Consequentialism - is it ultimately flawed ethical idea

[evilsoup]

Okay I know this might make some people go 'Golden Mean Fallacy', but I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. In my opinion, saying that humans are equal to dogs are equal to flies is obviously ridiculous - but so is saying that dogs have no moral worth whatsoever. If it comes down to a choice between the survival of a dog and a human, I'll go with the human every time; but that doesn't mean that dogs shouldn't have some protection.

It might be okay to casually swat flies for hygiene purposes, but that doesn't make it okay for some shithead kid to rip the wings off of a one - flies must have some moral value.

[K. A. Pital]

They obviously do. But whereas we make a judgement on the basis of intelligence (we don't consider people carving hearts on tree trunks to be an act of brutality, whereas ripping wings off a fly or burning dogs alive is definetely brutality), another system has yet to come up with a method to determine whose needs come first.

Intelligence allows the system to function more or less coherently. Once you remove this qualifier, carving a heart on a tree trunk is basically same as cutting a dog's skin, say.

If the natural order is built on predators surviving via the suffering of other beings, does it mean humans should seek to put all predators in Ultima-LifeSupportCage 3000 where they'd still be alive and at the same time be unable to kill any prey? If you espouse the universalist system of absolute reduction of suffering regardless of intelligence, that's what humans should do.

[Ziggy Stardust]

EDIT: Not really trying to get in the middle of this debate, but there are just a couple of little points I felt the need to bring up

They kill annual plants because they believe that it is less harmful to cut short a brief life than to do so to a longer one.

I know you are not a Jain, so I am not attributing these claims to you, but by this logic, humans have the right to kill just about everything. After all, our lives are longer than most plant/animal lives (though there are exceptions...), and if we are exploiting these for our own survival, it would be right to do so under a system that considers the length of life to be a moral qualifier.

------------------------------------------

Yes, that is morally wrong. You're killing them not because of great risk to yourself, but because they land on you.

Actually, mosquitoes are arguably the deadliest animal on the planet. More people die of diseases contracted from mosquito bites than of attacks from any other animal. So we are not killing them JUST because they land on us, but because there is a verifiable risk to our lives and the lives of others in letting that mosquito bite us, or letting it live to bite another.

[Bakustra]

Luckily Jains don't view it in terms of "rights", but rather in terms of what you should and should not do, so your criticism is essentially invalid. You have a "right" to kill anything, but it's not something you should do, and instead you should act on the principles of avoiding unnecessary harm, within the Jain moral framework.

[K. A. Pital]

Luckily Jains don't view it in terms of "rights", but rather in terms of what you should and should not do, so your criticism is essentially invalid. You have a "right" to kill anything, but it's not something you should do, and instead you should act on the principles of avoiding unnecessary harm, within the Jain moral framework.

Is it necessary to burn down a tree to lower the chance of dying in winter from 50% to 20%? To 10%? "Necessary harm" is vague subjectivist stuff.

[Bakustra]

Did you know that Jains are not a centralized religion, and that it's up to the person to decide what is the minimal harm? Oops, that's subjectivist, better infantilize people instead!

[Straha]

Alright, there are a bunch of new posts for me to respond to, but I’m going to pull out the two biggest issues with Stas’ responses and reply to them first. Everything else will come in a later post.

My ethic relies on science. Your ethical system... relies on axiomatic absolutist claims which cannot be verified.

There are a number of huge problems with this. The main one is that science relies on just as many ‘absolutist axioms’ as the system
of ethics we’re advocating, and that science is subject to cultural interpretation and influence.

This means (amongst other things) you lose the ability to condemn people for actions that they have taken which they thought were scientific. This is a big deal because two hundred years ago it was common knowledge that the women, non-whites, and the poor were all scientifically stupider and less-able than the upper classes. A hundred years ago forcible sterilization of populaces was deemed acceptable because eugenics knew how to determine the best children for the future. Seventy-Five years ago a group of Germans using the best Science available to them segregated their country and instituted massive discrimination laws against minority populaces who they deemed to be sub-human, culminating in genocide. We even lose the ability now to condemn countries in the Middle East (like Iran) for systemic discrimination against women.

Your response, like before, is going to be that these people are wrong, but that misses the point. According to the contemporary science they weren’t. Your system means that while we can say “this is something we should not do now”, we lose the ability to say that the slave-holder, the anti-suffragette, and the concentration camp guard were wrong. The system we advocate for might needlessly protect groups because of our concerns, but your system is far more flawed because it lacks the ability to either shun or condemn actions in our past, and lacks the ability to say that in the future these actions might not become permissible once more.

I will go all in on this, if your system of ethics can not universally condemn both genocide and racism it is not a system of ethics worth considering. I would much rather be guilty of protecting too many beings from harm than not nearly enough.

As resources are scarce, this system will strive to distribute them in a non-discriminatory fashion (plants getting as much protection as animals, animals as much as people, brain-dead people as much as living minds - etc.). This would result in massive increase of suffering of intelligent beings, since their share of resources consumed will drastically drop. As they're the most capable of experiencing suffering, they will also feel it better than other beings and, being sentient, will revolt against such a system in a very short order.

There are a number of major issues with this line of thought, the two most egregious ones are:

First, you’re going all in on protecting intelligence -> stopping suffering, but you have absolutely no evidence that there is a correlation (and with that causation) between intelligence and the ability to suffer. We have first hand evidence that other beings like pigs, dogs, cows, chickens, whales etc. can and do suffer and there is absolutely no rubric for us to compare these levels of suffering, objective or otherwise. For you to place these beings outside the ethical community leads to the horrors of the farm, and the factory-farm, where they are tortured, mutilated, raped, and murdered, where they experience suffering the likes of which we can only imagine, and no condemnation is made. Under your system the most vile and heinous acts are allowed to creatures fully capable of pain, but because of an unwarranted assertion (intelligent beings are capable of feeling far greater pain than unintelligent beings) no condemnation can be given, and any attempt to condemn is ridiculed. This is what Bakustra and I are talking about when we say that these categories exponentially increase suffering, the second you place beings outside the ethical community they are disregarded and destroyed, and why consequentialism cannot solve for suffering.

Second, you’re also creating a false dilemma. If we’re comparing ‘increase in suffering’ and ‘decrease in resources’ to the status quo then empirically the exact opposite of what you’re saying is going to occur. Human society wastes vast amounts of resources on the unnecessary destruction of animal life for meat comsumption and other by-products and gets negligible gain from it (in fact a number of studies show people who abstain from the consumption of flesh are net happier as a result.) In a sense you are right, this is a question of distribution of resources but the bigger picture is that by protecting all beings resources can be diverted away from animal domestication.

There’s more to go on here, but that’s it in a nutshell. I’ll have a full reply out tomorrow (I hope.)

[K. A. Pital]

You forgot that annihilating plants is as bad as eating animals. So vegans are complicit in wasting resources on mass murdering plants too. Why are you willing to allow an increase in killing plants in favor of animal life?

[Straha]

You forgot that annihilating plants is as bad as eating animals. So vegans are complicit in wasting resources on mass murdering plants too. Why are you willing to allow an increase in killing plants in favor of animal life?

Because it takes 3-5 pounds of plant matter to create one pound of animal flesh for human consumption. Meaning going Vegan actually nets a massive decrease in plant cultivation.

Edit: I feel I should note here that nobody in this thread (except for, maybe, Destructionator) is saying humans can stop killing other beings, either plant or animal, altogether. We're just saying that ethically we should act in a way to reduce it to the barest minimum possible.

Also, in fairness, fish cultivation works out at 1.8-3 pounds of vegetable based feed per pound of flesh produced, but that figure is still HIGHLY variable and depends on factory farming of fish which makes up a minority of fish produced for consumption.

[K. A. Pital]

So tell me, are all humans universally capable of completely abstaining from consuming flesh without adverse health consequences?

And why do you imply that there is a "minimum" of suffering if one person switches from animals to plants? How are plants worse than animals? For your own ethnical choice if intelligence and brain sophistication does not matter as a criterion, it wouldn't matter if you kill a plant or an animal (though you can take some comfort in the fact you're killing less of them overall).

[Straha]

So tell me, are all humans universally capable of completely abstaining from consuming flesh without adverse health consequences?

Pretty much. There are a bunch of benefits from it too, like reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, lower risk of depression, lower risk of cancer, and an absolutely miniscule risk of diabetes and obesity.

And why do you imply that there is a "minimum" of suffering if one person switches from animals to plants? How are plants worse than animals? For your own ethnical choice if intelligence and brain sophistication does not matter as a criterion, it wouldn't matter if you kill a plant or an animal (though you can take some comfort in the fact you're killing less of them overall).

Two reasons:

A. You don't need to kill a plant in order to eat it, and most of the time the plant it giving up its food freely. Fruits and nuts don't kill the plant, and wheat, corn, rice, and a whole slew of other major food sources are only cultivated after the plant reaches the point of death (the annual v. perrenial thing discussed above.) With the exception of a few food sources, mainly tubers like potatoes and carrots, these are plants whose entire purpose is to give off something edible and suffer nothing in doing so. Plucking an apple tree causes no suffering, or if it does it's minimal, whereas raising and killing a cow is pretty damn horrific.

B. Even if you are eating plants that are being killed before their time the numbers game still works. If you switch to a vegan lifestyle you're killing far less than a flesh eater does. If it's a choice between killing a cow and three tons of plant matter or one ton of plant matter I'm taking the latter any day of the week.

[K. A. Pital]

Pretty much. There are a bunch of benefits from it too, like reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, lower risk of depression, lower risk of cancer, and an absolutely miniscule risk of diabetes and obesity.

And B12 deficiency is a nice part of the pack if you stop taking dietary supplements.

Plucking an apple tree causes no suffering, or if it does it's minimal, whereas raising and killing a cow is pretty damn horrific.

How do you reason? The apple seed has the potential to become an apple tree. It is an organism. You grow it, then you kill it.

If it's a choice between killing a cow and three tons of plant matter or one ton of plant matter I'm taking the latter any day of the week.

But why? How is "plant matter" worse than a cow? Seriously? Brain sophistication is no longer a qualifier. Even infusoria are worth same as the cow.

[Straha]

Pretty much. There are a bunch of benefits from it too, like reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, lower risk of depression, lower risk of cancer, and an absolutely miniscule risk of diabetes and obesity.

And B12 deficiency is a nice part of the pack if you stop taking dietary supplements.

Yes... and?
A. There are a bunch of plant based B12 supplements on the market these days, seaweed and tempeh being the obvious choices.
B. The existence of vegan populaces like the Jains for thousands of years indicates that B12 is available from plant-based sources, and has been for thousands of years.
C. Even if you are right that a vegan needs to eat bacterial based B12 supplements they're still causing less suffering than getting B12 from Bacterial sources inside a cow.

If you're looking for some offense here you're barking up the wrong tree.

How do you reason? The apple seed has the potential to become an apple tree. It is an organism. You grow it, then you kill it.

If you're going to open the discussion to 'seeds should be considered to be the creatures they could become' that's fine (and considering the mass rape and abuse committed against animals I'll still win that a universalist ethical system is preferable to yours), but that opens up a whole new angle on this conversation which you weren't bringing up before and which does your side no favors.

If it's a choice between killing a cow and three tons of plant matter or one ton of plant matter I'm taking the latter any day of the week.

But why? How is "plant matter" worse than a cow? Seriously? Brain sophistication is no longer a qualifier. Even infusoria are worth same as the cow.

What?
What you're saying doesn't make sense. Why would I kill less creatures overall? Because I'm minimizing suffering.
Are you asking 'Why would I not kill the cow?' Because I'm killing less creatures overall. Suffering is being committed but in a much more limited sense.
Are you asking 'How is killing plant matter worse than killing a cow?' It's not? I certainly never made that claim.
If you're saying my system means infusoria are worth the same as a cow, sure I guess. This way I'm killing less infusoria than I was when I was actively eating flesh though. So I'm still better off for it.

What are you trying to say?

[K. A. Pital]

This way I'm killing less infusoria than I was when I was actively eating flesh though. So I'm still better off for it.

You're taking steps to kill less infusoria?

As for seeds, they obviously, like the unborn, do not deserve too much consideration. Except for your system that would create lots of problems. We abort children because they have not reached intelligence. We actually acknowledge that a certain step when biological life is already there, but is not yet "mature" (the maturation criteria is floating depending on our level of tech advancement) is not yet alive. And its end does not represent a massive moral transgression.

[Straha]

This way I'm killing less infusoria than I was when I was actively eating flesh though. So I'm still better off for it.

You're taking steps to kill less infusoria?

Empirically true: Giving up animal products in your diet leads to a tremendous reduction in water consumption and environmental interference (some studies say that a vegetarian diet uses 1/40th the water that a meat-based diet does.) In such a world I feel it's a safe bet to make that I'm responsible for disturbing less infusoria than I would otherwise.

As for seeds, they obviously, like the unborn, do not deserve too much consideration. Except for your system that would create lots of problems. We abort children because they have not reached intelligence.

We abort children because we don't view them as being alive, not because of intelligence. If it was intelligence we could slaughter babies in the first year or so of their life (oh... wait, you think that's okay.)

The issue of abortion is one which troubles me deeply and I'm still not sure where I sit on that debate. Seeds, not so much, and once again even if killing seeds is bad it's still a partial necessity.

[K. A. Pital]

We abort children because we don't view them as being alive, not because of intelligence.

We destroy plants with few moral qualms for the same reason. Intelligence and the possibility of being viewed as a worthwhile living being are very much correlated, whether it is comforting or discomforting.

If it was intelligence we could slaughter babies in the first year or so of their life (oh... wait, you think that's okay.)

You would note that I said the view on human life has progressed with technology. Primitive societies with crude technology or no technology often don't give names to babies during the first year or so due to the high mortality. You go further, and you'll have "God gives, God takes" attitude in more advanced societies.

[Straha]

We destroy plants with few moral qualms for the same reason. Intelligence and the possibility of being viewed as a worthwhile living being are very much correlated, whether it is comforting or discomforting.

*shrug* All this does nothing to prove that consequentialism is in the least bit ethically preferable compared to a universalist system.

You would note that I said the view on human life has progressed with technology. Primitive societies with crude technology or no technology often don't give names to babies during the first year or so due to the high mortality. You go further, and you'll have "God gives, God takes" attitude in more advanced societies.

I'm also noting that you openly categorized infants as being on the same level as animals, and said that we could slaughter them if we didn't think they'd turn into proper humans. Whether or not most peoples views have progressed you still think the slaughter of infants is A-Okay in a number of scenarios, and I don't think that's cool.

[K. A. Pital]

I also think that killing adult human beings is acceptable depending on the situation. Moreover, the only reason why slaughter of infants is morally worse than slaughter of adults is due to the lost potential life being greater than the lost years of an adult's life (which is not always true, but we make a judgement on a general basis).

All this does nothing to prove that consequentialism is in the least bit ethically preferable compared to a universalist system.

Utilitarism, not consequentialism. Consequentialism is simply judging the action by consequences.

[Straha]

:: shrug::

Whatever you're calling it you're still advocating for a system that excuses genocide, slavery, and racism.

[K. A. Pital]

:: shrug::

Whatever you're calling it you're still advocating for a system that excuses genocide, slavery, and racism.

None of the above, unless you're calling the collateral loss of non-sentient life "genocide".

[Straha]

You're using a subjective, cultural, and relatively arbitrary system (science) to decide who is or is not human. Using this, and your categorization of people who lack arbitrary human characteristics as beings outside the ethical sphere, you can identify any subject group as 'animal' and destroy them. It's happened before, is happening now, and will probably happen again.

Twice this has been brought up, once you ducked the question completely and the second time you flat out ignored it.

Third time's a charm, right?

[K. A. Pital]

Sentience is objective. We're not talking about "arbitrary" human characteristics. A post-Turing AI, a sentient alien or a potentially sentient new species (e.g. apes) would likewise be protected as sentient life.

The scientific method is "subjective and cultural", but absolutist dogma are likewise cultural and much, much worse - they don't give any criteria by which one may decide in favour of one lifeform against another (or even inanimate matter, actually).

Not to mention humanity tried absolutist moral doctrines. They suck. Religious cults suck. As a practical matter and as a moral framework they are repugnant. You're trying to weasel out by saying a new absolutist doctrine wouldn't have any downsides that the traditional ones had. I am not convinced. Jain monks go out of their way to avoid killing microbes but their beliefs have forced suicide by fasting on some of the monks. Not sure if your attempt to bring them as a positive example of absolutist system is working.

[Straha]

Sentience is objective. We're not talking about "arbitrary" human characteristics. A post-Turing AI, a sentient alien or a potentially sentient new species (e.g. apes) would likewise be protected as sentient life.

A-swing and a MISS. Strike three. You're out of there.

Are you actually this dense or do you know that I'm showing your posts off to friends who think you're the cutest thing since... well, ever?

A. Once again, you're not responding to the argument which is that contemporary standards get to determine who counts and who doesn't because the contemporary powers of the time get to determine who counts and who doesn't. Seventy years ago Germans, (and the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and quite a few other countries) thought they'd objectively defined what it meant to be the ideal human and viewed anyone who didn't meet those standards as sub-human and without the protections normal humans get. Once again, how does your system check for this? (It doesn't.)

B. Sentience isn't by any means objective now. I have three books by Gary Francione full of arguments on why animals are fully sentient creatures, and if we want to talk legally even the EU has recognized animal sentience in the Treaty of Amsterdam, meaning if you're going all in on sentience being protected you're shit out of luck. (To say nothing about how it effects people. Are people in persistent vegetative states sentient? How about people who suffer from severe forms of Down Syndrome? How about people who suffer from severe Aspergers and cannot comprehend other people's emotions? How about medium aspergers? )

C. The idea that we can ever understand sentience is a fucking pipedream. I will never, and can never, imagine what you are thinking or even ascertain that you are a fully objective individual (much like you could never do the same to me.) Going from this nearly unbridgable gap amongst people and saying that we can somehow understand animals, who have completely different neurological, social, and physiological conditions, is the height of fucking hubris.

D. EVEN IF you can account for points B and C you're still left with the problem that the definition of sentient is subject to cultural change, what we define as sentient now might not be the same in fifteen years. Meaning you're still opening the door for mass invasion of rights and genocide.

The scientific method is "subjective and cultural", but absolutist dogma are likewise cultural and much, much worse - they don't give any criteria by which one may decide in favour of one lifeform against another (or even inanimate matter, actually).

See, the difference between these systems is yours looks at the world and, rather than trying to fix any systemic harms, engages in a severe form of moral cowardice by claiming that it can come up with a system that's ethically unimpeachable while still allowing for loopholes for every fucking known injustice to keep on happening. A universalist system looks at the world, realizes we've fucked it up and tries to set up a system so we won't do it anymore.

Moreover these difficulties you keep trying to bring up are phantom, at best. Do you need to kill/harm it in order to survive? If not then don't. Otherwise don't interfere, and keep any interference you might commit to a minimum. End of story. That's not so hard now, is it?

Not to mention humanity tried absolutist moral doctrines. They suck. Religious cults suck. As a practical matter and as a moral framework they are repugnant. You're trying to weasel out by saying a new absolutist doctrine wouldn't have any downsides that the traditional ones had. I am not convinced. Jain monks go out of their way to avoid killing microbes but their beliefs have forced suicide by fasting on some of the monks. Not sure if your attempt to bring them as a positive example of absolutist system is working.

Get out a Latin dictionary and look-up "non-sequitor". It applies here.

[K. A. Pital]

Once again, how does your system check for this?

It does not. But why should it? A materialist recognizes that at some point in history the conditions allow one system, and at a later stage another system. Clearly I'm not going to castigate Mesoamerican natives for having a violent culture - back at the time it was inevitable. The point is that we cannot have it now. Same goes for Nazism. It was an objective fruit of the circumstances, if you're so willing. A materialist cannot and will not subscribe to subjective emotions. I may not like fascism and nazism, but I understand that their birth is as preordained as that of the tsunami or that of the earthquake, except they're social processes.

So I prefer an evolving system to an absolutist standard. Why? Because an evolving system can actually include (or, as a downside, exclude) categories, it can expand and redefine meanings. A rigid system cannot, if the dogma would be challenged, the whole system would fall apart (or fracture into a myriad different cults, like it happened with major religions).

Sentience isn't by any means objective now. I have three books by Gary Francione full of arguments on why animals are fully sentient creatures, and if we want to talk legally even the EU has recognized animal sentience in the Treaty of Amsterdam, meaning if you're going all in on sentience being protected you're shit out of luck. (To say nothing about how it effects people. Are people in persistent vegetative states sentient? How about people who suffer from severe forms of Down Syndrome? How about people who suffer from severe Aspergers and cannot comprehend other people's emotions? How about medium aspergers? )

PVS people are brain-dead and their relatives have a right for euthanasia. You don't think so? Why? Because bodies with the "sentience" of a vegetable (I am sorry, but "vegetative state" is just a nice way of saying that) are not sentient. You're doing a disservice by making a fetish out of biological tissue par se. Sort of like people who make a fetish out of funerals when they bury dead tissue with pompous ceremonies or folks who just can't let go of a brain-dead person. While I can understand their feelings, that is in no way a rational position.

I already said that people who suffer from Down syndrome and other monogenetic disorders are, in fact, heavily injured humans. Same for Aspergers. We care for the injured even if we realize that their brain (and therefore sentience) is heavily damaged. When you hit PVS, it is dead (with a very high probability).

And here's the difference in position. In your view, Down syndrome people are same as others. They do not require any treatment. For example, IVF can solidly exclude the very chance of a person being born with monogenetic disorders. In my system, it would be desireable to use IVF more and more until there won't be any people with Down syndrome or other horrible disorders ever born. In your system, I'd be killing lumps of cells to do that, so I'm commiting genocide of potential people with monogenetic disorders. Your pseudo-Jain ethics would solidly ban IVF (and stem cell embryo research, and experiments on animals, and so on and so forth). Your ethics would ruin medicine and biology, crush science and return it to a bullshit state of being. You wouldn't even be able to cremate people or vivisect their dead bodies, lest you injure the millions of bacteria who devour the dead body after the death.

The idea that we can ever understand sentience is a fucking pipedream.

Epistemological nihilism is your last resort? "There are things in the material world which are unknowable"? Please. Spare me that. You might as well postulate the existence of the unknowable soul (or even God), wouldn't matter at all. As a materialist, I subscribe to the idea that the world is in principle knowable. We can know the material world and its processes down to the smallest interaction. We already simulated a rat's brain on a computer. Sooner or later we will create a sentient AI. Would you still cling to the pathetic idea that somehow biological lifeforms are the only carriers of sentience, that biology makes for "unknowable" sentience?

EVEN IF you can account for points B and C you're still left with the problem that the definition of sentient is subject to cultural change, what we define as sentient now might not be the same in fifteen years. Meaning you're still opening the door for mass invasion of rights and genocide.

Absolutists leave the door for genocide always open. What about possible non-biological lifeforms? Sentient software? Would you just wipe your hard drive since these sentient programs might not be able to experience suffering par se (unlike a dog)? If not, why not? The concepts of "life" and "necessary harm" are even more subjective than sentience. Like I said, one may burn down the tree not to take the risk of freezing to death. Another (a Jain, perhaps) might rather risk his own death than cut the tree down and burn it. Your system is relying on a subjective concept of "necessary harm" - a much worse idea than just relying on sentience as we understand it now.

Moreover these difficulties you keep trying to bring up are phantom, at best. Do you need to kill/harm it in order to survive? If not then don't. Otherwise don't interfere, and keep any interference you might commit to a minimum. End of story. That's not so hard now, is it?

That is hard, obviously. Since "do you need" is a subjective question. I may answer "Yes, I need to" since I value my own life higher than that tree outside. Or I may answer "No, I don't" since I'd rather die than harm the tree. Your system is highly subjective and there's nothing "simple" about it. Only in your weird presentation of it.

[K. A. Pital]

Not to mention that Nazism did not just rely on a dehumanizing attitude, oh no. It relied on the concept of "imminent destruction", an apocalyptic battle between the Enemy (Jews and others led by them) and the Aryan race. So Nazis postulated that it was a matter of life and death to annihilate the enemy, else it would annihilate them. Even if the enemy were human, that wouldn't change the maxim.

And indeed, Christianity, a universalist system of ethics, did not exclude other people from humanity. "All are God's children". And yet, if there was an "existential threat" that gave Christians the right to attack and kill both other Christians and people of other faiths. Universalism did not prevent the Inquisition or Crusades, despite the acknowledgement that the enemy was in fact fully human. The inquisitors actually thought they are saving the souls of other humans from "heresy", an existential threat.

Therefore, absolustist systems do not have a "closed door" for mass invasion of rights. Because they still hinge on the "necessary harm" concept which is entirely subjective down to the last letter. Sorry.