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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.
I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."
The new wars will be over "a pill to turn LGBT kids cis het? this is genocide!" and those who want "a pill to change cis het to glorious queerness". As humans, we can always find something to fight over.
I think the next frontier is the rights of midgets. It's been simmering for a while, and I assumed it would happen as soon as the trans thing died down, but that was ten years ago and the trans thing lasted longer than I would have thought.
I think you might be right about this one, at least in a broad way. Interestingly I think “midget rights” is/was catching on more in Britain than in the U.S., although it may have died down. As a specific example I recall watching the last season of Derry Girls with my girlfriend a few years ago and there was a midget reporter (or news anchor, or something like that, I think) whose midget-ness went completely unremarked upon by the characters, to a really implausible extent that took us out of the episode in a sort of “are we really not going to address this?” kind of way. I’m certain there were at least one or two other British TV shows from that period that did a similar thing but I can’t recall them off my head. I don’t think this particular version of woke casting ever caught on at all in American media and I suspect it died down in Britain as well, although I’m not sufficiently keyed in to the British media scene to say that for sure. I hadn’t thought about this in some time so I’m curious if any Brits (or anglophiles) here can weigh in.
As an aside, did “we”, so to speak, ever settle on a politically correct word for “midget”? I’m positive midget is considered rude but it frankly feels like the least bad way to say it, and is what I would probably choose in most cases in real life. “Little person” is ridiculously patronizing… maybe “dwarf”? That still feels weird to me, but introspecting maybe it’s what I would choose in woke company.
I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”
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