continue to expand, should future consciousness research tend to confirm rather than refute the intuitions I have set down here, and – perhaps most importantly – should technological progress divorce animal protein from animal suffering, then our historical era will be seen as morally compromised as any other.
***
[1] Due to the energy inefficiency of indoor farming, this might be a necessity if we are to do interstellar travel without cryonics
[2] FWIW, there are some good selfish arguments for the latter. For instance, where I live, free range eggs cost 50% more than eggs from battery raised chickens. However, free range eggs have 2-3x the vitamin content of the latter, so opting for them might be a good deal anyway.
[3] Though to be frank, the most common EA approach is to just go vegetarianism. More power to those who go down that path.
[4] Incidentally, elephants are particularly interesting since they are not only rather cognitively developed, but their vast amount of neurons may have even given them the most developed moral sense of any animal: “Elephants practice altruism. There is a now famous story of an Indian elephant called Chandrasekharan, who was working lifting poles off a truck as it moved along, and placing them in holes dug in the ground. When Chandrasekharan came to one hole he refused to put the log in. Eventually the Mahout checked and discovered a dog sleeping in it. Only when the dog was gone would Chandrasekharan put the pole in. This sort of behaviour is typical of elephants.”
[5] Though corvid and parrot brains are necessarily quite modest, they are much denser than those of primates, and perhaps better organized; this allows them to have competitive intelligence. Corvids traditionally have a fell reputation – they are seen as carrion eaters, feeders on death, evil omens. But this is yet another pet peeve I have with conventional moralities. Carrion birds prefer to scavenge, in the process cleaning up the landscape, over killing prey and causing suffering. What exactly is wrong with that? The long-lived, intelligent, K-selected corvid needs to be respected.
[6] Though my own experience is very much limited, I can personally vouch for that list. We currently have a mini-poodle female and a Yorkie male. While the Yorkie is great, the mini-poodle is much smarter than him. While our German Shepherd is long dead, he was also very bright.
[7] There is a remarkably consistent trend in macro-world history towards exponential growth in neuron numbers and the encephalization index amongst the world’s major animal groups. It is entirely possible that humans only got to where they are <25 million years ahead of other potential contenders. In other words, if we were to suddenly vanish off the face in some way that doesn’t destroy the planetary biosphere, it’s entirely plausible a new technological species will evolve from other primates, canines, pigs, crows, ravens, or even irradiated rats (Dawkins).
[8] An example of exceptions: Horses seem to have too many neurons for their low level of intelligence, while brown bears have a remarkably small amount of neurons in the cerebral cortex – but there is nonetheless a distinct pattern.
[9] For instance, nutria is a staple in the Russian South, and has made its way to Moscow in recent years.
[10] Beef bacon: A means of moral progress?
While opinions on Islamic immigration might differ, one change this creates is the appearance of alternatives to traditional pork dishes. I live in Moscow, so two examples I can immediately think of are halal pelmeni (traditional pelmeni consists of beef and pork) and, more recently, beef bacon. While Jewish/Islamic bans on pork obviously had nothing to do with altruistic concerns over pig welfare – instead, they were behavioral adaptations to the punishing disease environment of the world’s first region to experience significant urbanization – those restrictions must have still wracked up a significant positive moral tally over the centuries and millennia. Ex-Muslims looking to celebrate their apostasy with bacon and booze might stop to consider that their former religion may have had a point – if inadvertently – about the former.
[11] I was making this point as early as 2017 on Razib Khan’s blog.
Since Karlin is of the same generation of me, I can only assume that the ’90s milkcap game POGS memetically programmed him to accept the Porcine Occupation Government.
Mr. Karlin, how about a trigger warning for cat lovers?
My (meagre) understanding of the Jain religion is that it mandates veganism, so Indian Jains would be one such completely vegan culture.
The point about elephants’ moral sense is well taken, and should be considered in conjunction with IQ. It should be noted that certain breeds of cat have been naturally and artificially selected for high bondability, trust, and affection to the human female, rendering them incapable of independent survival and therefore entitled to the utmost protection.
I am glad that you posted this. Some people, like me, need a real slap in the face to understand when they have been wasting their time.
Super piece, one of your best. Wasted here. Needs more exposure.
I eat pork with an uneasy soul. You can’t fatten an unhappy pig. They have to be kept physically and mentally healthy. This means at least 5 members of your gang to grow up with for the social interaction. Farrowing (giving birth) is a terrible thing but it saves piglets lives compared to using pig sties. Arguably free-range pigs have tougher lives. So pig farming is not cruel but pigs are clever (some more than others), certainly social.
Battery hens whether for meat or eggs, on the other hand, have unhealthy and probably psychologically damaging lives, give or take a Bird Brain or two but I don’t feel guilty about eggs or poultry meat. Turkey’s have it easier than chickens. So do ducks.
That was an interesting fact about brown bears. I would have expected them to be rather clever pigs, omnivore with hunting skills. Maybe they are like gorillas. Top of their local pyramid and going soft. Polar bears seem to be clever.
Here we see the potential maladapative consequences of a high IQ. In adopting this completely ridiculous position you make your quality of life worse for no benefit whatsoever. It would be amusing if not for the fact that this style of thinking is in fact dangerous and leads to disastrous consequences.
My simple take is that animals exist to serve people. We are the #1 species and all others are inferior and exist only because we permit them to exist.
Pigs included.
Their suffering is completely irrelevant because they’re not people (let alone the very best people).
Pigs provide healthful, tasty meat (and other useful products) at an economical price point. That is the only thing that matters.
I’ve always felt that vegetarians, vegans, and the like should be sent to concentration camps for failing to grasp this fundamental law of nature. I never had to think about this for even a second. As soon as I first learned as a boy that vegetarians existed I hated them intensely. And I still hate them.
Public facilities should be prohibited from serving vegetarian cuisine. Vegetarian and vegan substitute goods should be illegal. All medicines and supplements should be encapsulated in gelatin by law.
I agree with George Orwell that philosophy ought to be forbidden by law, but if you want to put some sort of ethical underpinning to this worldview potential avenues are Confucian circles of loyalty, genetic similarity theory, and of course the good old Bible.
You had me going there for a second.
Anatoly, I have a question–is it true that even pigs, chicken, and fish have more signs of consciousness and rationality than fetuses, newborn infants, and mentally disabled people have? :
https://www.str.org/blog/peter-singer-rejects-inalienable-human-rights#.XHh8EYhKiUk
If so, is it really fair to give the former a higher legal status than the latter–ignoring any evolutionary biases that we might have?
Also, as a side note, I have a question–did people in what is now the Muslim world eat a lot of pork before the arrival of Islam onto their territories?
1. I would assume so.
2. Who gets to define what’s fair? Well… us, being a dominant and sapient species. No more us – a possible result of the runaway altruism that you suggest – no more fairness. Just the continuing grind of natural selection.
Quite possibly, even just theorizing about Cognitive Chain of Being is also an evolutionary maladaptation, as Thorfinnsson suggests. Though I doubt it. I agree that such an outlook would have been disastrous in a 95% agricultural economy, to which we have become adapted to in the past 10,000 years. However, it hardly seems relevant to an industrial economy with huge surpluses.
3. Interesting question. Talha would probably be able to answer that question, if he still commented.
In response to your point #2, I really fail to see how exactly my solution here would result in “[n]o more us.” I mean, downgrading human infants could result in the legalization of infanticide–at least in certain cases–but how exactly is that going to result in “no more fairness”? After all, adult humans are still going to be in charge of our decision-making policies. It’s not like non-human animals are actually going to get a vote in this (just like human children don’t have a vote in shaping national policies).
Also, interestingly enough, I’ve seen pro-lifers argue that if human infants should get a high legal status based on their future abilities and/or species membership, then it’s only fair to likewise do the same for human embryos and human fetuses.
The intelligence and empathy necessary to contemplate the question can lend themselves to maladaptive purposes.
In this particular question, no, it is not particularly harmful.
The negative personal consequences you suffer are mild inconvenience, social awkwardness (depending on how committed you are), and sensory deprivation. All completely manageable.
And to be objective, there are some benefits. Interesting conversation material, increased self-regard.
Hypothetically, if this caught on, it would have negative but manageable consequences. It would be culturally destructive, but the world could get on without prosciutto and jamon iberico. Though personally I’d opt for the Smith & Wesson retirement plan rather than suffer such a grim existence.
It’s the line of thinking itself that is dangerous. This is the same sort of thinking that led to “equality”. And, of course, a more aggressive approach in reducing the suffering of animals (vegetarianism, veganism).
I agree; imo vegetarianism/veganism is a symptom of the same kind of softness and excessive empathy that leads to categoric rejection of the death penalty, corporal punishment etc. Well-intentioned, but such sentiments can ultimately render a society defenseless.
A reasonable moral objection to killing newborns (or fetuses) despite possessing less immediate rational ability than, say, a calf, is that we are obligated to protect not only current sapience, but also the capacity of a particular organism to develop sapience in the future. We might say that, when considering the worth of an individual soul (in the sense of a “psyche,” not anything necessarily supernatural), we have to consider its value over its entire expected lifespan, not just “at this moment.”
For example, think of a man in a deep coma with absolutely no sapience–neither a rational soul nor even a sensitive one. We are certain that this person will fully recover in less than a year given adequate medical treatment. Should we have any compunction against killing him? By Singer’s logic, no: at this moment, the man is literally vegetative, so killing him would cause no more “rational suffering” than crushing a dandelion. The only reason to oppose killing him is his soul’s capacity to develop sapience in the future.
Opposing the death penalty actually makes sense. Some innocent people–such as Cameron Todd Willingham–have previously been executed in the past. In Willingham’s case, this was just 15 years ago and occurred in spite of the fact that, even before his execution, significant doubts about his guilt emerged.
As for corporal punishment, I think that it should be discouraged but not banned. Sometimes a good dose of discipline should be in order, but one should try other options first and not overdo it if you indeed have to resort to it.
That’s certainly an interesting argument–one that I have heard before–but it does raise a couple of questions:
1. Should embryos and fetuses be considered to be persons? After all, they also have the potential to become sentient and self-aware in the future. This might be especially relevant if/once we will develop artificial wombs. After all, in such a case, there could be situations where a couple changed their minds and did not want to carry their fetus to term in an artificial womb but where the state would nevertheless want their fetus to be carried to term.
Also, should this principle also extend to IVF? For instance, should a doctor who destroys excess embryos which were created through IVF be charged with multiple counts of manslaughter?
2. Taking your logic to its ultimate conclusion would mean that killing an infant or even a fetus would be much worse than killing, say, a 110-year-old or a 115-year-old person. After all, the infant or fetus is, statistically speaking, going to have many decades of life ahead of him or her. In contrast, a 110-year-old or a 115-year-old person almost certainly isn’t going to have very much time left to live even if he or she is currently in tip-top shape. (At the very most, we should expect 5-10 additional years of life for this person in the utmost best-case scenario.)
Should the law recognize this distinction and thus punish people much more heavily for killing an infant or a wanted fetus in comparison to killing an extremely old person? After all, the former would have lost much more additional years of life as a result of being killed than the latter would have.
I know about that case, quite disturbing. Indeed that’s the only argument against the death penalty I find convincing, human lawcourts aren’t infallible.
However I don’t believe that human life is sacred per se and categorically reject such arguments (that’s also why I’m not absolutely against abortion in all cases, even though I generally regard it as negative). Just look at the bizarre business of thousands of IS jihadis who will probably be sent back to Europe, with European governments even intervening on behalf of some who have been sentenced to death in Iraq; imo they should all be killed.
As if that would be an absurd conclusion.
As it stands now, eagles and other “protected” animal species have more “protections” than a viable human being–even one that is minutes from being born…and if democRATs have their way, humans up to 7 years of age…will be subject to “post-birth” abortion…sick.
Hens are absolutely monstrous animals – they will peck another hen that died of a hemorrhage while it is still in its final death spasms.
Going to go in the opposite direction: all our political candidates should be required to kill chickens, as a test to eliminate overly effeminate people who suffer from a false empathy. Meanwhile, people in charge of the border should, at a minimum, be big game hunters. And perhaps more: required to complete the circuit, when a murderer is sitting in the electric chair.
Personally, even if I were to acknowledge that some people deserve to be executed (and it’s certainly a very legitimate position–for instance, in regards to people such as Osama bin Laden), I would still think that it would be fairer not to execute anyone even if some people who are deserving of the death penalty get life in prison instead. At least that way there wouldn’t be any innocent people who are getting executed–which is my specific worry (as opposed to me thinking that all human life is sacred per se).
It wouldn’t necessarily be an absurd conclusion, but our legal system doesn’t appear to differentiate between the two cases that I listed in my post above. AFAIK, you’d get the same punishment for both of these things.
Your concern is of course very well-founded. My only qualm is that I think there are some souls that are so foul that they create a stench for everyone who must be in their presence. Like, imagine you had to guard John Wayne Gacy in prison (bring him food and such) and be reminded of his sadistic crimes for years on end. It would seem that would be traumatizing for a person.
Well, if you’re not up for the job of working at a prison, no one is going to force you to have this job. In turn, this should ensure that only those people who are emotionally and mentally prepared to handle such a job are actually going to have a job working at a prison.
Fair enough.
I am not a theologian but this seems suspect:
1. It doesn’t. According to Christian tradition animals have souls, they just don’t have immortal souls. What can immortality be for a creature that is incapable of recognizing time, oneself, and one’s place in time? But their subjective feeling wasn’t denied and wanton cruelty wasn’t viewed as acceptable.
2. Also, AFAIK the Biblical idea is that man was given dominion over nature, and ought to be grateful for the gift he has received and accordingly to treat it well – he is expected to treat his own body well too, of course. So therefore it is absurd to treat an animal equal to a human (as it is absurd to give equal rights to one’s car as to a human) and to not use it for the purpose God assigned to it (such as food) but gratuitously maiming or destroying one’s gift is to spit in the face of the gift-giver.
This was really monstrous. They would engage in vivisection and believe the creature’s screaming was no more meaningful than the noise made by a clock as its springs were unwinding. One sees a preview of Bolshevism in this new way of thinking.
AK: Thanks, on reading up, it seems you’re right. I slightly adjusted the text to better reflect that.
Forget all the nonsense you have heard or written.
It is really simple. All domesticated species have entered into a symbiotic relationship with humans where we have agreed to ensure their genes are propagated into the future for as long as we survive, but for a cost.
For some animals the cost is relatively light, eg dogs.
For some animals, the cost is relatively onerous, eg, food species, but they are going to die eventually anyway.
For some, the cost is negative, in that they get to pretty much rule us, eg, cats.
1. Yes, and yes.
2. This is an interesting point, although perhaps not as radical as it seems. I think most people intuitively feel worse when a young child is killed than an adult–not to say that intuition should be the origin of our ethics, but rather that this isn’t so extreme a proposition. But I would add two caveats:
a) It could be that killing the young should be punished more severely, but it isn’t possible to punish more severely. For instance, killing a 110 year old man is still repugnant enough to warrant a life sentence. Killing a 10 year old may deserve 15 life sentences, but alas, the criminal only has one life sentence to be held for.
b) What is the purpose of punishment here? I find it impossible to believe that punishment is actually intended as a direct moral recompense to however much wrong has been committed. If that were the case we wouldn’t have different degrees of murder, because the negative impact of killing a person is the same (or at least far closer than the order of magnitude difference in punishment would suggest). Rather punishment also is intended as a deterrent and to penalize certain actions which we consider always categorically wrong.
Yeah.
I’m glad that we agree to disagree. 🙂
Mr. Karlin,
How can one simply assume that plants lack consciousness? See, for example,
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/plant-talk-38209
Also, cells in plants and animals both release heat-shock proteins when stressed. Analogous to a cry of pain?
Very interesting essay, thank you Anatoly. I’ve been toying with similar ideas myself, though not with regard to dietary ethics, but to fair distribution of resources in a hypothetical sci-fi society with multiple alien species which are of varying sizes and intelligences and require vastly different amounts of resources and living area. I won’t go into too much detail, but I do have a question related to something you touched on:
Just how densely can intelligence be packed?
And how come ants (ants!) can reliably pass the mirror test?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects
If it is possible, would not the most ethical course for humanity be to bioengineer themselves to be smaller, even microscopic, and thus require fewer energy resources?
Well, then I am not a “normal” or “civilized” person. I thank God for that every day.
P.S. Torturing animals should, of course, be punished by law. But not because it hurts animal feelings; animals don’t have feelings. It should be punished by law because it encourages evil and cruel people to act on their evil and cruel fantasies.
Of course it isn’t true. Are you daft? Anybody who ever had a child knows this is total bullshit. Newborn infants are more intelligent than adults. They’re born mostly blind and have no motor control until a relatively late age, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a very acute intelligence. (They need to, otherwise people won’t learn complex tasks like bipedal walking and language in just a short 12 months.)
Also, there isn’t any sudden change when a ‘fetus’ becomes a ‘newborn’. We’re really good at taking care of premature babies now, we can successfully raise to normal childhood those born 4 months premature. Those are basically babies like any other, not ‘fetuses’. Just vulnerable babies, physiologically.
Abortion is already legal. Since infanticide is by far mostly a female crime, we tolerate it in the name of feminism already.
The real question is how will the Nigerians, Somalis, Mestizos, and Chinese that supplant Europeans treat animals?
…
To come up with justifications for prioritising the wellbeing of the out-group at the expense of the in-group is the product of a diseased mind and a weakness which will lead to one’s perishing.
Some conflicts are not right versus wrong, but about right versus right. Or rather, there are merely two opposing forces. So long as one took one’s own side one has fulfilled one’s duty.
However, I do not believe that awakened nationalities can return to the instinctual realm of Morpheus, at least not on any time scale that matters to us, so I do believe a philosophical and ideological foundation is required as an intellectual defense.
I endorse this view. If intruders were to try to abduct my children, my dogs will sacrifice themselves to protect the children. No pig will do so. Dogs are special animals with a deep bond with human beings. They deserve a special consideration.
Things have changed in Korea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat_consumption_in_South_Korea
In major cities in South Korea, it is nowadays very common to see people walking pet dogs. I can’t see such people being okay with consuming dog meat, let alone slaughtering them cruelly.
http://www.thedogpress.com/Funny/All-Dogs-To-Heaven.asp
(Yes, I know it’s made up.)
Nice to see you back.
Because the test doesn’t measure intelligence, it measures situational awareness. Humans are born without any situational awareness, it’s something that we painstakingly learn hands-on. (And some of us never do learn it, hence the large numbers of “autists” and those “on the spectrum” without any physiological deficiencies.)
The fact that it’s a hard process for people makes us confuse situational awareness and intelligence, when clearly they’re different things. (I’m sure everyone knows the “genius who can’t tie his own shoelaces” trope; it’s real.)
My favourite 2019 cognitive dissonance is that chickens need rights but human fetuses are totally fair play. Maybe we will transition to eating human fetuses? After all, chickens and cows are lively animals – eating them is a moral disgrace. However, fetuses, being just lump of cells, seem like a much more morally sound source of protein.
Is veganism bad for your health? They all look horribly emaciated, worse the longer they do it.
Come the fuck on Anatoly, we are living in the middle of a crashing civilization, well, you don’t, but you live in a country where hospitals still look like shit so things aren’t that rosy there either. Why worry about pigs ffs. We don’t have that kind of surplus to worry about luxury problems.
And miss this? No way.
For Jews not eating pigs is a supra-rational mitzvah that is beyond logical explanations. Arguments against it or for it are left to “the Satan and the gentile nations” not for Jews. Jews do not argue about it and do not rationalize it. Karlin’s circuitous path of elaborate rationalizations of his resolve for not eating pork is not a mitzvah, however his willingness and effort for emulation and mimicry with the Jews might be appreciated in some Jewish circles less for not eating pork than for his talmudic quality of his mind and the obsequiousness of his character. On the other hand Christians may see the pig slaughter as an act of defiance and resistance against Muslim [and Jewish] dominance and occupation as the ritual public pig slaughter, the matanza symbolized in Spain in times of Muslim occupation.
Nice.
My impression is that according to Christian tradition dogs “go to heaven”, but not because they have immortal souls. “Going to heaven” involves a resurrection of the pleasing aspects of the natural world of those who are resurrected – this would include their beloved pets (as their beloved forests, etc.). So people save their beloved pets. Thus even rocks can go to heaven also.
Huh?
Did you mean to say something other than that animals don’t have feelings? Obviously mammals have feelings, and I’m quite sure a lot of non-mammalian animals do as well. Certainly birds appear to have emotions from casual observation (haven’t looked into the science on this).
I don’t think anyone white is going to stick up for animal torture, but countless boys have tortured insects (in particular ants with a magnifying glass) with no apparent ill effects. Depending on your point of view various animal blood sports could be considered torture.
There were in the 1970s a number of psychological studies done on American participants in cock fighting, which were intended to prove the liberal suspicion that cock fighters are bloodthirsty monsters. The studies found that they were psychologically normal.
Even Michael Vick came across as a man with considerable empathy after his dog fighting was exposed.
Summertime in Russia and Ukraine has become synonymous in culinary circles with the grilling of deliciously marinated pork loin skewered over a fire of coals or hardwood, accompanied by many other goodies and alcoholic beverages. But front and center, of course, is the mouth watering and tender ‘shashlik’. Anatoly, it’s hard for me to believe that you (an unabashed foodie) stays away from these types of social events or don’t partake in the main offering? Tofu shashlik anybody? 🙂
Yes. As Karlin hinted at, there is in fact no medical need to consume any plant foods at all. But there is a need to consume animal foods. Indian Jains unwittingly consume animal foods in the form of insects, fecal droppings, etc. Jains who moved to the UK began suffering from various deficiencies.
Basic problems with veganism:
• No complete plant proteins
• No plant source of vitamin B12
• Plant vitamins and minerals generally less bioavailable than animal sources
• Typically excessive net carbohydrate intake and thus insulin resistance
• Excessive production of shit leads to constant flatulence and shitting (staple joke about vegan dating is how flatulence ruins “intimacy”)
A properly designed vegan diet combined with supplements can be healthy enough, and indeed there are certainly vegans who have better diets and are healthier than people consuming the “Standard American Diet” (SAD).
The vegans, unfortunately, are quite clever. They understand that people hate them, so now they’ve changed their rhetoric and promote a “plant-based” diet. This is claimed necessary for health reasons and, of course, the climate. Never mind that the majority of calories consumed in all countries (even the USA and Australia) already come from plant sources.
3. Interesting question
In the Middle East, it seems that pork-eating was common, or at least not uncommon, until sometime around 1000 BC. According to Marvin Harris (“The Abominable Pig”) the reason for its diminution and subsequent taboo had nothing to do with a fear of trichinosis (all undercooked meats are dangerous, most more so than pork) but was a result of environmental/ecological factors: pigs require lots of shade and water (decreasingly available as the Middle East became progessively deforested), and compete with humans for consumption of edible grains (whereas ruminants like cattle and sheep eat grass and other high cellulose plants which are indigestible to humans).
So Islam essentially developed in a region where pork eating was already a taboo, and it then spread to regions where it was likewise largely a taboo (Middle East) or of little practical importance for environmental/ecological reasons (North Africa).
Many years ago, I saw a group put up flyers comparing eating chicken eggs to abortion.
Normally that sort of humor (though unintended) wouldn’t appeal to me, but it is quite funny, on multiple levels. The least being that eggs are gigantic haploid cells that hens slough off. They don’t even have the potentiality of to become chickens unless fertilized and incubated. Not to mention, that chickens very readily eat their own eggs. And that chickens lay nearly every day, so that if every egg turned into a chicken, it would eventually result in a big collapse of the chicken population.
God gave man canine teeth and incisors.
Canine teeth and incisors are for eating meat
Therefore, God intended for man to eat meat.
Vegans and vegetarians believe man should not eat meat
Therefore, vegans and vegetarians do not believe in God’s will
Those who do not believe in God’s will do not believe God is supreme [i.e. God]
Therefore, vegans and vegetarians are atheists
God says that atheists go to hell
Therefore, all vegans and vegetarians can go to hell
Alternatively
There is no God
There is evolution
Evolution gave man cannine and incisor teeth
There are few if any humans born with teeth that do not have cannines or incisors
Therefore, it is natural for man to eat meat, vegan and vegetarianism is dysgenic
I would add that the most vegetarian societies are the least “free range” and most “factory farmed”
😉
“Feelings” as such are only interesting insofar as they’re part of your free will in making ethical and moral choices.
Since animals don’t have free will and can’t make ethical and moral choices, what the animals are experiencing is just a complex pre-programmed response to stimuli. (Your smartphone also has complex pre-programmed responses to stimuli; feel free to call them “feelings” too.)
What I’m saying is that the “feelings” of animals are qualitatively different from the feelings of human beings.
I like cats.
Apparently Gacy suffered a severe head injury after being hit by a swing which seemed to greatly affect his personality.
My take is this:
– intelligence alone is not sufficient. A high functioning 135 IQ psychopath might be smarter, but he’s probably less capable of real suffering than a normal 85 IQ brickie who loves his family. Animals are usually pretty psychopathic by human standards (lion and gorilla males always kill the cubs/infants of females when conquering a new harem from another male; a very bloodthirsty human, Genghis Khan, didn’t kill his oldest son, whose father was probably another man, in fact, he treated him as his own, even though, well, he must have known)
– you need to skew the thing towards the ingroup (which should be humans), and so loyal dogs (and perhaps some other species like horses?) need special consideration.
– we need some reciprocity, so a species whose members don’t show the slightest consideration to humans (I heard that pigs need to be fed with caution, because they sometimes bite off the hands or fingers of inexperienced people, usually children, who fed them; can anyone confirm this? you can feed corpses to pigs anytime) should receive way less consideration.
– I have to agree with anonymous coward that the biggest reason for punishing cruelty towards animals is the suspicion that needlessly cruel people are shit (psychopathic or mentally ill), so it’s basically catching something at an early stage.
– any totally universal theory or ideology will make it difficult to defend against aliens (who might be a million times smarter than us, but then again, might not be much smarter; it’ll be very difficult if not outright impossible to observe if they have any feelings of empathy, towards us or each other; it’s unclear what it might mean); depending on whatever we think of the risk of them arriving, this argument has a value larger than or equal to zero.
– similarly, true universalism might make it difficult to defend us against some super-smart AI, whatever we think of its dangers.
In the meantime, pork is one of the very few types of meat (and very good), so it’d make our diets way poorer. As utu mentioned, it’s a way of showing our cultural independence from non-pork-eaters like Muslims or Jews.
Pork itself isn’t that good. The Italians like to say, “pork needs help.” Hence why they make porchetta.
Some cured pork products however are very good. Neither beef nor chicken can substitute in these applications because their fat profiles differ. Beef fat is considerably more saturated and thus has poor mouthfeel (especially at room temperature), and chicken is simply too lean.
For sausage you could engineer a fat with the appropriate characteristics I suppose. The number one constituent of porcine fat is oleic acid, which also happens to be the number one constituent of olive oil. If you mixed olive oil (or avocado oil) with some beef tallow (or coconut oil for that matter) you could get a fat with characteristics similar to porcine fat.
No such luck with cured whole muscle meats. Every cured beef meat worth eating (e.g. bresaola) is thoroughly defatted prior to curing. Beef bacon is…not bacon. At least not what anyone expects from bacon.
You make a strong point on culture. Now that we have an unfortunate metaethnic frontier with Mohammedans within our own countries a very strong point in favor of pork consumption is of course to assert our identity.
Lol maybe Karlin is a secret Spanish Jew, who is planning revenge against jamon and chorizo?
But why in Israel, are the Jews so obsessed about eating pork. Although even bacon is an expensive luxury product there.
The most fashionable restaurant chain for young Israelis is Benedict.
It has branches in multiple cities in Israel. Always full of the young Israelis, including soldiers with guns, are there eating bacon, which is served all day and night in different ways.
http://www.benedict.co.il/en/
But two slices of bacon – cost like $5 if I remember.
The weird thing is they don’t write about bacon on their website. But it’s the main food they serve in the restaurants – bacon being presented in 20 different ways.
Pork itself has to be produced in Israel, as it is illegal to import it. In pig farms, the pigs have to be living on special platforms (so they are not “on the land of Israel”).
What I read is that animals rights movement in Israel is constantly growing, and they are campaigning the most aggressively now to ban the pig farms.
I hope not. Legally slaughtering fellow humans in utero (and just out of utero) and worship of the practice seems a much bigger moral failing. However, given our current moral trajectory, I fear you are correct.
I’ve always been skeptical of the trichinosis theory, which strikes me as being über-PC. Ancient Jews and Arabs were probably not conducting autopsies. And it strikes me as the height of silliness to imbue them with the knowledge of 19th-century Europeans.
Food prohibition seems generally to be about enforcing a separate identity. The castes of India have different diets, with the lower ones being the most inclusive. One of these foods is pork, which the highest do not eat. As Pork is a common food in SE Asia, this is probably due to Muslim influence over Hindus.
But I think Islam probably adapted it from a caste system in Egypt or the Levant. The best prohibitions are things you are already accustomed to abstaining from, helpful when you are radically expanding. In a somewhat similar vein, Muhammad apparently did not like dogs.
Every public official in Europe should be required to regularly eat pork and beef, have a dog as pet, and shake the hand of a woman every day. I imagine they would quickly adapt their behavior, but the important thing is that we assert our identity.
Growing up, I had a good Jewish buddy who came from an “Orthodox’ home. He would often visit me and ask my mother to cook up some BLT sandwiches for us. He grew up to become a cantor and a writer too. He once told me that he even wrote some funny short stories about the different Ukie types that he would encounter at my home, who he thought were closet ‘Nazis’. Years of daily cannabis usage took its toll on my dear friend. 🙁
Similar phenomenon in China, though since it is such a big country, you always hear of restaurants sending vans around stealing people’s dogs from their yards. It is no joke either – there’s a lot of video of it.
I have heard that dogs bred for meat are a lot stupider than normal pet dogs. Can anyone confirm?
That’s objectively wrong. Pork belly with the skin could be made delicious if you roast the skin crispy. I’ve eaten Hungarian and Vietnamese versions of it, both among the very best meat dishes I’ve ever eaten.
Pork loin marinated in some wine vinegar & garlic not good? Since when?…(I like it even better than lamb).
Based on acquaintances at least, a lot of Jews in America seem to consume ham. “Reformed Jews”, they are called. Perhaps this is changing as they don’t seem to keep their identity as strongly as the Orthodox.
Newly arrived Muslims seem to get a kick out of the word “hamburger.”
Pork belly is an improvement over pork, but there’s a reason people usually consume pork belly in the form of bacon, pancetta, salt pork, etc.
And I assume that the Vietnamese version in question involves all sorts of added flavors.
Note that I stated:
So you love pork loin that has been helped by wine vinegar & garlic. I too enjoy marinating pork loin, and it’s especially good if you stuff it. That’s a whole lot of help.
Even grilled center-cut pork chops, which is one of the better forms of straight pork available, are nearly always served with some kind of sauce.
If you really believe pork is fantastic without help, I encourage you to cook a pork loin and eat it with…nothing.
Even chicken, which is pretty flavorless and lame, is not bad roasted and eaten plain because of how juicy it is (crisp skin also really helps).
With beef, lamb, and other red meat there is simply no comparison. They are very flavorful all on their own.
Okay, I concede that point. Even roasted salo is usually eaten with salt. (Though it’s definitely edible without, too. And, to be honest, red meat is also better with a little – really little! – salt and perhaps pepper.) A staple of Austrian cuisine, Wiener Schnitzel, is also better with pork medallion than with veal, even though ordinary people believe it’s better with veal. But, yes, it’s not on its own there, either.
Anyway, pork is very good food, even if it needs help. I don’t think there are so many different types of meat (or, really, food), that we could easily make do without such a major item. I mean, of course we could, but not without a very good reason.
For me, adding garlic to most any meat product (even sometimes to fish, in the soup stock) is de rigueur. Pork loin over a flame is tender, juicy and plain scrumptuous, IMHO.
Since eggs are on the list, I suggest it’s time to start a ‘Sperm Lives Matter’ movement.
Unfortunately semen has become indispensable dietary supplement to certain ‘progressives’
Salt, in addition to having its own pleasant flavor and being an essential micronutrient, is also a flavor enhancer. It’s difficult to think of anything that shouldn’t be salted, though the quantity varies greatly (e.g. a green salad should have salt, but very little compared to a hunk of meat).
Veal is not particularly flavorful. People enjoy it because of how tender it is. Schnitzel being a pounded, breaded, and deep-fried cutlet it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to use something as expensive as veal for it. Chicken actually works very well in this application too (which is quite common in the Latin American variant of schnitzel).
I’d say the great appeal of the pig is the variety of meat products it gives us. Pork, ham, bacon, and sausage (I realize there’s non-pig sausage but pig dominates) are all quite distinct and yet all come from the same animal. Remarkable really.
Pigs are also useful animals in traditional-style agriculture because of their scavenging and foraging. Not a consideration with factory farming of course.
Garlic improves a lot of things.
Doesn’t change the fact that people enjoy beef steak (including steaks cut from the loin) with nothing other than salt.
The same is not true of pork loin. It’s not tender or juicy compared to poultry, and it isn’t flavorful compared to red meat. “The other white meat” is actually a pretty good descriptor.
Used to know a guy that fit into this really weird category. He was like a vegetarian, in that he did not consume most mainstream meat products, like chicken, steaks, hamburgers, or pork.
But he did eat the really weird and somewhat gross stuff. Stuff in appearance being very dissociated from animals, like slimjims, porkreins, and non-casing hotdogs. One of his older siblings explained that they had traumatized him when he was a very young boy by putting his favorite stuffed animal in a pot.
Lawyers I have asked this seem to all huff and puff about it but not one of them has yet given me a comprehensible answer to the following suggestion.
Whenever a judge gives a Guilty verdict, there should also be some mechanism – e.g. through a panel of experts – to also attach a probability that said verdict is justified.
For many (most?) crimes meriting the death penalty, that probability will approach 1.
But in cases where this probability factor is <0.99, all death penalties will be automatically suspended.
“But why in Israel, are the Jews so obsessed about eating pork” – forbidden fruit, liberation?
https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/pork-bacon-israel-other-meat
Need a pork chop in Tel Aviv? Look under “other meat” or “short cow.”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/08/israels-pork-problem-and-what-it-means-for-the-countrys-christian-arabs.html
The law—considered to be one of the most controversial in Israeli history—was designed with a loophole that permitted raising hogs in majority Christian regions in the North as a concession to Israel’s religious minorities and the young democracy. As a result, Christian-Arab towns became hog country.
Until the 1990s, the Israeli pork industry was somewhat clandestine, but with an influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and a progressive Supreme Court, pork became more common in Israel.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/08/israels-pork-problem-and-what-it-means-for-the-countrys-christian-arabs.html
I’ve known Vietnamese who put salt on fruit.
Pork is also great in that it quite affordable to all classes, owing to the greater efficiency of pigs. Thus it is a bulwark against the evil ideology of globohomo-veganism. But the widespread appeal of pigflesh creates the confusing problem of what cut should universally be called bacon, without a national modifier.
Any attempt to quantify various animals consciousness and emotional abilities, as well as vegetarianism and veganism generally, are greatly complicated if you take any of this seriously:
Bizarre as it seems we probably should, it’s pretty legit.
Very interesting! I honestly have no idea.
One guess might be that even though insects have few neurons, most species are so old that evolution has had a very long time to refine their cognitive processes to very high degree of efficiency.
If you really want to be impressed by insect intelligence, check out the portia spider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)
Sci-fi book by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time) in which they get uplifted – see relevant chapter.
I doubt that will be possible, though I suspect we could reduce ourselves to hobbit size without losing much IQ – verbal IQ, anyway.
That is good to hear about South Korea.
I’ve been thinking about your 115 year old hypothetical. It occurs to me that it would be strange indeed to claim that his age would mitigate his murder. On the other hand, to claim that murder of an infant would be aggravated by the infant’s age seems perfectly reasonable, though the net effect would be the same. Sometimes, our moral intuitions are heavily influenced by framing.
Can’t such experts also be wrong in their probability, though?
Well I am not autistic about my culinary preferences, if the main dish is a pork dish – the only situation in which avoiding it would be socially uncomfortable – then I am not making a fuss about it. This happens perhaps once a year, if that. I don’t know to what extent this is prevalent, but in my circles, the most common shashlyk meat is lamb. Ergo for plov made over the mangal. This is also, of course, more authentic (these dishes hailing from the Caucasus and Central Asia, respectively).
I am not sure I am a foodie. While I am interested in cuisine as in other aspects of culture, said interest is of a primarily sociological nature (e.g. is there a global SWPL “food way” based around upper end burgers served on wooden boards and craft beer?).
Koreans eat pork belly with minimal, if any, flavoring and it is delicious! See the video I embedded in the comment earlier:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/animals/#comment-3067916
The former is the first time I hear of that. Google searching just turns up this story:
Drunk farmer ‘starts fight with his own pig but dies after having three fingers and his privates bitten off’. The bizarre incident was reported to have occurred in the town of San Lucas Ojitlan, in south-western Mexico.
You can of course feed corpses to pigs, but you can feed corpses to any omnivore.
Also, carnivore/omnivore/herbivore divisions aren’t strict. For instance, you can find YouTube videos of cattle snapping up small, overly slow/stupid birds.
Another point is that it’s not like any other sentence is easily reversible. How are you going to give back seven years in prison? And it’s not like shorter sentences get scrutinized so much. I’ve seen dubious cases where the evidence seemed shaky, but the sentence was relatively light (just a few years), but it’s enough to destroy an honest person’s life, his job prospects, what kind of wife he’ll find, etc. No lawyer seems to care much about this.
In Hungary there was a big robbery and mass murder in 2001, where the robbers gunned down the bank clerks and the clients, too. The incompetent Hungarian justice system produced two guilty verdicts for two professional robbers (who didn’t commit the crime, as it later turned out), and it was very likely that if the death penalty had not been abolished, they’d have received it. But they weren’t fully innocent: they had committed dozens of violent robberies, including several bank robberies! So probably a fully innocent person would never have been convicted for this. The issue is usually a slightly higher sentence than deserved, in that case a death sentence instead of maybe twenty years in prison. Or, in cases which receive no spotlight at all, three years in jail versus an innocent verdict.
To be honest, I’ve seen in Hungary murder or manslaughter cases (with the usual 15 year sentences, so a death penalty would have been out of the question), where guilt didn’t seem to be fully proven. So a potentially fully innocent person’s life was destroyed, but it never bothers these lawyers and similar people, because “nothing irreversible happened.” Fuck, these guys only had one life, and it pretty irreversibly got screwed up, if they were innocent. Which is not at all impossible.
Could be they mirror each other naturally, meaning it is not self-recognition.
I wonder if they tested for that. I mean something like a scenario where an ant sees another ant with a parasite on its head, so it checks its own head.
I think there is a case to be made that the state should not have the power to execute people.
However, I really think some moderate form of corporal punishment would help society. Example, people intentionally block traffic on major route into the city. They should be caned or put in stocks.
But I’m thinking a better form might be ostracism – send them to an island. This should be done to the militant gays and lesbians that harm society. Meanwhile, open borders people should be sent to Africa.
Then logically it shouldn’t have the power to wage war, which could result in the deaths of the majority of citizens.
I raise pigs from time to time. The main reason pork is less flavorful and colorful than the so called red meats is because most pigs can never get to the ground. If they could, they would eat loads of dirt, incorporating lots of minerals (especially iron). I think it’s mainly a marketing thing: the other white meat. But pigs that get to turn over dirt get more flavor and color to their meat.
Korean food is inferior to that of the two neighboring East Asian countries.
Pass.
Pork belly was also a stupid foodie trend in the first half of this decade.
Not that pork belly is bad (it’s not), it’s just not as good as cured pork belly products which are very widely available (especially in the United States where bacon is a national obsession).
Beef is flavorful no matter what cattle eat. It’s more flavorful if the cattle are purely grass-fed, though this results in inferior marbling and thus increased toughness. Get your steaks from grain finished cattle but your burger & dairy from grass-fed.
Pigs, not being ruminants, are very affected by what they eat. Hence why the Spanish swine from which jamon iberico comes from are fattened with acorns and figs.
This is also a major reason why red meat, contrary to the globohomo propaganda of the WHO and the usual suspects, is healthier than white meat.
That’s good. Being a paleo LCHF and mostly carnivorous dieter my ordinary food intake is highly restrictive. But at a dinner party I will eat whatever is served.
Refusal to eat what other people serve, or making a fuss about what restaurants you can attend in group settings, is why everyone hates vegetarians and especially vegans. Nobody likes picky eaters, and these people are the pickiest.
American proles incidentally are picky eaters as well (though not about meat, obviously) which is extremely irritating. Being uncultured swine some of them, especially females, act like this is something to be proud of. Many of them refuse to eat seafood, but there are also a lot of other bizarre things like disliking onions. Who doesn’t like onions?!
Religious dietary restrictions are irritating as well but get a pass owing to thousands of years of tradition and such.
You might not even need to be dead for pigs to eat you:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2515069/Gangster-kills-rival-feeding-alive-pigs-year-feud-members-Italian-crime-syndicate.html
https://www.quora.com/Do-pigs-eat-people
Ok, maybe not the best sources, but good enough to justify eating pigs for me. They’d probably do the same to us if they could after all.
Many people disagree with you, including those in the video clip I embedded, but taste is subjective, so carry on.
But it sounds like you’ve never had what those guys were having in the video.
Yup. Their conversion to SWPL is nearly complete.
Honestly, these annoy me too. There’s generally little (even internally logical) justification for them. I like to think that at one point shellfish and pork made people sick, in the absence of refrigeration. Not so much now though. As for milk and meat, that has no more basis than a metaphor about not adding insult to injury. A clerical class will be clerical…
South Korea is yet more evidence for why Karl Marx might have been right. Everything is superficial, according to him, and is downstream of the form of production. Thus capitalist industrial economic development almost* inevitably leads to certain ideological superstructure.
* The exceptions exist in such extreme circumstances that they prove the rule.
What is one to say? That the way in which people work doesn’t actually have a substantially determining effect on how they think? Maybe, but then why is there such huge ideological convergence?
It’s the other way around. Cats carry toxoplasmosis and who knows what other pathogens that infect human female brains and turn them into cat ladies:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-cats-responsible-for-ldquo-cat-ladies-rdquo/
Only the state has the organizational potential to wage modern war. Yet, it seems that each time there is a war, the power of the state grows intractably. Even where there is monarchy, it often effectively abolishes it or makes a joke out of it, to further the bureaucracy.
There’s even an absurd signaling value for it, where people in the military are constantly thanked for their service, or said to be fighting for our freedom in Iraq, or other such neocon BS. There’s a constant creep to expand alliances, like the insane move to add the Baltics to NATO, or the desire to add Georgia. There’s an insane mission creep, when NATO, in whatever format, is involved in Libya
IMO, Japan should be careful about changes to its constitution. Perhaps, they have interests outside their country, but there really is no point going to a lot of places.
Grass fed beef and dairy are supposed to be healthier, so there are good reasons to eat it over grain fed, but I’ve never been able to get used to the flavor and tougher texture. Grass fed milk has that grassy aftertaste. Grass fed butter like Kerrygold though has no grassy flavor and just tastes better than regular butter.
I waver between beef and pork as the best kind of meat. Chicken is too plain, and lamb has that weird taste that can be hard to get used to. Pork by itself is good as its fattiness gives it a lot of natural flavor, like in pork chops and pork belly, which is uncured bacon. And the various ways in which pork is cured and prepared make it very good. Whereas beef is best plain, and adding to it and preparing it tends to detract from its natural goodness.
If you want my cat, come take him from my cold, dead arms.
Article seems somewhat melodramatic, like most English articles about Israel. It’s saying there is some controversy that Christian Arabs would lose a monopoly on farming pigs?
How is that desirable in a capitalist country – farming should be open for anyone who complies with the regulations, not a monopoly of a particular group who do not comply with regulation.
Moreover, article ignores that in Israel, the most pork is traditionally farmed in a Kibbutz.
–
What is a culture shock is to see naive, native Israelis view bacon as an expensive “luxury product” (and this could be related to restricted supply), where they queue for it in the fashionable restaurant chains.
Bacon is cargo culted as an elite European product, not realizing in the rest of the world (maybe excluding some variants in Italy) how cheap and low status bacon usually is.
The way Israelis advertise 3 slices of bacon at 0:20
BTW, on mirror tests:
Our Yorkie failed it, predictactably. However, our mini-poodle – whom we have observed to be much smarter – seems to have passed. She recognized herself immediately and has enjoyed strutting and admiring herself in front of the mirror ever since. So either the people who say all dogs fail the mirror test are wrong or she is some sort of canine genius.
There is a logic to all that:
1. Religious dietary prescriptions are pretty absolute, the only tolerated exceptions being if your health is in serious danger. Your eternal soul is at stake.
2. Vegetarians and vegans, especially the more hardcore ones, consider eating animal flesh to be almost akin to cannibalism. Can’t exactly make exceptions either.
3. Cognitive Chain of Being suggests that eating pork meat is merely an order of magnitude worse than eating an equivalent chunk of beef or poultry. Much less negative karma than in cases above. Extra committed cognitive ethicists might even go pescetarian for the next two weeks in atonement.
Incidentally, I am on a ketogenic diet since I permanently moved to my new apartment this January.
Further edit:
TIL! Onions, wtf not? They are one of the traddest European foods. I read (in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, iirc) that when Japanese food first came to America it was treated with revulsion, because things like raw fish were repugnant to Americans; but why no seafood, though? I know they were really low class back in the 18th century, food meant for convicts, but overfishing has since made them more of a prestige food. I don’t get those proles. What is their logic?
The advantage of grass-fed beef is a trivially improved ratio of omega 3 to omega 6. An advantage which can be completely obliterated by simply foregoing consumption of chicken (which has hugely more omega 6 than any kind of beef). To say nothing of avoiding consumption of industrial seed oils (i.e. “vegetable” oil).
And I think most people clued into this are already eating seafood and/or supplementing with fish oil.
The picture is a bit different with dairy as grass-fed dairy has much more vitamin k and CLA.
There is something deeply life denying and nihilistic about these sorts of decadent attitudes. I think the high IQ comes in after the fact to rationalize and justify the decadence that has set in. And as you say, it leads to terrible consequences, the ultimate of which is alluded to in the OP when describing David Pearce’s argument for genetically editing carnivorous animals. The problem according to this decadent view is ultimately not suffering, but life itself. Life itself is the problem, and it must be destroyed in the name of stopping suffering. It has to be genetically edited and modified and contained in a static, “lifeless” state, or transcended altogether with machines. Either way, life must go.
Western man was life affirming and vital when he was engaging in blood sports like cat burning and fox tossing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_tossing
I wonder how much modern day vegetarianism contributes to assortative mating.
Also, I wonder what percentage of Ashkenazi might be vegetarians. Could be the people who weren’t picky eaters were boiled off the community, leaving a greater predilection for dietary strictures.
You’re right. Western man needs to be brutal, and not only to animals, but humans, too.
I volunteer you as the victim.
Thank you very much for this. I hit 50 years as a vegetarian this coming July. I’ve long since formulated my own (simple) rationalization for my choice, but have steered clear of any objective analysis. This piece, which I’ve only skimmed so far, will give me hours of serious reading and reflection on the subject.
I think I could have enjoyed those contests the Victorians engaged in of dogs killing rats.
Haitians and Dominicans love cockfighting. I’m not crazy about the idea, but on another level, the breeding aspect, I find it really fascinating. Some roosters they breed specifically for their claws, but not for fighting, cutting them off and gluing them onto fighting roosters.
As soon as your arms are cold and dead your cat will start eating them anyway.
Wait a minute. You are saying that millions of years of evolution were not enough to make humans “normal”? That sounds about right. After all, evolution is a gigantic machine of abnormality-making.
Same for “civilized”? Well, I guess we still have a few more years in store for that accomplishment.
When I read the rest of the article, I will be back with more uncivilized and abnormal comments.
The environmentalist movement was quite successful in infantilizing the general public by making outlandish claims, giving animals rights, among other things
I call it the “disneyfication” of animals, raising animals up to the status of humans, imbuing human qualities on them-Walt Disney and his animal cartoons, Bambi, among others, is responsible for turning adult humans into animal-worshipping crazies-the roots of rabid environmentalism also has its start with disney cartoons.
The “disneyfication” of animals has done more to damage the concept of man having dominion over other living things and has contributed greatly to our present crop of anti-hunters and pro-animal activists.
If civilization collapses, you can bet that this “disneyfication” of animals along with gun control (actually people control) will go away, people will be too busy looking for their next meal.
PETA=people eating tasty animals.
It is interesting to note that these same “animal lovers” have no problem with human babies being ripped out of their mothers’ wombs. In fact, bald eagles and other species have MORE protections than pre-born and now post-born humans. Go figure…
AK discovered utilitarianism and Effective Altruism.
I’m not buying any of this.
I see morality as a way to regulate social interactions, so there is not much about animals in it.
Seeing a human being cruel with an animal is scary because we fear that ourselves or people we love may fall prey to his cruelty. It may be because torturing animals is sometimes a sign of sociopathy and we may have some instinctual alarm bells toward this behaviour. This is distinct from socially accepted forms of brutality like venationes, corrida or organized cat burnings which tell us nothing about the psychology of the individual gladiator, bullfighter etc.
Seeing a killer whale playing with a injured seal, like a cat with a mouse, doesn’t seem so cruel compared with seal clubbing, because is the instinctual behaviour of an animal, not the result of human moral reasoning. That’s why those who insist on reducing the suffering of wild animals caused by wild animals, strike most people as bizzare and misguided.
AK: I have been familiar with EA for years, and even made EA-based arguments against immigration, which the UR commentariat for some reason was better disposed towards…
We’re not that stupid. I care a great deal about animal welfare, but I have no problem at all with hunters. Indeed, I think hunting wild animals is the most ethical way to procure meat.
I suppose on some level that is at the root of all empathic feelings. So what?
True, but then if civilization collapses, I imagine people won’t be too concerned about other humans either. It is absurd to suppose that has anything to do with our moral obligations right here and now.
That is no concern to me. What matters is the affection and loyalty he shows me while I’m alive.
Lol maybe you had a Russian soul in your past life, with this obsession for cats.
Have you seen the argument about cats vs. dogs by H.P Lovecraft.
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/cd.aspx
You are correct.
I have observed many dog-lovers put up with not only the idiosyncrasies of their dogs, but put up with totally destructive behavior that these animals are capable of. Add to that, spending thousands of dollars on veterinary services and other attempts to “train” their dogs to their liking.
At the end of the day, a dog that is determined to sh!t on its owner’s carpet will still do so, regardless of “punishment” administered.
I still cannot get used to the “smell” that all dog owners’ houses reek of…when visiting, I tolerate it, but that is as far as it goes…
Unfortunately, there ARE a lot of people who have been “brainwashed” by Disney animals and DO imbue human-like characteristics to animals…
Regards,
I am watching Al Jazeera. There is a documentary about Icelandic whaling. Where should whales sit on the Karlin list? Fin whales specifically.
Are whales sea cattle? My parents ate whalemeat during the war. They said it looked and tasted like beef.
I have to think that beer made from whale’s testicles smoked with sheeps’ dung is a deliberate challenge to metropolitan hippies. It is available in Iceland.
Morality derives not from “evolution, biology, etc”, but from metaphysics.
We have the intuition “do to others as you want done to yourself”, because we have an intuition about universality of consciousness.
Empathy is not just instinct, but rather “instinct mediated form of perception”.
If you want analogy – think about colour perception. “Red”, “Yellow”, “Green”, are evolved ways for our brain to mark bands of light wavelengths.
The light wavelengths are not product of evolution, but evolution simply mediates the way we mark the wavelengths .
Likewise, when you feel empathy, it is a result of perception of actual state of consciousness of another. What evolution mediated, is the way you can react to this, ignore it, etc.
Your cat is also incapable of maths, but this does not mean that 1 +3 = 2.
By the way, maths is quite a similar subject. Maths is not a product of human evolution, and appears to be independent of our perception of it in certain ways.
Moreover, there was no evolutionary selection for our abilities in maths (perhaps beyond simple counting).
The mediation of evolution to mathematics, is likely that we evolved (due to unrelated selection) to a certain intellectual ability, at which we are able to access the mathematical realm.
Plato will probably be ultimately correct in this area.
And similarly, we evolved (due to unrelated selection) to a certain intellectual level where we are able to access or at least receive intuitions about moral realm (actually metaphysics).
If you stay on your feet you are OK, even sitting, say back to wall.. If you fall over for any time, you are food.
Veganism and daddy food choices can be a hangover from anorexia. It’s a control issue more than the actual food.
In the cited text, it looks like he is trying to discuss the implications of the assumptions. This is objective or logical thought. It is refreshing to read.
Unintelligent people react, and always have reacted, with hostility to logic – but to translate it to terms practical people can understand: if it wasn’t for men who enjoy thinking in logically consistent ways, we would not be writing on a computer.
Sure, as from the beginning – when Socrates has perished drinking hemlock.
But trying to understand the world, or even just implications of what we perceive, is often more interesting than personal self-interest.
I apologize in advanced, as I will answer it all in a simplistically literalist way, but – there is no relation between masculine and feminine, and killing chickens. (Any old women on the farm, without any testosterone in her body, will be killing chickens, while Schopenhauer was an extreme male brain, and by his own writings not want to kill a chicken).
Currently, we have wide differences between individuals in how they feel empathy, and also debates about what “objects” (or beings) we decide to assign a perception of there being consciousness to.
Latter are very deep scientific problems (although we can presume hippies should not hug trees, as trees do not have what we currently understand to be preconditions for consciousness), while the former is one which would be understandable more by human psychology (and pathology, in the case of psychopaths).
How people behave in this is somewhat malleable/programmable, although there will be an objectively true and false answer to both the question of what beings have consciousness, and the question of how we should correctly relate to this (and theoretically we might be to understand consciousness scientifically one day).
Lol ok I didn’t fully read the comments here or Karlin’s article yet (which I am sure will be insightful).
But your comment is the first time I hear a completely new idea (genius or madness?) for some time.
I didn’t know Russians had a particular love of cats, though I’m not surprised. They are very much a a homebody’s pet, so they are a particular blessing in cold climates. I cherish the long hours I spend during winter curled up with a book and my cat and a cup of coffee.
Thank you for this. I was not aware of it. I think cats appeal particularly to contemplative types because of their beauty as well as their appeal to the other senses, the feel of their fur and the sound of their purring.
“Every feline is a masterpiece.”
-Leonardo da Vinci
This is a hard one, because whales are very intelligent and social, but OTOH one kill provides a tremendous amount of calories. Ideally, hunters would target large, fully grown males whose best days are behind them. Whether that is practical I don’t know.
Karlin mentioned aliens, so I thought it’s a point.
Whales are interesting, and on the verge of extinction. It’s also cool that they are so big. I don’t want to see them go just so that a few tens of millions of people (each of whom could easily afford something similar) can gorge on them for a few decades.
I was unaware that they were endangered.
More evidence that PUTIN reads my blog: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/russia-whale-prison-orca-beluga-putin-nakhodka-a8802186.html
Well, we can’t exactly keep cats as I have a cat allergy, and don’t want to be on antihistamines all the time.
The reason Russians prefer cats is that it’s either that or small dogs in cities, big dogs are too impractical for most.
Big dog culture is related to: (1) Small time farming, in traditional times; largely made redundant by collectivization, and largely finished off under post-2000s capitalism; (2) High crime rates – an issue in the 1990s, not so much today; (3) Suburbia, which is much less prevalent in Russia than in the Anglo-Saxon world.
More big dogs should appear again when more Russian cities become suburban and village people become richer.
Great point!
A straightforward CCB accounting would suggest that blue whales might be comparable to or even slightly better than cows (Tier 1 vs. Tier 3, so factor of 100x; average cow is 700 kg vs. average blue whale is 140,000 kg, or factor of 200x). Smaller whale species – assuming they remain in Tier 1 – would be worse than cows, but virtually any would be better than pigs.
Of course some additional considerations for whales:
1) Chimps are within or almost within range of the dullest humans, and cetaceans may be more intelligent than chimps. Morally icky.
2) Conservation issues. I forgot to mention this, but yes, obviously conserving species and biodiversity has independent value of its own.
In the old days, fish including salmon used to be much bigger – see the accounts of the fishermen off Newfoundland many centuries ago. The bigger, less wily fish have been killed off since. Perhaps it would be a good idea to try to reengineer those fish back to the way they were.
Killing chickens is nothing. Women raised on farms can and will slaughter and butcher much larger animals like pigs and cattle. They are a lot less squeamish than urbanized men in that regard.
Schopenhauer’s life history is instructive. He was from an urban, wealthy merchant family in a time when most people were rural farmers. His father was an anti-Prussian liberal and cosmopolitan. His father is believed to have committed suicide and to have suffered from depression and mental health issues. Other members of his father’s side of the family are also believed to have had serious mental health issues, and it’s believed that Arthur Schopenhauer himself inherited his depressive attitudes from his father.
Philosophically, Schopenhauer was atheistic, pessimistic, nihilistic, and was attracted to ascetic and nihilistic strains of Eastern thought like Buddhism.
Have you ever spent any significant amount of time around a cat? I ask because allergies sometimes wear off. I almost always have some symptoms, including red eyes, when a new cat comes into our household, but then my immune system becomes desensitized in a short time.
There is a Buddhist story I read a while back stating that when a human dies he meets all the animals he interacted with in his life (owned, killed, ate, kicked, bought, sold, loved, fed, etc, etc) on a bridge and they get to decide whether he goes to heaven or not. Interesting take.
Yes, I had a young stray (a Blue Russian) come in for a couple of months towards the end of my stay in the US. I left it with a family we were good friends with, who were happy to get a companion for their dog.
No my allergy did not wear off.
☹️
Our canines pale in comparison to gorilla canines. Yet gorillas are rather close to purely vegan. (I’m not saying that we should be vegan. Just that our canines don’t prove anything.)
It must never happen (but it does) that Human A gains power over Human B because of something Human B did or did not do to any animal that is not the property of some other Human. And when Human B is caught harming the property of some other human, his liability is for damages to that other Human, not for anything the animal experienced.
This article was very poorly edited (or, more-likely, not at all).
That is probably the greatest danger of aliens. Not that they would come shooting death rays, or nuking us from orbit, but that they would settle here and that the universalists would go into a purity spiral welcoming them to our detriment.
I really think the psychology is already there. Many scifi shows have had an anti-racist message when it comes to aliens. One had aliens settling on earth in large numbers (open immigration) in the mid ’90s and the people who opposed it were made to be evil. And there is much earlier stuff.
Good point, but they are violent animals, with a much greater bite force. Men are about 174 PSI, woman about 100 PSI. Gorillas about 1300 PSI. Troop leaders often fight to the death.
I was once bitten by a dog. I believe accidentally – it lunged at another dog. (BTW, let that be a lesson, never get between growling dogs) Anyway, though I was not injured since I was wearing a thick coat, I was really surprised by the force. It was something you could really feel – just the closing force. Obviously greater than a person. I look up the breed and it is only 230 PSI, supposedly, though with a very large mouth.
It is also characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder.
There are plenty of big dogs out where the dachas are. One of our neighbors has a beautiful Moscow guard dog (a breed I’ve never seen in America, it is like a more-aggressive Saint Bernard).
Except when eagles and other raptors get chopped up by wind turbines.
Damn the eagles! Full speed ahead with intermittent, unreliable “green” energy. How stupid are humans? Only time will tell but already the landscape is blighted with the unreliable, whirling contraptions, and many benjamins have gone done the crapper, or actually into a few favored pockets of the carbon credit wheeler dealers. Swift would love it.
And what rights does a dog have when it is taken captive by
humans== D o g – G u a r d i a n s == while still a puppy?
Oh I almost forgot. The dog has the right to disturb its neighbors with incessant barking, and leave them stinking piles of dog poop.
Mondo Cane
Peter Singer: “If animals had language, they would have rights.”
This, alas, is a paramount–and unforgivable–tragedy of our era.
Why no reference to Albert Schweitzer and his reverence for life ethic? Is he that completely forgotten? Sad!
Not sure how that relates to humans being omnivores. AAR, gorillas actually aren’t particularly violent, and prefer bluff an buster to outright conflict. Their canines are largely for display (male canines are much larger than female canines).
Interesting point. Thanks for the insight. FWIW, I was mainly trying to be provocative taking the two extremes – the religious vs the purely mechanistic. Yet both extremes end up in the non-vegetarian camp.
I had not considered that canines could be exclusively for tearing the meat off enemies bones in battle, but they are not best suited for eating vegetables. Human canines are not likely to be for that purpose and perhaps there are different sub-types of canines. I am certainly no expert there. The same philosophical position could be reached in either case by using a different prop than canines.
I myself at times, am sentimentally attracted to the vegetarian position but it seems to me it is a difficult position to defend philosophically with wide gray zones and based mostly on sentimentality and not science or traditional monotheistic religion.
It is an attractive personal choice for many, and many interpret it differently. The same could be said for transvestism, transsexualism, etc. or less pejoratively, liberalism, conservatism, neo-conservatism etc.
There is a genetics research guy who has a bunch of documentation to support the theory that homo sapiens is a hybrid mix of pig and chimpanzee. So eating pigs is theoretically sort of cannibalistic.
Bacon is pretty damn tasty however.
The Hybrid Hypothesis: http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html
But the usefulness of logic also depends on the worth of what those assumptions are based on in the first place.
From a logical perspective, the corpses of deceased people, who after all are unable to appreciate the gesture of a burial, are better off being used as fertiliser and rendered down for fat, which can be used to manufacture nitroglycerine, candles, lubricants, etc.
Yet we usually spend a lot of time, effort and money to provide people with a grave and sometimes even elaborate monuments with angel figures et al and keep the churchyards maintained and well kept for years and decades on end.
We do this out of a sense of sacrality even though this is economically unpractical.
As humans treasure different things, certain parts of morality will be subjective and non-universal.
Didn’t von Neumann advocate an American nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union?
If one wishes to evaluate this proposal, one needs a moral foundation, that is to say what values and ideas one prioritises above other values and ideas, before logic can be applied.
I believe it is better to have a clear view of what one’s moral foundation so that one is swayed by conscious biases rather than unconscious biases.
But as I stated, I don’t believe these questions can avoided, at least not by Anglo-Saxons and Europeans, so there is a need to develop coherent answers to these questions.