Cheesecaketarianism
The good is the life of eudaimonia, not a 10% reduction in wild animal pain.
By the end of this essay, we will see that the most moral thing to do is to maximize the amount of blueberry cheesecake in the Universe.
Moral philosophy is the attempt to answer the question “How ought I live?”
Some people believe that the purpose of the good life, the most morally important thing in the world, is to anaesthetize small invertebrate wild animals such as shrimp.
One person who believes this is Silas Abrahamsen, who recently argued that all of social and economic progress over the past few centuries might actually have been a bad thing, because industrialization has allowed us to kill a larger number of shrimp than we could kill hundreds of years ago.
I agree that it is morally wrong to eat shrimp. If you agree with the moral rule “don’t stick a knife in a puppy’s eye” you probably would agree with the principle that it is wrong to cause severe pain to animals for capricious reasons. And if you agree with that principle, then you should think that it is wrong to torture shrimp to death just for the momentary pleasure of eating them. I do not eat shrimp.
But Utilitarians1 don’t merely think that it is wrong to actively harm shrimp and eat them, Utilitarians believe that you are obligated to go out of your way to help shrimp. They believe that you are obligated to give your money to shrimp-anaesthetization charities. They think that donating money to help a few thousand shrimp is more morally good than any of the moral actions that you ordinarily do for other people.
Every nice thing I’ve ever done has done much less good than donating a bit of money to shrimp welfare. -Bentham’s Bulldog
If they were logically consistent, they would think that you should spend every waking second making money to donate to shrimp - and that not doing so is morally equivalent to torturing people.
Abrahamsen’s argument against Civilization
Abrahamsen makes the following argument:
Our moral intuition tells us that the social and economic advancement over the past few centuries has been a great thing.
But we have this intuition because we are considering only the “seen” effects of social and economic advancement, not the “unseen” externalities.
Therefore, we shouldn’t have much credence in our intuition that social and economic advancement has been a good thing.
If human social and economic advancement turns out to have had horrible results for non-human animals, then human social and economic advancement may have been bad.
Cheesecaketarianism
In response to Utilitarianism, I offer a moral theory called Cheesecaketarianism. Cheesecaketarianism is the theory that the right thing to do in any situation is the thing that maximizes the total quantity of blueberry cheesecake in the universe.
You might object that Cheesecaketarianism doesn’t line up with our intuitions, but our moral intuitions evolved to track what’s beneficial for survival, not what’s objectively good!
Of course, we are not psychologically capable of loving cheesecake, just as we are not psychologically capable of loving shrimp. But that makes it even more virtuous to maximize the amount of cheesecake, because doing things that you want to do is easy. It’s especially virtuous, you see, to do things that you know in your bones are crazy and wrong.
Once you shed your primitive moral intuitions and enter the cool light of reason, you see that you ought to become an Effective Cheesecake Donor.
For just $1000 you can cause the production of a huge amount of blueberry cheesecake. Every good thing you’ve ever done has done much less good than donating a bit of money to cheesecake production.
Conclusion
I deny step 2 of Abrahamsen’s argument. There is an extremely strong moral intuition that social and economic progress over the past few centuries has been more important than the suffering of invertebrates.
Utiliarians think you should be a slave to shrimp, or that humanity should be exterminated so that an AI can produce large numbers of happy shrimp, which is a reductio ad absurdum of their ideology.
The flourishing life is the good, and any moral theory which says that the flourishing life must be destroyed must be wrong.
Here’s the point of the cheesecaketarianism example:
Utilitarians want to reject the intuition that human flourishing is more important than any amount of shrimp flourishing.
But rejecting that intuition is just as silly as rejecting the intuition that pain is more important than cheesecake.
Technically, they’re Hedonist, Unitarian Universalist, Utilitarians
Well, I'm honored that my article is deserving of a response!
I'm not quite sure what purpose the Cheesecaketarianism is playing here. My argument wasn't that weird implications can't be reasons to doubt a theory. Rather the argument was that you can't infer from the fact that, given some moral principle plus evidence about the way the world actually is, the moral valence of actual events are different than you expected prior to getting that evidence, to that moral principle or empirical finding being wrong.
The reason I reject cheesecaketarianism is that it gets obviously wrong results in hypothetical cases where we stipulate the facts (as well as the theory being highly arbitrary, etc.). For example, it claims that given the choice of saving the lives of 541709734 happy non-cheesecake producing people, and saving a single gram of delicious cheesecake, I should save the cheesecake. The problem is that the theory is a function from possible situations to moral judgements, and the fact that it sometimes turns some possible input into the wrong output is a sign that the function is wrong. I have no problem with this inference!
But suppose that I have imagined all these strange hypotheticals, and come to terms with them and cheesecaketarianism. Now I find myself *actually* in the scenario just described above. I already know that *if* I were in this scenario, *then* I should save the cheesecake given cheesecaketarianism. Simply finding out that the scenario is actual gives me no reason for adjusting my belief in the theory of cheesecaketarianism. I already knew that given this input, the function would spit out that output. Seeing this input actually being put in the function and that output be spat out should in no way affect whether I think the function is right--I already knew it would happen.
It also shouldn't change how confident I am that the input actually happened. Why? Because the output is always inferred from the function plus the input. That means that given the function, my credence in any output should simply be my credence in the disjunction of the inputs that would lead to that output. Thus the output should be no more surprising than the inputs in question, and so however likely you think the given input is, prior to considering what output it would lead to, should never be changed by finding out that it leads to that output.
But it is this last type of inference you would need to infer from social progress being good to animal welfarism or shrimp consciousness being false. After all, you already knew that *if* shrimp were conscious, *then* animal welfarism would tell you that social progress is bad. Finding out that shrimp are actually conscious then gives you no new evidence against animal welfarism, and you also get no reason to doubt whether shrimp are conscious.
Now, perhaps you antecedently thought that it is false that in the hypothetical world where shrimp feel pain, it's wrong to cause them lots of pain for minor personal pleasure. That's another matter, but you certainly shouldn't think that animal welfarism has some probability, get evidence that the *actual* world is in such and such a state, and then lower your credence in animal welfarism or the world being in such and such a state.
(P.S. just to clarify, I'm not necessarily claiming that social progress has been bad. I think it is pretty probable, but it's also a difficult and complex issue. My problem is simply with the inference made.)
> Of course, we are not psychologically capable of loving cheesecake, just as we are not psychologically capable of loving shrimp. But that makes it even more virtuous to maximize the amount of cheesecake
I agree with this bit—Bentham's piece on the virtue ethics of shrimp welfare was silly, and I think I even brought up Cheesecaketarianism in the comments. Weirdness is not virtuous in itself.
But your broader argument is still, uh, dumb.
> You might object that Cheesecaketarianism doesn’t line up with our intuitions, but our moral intuitions evolved to track what’s beneficial for survival, not what’s objectively good!
That's not why I object to Cheesecaketarianism! I object because caring about the amount of cheesecake in the world is much more arbitrary than caring about the amount of pain in the world.
I, and everyone else around me, have regular qualitative experience of pain being unpleasant and wanting less of it, which gives us good reason to think that morality commands us to decrease the amount of pain in the world. Further, there's not really an obvious candidate to reduce pain any further—no deeper experience that we can say is *actually* being had when pain is felt.
When it comes to cheesecake, on the other hand, sure, I might say that cheesecake gives me a regular qualitative experience of pleasantness. But I can reduce it into constituent parts like satiety and nutrition, which a moral theory can take account of without specifically caring about cheesecake.
> There is an extremely strong moral intuition that social and economic progress over the past few centuries has been more important than the suffering of invertebrates.
Is there? What does "intuition" mean to you? Is it similarly intuitive that, say, 19th-century English literature is higher quality than the medieval Persian canon?
I don't think so! Your intuition says that Dickens is good because you've read Dickens and enjoyed it—if I presented you with a compelling argument for why medieval Persian writing was really great, and gave you some excerpts that you enjoyed, then you'd have good reason to reevaluate your stance!