[content: hurting animals]
Yesterday in a discussion with some undergrad philosophy students, one of them argued it’s immoral to benefit from wrong acts. If someone kills an animal and nothing will be different if you do or you don’t eat it, is it ok to eat it? He thought no, I thought yes. In this thought experiment, your choice doesn’t change at all whether any other animals are killed. I couldn’t see any way that this made anybody worse off, and that’s what I care about. He thought it was inherently wrong, even though you weren’t changing any outcome.
We reran the argument with various other appalling variations: theft, torture, etc. (This was at breakfast; gotta love philosophy students.)
I thought these things were upsetting and I wouldn’t want to be connected with them, but it’s out of some basic squeamishness rather than because I really believe it’s morally wrong to benefit from them, if truly there’s no downstream harm.
Strict rule-following feels like the wrong approach to me in these thought experiments. But it’s like a much more sensible approach in the real world where there are nearly always indirect effects, and where you’re more likely to break a boundary again after you’ve broken it once.
Eating meat, even if it was going to be thrown away, sets norms about this being an acceptable thing to do. If you’re a vegan who wants to end animal farming, avoiding any animal products does strengthen your position! That’s because we live in the real world where things have consequences.
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If someone’s actually willing to push people onto trolley tracks and so forth, you should be concerned that they’re a psychopath! They don’t seem to have normal moral intuitions, and they might behave abnormally in other circumstances too.
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Sometimes “follow social rules and act like a good person” fails because social rules are inadequate. Most people who’ve never participated in an animal slaughter would be grossed out if they had to watch the slaughter, and might well refuse to eat the result. But we don’t have to watch it or think about it, and eating meat is socially acceptable.
Willingness to eat meat doesn’t indicate psychopathy in our society. Cutting the tails off puppies for fun would be a genuine red flag about someone, because it’s not normal in our society. Cutting the tails off pigs is a standard agricultural practice, and the fact that your neighbors eat pork doesn’t mean you have to worry about what they’ll do to your puppy.
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Related reading by Christianity on the Spectrum, my new favorite author: “To Eat or Not to Eat (Your Dog After it Dies) A dramatic retelling of the time I tried to convince a group autistic boys to not discuss eating a family pet when a classmate just announced her dog died.”
These kids are not proposing anything morally wrong, according to me. The comedy of the essay is that they have no sense of why their perfectly logical stances will upset their classmates.
The kids are carefully thinking about how to not hurt any animals here. But their classmates have a hard time telling that, or predicting their behavior. Following social rules even when they’re arbitrary (we don’t eat dogs because we just don’t) helps your classmates know how to engage with you.
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Arguments for effective altruism sometimes focus on why “good intentions are not enough.” Someone who donates to charity that turns out to be useless might feel like they’re a good person for donating, but they’re not actually helping anyone. I’d rather have this person for a neighbor than someone who didn’t donate at all — they’re the kind of person who at least tries to help and cares about what a good person should do. I suspect that on a subconscious level, a lot of what people are doing when they pursue “being a good person” is demonstrating that they’re a trustworthy collaborator / tribe member / neighbor / partner. Their decisions might not be optimal, but it’s usually good to live in a setting with a lot of these people.
The people I actually most want to collaborate with are people who understand how to act “like a good person” in conventional ways, but also think about consequences. And if I’m on the receiving end of a service or policy, I definitely want it to be designed by a consequentialist who cares about the real-world effects (including the indirect effects.)