We talked about many topics at the latest philosophy night; here's my unbelievably biased summary of some of them.
Q: Can pets, or animals in general, provide the same need for companionship that human friends / family provide? I.e. are there people who can avoid being lonely solely by having animal friends, or do we all need other humans specifically?
A: Most people said, I think, said there is something special about humans which we need, though pets can help with loneliness and give us some of the same happiness we get from human friends. Though in some cases we like some animals more than some humans. A few people seem to be able to be happy as hermits, so it would seem that there are a few people who don't have as much of a need for other humans as most of us have.
Later, we also discussed the ethics of pets, in which I was potentially converted or rethought something: I've avoided having pets because I think animals should be free in the wild and aren't happy being the only animal among a family of humans. However, I was told that studies on dogs in particular have found that they can be happier with just humans and no other dogs, since they evolved to be a companion to humans. There are 3 categories of animals: wild, domesticated (animals that have changed to co-depend on humans), and animals that have evolved to live near humans (such as rats, pigeons, and squirrels). I do still think it's important to have dogs in the country, though, where they don't need a leash; the dogs on the farm I visited in South Africa were very different and seemed much happier than the city dogs on leashes I see here. But I'd have to admit that it's possible that such domesticated dogs might be happy enough, compared to wolves who live in the wild, to justify the existence of dogs who live with humans. For that matter, it occurs to me that some humans who live in civilization might be happier than many our more primitive ancestors, maybe even happy enough to justify the existence of civilization.
Q: Is there a difference between lying and omission?
A: This is another question that converted me; I've always thought of lying as wrong, but omitting information as not wrong. However, omitting relevant information in a way that selfishly manipulates someone can have the same effect as lying to them, so actually, I'd have to say it's as bad. I think we all agreed, though I'm still not sure if this makes lying in non-harmful ways OK.
Q: Does utilizing time properly make our lives meaningful and happy?
A: I think it does for me in the cases where I spend time to get more time overall, by activities such as scheduling, multitasking, or automating tasks, particularly for programmers. However, a lot of people feel that automating tasks, especially in the workplace, causes some people's jobs to become obsolete, which causes problems. And the really significant problem is that the automation, which is done by skilled, educated people who work in offices and are removed from the detailed reality, removes the jobs of low income, labour-oriented workers, who can't afford to lose their job or to pay tuition to learn a new profession that hasn't been automated yet. Many of us agreed that this is a strong argument for Universal Basic Income. I'm not really convinced it's an argument to not automate things, though. If we stop automating or intentionally reduce efficiency, we'll have more work to do and more people will have jobs but we might have either scarcer resources or people spending a lot of their lives working at manual labour. I do think it's valuable to be thoughtful in intentionally choosing to do some manual labour sometimes: for example, I intentionally wash dishes by hand and shovel snow with a shovel, and the process of doing those things can be mentally beneficial in small amounts, making me happier. The danger in having certain things done for you automatically is then squandering the extra time you gain doing things that don't make your lives meaningful and happy.
Q: If your girlfriend puts her sex toys in the oven to clean them and then leaves the oven on and goes to the grocery store, what should you do?
A: Have a serious discussion about your relationship.
Q: If everyone spoke their mind, would this world be a better place?
A: A bunch of people said no, which made me think I should maybe be more careful about what I say. I do certainly see that on the internet there is damage from people speaking their minds, though I'm not sure if people speaking their minds offline would have the same problems and am not even convinced it would be a bad thing.
A great point was made regarding politics: that there can be circles of people who are either liberal or conservative and, for example, if you're among a group of liberal-minded people, but you happen to believe one thing that doesn't align with their beliefs, then you might be shunned. Or similarly at a conservative workplace where you don't want to say too much because you don't want to risk your job for being non-conservative. In fact, each belief is separate, and it makes total sense to believe some things that are conservative and other things that are liberal. When people decide that they're one or the other, it becomes part of their identity and then when thinking about a new belief, they don't really think about whether it's true, they think about whether it's something that a liberal/conservative is supposed to believe, or they think about whether their friends / community will accept them if they say it. That's a huge problem and I think we need to become a lot more non-partisan and cosmopolitan in accepting people with different beliefs or values.
There are still a few beliefs or values that are in a different kind of category, where I may not feel safe or comfortable around someone who says them, and it's reasonable to have some boundaries. Things like racism / bigotry, or science denial conspiracies, or those people who tried to take over the US election by force in 2021. But the vast majority of conservative or liberal values are not like that, they're beliefs that people have a right to believe and say and we can get along just fine with people who believe and say them even when they're opposite to some of our core values.
Q: If a pig wants to be eaten, should you eat it? Is doing so better than eating a pig that doesn't want to be eaten?
A: I think everybody, at least at first, said they would eat the pig and didn't see how that's a dilemma. But this then leads to the question: does that mean it's better to genetically engineer pigs to want to be eaten? And with factory farms, we've done something like that: genetically engineered animals to not think the same kind of thoughts they would think in the wild, but to be more like vegetables. Yet there's a sense in which the fact that they don't care if they're eaten for that reason makes it worse. A great point was made about our relationship to death: we don't want to think about death and we remove ourselves from it, so that the death of a pet is a big deal for us, but free-range farmers see death every day. This means I think there's a virtue in facing death and the necessity of taking a life to eat, rather than keeping yourself separate from it.
