I wrote a reply to the Bentham Bulldog argument that has been going mildly viral. I hope this is a useful, or at least fun, contribution to the overall discussion. Intro/summary below, full post on Substack.
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“One pump of honey?” the barista asked.
“Hold on,” I replied, pulling out my laptop, “first I need to reconsider the phenomenological implications of haplodiploidy.”
Recently, an article arguing against honey has been making the rounds. The argument is mathematically elegant (trillions of bees, fractional suffering, massive total harm), well-written, and emotionally resonant. Naturally, I think it's completely wrong.
Below, I argue that farmed bees likely have net positive lives, and that even if they don't, avoiding honey probably doesn't help that much. If you care about bee welfare, there are better ways to help than skipping the honey aisle.
Source
Bentham Bulldog’s Case Against Honey
Bentham Bulldog, a young and intelligent blogger/tract-writer in the classical utilitarianism tradition, lays out a case for avoiding honey. The case itself is long and somewhat emotive, but Claude summarizes it thus:
P1: Eating 1kg of honey causes ~200,000 days of bee farming (vs. 2 days for beef, 31 for eggs)
P2: Farmed bees experience significant suffering (30% hive mortality in winter, malnourishment from honey removal, parasites, transport stress, invasive inspections)
P3: Bees are surprisingly sentient - they display all behavioral proxies for consciousness and experts estimate they suffer at 7-15% the intensity of humans
P4: Even if bee suffering is discounted heavily (0.1% of chicken suffering), the sheer numbers make honey consumption cause more total suffering than other animal products
C: Therefore, honey is the worst commonly consumed animal product and should be avoided
The key move is combining scale (P1) with evidence of suffering (P2) and consciousness (P3) to reach a mathematical conclusion (
Congrats Elliott! Looks like a nice paper.
Thanks!
(FWIW, I don't give much weight to critical-set views, anyway.)
In section 3. The Drop, you assume biographical identity is determinately-all-or-determinately-nothing, but this doesn't seem very plausible to me. What could a justification for a specific such account even look like, with specific precise cutoffs for a given person? The only I could imagine is someone very sharply going from fully personally identifying to not at all identifying with their past with the additional tiny change. However, I would be surprised if that happened for most people or that we should interpret this as actually giving a determinate sharp cutoff when it would happen.
In my view, the result is going to be fairly continuous, because any of the following reasons (conditioning on any of them) will hold:
Plus, if someone is specifically endorsing a critical-range view, then they'll probably be more broadly sympathetic to vagueness, including for identity, anyway. OTOH, if they did something like 3 for the critical range, too, then they'd turn the critical-range view into something like a critical-level view with uncertainty about the location of the critical level, rather than supervaluationism, which requires truth of the predicate on all precisifications.
I think your objections in sections 4 and 5 are good, and probably (?) extend to vague accounts and highly graded accounts of biographical identity.
Probably a few ways to formalize this, but I imagine Lipschitz continuity of the probability distribution over the set of possible cutoffs or over large subsets, and for each "type" of cutoff, a unimodal probability distribution for its location.