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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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Factory Farm Ban: Current law forbids the recording of industrial livestock processing. These laws should be lifted and their contents infoblasted to the public until reform is inevitable. Likewise, ban octopus farming and shrimp eyestalk ablation

Today I learned about shrimp eyestalk ablation and guess what? I don't care. I don't think shrimp feel pain in any meaningful sense, because I don't think shrimps have minds, consciousness, or the ability to recognise above the transient physical sensation. This is like worrying about the pain a plant feels when you cut its stalk. I don't even eat shrimp, so this is not "but I love shrimp, I don't want to give up eating them!" It's "this is not a creature that has any level of brain that I care about".

So "blasting" imagery of what factory farming entails ties in, oddly enough, with the discussion we've been having about capital punishment and why aren't executions public. Enough people are "hell yeah, I want the bastards to suffer, lemme watch them writhe in agony as they die" that I wonder if your proposal would work as you think it would. EDIT: Or if this is not your own opinion, as those proposing such things hope they would work.

EDIT EDIT: As for "oh the cute cuddly octopuses which are just as intelligent as we are, don't farm them!", I think a few videos of the intelligent cute octupuses hunting and eating their own fellows would counter all that. If octopuses think their own species make delicious meals, why object to a totally different species eating them?

Perhaps seeing factory farming and public executions would move the public to call for reform and abolition. Or perhaps we'd get a new Roman public who are hardened by seeing real! time! real! life! suffering and there is nothing "inevitable" about reform.

To quote St. Augustine from years back talking about his friend Alypius:

He, not relinquishing that worldly way which his parents had bewitched him to pursue, had gone before me to Rome, to study law, and there he was carried away in an extraordinary manner with an incredible eagerness after the gladiatorial shows. For, being utterly opposed to and detesting such spectacles, he was one day met by chance by divers of his acquaintance and fellow-students returning from dinner, and they with a friendly violence drew him, vehemently objecting and resisting, into the amphitheatre, on a day of these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting: “Though you drag my body to that place, and there place me, can you force me to give my mind and lend my eyes to these shows? Thus shall I be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.” They hearing this, dragged him on nevertheless, desirous, perchance, to see whether he could do as he said. When they had arrived thither, and had taken their places as they could, the whole place became excited with the inhuman sports. But he, shutting up the doors of his eyes, forbade his mind to roam abroad after such naughtiness; and would that he had shut his ears also! For, upon the fall of one in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirring him strongly, he, overcome by curiosity, and prepared as it were to despise and rise superior to it, no matter what it were, opened his eyes, and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to see, was in his body; he fell more miserably than he on whose fall that mighty clamour was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of his soul, which was bold rather than valiant hitherto; and so much the weaker in that it presumed on itself, which ought to have depended on Thee. For, directly he saw that blood, he therewith imbibed a sort of savageness; nor did he turn away, but fixed his eye, drinking in madness unconsciously, and was delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the same he came in, but was one of the throng he came unto, and a true companion of those who had brought him thither. Why need I say more? He looked, shouted, was excited, carried away with him the madness which would stimulate him to return, not only with those who first enticed him, but also before them, yea, and to draw in others.

As for "oh the cute cuddly octopuses which are just as intelligent as we are, don't farm them!", I think a few videos of the intelligent cute octupuses hunting and eating their own fellows would counter all that. If octopuses think their own species make delicious meals, why object to a totally different species eating them?

"Other tribs of humans naturally hunt and kill each other in war, why object to my tribe doing it to them for fun"?

Today I learned about shrimp eyestalk ablation and guess what? I don't care.

Those gruesome scenes with the pregnant women at the end of Bone Tomahawk make a lot more sense now.

I don't think shrimps have minds, consciousness, or the ability to recognise above the transient physical sensation.

What…do you think pain is, exactly?

I’m asking this as someone who also does not really care about shrimp. It seems obvious to me that transient, physical sensations can be Bad in an abstract sense. I would understand if a human would like to avoid them. Same for a dog or a bird or a weird little sea bug. We’re all capable of identifying Bad Things and preferring to avoid them.

Note that I say “capable,” because we higher beings are also capable of accepting Bad Things to get more Good Things. Even a dog can learn to restrain itself for long enough to get the treat. The shrimp cannot choose. This is…fine. Or, at the least, it’s the natural order of things, and we don’t have any obligation to fix it. But it’s perfectly reasonable to prefer less of the Bad Thing, and to ask ourselves how much of it we want to create.

Which brings me to the octopus.

Frankly, I’m disappointed in your proposed solution. Either you’re assuming empathy for these things is driven by cuteness, and may thus be dispelled by the unvarnished truth; if so, you are failing to take your opponents seriously. Or you know that their support comes from other reasons, in which case you’re engaging in the age-old atheist pursuit. Aha, if those darn Papists see one news segment about a deviant priest, they will surely cast away all belief in the Church!

If octopuses think their own species make delicious meals, why object to a totally different species eating them?

We are responsible for our own choices. Augustine was quite clear on this, too.

You're expecting me to worry about a shrimp feeling pain as though it feels it the way a human does: that it has the concept of pain, remembers past pain, can anticipate future pain, and feels it on more levels than the mere physical.

Once the immediate physical sensation passes, and I have no idea how acutely a shrimp may feel pain which is another question entirely, I don't think the shrimp suffers at all. It's humans who are going around fretting over shrimp, while shrimp in the wild probably have a lot more limbs torn off or damaged than an eyestalk.

Like I said, a plant having its stalk cut also suffers physical damage, but I don't think anyone (as yet) would claim that you are inflicting 'pain' on your rose bushes when you prune them.

Like I said, a plant having its stalk cut also suffers physical damage, but I don't think anyone (as yet) would claim that you are inflicting 'pain' on your rose bushes when you prune them.

This is less obvious from first-principles than you think, and like all such interesting questions, there is a LessWrong sequence post on it.

Damn, looks like Chesterton was right all along:

And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.

What…do you think pain is, exactly?

Momentary sensation. The problem is that people say "pain" when they mean "suffering", and whether shrimp suffer is the question at hand, no?

Maybe I'm missing some brilliant research out there, but my impression is we scientifically understand what "pain" actually is about as well as we understand what "consciousness" actually is. If you run a client app and it tries and fails to contact a server, is that "pain"? If you give an LLM some text that makes very little sense so it outputs gibberish, is it feeling "pain"? Seems like you could potentially draw out a spectrum of frustrated complex systems that includes silly examples like those all the way up to mosquitos, shrimp, octopuses, cattle, pigs, and humans.

It'd be nice if we could figure out a reasonable compromise for how "complex" a brain needs to be before its pain matters. It really seems like shrimp or insects should fall below that line. But it's like abortion limits - you should pick SOME value in the middle somewhere (it's ridiculous to go all the way to the extremes), but that doesn't mean it's the only correct moral choice.

But I don't care about abolishing pain. Pain is part of the normal range of feelings that animals, including humans, all experience. It is often necessary and arguably, a full life lived, includes pain.

Feeling pain does not equal suffering, which is something that you seem to be unable to understand. Plenty of pain doesn't rank as suffering in my book, and suffering can exist without physical pain.

Most people would draw a contrast between executing a violent criminal, a fight to the death between able bodied men, and brutally slaughtering a pig in disgusting industrial conditions.

"Brutally" slaughtering a pig in "disgusting" "industrial" conditions? Those are very subjective words. The pig doesn't care that it's not being given a dignified sendoff by its loving family at the end of a fulfilled life in a beautiful grassy glade with dandelions wafting in the breeze. Humans fear death; animals don't even understand the concept. As long as we kill them quickly, I really don't give a shit how it's done.

Which isn't to say I don't have concerns about factory farming. The rest of the pig's life may be filled with suffering, and (IMO) we're rich enough, as a society, to do better. My morality-o-meter is ok with sacrificing, say, 0.01% of value to humans to improve the life of pigs by 500%.

The pig doesn't care that it's not being given a dignified sendoff by its loving family at the end of a fulfilled life in a beautiful grassy glade with dandelions wafting in the breeze.

The pig in fact does care about this, you don't need to be a human or even understand the concept of death to feel stressed in an industrial slaughterhouse.

Citation needed...? It's a little hard to ask the pig. And even if true, should I care overmuch that the pig "feels stressed" for the last hour of its life? Humans go through worse (to say nothing of how animals die in nature!). If you want me to care about animal welfare, you should focus on the part that really matters - the life the pig lived - rather than the lurid, but ultimately unimportant, details of its death.

We have the Saw movies and other lovely examples of splatterpunk and torture porn. I don't think there's as much of a contrast as we'd all hope would prevail. The gory death of a pig and the gory death of a criminal that society has declared to be less than human, what's the major difference?

The difference is that Saw is fiction and the pig is innocent of any crime.

Yes, but, extremely guilty of being full of pork.

People will certainly distinguish between the three in some ways. I agree with @FarNearEverywhere that it's far from certain whether "blasting" imagery of any of them would result in more or less support.

True, but there is already potentially broad support for limiting factory farming.

I do not believe there is broad support for the effects of significantly limiting factory farming: less meat available and far higher prices.

Most Americans aren't political, don't care about broader issues, and just want to hang out with their friends and "watch the game". They care about social signaling, so they'll say they're against factory farming when that seems like what they're supposed to say. I would not count on them to maintain that stance once the effects of significantly limiting factory farming become apparent.

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