Skywritings

“…I wish to reiterate my admiration for your veganism…”

Admiration? For veganism? But it is so simple and easy — not at all what people (including me) imagined. No sacrifice, no hardship — and no reduction whatsoever in gastronomic pleasure: in fact, quite the opposite.

I now realize that not only is it true (as we have all heard many times) that our species is neither herbivore nor carnivore but omnivore, but that this consists of two contingent “modes.” When a human consumes animal protein, most alimentary needs are fulfilled, so there is very little need or desire for herbivory. (That’s why it’s hard to get meat-eating kids to eat vegetables.)

But when our metabolism gets the cue to switch to herbivore mode — the cue is the complete absence of animal protein (meat, fish, dairy, eggs) from one’s diet — then the taste of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains all transforms and becomes incomparably more delicious and satisfying than when one was in carnivore mode.

It is for this reason (and not the opposite, as people imagine: not because vegans can’t find enough tasty things to eat) that many vegans are so obsessed with food, recipes, cooking! It is because everything tastes so good, and such a rich variety of potential gustatory pleasure is opened up by the complete switch to the herbivore mode. For most of my life, while I was still just a vegetarian, still eating dairy and eggs, hence animal protein, I never bothered to cook. It wasn’t worth the effort. Since I became a vegan 6 years ago, my pleasure from and interest in food have grown so much that I have not only taken to cooking things, but I have discovered that I may even have a little talent for it!

And one last thing: The reason I (politely, and appreciatively) decline admiration for being a vegan is not just because it is in reality so trivially easy and rewarding, but out of the belief and hope that in fact I am absolutely no different from the majority of human beings: the majority are decent, and are eating meat only because they mistakenly believe two things to be true that are in fact untrue: that (1) we need to consume animals in order to survive and be healthy and (2) that this can be and is being done in a humane way that does not involve suffering for the animals.

Both (1) and (2) are in fact untrue. And (2), in particular, is untrue in a monstrously horrific way.

So I decline admiration for becoming vegan because I think the only difference between me and the majority — who, like me, would never knowingly cause needless suffering — is merely informational. I (and many others) just happen to have learned already that the animal suffering is (1) indeed needless and (2) indeed suffering, terrible suffering. Hence it is our duty to inform and awaken the rest of the decent majority who are still so tragically misinformed.

Indeed, the fact that the only relevant difference between us and the majority of humanity is informational, and hence remediable, is the only hope of the countless tragic victims of humanity’s greatest crime. (The Holocaust was humanity’s greatest crime against humanity, but our treatment of animals is humanity’s greatest crime tout court.)

If vegans weren’t exactly the same as everyone else, it would mean that animals were doomed to eternal, inescapable agony.

Booth, D. A. (1985). Food‐conditioned Eating Preferences and Aversions with Interoceptive Elements: Conditioned Appetites and Satieties. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 443(1), 22-41.

Booth, D. A., & Simson, P. C. (1971). Food preferences acquired by association with variations in amino acid nutrition. The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 23(1), 135-145.

Young, P. T. (1957). Psychologic factors regulating the feeding process. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 5, 154-161.

Young, P. T. (1948). Appetite, palatability and feeding habit: a critical review. Psychological Bulletin, 45(4), 289.

I have been thinking about morality from a very early age (partly, no doubt, because my parents were survivors of the Holocaust in which much of my family was killed).

I don’t know at what age I began thinking about it, but I do know that I became a vegetarian when I turned 17, and that it was because it was only then that I found out that it was possible; I would have done it much earlier if I had known. I don’t blame myself for not having inquired and found out earlier then, but I do blame myself for not having inquired and found out until almost 50 years later that it was possible to be a vegan too.

I am not a believer in gods or the supernatural (apart from a very brief period when I was very young). I am a naturalist.

And I know that nature (i.e., physical laws and Darwnian evolution) are amoral, i.e., psychopathic. The only criterion is (morally blind) causality. Nothing matters. There is no good or evil, right or wrong. In the biological realm, causality has led to mechanisms that engender survival and reproduction.

In the causal system that has evolved in the earth’s biosphere, at some time, and for some cause as yet unknown but no doubt related to survival and reproduction, sentience evolved. And with sentience, the capacity for pain and pleasure. Organisms feel.

Hence morality, too, evolved only then. Not just with the capacity for feeling, but also with the capacity for empathy (feeling for the feelings of others) — mainly present in organisms toward their young, and especially pronounced in mammals and other K-selected species.

Apart from that, there is no law, either physical or mathematical, that engenders, dictates or adjudicates morality, apart from whatever causal forces that led to the evolution of sentience, and of empathy and altruism, no doubt in the service of survival and reproduction. That also means there is no rational basis for morality, if “rational” means deduction or justification via reasoning (assuming that reasoning means inferences based on logic and evidence).

Logic can indicate what follows formally from what (from axioms to theorems). Empirical evidence can indicate what is probably the case in the world. But neither of them can engender or dictate morality, because both the object and the subject of morality is feeling (sentience) itself. Without feeling there is no morality.

What do feelings have to say about morality? Only one thing. It is wrong to hurt. From this it follows that it is right to minimize hurt. Nothing follows about pleasure, at least not morally, except where being deprived of pleasure hurts.

The rest is all about determining what minimizes hurt. And that necessarily requires inferences, predictions, hypotheses. If there were a way to know when we have a valid hypothesis about how to minimize hurt, then the rest is just implementation and can perhaps be described as applied negative utility calculations.

But pleasure (other than pain from pleasure-deprivation) has no place at all in the moral equation, any more than mass, momentum or position do.

The only border case is painless euthanasia, and for this I can only propose the ad hoc moral intuition that depriving a sentient organism of its life needlessly is much the same thing as hurting it.

The mission of all animal advocates (indeed of all those who are concerned with right and wrong) should be to minimize pain in sentients. (Nothing to do with pleasure, or maximizing pleasure.)

“Speciesism” is a misnomer, in an effort to liken animal mistreatment to racism. There is some validity to the intuition, but it does not generate a general principle, because if applied to all sentients based on numbers, it could lead to absurd (and immoral) conclusions such as: euthanize all sentients other than the most numerous ones, insects, in order to minimize overall net pain (if we bracket the ecological uncertainty).

So “minimize” hurt needs another constraint, based on conflicts of vital interest: Minimize needless hurt, where “need” refers to vital needs in cases of conflicts of vital interest.

And since humans are the only species that are in the position to conceive or implement moral principles, their own vital interests must take some sort of relative (but not absolute) precedence (otherwise we are again left with the strictly numerical option of euthanasia and insects).

To summarize: By my lights, morality is rational, but it is not based on rationality. It is based on sentience (feelings) and on feelings about the feelings of others: the moral intuition that hurting is wrong. The only feelings that are morally relevant are negative ones: hurt. (We have intuitions about pleasure too, but they are not moral intuitions, except if somehow correlated with pain.)

And I would repeat that if pure selfishness — obliviousness to the hurting of others in the pursuit of one’s own interests, vital and non-vital — is psychopathic (much the way Darwinian evolution and physical causality are psychopathic), so to is pure selflessness — obliviousness to proximity, consanguinity and collateral damage — in the strictly numerical dispensation of net welfare across sentient organisms (and time) according to formal calculations. (Purely formal calculations are as psychopathic as causality and evolution.)

Transitional Plan: (1) Use the recent amendments according animals the status of “sentient beings with biological imperatives” (as in Quebec) to (2) adopt laws making 24-hour CCTV video/audio recording mandatory everywhere animals are commercially bred, transported, used or slaughtered, (3) mandate the permanent open web-streaming of all the videos to allow crowd-sourcing surveillance to ensure that all existing regulations are complied with. If (as is to be hoped) the widespread awareness of the reality in the videos sensitizes the majority to the fact that the animal industries are intrinsically cruel and need to be scaled down and phased out, then (4) mandate a gradually increasing tax on all animal products and production — on the consumer, the vendor and the producer, (5) allow a full rebate on the tax for all consumers, vendors and producers who instead buy, sell and produce non-animal alternatives. (6) Any tax surplus should be designated to use for (6a) sanctuaries for animals liberated by the switch to alternatives (i.e., subsidies so they should not be killed) and (6b) any residual should be used to fund research on non-animal alternatives.

Harnad, Stevan (2015) To Close Slaughterhouses We Must Open People’s Hearts. HuffPost Impact Canada

Matthieu Ricard débute toujours ses entretiens concernant les animaux avec la question: « S’il vous plaît lever la main si vous êtes en faveur du fait d’infliger la souffrance sans nécessité ». Personne ne lève la main. Ensuite il demande « S’il vous plaît lever la main si vous mangez de la viande ». Beaucoup de mains se lèvent, mais avec beaucoup d’hésitation et de murmurements inquiets.

Comme le dit Dr. Kona-Boun, on cherche à sensibiliser le public concernant deux faits fondamentaux: (1) Manger de la viande n’est pas nécessaire ni à la survie ni à la santé humaine et (2) la quantité de souffrance infligée aux animaux par notre consommation de la viande est indiciblement horrifique.

Les activistes sont motivés par une foi en la décence humaine: Lorsque les citoyens sauront que (1) et (2) sont vrais, il vont certes vouloir cesser de manger de la viande et vont vouloir fermer les abattoirs: Brefs, ils deviendront des activistes aussi.

On ne peut pas faire le changement du jour au lendemain (malgré le fait tragique que ça prolonge les horreurs) sans l’accord de la majorité. D’abord on sensibilise les gens (avec le CCTV dans les abattoirs, diffusé sur Internet), pour que la majorité décente appuie l’adoption d’une taxe progressive (pour le client ainsi que le producteur) sur la viande, remboursée (pour le client et/ou le producteur) s’ils achètent/produisent une alternative non-viande. Toutes les taxes non-remboursées paient les sanctuaires pour les animaux ainsi sauvés.

There’s nothing to admire in the slogan (or sentiment) “I’m the greatest,” whether from Muhammad Ali or Donald Trump.

Maybe it’s an effective way to pump yourself up for combat if you’re a prizefighter, but that calling’s not one to admire either.

Muhammad Ali had at least had the real experience of being the victim of bigotry; his aggressive response — combat and braggadocio — is understandable, even excusable, since no one has written an etiquette book on how to behave politely when you are being systematically discriminated against.

But Trump’s life has been lucre, luck and lechery from the start, and the only thing it has inspired in him is the crudest form of narcissism and demagoguery.

If the American electorate has any sense (and decency) it will award him the crashing defeat he deserves.

And may all his undeserved fortunes fail him while he is still compos mentis to collect the wages of his vicious and vacuous vanity.

I sincerely hope that Peter Singer’s “The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically” will do a lot of good by inspiring a lot of people to do a lot of good.

But when I reached this sentence:

“Aaron Moore, an Australian international aid worker and artist, is one of the relatively few Christians who have taken the words of Jesus seriously. On his website, Moore links them to a statement of mine…”

I knew I would not be finishing this book[1]. I put it down when I got to:

“Everyone has boundaries. If you find yourself doing something that makes you bitter, it’s time to reconsider… Now Julia doesn’t scrimp on ice cream because, as she told the class, ‘Ice cream is really important to my happiness’.”

The book has the style of a self-help book, but of course it can hardly be that, since what it is promoting is other-help. I guess it’s not for me because what it is recommending already seems very obvious to me. But I was also disappointed to see most of it devoted to helping people, just as most charities are. Of course people need help, and certainly much more help than they are getting. But I’m not sure they need the most help, nor that they need help the most.

There is no misery that animals undergo that humans don’t undergo too, whether “natural” or human-inflicted. But most animal misery is human-inflicted, one way or the other. And most humans are not undergoing that misery. Nor is most of human misery deliberately inflicted on people by people; on animals, most of it is. And it’s legal to inflict that misery on animals. And most people inflict it, or demand that it be inflicted on their behalf. And most of it is not necessary to human survival or health. (Nor even to human wealth: there are more humane ways to make a living, or even a killing (financial). I also doubt that ice cream, hence bovine agony, is necessary for human happiness.)

I think the most good you could do would be to inspire people to stop causing gratuitous misery. I am not sure how inspiring people to get rich so they can donate most of what they make to charity to reduce mostly human misery is the most good you can do. But Peter Singer did write “Animal Liberation,” which has inspired a lot of people to help animals. Maybe there will be some trickle-down from “effective altruism” to animals too. I hope so. I don’t pretend to know any more effective solutions. I just wish this book had devoted more than a chapter to the most numerous and wretched victims on the planet — and to doing the least harm you can do with the money you spend.

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[1] It is not at all that the contemporary philosopher of ethics who has inspired generation after generation to renounce meat and defend animals is not to be likened to the biblical prophet of charity: quite the contrary. It’s just my own squeamishness about who draws attention to the likeness. (The animus toward ice cream, however, and toward professions of its need for happiness, is not squeamishness but deep dismay at the implied trade-off.)

more… air… please…
less… air… please…
more… air… please…
less… air… please…
more… air… please…

What was it?

that torment?

at 30-second intervals?

raise the fan…
lower the fan…

Terminal care

near the end

when it waxed:
fáj!…fáj!…fáj!…

then release

to induced
coma… all
cycles’ end

What was it?

that shrinking
relentless
merciless
epicycle
of torment?

hyperesthesia? hypomnesia?

foreshadowed
months before
at home still

but restless

window… up…
window… down…

my quest (not
about me)
for closure?
foreclosure?

like yearning
unfulfilled
unredeemed

to inter
lost loved ones’
lost remains?

to punish
brutally
those brutes who
hurt our kin?

or is it
dread to be
drawn into
the rise/fall
of that fell
vortex too?

No, still not
about me
it’s of your
agony

that I wail

more… air… please…
less… air… please…

powerless
to foretell
to forestall

yet again
so in vain
just as then…

“I’d love to get your thoughts on whether it’s not only the neurobiological components of emotion that are widespread in the animal kingdom, but the subjective experience of emotions — or, conversely, whether aspects of cognition that are unique to humans modulate those components such that our experiences of emotions are likely singular.”

That’s a rather complicated way of putting it. Let me first try translating your question (which sounds like it comes from the abstract of a peer-reviewed journal article!) into ordinary lay English:

“Is the brain activity and the behavior that accompanies our feelings — and that we share with many kinds of animals — evidence enough that they, too, feel? or are human feelings somehow different?”

The answer is that there is a kind of mind/matter dualism — the idea that feelings are some sort of “non-material” stuff — lurking behind that kind of question (just as it lurks behind the belief in an immaterial, immortal “soul”).

I think the fact is that the only way we even know that other people feel is because they act much the same way I do when I feel (and so do their brains). That’s the “solution” to the “other-minds problem” (“does anything other than me feel?”): If it’s otherwise indistinguishable from me, then yes, it too feels. (That’s what’s behind Turing’s insight in the Turing Test. And, ironically, it’s the implicit assumption behind all biomedicine, both somatic and psychobiological).

I suppose that in the days of slavery, racists might have asked the same kind of question:

“How do we know that when Africans behave the same way I do when they seem to “feel” something, and so do their brains, that they really are feeling (or feeling what I or any other white person feels)? Maybe there’s something special, something different about white people”s feelings, and that’s what “modulates” their behavior and brain activity so that when it happens in them, it really means they are feeling something, but when it happens in black people it doesn’t?”

That link between dualism and racism is a bit shrill. But I think exactly — and I really mean exactly — the same reasoning is behind the notion of human exceptionalism that makes people think that when animals’ bodies and brains are doing pretty much the same thing ours are doing, they’re not really feeling: something else is going on.

And note that what is at issue here is not whether other species can think the same esoteric thoughts and harbor the same rarefied sentiments about the mind — “I think therefore I am,” “The quality of mercy is not strained,” “Sic duo faciunt item, non est item” — that we humans do.

That’s more a question about exactly what is being felt, rather than whether.

Let me speak, confidently, for other species here: “We don’t care whether you think we are having the same lofty sentiments you do. But please, don’t doubt that we are feeling. Let Shakespeare, in another racial context, be our voice”:

“I am a “beast.” Hath not a beast eyes? Hath not a beast hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a “man” is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?.… If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

Segner, Helmut (2016) Why babies do not feel pain, or: How structure-derived functional interpretations can go wrong Animal Sentience 2016.033

Safina, Carl (2016) Animals think and feel: Précis of Beyond words: What animals think and feel (Safina 2015) Animal Sentience 2016.002

Or, as often evoked from Jeremy Bentham from The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780):

The question is not, “Can they reason?”
nor, “Can they talk?”
but “Can they suffer?”

The human species
is a colossal pyramid scheme
a biological bubble
bound to burst

But oh
the collateral damage

The innocents
we are dragging down with us…

I had always intuitively considered marriage — not pair-bonding nor economic contracts, but marriage — as a silly, cultish, sentimental ritual: largely harmless but mostly ridiculous. By the same token, I had the same opinion of same-sex marriage.

But when I noticed the kinds of people who were opposing same-sex marriage, how and why, and what else they opposed (which included the values I hold the most dear, such as kindness, fairness and tolerance towards all) I realized that same-sex marriage (despite its silliness) was something to be resolutely defended against such opposition.

In much the same way, although I am, like most decent people, resolutely opposed to murder, including infanticide, pre- and post-partum, I noticed that the kinds of people who were opposing abortion were not vegans, defending the life of all sentient organisms, but again pretty much those same people who were against same-sex marriage (along with kindness and tolerance)