In much of mainstream society, it is considered kind to "put an animal out of its misery" if it is suffering and will likely not recover. Yet it's considered morally abhorrant to do the same to a human.
It surprised me to learn that, despite their willingness in general to break with conventional morality, much of EA appears to feel similarly. (Example, and another example. Content warnings for animal death, etc.)
Yet I haven't been able to find any good argument for this. If your goal is to reduce suffering, then killing humans in pain acomplishes that just as effectivly as killing animals in pain does. If your goal is to maximize preferences satisfied, I'm pretty sure those animals would prefer to not die.
Obviously you can justify this by just saying "my utility function sees animal death as neutral and human death as negative", which is a perfectly valid utility function for someone to have, but EA usually tries to provide more objective grounding for their morality.
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Apologies for the delay. Resolved to my opinion at the end of the year.
As of right now I'm uncertain. A few people argued that animals don't have the reflective capacity to really have "preferences" in the same way as humans, which seems plausible and I don't have the knowledge to evaluate.
So far I find these unconvincing. I realize there were a few comments I didn't reply to at the time, which seems a little unfair to the YES traders trying to change my mind. So if none of the YES traders object, I'll finish replying to those comment threads, just in case someone had a knockdown argument ready to go just as soon as I responded. (If you think this is unfair, let me know, and I'll figure out something that's fair to everyone.)
Hmm, if anything actually does change my mind, it would also be unfair to resolve the market to YES without giving the other side a chance to respond. Which effectively means I'm just ignoring my original close date.
I didn't consider in advance that I might just not engage with the comments for a while, preventing me from being exposed to arguments that people were trying to make.
What seems like the most honorable resolution here? Stick to the original close date? Or reopen the market and wait until all discussion threads have finished?
Resolving to your opinion at the end of 2022, ignoring any extra arguments, is the safe option. At worst, it makes you a "bad market creator" for not engaging with the market to the degree the traders hoped you would, but it's not ever going to be looked at as a dishonorable resolution.
I wouldn't extend deadlines without the buy-in from major traders on both sides (As for minor traders, I'm sure the major YES holders would be happy to buy off the minor NO holders in the event that an extension wins them the market). But if you can get it, it does seem like the outcome that would leave the fewest people disappointed.
@MichaelWheatley I agree, that matches the criteria, and Isaac didn't commit to reading the comments here.
Humans don't like pain, and we usually care more about human preferences than animal, so it makes sense to kill a painful animal against its will.
This argument does not apply to most humans, because their preference to not die matters more, and because lots of other people dislike murder or dislike human euthanasia.
@IsaacKing I didn't take this to be about self defense, just an unusual use of 'painful animal' (animal full of pain)
@DavidSartor Well then this seems like it's begging the question. Yes, we "usually care more about human preferences than animal". My question was why we should do that.
I'm confused by your examples. The author of the squirrel story indicated that early EA was okay with putting an animal out of its misery, but the author was not okay with that, and didn't consider it kind. They don't express an opinion on human euthanasia. And they don't currently identify as EA. I'm not sure what this tells me about EA attitudes in general, but I think very little. It doesn't seem like evidence for your thesis.
On the market resolution, I think there's a pretty clear consent and communication difference, where the vast majority of humans are capable of informed consent to euthanasia, and the vast majority of non-human animals are not. I think that's a clear moral difference.
@MartinRandall To be clear, I'm referring only to situations where the entity doesn't consent. i.e. why is it ok to kill a suffering animal without its consent, but not a suffering human?
@IsaacKing are you also referring only to humans that cannot communicate their consent or lack of consent?
@IsaacKing huh.
Well I think the normal claim for non-human animal euthanasia is that killing the animal is in the animal's interests, and the smarter human who is doing the killing is able to judge that. The animal cannot communicate to argue otherwise. Opinions can differ on individual cases but there is at least room for disagreement on the matter. You are pretty sure that all such animals would prefer not to die but that is not the consensus.
When a human kills another human, against their will, the two are roughly equal in intelligence, both can communicate, and so the situation is very different. A human who believes that their life is worth living is the best judge of that, because they are living their life.
@MartinRandall The claim that animals aren't able to consent and therefore a smarter being should make that decision for them is interesting, but certainly is not the view held by a majority of people, since it would also make it ok to kill a suffering child.
If you come across a mentally retarded person who has been seriously injured such that they cannot speak, would you kill them?
@IsaacKing Human society follows a different set of rules for both emotional and pragmatic reasons.
For instance, we've noticed in the past that if you let people do destructive things to other people "for their own good," while there might be good justifications in theory, as soon as you open that door, its used as an excuse to do nasty things. This is part of why there's a lot of opposition to euthanasia by people worried about a slippery slope, even among people who are fine with it in theory.
@IsaacKing Human children are more intelligent than non-human animals, and better communicators, so no, that argument does not imply that it's okay to go around killing random human children based on their apparent suffering. Ditto human adults with disabilities.
I guess a slippery slope argument with respect to animals would be something like "if we let someone euthanize their pet cat when it is suffering horribly from terminal cancer, pretty soon we'll be brutally killing millions of chickens every day to get cheaper protein". Doesn't really work.
@IsaacKing Society values autonomy & consent a lot. For people unable to make decisions for themselves effectively, such as children, those who are disabled or seriously ill, society has to assign people to make decisions on their behalf. Being guardian of someone else can be a thankless responsibility, so society simply doesn't allow guardians to make certain decisions on the behalf of their wards which could plausibly be legitimate, but which, in the absence of any way to determine the purity of the guardians' motives, would often be abused for the guardians' benefit.
In the case of animals, if you adopt a goat but then decide it's too much work, you're allowed to give it away or sell it or eat it, so there's less concern about moral hazard. Say a goat owner decides the goat should be put out of its misery. They're allowed to kill the goat, so we know it's not just a flimsy excuse to do so.
This has kind of gone on a tangent. What are your present objections/stumbling blocks that we have to address?
I agree this is a bit of a tangent. If I understand correctly, I think you two are arguing not that there's any intrinsic moral difference between them, but that there are practical differences. Giving humans the power to kill other humans would result in that being abused for personal gain, whereas that's less of a risk with animals since there's much less to be gained. Is that right?
If so, that seems reasonable to me, but it doesn't really address the question that the market is asking about. I'm also a bit skeptical of that; do we really think that having a norm making it ok to kill a human who has just had their legs crushed and no ambulance can get there soon is going to lead to people killing each other for profit in less extreme circumstances?
@IsaacKing I think Michael and I are making slightly different arguments, or maybe have a different emphasis. I'll try to make my argument a bit more rigorous and clear.
At the most fundamental level, humans, non-human animals, plants, robots, rocks, are all just patterns of matter/energy/information, and there's no "intrinsic moral difference". I don't think this is what the market is about.
At a higher level, we see that there are higher level concepts like intelligence, communication, suffering, desires, goals, agreements, consent, etc. They are mostly present in humans. They are mostly not present in rocks. And because of these differences we treat humans differently to rocks.
The differences between humans and cats are not quite as stark as the differences between humans and rocks, but they are stark. The differences are so big that "a difference in quantity can become a difference in quality". For example, if my cat is in a lot of pain, it is really hard to know what it wants. If my human friend is in a lot of pain it is really easy - just ask.
Suppose you say that the differences between humans and cats are small, so they should be treated the same. This would be a massive overhaul of current society. If there are no intrinsic moral differences maybe that's inconveniently correct. But now we run into the question of rats. The differences between cats and rats are smaller than the differences between humans and cats. So by the transitive logic, we need to treat rats like humans. And it keeps going like that. After rats, insects. After insects, plants. After plants, rocks. Add as many intermediary steps as you need to make the absurdity work for you.
Maybe this starts to convince you but now you are worried about vulnerable humans. What about some tiny human, too young to communicate, too small to form plans, totally dependent on others? Are we to treat them fundamentally differently to adult humans, based only on the massive differences in intelligence, communication, etc?
Well, of course the answer is yes, human embryos are killed in large numbers every day and we treat them very differently to adult humans. I don't want to get into the morality of abortion, I've never had to make those decisions. But I observe that humans are treated differently at every stage of development from embryo to adulthood, because they are different at each of these stages.
What about people with terminal illnesses, in pain, unable to communicate their wishes, unable to act, their intelligence declining? Are we to treat them fundamentally differently too? Where does it end?
But of course we do treat them fundamentally differently. See deceleration of care. See the doctrine of double effect. See medical power of attorney. See legalized euthanasia. See prosecutorial discretion. I've never had to make those decisions either. But people do.
Okay, so what if we have a newborn baby, and we compare them to a genius dolphin at the prime of its life, and maybe we say that they have similar intelligence and communication abilities, plus the "etc". So really there's no intrinsic moral difference here after all. Overlapping populations.
But dolphins are not actually treated the same as human babies. The dolphin might get the ability to decide what fish to eat, but the baby gets what it's given. But the baby doesn't have to do tricks to earn fish. And this is because dolphins are not actually the same as human babies. Even if they would score as many points on some one-dimensional scale, there are many dimensions.
Let me reply again to the last response you gave to this line of argument, before the conversation went on a tangent.
The claim that animals aren't able to consent and therefore a smarter being should make that decision for them is interesting, but certainly is not the view held by a majority of people, since it would also make it ok to kill a suffering child.
Most suffering children will not be suffering tomorrow. Most suffering children can communicate perfectly well. No, it is not okay to kill suffering children. I think you are thinking of legal "consent". I'm thinking of asking a kid "shall we watch TV?" and they say "yes" or "no". Most animals can't do that.
If you come across a mentally retarded person who has been seriously injured such that they cannot speak, would you kill them?
No. It's not my job to make life and death decisions for random strangers. Also, people who can't speak can still communicate. Also, people with mental disabilities typically don't want to die. This is a weird and offensive hypothetical. I think you are overestimating the impact of disability on desire to live.