This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Insect welfare is what you get when you take ideas seriously, but normies have the ideas a lot without taking them seriously. Normies who "believe in animal welfare" don't take the idea seriously. Even vegetarians don't treat seriously the ideas that lead to vegetarianism. Actually believing the things the normies are saying and taking them seriously leads to this mess.
(In this case I don't think even rationalism would support letting the insects live. Insect welfare falls out from animal welfare because the sentience of an insect is small but there are billions of them. There are not billions of insects in your apartment, so the disutility of killing them is low even if you take animal welfare seriously. I would agree that this sounds more like OCD.)
I might quibble with "take ideas seriously" here. I don't think what's happening is so much "taking ideas seriously" as "taking ideas to the farthest endpoints still supported by the underlying logic while not performing any real cost-benefit analysis on any of the steps on the road to that endpoint." It's a form of pretending that trade-offs don't exist, and not engaging in that kind of analysis by saying that logic doesn't require it. That's a consistent position, but precise logical consistency isn't necessarily the most important factor when considering a pragmatic policy choice.
There's a combination of excessive sentiment (while concern for animal welfare is good, concern to the levels of worrying about being a moth genocider are excessive), extreme sensitivity, and vulnerability to influence. Scrupulosity is part of it, as is the point about "cute animals".
This level of worrying about insects does seem, to me, to be because of being the type of person to take the concerns seriously on an almost religious level (and I'm going to bring in that she is a vegan, so that's already predisposed to be very ritually pure around consumption of non-animal food and resources), to incorporate the values to a degree that goes this far, and not see it as going far because you're in the bubble of like-minded people. Any ordinary midwit can be concerned about cows or pigs, the higher, more refined, 'shut up and multiply' person worries about fish and shrimp and moths.
I'm not doubting her sincerity, I am doubting her good judgement. As she admits, she ended up killing the moths anyway, and caused excess suffering in the end, besides the time spent living with a moth infestation.
More options
Context Copy link
I think that's a good point.
This comment brought to you courtesy of the seagulls crying outside my window (because it's bin day and the little buggers are smart enough to have figured out that on certain days stuff is left outside that sometimes drops tasty morsels).
If you're used to seeing gulls and crows following the plough when the farmers start ploughing, because they're eating the worms and insects turned up when the soil is ploughed, then this is nature to you. To be brutal, everything is something else's food. To quote Willy Shakes, "We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots." In that context, insect suffering is meaningless, or at least not morally significant.
But if you're worried about the moral implications of insect suffering vis-à-vis taking action to kill a moth infestation, then you are in fact going against that nature you claim to value or prioritise. You are imposing human values on the natural world. If moths should not be killed because their suffering is morally significant, gulls and crows shouldn't eat insects either, because that is also "meat is murder".
So if we are going to impose human values on such categories, then there is no reason "humans are entitled to eat meat animals" is inferior to "I am a moth genocider" as values systems. Certainly, humans should not be deliberately cruel to animals, but that's not the moral question here.
'You are objectively evil for meat eating' is as artificial and arbitrary as any other imposition of our morals on those who don't share those values. Objective by what metric? Certainly not that of nature. Objective by human systems? Ah, there we come back again to "socially constructed" and "there is no objective moral system of right and wrong" and the likes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link