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Comment by koboll | Hacker News Reader

We can, without lapsing into full panpsychism, state some ethical paradoxes about the way we can observe animal emotion, versus the way we actually treat animals.

For example, it's widely accepted that pigs are extremely intelligent animals, capable of feeling pain and suffering to a degree more sophisticated even than young children.

And yet treating young children with the same level of disregard-for-suffering that we routinely, banally treat pigs with is considered a capital crime.

At a certain point, we'll have to resolve this societal cognitive dissonance. I strongly suspect it will end up being resolved with animals being granted a far greater degree of legal protection from pain and suffering than they have now.

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Another way for resolving the dissonance, is to assume that torturing young children is worse than torturing pigs because young children can become more sophisticated than pigs.

But i agree with you that eventually we'll stop treating animals the way we treat them now, because growing meat in a lab will be cheaper, making majority of the people indifferent, and allowing the minority of the people who care to pass stricter laws (though i am not sure if that would work for fish, and for abolishing all the hunting).

I don't really think that it just comes down to can-become-more-sophisticated. Assume we had children that never grow up, and we can tell which ones. Assume even that they just mysteriously from the forest, so they don't have parents/owners. I really can't see the legal system changing to permit us to treat them in the same manner we treat pigs.

I can't see the legal system changing either, but thousands of years ago after a hungry winter i can't believe people feeding the non-growing children, or letting the real children to die because they don't want to kill and eat the 'broken' children from the forest.

Many hunter gatherer societies were ok with killing ill or unwanted children, because those who didn't do that didn't survive.

I don't think anyone was making an argument based on human behaviours thousands of years ago, or how an argument based on primitive cultures is relevant. Unless your point is that if these hypothetical forest-children existed, modern society would be okay with farming them en-mass in cages for their meat?

I don't know any vegans or vegetarians who refuse to acknowledge the reality of eating for survival - the issue is based on choice, and if you have the luxury of choice why would you decide to eat another sentient being.

My argument is that eating them would become an accepted thing, and then at some point society would be having debates about replacing their meat with some other kind of food, very similar to what our society does about animals now. And my guess is that in that situation again the course of action would be mostly determined by economics of farming.

> and if you have the luxury of choice why would you decide to eat another sentient being

It's not a completely equivalent choice, but also a little bit of inconvenience in the form of not eating the favorite types of foods or often having to take supplements (e.g. B12), and most people seem to have a healthy dose of selfishness. I personally am not convinced that farm animals are intelligent enough to justify the urgent action, instead of waiting until artificially grown meat becomes cheaper and resolves the issue in a natural way.

>At a certain point, we'll have to resolve this societal cognitive dissonance. //

It appears that the majority of the World, setting aside the question of the the truth of the notion for now, believes that this is entirely solved as the child has a soul and the pig does not?

So, for most there is no dissonance?

Most of the world probably does believe this, which is something I find profoundly disturbing. We have a long way to go as a species in developing a sane ethics system.

However, considering the progress we've already made, I have hope that we can make more.

Perhaps ethics is not something absolute, and is a game thorethic optimal strategy that changes as the rules of the game change.

If hunting is the only thing you can do sane ethics system would allow killing the whale no matter how intelligent creature it is. And letting members of another tribe die instead of trying to share and risking members of your own tribe to die is a sane thing too.

But things change if you a member of a civilization that can produce as much food as it wants without killing anyone.

My understanding is that most (many?) vegans even today accept killing when it's necessary for survival. That necessity is just extremely rare for modern humans (or it should be, in a fairer world).

That said, I find the idea of game-theory as a "universal basis" of ethics intriguing.

For more than a few people, someone with darker skin is no better than a pig. If we can't get past treating animals we know to be human as if they are no more than useful pets, there isn't much hope at all for the non-humans.

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