Thread by @EpistemicHope

All this sounds basically right to me, and, comports with my own (not yet published) personal ethics, modulo that (to speak in the language Scott is using here, which is not my usual language) we TOTALLY have implicit obligations to animals.

Why wouldn't we?

https://twitter.com/1526643050/status/1886505797502546326

"If animals are conscious...we probably don't have obligations to them, because we never signed any treaties."

...but also...

"You're obligated to take care of your kids, because you accepted an implicit promise to do so by giving birth to them."

...is a very weird juxtaposition.

We don't have contracts with our kids before we bring them into the world, but we nevertheless have duties to them. Broadly, we need to make sure that they're "ok".

We also don't have contracts with the chickens that we bring into the world, but we have duties to them by the same token.

Why WOULDN'T I have obligations to the chickens who I cause to exist?

Is there something special about mammalian biology such that we have implicit obligations to our biological offspring, but not to beings that we create by other means?

I think obviously not. If I grow a clone in a vat, or build a conscious AI, or genetically engineer a new organism, I think I'm responsible for its wellbeing in more or less the same way as if I have a kid in the more usual way.

(And I speculate that if you think otherwise, you're confusing your personal parental attachment to your child—or perhaps a social expectation of how parents are supposed to behave—for an implicit promise that you made to him/her.

The parental attachment is real, but that's not the moral obligation.)

I think I have an implicit obligation to only create new beings when I have reasonable grounds to expect their getting to exist is a "good deal".

Which is a reasonable supposition about (most) kids and and...unlikely (to say the least) in the case of the chickens.

But even if I didn't cause some particular chickens to exist (say, I just met some wild chickens on a nature hike) it would still not be ok to torture them for small gain.

We have an implicit obligation not to torture others for small gain!

"You're obligated to follow the law, because of the implicit social contract."

There's lots of evil behavior that was/is legal at some place and time.

Murder, rape, and enslavement aren't morally bad because they're legally banned by a given society.

They're morally bad because they involve harming people unconsensually.

(Technically, the nonconsent is only part of the problem. Most people would regard it as morally dubious to trick someone into a completely legal contract, which hurts them immensely to your benefit.

But "no large nonconsensual harm" is a fine lower bound on our default implicit obligations to others.)

Basically, we all have an implicit obligation of fairness: to not massively fuck people over in our dealings with them.

That's not because of a social contract.

Or if it is a social contract, it's a timeless one that applies about as much to the non-aggressive-to-human animals we happen to encounter as to any new human societies (who, on priors, are more threatening) that we happen to encounter.

It's wrong to massively fuck over people who happen to be in your power, even if your society has carved out an exception for that kind of fucking over of those kinds of people.

Creating chickens, torturing them for their whole lives, and then slaughtering them, is a fucking over the chickens. And it shouldn't be a crux whether we made treaties with the chickens about it or not.

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