"I think that the real nail in the coffin for this defense of the claim that insects don’t matter, though, involves polarized sunglasses and the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics."
The position that moral rightness is scalar and bidirectionally infinite is one of the things that seems so incredibly obvious to me, that I can't wrap my mind around arguments from hypocrisy. They make no more sense than arguing that because someone doesn't maximize their physical fitness, therefore their views on what fitness consists of or which methods are better or worse for getting fitter, are wrong.
Hypocrisy isn't failing to maximize some desirable trait according to one's own standard. Hypocrisy is socially criticizing someone else who's doing no worse than you.
You seem obviously right about Caplan, including thinking that he is usually right about things. You raise an interesting point in discussing how a weird world makes for weird moral conclusions. It seems to me that for most of human history and apparently prehistory it would have been weird and downright strange to concern oneself really at all with the suffering of the outgroup. The question isn't whether bugs or chickens or dogs or foreigners are conscious or capable of suffering. It's more whether it is even possible to construct an argument for caring about the suffering of the outgroup that doesn't just beg the question in some way, or define in-group as containing the outgroup. From this perspective, when people defend eating meat, they are refusing to grant that animals are members of the in group (while usually very much including dogs and cats). When people on the internet speak of actively desiring the outgroup to suffer in some way (for instance, by hoping that anti vaxxers die painfully on ventilators or that the transgender kill themselves, or in yesteryear die of AIDS) they are directly giving voice to this.
Bringing up the suffering of bugs then is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Most people, if honest with themselves, would be happy to eliminate every single hornet from the surface of the earth, even if each one took one or ten or a hundred hours to die in agony. Hornets are enemies. Arguably, so are the kinds of bugs that die on windshields. The actual underlying claim beneath the accusation of hypocrisy is that including animals so strongly in the ingroup as to stop eating meat is itself strange and worthy of mockery.
The position that moral rightness is scalar and bidirectionally infinite is one of the things that seems so incredibly obvious to me, that I can't wrap my mind around arguments from hypocrisy. They make no more sense than arguing that because someone doesn't maximize their physical fitness, therefore their views on what fitness consists of or which methods are better or worse for getting fitter, are wrong.
Hypocrisy isn't failing to maximize some desirable trait according to one's own standard. Hypocrisy is socially criticizing someone else who's doing no worse than you.
You seem obviously right about Caplan, including thinking that he is usually right about things. You raise an interesting point in discussing how a weird world makes for weird moral conclusions. It seems to me that for most of human history and apparently prehistory it would have been weird and downright strange to concern oneself really at all with the suffering of the outgroup. The question isn't whether bugs or chickens or dogs or foreigners are conscious or capable of suffering. It's more whether it is even possible to construct an argument for caring about the suffering of the outgroup that doesn't just beg the question in some way, or define in-group as containing the outgroup. From this perspective, when people defend eating meat, they are refusing to grant that animals are members of the in group (while usually very much including dogs and cats). When people on the internet speak of actively desiring the outgroup to suffer in some way (for instance, by hoping that anti vaxxers die painfully on ventilators or that the transgender kill themselves, or in yesteryear die of AIDS) they are directly giving voice to this.
Bringing up the suffering of bugs then is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Most people, if honest with themselves, would be happy to eliminate every single hornet from the surface of the earth, even if each one took one or ten or a hundred hours to die in agony. Hornets are enemies. Arguably, so are the kinds of bugs that die on windshields. The actual underlying claim beneath the accusation of hypocrisy is that including animals so strongly in the ingroup as to stop eating meat is itself strange and worthy of mockery.
How does the nervous system differ between species?
It's not obvious to me that insects have "miserable" "horrible" lives. They have short lives, but that's not the same thing.