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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.
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.
That's a vibe, and only a vibe, and only for now.
In the long run, it's a self-defeating philosophy. Reducing suffering is adaptive only so long as suffering is itself a proxy for maladaptive practices. Simple example: You don't eat, you starve, you suffer, you won't be very fit for any competition. But he point is increasing fitness, not reducing suffering itself. There are countless ways to take negative utilitarianism to absurd conclusions. An example thereof: You can't stop giving someone heroin because that would increase his suffering. Or: We all have to commit suicide right this instant, or ideally shut down the entire universe, to minimize suffering. It's ridiculous, but so is the entire philosophy.
said a fictional character. Quite a lot, many people do...but as far as I care that's just post-Christian purity spiralling. But it's a dead end. Sorry for going all Adolf here, but in the long enough run different cultures, societies and philosophies do compete, and the less fit ones will be weeded out by natural selection. And man, is it not obvious how a negative utilitarian philosophy absolutely cripples a society? Turbo-pacifist Mennonites can survive so long as there are less-pacifist societies around that will host them, but anyone who takes negative utilitarianism seriously is just angling for self-destruction. It's a joke philosophy. "How about we take the proxy of suffering and turn it into our target metric?" is risible.
Is there anyone left on the Motte who seriously identifies as a negative utilitarian? I doubt it. Yes you can naively state that "less suffering is better than more suffering", but I would have to ask - yes, for myself and the people I care about, instinctively so, but still only as a proxy. "Why not shrimp welfare, doesn't hurt anyone.", one might say, and I could maybe take it seriously if it were followed up with a well-founded explanation of how suffering in shrimps releases stress hormones that dangerously reduce the meat quality. Beyond that, let them suffer if that's what it takes.
And I hope it's obvious that I'm not pro-suffering. I strongly reject any cruelty for cruelty's sake. But it seems obvious that suffering must be treated as a proxy metric, not a target metric.
I like bees. I try to carefully shoo them out the house along with the bumblebees and butterflies. They're cute and agreeable and I like to think of myself as someone who doesn't destroy needlessly. Wasps and moths and flies on the other hand I kill on sight. I could argue that this is in consequence to some utilitarian calculus in which the harm done by those animals in the house is greater than the harm I inflict on them, and maybe it is...but does it matter? They annoy me and do not please me, so they have to go. Am I now immoral? Unethical? Do I make the world worse?
Animals kill animals all the time. Are the animals immoral? If the plants do indeed turn out to be capable of suffering and we decide to starve ourselves out of existence to fulfill some imaginary moral imperative, what purpose will that have served? I'm rambling wildly because I just cannot fathom how anyone ever can take negative utilitarianism seriously. With all the charity I can muster, no! It goes the wrong way, in every way! And even if one tried to steelman it as "reducing suffering is pragmatic and practical and has positive consequences by several other, more obviously useful metrics", then any such reasoning goes out of the window as soon as the negative utilitarian seriously brings up insect suffering. Insect suffering! How can that be anything other than clickbait? Fodder for the ultra-woke who are just in love with all things that get in the way of meaningful human activity?
Please, someone, come out as a negative utilitarian. Steelman it for me. Provide the charity I lack.
It's the religious impulse turned in on itself. There are people who are naturally compassionate and charitable, and there are people who are naturally scrupulous and tormented by conscience, and there are people who like increasingly abstract thought experiments far divorced from any practical application.
And in the old days, their impulses would have led them to be like this man. There was an understood social framework around feeding the hungry, helping those in need, alms giving, and doing good works.
But that's gone by the wayside now, so what happens to those impulses that still persist but don't have the same socially cohesive and universal channels to divert them? If you get hung up on the likes of EA (sorry, EA, to always be kicking this philosophy but it does seem to get diverted very damn easily from 'cure the sick' to 'we must all network and get well-paying jobs so we can donate so that we can hold conferences about existential risk, sorry sick people but your present suffering is nothing compared to the potential suffering of potential future billions if we do the calculations right') and thus you need more extreme forms of do-gooding to satisfy your inflamed intellect. Ordinary "give to local church donations for the needy, help out in a soup kitchen", etc. actions are not good enough because any ignorant normie can do that, plus your philosophy has tidily proven that helping those you know near to you is racist and elitist and much less effective and efficient and not worth doing.
So you get hung up on shrimp and plants and 'suffering is bad' (which most people will agree on) 'hence we must wipe out all organic life, starting with every single wild animal, because their natural lives where we don't interfere with them are just horrible - nasty, brutish and short like the guy said' (which most people will think is freakin' extreme and slightly nuts).
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