I was once in a running group with a guy who worked for Stanford inducing cancers in dogs, to trial and error test various treatments.
Personally I find this unconscionable, as there's an endless supply of all cancers in most species which would benefit from treatments.
It was an hour run, the time he spoke of it, of absolutely disgusting shame for our species and in particular because these experiments were largely grant securing.
I would argue we treat pigs (which are comparable to dogs in terms of intelligence) raised for slaughter much worse than these dogs. Yet I still eat bacon.
Moral consistency on animal welfare is really hard because we have so many blind spots due to how commonplace some practices are. There is definitely a push for ending things like cosmetics testing on animals[1], but I'm not sure we can or should stop testing things like cancer treatments on animals. At least not until we have viable alternatives.
Is it really a blind spot if you're aware yet still continue to support the behavior? Seems like mental gymnastics to feel less bad. "Well, I'm not absolutely certain this particular pig was mistreated, so..."
> I would argue we treat pigs (which are comparable to dogs in terms of intelligence)
Closer to toddlers actually. I'm not a vegetarian or animals rights activist or anything but I'm kind of surprised people eat pigs with how smart they are.
> pigs (which are comparable to dogs in terms of intelligence)
You must really like dogs. Pig intelligence is vastly superior to dog intelligence. Pigs basically are as smart as children, with a full range of emotion. Seriously, stop eating them. Be an example rather than entitled to indulge horrid tastes. We can all live without.
People like that don't rationalize it. You cannot win the ethical argument against eating animals. One simply ignores morals or does not care. And I don't mean this in an attacking way because we all do this to some extent.
Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
When you say "some people have different values" you probably mean "some people have simply not thought it through". I really don't think there's an ethical framework that favours industrial meat production. But please surprise me.
Now, most people have inconsistent ethics. Which I think is a different thing. I think most people that engage with the industrial meat complex simply ignore the ethical implications, that's actually quite easy to do and even more so when most people are just inconsistent when it comes to ethics. Sometimes people are utilitarians, other times they behave like deontologists and other times they will apply ethics of care.
I believe we are constantly building our own personal ethical frameworks. And that's kind of what you're alluding to, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that consistency is important, and I believe if we really tried to accomplish that most people would be faced with a very harsh reality. It's a struggle but we should be more honest with ourselves and the rest.
> Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
The one in which human comfort takes precedence over that of a domesticated species which have been selectively bred over generations to produce meat for consumption. The industrial process is tertiary to the slaughter itself and the economics of meat consumption. You can argue about 'industrialization' of anything -- resource extraction and industrial agriculture at large destroy life on a massive scale.
> When you say "some people have different values" you probably mean "some people have simply not thought it through"
No, some people don't value animal life that has been domesticate specifically for food production. Not many people want a domestic pig in their house, so why do they exist? Not by natural selection and not for their own sake. We made them and we eat them and we don't care because we also don't care about paramecium and the pigs certainly wouldn't care if you were being fed to it, it would just eat you.
> Now, most people have inconsistent ethics.
Sure, I will grant you that and go one further -- all people have inconsistent ethics.
Why do you care about pigs and not amoebas? Is it because one has a brain? Is it because one is multicellular? Is it because one is cute, or intelligent? What are the criteria? List all of your ethical criteria for food consumption and 'willing to argue that people who do it are bad people' and then list the features of everything you do and the consequences of those things and cross reference -- now, when you find a conflict, highlight it and then stop doing it. I bet you can't without seriously inconveniencing yourself to the point where you justify not following through.
> It's a struggle but we should be more honest with ourselves and the rest.
Absolutely agree. Self-awareness is the most important trait. I think that the term 'good person' can be roughly defined to mean 'self-aware and willing to correct after reflection'.
>> Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
> The one in which human comfort takes precedence over that of a domesticated species which have been selectively bred over generations to produce meat for consumption. The industrial process is tertiary to the slaughter itself and the economics of meat consumption. You can argue about 'industrialization' of anything -- resource extraction and industrial agriculture at large destroy life on a massive scale.
How is human comfort an "ethical framework"? I'm not sure you understand what ethics are.
So, in short, most people think it’s wrong to permanently end a creatures life because you get some temporary good feelings out of it.
You can prescribe a value, but if temporary sensory pleasures truly outweigh the entire lives of other beings, there may be neurological issues affecting compassion.
Then I would argue that there is no difference in comfort when living a life fueled by dead animals and their excretions versus a life fueled by plants.
Most individuals are comfortable admitting that they prefer to not abstain from things like steak and cheese because those things simply taste good. That, to me, is hedonistic pleasure: unnecessary, and an invalid argument for the continued abuse and slaughter of billions of animals around the world.
Many people (including me) do not take any pleasure in eating. In fact it is a chore. If I had to conform to a vegan diet I would literally not get enough nutrients for lack of motivation.
As an athlete that’s been vegan for nearly 5 years, I promise you it’s not that difficult.
But are you truly convinced that your lack of motivation to properly sustain yourself is worth the needless killing of animals and serious impact on the environment? If you’re here asking about moral frameworks and nitpicking definitions, I don’t think you are.
I contend it is not needless, and I contend that you are cause of just as much loss of life as I am through your actions. Though those lives may not meet your qualifications because you also make a judgement about what deserves your empathy and what does not -- and you have every right to. However you have no right to judge others.
People who do that come off like that 'born again' uncle everyone has who you have to avoid because you know that they are constantly thinking about how 'saved' they are and how you are walking the wayward path and every second sentence has to do with Jesus or politics centered around Jesus.
You don't care that he has his beliefs but you realize how he has taken one thing that he feels strong about philosophically and refuses to allow anyone else the same dignity of having their own moral compass free of side-eye and proselytizing. And that makes him extremely annoying to be around.
>I contend that you are cause of just as much loss of life as I am through your actions.
That's patently false. More than 85 billion land animals alone are slaughtered annually for food. Trillions if you include sea life. Regardless, any incidental deaths like rats or frogs getting crushed while harvesting vegetables are just not on the same ethical plane as factory farmed animals whose entire purpose for existing is to be slaughtered for mere human flavor preference.
You have yet to substantiate your position in any way other than a lack of motivation, and the evidence simply doesn't support your assertion that vegans cause just as much loss of life as people who regularly eat animals.
You can check this external source out as a starting point:
> If I had to conform to a vegan diet I would literally not get enough nutrients for lack of motivation.
I sincerely welcome any credible evidence you can provide that feeding animals plants for years and then slaughtering them for a few meals worth of food somehow equates to less use of virtually any resources compared to just eating the damn plants.
It's pretty appalling to see such disregard to non-human life. As if the fact that animals have been domesticated somehow made them lesser beings.
I mean, I guess you come at it from a sort of utilitarian maybe epicurean perspective? The idea of maximising human pleasure? What does the word "comfort" really means in this context? For example, people who take heroin or morphine feel great comfort; should we administer a lethal dosis of morphine to everyone at once? And of course we can argue that industrialization brings destruction I mean a big argument against mass agriculture is precisely that. Some argue that we should go back to more local food sources for this reason, de industralise our society a bit and I can see merit to that.
But really, the question I guess I'm asking is why do you place humans on the center to begin with? Is it because we are capable of overpowering other species and do with them as we want that there is justification to our actions? It seems you're really hammering on the concept of domestication, but why? Why is for example a domesticated pig less worthy of living than a domesticated dog, or a domesticated plant or a human? If someone commits a crime, is it okay for society to punish them in return? What if that person didn't know they were committing a crime, is it still okay to punish them? What if the person does not have the capability to understand that they are committing a crime? What if the person is not a human, but a pig? Is it possible to assign the category of person to an animal? Some philosophers and scientists believe that's a discussion worth having.
It's funny to me that you're taking such a defensive position just at the mention that maybe meat consumption requires a more thorough examination of our personal ethics. I think veganism is a very tough fight in modern society, which is why I think this is an issue that needs to be tackled in a much more systemic way. The first step is just making a societal decision on these questions you ask me. Is a chicken okay? Is a pig okay? Is an amoeba okay? Is a human okay? I think most people will feel disgusted and repulsed at the notion of eating another human being; but why? Is it as significantly different from a pig as a pig is to a plant? Is an amoeba capable of suffering? Do they feel pain? We know for certain that pigs feel pain as we've studied their brains and behaviour but amoeba, for example, don't have any of the necessary cellular components to feel "pain" as animals experience it. But this position can be challenged as well, why pain?
Like you said, there might be a myriad of reasons why someone would find eating animals objectionable and there might be reasons why we might find it necessary as well (for example, health reasons). I am simply wondering "is pleasure reason enough to eat animals the way we eat them?". For you, it seems like pleasure is reason enough, I wonder if you're in favour of the legalisation of all drugs? What about killing people for pleasure, if a serial killer finds infinite pleasure in the act of killing... should he be allowed? Or should we also take into account the suffering of the victim?
I actually find the term "good person" a bit... i don't know. I don't like it. The way I position myself in the world, I'm not a deontologist, I think a lot of these things are subjective. Consistence is important to me and I try to be consistent; we all have failings but I think admitting that we are flawed is the first step. And personally, I believe eating meat is an ethical failing as there are many others. People lie and cheat all the time, it doesn't necessarily make them bad. People hurt others in the pursuit of pleasure, it doesn't mean they are bad. I agree with you when you talk about the importance of willingness to correct after self reflection.
Ultimately my point is that eating meat is actually a really challenging philosophical problem that I don't think we really take it as seriously as we should, because it's much easier to ignore the problem than face the reality of our actions and think of the consequences that course correcting them might have on our lives and societies as a whole. I view our meat eating an addiction at the societal level, and I think in order to get to a healthy consumption (which might mean little or none) we would need to treat the issue the same way we treat addiction problems on communities. That's why to me acknowledging that we have a problem is such an important first step. I've realised now in this thread that many people don't think we even have a problem at all, that's a bit of a surprise for me.
> But really, the question I guess I'm asking is why do you place humans on the center to begin with?
You don't? Please tell me that you are not advocating reallocating half of all hospital funds to animal shelters in order to equalize the balance between us and domesticated animals.
> It seems you're really hammering on the concept of domestication, but why?
Because it explains the value system. We domesticated animals to eat them. Pigs ate the food scraps we couldn't and we ate them. I'm not sure what is unclear to you about this setup.
> Why is for example a domesticated pig less worthy of living than a domesticated dog, or a domesticated plant or a human?
Everything has life worthy of living. My question to you is why you don't cry over the single celled organism holocaust every time you wash your hands? Are their lives not worthy? We compartmentalize and prioritize -- you do it just as much as I do, you just feel like judging me for being honest about what mine are.
I thought I was clear in saying that life in itself might not be enough?
Why would you say something "everything has life worthy of living" why? I actually disagree with this statement. Animals like pigs or dogs or humans are not just living beings, they also have complex mental processes. Did you know pigs are very much aware of deaths in their close families? These are complex animals that feel both physical and emotional pain. I'm sorry you think domestication has turned pigs into walking meat but that's simply not the case. So it's not difficult to justify the ending of lives of bacteria as opposed to pigs, but it is much more difficult to justify the ending of the lives of pigs as opposed to humans.
And I think you really haven't been able to justify your human exceptionalism, instead you simply attack me as if I'm supposed to convince you that this is not the case simply because you "feel" that it's right. And that's my point, you have a dogmatic belief that you're not willing to even challenge.
Obviously I get the instinct of human exceptionalism, but instinct does not make for good reason. Should we allocate half of our hospital resources to animal shelters? I mean, how about we stop eating meat instead? How about we stop the mass consumerism we are trapped in? We don't have to sacrifice the well being of humans to improve the well being of animals. Well, we might have to sacrifice some comfort, because the way we live is simply unsustainable.
> Why would you say something "everything has life worthy of living" why?
I'm confused. You qualify some life as exceptional and other life as not. Because of 'complexity'? How is one thing different from another?
> So it's not difficult to justify the ending of lives of bacteria as opposed to pigs, but it is much more difficult to justify the ending of the lives of pigs as opposed to humans.
According to what? Because they have emotions and care about family? How do you know? You anthropomorphize an animal and use that to justify your stance -- and complain about human centric thinking.
> And I think you really haven't been able to justify your human exceptionalism
I never even attempted to do so. I said it is innate to humans to do that. You just did it without even realizing it by ascribing human qualities to pigs to justify why they should be treated better than other animals.
> instead you simply attack me as if I'm supposed to convince you that this is not the case simply because you "feel" that it's right.
Oh please. I haven't been emotional even a tiny bit here and I haven't attacked anyone. You feel attacked, but if you re-read this entire conversation what is being attacked is a push to see that there is no absolute moral decision one can make about animal life and food without contradiction on many levels. I happen to pick the dubious morality accepted by the vast vast majority of human society throughout recorded history and I acknowledge that it is flawed, and I have no qualms picking my own species comfort over those lower in the food chain which have been adapted by us for utilitarian purpose.
> Obviously I get the instinct of human exceptionalism, but instinct does not make for good reason.
No, but it doesn't have to, because you can't escape it. It is innate.
Look, I don't agree with industrially processing animal life to be a mass commodity but I can't separate 'killing a whole lot of them at once centrally' with 'killing a few in disparate locations'. But I will defend eating meat against vague philosophical word salads that do nothing but claim the same thing I am but with a different set of qualifications for what is and is not worthy of our empathy for reasons just as dubious as mine. At least I admit it.
> Under which ethical framework is it possible to justify industrial slaughtering of animals?
Most major religions for starts. Probably not the answer you were looking for, nor one that sits well with you, but it is nevertheless the truth.
Perhaps you, like myself, are an atheist. Well it turns out that most atheists eat meat too. So the evidence points towards industrial slaughter being ethical in most secular ethical frameworks as well.
inb4 "it's not a real ethical framework if I disagree with it."
It strikes me as more of an ethical dilemma. I've known quite a few devout vegans who resumed eating animals when their health declined and they could not reverse it without abandoning veganism.
The dilemma being that despite the harm caused, our species developed to eat animal products, and it's difficult to fully replace that.
That's an interesting point. Some people might really need to supplement their diets with certain animal products, though as far as I know, a vegetarian diet or a diet that includes very little meat consumption is more than enough for most people in terms of health requirements.
Yet that's not really the case, we eat a lot of meat. And red meat as well which really is not necessary in our diets. I believe trying to argue from a naturalist perspective is rather dishonest in that it's by no means the real reason why people consume meat. People consume meat the way they do because it's a cultural expectation as well as a highly pleasurable act for most.
So really, to me, the dilemma has much more to do with how much pleasure are we willing to give up as a society and I really don't think that goes very far. I mean, this debate has also ramifications when it comes to the climate; how much are we willing to give up in comfort and pleasure to curtail the ecological disaster we are causing? The answer: not much really.
In my opinion these are really failings of our political systems, so in other words, the system that's supposed to help us make decisions for our society as a whole. I'm pretty sure most people would agree that maybe in a reasonable amount of time we'd like to see changes to our diets, it's an interesting discussion to have and there could be long term plans to achieve it that could be very much realistic... but our political system simply does not allow the for the discussion to be had in the first place.
It's primarily about what livers produce, which determines which chemicals are vitamins (which varies across mammals, for example) and which amino acids (the lego blocks that form proteins) are "essential amino acids" for a species.
It's possible as a human to ingest from non animal sources all the essential nutrients, but there's HUGE misdirection in at least american commerce about how to do so. For instance, labels talk about grams of protein, which is inadequate: you could be ingesting a ton of a subset of amino acids in protein, and entirely deficient in an essential amino acid.
It seems that eating animals was a heuristic that supplies essential amino acids and vitamins.
Just to clarify because it’s not obvious in your comment (but not alluded to either): it is very much possible to opt out of animal cruelty for food and eat a vegan diet while being healthy.
It's a slippery slope. You can't test on people, and need animals that have similar drug kinetics. That being said, so much drug research is unnecessary garbage, and living beings pay the price.
I worked in immunotherapeutics and gave cancer to ~25 mice. I can't say it helped progress the field much, and I still feel bad. Cannot imagine what it's like to give cancer to a dog.
To study cures for cancer you need to induce the exact type of cancer you are trying to treat in dozens of identical animals that are as similar as possible to humans, and do so in a reproducible way. suggesting you could just go and work with any old animal that happens to have some sort of cancer is incredibly naive.
You were vague, so readers used the most probable parse: that the dogs were used for human-medical research.
Anyway, pet owners aren't lining up to volunteer their pets for experimental treatments, so researching dog cancer on random sick dogs isn't a great model either.
Some subset of owners of sick pets DO enroll pets in experimental treatments, which i know from a life among animals. In a personal case, the results amazed the oncologists.
Interesting that you point out the fact that they can't speak. I wonder how much of our willingness to mark animals out as, in some sense, lower than us is down to their lack of human vocalisation ability. I sometimes worry that their thoughts are closer to ours than we give credit for.
I only used 'speak' because the person I was replying to had said:
> What would a dog answer
To me it's interesting that they chose to give a dog the ability to answer. Certainly the ability to speak like a human would factor in 'how much like humans they are'. It's a way of humanizing the dog, which introduces bias, making the dog more human than it really is.
There is no need to pretend dogs are almost people to justify treating them well.
Sure, I wasn't trying to catch you out :-) and I agree that animals should be treated well, of course.
Your mention of speaking just reminded me of a thought I'd had, regarding how we measure where animals' sit on the human-ness scale. I think that metric has a lot of biases in how we weight its constituent factors. I.e. how well an animal can communicate with us - which might be quite orthogonal to its intelligence. (For example an octopus)
Your statement made me realize I should empathize with the machines in the Matrix. After all, a human life is objectively worth less to machines than to humans. A machine can last for centuries and can have more utility on a daily basis than a human.
Different things have different values, which you seem to have realized here: "a human life is objectively worth less to machines" "To machines" is the important part. But unless you're a machine, it would be strange for you to have machine values, so I don't understand why you say that you should empathize with the machines. Unless... are you an LLM?
Anyway, different sorts of things having different values is why so many people are concerned about powerful non-human entities with inhuman motivations (AIs generally, and corporations particularly.) It's also the reason people are afraid of hungry bears (the bear cares more about itself than you.)
I wasn't arguing utility. I'm arguing there there's some value we place on human life that is above a dog's life. It doesn't depend on how much utility one derives from humans vs dogs.
The value judgement could simply come from the fact that we need to preserve our own species, and if we need to sacrifice some small percentage of dogs to do so, than this is perfectly reasonable. We can still exhibit empathy by accepting that this situation is not ideal and striving to reduce that percentage down to 0, maybe by inventing substitutes.
As for the machines example, I would expect the machines to place higher value on their own life than on human life, precisely because they would be objectively superior, which is why I would not let machines exist without any restrictions, even if the machines would be a more useful dominant species.
Utility (= (pleasure minus pain) x time) is the essential good when we're talking about animal and human welfare. Good actions increase expected utility; bad actions decrease expected utility.
Machines experience no pleasure or pain and thus there is zero utility gained/lost by destroying them. Dogs and humans do; it's bad to kill or torture them.
Throwing a dog in front of a train (or killing/torturing it for research) to save a child depends on how likely it is that it will work, and how many QALYs the dog and child have left.
Sure. To me, my daughter's life is worth more than yours, your family's and everyone else who reads HN. I accept that the inverse is true for you.
If I had to press a button to choose between my daughter or all the strangers on HN and their dogs, I would press it and wouldn't even blink.
If it were a stranger's daughter, though, I'd probably ask some questions about the daughter, and if I can't determine that there's something about her that would be worth a million strangers, she would have the same value as an average stranger, so I would opt to save a million strangers.
If I had to choose between a stranger and all dogs on Earth, I would ask some questions about the human, and, absent any red flags, I would choose the human, simply out of the need to preserve my own species, even if I think there's more than enough of us and having dogs around would probably make a lot of people's life better than that one person.
There's plenty of research showing what an ecological disaster dogs are (and other pets too, but dogs are the worst by a large margin for various reasons, including body size). Objectively speaking, if you had to choose between a stranger human and all the dogs on Earth, you'd be doing the planet a big favor by choosing to keep the human alive.
Of course, humans are an ecological disaster too, but a single human out of 8B is a drop in the ocean, and we're not comparing 1 human to 1 dog.
And honestly, I don't see how dogs make anyone's life "easier": they require more care and attention than a toddler, and it never stops until they die. People I know with dogs basically never travel or take any kind of vacation, because they can never leave their dog alone for more than ~8 hours at a time. Any kind of pet is truly a luxury, but dogs require a level of commitment and caretaking well above and beyond almost any other.
Citation for that research would be very interesting, as i've not seen that.
Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.
I think this is normally called "A dog is a man's best friend." or something similar.
I suspect it holds across millenia because that cross species relation is at times more dependable and communicative than individuals of the same species often are capable of, and that's not sarcasm, I mean it's where that phrase comes from. And i say that as someone not averse to humans collaborating, just as someone who lives among many species.
>Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.
I don't see this with dogs at all. People with dogs are basically slaves to the dogs; their entire life revolves around the dog. It's absolutely no different than having a small toddler, except that you can bring toddlers with you places. I don't see how it's healthy or productive to not be allowed to leave your home for more than 6 hours because your dog will destroy stuff or pee or poop if you're gone too long, you can never go on a vacation, everything in your daily life has to be planned around the dog. How this ever got normalized, I have no idea, but it wasn't like this a generation ago.
The dog would say that it has more value, same for a tree, or an ant. If we had to fully protect everything categorized as intelligent/living, we wouldn't do much.
Dogs may be a hard no for someone, and yes for someone else. It's kinda arbitrary.
I think I know what you mean, but the impression was that the tests were for treatments in dogs, perhaps the presumption being they'd work in humans, but that was not clear.
> Is it so outrageous to say that a dog's life has less value than a human's?
The commenter I replied to said "yes"
So the commenter is saying that yes, it is outrageous to say that a dog's life has less value than a human's.
So that implies that it is outrageous to say that because a dog's life does not have less value than a human life. It has equal or greater value. I'm going to assume that the commenter means equal value.
So if a dog's life is equal in value to a humans, it follows we should dedicate as many resources to dog health as human health.
Is any of the above flawed?
> nor was any mention of values made.
We're talking about the relative value of human life vs dog here. The term 'value' has literally been mentioned. Values by definition are what we believe to be valuable. By answering "yes" to the question, the commenter has revealed some of their values as it relates to dog vs. human life.
If they are at all subject to a functional IACUC (i.e. at a university) this is required. The bar for testing things on (especially charismatic) animals is quite high.
Personally I find this unconscionable, as there's an endless supply of all cancers in most species which would benefit from treatments.
It was an hour run, the time he spoke of it, of absolutely disgusting shame for our species and in particular because these experiments were largely grant securing.