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

So I was going around looking for data on the average annual cost of a pet and I found a shocking degree of shitty or unresearched information out there, including lazy shit like using the average costs of various categories of pet care as an annual total. Most of it was an assertion sans citation.

I needed this information to calculate the NPV of a dog so that we can appropriately asses the lower bound on their utility. If the NPV of a dog is roughly equivalent to that of a used car (plausible, annual cost of dog ownership on these many sites and surveys ranged from $500 to $2500 per year for the average dog with an average lifespan), they must have equivalent user value. Since dogs cannot shuttle people to and from work, the cuddles and companionship they provide must be equivalent in value to said shuttling.

But the price is a lower bound. People don't tend to grieve when their car dies, but post pet death depression is sufficiently common that the AVMA has an article on it (https://www.avma.org/public/PetCare/Pages/pet-loss.aspx). So we can plausibly put the upper bound on pet utility at or near that of a human family member. I doubt many people would, given a choice between their brother and their dog, pick their dog but the possibility is not sufficiently farcical so as to be ruled out outright. After all, some people give more in their will to their pets than their family.

Not everyone derives the same utility from a pet. The same is true of hamburgers and hammers. But pets clearly have more value to the average owner than a cow (http://www.farmandranchguide.com/ne...cle_94e22c5a-4601-11e1-8214-0019bb2963f4.html) or a hammer. After all, a cow provides a revenue stream and mostly maintains itself, and a hammer can be used for shit. Dogs generate no revenue stream and are -- from an infantile perspective -- functionless. Yet people prefer dogs to cows despite the significantly higher lifetime costs, meaning the dog must have more utility.

Also relevant: http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...1e2-8a97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html?tid=socialss

My mind / my subjectivity circa age 3, is fundamentally different from my brain at age 20 according to a checklist of really big criteria about what minds do, abstract thinking, understanding of self, of others, all sorts of really big deal things. IMO one way of saying that is saying it's different in kind. That doesn't mean it's on one side of some sort of magical Thomistic fish-vs-fowl list or something. We don't have a really bulletproof way of describing/understanding what a subjective consciousness is exactly.

I sense "I" exist, and I know there are complications about the mind coming from different bits and the cartesian I being debatable and all of that, but we definitely have the sense of a subjective I, and our terminology about it isn't going to be unimpeachable. So I stand by the difference in kind comment and don't really think it's a theology or self-esteem thing, just wishing to avoid daylight between my philosophical best-guess and my actual experience of existence.

This seems pejorative to me but we may just be arguing at cross purposes, as

has nothing to do with what I'm discussing. I'm saying if Bill runs into a burning orphanage and dies, I don't learn more from someone saying "increasingly diffuse types of kin- and then group-based self-interest meant that his behavior was in some sense meta-adaptive even though he was a 20 year old with a vasectomy who didn't want kids and really enjoyed his life" than if someone said "he decided a moral imperative outweighed his survival." Maybe he's 4% more likely to run into an orphanage if he thinks a plurality of infants inside are of his ethnic group or something but I suspect that sort of analysis is in the realm of fictional science.

Stand by it, then. But surely you realize that it's not accident that your deriving your arguments from something that was novel in the 16th century. You are in company with people who were primarily theologically driven thinkers and they were working with limited scientific knowledge as we understand it today. There's a reason that they thought the world revolved around the arbitrary categories that they were capable of using.

Really? Because in a discussion where you've variously labeled my approach as inane, irretrievably linked to reprehensible philosophies of life, and implicitly insensible, it is my carefully constrained comparison of the relative utility of the two concepts that gives offense. This is a discussion, I'll remind you, which was begun by the (no doubt offhand) blanket description of people who mistrust altruism as sociopathic.

I'm pretty sure at the point you're working overtime to ignore the distinction I drew between particular altruism and general altruism that the conversation is over, from my end. For the last time, I specifically exempted any specific Bill rescues from my analysis, exactly because I believe that trying to break down individual actions in that manner would be a fool's errand. That doesn't mean that what I think work as testable hypotheses that flesh out what is actually happening in *individually* altruistic actions across the species is broken; I just object to viewing the placeholder of altruism as a solution.

The problem is, the actual 'differences' in the 'difference in kind' thing are constantly being eroded by research. Go back even 20 years and there are probably dozens of things that 'only humans do' that we've discovered in animal behavior. Language learning, play behaviors, mourning behaviors, war, etc. I think you're standing on a rather sandy, erosion prone piece of ground with that.

Again, I'm not arguing a humans vs. animals dichotomy, which is why I expanded to say "different in kind" - in the sense of "major differences like presence or absence of types of conscious experience/thought" the same human from him or herself at 3 or 10 years old. Leaving aside the slipperiness of what a subjective "mind," I think contending that a 3 year-old-human mind is different from the same mind at 20 if anything could serve to collapse some artificial wall between humans and, say, human-like primates.

I used "inane" to describe a hypothetical corrollary to an argument I once made in a different discussion. Nothing you said or are saying is inane or insensible or implicitly sociopathic. Honestly I think my prose style must rub you the wrong way whenever we get into wall of text discussions, as I rarely even disagree with what you say except for comparatively nitpicking differences emphasis or further inquiry direction. So no other vibe was intended in my posting.

Just omitting things to avoid wall of text - I thought I'd implicitly conceded/agreed that altruism wasn't a systemically modelable or "generalizable" model along the lines of self-interest - (ie, "general altruism" is a bad concept) - by dint of my argument's emphasis, but I guess it wasn't clearly implied. As has come up in discussions with Aeon, I often feel that moral/ideological sentiment - a broad category in which altruism is a small slice - is a not-very-modellable fly in the ointment of attempts to model or predict (mass) human behaviour. Which, needless to say, doesn't prevent that from being an important priority for practical and academic students of the social sciences.

I've realized in the last few years - partly because of some philosophy of history maundering - that I'm pretty far on the "messy, particularist, Isaiah-Berlinish anti-systematization" end of the spectrum on questions of generalizability of human or historical phenomena. Understanding requires generalization, it's nothing dogmatic, it's just I'm always attracted to the points at which generalization breaks down or fails to model particular/individual circumstances.

Review of Jonathan Haidt's bio/evolutionary-origins-of-morality book in NYRB. I think this is the same wider research at the University of Pennsylvania that Nicholas Kristof was writing about in that "would you slap your father" article I link to periodically.

I think the weird discontinuity the reviewer detects between Haidt's theory of morality and his practice is worth noting, but it's still as interesting as ever in looking at left/right conceptions of morality. I hadn't really thought of looking at "nasty right wing fairness" - of the "you stole a loaf of bread, you go to jail," "you got pregnant, you keep the baby" sort - as a product of avatistic anti-free-rider behavior, but it's an interesting notion.