They are speaking of their emotion-less moral sense
Jren:
Well, to me what you call ethics are a means to an end, which is to maximize the production of wealth.
You say that a system of violent slavery could produce more material wealth than a free system of voluntary exchange, but that’s just it, they don’t.
When you ask “wealth for whom?”, my answer is wealth for everyone engaging in the peacekeeping contract.
About treating animals badly, I don’t necessarily agree that it is more economically beneficial to do so. Think free range chickens versus the ones kept in very small cages, fed growth hormones and with lights on 23/7. The second group produces more eggs, but of much lesser nutritional quality. They grow faster, but the meat tastes much worse and has a much higher fat content. Not to mention most are infected with salmonella just from being packed together so tightly.
Likewise, grain-fed cows are cheaper to raise than grass-fed cows (at least when considering State subsidies on grains like corn), but if you ever tasted grass fed cows you would realize the huge difference in quality.
Animals that are stressed and unhealthy produce less tasty and less nutritionally rich meat, dairy and eggs. In many cases it is only because of State interference that the industry gravitates towards the cheaper, lower quality alternatives. For example, most of the land that could be used to feed cattle in most countries is held by The State, which makes no productive use of it. This makes grassland unnecessarily expensive.
Is there any way to tell someone else how to experience that?
If they can experience any formal system…math, chess, a computer simulation. then they can experience that.
I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a formal system like math myself. I mean, I’ve certainly “done math,” but I can’t say I know what it feels like to “experience” the number 6. (Seeing a curvy shape known as the Arabic numeral six - I can experience that - along with strumming a six-string guitar and stuffing six gummy worms into my mouth, but that’s not really anything I’d want to call “experiencing” the math or the number itself.)
Chris,
I am not ridiculing you.
The difference between a human and an animal it being able to supress physical responses. That is, to understand that sensory data is processed by the mind, and a mind can triumph over pain, loss, anger, regret and love. Animals do not have this higher reasoning function, and in fact, many so-called humans do not either. There are many humans who are happy to exist as animals do, with high time preferences and little intellectual participation outside of reacting to obvious physical drives like sex and hunger.
Not all humans are equally human, let’s not even start equating humans as a species to cows, birds or rodents.
You misinterpreted my post. I never wrote that a system of slavery would produce more material wealth than a free system of voluntary exchange. I would never claim such a thing, as it is clearly false (in the aggregate!). What I was saying is that IF it would, that still wouldn’t make such a (anti-)social order civilized. Which means that the extent to which a social order produces material wealth can never be a standard for how civilized it is, if you argue that a system of slavery is always uncivilized.
When it comes to animals, it is clearly economically beneficial for the farmer to treat his animals badly (again, assuming consumer indifference to animal suffering). This does not mean it is economically to treat them as badly as you possibly could, which means spending all your time torturing them. But it is economically inefficient for the farmer to treat his animals well, i.e. to not initiate aggressive violence against them. You still lock them up, take their milk, boss them around and then kill them. Same is true for the slave owner, except maybe the killing part when the slaves don’t resist.
In your answer to my question “Wealth for whom?”, you answer wealth for everyone engaging in this peacekeeping contract. What contract is this you are referring to? A farmer’s relation to his animals is just as non-peaceful as the slaveowner’s relation to his slaves, or the government’s relation to its subjects. Yet, you use wealth generation for the human population as a criterion for how civilized a society is, just like someone in the 19th century might have used wealth creation for the white population as an argument for slavery.
Completely disagree. I used to eat meat, and enjoyed it. My friend then reasoned with me, and based on that reasoning I became a vegetarian, not because I was disgusted with eating animals; in fact, I wasn’t disgusted, so it wasn’t because of any emotional bias
Whatever, call it subjective bias than. It’s the same catagory of stuff that is senselss to really talk about but people love to bring their armchairs ot and start pontificating on. Little other than words floating around a vacuum, which is low cost, low risk, and at least some possability for a pay off. This is the bad kind of intellectualism.
I doesn’t matter how you reasoned Coke is better than Pepsi, or how dressing up like the Byzantine Emperor and kissing wood with paint on it is a good idea, it can only be seen as a consumer choice within the realm of intersubjective dialogue. What you are calling “reason” is nothing more than aesthetic preference, regardless of how it was formed, and hence out of our scope. You simply “reasoned” (whatever the hell that means, and assuming this isn’t a false dichotomy which it probably is) to a subjective conclusion
That’s a really good point; we need to look at this from the perspective of the animals we are killing, not from our perspective since it doesn’t affect us in the same way.
Just like Jrgen said, throughout history you could replace ‘animal’ with any of the following, ‘black’, ‘jew’, ‘heathen’, ‘foreigner’ and so on…
@liberty student
‘Animals do not have this higher reasoning function, and in fact, many so-called humans do not either.’
‘many so-called humans’, what else are you going to call them? Or is being human defined by your intellectual abilities, not being a homosapien?
But that sidesteps the issue. Explain how having higher reasoning functions entitles humans to kill and eat whatever we want?
I don’t have to. Explain how a lion has (or does not have) the right to kill a deer.
Jren:
The point is that slavery is not more productive in the long term, but less productive. And I contest that if that wasn’t the case, civilized human beings wouldn’t have developed a concept of slavery being “wrong”. If by enslaving group B, group A would have access to greater production of wealth in the long term than by trading with group B, then group A would surely enslave group B, to the extent of their ability to do so.
The problem is that State-sanctioned education teaches us that the slaveowners profited off of enslaving the slaves, without proper consideration of State enforcement of slavery, at times against the very wishes of the private slaveowners. This creates an understanding in people’s minds where they see slavery as a bad simply because it is exploitative, but that it was (in their opinion) a productive endeavor for everyone except the slaves. In reality, the whole reason slavery was recognized as a bad is because it is less productive, often even counterproductive, precisely because it is exploitative.
I said everyone engaging in the peacekeeping contract. Non-human animals don’t have an ability to enter into contracts, nor to abide by a contract’s clauses, because they just can’t understand them.
There is no reason to consider the wealth of non-human animals when considering the maximization of wealth for all people who enter into the social contract to respect private property and to not initiate acts of aggression against each other.
^This.
If an alien species occupied Earth tomorrow and they started eating humans for dinner, would it make a smidgen of a difference to any of us if they justified that by pointing out our inability to do telekinesis, teleportation and/or mind-reading (which they practice easily/readily)? “I guess it’s OK for you to eat me, now that you put it that way.” ;^)
So now you have gone from wealth generation to productivity. This would appear to be a slightly more sensible view than using wealth creation as a measure of how civilized we are, if we had believed in objective values. However, as we are Austrians, we know that there is no value other than that which we subjectively and individually place in an object or service. Productivity then still doesn’t get rid of the question “as judged by whom?” Productivity is a measure of how much value a certain production process produces, and its value is exclusively derived from the subjective evaluation of the ultimate possessor of the product (and, passively, the producers in all the intermediate stages of production). Therefore, a system of slavery is still more productive to the slaveowner, as he is the one of the people deriving wealth from the production. Were he slaveless, he would be worse off. If his thralls were to simply walk off, he would be worse off. For him, the slaves would now be less productive. In fact, they wouldn’t be a factor of production at all to him, unless he hired them. As you cannot make interpersonal comparisons of utility, you cannot really say that just because the slaves now produce a larger output of goods, they are more productive. For producing goods may very well amount to destruction of value, as is the case when it comes to government projects. If you say that a system of non-slavery is more productive than a system of slavery, you must still ask yourself why you value the utility of peaceful groups higher than the utility of slave owners, because it is not obvious that consumer A’s utility from a product is “higher” than that of consumer B, simply because A is willing to pay more money for it. You simply can’t make such comparisons.
The institution of slavery is more economical for some, as is the mistreatment of animals. If the institution of slavery would be worse for the actual slaver owners than a system under which you pay your laborers market wages, slavery would never have arisen in the first place.
And what do you mean when you say that slavery is counter-productive precisely because it is exploitative? If this were the case, then eating animals and milking cows would clearly be counter-productive as well, because it is obviously exploitative too.
But what you are arguing here is that morality, the concept of right and wrong, is ultimately derived from productivity. What is most productive must be what is moral. That whichever institution creates more wealth, for some arbitrarily choosen group, is what is morally “right”, and whatever is less productive to that same group is morally “wrong”. Does this mean that if you raped and killed a child, a tree on which golden apples grew, granting wishes to anyone who picked them, would grow out of its corpse, the practise of raping and killing children would become “right”, “moral” and most of all “civilized”? This highlights the essential problem behind the concept of productivity when talking about wealth creation rather than the technical aspects and efficiency of matter transformation. No one would call it productive to dig a ditch and then fill it with dirt again, no matter how great the shovels you use are. Productivity is judged in terms of the utility it yields to the consumer and can thus never truly be talked about in the aggregate. You always need to decide whose utility is to be considered when discussing productivity, to whom value is created. To the gold apple owners granted magical wishes, the endeavour of raping and killing children is clearly productive. But to the child, it is clearly destructive. The utility of the child is reduced at the expense of the apple owners. Such is the case for all coercive interaction, both between men, and between man and animal. It is only when interaction is voluntary that all parties involved benefit. That is not to say that one of the parties benefitting wouldn’t have benefitted more if it had employed coercive and violent methods. In the case of the child and the gold apple trees, value is destroyed for the child, while value is created for the apple pickers. The utility of the child cannot be measured and weighed against the utility of the apple owners, because such interpersonal comparisons simply cannot be made. The same is true for slave ownership. We cannot say that slave ownership is productive or improductive, without answering the question, for whom? And the same still applies when it comes to animal ownership. This question is central when discussing productivity, if we adhere to the idea that value is subjective. And it makes productivity naturally unfit as a measure of morality, or civilization, as productivity itself is a function of whose utility we choose to consider when we make productivity evaluations, and whose utility we consider will depend of other value judgements that we make. Values that are external to the concept of productivity, and therefore must be based on some other considerations.
Also, when you are talking about peacekeeping contracts and social contracts, I really have no idea what you are talking about. I think you need to define those terms. There is no such thing as a social contract, so referring to animals not signing such a thing when trying to justify not caring about their wellbeing is not really an argument, as no humans have ever signed such a thing either. And there are many human who are unable to grasp the concept of rights, the concept of a contract, the concept of an agreement. A young child, a mentally retarded person, or a coma patient may all lack these abilities. So if you are to hold “the comprehension of rights” or “the ability to enter into contracts” as a standard for who gets and who doesn’t get rights in your ideal society, then children, the mentally retarded and coma patients wouldn’t have rights either, and it would be free for all to rape, torture and kill them for our own pleasure. If you then argue that they have rights because “humans as a species” generally have the ability comprehend rights and enter into contracts, and these exceptional cases are granted rights based on group membership, then you are entering the realm of completely arbitrary collectivism.
LOL of the day: “Science has barely begun to discover what human nature is, let alone non-human animal nature.”
Please tell me you don’t equate science and knowledge…
Pain is certainly an avoidance of stimulus, but that’s only part of it. There’s also hurt in some types of pain, which is completely subjective. There is tolerance for certain types of pain, but pain exists despite its perceived level. Getting to your post, are you making a parallel between the type of pain plants without nervous systems avoid and the pain an animal feels? If so, you’re neglecting the degree involved and the type. As I said, plants are unlikely to hurt. However, all animals have the capacity to hurt from pain.
Because animals do not have the capacity to make legal claims. Animals that are unowned have no ability to prosecute because currently any system of jurisprudence must necessarily be human. Humans can only have meaningful interactions about abstract concepts like law and ethics with other humans and it is therefore impossible to know the legal claims of other animals unless they are considered property of other humans. If there are ways of communicating with animals in the future, perhaps they would be able to legally represent themselves. However, since animals are necessary in sustaining human life it’s doubtful their lives would ever be protected fully.
How are you distinguishing between “pain” and “hurt”? I don’t see any reason to distinguish the two.
Furthermore, I was indeed neglecting any/all notions of “degree” and “type” of pain, because I didn’t consider those notions (regardless of their validity) to be relevant here.
If humans had never aggressed against other humans (murder, theft, slavery etc.), the world would have been much more prosperous today than it actually is. If humans had never ‘aggressed’ against non-humans, humans would likely not exist today at all (though the environmentalists would revel in this, if they could). If you had the power to instantly make all humans 100% adverse to any ‘aggression’ against animals, would you do it? The result would be death by starvation for millions, since animals are huge source of subsistence and wealth (towards all kinds of goods and services) for millions who are extremely poor even with the massive benefits of this resource. There are not ‘vegan’ options to replace it that would not leave them greatly impoverished as compared to their condition today.
Beyond this, the main reason why such a thing can never come about was known to Homer:
“There can be no covenants between men and lions; wolves and lambs can never be of one mind”
You bring up a very important point, something which I failed to stress in my previous posts. When I wrote that the process of civilization in the sense of increased extension of the non-aggressing principle went hand in hand with the process of wealth creation, I really meant that. In his most primitive state, man is a singular entity in a completely non-social context. Nature is both his enemy and his means of survival. Because he is alone, surviving requires hard work and he has no time to worry about such matters as ethics or empathy. If something moves in his vicinity, he kills and eats it, as long as it isn’t poisonous. Now as other humans enter the picture and he chooses not to kill them, for whatever reason, a social situation arises. He sees the benefits of social cooperation and decides to extend the principle of non-aggression to these particular humans. In doing so, due to the division of labor, he doesn’t have to work as hard to survive anymore. This is true not only on this tribal level, but also when we look at the world today, with international trade and the Internet. Peaceful cooperation generates material abundance. In his most primitive state, man can hardly even extend empathy towards another human child. He cannot afford to do so, as he must work constantly to feed himself. Either he will leave the child, or he will have to eat it. However, in a slightly more advanced social setting, he will have slightly more material abundance, and in stead of eating the child, he actually has the choice to give the child a fish and help it, because he himself has two fishes instead of one, due to the division of labor. Now, there is no guarantee that he will do this. He may really like the taste of human flesh and eat the child regardless. All that we know is that he now has the option to feed the child, instead of abandoning, killing, or eating it. Now, as the non-aggression principle is extended to more and more humans, more and more material wealth is produced, and people experience constantly decreasing scarcity. This in turn affords them to be more generous in whom to extend the non-aggression principle and empathy to, which ultimately creates even more material abundance. This is, in my opinion, a process of civilization. But it is civilization on two accounts, it is both a process of social and of material civilization. As you point out, when it comes to human interaction, the two go hand in hand, but extending empathy to animals only increases the division of labor and material wealth in some cases (such as dog-human relations). Treating a cow better doesn’t really make its meat taste better, or make the job of the farmer any easier. Nevertheless, our everincreasing material abundance due to increasing social cooperation among humans affords us to treat animals better and to grant them certain rights. We may not gain from doing so materially, but the richer we become the less of a sacrifice it would be to pay a slightly higher price for meat that was produced with minimal animal suffering, or to abandon meat consumption altogether. While social and material civilization go hand in hand for interhuman relations, there is no reason why we should not aim for greater social civilization once we can afford it. The opportunity cost of extending rights to animals and treat them better is constantly decreasing, and I don’t see why we should reject this opportunity of social civilization just because it may not yield any material gain.
Also note that the argument you just presented could also be used as an argument against extending rights to the mentally handicapped, coma patients or the elderly.
“This in turn affords them to be more generous in whom to extend the non-aggression principle and empathy to, which ultimately creates even more material abundance.”
How does it create more material abundance? An animal does not create and trade with other animals or humans.
“Also note that the argument you just presented could also be used as an argument against extending rights to the mentally handicapped, coma patients or the elderly.”
I agree. They do not have ‘rights’. Nobody has such mystical things.