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.)
You're equivocating between two different claims. I agree that it is wrong to cause shrimp lots of pain for minor personal pleasure. I believe in shrimp RIGHTS.
You're talking about a very different claim that shrimp have moral VALUE and therefore we ought to go out of our way to actively help shrimp.
I added some bold text at the end to explain the cheesecake example. My point is that Utilitarians sometimes want to say "OK, it's really unintuitive but maybe our intuition is just wrong." But I don't think you can make that move. Once you throw out intuition, you've lost the ability to reject intuitively absurd theories like cheesecaketarianism.
I think I addressed why a utilitarian can still reject cheesecaketarianism, while holding that our intuition about social progress cannot be trusted in the same way: The inference away from cheesecaketarianism is based on the view being wrong in hypotheticals, where the inference from social progress being good away from animal welfarism requires inferring from an actual state of the world away from a normative theory. But as I explained, that is completely fallacious! Saying I just “throw out intuition” is way too simplistic and suggests that you haven't understood my argument--it has nothing to do with not being able to trust intuition simpliciter.
As for whether shrimp have no value, absent the inference from social progress, that's another question. I think that if humans have moral value, then shrimp very likely also have, and any justification for thinking they don't (except for arguing that they very, very, very certainly aren't conscious, which the evidence obviously isn't strong enough to support) will just be super gerrymandered, and obviously based on a antecedent bias in favor of humans and against shrimp. But strictly speaking, the arguments I made in the original post weren't supposed to settle whether shrimp have value, only whether the inference from social progress being good to shrimp not having value is a good inference (which I think it blatantly isn't).
But how do you know that it's wrong in the hypotheticals? It's because we know intuitively that sacrificing people for cheesecake is not morally good. You're making an appeal to intuition.
Here is the argument that Lyman Stone made:
1. Social and Economic progress over the past few centuries has been a good thing. This is a base-level moral fact; an extremely powerful moral intuition which would override almost any other moral intuition.
2. I have only a weak moral intuition that shrimp suffering is morally important.
3. The claim that shrimp suffering is morally important is incompatible with the claim that social and economic progress over the past few centuries has been a good thing.
4. Both cannot be true and the intuition in favor of the goodness of the past few centuries of social and economic progress is much stronger than the intuition about shrimp suffering.
5. Therefore shrimp suffering is not morally important.
That looks like a valid inference to me.
You're saying that we can't trust the intuition in point 1 because you think the intuition comes from having not considered whether there are externalities for shrimp.
Yes, I'm making an appeal to intuition with regards to cheesecaketarianism. But not all intuitions are created equal. Our moral intuitions *only* regard moral judgements *given* such and such descriptive facts. We cannot trust our intuitions about the value of some actual thing, if the evidence about the descriptive facts turns out different than when you formed that intuition. That is what is supposed to be borne out in the case with butt-scratching.
But that is exactly what you need for that inference. The inference is not strictly valid as stated, you need a connecting premise that you should favor the intuition about social progress, given that it is stronger prior to considering this argument. I will not grant that connecting premise. The reason is that you have *no* direct insight into the valence of social progress *at all*--you only have inferential access.
You only know that *if* such and such facts obtain *then* it would be good (the moral principle). And then you have evidence that such and such facts do obtain. From that you form the strong belief that social progress is good. But the second that you get evidence that those facts don't obtain after all, then *all* your justification is lost, and you would be making a mistake holding on to your belief that social progress is good.
So if someone, prior to looking at the evidence, were pretty confident that shrimp have moral value, and very confident that social progress is good, then the moment they get evidence that shrimp are severely harmed through social progress, their justification for social progress being good overall is undercut. So even though they were antecedently much more confident that social progress is good than that shrimp have value, they should give up the former.
But the reasons against cheesecaketarianism have nothing to do with what the descriptive facts are--its entirely dependent on hypothetical cases. Thus what I say here doesn't affect the arguments against cheesecaketarianism. (you can try reformulating what I say about shrimp in terms of cheesecaketarianism. It doesn't even make sense to do that, because cheesecaketarianism is a normative theory, and the fact that social progress is good is a judgement about the actual world that you have inferred based on a normative theory and descriptive facts.)
But it just clearly isn't! At least it's not a brute moral intuition that what we refer to as social progress in the actual world is good. What is a brute moral intuition is that social progress is good *if such and such assumptions are true*. One way to see this is that if it turned out that making asphalt involves painfully grinding up billions of babies, it wouldn't be good.
One such assumption, I'll say, is that shrimp don't matter or aren't being harmed, both of which I think are false. Thus the brute intuition that *if* shrimp don't have value *then* social progress is good, isn't gonna decide whether shrimp matter and thus whether social progress is good in the actual world.
> 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!
I'm saying you're in the same spot epistemically. Agreed that, intuitively, people not dying of cholera is very good. But you don't have any way to know whether that's actually more important than shrimp suffering, and if I make a good case for why shrimp suffering matters more, you can't just pretend that your intuition had already taken it into consideration.
No, not really. You can have intuitions that say "human flourishing is obviously good" and "pain is obviously bad" and even "cheesecake is clearly good (for satiety + nutrition reasons)." But I don't think you (Simon Laird) actually have a pure intuition about shrimp suffering that hasn't been colored by post-hoc incentives to ignore shrimp welfare—it's like if after I showed you some great Persian books, you said, "no, actually it's pretty obvious that Dickens is better because that's just more intuitive."
Even if you did have a pure intuition, do you really think it'd be based on anything more than blind speciesism? Would it be more trustworthy than the intuition that says pain is bad in general?
I think @wonderandaporia and @arishtein have said basically everything I would want to say in the comments already, so here I'll just paste in a very nice passage from an essay @amoswollen wrote about shrimp welfare. I think it does a good job addressing the issue of which kinds of ethical intuitions we should trust:
Intuitions — here I agree with Stone — are prima facie evidence in ethics; when people report intuitions that shrimp don’t matter, for example, that’s prima facie evidence that shrimp don’t matter. However, there’s a reason that ethical intuitionist philosophers sometimes accept results that are prima facie unintuitive, rather than steadfastly sticking to the first reaction they had to every ethical question they’ve ever been faced with. The reason is that moral philosophy, done right, relies on reflective equilibrium. Instead of just going with your first reaction to an ethical question, you’re supposed to gather up a wide range of ethical intuitions that you have — consider whether there’s any reason to think that some are likely to be less reliable than others, so that they don’t all have equal weight when you sort through them — and then weigh them against each other. As you do this, you’re supposed to weigh intuitions about specific cases against intuitions about abstract moral principles. An example of an intuition about a case is the intuition that you ought to save a nearby drowning child at minimal expense; an example of an intuition about a principle is that how morally important a child is shouldn’t hinge on whether her belly button is an innie or an outie. Over time, you’ll notice that you can’t possibly accept every intuition about cases and principles as true, since some of them are contradictory — sometimes, you will have to surrender some intuitions about cases or principles, generating verdicts that are counterintuitive.
In the case of shrimp welfare, defenders of shrimpkind have given positive reasons to think that our case-intuitions about shrimp are unlikely to be reliable, since they are probably delivered by heuristics that we have independent reasons to think are unreliable guides to moral truth. For example: (1) shrimp are small — many pro-lifers complain, quite rightly, that pro-choicers who write things like “zygotes don’t matter, since they’re smaller than the full stop at the end of this sentence.” are being silly, since they’re relying on a size-matters heuristic that we have no reason to think would be truth-tracking; (2) shrimp are the most eaten animal alive by the numbers, so we’d expect status quo bias to creep in when we’re considering how important their interests are; (3) many people believe — falsely — that shrimp aren’t cute: the fact that humans commonly assign more moral weight to cute animals than crusty ones gives us independent reason to think that shrimp cuteness-deniers would have unreliable intuitions about cases involving shrimp; (4) many people believe — for reasons that have nothing to do with the relevant scientific evidence — that shrimp either don’t feel pain or barely feel any if they do.
Also I think utilitarianism is correct and I don't think morality obligates you to do anything. There are merely things you could do that would improve the world (and you should do them) to differing degrees.
If you sign the Giving What We Can pledge and donate 10% of your salary to shrimp welfare, that's great! (This is what I do, though I don't donate solely to shrimp welfare.) That's a very good thing to do because it will make the world better. It does not imply that you are obligated to grind for every waking second so that you can donate everything to shrimp welfare. If you did that, it would be even better, but I kinda doubt you will and I sure won't (because I'm selfish).
As Scott Alexander has pointed out, we could all go to extreme lengths to be good people and improve the world. Instead of marrying the love of your life, you could marry someone from an extremely poor country to give them a green card so they can come live in a developed country. That would be a very good thing to do. The world in which you marry someone to help them immigrate is probably a better world than the one in which you marry the love of your life; it has more happiness and less suffering in it.
But that's not a sacrifice most people are willing to make, and it's not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a good thing to do.
>Instead of marrying the love of your life, you could marry someone from an extremely poor country to give them a green card so they can come live in a developed country. That would be a very good thing to do.
That would not be a good thing to do. That's horrible.
Hedonist, Unitarian Universalist, Utilitarianism is so stupid and evil I often question whether it’s even worth dignifying with discourse. I’ve never felt the need to regard morality as anything other than what I and the people I care about want most.
I don’t think it’s stupid. It is a simple, internally consistent philosophical theory that avoids some of the weird-sounding implications of other philosophical theories.
Many smart people believe it and we need to change their minds.
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.)
You're equivocating between two different claims. I agree that it is wrong to cause shrimp lots of pain for minor personal pleasure. I believe in shrimp RIGHTS.
You're talking about a very different claim that shrimp have moral VALUE and therefore we ought to go out of our way to actively help shrimp.
I added some bold text at the end to explain the cheesecake example. My point is that Utilitarians sometimes want to say "OK, it's really unintuitive but maybe our intuition is just wrong." But I don't think you can make that move. Once you throw out intuition, you've lost the ability to reject intuitively absurd theories like cheesecaketarianism.
I think I addressed why a utilitarian can still reject cheesecaketarianism, while holding that our intuition about social progress cannot be trusted in the same way: The inference away from cheesecaketarianism is based on the view being wrong in hypotheticals, where the inference from social progress being good away from animal welfarism requires inferring from an actual state of the world away from a normative theory. But as I explained, that is completely fallacious! Saying I just “throw out intuition” is way too simplistic and suggests that you haven't understood my argument--it has nothing to do with not being able to trust intuition simpliciter.
As for whether shrimp have no value, absent the inference from social progress, that's another question. I think that if humans have moral value, then shrimp very likely also have, and any justification for thinking they don't (except for arguing that they very, very, very certainly aren't conscious, which the evidence obviously isn't strong enough to support) will just be super gerrymandered, and obviously based on a antecedent bias in favor of humans and against shrimp. But strictly speaking, the arguments I made in the original post weren't supposed to settle whether shrimp have value, only whether the inference from social progress being good to shrimp not having value is a good inference (which I think it blatantly isn't).
But how do you know that it's wrong in the hypotheticals? It's because we know intuitively that sacrificing people for cheesecake is not morally good. You're making an appeal to intuition.
Here is the argument that Lyman Stone made:
1. Social and Economic progress over the past few centuries has been a good thing. This is a base-level moral fact; an extremely powerful moral intuition which would override almost any other moral intuition.
2. I have only a weak moral intuition that shrimp suffering is morally important.
3. The claim that shrimp suffering is morally important is incompatible with the claim that social and economic progress over the past few centuries has been a good thing.
4. Both cannot be true and the intuition in favor of the goodness of the past few centuries of social and economic progress is much stronger than the intuition about shrimp suffering.
5. Therefore shrimp suffering is not morally important.
That looks like a valid inference to me.
You're saying that we can't trust the intuition in point 1 because you think the intuition comes from having not considered whether there are externalities for shrimp.
Yes, I'm making an appeal to intuition with regards to cheesecaketarianism. But not all intuitions are created equal. Our moral intuitions *only* regard moral judgements *given* such and such descriptive facts. We cannot trust our intuitions about the value of some actual thing, if the evidence about the descriptive facts turns out different than when you formed that intuition. That is what is supposed to be borne out in the case with butt-scratching.
But that is exactly what you need for that inference. The inference is not strictly valid as stated, you need a connecting premise that you should favor the intuition about social progress, given that it is stronger prior to considering this argument. I will not grant that connecting premise. The reason is that you have *no* direct insight into the valence of social progress *at all*--you only have inferential access.
You only know that *if* such and such facts obtain *then* it would be good (the moral principle). And then you have evidence that such and such facts do obtain. From that you form the strong belief that social progress is good. But the second that you get evidence that those facts don't obtain after all, then *all* your justification is lost, and you would be making a mistake holding on to your belief that social progress is good.
So if someone, prior to looking at the evidence, were pretty confident that shrimp have moral value, and very confident that social progress is good, then the moment they get evidence that shrimp are severely harmed through social progress, their justification for social progress being good overall is undercut. So even though they were antecedently much more confident that social progress is good than that shrimp have value, they should give up the former.
But the reasons against cheesecaketarianism have nothing to do with what the descriptive facts are--its entirely dependent on hypothetical cases. Thus what I say here doesn't affect the arguments against cheesecaketarianism. (you can try reformulating what I say about shrimp in terms of cheesecaketarianism. It doesn't even make sense to do that, because cheesecaketarianism is a normative theory, and the fact that social progress is good is a judgement about the actual world that you have inferred based on a normative theory and descriptive facts.)
I'm saying that the judgment that social and economic progress is good is a brute moral intuition, not an inference from a normative theory.
EDITED to add "and economic"
But it just clearly isn't! At least it's not a brute moral intuition that what we refer to as social progress in the actual world is good. What is a brute moral intuition is that social progress is good *if such and such assumptions are true*. One way to see this is that if it turned out that making asphalt involves painfully grinding up billions of babies, it wouldn't be good.
One such assumption, I'll say, is that shrimp don't matter or aren't being harmed, both of which I think are false. Thus the brute intuition that *if* shrimp don't have value *then* social progress is good, isn't gonna decide whether shrimp matter and thus whether social progress is good in the actual world.
> 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!
I’m not talking about Dickens, I’m talking about the fact that people don’t die of Cholera so much anymore.
I'm saying you're in the same spot epistemically. Agreed that, intuitively, people not dying of cholera is very good. But you don't have any way to know whether that's actually more important than shrimp suffering, and if I make a good case for why shrimp suffering matters more, you can't just pretend that your intuition had already taken it into consideration.
I'm making claim A:
Human flourishing matters more than any amount of shrimp flourishing/suffering.
There's also claim B: pain matters more than any amount of cheesecake
Claim A is just as obviously intuitively true as Claim B.
No, not really. You can have intuitions that say "human flourishing is obviously good" and "pain is obviously bad" and even "cheesecake is clearly good (for satiety + nutrition reasons)." But I don't think you (Simon Laird) actually have a pure intuition about shrimp suffering that hasn't been colored by post-hoc incentives to ignore shrimp welfare—it's like if after I showed you some great Persian books, you said, "no, actually it's pretty obvious that Dickens is better because that's just more intuitive."
Even if you did have a pure intuition, do you really think it'd be based on anything more than blind speciesism? Would it be more trustworthy than the intuition that says pain is bad in general?
I think @wonderandaporia and @arishtein have said basically everything I would want to say in the comments already, so here I'll just paste in a very nice passage from an essay @amoswollen wrote about shrimp welfare. I think it does a good job addressing the issue of which kinds of ethical intuitions we should trust:
Intuitions — here I agree with Stone — are prima facie evidence in ethics; when people report intuitions that shrimp don’t matter, for example, that’s prima facie evidence that shrimp don’t matter. However, there’s a reason that ethical intuitionist philosophers sometimes accept results that are prima facie unintuitive, rather than steadfastly sticking to the first reaction they had to every ethical question they’ve ever been faced with. The reason is that moral philosophy, done right, relies on reflective equilibrium. Instead of just going with your first reaction to an ethical question, you’re supposed to gather up a wide range of ethical intuitions that you have — consider whether there’s any reason to think that some are likely to be less reliable than others, so that they don’t all have equal weight when you sort through them — and then weigh them against each other. As you do this, you’re supposed to weigh intuitions about specific cases against intuitions about abstract moral principles. An example of an intuition about a case is the intuition that you ought to save a nearby drowning child at minimal expense; an example of an intuition about a principle is that how morally important a child is shouldn’t hinge on whether her belly button is an innie or an outie. Over time, you’ll notice that you can’t possibly accept every intuition about cases and principles as true, since some of them are contradictory — sometimes, you will have to surrender some intuitions about cases or principles, generating verdicts that are counterintuitive.
In the case of shrimp welfare, defenders of shrimpkind have given positive reasons to think that our case-intuitions about shrimp are unlikely to be reliable, since they are probably delivered by heuristics that we have independent reasons to think are unreliable guides to moral truth. For example: (1) shrimp are small — many pro-lifers complain, quite rightly, that pro-choicers who write things like “zygotes don’t matter, since they’re smaller than the full stop at the end of this sentence.” are being silly, since they’re relying on a size-matters heuristic that we have no reason to think would be truth-tracking; (2) shrimp are the most eaten animal alive by the numbers, so we’d expect status quo bias to creep in when we’re considering how important their interests are; (3) many people believe — falsely — that shrimp aren’t cute: the fact that humans commonly assign more moral weight to cute animals than crusty ones gives us independent reason to think that shrimp cuteness-deniers would have unreliable intuitions about cases involving shrimp; (4) many people believe — for reasons that have nothing to do with the relevant scientific evidence — that shrimp either don’t feel pain or barely feel any if they do.
Also I think utilitarianism is correct and I don't think morality obligates you to do anything. There are merely things you could do that would improve the world (and you should do them) to differing degrees.
If you sign the Giving What We Can pledge and donate 10% of your salary to shrimp welfare, that's great! (This is what I do, though I don't donate solely to shrimp welfare.) That's a very good thing to do because it will make the world better. It does not imply that you are obligated to grind for every waking second so that you can donate everything to shrimp welfare. If you did that, it would be even better, but I kinda doubt you will and I sure won't (because I'm selfish).
As Scott Alexander has pointed out, we could all go to extreme lengths to be good people and improve the world. Instead of marrying the love of your life, you could marry someone from an extremely poor country to give them a green card so they can come live in a developed country. That would be a very good thing to do. The world in which you marry someone to help them immigrate is probably a better world than the one in which you marry the love of your life; it has more happiness and less suffering in it.
But that's not a sacrifice most people are willing to make, and it's not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a good thing to do.
>Instead of marrying the love of your life, you could marry someone from an extremely poor country to give them a green card so they can come live in a developed country. That would be a very good thing to do.
That would not be a good thing to do. That's horrible.
Why?
Hedonist, Unitarian Universalist, Utilitarianism is so stupid and evil I often question whether it’s even worth dignifying with discourse. I’ve never felt the need to regard morality as anything other than what I and the people I care about want most.
I don’t think it’s stupid. It is a simple, internally consistent philosophical theory that avoids some of the weird-sounding implications of other philosophical theories.
Many smart people believe it and we need to change their minds.
Your version of morality sends pretty self-serving!