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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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