Hello everyone!

I'm very excited to have found this forum. I am an undergraduate studying at Brown University (Providence, USA). I'm majoring in biochemistry (with premed intentions), but I have a strong interest in ethical philosophy.

I've spent a good portion of my life thinking about ethics, and disagreeing with how they are presented in the larger American culture. Everything sort of fell together when I started reading and watching Peter Singer; maybe it was the Australian accent that won me over, but never had I head a person say things that made so much sense.

This was a few months ago. Since then, I've become a vegetarian, pledged to live a life based around helping others and donating large portions of my income to charity, and analyzing everything I hear about with a utilitarian lens.

M y core interests lie in understanding animal neurology (specifically, quantifying animal pleasure and suffering), and examining ways to get the government to focus more on foreign aid.

I look forward to joining the discussion!

Hey JasonK. Great to have you at the forum!

As a 4th year medical student, over in Aus, I hope you follow through your premed intentions! It's a great career, with good emploment, good prospects for helping people directly, and great prospects for helping others through donating to foreign aid! It's fantastic to hear that you've become vegetarian. I am too. To be honest, I doubt vegetarianism is the optimal utilitarian diet. I think I should try to reduce my intake of other animal products, just as I would encourage a carnivore to minimise their intake of meat. I wonder if as a utilitarian vegetarian you might have had similar thoughts or experiences.

I can't agree more about Peter Singer. He has such a calm and considered approach. He analyses ethical dillemas so logically and systematically, without compromising on substance. I'm full of admiration for his work.

I hope that it won't be too long before we have a science of human and animal consciousness! It may require the best scientific work in generations!

Welcome to the site, JasonK, I hope you feel at home here!
Ryan
ps. I hope you'll participate in the upcoming Wiki Felicifia too!

"I'm very excited to have found this forum...I have a strong interest in ethical philosophy. I've spent a good portion of my life thinking about ethics, and disagreeing with how they are presented in the larger American culture. Everything sort of fell together when I started reading and watching Peter Singer; maybe it was the Australian accent that won me over, but never had I head a person say things that made so much sense...I've become a vegetarian, pledged to live a life based around helping others and donating large portions of my income to charity, and analyzing everything I hear about with a utilitarian lens. M y core interests lie in...examining ways to get the government to focus more on foreign aid."

Same here! You seem very awesome; you quote Dumbledore and everything.

Have you heard of Giving What We Can? The guy who founded it - Toby Ord - is like a mini-Singer When I first heard him talk I had that same feeling of awe that someone could be talking so much damn sense about ethical matters!

LadyMorgana wrote:The guy who founded it - Toby Ord - is like a mini-Toby

A mini-Singer?

Ahem, yes, thanks Arepo!

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for the encouragement- my interest in medicine is new but I hope it will continue. I have always found an interesting link between medical ethics as they exist today and utilitarianism (for instance, triage codes).

You also raise an interesting point...

RyanCarey wrote: I doubt vegetarianism is the optimal utilitarian diet. I think I should try to reduce my intake of other animal products, just as I would encourage a carnivore to minimise their intake of meat. I wonder if as a utilitarian vegetarian you might have had similar thoughts or experiences.

That's a really interesting though, and one I've been grappling with since I became veggie. On a practical (and perhaps selfish) level, I thought veganism was too extreme a jump for full-on omnivorism. This is a lousy excuse, but part of what allowed me to make the transition to vegetarianism was the promise that I could still eat milk and cheese and eggs, etc. But that's dodging the question. I don't think it is inherently wrong to "use" an animal as means to an end, which is usually what gets groups like PETA angry; thus, if milk and eggs were produced humanely, giving the animals as good or better lives compared to what they would have in the wild, I don't see anything ethically wrong about eating those things. However, the reality of the situation is that a good amount of eggs and milk are not produced humanely. Thus, I would say that I am trying to move not to full-on veganism but rather to only eating dairy and eggs that are produced in a way that I find satisfactorily humane (eg: a small farm that I've visited to make sure that the animals have room to roam, proper bedding, etc.).

So yeah, I'm definitely not perfect with my food intake, just as I recognize that I have a long way to go before I begin to donate what I should to the developing world. I think an interesting discussion to have (and one that I hear some utilitarians like Singer touch on occasionally) is whether ethical meat eating is possible. This would stem from the observation that if everyone were vegetarian, there would be less animal suffering but there also would be fewer animals and thus less possible animal pleasure. Do you think it would be possible (by strict regulations, etc.) to build a society that could breed animals in a way that would give them "happy" lives and thus making it permissible to kill them (painlessly) in order to allow for the next generation of animals to be born (given the limited resources we have to sustain animal life)?

That is something that I'm having difficultly thinking about.

LadyMorgana wrote:Same here! You seem very awesome; you quote Dumbledore and everything.

Have you heard of Giving What We Can? The guy who founded it - Toby Ord - is like a mini-Singer When I first heard him talk I had that same feeling of awe that someone could be talking so much damn sense about ethical matters!

LadyMorgana-
It's great to see that a fellow Harry Potter fan is involved in this. I thought the books always carried a message of working towards the greater good!

I looked up Toby Ord as per your recommendation-- so amazing! Voluntarily living on a student's budget for one's entire life displays such dedication. And his arguments are indeed air-tight (as a bonus, he has a delightfully hilarious set of mannerisms when he talks).

On a personal note, what do you do (or plan to do, if you're a student) for a living, and how does it tie into your philosophical values? I am very curious about what utilitarian-minded people decide to pursue as careers. Personally, I'm tentatively pre-med, and I often wonder how best to use that degree (or another degree) to best serve the world

I recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. If you think Canon!Harry cares about the greater good, wait until you read this.

"Yeah," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "that pretty much nails it. Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can't answer, I feel guilty about not being God."

Neville didn't quite understand that, but... "That doesn't sound good."

Harry sighed. "I understand that I have a problem, and I know what I need to do to solve it, all right? I'm working on it."

Harry watched Neville leave.

Of course Harry hadn't said what the solution was.

The solution, obviously, was to hurry up and become God.

Hey Jason,
you raise some good points. I don't think eating animals is inherently wrong either. If we took animal products without harming animals, there would be nothing wrong with it. However, is this sort of hypothetical relevant to a utilitarian? Not very. It alienates me from any sort of animal rights group like PETA. But that's an emotional obstacle more than a rational one.

Could I imagine a world where we eat meat ethically? Yes. We could make meat in a laboratories, we could lay out humane farm conditions, and then use general anaesthesia before killing animals. But I think the point is that world isn't our world, it's only an imaginary world!

Lastly you said we're not perfect, just as we aren't perfect in philanthropy. Given our human nature, none of us are perfect. But I find the more I think about these issues, the better I get, which is encouraging!

as a bonus, he has a delightfully hilarious set of mannerisms when he talks

Oh my god, YES Isn't he cute?? Lol I know he hates it when I act the patronising fangirl, but it entertains other so for the most part I keep it up, you know, for the greater good

R.e. careers, this lecture that a couple of utilitarian-minded people from Giving What We Can gave in Oxford is really useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAnh2FApskM (it's in 5 parts - links to the other parts should be suggested at the side of the screen). My advice to you would be to become a doctor and donate a significant proportion of your salary to the most cost-effective charities I'm planning to get work in the charity sector, or perhaps business more generally, and use the skills and contacts that gives me to help my voluntary work, which I intend to do a lot of (the current plan is that this will consist of continuing to volunteer for Giving What We Can). I'll hopefully be able to have some useful influence in the organisation I work for as well (e.g. directing charitable funds towards more utilitarian initiatives, convincing some rich businessman to give lots of money to a good charity). I've considered every career under the sun though, including highly-paid ones specifically because it will give me a lot of money to donate.

If I may comment on your convo with RyanCarey as well...for the most part, I agree with what you say. But there's one thing that you might want to think more about...

thus, if milk and eggs were produced humanely, giving the animals as good or better lives compared to what they would have in the wild, I don't see anything ethically wrong about eating those things.

This is what I used to think until recently. But the comparison you should be making is not between an animal's life on a farm vs in the wild, but between an animal's life on a farm and the animal not existing at all. This is because, in reality, farmers obviously do not just catch wild chickens, sheep etc., they breed them, so the difference that farming makes is between these animals not existing or these animals having a life on a farm. Thus, the relevant question is: "Do these animals have lives that are as good or better than not existing at all?" or, more simply, "Do these animals have lives worth living?"

But that's dodging the question.

I don't think it is. If you think the difficulty of going beyond vegetarianism is such that you're likely to keep it up for less long, you should be honest about your akrasia and work with it. The thing I find convenient about vegetarianism is its convenience - people are familiar with the label, it gives me a nice rule to work to, which means I can free up bits of my thought process/willpower for other things. Following more complicated principles is harder socially and personally - which doesn't mean it's wrong, but there's power in labels that we shouldn't ignore.

"Do these animals have lives worth living?"

But more accurately 'do they generate more utilons than the animals that would have lived if they don't?'

But more accurately 'do they generate more utilons than the animals that would have lived if they don't?'

Lol, didn't want to get too complicated just yet!

RyanCarey wrote:Could I imagine a world where we eat meat ethically? Yes. We could make meat in a laboratories, we could lay out humane farm conditions, and then use general anaesthesia before killing animals. But I think the point is that world isn't our world, it's only an imaginary world!

I'm definitely all for in vitro meat, but I think that there are some producers that operate close enough to the conditions you laid out above. These are small farms that give animals open fields in which to roam and kill the animals near-instantaneously (for instance, the slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin currently works with farms to implement stress-free ways of raising and killing animals). Of course, these sorts of places are the minority, but as Lady Morgana pointed out:

LadyMorgana wrote:the comparison you should be making is not between an animal's life on a farm vs in the wild, but between an animal's life on a farm and the animal not existing at all.

This is a difficult judgement call- when is an animal's life worth living? Intuitively, I would say that given a non-human animal's inability to logically rationalize and deal with what is happening to it, factory farm-raised animals would almost certainly be better off never having been born. However, it is not clear to me that an animal raised on a farm where it was not tortured, unreasonably confined, etc. would be better off never having existed.

Additionally, if we really want to look for the best way to personally make an impact in reducing animal suffering, by supporting local, humane farming practices we would be directly competing with factory farms, instead of merely boycotting them.

Then, to consider Arepo's comment on comparing the relative amount of utilon's generated by the farm animals to those generated by the animals that would take their place, I think it is highly unlikely that if a farm were to go out of business it would transform itself back into a place where a large number of animals would thrive. Most likely it would be turned into a place to grow crops or a factory, with relatively little animal life.

Personally, I am looking to get to a place where I get all of my eggs and dairy from humane farms. As for the vegetarian/ethical meat eating decision, I sometimes think that in a practical sense labeling oneself as vegetarian has more of a social impact than labeling oneself as "vegetarian, except...". I default to vegetarianism, but I do think it is an interesting conversation.

To be strict, the relevant comparison is between the welfare of the farm animals, and the welfare of the wild animals who would've lived on the land if it hadn't been used as farmland. See: http://www.qalys.org/animal-welfare.pdf

You talk a lot of sense, JasonK

A belated welcome, Jason!

JasonK wrote:Personally, I am looking to get to a place where I get all of my eggs and dairy from humane farms.

I think milk and eggs are nearly opposite in terms of their impacts on animals. According to these rough calculations, 1 kg of eggs has 1000 times the animal impact as 1 kg of milk. I would prefer to see people drink lots of milk and eat beef than to see them eat eggs.

JasonK wrote:As for the vegetarian/ethical meat eating decision, I sometimes think that in a practical sense labeling oneself as vegetarian has more of a social impact than labeling oneself as "vegetarian, except...".

Could be, unless you know the people well enough to engage the topic further. If you agree with my point above, you could call yourself a lacto-vegetarian (as distinguished from a lacto-ovo-vegetarian).

Also, even if you didn't refrain from eating any meat, you could offset the impact of your consumption by donating a few hundred dollars per year to Vegan Outreach (similar to carbon credits). Of course, I recommend donating much more.

Out of curiosity: Do you have thoughts on the suffering of wild animals and what, if anything, should be done about it? I've written on the subject here: "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering."

JasonK, an update on utilitarian careers: www.highimpactcareers.org

When do we expect HIC's career research section to be up?

That's the part of the site I'm most excited about. I hope it's sometime soon, so I can evaluate the different options for careers and whether I need to change what degree I'm doing etc etc.

I dunno, ask them on Saturday