They are quite a bit smarter than dogs. Pigs are among the smartest non-simian mammals.

Yeah, modern industrial slaughterhouse conditions are pretty awful.

But the other thing to remember about intelligence is that it’s a fairly nebulous term to begin with. There isn’t really a set definition and different species have different types of intelligence tests that they’ll do better or worse on compared to other species.

And an additional +1 for the Far Side reference.

Please, please, PLEASE tell me you have video…
(Oh please…)

Well… darn….

::shuffles off dejectedly with droopy ears and lifeless tail::

i want to upvote your Prof(s).

*groan*

Mm, but I think that’s not even pretending to be a general definition of intelligence, but an innately homo-referential one.

Such thinking does help this writer feel smart, sometimes.

Leaves carrots for the burro

Loranna

See, people always take it there. But a) humans were cannibalistic in the far more recent past than most would like to think, so it’s not quite so simple as ‘no one would ever do that’… in a lot of ways only the thinnest veneer of ‘current societal mores’ stops that happening, and b) it still fails into intelligence, because I am talking about intelligence as a species, not about the individual. Intelligence correlates with ability to understand death, and to grieve. and the coma patient would, in all but the rarest of cases, have relatives and friends who would suffer upon their being eaten. But relatives still frequently allow for the harvesting and redistribution of a dead loved one’s organs in order to save lives, so maybe one day society will change, and relatives will sign over their loved one to be eaten if it is a life saving measure… of course, eating other humans potentially has health issues, since they’d have all the diseases and bacteria that would easily infect us… Point is, people like to bring that one out like it’s a trump card in the intelligence argument (ugh, trump, even using it as a descriptor makes me grit my teeth), but it’s not, when you break it down.

As far as infliction of suffering versus existence of it, I thought I’d already made that point with the ‘wolves or slow starvation’ part, but I’ll make it clearer.

If, ideally, the animal is raised as humanely as possible, with all its social and biological needs met, and then slaughtered in such a way that the end comes quickly, as painlessly as possible, and without the animal seeing it coming, then farming that animal for meat technically *prevented* suffering – the kind of suffering it would go through if, say, it lived its wild life before being disemboweled by a wolf, or eaten alive by lions who only disabled it before tucking in, or twisted up and drowned by a crocodile while its jaws clamp down painfully on a limb…

If a creature lives well, and happily, and dies quickly, then both the ‘existence’ of its suffering, and the ‘infliction’ of suffering upon it, will be minimal. And it’s only really human-controlled environments that *can* minimise suffering for certain animals – animals that can have their needs met and be happy in a captive environment (which is not all animals, by any means – because, again, more intelligent species suffer terribly in confinement, often simply because they understand they are confined). I doubt there’s be any difference in chicken happiness were they raised free range on a wooded farm, or living wild in an actual woodland… except the wild ones would die more painfully (likely by fox).

Anyway – happy life, humane as possible death – that is my ideal for meat-eating. There are places you can get that, if you’re willing to look for them, and to pay more. And for the rest, I can campaign against factor farming, and for cameras in slaughterhouses, and generally push for things that will make animals’ lives better. Now. Whereas simply going vegan? It removes myself from affecting the situation altogether. And, as I said, it is not a healthy choice for me anyway. We evolved as omnivores. Not carnivores, but not herbivores either. We need balance, and different people have a wide variety of different dietary needs. Veganism and vegetarianism are safe for some, but not for others. Even if done carefully, not everyone *can* go vegan even if they want to.

But you have *no idea* how many people actually *need* to eat meat. The only way to know that would be to make the whole world vegetarian or vegan and then see how many people got sick! And beyond that, the fact we can’t get B12 from anything other than animal products proves we evolved as omnivores, and while science can potentially fill all of our nutritional needs, we are nowhere near there yet. Each human is built differently and needs different things, which is the same reason medications work so completely and totally differently on different people. There is *no* one size fits all solution to nutrition. We’re too varied for that.

In terms of animals having a right to their lives – of course they do. But that is completely irrelevant because it is far too late for that argument anyway. If I could go back in time, get rid of domestication for consumption and have people still hunt for whatever meat they need to eat? Ultimately that’s probably the most humane method of all, strange as it is to say – because, as I said, basically every wild death is horrible and painful – death by gunshot or arrow is probably the least awful way possible, short of falling asleep and freezing to death, since that could happen unknowingly. Hunting for food, and making use of the whole animal, is not something I have a problem with (except for dolphins and whales, which suffer horribly as they’re driven to their deaths, and would otherwise not go through something so awful except *maybe* if their death comes by orca, depending on which part of the world the animal is in). Humans are part of the ecosystem, much as we like to pretend we are not. And in the meantime the animals would live wild, as they were meant to (all of that said, I am totally against trophy hunting and find it a foul practice. Killing an animal when needed, for food, is a much, much different thing than killing for sport).

But I cannot go back in time and undo farm animal domestication. The best that can be done, until lab-grown meat’s inevitable takeover (if for no other reason than eventually, once the process is refined, it would be much, much cheaper than farming of any kind), is to do what I said. Get rid of factory farms, encourage people to cut down, and have farmed animals given an environment that caters to their needs, and lives as happy as possible before they end. Or would you rather the whole world stop eating meat immediately and the surplus of animals were just all herded up and slaughtered as fast as possible?

There is a middle ground, and by selecting to eat free range, locally raised, etc etc, an individual encourages that market’s growth, therefore contributing to more animals leading better lives. Being vegan means removing yourself from that equation altogether, which means yes, your money does not contribute to animal deaths… but it also doesn’t contribute to helping some live better lives in the meantime, either.

(Sadly, the most consistent hypothesis is that my immune system really hates having a titanium plate in my cervical spine. Obviously, having it removed would be a, ah, major undertaking.)

Ugh, that sounds bad. I thought Titanium wasn’t all that reactive (hence its use in products where corrosion would be dangerous), so it was hypo-allergenic.

So the debate about Max’s suffering versus those of millions dying without organ replacements etc really has a relevant dimension to you..

Interesting.

“…and one of my two siblings who died young died because she needed a liver transplant, and one wasn’t available.”

So if put in Alison’s position, with the clock ticking against your sister’s life, would you have coerced him?

If my sister was dying and someone had a superpower that could save her, I would drive over to their house, put a gun to their head and walk them to the hospital without hesitation. And honestly, I doubt I would have felt a tenth of the guilt Alison is feeling right now.

Not that this question was posed to me, but I’ve frequently considered chiming in. My mother and grandmother both suffered renal failure and eventually died of complications. My grandmother was offered a kidney transplant, but turned it down, even knowing she’d likely live only another 3-5 years without it. She said she’d rather the kidney go to a younger person with more life ahead of ’em. She passed at age 56.

My mother was never quite well enough to go through the tests to get her onto the transplant list in the first place. She died at age 35, when I was 15, and when my brother was less than a year old.

As desperately as I miss them both, and as irrevocably changed as my brother’s and my lives are, I wouldn’t have put a gun to anyone’s head to coerce them to save my mother and/or grandmother’s lives against free will. And based both on the 15-16 years I knew each of them (my grandmother passed 13 months after my mother), as well as my grandmother’s decision to give up a kidney and her shot at another 20-40 years of life (grand-grandma lived past 90, and grandmother had been in exceptional health until kidneys failed), I feel fairly confident in guessing that neither of them would have done such a thing – nor been willing to accept the results of my doing such a thing on their behalf.

My father has often said that he has two kidneys: one for me, and one for my brother, and that he’d give up both if we both got sick. I’d personally have a hard enough time with that – allowing my father to sacrifice his health, potentially (or certainly) his life, to save mine.

Neither of these are perfectly analogous to the Max/Allison situation, but they’ve certainly gone through my mind repeatedly while following this story.

Oh, we should talk – I have a friend for the purposes of staying in touch with (we met on a memorable airplane trip) who is the world’s coolest research nephrologist, words that I did not think belonged together. Works in third world nephrology – you might be interested.

Not been in Tylik’s position, but I can imagine circumstances in which I would do it, and being even more guilt-ridden than Alison as a result. (Catholic, we’ve got guilt down to a fine art).

Oh, I didn’t take it as such, it just surprised me as I hadn’t looked at my own experiences in such a light. (I mean, I teach anatomy and physiology, and neuroanatomy is kind of my thing, and I knew a lot about these procedures long before I had one, so comparing them to organ donation had never crossed my mind.)

I have a pretty great life. And for all that there’s been a lot of injury, and some dire predictions about how I would never recover, and never do this or that again (and, to be perfectly frank, some times when I spent a while wondering what quality of life indicated continuing being alive**)… I keep getting better. I’ve been through several cycles of this – it’s kind of hard to get fussed about it these days. I mean, now, I have some residual pain from the spine surgery, and there’s whatever the hell is going on with my immune system, which mostly manifests as having acquired a bunch of incredibly stupid food allergies (rice bran – who the hell is allergic to rice bran?!) but otherwise, I’m fine. I still bike everywhere, and teach martial arts, and hike in the mountains when I have the good taste to be somewhere that actually has mountains. There are some really weird things going on with my body, but at least half of them have been to my benefit – my outcomes have been consistently on “way better than expected” range that it’s a little ridiculous. (I also expect a lot from myself, wish I suppose means I appreciate this less than I should.)

* And Andrea’s death is something kind of different altogether. It’s kind of funny – I’d been thinking of it a bunch around New Year’s, which I don’t usually.
** This sounds really dire, but it wasn’t so much. Mostly I just got really pissed off because I like being alive and fuck everything. Going through that all was some of the best stuff that every happened to me, but damn some of the individual experiences sucked.

I live in a residential urban neighborhood (though a porous one – Cleveland, we don’t really do density after losing half our population…)

I would be happy to have a live and let live policy with the deer, but that’s not what’s happening here. I’d be even happier to have some top level predators (as long as they didn’t predate on me) but, yeah, not that either. I get that people don’t want to kill bambi, but the current situation is not really tenable.

It’s a somewhat tenuous theory, but there’s a lot of “no one knows” going on here. I mean, one of my favorite doctors, who also is a good friend, will talk about my “alternate physiology”. (I didn’t hit him, or even get mad, as he was doing so in a professional capacity, even if he also thought he was being cute.) (Okay, just a little mad. But, he doesn’t read my blog.)

Just as a data point – widespread cannibalism is well documented in the devastating famine in 1958-1962 in China. (This was a politically caused famine, in a time without war or major weather events. In the vicinity of 36 million purple died. There have only recently been really good sources on the subject available in the west. I’d recommend Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, myself.)

Of course, cannibalism is more complicated, and isn’t always about starvation. But severe enough famine will provoke it – this isn’t about it being a Chinese thing.

I mentioned Peter Singer a couple of weeks back. He’s a hard utilitarian who supports euthanasia for significantly physically/mentally handicapped infants. His argument goes along the lines giving the parents the option of euthanasia in cases where the parents would be ill-equipped to raise them (e.g if the person would need 24/7 supervision for the entirety of their life). I am VERY, VERY opposed to Singer on this issue, but agree with him on almost every other issue (so go figure).

Singer draws support from the idea that there are various animal that are more intelligent than infants with severe brain damage, and that we kill and eat those animals. I argue that we should not eat those animals at all. If an animal is capable of sign language (Gorillas and many others) or some form of human language comprehension; dogs, cats, pigs, horses, dolphins, simians and more, then we should only eat them if the alternative is immediate death by starvation. And in the cases where the alternative is immediate death by starvation I also permit cannibalism, so I’m not being specist here.

“Brain-damaged infants, in fact, fail this test.”

Bullshit. Plenty of people with CP demonstrating that every day. You would need an incredibly severe, and rare, disability, something on the level of acephaly, to completely knock out the stimulus-response loop. In fact we know that stimuli-response loops can form and adapt outside of the brain, they’re involved in the origin of chronic pain syndrome (BTDT). Look up ‘neuroplasticity’. (Straying into the dangerous gtounds of neurology, this is usually where Tylik corrects me)

You need to be very careful in listening to Singer on disability. He is repeatedly, and I can only conclude calculatedly, intellectually dishonest in the way he frames his positions and refuses to acknowlege his errors when corrected by actual disabled people. Most notably Singer repeatedly talks about disabled people as ‘suffering’, when he has repeatedly been told that we are in the overwhelmingly main happy in our lives and in many cases would not want to be cured.

“I’ve met a couple blind people who were surprisingly indifferent to the idea of sight,”

Isn’t that a bit of a clue? I have a significant number of disabled friends who don’t actually have any real desire to be ‘cured’. It’s in fact the overwhelmingly dominant position of the Deaf and Neurodiverse communities, but I also know wheelchair-using friends who really don’t see any need to disrupt their lives for some supposed cure. In fact I’m a neurodiverse wheelchair user myself, and that’s pretty much my view. This isn’t just a theoretical position, I’ve turned down better pain relief in the past (and we’re talking normal levels of pain bad enough I didn’t notice I’d also acquired one of the most acutely painful conditions known to medicine) because I wasn’t prepared to pay the price that went with it – fuzzier thinking.

The wheelchair use is from a genetic condition known to be statistically associated with neurodiversity. It’s a condition that often only becomes apparent/significantly disabling in adulthood, so there isn’t the binary division between natal and acquired disability most people imagine. I’ve had mobility issues since I was 25, so over a quarter of a century now, I’ve been using the chair for a couple of years and I’m kicking myself for not switching a decade ago.

Suppose someone comes along and offers me a cure. Neurodiversity is fundamental to development of the brain and the way we think. Would I still be me afterwards? EDS/HMS is a collagen disorder, we’re talking changes in every organ in the body. Every bone, every joint, every muscle and tendon. Skin, veins, arteries, intestines. That’s not going to be a simple fix (in practise it’s not going to be a practical fix, you’ld need to physically rebuild all of my joints, not just swap the tendons etc over to standard collagen). And that statistical association with neurodiversity means the genetic causes may be entangled. If we cure the EDS, will I still be me? The wheelchair use really isn’t a big thing. Do we need to fix me, or fix society? About the only thing I’d want rid of is the pain and fatigue, and I’ve actually got reasonable pain control right now for the price of sticking an opioid patch on my arm once a week.

So cures, not a huge priority for a lot of us, but it’s quite difficult to get non-disabled people to believe us. Part of the problem there is people are brought up with a negative view of disability and tend to believe the experience is much worse than the reality from the inside.

It is very condition dependant, it is linked to born vs acquired disability, but it’s also much less clear cut than non-disabled people assume.

“Is there a section of the disabled population that, while not
associating their disability with their identity, would scoff at the
idea of (re)gaining full function?”

Individuals rather than groups. I recall seeing a para comment WRT various proposed cures for spinal cord injurt “why would I want to spend months away from my family?” The idea of take a pill and you’re cured isn’t a realistic one for most disabilities. In many cases you’re looking at serious surgery to put things into a reasonable state for recovery, and with most disabilities you would then be looking at a recovery/rehab process taking months or years because of the need to learn or relearn physical processes such as walking that haven’t been used in years or decades. I just switched to varifocals, the optician’s advice was “It’ll take a month to get really used to them”, and that’s about as simple an adaption process as you can imagine.

There’s a lot of disabled people who look at those who spend their lives in pursuit of a cure, Christopher Reeve most prominently, and think they’ve got the balance wrong. Disability isn’t everything, you need to live the rest of your life as well.

“would you refuse a pain medication that didn’t come with fuzzy thinking”

It would depend what side effects it did come with, how effective it was and how satisfied I was with current pain relief. It’s actually a complex question WRT EDS, we’re renowned for atypical reactions to pain relief, some just don’t work at all. The last time I was forced into a change of pain relief (GP politics), I basically lost a year of my life to non-obvious psychological side effects. Eventually I realised what was happening, and told my GP I would rather have no pain relief than ever take gabapentin again. Fortunately that persuaded her to let me have butrans back. The gabapentin gave me the same level of pain relief as butrans does, but the side effects were intolerable.

“an exoskeleton that lets you walk?”

Again that’s not a simple question for me personally. I can walk, with issues, but using crutches was causing long term damage to my shoulders, so a chair is a better option for outdoors and preserving my long term function, but I still walk within the house. My major problem isn’t so much with walking as with the being upright for longer than 5 minutes. The current generation of exoskeletons wouldn’t help with that, and I have a better level of mobility in a chair than I would in one of them, plus I never need to look for somewhere to sit down. If I couldn’t otherwise stand, then an exoskeleton might solve certain access issues, but to be honest at the current state of the art there are standing wheelchairs that are probably more practical. I don’t know whether not being able to walk at all would change my mind, I have some doubts as there are days where I use the chair pretty much all the time and they don’t seem to be a massive issue.

You quote, apparently approvingly, Singer on murdering disabled babies*, no matter the blatantly obvious factual flaw in the argument, then take issue with people for killing animals. Honestly, what reaction did you expect? It’s not as if I haven’t pointed out his bigotry every time someone mentions him or made it clear that I’m a committed disability rights activist.

* And no, this is not simply a step in developing Singer’s position on animal rights, he has repeatedly argued for killing disabled infants independently of his position on animal rights.

“this is getting far afield of my point – no one is realistically suggesting eating disabled infants or people of
any age.”

No, but Singer actively advocates murdering them as an alleged ‘positive’ and you’re using his position on that to back your argument. If you back a defensible position with something indefensible, expect people to concentrate on the indefensible.

“I don’t think the existence of a syndrome destroying the ability to feel pain actually compromises the argument.”

It further demonstrates that Singer repeatedly over-generalises the reality of disability in his arguments and illustrates flaws in the claim brain-damaged infants cannot learn and the logic chain built from it. Singer repeatedly relies on data he knows is false (that disabled people inevitably ‘suffer’), but chooses not to admit for reasons of prejudice against disability. If he was a hard scientist, he’d have been up before an ethics board for falsifying his research years ago, but, bizarrely, because he’s an ethicist he’s allowed to get away with it.

“since we seem to be so unbelievably hung up on Singer”

Wow, patronising much. He actively advocates killing people like me, what reaction do you expect? My only interest in the ethics of vegetarianism is people who quote Singer as though it’s a positive, especially when they pull in his incredibly offensive thinking on disability.

I see…

Moo. Moo. Moo.

I am really not interested in continuing to debate the fish/jaw analogy. As far as I’m concerned, its only purpose was as imagery, to add emotional weight to his argument. Gurwara never claimed that literal big jaws are the ultimate authority. “Jaw” is a visual metaphor for power. Power takes many forms.

Since you haven’t responded to the points I was interested in talking about, there’s no need for me to draft another counterargument. Instead I’d like to recommend you this story, which I think you’ll enjoy: http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/sekhmet-hunts-the-dying-gnosis-a-computation/ It’s sort of an exercise in human defiance against “might-makes-right”/”survival of the fittest” as the natural order. I’ve always thought it was inspiring.

I’m…sorry for replying promptly? I’m already editing my post to respond to your edits.

I’ve completed the edits.

On reflection, I think my main point is getting bogged down in all of the sentence-by-sentence responses, so I’m just going to summarize it.

Power is the means by which moral values are translated into action. Values, on their own, exist only in the human mind. They only affect our reality when enacted by means of power.

No matter what rights we consider a person to have, those rights–if not protected by sufficient power–can be removed by force. For example, in spite of your strong belief that Max had the right not to boost Feral, the fact remains that Alison forced him to do so. With the application of her power, she enacted her own moral values at the expense of his. Max may have conceptually retained the right to his inaction, but what use was that right to him without the power to back it up?

This is why it’s necessary to use whatever power we have to enact and protect our values. Power does not necessarily mean violence. For example, suppose we find ourselves in a totally hypothetical situation where the leader of our nation is an impulsive, narcissistic bigot with aspirations of tyranny. We can exercise the power of our votes, our money, our skills, our presence, and our time to combat that tyranny–to wrest away at least some of his control over the world for ourselves. We must do this if we want our values to be anything more than conceptual. We must do this if we want our lives to be dictated by our values instead of his.

“Might makes right” doesn’t mean that power makes your actions moral. “Might makes right” means that power makes your morals into action.

I don’t care that some tyrants die of natural causes. It’s irrelevant. You were explicitly talking about intentionally removing tyrants from power, and I responded to that.

I don’t care that Washington’s decision was without precedent. It’s irrelevant. He could not have made that decision if he didn’t have the power to make it.

I don’t care if you think I support “might makes right.” I already told you otherwise. I’m not going to waste any more words trying to convince you of the distinction between “is” and “ought.” It’s well established by now that nothing will prevent you from making your own unflattering assumptions about my inner thoughts. And in any case, my opinion of “might makes right” is irrelevant to the question of whether it’s true.

I don’t care that certain exercises of power are limited. They are limited thanks to the ongoing application of power.

I don’t care that Alison’s specific power is based on physical might. It’s irrelevant to the broader point. Power takes many forms, including but not limited to physical might. Gurwara is clearly placing Alison’s strength into a broader context.

I don’t care that the power structures that exist to uphold rights are themselves limited in their exercise of power. Those limitations were implemented and are enforced via, you guessed it, power. If there were no mechanisms to enforce those limitations, the limitations would not exist.

I don’t care that most police officers are good. I never said otherwise. The threat of force is required (though clearly not always sufficient) to dissuade the bad ones from abusing their authority.

I don’t think that the majority of humans are sociopaths. I never claimed to think so. I believe that most people are trying to be good.

Do you want to debate the claims either you or I made, or do you just want to find irrelevant things to contradict me on? Trying to call me on irrelevancies won’t win you the argument. Neither will arguing against claims I didn’t actually make.

I’d rather see a single truly compelling counterargument that exposes a critical flaw in my thinking than a hundred pointless “um, actually”s.

I will respond to your argument that “might makes right” can’t be the basis of civilization if most people are inclined to cooperation. That’s a relevant counterargument to the claims I made. My response is that no matter how many people prefer cooperation, they are vulnerable to exploitation by those who don’t, unless they exercise power to enforce cooperation. It’s a “hawks and doves” scenario. The hawk strategy wins unless the hawks are prevented, via either the use or the threat of force, from taking advantage of the doves. E.g. “if you murder someone and take their money, we will use our superior force to restrain you and throw you in jail.”

He wasn’t saying “we are all in this together” was a bad thing. He was simply pointing out that it was the axiom of a tyrant. Alison was the one who took it as an insult.

Was he actually making out “the axiom of a tyrant” to be a bad thing in class? My recollection is that he just described Alison’s axiom that way and demonstrated why. It was Alison who saw the label as deeply offensive.

And in today’s comic, I don’t think he’s doing a “180 turn” from the position of “tyranny is bad” at all. He says that “might makes right” is his “tired admission.” He’s describing an attribute of human society that he’s clearly unhappy about.

Shit, you better hope the apocalypse really does happen or you’re going to be real embarrassed a year from today.