Response post #1

I've got a couple of great commenters, so I wanted to do a quick response post to encourage them to keep commenting (If they'd like to!). Aspirationally titled "Response post #1" -- we'll see if there's a #2.

Post: "Animal Rights"
Comment: here

I think I agree with all the premises of this article. And I think I agree on your categorization of rights as pragmatic. I don't think I agree that we should give animals rights. Buuut, I might have misunderstood, and I might be too stuck in my ways.

First, my understanding: if I'm reading it right, "animal rights" means, among other things, legally enforced veganism. Like, if we can't have animals as property, we probably definitely can't kill them for food, and it's hard to imagine how we could get a cow's agreement to give us milk. (correct me if I'm wrong.)

 Yeah, I agree that animal rights almost certainly mean we can't have them as property. I'm undecided on whether this actually means that you couldn't have an arrangement with a cow where you could get milk from them; we get labor from humans, after all, so there might be a legal arrangement where a cow could be "paid" (in nice living conditions, luxuries, etc?) to give milk. Obviously it's super-hard to do this, and might not be feasible (or oversight might be too expensive), but it's not obviously impossible to me.

Imagine that there was a service that could be performed only by people who weren't able to express themselves linguistically or understand language. I can imagine that an appointed guardian might be able to set up an employment situation that would work for everyone. However, this would be a lot more expensive than just, you know, owning the cows!

Breeding is another huge challenge -- it just doesn't seem likely to be acceptable.

(btw I realize "legally enforced veganism" would totally derail this conversation on many blogs; I'm hoping yours doesn't have the kind of readership that would do that)

Yeah :) Also, jumping suddenly to legally enforced veganism (or something very close to it) wouldn't work -- one of the big policy challenges would be avoiding a Prohibition-like reaction where production is pushed underground and the policy is reversed later anyway.

This seems a bit extreme if we actually just want to improve animal welfare. You can have laws around how you treat property, while it's still property. (I think?) Like, I can buy a car but I can't just drive it around wherever, or let my kid drive it, or ghost ride it. You've got to be responsible with cars (where "responsible" means a basket of things that not everyone agrees on); why not just work on defining the basket of responsibilities with animals?

Why not go all the way and do this with people as well? Welfare is what I really care about, so why not be libertarian and allow people to own other people (maybe only if it's mutually agreed upon), and define a basket of responsibilities for people-owners?

My answer, I think, is something like this:

• "defining a basket of responsibilities" is a building-up process -- we have to manually add pretty much everything we care about.
• "rights" are a way of dramatically limiting acceptable behaviors in one shot, and with lots of room for interpretation or refinement later by judges. We sort of know what a "right to freedom" means, or a "right to dignity", and we can later judge whether those things are violated through legal interpretation.

It seems to me like rights are more appropriate for people. It's very lucrative to own a person, and (unlike cars) the space of things you should or shouldn't be able to do with a person is very big, messy, and ill-defined. Also, we've societally decided that it's better to err on the side of restricting what people can do with people more rather than not enough. I think these arguments apply well to animals, as well.

The argument that "we can't legally protect animals effectively while they are property" is an old animal rights argument (see e.g. this, which refers to attempts to protect slaves' welfare without giving them the right to not be property), and I haven't done my homework on the debate over it, but it seems like a plausible argument to me.

On to your proposal of animal rights: How do you "represent" an animal in a decision? How can you represent a critter who can't ever communicate with? I guess you could get, say, a cow expert to tell you about all the things that make a cow's life better or worse. But again, we're in vegan world, so there probably wouldn't even be cow experts anymore. And we're far enough away from our current world that my instincts are probably not great moral judgment tools anymore. So, maybe I'm just too stuck in my ways.

I think this is a great point, and it might turn out that this is a thing we can't figure out how to do. I'm guessing there'll still be animal experts or cow experts, but that's totally a guess. If it turns out we can't get milk, my official answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

---

Post: Peak Experiences
Comment: here

Re. your concern about being too navel-gazey/introspective: it didn't feel that way at all for me, I really liked this post! I have a similar concern as a lot of what I write is very introspective, but I generally just try to make it clear I'm not suggesting my experiences necessarily generalise to others - just that they may be sufficiently similar to be interesting to others. Or I try to frame it more as "here's an experience of mine that made me think about a more general problem/thing, here are my thoughts on the more general thing." Regardless, this post made me think about my own peak experiences in a really useful way (and in a way I hadn't done before), so I don't think you're too much at risk of being overly navel-gazey yet! :) 

Thanks! That's reassuring, and a good suggestion. I think I'll replace my self-deprecating "me" tag with an "examined life" tag to counteract my bashfulness about introspection :)