Reflections on Ethical Vegetarianism, Part 2

Reply to Huemer and Adelstein's criticism of me

[continued from yesterday]

In the last fifth of their interview, Adelstein and Huemer discuss my views. I now respond point by point.

13. Adelstein:

    And it just almost feels like there's something different going on when Bryan Caplan does moral reasoning than when I do. Where it almost feels like what he's doing is an exercise, and just like finding things about the world that would sound weird and then if you can like offload them onto the opposing view then like that's a cost for them.

    Adelstein’s right, there is a difference. I’m doing normal moral philosophy, where you can challenge grand moral theories with pointed counterexamples. Adelstein is doing dogmatic utilitarianism, where you instantly reject all the counterexamples because they contradict your grand moral theory.

    Take, for example, the classic “Sheriff scenario” counterexample to utilitarianism, where a Sheriff can avert a bloody riot by executing an innocent man. You have the option of saying, “Does not compute, utilitarianism is always true, your example proves nothing.” But the normal thing is to admit, “Yes, it seems like utilitarianism gives the wrong answer, so that undermines the likelihood that utilitarianism is correct.” I’m doing the normal thing. We should all do the normal thing.

14. Huemer:

    In the Three Body Problem, there's a point where okay so the aliens the trisolarans, they've been doing these advanced physics particle experiments and at some point they discover that when they do these experiments they're actually destroying entire universes. Okay and then the alien decides to use to give an argument that destroying other civilizations is not a big deal because like yeah we just destroy universes all the time.

    No, that’s not what I’m doing. I don’t say that ignoring animal suffering is not a big deal because we do it all the time. I’m saying that the moral importance of suffering seems to me to heavily depend on the intelligence of the sufferer. Most people share this intuition, and both Adelstein and Huemer just keep insisting that we’re wrong and epistemically negligent.

15. Huemer continues:

    It's not totally implausible that there would be some psychological influence in this direction if you find out that you've been doing this all along then you sort of like downplay how important it is and then other horrible things that are similar start to seem better.

    I agree that it’s not totally psychologically implausible. In fact, I take this possibility seriously. But after taking it seriously, I stand my ground. I’m in the same position as Huemer in The Problem of Political Authority when he weighs the utilitarian view that it’s wrong for him to buy an extra jacket in a world where other people are hungry. Yes, maybe he refuses to accept this “undeniable” truth because he’s trying to weasel out of his onerous moral obligations to total strangers. But after pondering this possibility, he still thinks it’s moral permissible to buy the jacket.

16. Adelstein:

    If the world is weird, just as a matter of fact, then there should be weird ethical judgments. So like you were responding to the charge that factory farming is the worst thing in the world is weird. Like what's unintuitive because we don't normally vividly consider the fact that we're torturing a population as large as the number of people who have ever lived every two years, causing more agony in a few years than has ever existed in all of human history.

    OK, I’ve vividly considered this fact, and I’m not remotely persuaded. No matter how much I think about the issue, I still think that one human baby’s life is more morally valuable than the lives of a million wild birds. I don’t know how to convince Adelstein or Huemer that I’m right, but the problem isn’t lack of vivid consideration.

17. To be fair to ethical vegetarians, I agree that most meat-eaters would be dumbfounded by their arguments. Walter Block’s piece on this issue was truly terrible. But the best explanation isn’t that the arguments for ethical vegetarianism are unanswerable. The best explanation is that most humans are terrible at philosophy! They have no decent response to solipsism, skepticism, moral relativism, eliminative materialism, the Problem of Other Minds, or virtually any other fundamental challenge to common sense. But common sense is still correct.

18. One of the main lessons I learned from Huemer is that straightforward appeals to common sense are philosophically very strong. Faced with skepticism about the external world, for example, one of the best replies really is: “The conclusion that we can’t know if there’s a physical world contradicts common sense, so either one of your premises or your reasoning are wrong. I’m not smart enough to figure out more, but that’s enough.”

19. Huemer:

    You know how they say you can't infer an ought from an is? Now, maybe that's true, maybe that's not, but surely you can't go the other way, right? Like you can't just take your moral judgments and then figure out the descriptive facts of the world from your moral judgments, right? Like something has gone wrong there, okay? So like that's kind of like what the Caplan argument is doing.

    I protest that I am not doing this. Huemer would be correct if I denied the descriptive fact that factory farming causes immense suffering, but I don’t. I’m weighing one moral premise against another, which is precisely what moral reasoning is all about.

20. Huemer:

    If every time you scratched your ear an infinite number of people were tortured to death it would scratching your ear would be the worst thing you ever did.

    I agree, because this is a well-crafted hypothetical. But I still don’t think it’s wrong to make animals suffer horribly for minor benefits.

21. Back in 2010, Huemer wrote the following in a symposium on Ayn Rand’s Objectivism:

    Objectivists seem to find that essay [“The Objectivist Ethics”] completely convincing. But hardly anyone else finds it at all convincing. This is not a trivial observation — one often finds that people who do not accept a whole philosophical system nevertheless find certain parts of it plausible. And one often finds that people who are not ultimately persuaded by an argument nevertheless see some plausibility in it. But neither of these things is true of the argument of “The Objectivist Ethics”—hardly anyone finds that argument even slightly plausible, unless they also buy into virtually all of Ayn Rand’s views. This is not true of most of her other views: one would not be surprised to find a non-Objectivist who nevertheless thinks Rand’s political views are reasonable, or her epistemological views, or her aesthetic theories. The explanation is simple: the theory of “The Objectivist Ethics” is simultaneously the most distinctive and the least plausible, worst defended of all of Rand’s major ideas.

    I don’t think that Huemer’s arguments for ethical vegetarianism are as implausible and poorly defended as Rand’s arguments in “The Objectivist Ethics.” (Adelstein’s, though, are). But frankly, they are self-confidently cultish in the same way. Almost no one who isn’t a zealous ethical vegetarian finds any of the following positions “even slightly plausible”:

    1. A year’s worth of animal suffering is worse than the Holocaust.

    2. Exterminating mice because they’re befouling your basement is morally wrong.

    3. If humans and bees were the only species, and humans could end bee suffering by eradicating all bees, which would in turn reduce human living standards by 20%, they are morally obligated to do so.

    4. We should donate $1 to shrimp charities.

22. Sure, Huemer can insist, “Everyone who isn’t a zealous ethical vegetarian is morally benighted.” But this really does put him in the same boat as the cultish Objectivists. The strength of Huemer’s approach to philosophy is that you strive to start with innocuous common sense premises that would be plausible to almost anyone. If common sense happens leads to absurd conclusions, you salvage as much common sense as you can. You don’t ride the Crazy Train all the way to Absurdia.

23. Ethical vegetarianism isn’t absurd on its face, but it readily leads to absurdity. What’s the alternative? Accept the common sense views that eating meat, wearing leather, animal experimentation, and casually crushing insects is fine — and that giving money to shrimp and insect charities in a world with hungry human children is silly at best.

Reflections on Ethical Vegetarianism, Part 1

Dissecting the Huemer-Adelstein exchange

Now that you’ve watched and/or read the Matthew Adelstein-Mike Huemer conversation on the ethics of insect suffering, I hope you’re ready to hear my reaction.

I’m going to post this in two parts.

• In part 1, I dissect Adelstein and Huemer’s exchange with each other.

• In part 2, I reply to their criticism of me.

In case it’s not obvious, I hold the intelligence of both of these philosophers in highest regard. As I’ve often said, Huemer is the best philosopher. And young Adelstein has immense potential, though I fear he’s too dogmatic to reach his potential.

1. In our earlier exchanges on ethical vegetarianism, Huemer was highly confident that insects are not conscious. This allowed him to dismiss the empirical premise on which my challenge rests. In their interview, however, Adelstein very effectively rebuts Huemer’s skepticism. The connection between neurons and consciousness is complex, so insisting “Bugs don’t have the right kind of brains to be conscious” is silly. Furthermore, insects typically respond to pain like any other animal. While they may feel less chronic pain than higher animals, they still seem to intensely feel acute pain. As Adelstein tells Huemer:

   But one thing that seems plausibly true of fish and also potentially true of insects, is that it looks like they have the immediate shooting chronic pain. Sorry, opposite of chronic pain, like the immediate shooting pain when you cut someone, but they don't really have chronic pain. And so if that's true, that would explain the findings of why they seem to kind of ignore injuries after they've gotten them, but when you do injure them for the first time, then they act very adversely. And this is kind of what you'd expect if insects have these really short lives. Having lasting chronic pain that influences their behavior in the long term isn't that beneficial.

2. Adelstein surprised me (and, I think, Huemer as well) when he used “insects suffer horribly” to craft a utilitarian argument for mass extermination of insects. But there’s a weird logic to it. In Adelstein’s eyes, bug suffering is so horrible that the typical bug would be better off dead. Death doesn’t just end their misery, but the misery of all their descendants.

3. Adelstein also has a creative biological story for why bugs are better-off dead but humans aren’t: Bugs use a “high offspring, low survival probability” reproductive strategy (r-selection), while humans are a “few offspring, high survival probability” reproductive strategy (K-selection). The typical bug is a hedonic loser; the typical human, a hedonic winner.

4. That said, Adelstein rushes to advocate mass extermination of bugs, instead of calling for a massive research project on bug consciousness. Question: Given bugs’ fragility, isn’t it fairly likely that bugs and humans are miserable for similar percentages of their lives? Humans spend more more total time lingering in agony than insects. How often does a bug survive severe trauma for even a few days? If you respond, “Well, bugs might suffer from long-lasting starvation,” consider the fact that many bugs have evolved to eat less frequently than humans.

5. Like most utilitarians, Adelstein ends up with surprisingly conventional moral conclusions. Killing bugs to build houses is actually good — not because humans’ welfare is vastly more important than bug welfare, but because a dead bug is a better-off bug. But Adelstein could readily reach totally insane conclusions with a little extra thought. Consider: By his logic, exterminating all bees would be great for bees. Unfortunately, losing these pollinators would probably mean mass famine for humans. Since bees vastly outnumber humans, however, Adelstein should still consider bee extermination a net good (except insofar as the combined extermination of bees and humans ends up increasing the total number of non-bee insects).

6. Impatient readers will think that Adelstein and Huemer derive ethical vegetarianism from the same moral foundation, but they totally don’t. Adelstein is a bullet-biting utilitarian. As a result, he is immune to all moral counterexamples. The sole way to change his mind on moral questions is to show that he’s made a mistake about the best way to maximize total happiness. Huemer, in contrast, is a moral pluralist, skeptical of all comprehensive moral theories. He derives his ethical vegetarianism from a more modest foundation than “Always do whatever maximizes total happiness.” Namely:

   1. Suffering is bad.
   2. It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.

7. The upshot: Morally speaking, Adelstein and I are at an impasse. If none of the classic counterexamples to utilitarianism sway him, what hope do I have? The most I can say is that, for all his brilliance, Adelstein begs the question when he says things like “[S]uffering is bad. This isn't because we can do calculus or are smart, the badness of your headaches have nothing to do with how smart you are.” While this is a trivial deduction from utilitarianism, many people think that a random human’s headache is obviously morally worse than the painful death of a random mouse. If such people are right, utilitarianism is wrong.

8. In contrast, Huemer and I start from a similar place of moral pluralism. I freely concede that both of the moral premises underlying his ethical vegetarianism initially seem plausible. But since they lead to radically implausible conclusions, the only rational response is to reject at least one of the premises. Remember, if a is a good argument for b, then not-b is automatically a good argument for not-a. Which in turn requires us to weigh the plausibility of a versus not-b.

9. For example, you could have a=”It is wrong to cause enormous suffering to build a swimming pool,” and b=”It is wrong to cause enormous suffering to ants to build a swimming pool.” a implies b, so not-b implies not-a, which means we have to weigh the (nontrivial) plausibility of ”It is wrong to cause enormous suffering to build a swimming pool” against the (overwhelming) plausibility of “It is NOT wrong to cause enormous suffering to ants to build a swimming pool.”

10. On further reflection, both Huemerian premises are overstated. To repeat myself:

    1. Some suffering is morally good. Making Hitler burn in Hell for eternity, for example, would be morally wonderful, even if zero potential wrongdoers were deterred.

    2. The moral badness (and goodness) of suffering varies widely depending on the characteristics of the being who suffers. The suffering of low-intelligence creatures like bugs is vastly less bad than the suffering of high-intelligence creatures like humans.

11. How do I “prove” either of my alternative premises? I don’t — and ultimately, neither do any other moral philosophers. To “prove” something means to logically derive it from other premises. When you evaluate foundational premises, however, you have to rely on intuition. How plausible is the premise? How plausible are its implications? That’s all I’ve got. That’s all anyone’s got. See Huemer’s Ethical Intuitionism for detailed discussion.

12. Isn’t it better to have one foundational premise, and derive everything from that one premise? Only if that foundational premise is supremely invulnerable to counterexamples. Otherwise, you should be a moral pluralist, who thinks there are multiple compatible foundational moral premises. After studying the history of moral philosophy for years, I haven’t located a single supremely invulnerable foundational moral premise. Huemer should agree, seeing as he’s the man who made me a moral pluralist.

[to be continued]

My Feast-or-Famine AI Bet with Holden Karnofsky

Over the last month or so, I’ve been been hammering out a new AI wager with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy. I think of it as the “Feast-or-Famine” bet. Holden suspects that AI will dramatically change the global economy, but he’s undecided about whether the changes will be dramatically good or dramatically bad. In contrast, I’m skeptical that AI will do anything dramatic anytime soon. I think AI will be like electricity or the internet: another new technology that will takes decades to work its ultimate magic.

As usual, though, this characterization of our disagreement is vague poetry.

The literal wording of the Caplan-Karnofsky bet lies below.

---

Holden wins $5000 if, by the end of 2044, there has been at least one year for which it is plausible — according to Bryan Caplan — that at least one of the following was true:

• Real Gross World Product was (conceptually, as opposed to officially) at least 4x the real GWP of 2024.

• Or: real GWP was (conceptually, as opposed to officially) at most 1/2 the real GWP of 2024.

Otherwise, Bryan wins $1000.

This is an attempt by Holden to operationalize "Stuff is going to get extremely crazy (due to AI)" in a way that captures lots of possibilities, from a catastrophe big enough to cut GWP in half to a productivity explosion big enough to bring it well above trend. Based on historical data, Holden believes that his side of the bet would have lost for all prior 20-year periods in human history; he is expecting something unprecedented to happen in the next 20 years.

Some additional details:

• Bryan will strive to count "weird" production that might not be captured in official statistics — for example, if autonomous AIs are building lots of stuff in outer space, and this is being excluded from official GWP for some reason (for example, because the stuff is neither made/sold by nor consumed/purchased by any humans), Bryan would still take this production into account when adjudicating the bet.*

• The amount due (from the loser of the bet to the winner) will be inflation-adjusted using CPI.

• As soon as the bet's resolution is unambiguous, payment and public concession are due within 3 months.

• If either party dies or becomes incapacitated before the bet is resolved, the financial stakes are void, but the bet will still have an official winner as determined by a backup adjudicators named by Bryan.

• Bryan’s choice of backup adjudicators, in order of priority, are: Alex Tabarrok, Maxwell Tabarrok, and Zixuan Ma.

* An example Holden has in mind would be if misaligned AI systems were producing huge amounts of stuff for purposes of their own or even just for mysterious reasons, and neither using it to enrich humans nor attacking humans. This might not get counted in official GWP if the AI systems weren't considered to be part of any particular country, but it would still be production.

---

P.S. Notice that the terms make me the judge in my own case. I’m humbled by the trust Holden is putting in me, and I will strive to deserve it!

*Pro-Market and Pro-Business*: The Sheldon Richman Conversation

Or, "What's right with business and wrong with left-libertarianism?"

I met Sheldon Richman in 1989 at the “Mises University” seminar at Stanford. I was right out of high school. Two years later, I was a Cato Institute summer intern. Since Sheldon ran the program, I got to talk ideas with him every day. He’s a true autodidact and polymath, with deep knowledge of economics, philosophy, history, and much more. And, as you’d expect, a great lover of liberty.

Also, funny.

I was puzzled, then, when Sheldon became a vocal left-libertarian in the early 2000s. I was especially puzzled when he started arguing that libertarians should oppose “capitalism.” In recent years, though, he dropped the left-libertarian and "anti-capitalist” labels. Curiouser and curiouser.

I’ve been wanting to know more about Sheldon’s intellectual evolution for years, and the release of my new Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez-Faire seemed like a great opportunity for a Caplan-Richman conversation on markets, business, capitalism, lobbying, greed, self-employment, and beyond. I’ve been criticizing left-libertarians for over a decade, but Sheldon is the first one I know who changed his mind. Here’s full video for our dialogue, which I greatly enjoyed. I hope you enjoy it too!

P.S. Pro-Market and Pro-Business, is naturally still on sale. And I’m still available for further interviews on the book; just email me and we’ll work something out.

Let Them Be Hillsdale

Why I signed the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, line-by-line

In the United States, one institution of higher learning — Hillsdale College — refuses all government funding. (Another, Grove City College, abjures all federal funding, but still accepts some state funding). As a result, Hillsdale is exempt from a vast range of government regulations, both federal and state.

Historically speaking, this is a recent development. Although Hillsdale was founded in the mid-19th century, the U.S. government waited until the 1970s to start suing them for non-compliance with federal anti-discrimination rules. Remarkably, the government did not even accuse Hillsdale of actually discriminating against anyone; they sued Hillsdale merely for refusing to document their compliance with federal discrimination law.

After many years of litigation, the courts finally ruled that Hillsdale could ignore government regulation if they refused government funding. With much help from loyal philanthropists, Hillsdale gradually became financially independent: It stopped taking federal funding in 1984, and state funding in 2007.

I am not a lawyer, but I do speak English. Given the Hillsdale precedent, I say two things with confidence.

First, since Hillsdale is not legally entitled to government funding, neither is any other notable college in America. Why? Because unlike Hillsdale, virtually every college in the United States has been flagrantly discriminating on the basis of race and sex for decades. Selective schools discriminate in both admissions and hiring. Unselective schools discriminate in hiring. Everyone who works in the industry knows this to be true, though of course many embrace the Tertullian-inspired (“I believe because it is absurd”) doctrine that discrimination against whites, Asians, and men isn’t discrimination.

Second, every college in America that wishes to continue discriminating has a legally straightforward way to do so: be Hillsdale. Abjure all government funding, like Hillsdale, and you can ignore a wide range of government regulations, like Hillsdale.

I am well-aware, of course, that laws are often bad. I further maintain that bad laws are made to be broken. The best government funding policy, as I explain in The Case Against Education, is full separation of school and state. But we shouldn’t let the best be the enemy of the good. And all things considered, denying government funding to organizations that flagrantly discriminate is good. For three reasons:

First, while discrimination should be legal, it is still a serious evil and should not be subsidized by taxpayers.

Second, spending taxpayer money wisely is better than spending taxpayer money foolishly. Meritocratic admissions and hiring is wiser than any alternative, and far wiser than the travesty of woke admissions and hiring.

Third, since at least some schools will spurn onerous funding conditions, imposing onerous funding conditions moves us closer to my ultimate goal. Which is, to repeat: separation of school and state.

I signed because it is literally true.

Given these views, no one should be surprised that I signed the recently published Manhattan Statement on Higher Education. But since some of my friends were in fact surprised, I’m now going to walk through the statement line-by-line and explain my reasoning. The original statement is in blockquotes (or double blockquotes); I’m not.

America’s colleges and universities have long been the bright lights of our civilization. For nearly four centuries, they have pioneered new fields of knowledge, brought the arts and sciences to new heights, and educated the men who built our republic. But over the past half-century, these institutions gradually discarded their founding principles and burned down their accumulated prestige, all in pursuit of ideologies that corrupt knowledge and point the nation toward nihilism.

The first two cheerleading sentences gave me pause, but they’re still literally true. Lots of great stuff has happened over the centuries at American colleges and universities. And if you’ve read any of my writings on wokeness, you know why I emphatically agree with the last sentence.

There have been warnings. From William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale to Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, conservatives pleaded for the universities to maintain their basic commitments, while liberals promised to reform the campus from within. All of these attempts failed. The conservatives were ignored; the liberals were steamrolled; and the process of ideological capture accelerated.

Yep.

Now, the truth is undeniable. Beginning with the George Floyd riots and culminating in the celebration of the Hamas terror campaign, the institutions of higher education finally ripped off the mask and revealed their animating spirit: racialism, ideology, chaos.

Poetic but nonetheless true.

The current state of affairs is untenable. The American people send billions to the universities and are repaid with contempt. The leaders of these institutions seem to have forgotten that the university and the state are bound together by compact. During the Founding era, schools of higher education were established by government charter and written into the law, which stipulated that, in exchange for public support, they had a duty to advance the public good, and, if they were to stray from that mission, the people retained the right to intervene.

I naturally believe that schools should be free to refuse any compact with the government. (I also think that government should refuse any compact with schools!) But if you’re receiving taxpayer money, it is the fiduciary duty of government to get good value for the money.

Over the years, the locus of this particular compact has changed—the universities have entered into a relationship with the federal government—but the underlying principle remains the same: higher education must serve the public good and, in times of trouble, must be reformed.

If wrote the statement, I would have added, “Or better yet, privatized.” But I still agree with the sentence as written.

The troubles of the current era are neither light nor transient. The universities have brazenly, deliberately, and repeatedly violated their compact with the American people. They have engaged in a long train of abuses, evasions, and usurpations, which, with every turn of the ratchet, have moved our society toward a new kind of tyranny—one in which ideology determines truth, and the university functions as a political agent of the Left.

Let us enumerate the facts:

[…]

I have publicly agreed with all of the Manhattan statement’s accusations for many years.

Enough. The American people provide status, privileges, and more than $150 billion per year to the universities. In light of these transgressions, we have every right to renegotiate the terms of the compact with the universities and to demand that they return to their original mission: to pursue knowledge, to educate the citizen, and to uphold the law. In exchange for continued public support, these institutions must abide by the principles of the Constitution and honor their obligation to public good.

Implicit in the final sentence, of course, is that colleges retain the Hillsdale option: Lose all your government funding, and you can do as you please.

To that end, we call on the President of the United States to draft a new contract with the universities, which should be written into every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit:

I am well-aware that Trump is a caricature of an evil politician. But just as I call on him to stop enforcing U.S. immigration laws, I am happy to call on him to stop wasting taxpayer money. And all of the following are reasonable ways to waste less taxpayer money.

The universities must advance truth over ideology, with rigorous standards of academic conduct, controls for academic fraud, and merit-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.