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Notes -
Two screens, more literally than usual
There was a thread a few weeks back about Hasan Piker supposedly using a shock collar on his dog. I didn't think too much of it at the time, not knowing who Hasan Piker even was (I had heard the name, but couldn't tell you anything else). But a little later I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).
In the episode, she describes the shock collar claim as obvious nonsense that anyone watching the video can see for themselves, in addition to her having met Hasan and the dog in person and therefore she is sure the claim is false.
In comparison, in the Culture War thread post I linked above, /u/crushedoranages says
I have not gone down the rabbit hole of analysis of the video, so I'm not going to try to defend Taylor's interpretation. But I was struck by seeing a case where both sides are telling me to watch the exact same video clip since in it is plain to see the events transpired as they claim. The "two screens" concept comes up here a lot, but it's usually about seeing different subsets of a population, often whatever your social media algorithm surfaces, or different interpretations of the same utterance (see: taking Trump literally vs. seriously or, more recently, the Young Republicans group chat). This seems like a whole new level of disagreement about reality.
Taylor's thesis is mainly one of anti-surveillance (a major theme of her work), which is pretty well covered by this quote from the YouTube auto-transcript:
I don’t care if Hasan used a shock collar on his dog- this beast is likely still doing better than the alternative, which is security for a scrap metal dealer. But Taylor Lorenz saying something blatantly at odds with reality isn’t evidence of two screens. She’s a weird delusional lizard person on blue sky. This is just evidence that one mentally ill person is delusional.
A lizard person who goes to incredible lengths to hide her age (she's 40 as of earlier this month).
Am I the only one who thinks its facially insane that she purports to be so driven by pursuit of truth and LARPs a brave, crusading ace reporter meanwhile actively hiding/dodging basic information about herself that has no relevance aside from her own denial of reality?
After the whole story of how she got fired from The Washington Post, I could only conclude that she is deeply unwell.
Every little bit I've learned about her has led me to conclude that she could tell me it was raining in Seattle and I'd feel the need to check myself.
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Dog needs to go get a drink of water after hours in that bed? Dog needs to relieve itself and not make a mess on the bed (which probably would mean punishment)? Dog needs to stretch because no, it is not normal to be in one position for hours on end? Still gets shocked because its owner is an idiot?
By the same logic, if I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) put a bag over your head and chained you to a bed, you would still be doing better than, say, a migrant labourer in the UAE who is worked to death in the blazing sun. That may be true, but we are talking "lesser of two evils" and not "this is fine, this is okay, what is everyone making a fuss about?"
I suggest someone put a shock collar on Hasan and zap him every time he gets up from his chair to go get a drink or use the bathroom. After all, that's still way better than the alternative, right?
In principle - I have no good answer to the whole animal rights conundrum, namely:
This is a self-consistent rebuttal (and is the argument I personally believe in), but it's also exactly what an evil person trying to justify their evil would say in order to continue being evil ("Look, maybe being a cartel hitman is actually not a nice thing to do. But also, it's the only life I know, and I'd probably be killed myself if I stopped, and also coincidentally I have this neat philosophy that actually makes it kosher!"), so I often have doubts about this.
I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this (I have seen similar things written elsewhere, but never exactly this)
But - to go back to the original point: wider (meat-eating) society accepts the fact that animal lives are lesser than a human's. In particular, we kill and eat animals (okay, more realistically - we sponsor their killing by buying their meat in a supermarket), and not even for survival reasons. It seems that if we value a "life" so little, making said life have to stay still for a while and get shocked whilst being housed and fed and not slaughtered is pretty marginal in comparison ("it was one thing to kill and eat all those people, but when you trespassed into that lady's house to hide in her shower, you crossed the line")
I don't think it makes sense to oppose mild animal abuse unless you are a vegetarian (and even then there are other issues, but being vegetarian seems the bare minimum for holding this sort of position)
If I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) kidnapped you from your home (and also a bunch of other humans), put you on a farm, eugenically bred you with other humans with the goal of making succulent offspring, and eventually slaughtered you, butchered you, and sold your flesh for a profit... you'd actually be worse off than even the migrant labourer. Actually this is the plot for an especially disturbing horror movie - so if we're comparing animals to humans this way, you (and I, and everyone else who eats meat) are at an off-the-charts level of bad.
Well, my view is that animals and humans are not equal moral agents.
However, animals are beings of their own. They have their own needs. Forcing an animal to act outside its nature is cruel, just as (say) beating a toddler for crying when they are hungry would be cruel. A dog is not meant to sit in one position or lie on a bed for hours. I don't know why the dog got up - hungry? needed to relieve itself? stiff from sitting? bored? - but shocking it for that is cruel.
And we don't have to introduce farmed humans, we just have to treat animals as creatures that, if we assume the authority over them of ownership, should be responsible ownership. I hate the modern notion of treating pets like quasi-humans, or living plushies, whose existence is to provide the owner with unconditional love on the owner's demand, and if this means locking a dog up for hours every day in an apartment while the owner goes to work, then so be it. Keeping cats indoors and never letting them out? So be it. The function of the animal is not to be a being in its own right, but an extension of the owner's needs. I hate that because, even if I don't think animals are the equivalent of a human as moral agents, a dog is a dog, not a living toy.
Piker's shocking his dog was obviously cruel and neglectful, but spoiling your pet is another, if less obvious, way of being cruel. C. S. Lewis from "The Four Loves":
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There are animals that we let trained people butcher for meat and do not think much of it, or otherwise subject to harsh conditions for our utility, and there are animals that we cherish and pamper, or at least respect. Some societies do not have that clear demarcation between cattle and pets, but the society Hasan purports to be a part of does (which is why he doesn't go "even if I did shock her, big deal, she's my property and she's better off than etc etc.").
As mentioned elsewhere here, a person who knows the acceptable way to treat pets (enough to cover the mistreatment up) but doesn't is morally suspect.
I find the whole ranking of animal species business pretty suspect morally.
But fine, that is a self-consistent framework that justfies meat eating but not pet abuse (assuming you would be okay with someone abusing a pet from a "meat" species)
It's not about the species for me but about the adoption of the pet. So torturing your pet piglet is not ok. And vice versa, I don't care if people shoot stray dogs or, as is the rumored custom in some countries, farm them for food.
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I think moral intuitions on this point differ pretty widely. A lot of people would say that they find suffering to be more terrible than death, and thus, torture to be more wicked than murder. The idea that even if you intend to kill an animal, you should at least put it out of its misery quickly rather than let it suffer, is old and widespread; we typically recognize that a kid pulling the wings off flies is doing something wrong and perhaps concerning, whereas we would think nothing of that kid swatting the fly altogether. And this applies to humans, too. At an instinctive level I would be much more creeped out to learn that a guy I was about to shake hands with had once been a torturer, than to learn he'd shot someone dead. A good man might kill for a variety of contextual reasons, but outside of specific thought experiments about hidden bombs, torture's just wrong, and someone who practices it probably has something wrong with them.
So I don't think it's incoherent or even surprising for someone to object to the mistreatment of dogs while still eating meat. (Now, if they're morally consistent, such a person should also care about battery farming and other 'inhumane' practices. But I think a lot of people do insofar as they can bear to think about those things; if they don't act on this belief, it's out of moral cowardice, not a lack of theoretical opposition.) And actually, I think the "a torturer probably has something wrong with them" bit is important too, particularly here. Even if we think of animals as flesh automatons who don't suffer in a morally relevant sense - even then, it would lower my opinion of someone to learn they'd torture a dog, for much the same reason that it would lower my opinion of someone to learn that they have a hobby of ripping teddy bears apart with their teeth. It makes me instinctively suspect that something about their capacity to experience empathy is broken, in a way that makes them untrustworthy in terms of how they'll treat actual sentient humans.
In general, I am also unequivocally opposed to "torturing" animals.
But "suffering" is a spectrum, ranging from getting wet in the rain to the kind of stuff drug cartels do.
My actual practical resolution for this is to say torture is any situation where you make the victim want to die and then do not allow them to die. With an exception if you sincerely love and care for them (to avoid classifying extremely painful things that eventually lead to something good for the "victim" as torture)
And this situation does not seem to be torture. If it were really on the level of torture, I think the dog would just wig out and attack Hasan. A dog that sits still in discomfort for a long time is just suffering a "reasonable" amount. I think it still prefers living, and does not wish to die to escape the shock collar.
As I said, I don't think this particular thing amounts to torture. But I agree that it is causing suffering to the dog, and it should make us worried about a person if they wantonly cause suffering to living things because of what it says about their ability to empathise, but:
[*] Well, at least not worried he's a Ted Bundy. It is antisocial behaviour for him to break a rule and then hide his rule-breaking behaviour (even if the rule itself is bogus)
I don't think that's a very good definition, especially if we're trying to apply it to non-sapient creatures. In the first place, I'm not convinced it is actually cognitively possible for non-sapient animals to conceive of suicide, certainly not in the rational, goal-oriented way of a suffering human opting for assisted dying. Is it possible for human babies, even? I don't think "torturing an infant" is an oxymoron, but it would seem to fail your criterion.
And in the second place, it would mean that the exact same mistreatment could be torture or not-torture depending on the victim's will to live. Without tipping all the way over into suicidal, this is clearly something that varies from individual to individual. Some might have a very strong will to live; others might put one foot in front of the other mostly as the path of least resistance and wouldn't fight very hard if their life was in jeopardy. If people from those two groups are put through the exact same torments, and experience the exact same amount of pain, but the first remains steadfast in wanting to get through this while the other starts shouting "oh for God's sake just kill me now", is it reasonable to say that only the second guy is being tortured? Seems weird and contrived to me.
This isn't to say I necessarily want to die on the hill that Piker's treatment of his dog qualifies as torture. But "would the dog rather be dead than experience this treatment" seems far too high a bar assuming it's even applicable to a canine mind. (I will clarify that to the extent I think it might be in the realm of torture, I am very much talking about the compounding effect of "being forced to sit still for hours on end under threat of painful shocks", where the constant stress and enrichment-starvation are part of it as much as the shocks themselves. I certainly wouldn't argue that shocking a dog to house-train it would qualify as torture.)
Well, that's rather the problem. It suggests that he views the dog as property, as a living prop for his livestream, rather than a living being he loves and enjoys the company of. I don't think there's much of a leap from that to suspecting that he also thinks of the humans in his life as tools to be used for personal advancement, rather than people with inherent value and dignity.
(It is of course possible to straight-up believe that animals lack qualia and/or moral standing without being a psychopath in one's relationship to other humans - hence the teddy bear - but I don't think a Piker who was simply a principled Cartesian of that kind would have any reason to own a pet dog in the first place. Having a pet dog visible in his livestreams at all is a signal of "I'm the kind of person who enjoys the company of our four-legged furry friends", and if that's not actually how he thinks of dogs then the signal is deceitful and his whole moral character becomes suspect, never mind that he tried to cover up the shocking.)
So I did consider animals when I wrote the definition, which I why I carefully worded the condition as: "want[ing] to die" instead of the more sophisticated "wishing to commit suicide", etc. For animals, I am working on the assumption that they will express a death wish as going crazy and just thrashing about / attacking people / etc.
It's not a perfect solution, but unfortunately once an entity is unable to communicate verbally, it's hard to definitively rule out that it is not in some kind of terrible agony (see also: "The anesthesia only partially worked. The patient is unable to control their body, but feels everything"), so I think this is the best we can do.
I didn't really consider babies. I don't think it is an oxymoron either. But I think my definition still works, because we can try and reasonably infer if it is in agony, primarily by asking if the thing we are doing to it is painful (and, as I mentioned, there is the caveat of if you love the entity and are trying to help it, so medical procedures on newborns is not torture) - this is even less cut-and-dry than the animal case, but again I think it's just a hard problem to evaluate suffering on a living thing that cannot communicate its thoughts (and in fact probably doesn't even have "thoughts" in the way normal humans do)
Actually this is an intended aspect of my definition. The primary goal of my definition is that I find it disturbing that intelligent beings are able to inflict extreme "unnatural" levels of pain on living things, and sometimes it is in their benefit to do so.
In general, it feels "unnatural" to ban a state from inflicting any kind of suffering on someone, because a "baseline" level of suffering just exists without states (people/animals starve to death, creatures get eaten by stronger ones, etc), so why just disallow inflicting suffering in just this particular kind of circumstance.
But for torture, this is a thing that only happens if you have civilisation (lions don't torture gazelles or other lions, they can't because they are too stupid) - so I think it should be considered always immoral to torture.
As you yourself have mentioned, sometimes there are good and necessary reasons to kill someone (a criminal just starts attacking people and refuses to surrender), so we can't go so far as to ban killing for any reason (plus what about killing animals, etc)
So my definition comes out as the best coherent imperative that can actually be adhered to in any circumstance, but also rules out a particularly egregious class of suffering: i.e. a fate worse than death (if whatever is happening to someone is truly a fate worse than death, under this rule, they have the right to choose death instead)
In your particular comparison - the strong willed person is personally experiencing whatever is happening to them as a fate not as bad as death. As long as they are always given the option of choosing death (consent can always be taken away at any point, etc, etc) - I don't think I can do any better without my axiom becoming non-universal.
I think you're right, I went too far with my previous statement. What I do believe is that this is less worrying than wanton suffering, but still, being able to actually act on the philosophy I propose for animals with a real animal, even for a useful purpose, is still worrying because he was able to ignore its suffering / lacked the empathy to realise its suffering.
I agree, it is quite slimy he lied that way. I already mentioned it was bad he covered up his rule breaking, but you're right he also went out of his way to mislead people into thinking he was pro animal rights by having a pet.
Though I think misleading people into thinking you hold a particular ideological stance is less egregious than actually breaking a rule (thought crimes vs physical crimes)... but I guess I'm biased, since (like many others on this forum, I imagine) I personally mislead the people around me to believe I am on-board with progressive ideology (but in my defence, I will say I have tried to keep this deception implicit, I don't go around with dyed hair and pronoun pins)
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