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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32254 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Martha Nussbaum writes about wild animal suffering in the New York Review of Books.

Sort of. That exact wording is not used, and the utilitarian discourse on the subject not referenced, but it clearly is the same general thought. And it is very cathedralised. We have:

The "everything is political":

In the US, “wild horses” and other “wild” creatures live under the jurisdiction of our nation and its states. To the extent that they have limited rights of nonintervention, free movement, and even a type of property rights, that is because human law has seen fit to give them these rights. Humans are in control everywhere. Humans decide what habitats to protect for animals, and leave the animals only what they decide not to use.

One might grant that the current status quo is that humans dominate everywhere, while still recommending that humans simply back off and leave all the “wild” animals in all of these spaces to do the best they can for themselves. Even that proposal would require active human intervention to stop human practices that interfere with animal lives: poaching, hunting, whaling. And it would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, “Well, you are wild animals, so live with it as best you can.” It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.

The critical theorising:

There are also some very bad reasons for not moving against predation. Part of the Romantic idea of “the wild” is a yearning for violence. Blake’s Tyger and Shelley’s West Wind are emblems of what some humans feel they have lost by becoming hypercivilized. A longing for (putatively) lost aggression lies behind a lot of people’s fascination with large predatory animals and indeed with the spectacle of predation itself.

(And much more in this direction. That is most of the article.)

And just enough mention of the exterminationist angle to stay deniable:

Moreover, the animal reservation is geared as a whole to this exercise: the wild dogs are highly endangered, and much effort is made to preserve them. I am agnostic about the desirability of preserving that species, but I think here the central concern prompting preservation is a bad one: money from sado-tourism.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that:

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

I'm more interested in the (possibly imminent) moral repercussions of AI research actually uncovering the foundations of intelligence & self-awareness. We're actually qualitatively different from non-primates? Groovy, pass the steak. But if we're really not different at all, except maybe for a little self-deception capacity? Big oof, time to start talking about becoming grabby aliens to uplift all the bacteria in our light cone.

David Pearce, the most sympathetic of utilitarians and one of the smarter ones, bites the bullet here:

Reprogramming Predators

First, a cruelty-free world entails a transition to global veganism. Realistically, global veganism won't come about purely or even mainly via moral persuasion within any plausible timeframe. Such a momentous transition can occur only after the advent of mass-produced artificial meat ("Krea") that is at least as cheap, tasty and healthy as flesh from slaughtered factory-farmed animals - with moral argument playing a modest supporting role. For sure, there is still the "yuk factor" to overcome. But when delicious, cruelty-free cultured-meat products become commercially available, the "yuk factor" should actually work in favour of cultured meat - since meat from factory-farmed animals is not merely morally disgusting but often physically disgusting too.

However, this transition isn't enough. Even the hypothetical world-wide adoption of a cruelty-free diet leaves one immense source of suffering untouched. Here we shall explore one of the thorniest issues the end of suffering entails: the future of what biologists call obligate predators. For the abolitionist project seems inconsistent with one of our basic contemporary values. The need for species conservation is so axiomatic that an explicitly normative scientific sub-discipline, conservation biology, exists to promote it. In the modern era, the extinction of a species is usually accounted a tragedy, especially if that species is a prominent vertebrate rather than an obscure beetle. Yet if we seriously want a world without suffering, how many existing Darwinian life-forms can be conserved in their current guise? What should be the ultimate fate of iconic species like the large carnivores? True, only a minority of the Earth's species are carnivorous predators: the fundamental laws of thermodynamics entail that whenever there is an "exchange of energy" between one trophic level and another, there is a significant loss. The majority of the planet's 50,000 or so vertebrate species are vegetarian. But among the minority of carnivorous species are some of the best known creatures on the planet. Should these serial killers be permitted to prey on other sentient beings indefinitely?

A few forms of extinction are almost universally applauded even now. Thus the demise of the smallpox virus in the wild is wholly unlamented, though controversy persists over whether the last two pathogenic Variola copies in human custody should be destroyed. The virus could be recreated from scratch if needed. Technically, viruses aren't alive; they can't independently replicate. Yet the same welcome will be extended to the extinction of scores of bacterial pathogens that cause human disease if we can plot their eradication as efficiently as the two Variola variants that cause smallpox. Likewise, exterminating the five kinds of protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium that cause malaria would be almost entirely uncontentious; a human child dies from malaria on average every twelve seconds. ...

Most controversial of all, however, would be the extinction - or genetically-driven behavioural modification - of members of the cat family. We'll focus here on felines rather than the "easy" cases like parasitic tapeworms or cockroaches because of the unique status of members of the cat family in contemporary human culture, both as pets/companion animals and as our romanticised emblems of "wildlife". ...

It is worth stressing, repeatedly since the charge is made time and again, that this indictment of predators is not to blame a lion [or a domestic cat] for its behaviour. First, barring genetic engineering or freaks of nature, lions are obligate carnivores. Secondly, they don't understand the implications of what they are doing. Any mutant lion with a theory of mind capable of empathising with its prey would be rapidly outbred by "sociopathic" lions. Barring human intervention, a compassionate lion who rejected the "law of the jungle" would starve to death. Consequently so would its cubs. Lions are "sociopathic" towards members of prey species, just as throughout history many humans have behaved sociopathically to members of other races and tribes - though enslavement has been more common in humans than cannibalism. ["Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own." - Robert Louis Stevenson.] Either way, the extinction scenario for predatory life-forms needs to be taken seriously - but not out of naïve moralism. The committed abolitionist may tentatively predict that centuries hence lions will not exist outside the digital archives - any more than the smallpox virus. For that matter, one may tentatively predict that the same fate will befall feral Homo sapiens. The conditionally activated capacity to act in bloodthirsty and sexually aggressive ways has been genetically adaptive in the past. We are all the descendants of murderers and rapists. Thus geneticists claim that over 16 million people today may be descended from Genghis Khan. But prediction is not advocacy.

.... One critical response to the prospect of reprogramming carnivorous predators runs as follows. A quasi-domesticated lion that does not prey on members of other species has ceased to be a true lion. Lions, by their very nature, kill members of prey species (and sometimes hyenas, cheetahs and each other). Yes, lions kill their victims in gruesome ways described as "bestial" if done by humans; but such behaviour is perfectly natural if practised by lions: it's one aspect of their "behavioural phenotype". Hunting behaviour is a natural part of their species essence.

Yet here we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural". If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what (s)he was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath? Currently, sociopathy in humans cannot be cured; but various interventions, both genetic and pharmacological, have been mooted.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that

A while ago, I had a thought. God granted humanity stewardship over nature. Humans are above nature and have a responsibility towards nature for this reason. But you remove God, and that's all good. Then you only have two logical conclusions. That humans are no better than animals, and that animals are raised to the same status as humans. I think that trend and this article are examples of both of that.

I used the term 'God' generally here. For any metaphysical doctrine that similarly gives special status to humans the argument stays the same. If you adopt a purely materialist or naturalist outlook it's hard not to reach the conclusion that human are no different or better than animals.

If you adopt a purely materialist or naturalist outlook it's hard not to reach the conclusion that human are no different or better than animals.

If you're dealing with such nebulous tripe as 'inherent moral worth' instead of looking at ability.

Obviously, humans are far more capable than animals, hence deserve far more attention. If you nerve gas a rat colony, it won't nerve gas you back.

God granted humanity stewardship over nature. Humans are above nature

The seocnd part doesn't follow from the first part and it's controversial theologically. You need something like a "more authority, so more good" premise to draw the conclusion, which is questionably Christian - does a parent have more moral status in Christianity than a child?

I agree, and would suggest an ever better question might be "does a husband have more moral status than a wife?", given his scriptural position of head of household. The relationships are, in my mind, very similar between animal husbandry and familial husbandry.

Good analogy. The distinction between authority and moral importance is one of the innovations (AFAIK) in Christianity that I like the most.

I would've thought that if you remove God, you remove the whole 'stewardship' aspect. How are we responsible to do anything more than our own interests demand? Who do we answer to, in the absence of God?

Animals are not equal to humans. People can communicate in advanced ways, formulate ideas, organize on a large scale, make sophisticated use of tools, create art, discover scientific advancements. Animals cannot. This difference is overwhelming, it put us in sole control of the planet. Doesn't this mean that we're above animals and nature?

I'm a materialist and I do not care for nature apart from what we can get out of it. If the rainforests hold many potentially useful species and cures for diseases, let's keep them until we find them. If forests are important for keeping topsoil and people like walking in them, let's preserve them. But if there's some 'vulnerable' species of unhelpful frog that's blocking a bridge, fuck the frogs. If you want to drill for minerals in the arctic or under the oceans, go ahead.

Then you only have two logical conclusions. That humans are no better than animals, and that animals are raised to the same status as humans.

That's certainly one opinion.

Maybe an atheist could notice the enormous mental differences between people and animals and then determine that people have great moral worth and animals very little.

For instance: A dust mite has no moral worth at all. It is not apparently the equal to a person.

We are still experiencing the philosophical implications of the Darwinian Revolution. The implication being that humans are not apart from nature, but part of and a product of nature. Therefore the special status of humanity is questionable, we are no different from animals. We may be very sophisticated animals, but we are animals nevertheless.

We might say, as you have, that humans still have a special status by virtue of our higher intelligence, that we far more powerful and capable of changing and enacting our will on our environement and therefore have higher moral value than animals. But this is a questionable argument and presents a fleeting kind of moral superiority. Does a stronger, smarter man have more moral value than than a weaker, stupider man? That superior men should be held to different standards than inferior men? Some people seem to think so. Nietzsche certainly thought this was the inevitable outcome of the death of God. This is Raskolnikov's theory of the superior man.

We might also retreat into the safety of consciousness, that humans have unique qualia that gives us a special status. But the materialist/naturalist outlook has no reason to give special status to consciousness. Consciousness is merely just the complex interaction of chemicals in your brain. It's as much as part of nature and mechanistic as any other evolutionary biological development, one of many tools in the toolbox. Ultimately, assigning special status to human consciousness (or the soul or countless other names) and humanity itself requires some belief or argument from the metaphysical - whether that be God, Plato's Realm of the Forms or Kant's Reason.

So the impression I'm getting here is "turn all animals into pets. ALL animals. No wild animals, we involve ourselves in their lives to made sure the poor dears aren't predated or get sick or injure themselves".

That's even more of "humans are in control everywhere" than leaving the beasts alone once they have designated habitats and not hunting them (unless to reduce numbers/protect livestock/for meat because I think meat-eating is perfectly moral).

This is someone who has no experience of animals that aren't pets and haven't been bred, raised and trained to live in a shoebox apartment on their own for 18 hours of the day while their owner is at work, then comes home for that shot of unconditional love and attention from creatures that have been deprived of their own independent lives (you can't have an outdoor cat, dearie me no! think of the poor birdies and little animals it might hunt and kill because of its natural instincts! thus making a creature into a furry robot whose only purpose is to be an ersatz child-constant source of affection).

To quote Lewis from "The Four Loves":

But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain - you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.

that shot of unconditional love and attention from creatures that have been deprived of their own independent lives

An independent life was never in the cards for these pets. If they couldn't be kept in shoebox apartments, they'd never have been bred and sold in the first place, or if they were, they'd be put down.

The question is whether these docile animals that loaf around apartments all day would be better off never having existed, not whether they'd be better off in the Hundred Acre Woods.

But we have domesticated dogs to our requirements. I see people posting online with dog breeds that are descended from working animals and that need space and lots of exercise, and if they aren't in an apartment, they have a tiny patch of backyard.

I don't think those people should be permitted to keep anything bigger than a goldfish or a lizard or similar, but they are also the ones gushing about being "petmoms" or "petdads" and would be in line with Ms. Nussbaum about our duties to animals.

It is irony, that they keep animals as pets in ways that suit the convenience of the human owner but spout all the animal rights arguments and may indeed be part of the vegan movement that pushes that eating meat is cruelty and murder and all the rest of it. Tell me this looks like normal behaviour for a dog. Or this is the natural environment for this breed. (If the dog in that second one snapped and lunged for the stupid owner, I wouldn't blame it one bit, but the dog would then be put down as a dangerous animal when it's not its fault for acting according to its nature).

The question is whether these docile animals that loaf around apartments all day would be better off never having existed, not whether they'd be better off in the Hundred Acre Woods.

If they're being kept like this? Better off never to have existed. And that's just the creatures we've bred to live with us, not talking about the wild animals in the Hundred Acre Woods that the call is being made to interfere with how they live and turn them into zoo exhibits or pets as well.

But we have domesticated dogs to our requirements.

That's entirely my point. We don't keep wild dogs as pets, so there are no dogs that would be wild but for our domestication. Daydreaming that the fat beagle lounging in the apartment all day has been deprived his romp in the Hundred Acre Woods is folly, because that option was never in the cards for that beagle. At best, he never would have existed in the first place.

If they're being kept like this? Better off never to have existed.

Fair position, albeit one I don't agree with. But they still haven't been "deprived of their own independent lives."

Well yes, people with extreme views usually know a lot less than average about the things they want to change. News at 11.

The general atrociousness and wordsaladness of the piece aside - the complete strawmanning of Romanticism is infuriating -it's unclear to me what the position being put forward even is. The author says that basically humans have a responsibility to reduce the suffering of wild animals, but then she also says that humans basicially have no right to violate the autonomy of said animals? The solution (?) seems to be that the entirety of nature (which doesn't exist anyway according to the author) should basically be turned into a giant zoo, where humans are meant to be an invisible guiding hand for all animals. It has some pretty hilarious implications, like presumably we'd have to give all rabbits birth control drugs or something (in a way that doesn't violate their supposed autonomy?) so they don't... well... breed like rabbits. But honestly the whole exercise reads to me just as an excuse to berate humanity because the author hates humanity.

It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism. That humanity is distinct and apart from nature, and that humans are more than mere animals, but are capable of Reason which is what seperates and makes us superior to animals. Animals are stupid and much less important than humans. I don't care how much people make appeals to animals' supposed sentience. They are not sapient and not capable of Reason. It's not clear if they have any conciousness (and they probably don't, save for maybe our closest primate cousins). Animals do not deserve the same rights as humans, they are stupid beasts. I don't think anyone has ever said that to the author. We humans have decided that we want to preverse nature because we believe it has value - economic, aesthetic, moral etc value. But that value is ultimately derived from our human Reason something those animals are completely incapable of doing.

It's been said it's much harder to refute a really stupid argument than a smart argument because the really stupid argument has such stupid prepositions and poor logic that it's hard to know even where to begin or how to formulate a counter argument, the whole thing is just rubbish. This article seems to be one of those really stupid arguments. There's some hilariously stupid lines in this article such as:

when what we ought to do is respect animals’ choice of a way of life

As if animals have the capacity to make such choices!

It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism.

Why jump from one extreme to another? Intelligence is a gradient as pretty much everything else in biology. Humans are most probably smarter (= more capable of abstract reasoning, choosing between courses of action, anticipating experiences, working with complex systems, etc.) than elephants, crows, and dolphins, which are probably smarter than non-human apes, which are smarter than monkeys and octopodes, which are smarter than dogs, which are smarter than lizards, which are smarter than fish, which are smarter than earthworms, which are smarter than plants, which are smarter than bacteria. You can then assign rights and responsibilities accordingly with whatever criteria you prefer.

Talking about "animals" as a block in general is not very useful. Chimpanzees are more like humans than like, say, jellyfish under the vast majority of aspects.

It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism.

Why ?

Just have a pragmatic attitude.

Reason we care why someone shoots a person is because someone else may take revenge. You don't kill cats because if internet finds out, you're in trouble. One can say the moral value of some creature depends precisely on how powerful entities who care about that thing are.

It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism. That humanity is distinct and apart from nature, and that humans are more than mere animals, but are capable of Reason which is what separates and makes us superior to animals. Animals are stupid and much less important than humans. I don't care how much people make appeals to animals' supposed sentience. They are not sapient and not capable of Reason. It's not clear if they have any consciousness (and they probably don't, save for maybe our closest primate cousins). Animals do not deserve the same rights as humans, they are stupid beasts. I don't think anyone has ever said that to the author. We humans have decided that we want to preverse nature because we believe it has value - economic, aesthetic, moral etc value. But that value is ultimately derived from our human Reason something those animals are completely incapable of doing.

I think that's the wrong way to go about it. If you marry your ideology to claims that animals aren't sapient, are stupid, are incapable of reason, aren't conscious, you're... well I think you're just already wrong based on things I've seen animals do in life and studies. The untruths will eventually prove to have been an unstable intellectual foundation.

And unnecessary for the goal.

You can go much simpler. We are humans, we're the most dominant species on earth, so ultimately we are capable of acting in accordance with our values without animals stopping us. Ok. Now that we're established that, what do we want to do with the animals?

Even the author could do this. And then they could finish with "I aesthetically/morally dislike the constant war the animals live in, and if the average reader attempts to point human empathy at the average animal documentary, they probably will too. Let's improve the living conditions of wild animals (according to our aesthetics) as we're able."

If you marry your ideology to claims that animals aren't sapient, are stupid, are incapable of reason, aren't conscious, you're... well I think you're just already wrong based on things I've seen animals do in life and studies.

Those things are true. Animals aren't capable of reason, they aren't sapient (which is distinct from sentience). Animals are incapable of making moral judgements, asking and dealing with abstract concepts.

Like sure, a crow can pick up a stick and use it get some food from a puzzle box. That doesn't make the crow capable of reason.

There has been I think general push to present animals as capable of human like reason, to the point of fraudulent science. Infamously Koko the sign language-using gorilla's abilities were highly misrepresented to the point of fraud. Even our nearest, smartest primate cousins are incapable of human reason. They can't learn grammar, they can't understand abstract concepts, no matter how much researchs tried to make it appear so.

In some sense I would say your argument has an even less stable intellectual foundation. It's basically 'humans have power over animals, so whatever we say goes'. This argument is just weak as as if you were apply it to humans - "justice is the advantage of the stronger" or "might makes right".

Animals have been observed engaging in creative innovative behaviors. I'm not sure 'Sapience' is well defined. I agree that no animals appear to possess Redwall levels of human-like intelligence.

I am on the same page regarding grammar.

I'm not sure of what you mean by abstraction. I haven't deep dived or replicated the studies but to my knowledge: Various animals can be taught to use currency. Crows can use vending machines and will even modify vending machine tokens to fit the machine of their own initiative. Many animals can solve puzzles that require them to innovate solutions.

As for 'humans have power over animals, so whatever we say goes' I think that's just a fact. Humans do have power over animals. What we say does go.

It is unpalpable that it also applies to humans. But it does in fact also apply to humans.

Your position is 'Humans have Reason (and some other useful/aesthetic properties), and all value that animals have is derived from our Reason.'

I'm curious. Why do you think Reason justifies doing what we want?

I can clearly see that it enables us to do what we want. But if reason is good because I can feel it / I say so, then that's just our aesthetics asserting themselves again. If reason is good because its powerful, that's just 'the strong do what they will' again.

I'm curious. Why do you think Reason justifies doing what we want?

Because it is only Reason that allows us to even ask the question "what do we even want?" or "what is the moral outcome?" in the first place. Reason actually gives humans the capacity to be moral agents and make decisions. As much as I hate to lean on continental philosophy, Reason is what gives us humans (Kantian/Hegelian) autonomy.

I've observed ChatGPT engaging in "creative innovative behaviors". Except they weren't; they were just the outcome of processes that use so much computation that they are hard to understand on a gut level as mechanistic, so we interpret them as creative and innovative.

Everything that occurs in the brain is also mechanistic. AI is creative. Novel remixes of old data to fit new situations is a form of creation.

There are limits and caveats to that creativity. Including how much of it is data or architecture offloaded from humans, as well as the limits to what it can create in general. ChatGPT continuing to have issues with memory for instance, and lacking the insight or telos to remedy that issue in itself.

You might be skeptical of the generality of a crow's intelligence, or how much of it was informed by humans.

But I don't think it makes sense to be skeptical that it isn't 'merely' mechanistic.

We are too.

There are limits and caveats to that creativity.

There are limits and caveats both for ChatGPT and cows.

But I don't think it makes sense to be skeptical that it isn't 'merely' mechanistic.

The point is that you're happy to treat ChatGPT as not having any rights at all, but it seems to meet your standards as well as animals do, although in a different domain. Why should ChatGPT have no rights, but animals should? Especially if you exclude the answer "because ChatGPT is a machine"?

I don't think I've said animals should have rights in this thread.

I've said that animals are intelligent and I think it's unprincipled to base a human supremacy stance on them not being conscious or creative because they are, but that I think there are more principled human supremacist stances.

If you want to delve into what I actually think about animal rights personally-

I don't like seeing things I parse as capable of suffering doing so.

So insofar as I can recognize suffering and stop it I want to.

I don't think their rights actually matter that much. I was pro-superhappy when reading Three Worlds Collide.

presumably we'd have to give all rabbits birth control drugs or something (in a way that doesn't violate their supposed autonomy?) so they don't... well... breed like rabbits.

Ensure access to free contraception and abortion for rabbits! Reproductive justice now! Abortion rights are rabbit rights!

Let the rabbits wear glasses condoms!

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

It is not actually clear to me that Nussbaum's conclusions with respect to animal welfare follow from any Singerian premises, as opposed to having their own separate grounds. To the extent it would be hard in 100 years to argue that arguments like Nussbaums have their intellectual roots in Singer's writings, I think it is because that same task would be hard now.

Not necessarily from the same premises. Its a more general sense that, if the Singerian argument werent valid, hers would not be either. That can be because ethical theories share machinery, because they hinge on similar questions of fact, because they draw on the same intuitions, or some other reason.

I'm curious to hear what parts of the Singerian argument you take to be false that also imply the falsity of the Nussbaumian arguments. They proceed along quite different lines, to my understanding.

I think the shared core of the argument is: An account of whats good for an animal based on what that animal itself pursues, in terms that are causally relatively close to perception and behaviour, and independent of their actual environment, and a claim that we have a responsibility to individual animals to do whats good for them.

Its not important for my argument whether these actually are wrong.

You have, at last count, 5 warnings and 2 tempbans. You've been warned over and over to stop posting like this, but this kind of low-effort hawking and spitting at your outgroup is literally all you ever post. You are a very low-value contributor who never posts anything other than this kind of dunking on your enemies, and you've made it very clear by the way you ignore our warnings that your attitude to the discussion norms of this community is open contempt. You do not want to amend your behavior, you want to keep hawking and spitting. Well, this is our sidewalk you're spitting on.

Banned for two weeks, because that's the limit past which we generally have a mod discussion about permabans. Next time you get a warning, I will be arguing for a permaban.

You say the he has two temp bans but that's under counting by at least half a dozen, yes I know that Zorba wants to pretend that a how a person posts on reddit will not be indicative of how they post here but I think we both know that's bullshit.

I was only counting the tempbans that have occurred here, yes.

I think you are being a little unfair to Zorba here. No one is pretending we expect people to change their posting habits, but he made an explicit decision to start everyone with a clean slate (which I agree with, because I don't want to have to go back to reddit to cross-reference usernames). So the guy who was a terrible poster with a long history of bans on /r/TheMotte still gets to start with a fresh record here.

There is a certain irony in you complaining about other people benefiting from this amnesty.

Nothing new, "public intellectual" just discovered ideas vigorously debated on youtube, tumblr and reddit at least for 10 years and feels very very smart.

Everyone here knows about antinatalism, now look at efilism.

Efil = life backward, recognition that all life is suffering, extinction of all life is the only way to stop all suffering and is therefore absolute moral necessity.

Yes, all comic book super villains who wanted to destroy the world were the real heroes, and the super heroes who stopped them were the real villains.

Efilism is the next logical step after understanding Anti-natalism.

https://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/a-little-lexicon-childfree-antinatalist-efilist/

Now, let us look at the practical problems: is ending all suffering possible?

Yes, and it is easier and cheaper you would imagine.

Do not think about super plagues, nuclear weapons or asteroid hits - look at chemical compound called sulfur hexafluoride.

Ordinary non toxic, non flammable, non explosive gas, fully legal to buy and possess, useful for many industrial applications and goofy party tricks, that just happens to be 23,900 times more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.

It could be affordable for single billionaire to manufacture in secret enough HF6 to turn Earth's climate into Venus' one.

All life will cook out in few days/weeks and then all suffering will end for forever. Some bacteria might survive deep in Earth's crust, but they will not be complex enough to feel pain.

Mission accomplished.

Ordinary non toxic, non flammable, non explosive gas, fully legal to buy and possess, useful for many industrial applications and goofy party tricks, that just happens to be 23,900 times more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.

It could be affordable for single billionaire to manufacture in secret enough HF6 to turn Earth's climate into Venus' one.

Priors strongly against the feasibility of this sort of cartoon supervillain plot. Even ignoring the dynamics of heavy gases in the atmosphere and existence of tons of known and hypothetical stabilising processes that are bound to pull Earth back to equilibrium temperature and just modelling the setting as "one unit of SF6 is equivalent to 23900 units of CO2", that factor is not that big. Is a lab synthesis involving fickle reagents like F2 really doable in less than 23900 times the cost per unit of the hypothetical billionaire just setting-things-on-fire-maxing for CO2, or do you think that a billionaire could also cook earth with that if they were not disturbed in the process? (Another back-of-the-envelope calc.)

Back of envelope from another angle... SF6 is $5/kg, ~3x molar weight cf CO2. Mad scientist has $100B to play with, gets around 20M tons (ignoring that current global market for SF6 is $300M; probably not the biggest issue, plenty of S and F around), maybe 5M tons CO2 equivalent. 40B tons CO2 produced annually, gives us a factor of 8000. 24k/8k = you get 3 years worth of global warming from your $100B.

I'm surprised by how much bang for buck you get, but that's a pretty flaccid doomsday device. And you'd definitely attract attention anyway.

It's a fun problem, how to destroy all life. You only get one shot really; humans probably would be the most competitive vertebrate in most conditions and even probably most multicellular organisms, so if we can destroy ourselves, we probably have most other things covered. But you'd also want to wipe out anything that could conceivably evolve later on into something worthy of moral consideration, which seems insurmountable unless there's something like Ice-9 or a way to trigger a false vacuum collapse out there.

Also, if there's a good chance that extraterrestrial life is out there, isn't it our duty to first find and destroy them before ourselves, to save them from the vicissitudes of existence?

It's a fun problem, how to destroy all life.

Damn I feel old, but -- you may be interested in the Usenet archive of the group alt.pave.the.earth and related alt.destroy.the.earth, which consist(ed) of engineering nerds endlessly hashing out this and related questions.

I don't understand how antinatalism or elifism are given any credence at all on an intellectual basis.

Not in that I disagree with them, but they are so.. simple. Most edgy 4th graders hit their friends with a variation of "we can end hunger by nuking Africa huehuehue". It's the same idea, if there is some sort of universal accumulator, and you want to maximize the number there. If something is a net negative, you are best off stopping everything once and for all. Maybe in 11th grade, you can incorporate the concept of the expected value into that philosophy.

If anything its utilitarianism (with trepdiations) taken to its logical extent.

Simpler arguments are easier to onboard people onto than complex arguments.

I'm not sure whether high level philosophy is iterating on them much.

But they're really easy for young intellectuals to get into and develop strong feelings about. So it makes sense that they propagate.

I think it reflects a lack of familiarity with the world of academic philosophy.

I think your comment reflects a lack of familiarity with the Cthulhu discourse Im trying to address. Admittedly it doesnt have a canonical name or good reference link. But a good example here would be Benthams defense of homosexuality. When he wrote that, it wasnt a new culture war thing either. But eventually it was.

I don't think it's fair to call this a utilitarian piece.

And here too, we can return to the above example and see that many of those who would later advance the issue were not especially utilitarians, but still employed a broadly similar reasoning turning on similar facts, from deontological or humanistic backgrounds.

I also agree shes not making this argument because its gaining mainstream currency. My point it about what its intellectual history would look like, if it were to gain mainstream currency, and what this tells us about evaluating the relevance of things like the Bentham example to the intellectual history of our current politics.

Im sorry how contrived this looks if you dont know who Im trying to talk to.

This line of thought actually scares me because it can be used as propaganda against making humans and animals healthier. This will be propaganda to destroy more nature in the guise of protecting nature. In particular

Even the time-honored idea of the “balance of nature” has by now been decisively refuted by modern ecological thinking

Is pants on head dim. The death and competition of wild animals serves to purify their health. When the birds are healthy they produce more offspring, only a few of which will be healthy and produce more; and the birds that eat the most nutritious seeds will distribute these widely. The principle is baked into all living things. When you take, eg, humans out of nature’s filter, you see autoimmune diseases increase, dysgenics increase, etc — this is what the urbanite neo-philosopher fears, that people realize their “people” are slowly being corrupted. I would call this fear a little culturally Jewish, and it does seem Nussbaum converted — because Jews have been divorced from agriculture for so long, were oppressed by Darwinian thinking, and (although I can’t find it) but Jewish groups have warned about eco-fascism in the past.

Yes, when the weakest animals die they suffer, but consider the happiness gained by:

  • Future generations, who are healthier

  • The healthier animals, who procreate and have more resources

  • The predator, whose enjoyment of predation is his entire life

  • All who enjoy more and healthier foliage and trees

You cannot “save” the weak animals in nature without a worse cost. If you feed them, that is feed taken from those who deserve it. If you allow them to procreate, those are weaker animals that are destined to die anyway. Anything that substantively saves them longterm makes the whole of the community unhealthier.

I stand by my ethical principle that I do not care if 100 trillions dolphins die, the only thing I care about is if the dolphin “community” is healthy and thriving in its niche, balanced with the needs of the ecosystem

I wouldn't worry about it. You have to be really far up your own ass to take "wild animal suffering" seriously and it's the kind of topic that vaporizes in a cloud of laughter anywhere with an atmosphere comprised of less than 50% farts. Seriously imagine trying to describe this "problem" to anyone with a job that involves being responsible for anything real.

Oh god, we're doomed, aren't we?

In case what I'm saying isn't clear - you are aware this was said about the entire currently dominant progressive memeplex?

Stated differently, what makes an ecosystem antifragile is that the individual members are fragile. It seems counterintuitive at first but once one thinks about it then it makes sense.

And it applies to the business world as well.

Reminds me of Nick Land’s Hellbaked. Particularly this section which describes the results of Nussbaum’s leftward impulse:

Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

Isn't this just saying "available energy without competetive pressure allows you to have nice things"?

Yes, but also that we can not have nice things. Not for long.

Survive/Thrive is not a continuum axis, it's a mutual exclusion.

Eh, that sounds like an engineering problem. The whole goal of FAI research is to globally maximize for nice.

Humans are in control everywhere.

We exaggerate our control, especially our ability to act with predictable effects. I mean, if there's one thing that I hope people take away from covid, it's that nature can still bite us hard. Even if you think that covid was a big deal as a medical problem, it could have been a lot worse, and a fortiori it could have been much much worse if you think that it wasn't such a big deal. See also climate change, where (a) there is a lot of natural variation and (b) even the part that is due to human action is barely modifiable by human design due to political reasons and lagged effects.

We impact ecosystems. Our control of them is limited, unreliable, and extremely unrobust.

You guys are quibbling over differences that exist orders of magnitude past the threshold of her point being true. Your comparing existing under/a part of human dominance to the state of nature that is humanless ecosystems. By this standard my government is litterally perfect; the chances of my living flesh being torn apart by tooth and claw so a carnivore can eat has gone down to straight up zero.

as she seems to treat things like poachers as a limitation on the capacity of humans, instead of a chosen activity of humans

In retrospect, I should have included that as one of the cathedralising signs.

Does covid show that? Whether one takes issue with vaccine side effects, mandates and lockdowns, not locking down or masking enough, or the FDA being too slow - these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take. Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm. And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1, the response would've been quicker and harsher - plausibly with more mistakes along the way, but it'd be effective. To say we 'exaggerate our control' understates the power large-scale technology has, and if nature bites us hard, it probably looks more like complex, avoidable errors in use of that power than just climate or disease.

these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take

I think "can't" is ambiguous here, because social and institutional failures in response to a natural challenge is exactly an example of what I would regard as a failure of control over nature. Subject to the goals and abilities of the human race, as it was in 2020, the response to covid was not one of being able to control the situation, and not one of being able to avoid massive damages of multiple kinds.

I'm just arguing 'nature' isn't an interesting part of the picture here, unless you mean nature in the sense of ''natural law' (which just means 'progressivism is bad', not that i disagree, but that's a different thing) - but if nature means forests, diseases, and climate, we're very good at controlling the former two and navigating around the third.

I would certainly say we have some control over climate and some diseases. On the other hand, if a prion starts decomposing your brain or Yellowstone erupts, the limits of our control become apparent. It's a gross simplification to say that "Humans are in control everywhere".

Does covid show that?

yes because covid came and went at roughly equal regional levels largely irrelevant of the various costly responses at different degrees throughout the world

the institutional predictions were terrible; the institutional predictions of the effects of the various measures taken were horrible

Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm

And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1

but it wasn't; claiming sarscov2 outcomes aren't as bad as many of the flu epidemics makes a categorical error by equating it to those flus and the ability of those flus to cause damage

but covid19 never was those flus; humans not noticing it at all would have been a far superior outcome to what was done once it was noticed

and if you're comparing it to bad flu years, i.e., the "historical norm," given the costs of responses this would be an argument in favor of overestimation of human ability to control and predict outcomes

but it'd be effective

you would save humanity from covid by killing most people before covid can get them; this would be "effective" at stopping covid deaths, but it would also be far worse than covid

the effects of that would be largely predictable, too

but then again, so what? mass scale slaughter is certainly power, but it's not the sort of "control" being talked about which would be represented by the ability to accurately predict outcomes and costs for inaction or various "large scale technolog[ies]" which was a horrible failure at the institutional level

Whether one takes issue with vaccine side effects, mandates and lockdowns, not locking down or masking enough, or the FDA being too slow - these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take.

These are the same thing.

Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm.

Indeed, which is to say "none at all".

And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1, the response would've been quicker and harsher - plausibly with more mistakes along the way, but it'd be effective.

This is completely unproven.

Social failures don't need an external stimulus from 'nature' to manifest - they can be entirely internal, see america's crime problem. And the incorrect intentions, lack of competence, or whatever that leads to internal mistakes is the same kind of thing that causes poor responses to nature's incursions. So I don't think they are the same thing - a poorly coordinated pandemic response due to democracy, media, and government is very different from a 1 in 500 year flood wiping out your citystate. The latter seems a lot more like 'we can't control nature', than the former. I think the technical or social complexity of disease eradication, which has happened, is comparable to that of a successful disease-stopping lockdown, the latter of which is admittedly unproven.

If social or institutional failures mean you can't take control what nature dishes out, you have failed to control what nature dishes out. That social failures can manifest without an external stimulus does not change that.

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