fine

Preface

"I" recently "received" some "writing advice" from a "friend." By my account, the advice is that if you want to write a blog post every day, you can do this by writing a blog post every day. Seems reasonable to me, but I've got enough habits to kick as it is. Also, C's get degrees in this household, so I'm intending to see you 22 days this month and likely not a minute more. Anyway the deadliest sin of blogging is the "welcome to the blog" post, so let's quit now before it gets any worse.

More overtly the advice was to find something that you disagree with, and then disagree with it. In the spirit of disagreeing with things, last night I reread a post from Benjamin Hoffman that I remember disagreeing with to see if I had in the intervening period learned anything that would allow me to more succinctly describe how wrong he is. I'm feeling about 50-50, so let's give it a shot.

Ethical Veganism is Correct

In his post, Hoffman outlines what he sees as the two primary arguments for ethical veganism, those being these:

1. Killing other animals is unjust aggression; you wouldn't like to be killed and eaten, so don't kill and eat them.

2. Factory farming causes animals to have bad lives.

I cosign these arguments as a card-carrying vegatarian (/vi.ɡæ.tɛ.ɹi.ən/). (My tolerance for dairy grows more nonexistent with each passing day.)

He gives his refutations in several parts, which I'll quote partially for context. (The post is very short, though, so you can just go read it.)

Argument from well animals are alive before they die so who's to say if killing them is good or not

1a. In a modern market economy, buying farmed meat causes more deaths by causing more animal lives. The ethical vegan must therefore decide whether their objection is to animals dying or to animals living. The question reduces to whether they'd be more glad to have been born than sad to die. [...]

I reject Hoffman's 1a as holding morals wrong. Specifically, little a Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is good for the bones. I'm not only interested in the end result and how many animals live and die, I'm interested in how I participate in the system that creates the outcome. I'm also operating under uncertainty about morality and in my playbook not farming (and therefore killing) billions of animals and also not killing a bunch of wild animals (even to stop them from killing other wild animals) beats doing either of those things. In the sense that even if I find out later I was wrong and we should have been killing all the wolves or whatever, I at least won't regret not having done it sooner.

But I can warrant this much: whatever happens to be true or ends up having to be true about (my) morality, completely destroying all wildlife on earth, is definitely not good. (Source: thinkin about it.) And dooming billions of animals to lives like the lives they lead on farms today is also definitely not good. (Source: ibid.) So we can at least operate within those constraints.

Argument from well animals can't do decision theory so who's to say if killing them is good or not

1b. Another way of interpreting argument 1 for ethical veganism invokes rights: we shouldn't kill other agents because this violates decision-theoretic principles about respecting agency. But this assumes the other party can engage in the kind of reciprocal decision-making that grounds such rights. [...]

1b puts up more of a fight. Logical decision theory is of course approximately correct, but much like utilitarianism is approximately correct, it's unclear whether that makes it of any use to us. This is a hallmark of all good theories because it increases engagement.

As has been amply discussed elsewhere, human beings are not actually capable of engaging in logical decision theory. Nevertheless, I find it generally useful to go around trying to do things that are vaguely shaped like logical decision theory outcomes. These are generally very normal things to do, because one of the first rules of being a logical decision theorist is to not get too weird with it.

Look: I'm a big softie who doesn't like hurting NPCs in video games and who finds it cute to cooperate with the rock that says cooperate on it. This probably has anything to do with logical decision theory, but it also probably has anything to do with how I yearn to buy the orange juice that has pretty pictures of oranges on it, regardless of how good the orange juice actually tastes. I really want to say we should cooperate with the animals because cooperating is good, but I know that if I do, someone will come along and start talking about the true prisoner's dilemma, and I'd rather not hear about it.

However, it seems noteworthy to me that in the modern day, the difference between farming and not farming animals isn't the difference between a positive and a negative outcome for the person involved, but rather the difference between a more and slightly less positive outcome (animals not suffering being farmed having a virtue of its own). I'm generally suspicious of opportunity costs and haven't yet fully accounted why, so I can't properly use this as a strike against the argument, but please consider it noted.

It's also worth noting that while animals (like humans) are not capable of actually doing logical decision theory, it seems like animals (like humans) have a bit of it baked into them. In the same way that we can fumblingly treat with each other in ways approximately (or not so approximately) prescribed by logical decision theory, perhaps it would also be in our(!) best interests to go around fumblingly attempting to treat with animals in the same way, even if to the best of our understanding there's no object-level mechanical reason to do so. Alternatively I guess we could slaughter them by the billions, because there's definitely no way we misunderstand how logical decision theory can be best applied in this scenario.

Argument from well if I'm not allowed to instrumentalize the animal as a thing to eat then I have no choice but to kill it and who's to say if that's good or not

1c. ...the instrumentalization of animals as things to eat is morally repugnant, so we should make sure it's not perpetuated. This seems to reflect a profound lack of empathy with the perspective of a domesticate that might want to go on existing. Declaring a group's existence repugnant and acting to end it is unambiguously a form of intergroup aggression.

Unfortunately for me 1c is a bit trickier still. Prior to my reread I thought "aha! but the instrumentalization of animals as things to eat is morally repugnant!" would be my shoe-in counterargument to the whole thing that I'd thought of since I originally read this post. Nevertheless, I do have a response.

First of all, I'm also suspicious of domestication and have written ("written") on the subject elsewhere on this website. We don't have time for a full treatment here, and we will likely return to it in the future; suffice to say I have questions. Happily, Hoffman jumps to conclusions: he assumes that given we have domesticated animals in order to eat them, and if we've decided that we no longer want to eat them, thereby we must act to eradicate them. This is not a necessary conclusion even if you account "stopping continuously creating massive farm populations" as an act of aggression. We could just as well maintain farm populations at exactly the size they currently are, or even continue to grow them, just without the death and torture. It'd be an unlikely accomplishment in a market-based economy, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be to the Good.

Second of all, there's a difference between attempting to eradicate something and ceasing to support it in a way that was previously induced by some third cause to begin with. You could account our farm populations as being engaged in an involuntary trade with us: their flesh and blood for our temporary and unasked-for support. I can decide without reference to my counterparty that this trade doesn't suit me, so long as we're playing hardball, and I claim that so long as this is in fact in my best interests as I understand them I am not, logically, harming you by depriving you of gains from trade.

(Now that we've made it through all the refutations of (1), it's worth observing that none of these actually attempt to refute that "killing animals is unjust aggression" or claim that "unjust aggression" against animals isn't a bad thing.)

Argument from, uh, quick look over there

2. If factory farming seems like a bad thing, you should do something about the version happening to you first. [...]

Thankfully Hoffman ends by throwing us a textbook whataboutism softball. "If thing X is bad, what about thing Y that's completely unrelated?" What?

Hoffman's point as I read it is that we have some kind of oxygen mask we need to put on as a society, I guess at least in part by continuing to factory farm animals for some reason, so that we can (presumably?) stop factory farming animals at some time in the future. Is what I would say were I giving him a charitable read, which in earnestness I can't help but do, but this is still a completely wild objection. I agree that Society has Problems? My copy of the blog post must be missing the margin notes explaining the situation.

(Not to mention his flatly false assertions that factory farmed animals express no discontent with their "conditions" or that they are somehow bred to tolerate those conditions. Were that it were so! I can imagine what a successfully-tolerating-its-conditions cow, chicken, or pig might look like, and it would not seem to involve genetic disease, or self-harm, or anxiety.)

Ultimately none of this is an argument in favor of factory farming at all; at best it's an argument for temporarily not caring about it, which is a matter of triage, not of philosophy. I would characterize Hoffman more as a sneering at the idea of caring about animals at all while humans are suffering. Which isn't unrelatable, in the abstract, but still doesn't count as an argument for factory farming.

Sorry I could've been more polite with these section titles I leaned in a bit too hard

Hoffman's points amount less to a conclusion that ethical veganism is "wrong" and more an argument that other things could be more important than not hurting animals. GiveWell can make spreadsheets about this as it pleases them; ethical veganism is, as a matter of the moral law, correct.

(Under current conditions of uncertainty, given warrants as obtain for me, blah blah blah)

The kanji of the day is: 共

(This is the section where I tell you which of the kanji I learned today I liked the most, or maybe some other kanji I know that I like if I don't like any of the day's that much.)

The kanji of the day is 共.

• Its Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course keyword is JOINT.
• Its readings are とも, ども, and キョウ.

There was some tough competition today, but I like that even though the proper meaning of JOINT in this sense is not as a joint between two pieces of wood but rather of togetherness, 共 still kind of looks like some wooden joints. It also has some great words, like 共和国 ("republic"), and 共産主義 ("Communism"). (This latter is technically cheating because I don't know 義 yet, but I baaaasically recognize all the radicals so close enough.)