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freeradicalx t1_j0ihuol wrote

Reply to comment by _Maxolotl in State Orders NYC To Drop Foie Gras Sales Ban, Says Ban Violates NY Agricultural Law by Gato1980

We usually agree wholeheartedly when the government bans certain inhumane practices. Why is this any different? Harboring a wide variety of views is one thing and that's just fine. That is very different from allowing actual suffering to carry on.

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_Maxolotl t1_j0j8225 wrote

Most people don't care about geese anywhere near as much as vegans and animal rights activists do.

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j0jrb65 wrote

When talk about foie gras with such radicalism as if it's on the same level of child exploitation or slavery (as you did more explicitly in other comments), I don't think you'll get much positive response.

I'd be surprised if such rhetoric even helps your cause, to be honest.

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freeradicalx t1_j0jvrvr wrote

Is this advice, or a defensive reflex?

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j0jy76r wrote

I don’t know, but I’ll let you decide.

Do you feel guilt or shame for the suffering of the animals? Maybe so much so that you desire other people to feel the same?

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freeradicalx t1_j0kggpb wrote

I think that the majority of defensive reactions to animal activism can be explained as a protective mechanism against existing unexamined guilt or shame. But I could be biased because yes, I did go vegan as consequence of a crisis of guilt and shame. No, aggravating guilt or shame in others is not necessarily something I'd want to do as advocacy. Maybe if someone is right on the cusp of coming around, but not someone happily entrenched in animal exploitation through their normative culture, diet, identity, etc. Where exactly do you think I might have "poked the bear" a bit too hard, and how might I have done so better?

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j0lb83o wrote

Thank you for sharing.

For many people it’ll be obvious that the mention of slavery and child exploitation is just an exaggeration to try to make a point and they would be able to understand. However, for many others it may appear to be making those grave issues more trivial and that’s going to turn people away.

There will be the people who won’t think it’s an exaggeration and literally agree, but that’s just preaching to the choir.

I myself see a lot of issues with animal diets, for my own health, for the environment and for the treatment of the animals (in this exact order). But while they influence me into being more mindful about my diet, I admit I’m very far from the cusp of becoming vegan.

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GambitGamer t1_j14797g wrote

Those who think it’s obvious that a comparison to slavery or child exploitation is an exaggeration ought to re-examine their moral understanding of the world. Farmed animal suffering is one of the worst scourges of all time. Most people don’t think so, but most people also didn’t think so of slavery or child exploitation for the vast majority of history. That’s fine, it’s the nature of moral progress, and we’ll see how popular opinion changes in the long arc of the moral universe.

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j14fezh wrote

That is an interesting thing to reflect upon.

I think almost anything can be found to be morally equivalent to anything else if one adopts a sufficiently reductive view.

On a wider perspective though, the arcs of the dominant opinions in the moral universe mostly flap around on the winds of the economic universe. Slavery and many other atrocities rose and fell over time because of the economics, and the moral universe (including religious morality and such) served most of the time as an after-the-fact rationalization.

I expect the same to happen with animal protein. The economics of raising animals in farms are inefficient and bad in many ways, but that's the best we have today. Once that can be genuinely replaced by superior economic processes (lab grown meat?), I bet will see the moral winds shift rather quickly.

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GambitGamer t1_j14kezg wrote

I used to think so too, but the predominant scholarly opinion is that the abolition of slavery was very much a moral/cultural movement.

See What We Owe The Future for a recent discussion.

> In the book, he argues that what people value is far more fragile and historically contingent than it might first seem. For instance, today it feels like the abolition of slavery was an inevitable part of the arc of history. But Will lays out that the best research on the topic suggests otherwise.

> For thousands of years, almost everyone — from philosophers to slaves themselves — regarded slavery as acceptable in principle. At the time the British Empire ended its participation in the slave trade, the industry was booming and earning enormous profits. It’s estimated that abolition cost Britain 2% of its GDP for 50 years.

> So why did it happen? The global abolition movement seems to have originated within the peculiar culture of the Quakers, who were the first to argue slavery was unacceptable in all cases and campaign for its elimination, gradually convincing those around them with both Enlightenment and Christian arguments. If a few such moral pioneers had fallen off their horses at the wrong time, maybe the abolition movement never would have gotten off the ground and slavery would remain widespread today.

and

> Will MacAskill: The example that I focus on most in the book is the abolition of slavery. I go deepest into this because, firstly, it’s just the most important moral change that I know of — certainly among the most important moral changes in all history. And secondly, I think the case for it being, in some important way, contingent — that is, it could have gone either way, such that we could have current levels of technology and very widespread slavery — is much stronger than one might think.

> Will MacAskill: We certainly shouldn’t be very confident that current levels of technological development would lead to a society that had banned slavery. Maybe one thinks it’s 50/50. Maybe actually you think it’s more likely than not that we didn’t. And we talked about this more in the last podcast. I go deep into it in the book. One thing I should say is I’m not some philosopher, imperialistically going into history and then making all sorts of pontifications.

> Rob Wiblin: This was the view among people who’ve studied it?

> Will MacAskill: Yeah. I couldn’t say definitively what’s the median view among academic historians, but certainly the idea that the abolition of slavery was economically determined is very, very out of fashion among historians now.

> Rob Wiblin: I see.

> Will MacAskill: The general view is that it was a cultural change primarily. And then there’s a question of, why did that cultural change happen? Was it actually just really quite a contingent particular thing? There’s some real evidence for this. The fact that you really don’t see abolitionist campaigns occurring outside of Britain. Abolitionist sentiment, you don’t really see outside of Britain and France, and the United States as well.

> Will MacAskill: You look at the Netherlands, which in some sense was the first modern economy, and they had these petition campaigns that got almost no signatures. There was almost no abolitionist sentiment, almost no movement there. The Industrial Revolution could easily have happened in the Netherlands. It could have resulted in a very different kind of moral landscape.

from https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macAskill-what-we-owe-the-future/

That being said, I agree that if we make better moral choices easier for people, they’ll make those choices more… as is the case with any choice with an easy option. So I am emphatically in favor of cultivated meat.

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freeradicalx t1_j0n61jq wrote

Thanks, that point about comparisons between animals and human suffering is actually helpful. I had a feeling that was the primary complaint, and I really do think that suffering is the same no matter who is experiencing it, but it'll be good to remember going into that analogy in the future to be explicit that I am just comparing suffering, and not the lived experiences of a person and the people they affect vs eg an animal on a farm. Or maybe just take mention of the species (Humans or animals) out of it entirely.

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DadBodofanAmerican t1_j0lyt00 wrote

If the city wanted to ban the production of Foie Gras inside NYC then they are more than welcome to. They didn't. They banned the sale at restaurants. The farmers that this hurts aren't city residents so they have no voice in the process. But they are state residents so Albany stepped in to protect them.

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freeradicalx t1_j0n6o23 wrote

Yeah I get that, though I wasn't necessarily talking about city government. They were just the particular gov that tried to do it this time.

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lotsofdeadkittens t1_j0khgah wrote

I dont think foi gras is even remotly more inhumane than murdering animals. I eat meat and do see animal cruelty as an issue with meat consumption but outright banning torture of animals but being ok with murdering them is moral gymnastics

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deltamental t1_j0it3mr wrote

Yeah like, "there are a diverse set of views on child labor". Doesn't mean we shrug our shoulders: there's still an objective right and wrong in this situation because it's an objective fact that individuals are suffering unnecessarily. The avoidable suffering of anyone should be the concern of everyone.

Unfortunately, many people view the purpose of society as just a pragmatic tool to further their own desires. If the government gets in the way of their Nikes or their foie gras because the exploitation involved in those industries, suddenly it's overreach. But that same government putting people in cages on Rikers for over a year without a trial is A-OK because it doesn't affect them.

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_Maxolotl t1_j0j86kj wrote

Is there a wide range of views about whether human children and geese are equivalents?

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freeradicalx t1_j0jbju4 wrote

Geese not being equivalent to children doesn't mean they don't suffer, and you already know that so you shouldn't be pretending like you don't just to be snappy on the internet.

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deltamental t1_j0jrorj wrote

Exactly, I'm trying to point out that reasoning from "people have differing views on this issue" to "we shouldn't try to address this issue" is fallacious.

Generally speaking, the easiest way to demonstrate that a kind of reasoning is flawed is to apply that flawed reasoning to a situation in which where it obviously fails. If you tell me "I can eat any pepper, no matter how spicy", I'm testing that by giving you a Carolina Reaper, not a Jalepeño.

If you tell me, "I don't think the government should be getting involved in moral issues for which there are a diversity of different views about it", I'm going to bring up child labor precisely because it's something the government obviously should do something about, and for which there have historically been differing views on (from parents pulling their kids out of school at age 12 to work the farm, to Hollywood execs arguing child actors should be exempt from the usual rules, etc.).

To make another analogy, if some hippie said "I don't vaccinate my kids because vaccines are made in labs, not by nature", I could respond rhetorically "I don't cook for my kids because metal pans are made in factories, not forests".

If the hippie responds back, "Are you seriously comparing starving your kids with keeping them away from experimental injections?", then clearly they either (1) missed the point of my rhetorical response, or (2) understood it, but just don't want to think about or address the shaky foundation of their stated reasoning. Obviously I'm not trying to tell the hippie that not vaccinating your kids is abuse on the same level as starving them to death, and I can clearly see a distinction. I'm trying to tell them that "natural is better" reasoning is unreliable, so they shouldn't use it to make major health decisions.

In general, people use nice-sounding reasoning like "I don't want to legislate moral issues" or "I prefer natural solutions" to avoid actually addressing the issue at hand. I know they don't apply that kind of reasoning universally, so what's the actual reason they believe what they believe? Like, this isn't an awkward dinner with overly-religious relatives where we have to pretend to pray. This is public policy that has impact, and we're explicitly debating that policy, not trying to be polite and avoid rocking the boat.

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