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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.

A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.

The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!

If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken

This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!

'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.

We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.

According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.

One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.

My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.

As perhaps one of the few resident vegans (although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey) on this forum, I think this stuff is insane and is why we've had little to no progress in growing the movement or in meaningfully reducing animal suffering that we cause. Things like animal welfare restrictions that make factory farms impractical are broadly popular (although would require people to eat less meat). Nope, instead we have to focus on utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).

I still have an intuitive belief in a lot of what veganism stands for. I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure. Yet as a movement, or at least how it's practiced right now, veganism can never work. Nutritionally it's become clear to me that eating shellfish/fish is straight better than being on a strict vegan diet. Ethically, the emphasis on not eating/exploiting kingdom Animalia, when things like oysters have just as little sense perception as plants makes no sense, not to mention the failure to admit that there are gradations of intelligence/sense perception that should cause us to feel differently about cephalopod or mammalian suffering say, compared to that of arthropods. Practically, people don't like being scolded, and that's what a lot of vegans end up doing when it comes time to do activism. You can prevent a lot more animal suffering by teaching all your friends to cook more plant-rich meals than by converting one person to veganism and alienating everyone else.

I find this true with a lot of moralizing movements. They never really think about how many barriers to entry the6 put in front of people who want to do these things. And really the thing that would change farming (just for an example) is millions of plant-based eaters who might include fish and eggs and cheese rather than 5000 hard core vegans studiously reading labels for obscure food ingredients that might have come from an animal of some sort. 5000 people is a rounding error, a million is a movement. And for most Altruistic movements, they have such high barriers that nobody can take on unless they have high enough income and enough time to actually do that. Normies have lives and don’t have extra money to search for and purchase the “pure” foods that would make them “pure” vegans. If you throw in organic on top, you’re restricting the movement to the comfortable middle class to upper middle class who have the money to purchase food that costs 33% or more over the normie food they’re eating now. It would be much more effective to have those people choose to limit meat consumption to a side dish or veggie heavy casserole or a veggie burger with cheese than to play purity games.

Yep. It's the same conclusion that I've come to. Lots of vegans will shoot back with "you wouldn't buy something made with slave labor" or "it's not okay to beat your wife just a little bit". The former is funny because all of us do in fact buy things made with slave (or quasi-slave labor). The second is true, but if I was the wife in question I'd much rather a little light spanking than being beat by a crowbar. It's this same false equivalence and purity culture (you eat oysters so you're equivalent to a guy who eats steak twice a day) in veganism which is so contrary to the actual goals of the movement (get people to eat less meat so less animals suffer and die on factory farms).

I genuinely think what will reduce meat eating is the price of meat and other animal products becoming ever more expensive, not vegan sermons about ethics and moralising about the monstrosity of liking roast chicken and burgers.

When we get back to the days of meat being a luxury item for the common man, then we'll all be eating more plants, pulses, and vegetarian/vegan alternatives. It'll be interesting to see how agri-business responds to the need to grow more crops to feed the world - I think the vegans may not like the results of what is needed for mass industrial farming in order to produce enough foodstuffs to feed the West (monoculture, insecticide and pesticide reliance, GMOs, huge fields cleared to be easy to plant, sow, and harvest those crops meaning no hedgerows or ditches or habitats for birds or wild flowers/plants, otherwise known as 'weeds', the demands on water, the problems with pesticide and fertiliser and insecticide run-off into ground water, and a hell of a lot more).

There's seven billion people in the world. We won't feed ourselves on a few herbs grown at home in window boxes.

Long term I think more expensive food/meat is unlikely. We reached peak farmland in the late 90s. Since then we've been growing more food on less land. Future technologies aren't going to make food more expensive to produce, obviously, but AI and greater use of GMOs can definitely make it less expensive. And the world's population is likely to peak in the 2050s, with declines in the developed world way before then.

Of course, the birth rate and population collapse could also crash the global economy, making us much poorer overall. But I still suspect that food is something that will stay cheap or get cheaper.

although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey

If you eat oysters, I don't even consider you vegetarian, never mind vegan. You're pescatarian, surely.

Oysters are particularly weird, to be honest. No brain! They just sort of stick around, filtering the water. Like plants, but meaty.

I don’t trust them.

I only had them for the first time last year. The first time I had them I think they'd been frozen and weren't particularly nice, but earlier this year I had fresh ones. With some lemon juice and red onion (or alternatively, tabasco), I thought they were delicious.

Smoked canned oysters aren't bad but they're not nearly as good as fresh with a little mignonette. Even more fun is finding a decent oyster bar to sample a few varieties and compare the merroir.

But oysters aren't fish either. Something like ostrotarian would probably be best, but that will invariably end up confusing the people you're trying to communicate your dietary desires to.

I kind of fall into a similar category: I'm a vegetarian who eats bivalves (because no central nervous system) and caviar (because yum). When going out to eat, I say vegetarian because it communicates all the information people need to make any accomodations they want to; giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them. (And, in my head, I don't really identify as anything, dietary wise.)

I know that strictly speaking "pescatarian" means "eats fish", but most people colloquially use it to mean "I don't eat meat but I do eat fish and other kinds of seafood", which would include oysters and caviar. If someone describes himself as pescatarian, without further disambiguation I think it's reasonable to assume I can offer him prawn curry for dinner.

giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them.

Along these lines, I once wrote an article expressing my distaste for terms like "flexitarian".

I don't eat diary or eggs though. Looks like there's a name for this. Ostrovegan?

Never heard of it before, fair enough. To be pedantic, I'd rather "ostrotarian", as mussels and oysters seem unambiguously "meat" or "meat-like" in a way that honey, dairy or eggs obviously aren't.

A few years ago I coined the terms "trans-vegetarian" and "trans-vegan" for people who aren't vegetarian or vegan, but identify as such.

I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure.

How can you consistently believe this, yet not want to minmax animal suffering? Surely if you are vegan because of animal suffering, it follows that you want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible. And "utilitarian suffering min-maxing" is how you figure out what course of action reduces it as much as possible.

I don’t know about you, but I have all sorts of preferences which don’t lead to minmaxing.

True. So let me modify the question a bit.

He may not want to personally reduce suffering as much as possible. But not only does he not do it himself, he also seems to think that people who do do so are misguided. Why would he think that it's misguided to reduce suffering as much as possible?

(In fact, let's rephrase that again: Given that someone wants to reduce animal suffering, why does he think it's misguided to do so efficiently?)

If I’m willing to pay $5 for a coffee, and someone else says it’s worth $100, why wouldn’t I think that person is misguided?

I don't see how that's relevant. Is someone who wants to stop the suffering of non-cute animals counting it too much?

Sure, when someone says that insect suffering counts at 15% of human suffering, he's counting it too much, but that doesn't generalize. In the more general case "tries to stop animal suffering efficiently", how exactly is he counting it too much?

He may not be a utilitarian, for instance. Both virtue ethicists and deontologists are often sensitive to suffering, but they ground their ethics in a framework where actively minmaxing suffering isn’t the goal. I think reducing suffering is good, but it’s one good goal out of many.

Even Kant had a famous footnote where he argued that not causing unnecessary suffering to animals is an indirect duty to human beings, because harming animals can be a stepping stone to harming humans. See every serial killer’s origin story.

Simply put, “I care about animal suffering” does not imply “I am a negative utilitarian.”

utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).

Is this actaully utilitarian if they are not minimizing the suffering by compromise? In my opinion, what they and the boarder progressive are doing seems to be closer to deontologist

As an utilitarian, one should optimize for the result and use whatever means to achieve it, while the end justifies the means, it also unjustifies the means if the end is nothing to show for

many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey

I can see how honey is at least arguably vegan-compatible, but why oysters? I guess they’re not exactly intelligent but they have nerves and such. Sincerely curious, if you’d care to elaborate.

They lack a central nervous system. If you care about suffering, then they don't count.

Except I once long ago asserted that on a different forum and got a bunch of angry vegans arguing that we don't know they can't suffer despite lacking a central nervous system.

Even Peter Singer eats bivalves. They are incredibly simple "animals".

They have about as much sense perception as a tree: their single sensory nerve is to open and close the valve that allows them to filter feed. Nutritionally they fill a gap in my diet (Taurine, Iron, Omega-3s, B12), and I live in Maryland so they're cheap and tasty

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