Declining Marginal Utility of Blizzards

Our newly shoveled driveway

Originally uploaded by enkrates.

It’s been about a week since the blizzards started, and I think today was the first day of the rest of our lives. We’ve been mostly waiting the storms out at home, although we did get out a few times on and near Christmas Day.

Today was also the first day we got any plowing on our street, which made all the difference. We tried to keep the driveway pretty close to shoveled, so that we could start driving again ASAP. Getting our street plowed today made it very quick to get from the beginning of shoveling to the beginning of driving (maybe an hour).

Things we learned:

1.) Buy more groceries that can stay edible for a week or two.
2.) Make sure we have shovels before the snow starts (we bought ours after the first blizzard).
3.) Make sure we have a car that is tough enough to drive in relatively deep snow, just in case we get stuck without plowing again.
4.) Maybe an indoor pool isn’t as decadent as it might have seemed at first…

Darwin, waiting

People sometimes give Charles Darwin a hard time about waiting 20 years to publish his theory of natural selection. I am strongly in favor of sitting at home and thinking about a new idea for a long while, especially an idea as good as natural selection. In our current age of product recalls, plagiarism, and fatally broken commercial software, wouldn’t we all benefit from taking our time just a little bit more? If there’s anything I could use more of, it’s civility, thoughtfulness, and some more attention paid to quality.

Laying in their deathbed, no one wishes they spent more time at the office, and no one wishes MS Word 2007 shipped a little sooner (and a little buggier).

How and Why I Care About Animal Welfare

I would count myself as a member of all sorts of subcultures. Internet Geeks. Baseball Fans. Movie Buffs.

None of those have a whole lot to do with animal welfare, so they’re not relevant here. But two subcultures, Objectivists and American Conservatives, are both proudly anti-animal welfare, at least in some sense. Neither embraces animal cruelty as most people would understand that phrase, but both could consider eating a steak to be a political act against hippies who think animals should have rights.

I don’t believe in animal rights. Animals are not political. I won’t go into this too deeply, but I will just say that Ayn Rand’s derivation of rights is the one I find most convincing, and it doesn’t apply to non-conceptual beings. And that’s where I’ve stood for a long time in relation to animal welfare.

But I am not much for politics in general and I certainly don’t care to use political ideas to make personal decisions. Rights are useful for constructing societies, but when I’m choosing among possible actions rights are under-determinative or irrelevant.

Simply, I have an animal in my family. We have a dog named Robot and I am unable to feel the way I do about him without also caring about the welfare of animals like him. That means when I eat, it matters to me that the cow that gave the milk in my food did not suffer in so giving. It matters that the meat I eat did not come from a sick animal, rotting in what is effectively a cell.
Further, it matters to me that I not eat meat or drink milk at all. But that isn’t the only thing that matters to me. I try to live a happy life and suddenly changing almost every dish in my diet is not likely to make me happy. I’ve spent the last 28 or so years learning the foods I like to eat and I doubt I could find vegan meals to replace all those dishes very quickly. Living a vegan life is a factor in my eating decisions, but it is not the only factor. These days I try to eat new vegan meals pretty regularly, but I almost never have only vegan meals for a whole day. I’m walking, not running, to veganism. I expect to get there, but I’m not in a rush. It’s hard for me to rush and be happy at the same time.

I’m an egoist, so animal suffering doesn’t count for everything. In fact, human suffering doesn’t count for everything, either. But they both count for something, at least to me.