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I think watching this documentary is important.
youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyE…
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Correct. There is no reason why civilization shouldn't be extended to animals. We should also increase sapience so that they can speak for themselves.
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Correct. You don't have sentience without valence, and you don't have valence without phenomenal consciousness.
Important caveout, though: you can have the functional equivalent: zombies. These zombies could act based on this equivalent, and thus "force" moral consideration.
Sentience refers specifically to valenced states of phenomenal consciousness, i.e. conscious states that are intrinsically experienced as desirable or undesirable. In principle you can also have conscious states with no valence at all, just hedonically neutral pure perception.
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I think about this a lot. People who undergo a callosotomy see their left hand start behaving independently, sometimes to the point of attacking them. What if each hemisphere is a complete, conscious subject?
What if the nonverbal parts of your brain have their own entirely independent consciousness, but we'll never know about it because among them only "you" can talk.
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Rado9910 retweeted
Shrimps have a pleasure-pain axis, a complex opioid system, and a fondness for morphine just like the rest of us. In cases of an irreconcilable conflict of interests, humans should be prioritised because we are more sentient.
But let’s help humble minds too.
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Rado9910 retweeted
Shrimp welfare is one of many EA issues people reflexively mock but 99% of people actually agree with on the merits
"Should fishermen electrically stun shrimp before boiling them alive?"
"Uh that seems reasonable" --Normie Mc MedianVoter
Let me defend effective altruists’ concern for shrimp welfare. We don’t know whether shrimp are conscious. But if they are conscious and can feel pain, we should be willing to spend resources to reduce the suffering we inflict on them. We don’t need certainty to justify spending resources to reduce the risk that we’re torturing conscious beings. Yes, reducing this to math can yield absurd conclusions about, say, how many babies we should sacrifice to spare how many shrimp from suffering. But any well-defined moral system can lead to troubling conclusions, and that doesn’t excuse cruelty to beings that may be conscious nor justify not thinking carefully about moral choices.
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Rado9910 retweeted
You thought utilitarianism was repugnant, wait until you realize that "ordinary discount rates" imply that we should torture galaxies of future people in exchange for an extra lollipop today...
many followers have correctly noticed that longtermist moral math doesn't survive an ordinary discount rate.
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Rado9910 retweeted
Boxing is a good stress test for virtue ethics because the concussions are not some unfortunate side effect accidentally attached to an otherwise noble practice. Repeatedly hitting someone in the head hard enough to impair them is part of the sport. And yet depending on the surrounding culture, the exact same practice gets narrated as courage, discipline, mastery, honor, self-command, or as cruelty, recklessness, and normalized brain damage. That seems like a real problem for virtue ethics: if your account of virtue depends heavily on inherited social wisdom, exemplars, and intuitions about what a flourishing person looks like, then different cultures can generate radically different moral verdicts while each feeling internally coherent. At some point you need an external error-correction signal. Consequences, rights, welfare, something. Otherwise “practical wisdom” risks collapsing into whatever your culture has become good at admiring.
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Rado9910 retweeted
In all of the wars in human history combined, 600 million people have been killed.
Humans kill this many animals (95% being chickens and fish) every 5 days.
EVERY. FIVE. DAYS.
Please RT. 🤯
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Rado9910 retweeted
There are few things more anti-human than factory farming.
It replaced human farmers with cages and machines. It broke the millennia-old human-animal bond. It elevated the sin of greed over the virtue of compassion.
Caring about that isn't weird. It's core to our humanity.
I’m telling you guys. You don’t understand how weird and anti-human Effective Altruism is. This is only surface level stuff.
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Rado9910 retweeted
I will happily talk about any and all weird stuff EAs worry about, but I have to say almost no one I meet anywhere disagrees with the idea that billions of animals are in hellish conditions once we agree on the number in factory farms.
I’m telling you guys. You don’t understand how weird and anti-human Effective Altruism is. This is only surface level stuff.
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I wonder what happens in the head of the people who decide to dedicate their lives to creating ever more extreme forms of animal abuse.
A new study (Li et al., 2026) recommends giving chickens just 2 hours of darkness nightly to maximize the time they spend eating.
The study and photo are Chinese. But the idea is American: US chicken producers pioneered sleep restriction to keep their birds eating around the clock.
We know chickens have far better welfare with 7–8 hours of darkness to sleep. Their ancestors, the red junglefowl, naturally sleep 12 hours a night.
Today the US industry gives most birds just 4 hours of intermittent darkness. Will they now drop that to 2?
Don't count on them considering what the birds need.
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Rado9910 retweeted
we put a guy in a cage and gave him impossible puzzles to solve until he went insane, broke out, and started breaking into people's homes and looking for the answer keys. cage experts say that if cage construction best practices had been followed, this never would have happened
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