Utilitarianism, Animal Rights, Kooky Ideas About How People Relate to Things, Etc.

That's not what being on top of the food chain means.

I think you're confused. He's not arguing for veganism.

I'd argue that it does. In the same way that if a wolf wants to move into a certain part of the forest, the rabbits don't get a dissenting voice. I understand that he's saying that, unlike wolves, humans are rational actors that can choose to not prey on other species, we're just differing in opinion as to whether we have a moral obligation to abstain from doing so.

I swear to god I don't know where you got the idea that all the rest of us are vegans.

My point isn't that we are or aren't greater (not sure I like this word in this context) but that being greater doesn't confer any additional rights over the lesser.

Additionally our intelligence wasn't granted by choice, we have it whether we want it or not. Our responsibility doesn't come purely from the existence of our intelligence it comes from what we do with it. We had the intelligence to create nuclear weapons, this now imposes the responsibility to not blow up the planet, no new rights have been granted to humans by this creation.

Considering genocide has been attempted on several occasions by several different people/groups it's not an absurdity. If you believe yourself to be greater than another your belief system implies you have rights over the other. Whether that's an animal or not isn't relevant, particularly when many humans considered other humans to be nothing more than animals in the past and exercised their assumed rights over them.

Taking the argument to the other extreme - if you extend the same rights to animals as you do to humans, are you also extending the same responsibilities to them?

Considering the responsibilities stem from our own creations, not particularly. What responsibility were you thinking of?

No. Responsibilities depend upon capability. Without the capability to fulfill a responsibility, it's meaningless to attempt to ascribe it to the entity.

So why should we be burdened with responsibility when they are not, when the same rights apply to both?

Example: assume that humans and animals have equal right to life. Humans can choose to respect this and not kill animals. Animals, however, lack the capability to make this choice as Aaron said. So if they don't follow the rules, why should they reap the benefits that come from doing so? You get rights by fulfilling responsibilities, not the other way around.

Incorrect. It is privileges, not rights, which you get from fulfilling responsibilities.

Then why can we take away certain rights of people who fail to fulfill their societal responsibilities?

I wouldn't consider those rights.

Here we get into the biggest problem of approaching a set of questions from an angle; we're using terms that don't have a shared, concrete definition. My "rights", your "rights", and TheTrunkDr's "rights" are all different.

I don't think humans have very many rights, and those rights that I ascribe are ones which I don't believe you ever lose. For example, very loosely described, I believe that you have the right to have a social context, one which is violated by solitary/isolation, and I do not believe that forced solitary confinement even for the worst of felons is ever morally justified.

Similarly, you have the right to freedom of thought. There will never be a day that I believe neurochemical manipulations (which are at the moment science fiction, but may in the future become feasible) may be forced upon the unwilling.

You do not have a right, in the way I would use the term, to bear arms. It is a privilege, one which can be revoked for felons and those with mental illness.

If you do have a right to vote, as many believe you do in the United States, it is one which is violated - and unconscionably - by laws that bar felons from voting.


Does that make sense?

I've specifically just mentioned right to exist. Legal rights are a different beast than philosophical rights I'm talking about. Rights granted by rule of law can be revoked by the same rule of law, I think it's obvious that these sorts of rights don't typically apply to animals as they aren't a part of human society.

I think Aaron covered it pretty well.

Yeah, that's another problem with using the term "rights". It's overloaded! Overloaded terms are confusing.

Makes perfect sense. I think we're on mostly the same page there.

Okay, position the first: No living being should suffer needlessly. Accepted?
Second: If you are capable of acting without needless harm to other living things, you should endeavor to do so. The vagueness here is the definition of "needless". A philosophy of "do no harm whatsoever" such as Jainism is absolutely untenable to the point of lunacy - were we all to adopt such an extreme belief, the human race would stagnate completely.

I don't agree with your second position. I don't see any reason to hold action as a morally good thing in and of itself; action is only moral inasmuch as it has consequences, and it takes the morality of those consequences.

But if we posit that needless harm is by nature immoral, then the action of causing harm without valid reason would be an immoral act. There are times when you have to do some harm to achieve some good - surgery causes harm to the body to remedy a greater problem, for instance. I'd say that there are even acceptable levels of harm. But pointless deprivation of rights - including the right to exist - should be avoided.

I agree, but I think that your second position is still ... at least inelegantly framed. Perhaps...

1 - If one can act in such a way as to increase net utility, one should act.
2 - When acting, one should seek to maximize the increase in net utility.
3 - Harm necessarily has negative utility.

The questions then become a matter of figuring out what things are harmful, and how harmful they are in terms of how much negative utility an action involving them incurs; the same for matters of positive utility; and the unanswerable question (in terms of a globally-applicable answer) of how much you weigh harm vs gain to determine net utility.

Dammit, where were you when I was trying to phrase this elegantly yesterday instead of acting like a complete berk?

Taking a day off from being pedantic on the internet? :)

Actually, at the dentist's office. Now there is an example of short-term harm, long-term gain!

I think the main differences here are stylistic more than anything, Nute, given that only a tiny tiny minority of people (none that I'm aware of here?) disagree with the basic idea that human life/rights/value is considerably weightier than that of other animals generally on a sliding scale of mind-complexity or whatever.

It's more the flourishes, the "we're our own category," "they are ours (as a resource and responsibility)" stuff that just sounds a bit more proprietary and lordly than some people care for. There's something to be said for a humble custodial approach when one's talking about other living things (especially those that can suffer.)

Also "if they don't contribute to progress they aren't moral entities" smacks pretty hardcore of old school European colonialism, which is pretty objectionable in its own right.

I also don't buy that decision making has anything to do with moral worth. Imagine a person with a full range of sentience, consciousness, and emotional and intellectual inner life. The only difference between an "ordinary" person and this special person is that this special person lacks free will. This special person may even believe that he or she has free will, but is simply mistaken. Would we really conclude that this person is not worthy of moral regard?

Reason can tell you how to accomplish something but it can't tell you what is worth accomplishing. At best, perhaps, it can help you in choosing between different desirable goals. You can't cross the is/ought gulf with it, though.

So if you think your actions are rooted in reason, you're kidding yourself. Dig a little under the reason and you'll find the real root - some intuition or feeling - below. I don't think this is a bad thing at all, but regardless of whether or not you think it's bad, it's what is.

Not only a robot, but a Heinlein Mark IV.

Speciesist!

Yeah, I am too. I'm ok with animal testing (within limits) and I'm not a vegetarian. That sliding scale you mentioned is important to me, though; apes, elephants, and cetaceans (I can't think of others but there may be) should be treated almost as repsectfully as human children in my opinion.

Late to the party, sorry.

I can't make sense of this. You say you don't care about most other people, you only care that someone else cares about them - that they have value to them. But that's an empty statement by itself. What you really mean, I assume, based on your friend example, is that you care that other people are made happy because they find others valuable. I'm not sure I see any distinction there. That's still caring about other people's wellbeing. In fact everyone thinks that.

If you literally mean that you only care that there are these connections between people, and nothing else whatsoever, then as I say that's meaningless. There's no reason to care about connections without reference to the happiness/wellbeing/meaning they generate for individuals.

I think the evidence suggests that altruism is an abstraction unsupported by practical evidence (ie being nice makes you feel good). I don't think that leads inevitably to utilitarianism or, god forbid, objectivism. How things work is not the same as how things ought to be or what constitutes an ethical approach to human conduct. As Richard Dawkins would tell you in any of his introductions before he explains how genes are selfish or how other things work in a more substantive abstraction than altruism.

Altruism is an abstraction unsupported by practical evidence? I am trying to parse this statement and coming up blank. What would it mean for an abstraction to be supported by evidence?

It seems to me that the test of the validity of an abstraction is, can it be usefully used to describe something in the real world that would otherwise only be clumsily or inadequately described by the other concepts available to us? In short, is the idea communicatively useful? "Circles" are an abstraction - there are no physically existing perfect circles - but we'd have great difficulty communicating with each other about, eg, how machinery works, without the concept.

I mean that it gets you from A to B in a manner that is supported by what faith would like to be true about nature versus getting you from A to B in reasonable (without the projections of faith) but less narrowly fulfilling choices. Like, it seems to me suspect as an abstraction that makes people feel good versus one that either describes the behavior in play efficiently or creates a useful long-term ideal of right and wrong. I think people as animals are sometimes good in spite of altruism not being an actual biologically-founded prerogative instead of viewing events that could be described as altruism as the outcomes of the true nature of humans or any other animal.

So why are rights associated with responsibility? How do you "accept" this responsibility - birth?

In the interests of speeding up the thread life cycle: The extremely mentally disabled and violent don't get a choice either. We don't punish them like they're fully rational actors, but it's also not legal to eat them.

Soylent Nute is people

OK, I think I understand better what you're saying. I think now that I understand I can say I disagree, or at least partially disagree. ;)

Let's say we see an example - a person walking home on a cold winter's evening sees a homeless person sitting on the ground, shivering with cold. They decide to take off their own warm coat and give it to that person, knowing they can fairly well afford to replace it, and they won't suffer too much in the fifteen minutes of walking left before they're inside again. I'd say, whatever else is going on here, whatever motivations we can discover for this act on the part of the giver, it's reasonable as a starting point to call it an act of altruism. It gives a benefit to another person and costs the giver something from their own resources. Whereas, you would say, because there's no clear biological basis for this action, nothing we could call a prerogative or an imperative to do it, then describing it as "altruism" is needlessly imprecise and leads us in the direction of making shallow and unjustified assumptions in our thinking about the situation - am I off-track?

Lizard_King I'm not sure I'm on board with your level of altruism skepticism. I mean one can reject the term along with concepts of objective morality as an actual thing in the universe, I suppose, but the "we do what feels good (on the basis of self interest or otherwise)" model of altruism doesn't seem like an elegant tidy explanation of human (perhaps rarely also human-like animal) behaviour either

To my mind, genes are intelligible as 'self-interested' in the sense that something congruent with "selfish" or "kin selfish" is adaptive. The interests and behaviour of complex organisms are not 100% congruent with the selfishness of genes. The interests and behaviour of humans - endowed, probably flukily, with a mind instead of just a brain - is that much more removed from the dictates of the gene. We invented vasectomies and celibacy and DINK and somewhere a trillion human genes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Think of a scenario - admittedly, an extreme, just-so story - in which a person sacrifices their life for non-kin individuals on the grounds of it being "the right thing to do." Is some part of them humming with smug self-satisfaction the whole time? Doing it because it feels good? To my mind the "no altruism" school of thought is a bit precious in saying "well, granted, he wasn't smug in the burning orphanage because he didn't have time to be, but if he'd stopped to think of it he was doing it because it felt good."

Well, I think the key thing there is "self interest or otherwise". Individuals (in many kinds of animals) are complicated and you can create a particular hypothetical that fits nearly any philosophical abstraction, and it's entirely possible that an individual can meet enough "quacks like a duck" criteria that it's the best explanation at hand. But I guess what I'm saying is that I don't find altruism useful as a means of describing actions or types of actions at a systemic level in terms of the natural world. It just seems like an analytical dead end in terms of the big picture, like a placeholder for behaviors we don't really understand.

Also I'm saying that I have the most boring drunk posts in the world.

I'm sure you have to get pretty far into just-so stories to find "altruism" in non-humans.

But adding minds to humans really screwed around with self-interest as a motivator, even if it's still a practical crude basis for predicting behavior (if only because it's orderly and predictable.)

But is it logical to explain anti-self-interest political idealism or personally uncomfortable altruism as hard-to-rationalize hedonism strategies (instead of - as they would be otherwise - some of the most edifying things human beings get up to)? Strikes me both as an unnecessary downer and a case of straining the facts of particular phenomena to fit a broader elegant model.

Well, that's a big thing, perhaps. I don't see a difference of kind but rather of degree in what we call "human" levels of sentience, and the biggest problem we have describing animal actions is that we are used to being able to talk about what we think we are doing when it comes to each other, not that animals don't get up to some pretty complex behaviors that are difficult to explain in terms that are simply building on chemical reactions and the desire to procreate or whatever.

As far as individual actions go, I think humans have a lot of things going on with how we explain actions that are, in and of themselves, a lot more interesting than pointing to a nice act and saying it was altruism. But that capacity we lack with animals tends to take center stage when humans are terribly unreliable narrators of their own motivations over time.I take, for instance, my own decisions across my life and while I have "talking points" versions of them that are relatively consistent, it gets complicated when I'm pressed on them and I find a level of "presentism" informing past decisions in memory. This isn't a crazy wise insight, of course, but I think it speaks to weighing the narrative component against things that are more measurable when possible rather than privileging talking about memory above all things because it seems uniquely human.

Again, I'm not arguing for universal hedonism, but just that altruism seems to me a placeholder at best in terms of its utility as an analytical starting point. I don't find it any more depressing or unnecessary to think so than conceiving of a world without a god or the inevitability of death.

So I don't know what's more logical, but whatever "anti-self-interest" politics are, they seem very difficult to use as an abstraction given all of the different interpretations. A lot of it seems like "politics I like" versus anything that is coherently altruistic when examined closely.

Well as organisms get more complex there's clearly a "degree but not kind" increase in behavior complexity away from simple make-more-gene "self interest," (bearing in mind that "self-interest" is anthropomorphizing genes and evolution.) But I do think there's a difference "of kind," or at least that looks like a difference of kind, between human and animal mind. (With very few animals even making that a complicated thing to assert). Obviously it's difficult to be certain for the reasons you mentioned, but we can, for example, look at the developmental psychology of human children. (Are the minds of a 3 year old, 10 year old and adult different in kind or degree?)

With respect to the problems of "altruism" as a ruleset of comparable explanatory value to self-interest - I'm not arguing that altruism is readily generalizable or unproblematic. It's just sensible, and apposite, and sufficient for explaining things that walk and quack like altruism. To make an analogy, I've spent hours arguing, hammer and tong, that free will and subjective consciousness, which feel 100% confirmed as subjective experience, contradict our understanding of materialist predestination, and I think they do. But I'd consider pivoting from that sort of argument to saying "free will and subjectivity aren't the basis of my experience of life" would be as inane as arguing solipsism.

And, just as an anti-free will argument could, in a silly way, argue against moral conduct, so a "refutation of altruism" can be a basis for cynicism, devaluation of idealism, etc. I don't precisely mean that as an appeal to consequence, which is obviously poor form in philosophical argument, but in discussing practical things like one's view on animal rights or politics or whatever, it's good to have views that interface intelligibly with one's experience of life and morality.

Well, "looks like a difference of kind" says a lot about our choice of measurements and ourselves as measurers, and only gives us one indicator among many for what's going on with animals. Or children, for that matter; you don't have to look much farther than the mental gymnastics we go through as a species in terms of the human-ness of people with disabilities (which is to me obvious and self-evident without any "sentience tests") in order to see the problems that asserting a difference of kind can bring one to in a practical sense.

I don't understand where this disagrees with what I said.

Again, I'm not sure what part of this disagrees with what I said. I agree that refutations of altruism are often misused. That does not do much against the qualified, limited arguments against overuse of altruism as a systemic form of analysis that I believe I am making. It could describe what can be read into my first post, which was really an off the cuff reaction to specific language about sociopathy and anti-altruism in Ingmar's post, but I think I've narrowed it significantly from there.

But, there we are - "best I can figure" is, in fact, the best I can figure. With respect to the humanness of children / people with disabilities I don't disagree, obviously, but momentarily leaving aside the potentially charged issue of people with disabilities, I don't think claiming a difference in kind between my mind and the mind of a 3-year-old dehumanizes the three-year-old.

Certainly no flat disagreement. Tonally, when I hear "altruism/idealistic sentiment is only a placeholder, a dead-end, and it can't be used systematically," that connotes to me a negative value judgement about altruism / idealistic sentiment as an explanation. The "can't be used systematically" sort of implies something else, ie "self-interest + epicycles" could systematically explain the same phenomena, and I'm not convinced that's true.

I'm enoying the back and forth between Jason T and Lizard_King, but I do find myself wondering how the two of you would define "altruism" in the context of this discussion. Is it simply any action to which we can't subscribe some benefit to the individual actor organism?

Sure, that's fine with me. I would just say that "we can't" is the key part of the phrase, and is not the same as "there isn't one".

I don't know if it dehumanizes them, but it just seems bizarre to be aware of the degrees of change that human brains go through in order to become whatever your kind of brain is, and then draw the line around that to a difference of kind. Writ large, that's my problem with drawing a bigger box around most humans and saying that animals are of a different kind, when it seems plainly a holdover from theology-driven analyses of the world and in fact one that seems to me presents obstacles to meaningful analysis and comparison that are pretty arbitrary once you remove self-esteem boosts from the equation. Much like altruism.

The difference is that self-interest does explain things by giving you variables to change and follow according to a coherent sense of what is driving what.Altruism explains things in the way that "god did it" explains things.

Take a hypothetical altruistic act x, where person A simply helps person B despite not appearing to benefit directly. What if they are more likely to help someone related to them, or someone who appeals to them subconsciously, or someone who is a certain gender, or someone who is a certain race? The point isn't to generate an endless list of what-ifs, but it just seems to me that altruism is what we use when we don't understand what variables are driving decisionmaking. It's fine in the particular case of someone "being" altruistic in an instance because you can't really get at most of the variables or run controlled experiments at the individual level, and moreover it's a lot of fuss when you can just thank somebody for being nice at that level. But in what I've seen of systemic analyses, it seems to me that there are always trends, and those trends tell you more than the label of altruism.

Again, it's fine for individuals, but lousy for the big picture. There's a reason why when someone promotes a political movement as altruistic you should look deeper, when that might not be as useful (or indeed counterproductive) relative to an individual political actor.