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The shrimp welfare project

(benthams.substack.com)
81 points 0xDEAFBEAD | 3 comments | 18 Nov 24 14:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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n4r9 ◴[18 Nov 24 15:11 UTC] No.42173011[source]▶
Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:

> ... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...

Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

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sodality2 ◴[18 Nov 24 15:18 UTC] No.42173107[source]▶
Have you read the linked paper by Norcross? "Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headaches" [0].

[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328486

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1. n4r9 ◴[18 Nov 24 15:26 UTC] No.42173211[source]▶
No; thanks for bringing it to my attention. The first page is intriguing... I'll see if I can locate a free copy somewhere.
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2. sodality2 ◴[18 Nov 24 15:31 UTC] No.42173263[source]▶
Here's a copy I found: https://philosophysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/alist...

It's pretty short, I liked it. Was surprised to find myself agreeing with it at the end of my first read.

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3. n4r9 ◴[19 Nov 24 19:26 UTC] No.42187128[source]▶
Thanks. It's very clever how he uses probabilistic variants to move between scenarios. I've read to the end and whilst I'm not convinced, it's definitely given me food for thought. I'm stuck on two bits so far:

* He slides between talking about personal decisions vs decisions about someone else. The argument for Headache is couched in terms of whether an average person would drive to the chemist. Whilst the argument for shifting from Headache to Many Headaches is couched in terms of decisions made by an external party. This feels problematic to me. There may be some workaround.

* He describes rejecting transitivity as being overwhelmingly implausible. Is that obvious? Ethical considerations ultimately boil down to subjective evaluations, and there seems no obvious reason why those evaluations would be transitive.