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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27979 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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The suffering of bees may be important to mitigate (I think that’s true — wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?) but the author must convince us —

  • the suffering of bees is of such high importance that it is worth writing on it to convince people to place a burden on themselves. (Unlikely. There is worse suffering taking place even if we consider only bees, like the effects of pesticides. It’s not worth discourse hours).

  • that writing something so unintuitive that people ignore what else you write is morally worth the future drawbacks of loss of influence.

  • that the suffering of bees is so important that we should forego the very term of pleasure. This is problematic to his utilitarian ambitions, because our motivation to live well and expand our wellbeing is tied to whether we are able to experience wholesome pleasures in life. If people feel better from a spoonful of honey, not only does their own suffering decrease, but (1) they have energy to reduce the suffering of others and (2) the reason to love bees over wasps is brought to mind.

  • bees are not designed to be destroyed by mammals, given that bears and raccoons destroy them in the wild, and given that fish are designed to be eaten by other fish. If the author does not believe that nature’s design should be respected, then his interest should be ensuring that killer whales aren’t able to kill dolphins in the ocean. But wouldn’t only a senseless person have a problem with the killer whale enjoying his design and eating dolphins, who significantly more intelligent than bees? So the suffering of bees is within our design — we should only guarantee that the suffering isn’t excessive, like with some easy regulations about whether all the young bees are killed off after the honey is made.

There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.

wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?

Not in the least. I've heard of worse hobbies.

Where is the line you draw in biological sophistication when you begin to care? A mouse? A bird?

A human. More or less, there are caveats involved. A brain-dead or severely cognitively impaired (without hope of improvement) human loses all/most of their moral worth as far as I'm concerned. Not all humans are made alike.

This doesn't mean that entities that are more "sophisticated", biologically or otherwise, but aren't human in terms of genetic or cognitive origin enter my circle of concern. An intelligent alien? I don't particularly care about its welfare? A superintelligent AI? What's it to me? A transhuman or posthuman descendant of Homo sapiens? I care about such a being's welfare. Call it selfish if you want, since I expect to become one or have my descendants become them.

This is simply a fact about my preferences, and I'm not open to debate on the criteria I use personally. I'm open to discussing it, but please don't go to the trouble if you expect to change my mind.

Forgive me, but could you clarify a bit? Are you saying:

  1. You literally feel absolutely no repugnance / negative valence whatsoever at somebody buying lots of helpless creatures purely because they find it fun to kill them.
  2. You have some kind of negative emotional response to it, but for intellectual reasons you have decided not to indulge that response. E.g. you rationalise that no actual harm has taken place to anything with moral weight / man is master of the animals and therefore has the right to do such things even if you don’t find it tasteful.
  3. You feel a negative response that is weak enough that, to you, it can be rounded down to zero in mildly hyperbolic fashion on the internet.

I'd probably go with number 2 and a bit of 3. I would likely think slightly worse of someone who acts that way, but not to the point I'd say or do much about it.

I think that the majority of our intuitions about the distasteful nature of torturing animals arises from the fact that, in the modern day, the majority of people who do such a thing are socio/psychopaths and hence dangerous to their fellow man.

This is not a universal unchanging truth! You don't have to go very far back in time to find societies and cultures where randomly kicking dogs and torturing cats was no big deal, and great fun for the whole gang. Even today, many small kids will tear wings off flies without being sociopaths or psychopaths. They get trained out of expressing such behavior.

If a person got their kicks out of torturing animals, but didn't demonstrate other reasons for me to be concerned about them, I don't really care.

On a slight tangent, I don't care about animal rights or welfare. The fact that a cutesy little cow had to die to make a steak means nothing to me. I'm still only human, so I feel bad if I see someone mistreat a dog, and might occasionally intervene if my emotions get too strong. That's an emotional response, not an intellectual one, because I think the crime they're commuting is equivalent to property damage, and they have the right to treat their own property as they will. This doesn't stop me from loving my own two dogs, and being willing to use severe violence on anyone who'd hurt them. But it's the fact that they're my dogs that makes it so, and I wouldn't donate money to the RSPCA.

Thanks for explaining, I get where you're coming from better now.

I would think if I found out someone enjoyed killing bees, I would be concerned but only inasmuch as their behavior analogizes to things I care about. I wouldn't want my sister to date a guy who purchased bees for the purpose of killing them.

wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?

Only if they were doing so on an industrial scale and fucking with the bee economy. Human beings annihilate insects in their quadrillions every year; if they're worth anything more than zero then I guess we should all just kill ourselves right now to make room for them.

I would care if they were doing it even on a small scale, unless there was a good reason, but I don't think that particularly implies that bees' suffering matters. I think I'd be aggrieved by anyone buying any cool thing in order to pointlessly destroy it, living or not. And bees are cool.

There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.

This is called autism, not Jewishness. Autism can lead to people not having an innate understanding of why social rules work the way they do and trying to make sense of them in arcane ways that take them overly literally.

Autism can lead to people not having an innate understanding of why social rules work the way they do

Most normal neurotypical people don't understand why social rules work the way they do. They just can intuit what the rules are and don't question following them. Trying to get them to actually explain these arbitrary rules and why this or that particular variation exist is a maddening exercise in futility. It almost always results in a tautology.

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