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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30738 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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I had to do some looking here. I figured the fixation on not killing insects was an allegory for empathy for humans outside your tribe.

Nope. Dude has spent a lot of time really fixated on insect suffering. But not just suffering caused by humans. Oh no: he is seriously considering how to intervene in nature to reduce predation in all contexts. As in, he is torn up about spiders killing flies.

New solution to Fermi paradox: intelligent aliens become so opposed to suffering and so empathetic with microorganisms that they thoroughly sterilize all life that they encounter. Can't have microscopic mites suffering as they die.

But I had doubts as well. In a 17 Oct. 2005 letter to Peter Singer, I asked:

Finally, what implications would follow if insects did turn out to be sentient? Might it be possible that the net balance of utility of their lives would be negative, considering that many insects live only for a few days or weeks before enduring what I presume is generally a painful death? If I could choose between not existing or experiencing the life of an insect under the assumed circumstances, I might prefer the former. If insect life were actually a great source of disutility, would a utilitarian not then be obligated to support, for instance, destruction of the rainforest, since that would destroy insect habitat and prevent many painful lives?

God damn it, Flannery O'Connor is right:

In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in force-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

Tomasik's 'tenderness' and squeamishness about things like the spider web in his cellar leads him to - mass extinction of all the animals for which he feels this 'tenderness'. "To save the village, we had to destroy it". To ameliorate the suffering of mindless creatures, we must kill them all and make them extinct so none of their kind ever lives - and thus suffers - again. And this is his notion of compassion.

And if we should kill the mindless, what about those with minds? A greater capacity for suffering and awareness of suffering surely means we are obligated to kill them all - without even a God to sort them out, save the gods that we have set ourselves up as, dealing out judgement as to who lives and who dies.

Of course, Tomasik's 'compassion' and 'tenderness' are ultimately for himself. Did he not feel upset and distressed by the idea of spiders killing and eating flies, he would not entertain the notion of killing all insects. So his real objection is not to their suffering, it is to "their suffering makes me feel bad and I don't like feeling bad, so to make it stop we must kill them all".

(I don't think he really means 'kill them all', this is just him grappling with his scrupulosity, but the easier thing for him and for the insects would be to choke off this over-sensitivity and be less upset about it. That way he doesn't feel so bad, and wild animals don't have to die so he can feel better).

So his real objection is not to their suffering, it is to "their suffering makes me feel bad and I don't like feeling bad, so to make it stop we must kill them all".

But isn't that why everyone wants to prevent suffering? Except they don't take it as seriously or don't think about it so much so it doesn't bother them as much.

I don't see anything particularly illogical in what he's saying. If you are obliged to save a drowning child, that obligation does imply a string of increasingly absurd things. The proper answer is "I am not obliged to save that drowning child unless it has literally no cost to me. If it has almost no cost, then I am only almost obligated."

But this 'solution' is on the level of "in order to prevent drowning children, I will shoot every child I see". It's bonkers.

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