The virtuous person

(Crossposted from my blog--for more on what I've written about shrimp welfare, see here).  

Scott Alexander’s fuego piece I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup begins with the following:

In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.

Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good-for-nothing brother. The good-for-nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman (and stole his identity). Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or burned alive, and it is only the priest who – consistently – offers a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection.

The priest tells them:

It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.

In the story, I think it’s quite clear that the priest is more virtuous than the rest of the townspeople. The priest demonstrates real compassion. He doesn’t stop caring about wrongdoing when it’s against people he doesn’t feel an attachment towards, nor is he especially severe in punishing wrongdoing when it’s against someone he likes. The priest is consistent, caring about what really matters; he demonstrates real and serious virtue.

It’s virtuous to take another’s interests seriously because you recognize that it’s the right thing to do, even if it doesn’t excite your emotions. There’s especially great virtue in forgiving your enemies because you have every emotional inclination not to do so. There’s virtue in helping those that you don’t feel empathy towards, simply because you recognize at a deep level that you owe them compassion. The virtuous person does not prance about, only pursuing what resonates with him emotionally, but values what really matters.

For this reason, the virtuous person cares about shrimp.

Shrimp

I’ve elsewhere written about the case for giving money to the shrimp welfare project, and for taking shrimp welfare seriously. Trillions of shrimp are tortured to death every year; thrown on a big thing of ice where they’re frozen and suffocated to death. Every dollar given to the shrimp welfare project anesthetizes around 15,000 shrimp before they endure this horrendous fate, thus averting an unfathomable amount of agony. By estimates so conservative they make Mike Pence look like a leftist radical, the shrimp welfare project averts as much agony, per dollar, as preventing a person from being tortured.

This argument obviously doesn’t depend on utilitarianism, any more than the statement “don’t stab people in the eye because it hurts them” does. Utilitarianism is radical in claiming that pleasure and pain are the only things that matter, but any remotely sane view will hold that they are among the things that matter. For this reason, I think everyone, no matter what they think about normative ethics, should be moved to give to shrimp welfare.

But there’s an argument for giving to shrimp welfare that appeals uniquely to virtue ethicists. Promoting shrimp welfare, or the welfare of other weird non-photogenic beings, is just about the most virtuous thing a person can do.

The virtuous person cares about the interests of others even if he cannot care for them emotionally. His moral response is not contingent on his having a strong emotional reaction. His pursuit of the good is not dragged around haphazardly by his whims. He, like the priest in The Secret of Father Brown, promotes justice and goodness even in cases where injustice and badness doesn’t offend him personally. Such a person recognizes that shrimp’s interests mater, even though shrimp aren’t cute or cuddly and we don’t have strong emotional reactions to their mistreatment.

For much of human history, there have been some severely physically disabled people. These people were scarred beyond recognition—most people treated them with revulsion and disgust. The virtuous thing to do is to treat such people with compassion—even if when you look upon them you feel sickened and disgusted, the virtuous thing to do is be kind. The virtuous person treats the victims of horrifying burns as persons, whatever they look like. They do not let their actions be dictated by morally irrelevant factors, for that is a vice of the highest order.

But now imagine that a human was even more disabled. Not only did they look hideous—in ways that caused many to lose compassion for them—they also had severe mental disabilities. They would never learn to read or write or speak, their mental abilities would remain below those of a toddler. Such a thing is true of many humans. If such people were being tortured, literally by the trillions, the right thing to do would be to treat them with compassion and value their interests.

Now, I do not know if there actually are people as cognitively incapacitated as shrimp. It’s hard to compare mental incapacitation across species. But if there were, it would be wrong to mistreat them by the trillions—to torture them to death for the purpose of eating them, after locking them in hellish torment facilities. They watch us through pain filled eyes, never understanding why we hurt them as we do, why we torture them. They all have eyes, and they are watching us as we hurt them.

The virtues of caring about shrimp

There’s especially great virtue in doing the right thing even when there’s social pressure not to do it. You get a lot more virtue points for promoting gay rights when your friends all oppose gay rights than when your friends support gay rights. You get a lot more virtue points if you do the right thing but don’t get credit for doing it—if you’re willing to risk seeming like a weirdo for the sake of doing the right thing.

Modernity has made it so that those in the west no longer need to fight or die for important causes. Instead, we need to undergo major inconvenience for important causes. We need to give our money and our time trying to promote the causes that matter. When those causes sound weird, doing so is genuinely costly. If people face mild social pressure when you do some action, most people won’t do it even if it’s obviously the right thing to do. For this reason, sticking up for the weird and unpopular cause of shrimp welfare displays genuine virtue.

In the twenty-first century, it isn’t just evil that’s banal: good is too! The most important things you’ll do in your life are no longer about dramatic displays of virtue. They’ve become about where you give a bit of money a month. Every nice thing I’ve ever done has done much less good than donating a bit of money to shrimp welfare.

“For they could not love you”

Even if one thinks that there are good reasons to neglect the interests of shrimp, it’s obvious that the main reason people neglect their interests is speciesism. Most people don’t care about shrimp because they look weird and are not human. But just as racism and sexism are vices, so too is speciesism, where one values a being less merely because it is a different species—for reasons having nothing to do with the traits it possesses. It makes sense to value a shrimp less than a person, because shrimp live shorter lives with much less significant goods than humans—but one should never value them less simply because they are not human.

The song Vincent has a line that has always stuck with me when I think about the mistreatment of animals. “For they could not love you.” Most people—myself included—cannot love the chickens or pigs that we kill on the farm, and they certainly can’t love all the shrimp. We cannot feel significant empathy for them and have minimal emotional reactions when they are killed. While I sometimes have an emotional reaction when I see particularly grotesque displays of animal cruelty against chickens and cows, I never feel it about the shrimp.

But what do you do when a being is too unlike you and weird looking for you to love them or to feel anything when they die? The virtuous thing to do is to recognize that even though you have no particularly strong emotional reaction to their mistreatment, though you cannot love them, you can still will their good. You can still oppose their mistreatment because mistreating conscious beings is wrong. Being blinded to horrifying cruelty that could very well cause more agony than has ever existed in all of human history just because you cannot feel empathy for its victims is wrong. It displays a lack of virtue.

The reasons people don’t care about shrimp is because of certain vices that they possess. I also possess those vices. Because our moral intuitions were tuned by evolution for survival rather than what really matters, we care much more about those that are nearer to us than those that are evolutionarily distant. The only question is whether, in the face of those vices, we will succumb to them or try to promote the interests of the beings that we are hurting.

Shrimp welfare shouldn’t just be a priority of weird utilitarians. It should be a priority of anyone who takes seriously suffering or virtue. For there is great virtue in helping the meek and vulnerable rather than giving in to one’s defective lack of empathy.