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Recently, I've been subjected to several posts on Twitter about Peter Singer. Singer posits a compelling argument: Society accepts a certain concept, A, yet its variant A', which along many relevant dimensions is similar to A but should be less objectionable, is met with taboo. Here is Singer's post, although I don't want to get into the the details because I'm thinking not about the argument itself but the prevalent reaction to it. The most common response to Singer's points is not an intellectual rebuttal but rather an expression of shock and outrage. The taboo around A' is like an emotional firewall, preventing any rational discourse.
This pattern of reaction is disconcerting. We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts. It's really hard for me not to feel disheartened or even adopt a misanthropic view when I see things like this.
So, is this emotional explosiveness truly representative of the general populace, or is it just that on Twitter, the most extreme views gain the most traction? Moreover, how can we, as individuals seeking constructive dialogue, navigate this landscape without succumbing to frustration or misanthropy?
I'm genuinely interested in understanding whether these reactions are as pervasive as they seem and what strategies we might employ to foster more meaningful, thought-provoking conversations, especially in a world dominated by emotional responses.
Besides being obvious sneerclub bait, this post is kind of ridiculous because you can sum it up as "Why does the Motte exist?", but I just want to know if there is any way to bring more people into the Motte's style of discourse or how serious a problem it is that some people are seemingly unpersuadable.
Yes, the majority of the population is incapable of suppressing taboo-based emotional reactions, and moreover is incapable or uninterested in engaging with this sort of reasoning.
Then add in that no one can speak in support of Singer, because doing so would involve saying things that could be construed as supporting bestiality. People do not want to get disowned by their loved ones.
If I were more popular on this site, I'd be unwilling to say this, but I'm mostly a lurker, so: There's nothing wrong with bestiality. Animals are not moral patients, it's OK to both eat them, have sex with them, or do anything else with them. People have a disgust reaction to this, which is fine, but shouldn't be taken so seriously.
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I just really want to know if you are aware of what you did here. You are against "emotional outbursts" because they make you "feel disheartened" and move you towards misanthropy AKA hatred of humans? Does it not "feel" a little bit too melodramatic and emotional to you, the supposed rationalist?
Feeling Rational:
For the n+1-th time, emotions are not incompatible with rationality. They can be appropriate or inappropriate, relevant to reality or not, but they're not irrational by default.
Further, presumably @zataomm takes umbrage to arguments that rely entirely or mostly on emotion, not a claim that emotion is entirely out of place in an argument.
Your response to him reeks of the "Ah yes you claim to hate society, yet you participate it, curious" meme.
Write that to the OP.
So do I. I do not understand why anybody should give a shit what reading some arguments made OP feel: if he is disheartened or if he hates humanity or if his hand hurts today as he slammed it against the table reading these arguments. It is tangential to the discussion and it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is his incredulity with why people are emotional if somebody defends bestiality.
Which is BTW the hidden point that may have gotten over your head: the other people maybe also feel disheartened and lost faith in humanity and hate the society after reading arguments supporting bestiality. This would be equally emotionally "rational" response. So by rationally examining his own elevated emotions, the OP answered his question at least as it pertains to certain part of the outraged mob. Now I hope his curiosity is at least partially sated.
You're right that whether I feel sad is not the point of this discussion. The fact that it has generated several replies should indicate to you that people think there is something interesting to be discussed, and it is not my sadness. Here are the bullet points of what we are talking about:
I actually don't think I understand your point overall but it feels like your point is we can't rationally prove that pain and suffering are bad, so checkmate rationalists, we're no better than anyone else. Which... okay.
No, this was not the point. Go and analyze pain and suffering of animals abused for bestiality compared to animals slaughtered for meat all you like in fine rationalist tradition. What I object is going to meta level of what are your personal feelings about this or that response to such thought experiments, in that sense a rationalist is not obliged to privilege your anecdotal emotional outburst. I may as well imagine somebody who is hurt by what you are saying - and believe me there would be no shortage of agitated people if I said that we are going to normalize bestiality.
And now voilà, you have some basis of understanding of what is going on, just by analyzing your own emotions. And we do not have to model other people as if they do not understand that pain and suffering is bad and they need you to explain it to them. They do understand it very, very well - only from their standpoint it is people promoting bestiality who are source of that pain and suffering for them. And it is you who opened this door for them by harping on your own personal feelings about the whole discussion, you made this meta discussion about how this original discussion makes people feel part of the game.
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On an intellectual level, most people on the left (in the broad sense) have bought into a harm-based model of morality. Since most people have very little need for intellectual consistency, what this means in practice is that they rationalize all of their moral intuitions by convincing themselves that the things they don't like are harmful. Hence "words are violence."
Bestiality grosses most people out. But in order to give themselves license to support banning it, they have to convince themselves that it's inherently harmful to animals. Non-vegetarians have to convince themselves that it's more harmful to animals than killing and eating them.
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Singer's point hinges on the assumption that we, as a society, share an utilitarian ethic, which we don't, really, even if we often use utilitarian argument to try to justify moral points that are really based on other moral criteria. I mean, Singer should know this, considering he has dedicated his life to trying (and failing) make utilitarianism a thing, often failing precisely because he takes utilitarianism to logical conclusions that cause others to go "Uhh, wait, that's what it meant all along? I don't support that, that's insane/disgusting!"
In the end, the societal function of the prohibition against having sex with animals, like the prohibition against personally causing animals unnecessary pain, is a sort of a sieve meant to bring out and weed out insane persons before they cause harm to people. It's very obvious when we're talking about torturing animals - how often is stereotype of serial killers torturing small animals as kids before graduating to people as adults referred to in the media, how example? - and having sex with animals, in addition to arousing a strong disgust reaction, is also something that's considered the providence of insane people of the sort that no longer understand or care about the correct delineation of people from animals.
Eating meat, on the other hand, doesn't of course carry the same idea of insanity, since it's normal in our society (and most human societies that have existed) - unless it's human meat, which again arouses a disgust reaction and is considered something done by insane people who, again, do not understand the correct delineation of people from animals, expect in a whole other way.
I disagree that this is necessarily a consequence of utilitarianism, be it in the original Benthamite sense or the offshoots endorsed by Effective Altruists who extend utility to animals.
For one, I'm very much not a utilitarian, merely a consequentalist, which is a much broader category (I'd go so far as to say most Deontologists are just the same in denial). Of course, I draw the opposite conclusion he does, namely that it's okay to both eat and have sex with non-human animals, even if I don't claim either are morally laudable, merely neutral.
Now this is perfectly true in the case of Singer himself, but I consider a world where prawns and pigeons are given significant moral weight to be abhorrent in themselves, especially when you multiply by total population.
I strongly believe that you're confusing the goal with the outcome in a very important sense.
For the overwhelming majority of human history, and in many parts of the globe, cruelty to animals was believed to be no big deal at all. The average person happily threw stones at cats or watched dog fights, and if you used enjoyment of the same as a heuristic to root out psychopathy, you'd find it to be incredibly useless.
However, when a society has moved in the direction of considering such acts morally reprehensible and simply Not Done by good upstanding folk, is it any surprise that those who still do it aren't "good upstanding folk"? They're clearly abnormal in some regard, since they are either too impulsive or too dumb to consider the consequences of their action, and both strongly correlate with other things we consider bad like cruelty towards humans.
If you declare shaving your head to be a clear sign of Nazism and demand all desist, then many people who would otherwise have shaved theirs don't any more, and voila, finding a skinhead is close to proof of NatSoc sympathies.
The majority of humans start out inclined to be at least a little cruel towards animals, and in most places, they're socialized out of it, and those who persist have something wrong with them. That does not necessarily mean that it's the cruelty to animals that causes psychopathy or sociopathy, for much the same reason that, protestations of ardent vegans aside, the typical meat eater isn't particularly more likely to be a sadistic serial killer.
On a more personal note, I love dogs and find cruelty towards them abhorrent, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it should be banned. I get no pleasure out of tormenting most creatures, and the closest I ever get is when, after concussing but not outright killing a mosquito, I've occasionally in the past torn off its wings and watched it suffer with mild smugness. Or perhaps when I make sure the tics I occasionally pick off my dog die just a little more painfully (do they even feel pain? Doesn't particularly matter) than they could have.
I invite anyone and everyone to demonstrate how I've been less than upstanding in my interpersonal relations or as a citizen, regardless of whatever heterodox views I hold.
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At least for this specific topic, part of the problem is that any serious engagement with the deeper questions at best imply a fascination with the material, and more often a desire, even for people who argue against it. That was true even for necrobestialitygate in the tumblr ratsphere, a lengthy discussion on the Haidt 'disgust' moral foundations theory, where Haidt used as one 'disgust' reaction the question of a man using chicken meat to jerk it.
Thinking about questions like "what are you going to do when your 'sex partner' of ten years has crippling health problems, and you're 30, and the next animal you adopt is going to have crippling health problems when you're 40" or "if you get hit by a truck, who's going to own your 'sex partner' after you're gone, and what are the odds that this makes the animal unadoptable" are relevant and have pretty serious impact on how the utilitarian viewpoint of the argument should look, but they're also absolutely not the sort of question you should ask under your real name, or under anything that might eventually get doxxed into your real name, or without carefully evaluating their impact on the reputation of the community where you ask them.
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Singer's argument isn't going to attract much of a response even in the best case. I think it comes off as lazy.
It's not a new issue. I'm sure there has been plenty written on it before. If Singer had done the obvious reading then he should be presenting the common counter arguments and rebutting them. He's not doing that, so he's either hiding them or hasn't done his homework.
He's got to at least make a cursory comment about zoonotic disease risks to be taken seriously.
Twitter's format does favour quick emotional responses so it's not really a good format for a charged discussion.
I don't think Singer was lazy in the least, and he has a sufficient body of literature out there for anyone who wishes to find proof of effort outside of a tweet. I guess that's one of the perks of being a renowned philosopher/ethicist, not having to repeat yourself that is.
He'd certainly recoil with horror given my interpretation of the fact that for most moralities, it's inconsistent to decry bestiality but endorse meat eating, but we both agree it's an inconsistency worth resolving, even if in polar opposite ways.
Really? You think that would appease everyone?
Very well, let's pretend he suggested that people fucking animals wear a condom. Problem solved, or at least solved to the same extent as things like animal husbandry or keeping pets still contribute to zoonotic disease, and vanishingly few condemn them on those grounds.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I sincerely doubt that if Singer had amended his statement to endorse only bestiality where prophylaxis was used, you'd be swayed one jot more than you were..
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I mean, between 'every person who want to have sex with animals owning one animal in their home to have sex with' vs 'the entire global factory farming and livestock industry in all it forms', I'm gonna guess that the latter produces many orders of magnitude more zoonotic disease risk.
Sometimes an objection being common doesn't mean it's good, and I don't think every objection deserves a mention every time you talk about something.
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I'm pretty sure if you asked the same question Singer proposed to a random person on the street, or to your family or to your coworkers a lot of them would have the same visceral disgust response, even if these are intelligent people.
Even if they were capable of thinking through the possibility rationally, why would they want to possibly associate yourself with someone that would ask a question like that, even if it was in context of something that would make sense? Perhaps they might think "well I'm okay discussing this, but maybe Susie or John from accounting might overhear and then think I'm a weirdo too." Better to not take the risk.
Maybe a more anonymous platform would some users to be more willing to engage in that discussion, but even on places like reddit or 4chan you see emotional outbursts all the time.
Besides, most people don't think strictly logically and rationally. See the conjunction fallacy.
This is not an emotionally charged question and yet people aren't defaulting to logic, so it shouldn't be surprising that on a controversial question regarding zoophilia and animal cruelty people are not able to think about it objectively.
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I think in the specific case, it makes perfect sense that society developed a taboo against goat-fucking and not goat-eating. Widespread goat-eating is harmless, even beneficial if you lack other food sources; widespread goat-fucking leads to novel zoonotic diseases appearing. Social taboos don't develop as some representation of a society's shared ethical considerations, they develop as a mechanism to control the behavior of members of society. They don't need to be rational, they need to be effective in encouraging prosocial behavior and discouraging antisocial behavior.
I'm pretty sure the risk of zoonotic disease can be dropped to near zero by the use of a condom. Given that they were first made out of sheep intestines, there's a poetic way it comes full circle.
There are plenty of taboos that have no empirical justification, such as burning widows alive after their husbands died, which was a common practice in India till the Brits stamped it out. The fully-generalized-counterargument that is consideration of Chesterton's fences sometimes requires a bulldozer.
And I think the fully-generalized-counterargument to tearing down any Chesterton's fence that's starting to emerge is that if you allow even one fence to be torn down even with good reason, its tearing down will be used as a fully-generalized-argument to tear down every fence.
The example I can think of being gay acceptance/rights/marriage. There are good reasons I think to believe the fence that were holding them back was obsolete: wealth and technology is such a force multiplier that our societies are no longer in a demographic race against their neighbors, so we can afford to let off the natalism and hostility to pairings that don't lead to births. But that opening was then used to argue that ANY social objection to any orientation, sexual identity, etc... is Wrong and Bigoted.
Honestly I'm at a loss as for what to do. I guess the solution is to personally calmly keep evaluating fences and not let myself be influenced by the whims of the era, but I admit I do understand why conservatism-minded people are worried about cedeing any ground at all anymore; each time they do the bulldozers go on a rampage.
The demographic race against one's neighbours has never (except, maybe, for very brief periods of time when both populations were decimated by some calamity) been contained by reproduction, but constrained by carrying capacity of territory (as evidenced by the fact that starvation were common in all parts of the world until the 1800s).
If Adam and Bob had zero children together, when they would previously have had X in expectation, it just meant that Charlie and Delilah had X more children survive to adulthood.
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The flip side to that by focusing on holding up a generic fence, you undermine the strength of the stronger taboos where there are arguments better than holding back bulldozers. There were a lot of other problems in the early 1970s-era gay rights movement that allowed NAMLBA-types to get a foothold, but one of them was that California law brought a number of extremely sympathetic cases of seventeen-year-olds boinking each other.
@Meriadoc has a post here that's very interesting, but it's also quite plausible to read it as using the same principles to prohibit daikamura (pillows) and sex robots by its text, and there are other people using the same principles to argue against porn or sex toys. I think there's a way to square the circle, here, and actually find that bad things are bad without finding good or at least boring things bad too, but if you don't do so quite a large portion of the voting populace with reasonably expect you to be coming after them, eventually.
Are you sure you've got that right? I don't know Japanese, but everything I've seen from anime fandom suggests you mean "dakimakura".
Yeah, that's the right spelling, sorry.
Just be careful not to get ahegao and ahoge confused. They'll lead you towards very different things.
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I agree, there are lots of vestigial taboos/practices in many (most?) cultures that don't necessarily make sense any longer and could be usefully re-examined. Some perhaps never made any sense; I'd be curious to learn how a practice like widow burning ever came about. But that old saying "you can't reason a man out of a position he didn't reason himself into" seems to apply here.
I am amused at the idea of the future society that looks back at current bestiality with disgust because our sheep shaggers aren't using protection.
Much the same reason as Pharaohs and other kings/warlords entombed their wives, concubines, servants and slaves with them when they died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)
It has origins before recorded history, but went out of fashion for a while before a resurgence in the colonial era:
Basically, widows were often fucked, unless they had sympathetic children or family, and were often pressured into killing themselves ritually, or often did so themselves, because they had no social safety net. The ban of sati was about the same time that advocacy successfully had legislation passed to allow widows to remarry.
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Maybe proto-Indian males were killing each other a lot in order to marry the victim's widow?
Not a claim I've ever heard made, let alone with evidence to support it.
Some things are just bad for no particular good reason. Now that sati is a thing of the past, not even the most hardcore trad Hindutva activist expects their wife to climb on the pyre after they pass.
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That's contradictory. If there are shared ethical considerations, by definition they are controlling people, because people place serious weight on following one's moral values.
I don't see the contradiction. Seems like another way of making the same point is that that taboos aren't passed down as the conclusions of a blue-ribbon commission on ethics, but rather they survive because the behaviors they encourage are pro-social, and therefore groups that adopt certain taboos are more likely themselves to survive and pass their taboos to the next generation. Do you disagree with that?
I mean, it's not that they couldn't have been the conclusions of a blue-ribbon commission on ethics, it's just that their origin doesn't really matter as much as their effect on group survival.
The fact that taboos can and do die is proof enough that this objection is insufficient, since someone/some people had to convince a society to stop holding it.
If you see a clearly maladaptive trait or behavior in the wild, your priors are not particularly swayed by such considerations.
I acknowledge that Chesterton had a point about his Fence, my issue is with people who turn them into castle walls with spikes.
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Could you call it a "taboo" if most people were capable of calmly and dispassionately discussing the topic? By definition, what makes something a taboo is that most people will have such a strong emotional reaction to it that rational discussion is impossible. I'm surprised that you're surprised to see people behaving this way.
Because we live in such a complex world, most people are not capable of giving due thoughtful consideration to most topics. Taboos are a way of preventing people from reasoning on first principles about certain topics and arriving at socially harmful conclusions. Not all taboos do this job well, but I think some do. "Don't commit murder" works better as a rule than "don't commit murder unless you're able to determine that doing so would increase the net wellbeing of society." "Don't commit fraud" works better than "don't commit fraud unless you believe you can get away with it and you plan to donate your earnings to effective charities, thereby increasing the net utility of society." If people are allowed to engage in "thoughtful consideration" on these topics, they will often find ways to justify bad behavior as being for the net good of society. Because this kind of reasoning is so often self-interested and unreliable, it's sometimes better to just have a "no exceptions" taboo that forbids any reasoning about the topic.
Yeah, good point. And I'm sure if you get down to it I have topics that make me react emotionally instead of logically as well. Maybe it's the contact between different "tribes" with different taboos that happens on Twitter that makes other humans seem like a weird alien species to me, whereas if they just shared my taboos I would just say, "well of course B' is more objectional than B, B' is just disgusting."
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Zoophilia and meat eating are made comparable by Singer because he frames it as such. He illustrates that himself as "Imagine that you are an animal etc". But if one rejects this framework, if I imagine myself as a human, than it is effective to cut short engagement by having a simplified emotional response, eg by being shocked or mocking the idea. Taboos (an old fashioned word, you can also describe this category as "infohazard" or maladaptive training data which derails your brain software) are best preserved not by studying them in ever increasing detail, but by making them unthinkable.
For example a different framework could be: "Moral is that which makes my village survive the winter and makes my tribe/family/progenity thrive". A diverse diet does that. Romantic/Erotic attachment to animals does not and triggers disgust (maybe even genetically encoded?). It is noteworthy that the recent rise in veganism was not caused by the old arguments against animal harm like "imagine being an animal", but by new egoistic pro-human arguments like "veganism is more healthy" or "red meat causes more colon cancer" or "vegan calories can feed the world cheaper" or "western diet produces too much CO2, destroys the rainforest for cattles and we should switch to something more sustainable".
Of course, all of these instinctive revulsions are shaped by the ancestral environment, just like your genetic traits. The ability to store fat that served your ancestors well in the savannah is causing you obesity and diabetes. A moral preference that served your ancestors perfectly well in a nasty, brutish and short life as hunter-gatherers or tenant farmers may well be counterproductive today.
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Right, and creating a new taboo can often be done by appealing to an existing taboo and trying to draw an emotional connection between them, so that this unthinking revulsion gets spread to the new thing you're trying to eradicate.
That's the whole point of this line of argument, to try to do that to factory farming.
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Begging the question, like the Veil of Ignorance, a related utilitarian device. Both presuppose those whom ones actions affect. Rawls only talks about adult human inhabitants, and relies upon risk aversion[1] to make his point. If the reader would be forced to identify with any sentient being in a society, a dog, a child, a rat, his experiment would fail. Were I a rat, I would support rat poison being made illegal, but since this would be absurd, Rawls has to narrow down the set to only those which the present society deems within the overton window to advocate equal rights for.
[1] A "Those who Walk Away from Omeals" society in which one person is sacrificed for the salvation of the remainder, is disfavoured to a "Harrison Bergeron" society or our current one on either egalitarian grounds, or deontological ones.
I strongly disagree, and would go so far as to say that the only way this can be held true for our modern society is through willful delusion.
It requires that everyone suffer to some degree, and many significantly, to produce our material comforts. How many minimum wage workers in the West are particularly enthusiastic about their jobs? How many people do exactly the same things they would if they had infinite wealth and no need to labor for a living? Vanishingly few, none if you consider where said wealth came from.
I posit that almost anyone who had a tangible option of introducing Utopia at the cost of one suffering child would pick that option, either in a heartbeat like myself, or after much groaning and wringing of hands. It's only because it's a work of fiction that people can convince themselves that they'd do otherwise.
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Regarding "Those who Walk Away from Omelas": The older I get the more I suspect the people who walk away are in the wrong.
For example the map in this old article which became a meme:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
Great-Grandfather: Allowed at age 8 to walk six miles to go fishing.
Grandfather: Allowed to roam in the woods.
Mother: Allowed to walk by herself to the swimming bath.
Zoomer Kid: Only allowed to walk to the family house street.
In a sense past generations larger freedom was bought by Omelas-sacrificing of children lives.
Don't forget larger prosperity and technological advancements in general.
Things that would be risky or deadly in 1950 are actually not risky or deadly now, from sex (safer from pregnancy and disease, but far more restrictions on it then ca. 1970) to physical activities (we can fix injuries we couldn't before) to vehicles (airbags and crumple zones solved 90% of the problem) to being unaccompanied in public (every kid is wearing at least one tracker at all times and the "dog lost/want a ride?" trick stopped working 40 years ago for the same reason that airline hijackings are impossible now).
Yet even with all those improvements we still refuse to actually use any of them. Curious.
Hmm. With respect to sex, it was probably least consequential (socially and physically) from the late 60s until maybe 1985 or so, with the rise of AIDS.
As far as physical activity: trauma medicine is great at saving lives and also a very mixed bag. For the most part, if you're alive after suffering an injury that would've killed you in your father's time, you're going to be crippled for life and in chronic pain.
I think that a lot of it is that the Boomers were the first generation, or one of the first, to grow up in a world where the idea that no parent should have to bury a child was an accepted truism.
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Interestingly, most lifelong vegans I know are either South Indian Brahmins who are often vegans (rather than vegetarians like many other Hindus) [edit: I think some may drink milk, but they don’t eat eggs] or children of 1960s/1970s hippies who grew up vegan and don’t like the taste of meat and dairy, even if they don’t necessarily ‘believe’ the way their parents did.
At least in Europe (or maybe just Germany) there is increasing demand for vegan food and the main advertized advantage is that it is more eco friendly. Animal welfare is a bonus, but is more used as an argument by organic farmers pushing their animal products, eg one should drink bio milk and bio cheese from happy cows from the idyllic small family farm in your region, instead of buying from the gruesome big business factory farm industry.
https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=Plant-Based%20Food%20Goes%20Mainstream%20in%20Germany_Berlin_Germany_GM2023-0002.pdf
Of course it sorts itself into a little bit of culture war issue here, as vegan products are more coded left/young/urban/educated/female and eating meat is more rightwing/boomer/rural/workingclass/male, and politicians pander to certain voter segments with the food they post at instagram …
https://www-derwesten-de.translate.goog/panorama/promi-tv/markus-lanz-markus-soeder-zdf-mediathek-gaeste-id300507832.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
… but I see at family gatherings the resigned acceptance that a vegan alternative has to be served.
Watching the rise of a nominally new Gaia-based religion to replace the remnants of Christianity in Europe in real-time is going to be genuinely fascinating. Looking at successful religions, dietary restrictions and the conspicuous observance of them seems ritualistically important in binding people together and giving them a sense of commitment. Selecting a specific day for conspicuous dietary restriction is pretty on the nose, even if Tofurkey doesn't hold quite the culinary appeal of a good ol' Catholic fish fry Friday.
I think this is also part of it. There is the "Veganuary" in January which is even tried by flexitarians/carnivores and sort of like Ramadan or catholic lent. And the dietary restrictions by the more fanatic minority have outsized influence on the more tolerant/flexible majority, which pushes culture in one direction.
It is a bit of virtue signaling (the vegan has bragging rights over the vegetarian), a bit atonment for our sins (at least eating vegan Pizza with fake cheese feels that way), good old market capitalism (aside from fake cheese many products got crazy goods. I don't care if I eat real chicken nuggets or plant based nuggets), but it is also development of a shared culture and being part of something bigger (which is universally regarded as good or at least not bad, which is nice). Also the small talk aspect, one can share recipes and cooking tricks.
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The most serious variation of the question is how a rational person ought to balance reasoning and intuition. Themotte is on the far end of reasoning, and the ordinary American is now on the far end of intuition.
It might be surprising for someone to learn that the greatest chess players rely on intuition more than calculated reasoning, that they apply calculation with reservation and that they first obey their intuition to determine which possibilities they ought to calculate. Why is this? Well, they know from the results that this is the best course. But the underlying reason is that there is an infinite amount of ways to calculate in chess, and only a finite amount of time on the board, and only a small amount of cognitive energy you can spend in a day. Intuition, on the other hand, freely reveals itself without effort. It’s a kind of magical efficient reward algorithm baked into the human hardware that will unconsciously determine the most reasonable course of action with varying levels of probability. Intuition poses a serious problem for “strict rationalists” who believe that if we don’t know the reason why something works, we shouldn’t use it.
Okay, back to fucking animals. Singer confines himself to a narrowly-defined analytic space to determine the moral permissibility of beastiality. This is a mistake, as there is more to the question than the sum total comfort/discomfort of the animal. A strict rationalist with messed up tendencies would now be compelled to rescue animals destined for slaughter and rape them. Intuitively, this is absolutely beastly. The natural intuition of man is that this is fucked up. But it follows from Singer’s argument. [fleshing it out: humans cannot be expected to perform difficult moral actions without reward, which is why we pay doctors handsomely and don’t expect everyone to help out orphans in their free time. If the only reason you would save an animal is to do some (horrific) action to it out of perverse joy, then according to Singer’s calculation, you should. But Singer is disproved per below.]
The replies in the comments are attempting to bring intuition back into the discussion: “Don't factory farm animals. Don't fuck animals. When are you publishing me?” “Call me crazy, but gonna go out on a limb and say there might actually be a third option for animals here.” The next step is to see why our intuition is so strong. The moderns in the replies might be loathe to hear it, but they intuitively know that human sexuality is designed for particular outlets and not others. The wrong outlet causes disgust and a general feeling of something not being right. A religious person would give a simple, oh, it insults God, and be done with it. The moderns would be too reluctant to say something like, humans shouldn’t do disgusting acts that conflict with their design, and deeply disgusting things should be banned. They are left obeying their intuition but unable to actually explain it.
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I don't really think you can take the particular A and A' of Singer's comment and generalize them to all such forms of the argument. For example, something like this argument was (is) very common in the push for legal marijuana. That society already accepts and encourages use of much more dangerous drugs (in the form of alcohol and tobacco) so it doesn't make any sense to ban marijuana on the basis of its supposed danger.
"Should be less objectionable" according to who? It seems like the argument assumes a degree of inter-subjective agreement about the relative ranking of A and A' that is not, empirically, true.
Statements like this are why discussing this without the context of the actual A and A' are impossible. This may be true for the particular A' in Singer's post but I do not think it is true in general.
Exactly! And I guess your point is that the push for legal marijuana is slowly winning, but my counter-point is that legal marijuana is winning much more slowly than it ought to be, given that there is such a strong argument in its favor. Indeed, these are the kinds of important questions of public policy that I am worried about and that inspired this post, Singer's A' being illegal is nowhere near the top 10 on my list of biggest injustices. But we have lots of things that would make a lot of people better off but are illegal because they sound bad, which, as Bryan Caplan puts it, "The way I like to think about it is that markets are great at doing good things that sound bad, and governments are great at doing bad things, that sound good."
I agree with you that Singer's A' is not strictly comparable to A such that we can say supporting A but not A' is irrational, but my point is that the responses I have seen do not even get there, they stop at "A'? Ew, yuck"
I think this misunderstands my point. My point is rather, there are some arguments of the A/A' form that do not descend into "Ew, yuck" or similar, but also that what makes an argument convincing is not universal, it can be relative. It's relative to what ethical premises you accept. It's relative to facts you know about the world. Changes in policy get even more complicated, being related to facts about how governments are structured and a million other factors. There are many explanations for why the given A/A' argument is not considered strong by a lot of people, ranging from differences of premises to different knowledge of facts. It is not correct to extrapolate the state of the world by assuming most people share your moral opinions and state of knowledge.
Frankly, I think this is a terrible theory of mind. People generally have motivations and reasons for believing the things they do beyond "it sounds bad." Maybe you think their reasons round off to that because they are not utilitarians or consequentialists but I think it is much better to understand people's beliefs and motivations on their own terms.
Do you often see discussions of issues on Twitter that go the way you wish this discussion had gone?
Well... I disagree that it is a terrible theory of mind. In line with the main theme of this discussion, people just don't tend to think very deeply about most issues. And I don't believe that the average person who supports, say, rent control laws, understands the economic argument against them but still supports them because they have a different moral philosophy from economists, even though I agree that in theory there could be such a person with such a philosophy. I just think most voters go by "gut instinct", so if something sounds bad, they want a law against it, and if it sounds good, they want a law promoting it.
I think the issue is most people in favor of rent control policies don't understand the economic arguments against them. They have mistaken factual beliefs. They correctly perceive the first order effects of reducing rent for people covered by such policies and think it is desirable. I think it takes a pretty specific kind of economics education to see the prices as outputs of a system, rather than inputs, and reason from the implications of that.
I think there is a confusion in this discussion between people being irrational and people lacking specific technical knowledge or perspective.It's like the xkcd Average Familiarity comic but for moral philosophy or economics.
The issue here, to me, is that then the obvious follow-up question is, Why do they have mistaken factual beliefs? Surely some of them are just stupid and others are just in situations of forced ignorance, but I doubt that that covers more than a tiny fraction of them. So that would leave most people who are choosing to remain ignorant of the truth, which leads them to false conclusions; but why would they do that? My pet theory isn't "gut instinct" about what sounds good or what sounds bad to oneself, but rather another sort of "gut instinct" about what belief makes one more praised and less punished in one's social world. And thus people figure out what to remain ignorant of, so as to control one's own beliefs in a way that is beneficial to their social well-being (this may look like Bulverism, but in this case, the fact that these people in this hypothetical are mistaken, i.e. wrong, was taken as the baseline, so talking about how and why they landed on this wrongness rather than whether they're wrong seems appropriate).
That said, my pet theory might just be equivalent to the original assertion about what "sounds good," since one of the most common ways that I can tell of someone learning how to control one's own beliefs in such a way as to increase praise and reduce punishment socially is to modulate what "sounds good" (in an intuitive, ethical sense) to oneself.
I think you overestimate how much people are motivated to seek out the truth about something that's not interesting or important to them, especially if it means getting in long online debates and understanding technical arguments and possibly reading academic papers. It's not that people are aware of their ignorance and consciously choosing to be ignorant, it's that they were told incorrect things by some source they trust and have rarely been presented with counter evidence or reasoning. Or worse, have ended up in some epistemic closure that prevents them from considering alternative reasons and evidence. They are ignorant of their ignorance! I think certain kinds of arguments having certain social status attached might make sense as a cause for why people come to form particular beliefs but I think it is rarely a reason, in the sense of something subjectively experienced.
I'd agree with this, but, again, I think just moves things a step back - why are they ignorant of their own ignorance? Most of it is, I think, that it's really hard to pay attention to your own ignorance; given that it's so hard, it's natural that they would make that choice not to do it and just remain ignorant of it. The cost-benefit calculation, compared to the far less costly and usually more beneficial strategy of just following the "does it give me social praise/punishment" measurement just doesn't work out. So they choose - a good choice in most cases, almost certainly - not to put in the hard work necessary to confront their own ignorance, and so they remain ignorant of their own ignorance, causing them to land at wrong conclusions. But they do land at conclusions somehow - it might be a bit too pithy to call it "gut instinct" or "what feels good," but if it is, I don't think it is by much.
I haven't thought of this sort of distinction between "cause" versus "reason," but if you break it up that way, I think what you wrote here makes sense. It's just, I think the "reason" in the sense of something subjectively experienced is one of the least interesting and least impactful factors when it comes to exploring the way people think about things, because the flexibility that people have for using anything they want as a reason to support anything they want is effectively infinite.
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According to one survey, two-thirds of people in the US believe that the law of supply and demand does not apply to housing.
This seems perfectly compatible, indeed supportive, of my thesis that people have false factual beliefs about the housing market.
Yes, that's why I posted it.
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Or perhaps they're correctly noticing that the places with the most supply are often the places with the highest prices.
That isn't how the survey was worded.
Literally 60 to 70 percent of respondents chose "substantially increase", "somewhat increase", or "have no effect on".
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It's really hard to say because, as you said, most of the public square places where we discuss stuff like this are algorithmically optimized for strife and offense.
The only evidence I have that's not a social media thread is that I've personally discussed Singer with people I know and seen him discussed in college classes over a decade ago. People were mostly pretty reasonable and curious in those real-life settings, but of course those are massively biased samples.
Also, I know you didn't want to focus on the specifics of this one tweet, but a creator I like actually did a video on this specific topic (specifically how Twitter misaligns discussions of this topic), which might be of interest to some.
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Most people aren't capable of thoughtful consideration and inviting them to engage in thoughtful consideration of morality instead of blind allegiance to cultural norms will give them worse results. While an erudite and urbane individual such as Dr. Singer may recognize the parallel between meat-eating and goat-fucking as an argument against meat-eating, many people hearing this argument will instead conclude that goat-fucking is fine. If you want people to not engage in goat-fucking, telling them that it's no worse than eating meat is a bad idea. Explaining why eating meat is good and goat-fucking is bad might be a worthwhile exercise, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to improve the quality of life or moral upstandingness of the median person.
Spot on The greatest problem of high IQ people in a fully democratic system is that they cannot understood how low IQ people are incapable of some basic reasoning that they have access to. Maybe in another eras, where there was no ideology of equality and refusal of biology, this factor was still tolerable and they understood well what they were talking about. Not anymore
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The emotional explosiveness isn't limited to twitter.com, but that's fine because it's a good thing.
Ethical reasoning is something a person can be better or worse at, and it's good that most people do not engage in a priori ethical reasoning - they follow the guidelines laid down by those who've examined an issue deeply (their betters, to be maximally provocative).
There's a complex system through new norms are derived by experts, road-tested by organs of opinion propagation, the common man's reception is incorporated iteratively into refinements, and so on.
It's no more desirable that everyone should invent his own ethical systems than that he should invent his own electrical systems.
Sure, I can buy that to an extent.
But the problem is that with the advent of social media, everyone is talking about those issues, even if they're not thinking about them.
And they're putting that non-thoughtful talking into the same information stream that the elites are using to communicate and coordinate norms!
It's a dangerous form of pollution that interferes with the ability for intellectual elites to do their job and converge on good new ideas.
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Nice.
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There seems to be an epidemic of low decouplers on the Motte, most obviously notable by their inability to entertain hypotheticals the moment they become controversial in the least. Perhaps it's always been that way, but it stands out to me and I've been here for years, if not right from the start.
And the Motte is better in terms of quality of discussions than any other place on the open internet that I'm aware of, just imagine how awful it is elsewhere!
At any rate, I agree with Singer that by most formalized standards of morality endorsed by most people, it's farcical that eating non-human animals is widely acceptable, while having sex with them isn't.
However, modus ponens and modus tollens apply, so my take is that it's okay to do both! As is sadly necessary for topics such as these, while I accept people wanting to fuck nonhuman animals, that doesn't mean I want to do so myself. The fact that this disclaimer is even needed is yet another sign that the low decouplers are multiplying.
You eat dead animals.
They're past caring then.
And were they killed just as a coincidence, with no relation to the fact they were raised to be eaten?
All herbivores exist to be eaten.
Their literal function in nature.
Herbivore "function" in nature is the same as of other lifeforms - survive, escape being eaten and reproduce.
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Ay, there’s the rub. I’m not convinced today’s motte is any worse at hypotheticals. As always, the response is proportional to how much trust one has in the speaker.
Compare the JB situation. He got serious engagement at first, which disappeared as the bad faith and the alts were recognized.
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I'll happily admit I've moved away from high-decoupling, although it is more in the sense that I've started to recognize "high-decoupling" is a lie, and no one actually does it, including self-identified high-decouplers. For example:
Farcical is, it? Did I miss the part where you've done comparative analysis of all moral ideas, and system, and have clearly shown some of them to be self-contradictory? Or are you just sneering at the ones you don't like?
I think Singer has done a good enough job that I have little to add of consequence. You're holding me to a ridiculously high standard here, one you don't particularly adhere to yourself, unless you submit a thesis paper with every condemnation of a moral system. So yes, I consider it farcical, and you're welcome to disagree at your leisure.
Did I misunderstand what you were saying, or were you just bemoaning people not meeting the standard you're calling ridiculous, just a moment ago?
Oh you understand me perfectly well, I disagree that I'm forbidden from calling something ridiculous with the ridiculous burden of proof you demand.
I just don't quite get how you're supposed to be better from us low-decouplers.
My reply to Meriadoc:
https://www.themotte.org/post/760/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/159447?context=8#context
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One thing that's salient about to me is that the Argument from Farcical Nature is so easily flipped and would like appeal to the majority of listeners. It's farcical that someone would object to as basic and normal a thing as an omnivore eating meat while defending animal fucking! I actually sincerely believe that position, but I don't expect that farcical nature to be compelling to someone that doesn't share the same intuition.
It is farcial to expect that all taboos are philosophically well-grounded, so if your morality is based on your instincts and the norms of the society you live in, the high decouplers are missing the point. And that does look like "something has gone wrong with the intellectuals, they're condemning normal people while allowing taboo things" from the perspective of the low-decouplers.
I do think self_made_human is correct that the ratio of low to high decouplers here has increased recently.
I suspect that many of our regular posters are simply putting their rationalist phase behind them and are ceasing to actively value decoupling.
Possible. My guess would be that if you took each user's comments over the past year, you would see minimal change in the decouplishness of that user's comments over the year, but if you looked at comment volume by decouplishness the fraction of comments by low-decouplers has increased substantially over that same year. Though I have not actually run such an analysis -- if anyone does, I'd be super interested in the results.
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High decoupling is a good way to fool yourself into generalizing from fictional evidence.
"Assume every bad thing about X doesn't exist, and every good thing about Y doesn't exist, is X still worse than Y?" If this could actually be considered in a vacuum, sure, maybe. High decouplers often forget that this isn't a vacuum, reality can't be separated out into its component parts, and if you do separate it out (decouple it) then the conclusion you draw from your tiny selection of reality can't be converted back into something that applies to real life.
The hypothetical isn't representative of bestiality. Generally someone who engages in bestiality will be extremely perverse in other ways--more likely to harm the animal, more likely to engage in other forms of sexual abuse, and generally extremely unhealthy. "Decouple" that in order to consider the principle on its own, and you've elected to ignore the most important parts of what makes bestiality bad in order to make a decision about whether bestiality is bad. This isn't logical, it's just selectively ignoring evidence.
Sure, high decoupling has potential downsides, and can be misused, but so can everything really. It still seems clearly superior to me than the usual low decoupling strategy of using the worst argument in the world. You can see Ame succumbing to it in this very thread.
Similar arguments have and are made about gay sexuality, when a behavior is heavily societally condemned, then those who are high functioning and disciplined enough to restrain their urges tend to demur from either engaging in the activity, or vocally endorsing it. Thus you get a billion reprehensible witches and a few principled libertarians like me supporting them. When such behavior gets normalized, wouldn't you know it, it turns out that many of the practitioners who came out of the woodwork are otherwise perfectly normal people. Tattoos went from being a sure sign of criminality or deviant tendencies, to being something not out of the ordinary on a suburban wine mom (it's still associated to a degree with impulsiveness and worse outcomes, but not to the extent that the moment you see a tattoo, you're justified in shunning them)
At any rate, my stance that bestiality isn't a crime also arises from the fact I personally don't care about harm to non-human animals at all, so even if it were to be more traumatic to them than say, factory farming, I couldn't care less. The fact that those who do it in the West are also likely to be deviants in other regards is, as I suggested earlier, best attributed to them being people with low executive function who do dumb things even if they know the outcome isn't favorable for them.
In other words, the argument is whether it is possible to do something without dragging in all the negative associations with it, and that is what high decouplers are at least willing to consider while the low shrink away in pain. I know which side I respect more at the very least. Plenty of things have upsides that can be preserved and downsides that can be minimized with due care, and that matters a great deal indeed, regardless of the particular case of bestiality.
This is a high decoupling strategy! The original hypothetical is an extremely clear example of the noncentral fallacy, and that was my point. High decoupling in general is all about taking noncentral examples and asserting that they apply to the central examples. Low decoupling is the exact reverse, taking the central examples and asserting that they apply in all cases, or at least that the assumption that they always apply is a good heuristic.
I care about animal wellbeing, but my primary concern with bestiality is human wellbeing. It's not healthy to engage in a sexual relationship with an animal (citation needed), any more than it's healthy to engage in a sexual relationship with a pillow, a baby, a robot, a comatose person, or any other entity without the ability to reciprocate and give you the emotional connection which naturally accompanies such a relationship. Sex is one of the most intimate possible acts (along with motherhood) and humans are naturally wired to seek emotional connections to accompany the physical connection, and vice versa.
Even if you disagree with the above, you do value close human relationships, right? Surely you agree that someone engaging in bestiality is less likely to seek out, or be capable of attaining or sustaining, a healthy human relationship? Normal human promiscuity seems to harm one's capacity to maintain a healthy marriage; how much more something like this?
I'm not totally against decoupling--hypotheticals can be useful--but I think high decouplers pretty much universally overestimate their own ability to evaluate the hypothetical. Our instincts, first impressions, and intuitions are extremely adaptive and useful, and "shrinking away in pain" is what it looks like when someone knows intuitively that something is wrong, and trusts that intuition above their ability to think through the hypothetical and all its second-, third-, and fourth-order effects. I think you are overconfident about your own ability to do so.
When it comes down to it morality is more about self-control than it is about prescribing others' behavior. We often try to self-justify, which means feeding our moral system slightly (or very) inaccurate inputs in the hopes that it will tell us that the behavior we want to engage in is moral. This means things like telling your moral system that the adultery you're about to engage in will never get back to your spouse, you for sure won't catch any STDs, and thus your spouse won't be harmed at all.
Thus, unless you are morally perfect, the correct moral system is overly strict and reacts with skepticism to claims like "she'll never know", "the dog definitely likes it", "she's mature for her age", and so on. There is no such thing as a perfectly high decoupler, who can actually consider all knock-on effects, nor is there any such thing as a perfect philosopher who has the correct system of morality and follows it perfectly. You are not either of those things. Thus you will be harmed by adopting moral systems that allow for things like bestiality in certain cases, because you will lie to your own moral system, engage in the Worst Argument in the World, and tell it that this time the bestiality, adultery, or rape of an unconscious person is perfectly acceptable, because you've decoupled the act itself from all of the knock-on effects that always accompany it in reality.
Low decouplers may have a better or worse understanding of reality than you, but they have a better understanding of human psychology. They understand that humans have a tendency to generalize from fictional evidence, and thus such sterilized examples as Singer's are actively harmful and should not be given too much attention or weight.
As far as which is better, in the end, between high and low decoupling, obviously lower is generally better--that's how we engage in normal human cognition, day-to-day and second-to-second--and I'd say very high decoupling like the example in the thread should virtually never be used, especially by anyone still struggling with more basic and relevant aspects of morality (which is all of us).
See, regardless of whether or not you wish to describe yourself as one, the fact that you make these arguments reveals you to be a high decoupler yourself! (This is a good thing)
What about one's hand? That's common enough isn't it?
Masturbation/onanism was decried as a sin till within living memory, and still is by some, yet society didn't breakdown when people no longer felt shame about rubbing one out. If you think that doesn't count, look at vibrators or dildos (the former might cause desensitization if overused).
I do not think the average person is meaningfully harmed by sexual intercourse with something that doesn't reciprocate, not to an extent worth noting.
Further, I'm asking that people who already have urges to copulate with animals be allowed to do so without judicial punishment, if not social ones, and in societies, both historical and modern ones like Afghanistan where the practise is widespread, the people who have sex with animals are usually attempting to substitute for a lack of availability of real human women, at least for men, and have few qualms about sending their beloved to the abbatoir when they outlive their usefulness. The average haji goat fucker simply doesn't have access to women, which might explain why they're angry disaffected young men throwing their lives away.
If someone prefers animals over the opposite sex, they're too far gone for it to matter, and will likely just do it in secrecy.
For the overwhelming majority inclined to even try it, bestiality is a poor substitute for normal sex, but like a polyamorous relationship with Rosie Palm and her five sisters, they think it's better than nothing.
I mean, I'm certainly aware that there are likely plenty of deeply cherished beliefs I hold about the world that are likely false, for statistical reasons if nothing else. I think I do a decent enough job on updating as the evidence comes in, I demand an absence of intentional delusion in myself and bemoan those who practice it, how successful I am at that, who ever knows?
I personally think disgust is a terrible reason to prevent consenting humans (or a human, who presumably consents, and an animal, whose consent I don't care about) from doing as they please with each other. This might well be a moral anomaly, but it's an anomaly that allowed for the creation of modern civilization as the overwhelming trend has been for people to mind their own damn business, even if we're in an era of relative backsliding. I am close to a maximalist on the front of interpersonal liberty, even if I am more than willing to consider externalities.
It's striking how at least two people here have brought up the risk of zoonotic disease in the context of "objective" arguments against bestiality, and that strikes me as clear rationalization of a disgust response, did they even bother thinking for one moment how that might be prevented, or have they even seen data suggesting the increase is significant? For the former, I brought up the solution of condoms, and there you go, the problem's largely solved, beyond the residual risk from simply having other species in close proximity, which is a sin of everything from pet ownership to animal husbandry.
If the average person is harmed by thinking too hard for themselves, that's awful, and I can grant that might well be true. I still demand that those who can do better be allowed to opt out in one way or another, and I think we're lucky enough to live in an age where humans will be raised above their current limitations in many regards.
As much as I often disagree with @BurdensomeCount, I am sympathetic to his argument that those who are capable of being free-thinkers not be held down by those who can't resist licking live electric wiring. I'm not particularly beholden to the classist aspect of it either, just general intelligence, or a willingness to accept that negative outcomes are of their own making if it backfires.
Such people must exist, they're the scientists and innovators who bear the rest of us bastards along with them. Technological progress relies on challenging accepted notions, and while not everyone can do the same on the moral front, for the same reason the average person isn't a good PhD candidate even after grade inflation, I demand a right to try, or leave be the people who do.
Well, I don't want to get into a full and comprehensive description of my own system of morality, but yes I believe masturbation is bad. It's much less bad than bestiality though--the less personhood you ascribe to whatever non-person is stimulating you, the more healthy it is, because the less you're trying to make romantic connections where none exist, and the less such behavior actually replaces real romance. Very few people instinctually want to "date" their own hands i.e. attempt to engage in an actual relationship with them, post-masturbation. Many instinctually want to "date" their pets post-bestiality.
I've been couching this in consequentialist terms (which to be clear I do believe in), but bestiality is also just wrong. Conception is one of the highest, holiest powers we have--the ability to, with another person, create a whole new person--and should not be profaned in such a way. I believe this matters more than the psychological harm, but the latter alone is still important enough to outlaw it.
Disgust isn't the reason, disgust is part of the heuristic. I personally think optic nerve signals are a terrible reason to do anything, but in fact they're highly correlated with the actual reasons to do things. Boiling it down to the signal itself, and then saying that that signal is a terrible reason to do something, is poor reasoning.
Of course, heuristics can be wrong, but that doesn't mean they're always wrong or cannot be relied upon.
They're not certainly too far gone. People can come back from all sorts of things.
They probably got there by engaging in bestiality, meaning the law prevents some such people from existing in the first place.
This is the classic "If you ban it people will still do it, but more dangerously" argument. Sure, some will, but trivial inconveniences matter a lot. The numbers would decrease. The whole point is to decrease the number of people doing it.
Right, at some point you do need to decouple at least a little if you want to think for yourself. Similarly, there's a level where you're decoupling too much, and ignoring heuristics you shouldn't ignore. You need to know why Chesterton's Fence exists before you can knock it down, and people from both sides often are overconfident about their theories (like zoonotic disease) for its existence.
Whether laws should be written for everyone or selectively applied or what is its own discussion. I'm trying to tell you those free thinkers are wrong more often than not when it comes to things like this. The free thinkers are licking the same electric wiring, they're just justifying their actions more beforehand. The example that keeps coming to mind for me in this discussion is polyamory. Rationalists are about the most high-functioning, intelligent, wealthy group I can think of in the whole world, and they sacrificed most of their movement's momentum, and even more of its culture, fighting to make their natural desire to sleep around high-status. Everyone wants (in the sense that whatever their conflicting desires, this is also a desire) to sleep around and be socially praised for it. The fact that high-functioning people can remember to use birth control doesn't immediately remove all potential drawbacks, especially psychological drawbacks, which we as a species still barely understand at all.
https://x.com/mirondie/status/1684515767956508672?s=20
You can substitute the "only reason" or the "main reason" in my argument, that was my intent at any rate.
Disgust isn't a particularly good heuristic by itself, and while optic nerve signals are usually thanklessly at work doing useful things, if you start seeing the walls move or figures appear, such conflict with your normal priors and common sense should suggest it's more likely you're going crazy or being tricked than otherwise, the same when disgust isn't backed up by proper empirical considerations.
I think the overwhelming majority of people are unlikely to even want to engage in bestiality in the first place, and by my lights, the practise itself does little harm to anyone or anything I care about.
If I was put in a position where everyone else around me was fucking pigs, I'm not joining in, and if I'm Isekai'd into the body of a young Boris Johnson, I doubt I can even get it up.
Thus I don't particularly care about the creation of new people who engage in bestiality, since I deem anyone almost anyone who does finds it attractive abnormal in the first place!
I'm not one of those people who naively (or maliciously) claim that abolition or prohibition doesn't/can't work. The existence of Bukele's regime is certainly an example when it comes to drug related crime.
The issue is whether the costs associated with enforcement are worth it, and in this regard, I say that's not so. You can get fentanyl off the streets by shooting all the dealers and their customers or subjecting everyone to random stops and searches regularly after removing due process, but such a measure is most likely a pretty bad idea.
Further, the issue here is that bestiality is easy to conceal. It's not like building a personal nuclear reactor or even building an indoor weed farm, barnyard animals or pets are everywhere, and the kind of surveillance necessary to eliminate all potential bestiality is perfect panopticon in nature.
And often, unless caught in the act, there is little to no concrete evidence of the "crime", especially in animals bigger than a dog.
It isn't particularly possible to eliminate and (in my opinion) not desirable to eliminate, hence my claim that it should be de-criminalized. I'm not demanding wider society accept it or endorse it. Plenty of things are legal yet frowned upon, and I have no stake in the matter that makes me want more.
The majority of Rationalists aren't polyamorous, even if polys are over represented therein.
To me, the overall Western attitude towards polyamory is perfectly acceptable, modest to strong societal disapproval yet no meaningful legal consequences when it's not outright non-consensual cheating in a marriage.
In other words, I'm not asking people who disapprove of bestiality to like or endorse it, merely to tolerate it without judicial punishment.
I care about abnormal people and believe practicing bestiality harms them. I also think the marginally abnormal person here is not really all that abnormal; we're not just talking about 70 IQ Afghani shepherds, but also terminally online autists (especially furries) who could easily live perfectly normal lives if not memed into identifying as otherkin and othersexual. If you do not care about these people, or believe bestiality does not harm them, then that should be the focus of our discussion since it is our object-level disagreement.
Plenty of things are both easy to conceal and illegal, even absent the existence of a panopticon. It's pretty easy to keep children permanently chained up in your basement and do all manner of unholy things to them without anyone ever knowing. Making such behavior illegal still has many obvious positive effects:
Our options are not just to either legalize it or ban it and build a suitable panopticon; even lazy enforcement using existing resources probably gets us 80% of the benefit of full enforcement.
The more Rationalist you are the more likely you are to be poly, to the point I'd consider being poly to be a characteristic of Rationalism, much like upper arm strength is a characteristic of being male.
Cheating has no legal consequence at all in probably 99% of marriages in the States. Would you prefer it did? If not, why mention it? (I would prefer the government give adulterers a slap on the wrist, at least).
Wow, this argument sure sounds familiar. I wonder if anyone's ever said this in the past, and if so, how it went for those asked to tolerate it without celebrating it?
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I feel less sure if the comparison is to eating them, but definitely agree that factory farming them under current conditions is worse.
In the ad absurdum, letting them live out natural happy lives and then eating them once they've died of natural causes is not very bad at all.
I also think harvesting them from a happy natural life at a younger age would not be very bad, partly because I care about average utility while alive and am not super morally bothered about premature death, but also because most of them wouldn't exist at all in the counterfactual world where we weren't farming them, and the repugnant conclusion partially applies.
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Your notion of entertaining hypotheticals seems to be "agree with them". 'Oh, you don't like that proposal, you disagree with it? You're a low decoupler who's too stupid to be able to think abstractly'. That seems to be your go-to position.
Listen, you want to fuck goats? That's your thing, but don't try and get around objections with "Why are people so mean to me about goat-fucking, it must be because they're all too stupid to think outside of conventional notions".
Cool down a bit, please, this is much more antagonistic than I'd like.
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I had no intent of calling you out as a low decoupler, but that's evidently true, from this comment alone if nothing else. You've certainly been here as long or longer than I have, so you're nothing new in that regard.
I entertain plenty of hypotheticals because that's the form of entertainment I enjoy on the Motte, most of the reason I'm here if I'm being honest. I'd like you to point out any prolific poster who doesn't discuss things they agree with more than they don't, and I think I have a proven track record of tolerating or engaging in discussion about topics I don't personally prefer:
For example, in the recent discussion about the UK government refusing to let a baby with a terminal illness be taken to a Vatican hospital in Italy, I made it clear that while I agree that subjecting the baby to further care is both useless and close to torture, I still uphold the right of the child's guardians to avail of any opportunity for further care, especially since it costs the British taxpayer little to minimal extra money, since I strongly support the right to pursue treatment no matter how dubious, especially on your own dime or that of a sympathetic organization/charity. Congratulations, you're confronted with an example of me supporting an action on principled grounds even if I vehemently think it's a bad idea and those doing it are being a combination of stupid and cruel.
At any rate, calling someone who has no principled moral objection to fucking goats a goat-fucker is dumb, plain and simple.
Besides, the ability to decouple correlates strongly with intelligence and an ability to think analytically, yet there are plenty of otherwise intelligent people who are unable to do so. I don't think you're too stupid to think outside conventional notions, merely dogmatic about not doing so when it offends you.
I don't mind being called a "low decoupler" or "stupid moron" or the other sweet nothings, when it comes to "aw c'mon, can't you even think about why fucking six year olds/fucking goats isn't a big deal?" is the measure by which I'm being judged.
Quite happy to be a no-class moron who doesn't approve of kid-fucking (human or goat).
It's poor form, and worthy of mod action for me to make such claims about you, but I'm a fan of self-identification in most things, and I'm not going to protest particularly hard about well the
shoekid leather gloves fit.What I do resent is the implication that just because I don't condemn bestiality out of hand, that makes me a goat fucker.
It anyone thinks, by insinuation or association, that I advocate for fucking the other kind of kid, let it be clear that the argument was once again in the context of the merits of decoupling, and why a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a "6 year old having sex" might be dumb if, after cognitive/physical enhancement, said six year old was smarter than Von Neumann and had the physical body the average 25 yo would kill for. Notice the notable absence of any implications for what sex with the current average 6 year old child would entail, and the only reason I bring up that hypothetical is because I think cognitive enhancement is both a very much doable technology today, and one that will be increasingly robust in mere decades. Or you might just imagine a child born, if not on Mars, then in the orbit of Jupiter, where "6 years" means something very different to what it does today. Does a change in fact change the implication? If so, congratulations and welcome to decoupling.
This simple inability to entertain hypotheticals or consider where heuristics fail makes me more disgusted by low decouplers of any ideology than I am of someone who decides to shag their sheep. At least he's not really hurting my sanity in the process.
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As with many other such conundrums, this only appears as a problem if one is a strict utilitarian and extends that principle to all animals. I implore everyone to stop believing that people are utilitarians.
At least part of the stronger argument is not specific to utilitarians. The fuller text from the article doesn't dwell at length on it, but it does bring up that we're perfectly fine with industrialized animal-rape, whether that be make sure the next generation of cows exist, or to maximize horse race lineages, or to avoid possible complications for more esoteric dog breed combinations, sometimes in especially gross ways: the only rule is that the practitioner can't (explicitly) enjoy it.
((Mike Rowe famously described turkey farming as the grossest job he'd ever done, and he's not wrong!))
There are more serious arguments available even within a utilitarian framework. Ultimately, though, making any run prey to the problem that you've now that far too much and far too in-depth about animal-fucking.
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I think people are very much utilitarians in their everyday lives (or at least consequentialists), and the exceptions you can find to this are rare enough that they fall into the non-pedantic version of the 'prove the rule' category.
Of course, people are very often wrong about their utilitarian calculations, and using all kinds of faulty inputs and premises to do them, particularly about any large-scale issues outside of their personal lives and sphere of influence. And they often deal with this by falling back on heuristics that don't reference utilitarian concerns directly, such as virtues.
But I still think most people have a fundamental instinct towards 'we should do things that make the world better for people, instead of worse'. And that this is the basement level justification for all their types of moral reasoning.
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Doesn't seem like this argument requires utilitarianism to me, just a more principled take on good and bad than arbitrarily assigning things to that category. I certainly don't think a large number of people are utilitarians, and I'm not one myself.
The assignments of eating meat as morally neutral and fucking animals as negative aren't arbitrary, they're entirely defensible if you're not a utilitarian. People that would have been puzzled by the distinction are mostly a very modern phenomenon.
Defensible under what rule, exactly? The sacredness of sex and the profanity of murder? I guess the cow should have committed suicide rather than allow herself to be defiled.
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My point is that barring a few very specific things like a love for family or the state, people are willing to ground their moral values in some degree of consequentialism, if not utilitarianism per se. And even in those specific cases, they will rationalize reasons for doing so, even if they're not the true reason.
Many things are puzzling today that weren't in the past, simply because we're more willing to be analytical about our morality, even if at the end it grounds in arbitrary values deep down.
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Not to get even more misanthropic but is it possible that some people are so bad at reasoning that we are better off if they just decide everything by gut instinct? At least their conscience will provide some grounding and they won't be tempted to start changing the calendar and murdering the bourgeoisie?
Surely it's likely that some such people exist and they are better off deciding ethics by gut instinct. I'd even say "you should use gut instinct" should be the null hypothesis for any skill that humans can learn as children. Catch a ball by gut instinct. Next try to catch one by solving the differential equation governing its motion. Which way worked better?
Whether we are better off one way or another is a more interesting question.
With most skills the gut-instinct strategy starts to fail at scale. You might be able to build a cathedral by gut instinct but you might just end up with a lot of crushed stonemasons. For a skyscraper it's best to figure out the differential-equation strategy before even starting. That's fine. We get a few experts to learn the equations and they tell the steelworkers and masons what to do.
But ethics is a bit of a special case: "have a few experts who tell everybody else what to do" is a giant principal-agent problem, itself an ethical vulnerability. We try to decide all our most important ethical problems by democratic vote with nearly universal suffrage now. Does that mean everybody has to be brought up to speed if we want to be able to consistently handle any moral problems too far from what our gut instinct is prepared for?
Can we bring everybody up to speed? What precisely do we teach them? Preference utilitarianism is the closest thing we have to a mathematical model here (if we can get past issues like how utility functions are equivalent under affine transformation but aggregated utility functions are not...). But naive utilitarianism seems to be somewhere in between the "assume a spherical cow" and the "bumblebees can't fly!" levels of modeling, and more sophisticated versions don't seem to be at a level where they can safely ignore or even just canonically tractably reconstruct useful deontological and/or virtue ethics. From the goat's point of view, making curried goat is much worse than ... er... making "stuffed goat"; sure. But the person making curried goat might be a decent choice of babysitter for your (human) kids, and the other is not, and that's a matter of actual risk rather than of low-decoupler confusion.
Worse: ethical problems like these might not have a single context-free stable solution. Imagine nearly all the world become vegetarian for the next 200 years, and then your great-etc-grandkids' babysitter wants to feed them some curried goat. Naive utilitarianism says this still kills the same fraction of a goat that it would in today's world, but any sort of virtue ethics says that this time the parents should get their kids out of the house of that unstable individual ASAP.
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