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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.
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.
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.
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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