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sauce123
Hey guys,
About a year and a half ago, Matthew Janda invited me to contribute a foreword to his upcoming poker book, Applications of No-Limit Hold em' which focuses on GTO 6max no limit play (to be published this spring by 2p2 publishing, see http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33.../#post37793214). As a GTO player myself, I was both excited to read the content of the book and to contribute a foreword. Since then, I've read multiple drafts of Applications and talked extensively with Matt about poker theory and I'm very impressed both with Matt's knowledge of theory and with the quality of his book.
Unfortunately, the foreword I submitted was rejected by 2p2 publishing and they decided to publish Applications without it. I've decided to publish the foreword here, and I hope it gets some of you guys excited for Matthew's book.
I've attached the foreword since the graphics show up poorly in blog format. I also had to zip the file due to the forum's restrictions on file size, sorry for the inconvenience. It's in .doc and .odt.
This was meant to be a (relatively) finished draft of the foreword, but there are still a couple of typos and the graphics are inconsistent, etc. I hope you guys enjoy it, I was trying to give a relatively digestible introduction to the value of game theory in poker for advanced (but not expert) players. There's some information in there which should be new for most of you, and even if you're familiar with some basic GTO concepts, the foreword (hopefully) will show GTO is more useful than it might appear at first. Let me know what you guys think, and especially let me know if you're pumped to read Applications!
-Ben |
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Below is Xposted from the 2p2 marketplace forum:
Since this is a blog, I'll make a slightly more informal note and just say that I think these sorts of stakes represent mutually beneficial arrangements, a rare thing in poker or business. I'm not out to screw anybody: I've been on both sides of the fence in deals like this in my poker career, and I've been happy with the arrangement on both sides!
Sauce Stakes: “Expiring Makeup” Cash Game Staking
1. about: I will be offering cash game staking at limits between $25nl/pl (i.e. .25/.50 blinds), or $1/$2 limit, and $5k big bet, or $100/$200 limit. I am a long time high stakes professional specializing in NLHE and PLO, and due to some run-good/play-good in 2012, I have enough bankroll to reinvest in the poker community. Hopefully I can provide a mutually beneficial staking relationship to skilled and motivated 2p2ers. Odd arrangements will be considered: say you normally play on Stars but want to try playing on a Euro site. If I trust you, I'll stake you on the Euro site only, and you can freeroll there while keeping your own action on Stars. Etc. If you have a proposal, let me know- I'll probably say no, but I don't want to leave value on the table!
2. Structure: Incentive problems plague most cash game staking arrangements. Most arrangements include non expiring makeup, and vague conditions as to when profits may be distributed. Being in makeup provides perverse incentives for everyone. For the backed player, he would prefer the stake be ended tomorrow because while he is in makeup, his backer is freerolling on his wins until he gets back to even. The backer hates when his horse is in makeup because he can't make any money until the horse gets profitable. Moreover, it's incredibly difficult for the horse to continue to play his A game while deep in makeup. And once the horse is out of makeup, how long till he can get his money?
Instead, I will be offering stakes with expiring makeup. Specifically, for a given game/stake, we will pre arrange a sample size at which the horse's makeup disappears, and he is back at even (i.e. freerolling again). For example, a game/stake might be $400 buy in NLHE 6 max. The time of expiry on the makeup is called the interval, for example, 10k hands. The horse plays 10k hands of his $400 NLHE 6max, at the end of which he keeps a pre-arranged percentage of his profits and takes none of his losses. He then has the option of rebooking an identical expiring makeup stake going forward, or to play on his own money, or to renegotiate any of the conditions of subsequent intervals.
As your backer, I am totally indifferent to the size of your interval. If you can only play 5k hands a month, and you want to book your profits every 5k hands to pay your rent, tell me, and we'll make it happen. Profit distirbutions per interval will be designed to distribute expected profits per interval to player/backer in an agreed upon percentage. As interval size decreases, the backer is entitled to more of the absolute profits since he eats all of the losses on losing intervals. You tell me your interval size, and provide me with the necessary statistical information about your play, and I will price you an interval for every game/stake you are interested in.
3. Example: For a player with an expected winrate of 10 bb/100, an expected standard deviation of 125 bb/100, and an interval size of 10k hands, the player and backer split the expected value of the interval 50/50 when backer receives 56.23% of absolute profits to account for the fact that the stake has no makeup.
Say our hypothetical player was playing .50c/$1 6max nlhe. With a winrate of 10bb/100, over a sample of 10k hands, this player's expected win is .1 bb/hand * 10,000 hands= 1000bb, or $1000. To split that expected $1000 win 50/50 between player and backer, backer must collect more than 50% on winning 10k intervals to offset the losing 10k intervals in which he takes all of the losses. Taking 56.23% of winning intervals accomplishes this goal.
4. How To Apply: All stakes are built on a foundation of trust. Before you get me to let you play poker on a freeroll, I need to know a substantial amount of personal information about you. Specifically: a) I need all quantitative information on your cash game poker play. Most stakes will be done on Stars, and to be considered for a stake you must send me a forwarded email from Stars support attached with your Stars hand histories lifetime. Also include all other poker cash game results you have records of, or can get records of. b) I need to know your financial situation, and how that relates to you wanting/needing a stake. Leave nothing out, I don't care if you blew your roll at the strippers, buying expensive meals, or taking care of your sick parents, but I need to know. c) In light of a) and b) I need to know which games/stakes/interval sizes/percentage of expected profit you want on your stake. Example: 'I want to be staked for 200nl 6max through 600nl 6max on Poker Stars, I want my interval size to be 10k hands, and I want to keep 40% of expected profits.'
5. Other: All stakees will be required to install 'Tiltbreaker' on their computers to prevent deviations from games included in the stake, and to provide an unbreakable stop loss. All stakees will be required to sign standard contracts drafted by myself or my staking manager, and will be required to keep timely, accurate records, and to submit to accounting audits. I will provide infrequent and informal personal or group coaching to staked players in order to improve performance. My staking manager Aaron Steinberg is a certified life coach and masters candidate in psychology, and he spent a brief period of time learning from Jared Tendler. If you have interest in emotional poker coaching from him or general therapeutic work that you believe relates to your poker performance, he will be available for scheduled individual sessions.
6. Contact: All information should be emailed to saucestakes123@gmail.com with attached quantitative information. In order to gauge interest and manage portfolio risk, responses for intitial stakees will be sent by October 21, 2012 (one month from today). All subsequent applicants should receive a yes/no response within two weeks after our opening day of October 21st 2012. |
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Waaayyyy TL: DR if you aren't shopping for an internet provider !!
If I can do one thing to improve your life, it's this; please, PLEASE, DO NOT sign with Bell.
Here are 4 among many other stories:
1) Bell's "service" plans are so byzantine that no sane person would spend their time figuring out how to optimize their service. Bell's "customer service" reps are incentivized (read: paid) to saddle you with a plan which is good for Bell, not you. And so they saddle you with plans which screw you.
2) When Bell "credits" your account (say, provides something for free or as part of a loyalty program) they often cancel other parts of your account. For example, a friend of mine called Bell threatening to cancel his contract and they responded by saying they would match the offer from the other company and he could keep his contract. Instead, they canceled some of the extras on my friend's account in order to match the other company's offer, so that he was charged hundreds in overcharges. He canceled his account as soon as he found it.
3) I was being charged for 9 months for 10mb of dataservice which was then "blocked" (meaning I had no access to said data service on my phone) in order to "protect me from overcharges". They then informed me that they also credited my account each month with the same amount as the charge. I include this only to illustrate how arcane Bell's plans are.
4) I just got off the phone with Bell (2.5 hours). I called because I bought a high speed mobile internet connection. The problem? It only works once every 30-45 seconds (so not so great for playing poker). After being hung up on twice by tech support, I got through to someone who informed me I was in an "MS" zone, or marginal service zone. I live in downtown Toronto, Canada's largest city. He suggested I call their "loyalty" program and ask for an older species of turbostick which worked in my area. I called them up, and was informed that they had discontinued the older turbo stick, and had no definite plans on improving service in my area, and had no other options for mobile internet products. So I asked if they could reimburse me for my plan, my turbostick, and terminate the account. They said no, and a supervisor concurred, saying that "there was usage on the stick, therefore it works." Of course I had never maintained the stick never worked, just that it only works around 1/6th of the time; that 1/6th of the time it is definitely very fast. At this point I asked to get out of my contract, and the supervisory apparatus (apparently many of these geniuses were "reviewing the account" at once) said that they couldn't allow me to get out of my contract without paying the whole thing, because I had received a $720 free phone, the LG Optimus G. I had never even heard of the LG Optimus G, I use a cheap Samsung phone. When I informed of this they let me know I was being impertinent: the computer said I had an LG Optimus G, therefore I had an LG Optimus G and it would cost me $180 to get out of my contract with my spiffy new ghostphone. They also said I had sent a text from my LG Optimus G, implying that this caught me red handed, and I actually owned said phone.
What's particularly maddening about my experience is that it makes absolutely zero financial sense for Bell to treat me like shit. I have a ton of money, and therefore I don't spend the time reading the fine print of their absurdly complex array of service agreements. Consequently, I've gotten charged as much as $500/month in overcharges while away in Vegas, which I have always paid (my plan is $92/month). All told, I've donked off close to $5000 to this company. And this was the treatment I got.
I also want to make clear that there is probably a quasi-legal explanation of my account which absolves Bell of all responsibility. Maybe they are allowed to call different charges "phones", then not tell you about them, for example. They are certainly allowed to charge you full price for any service, provided it even works for one moment (they informed me they would credit my account had the turbostick never downloaded one KB of data in three months).
So, I hope my experience helps any potential wireless customers steer completely clear of this company, if you are ever browsing a phone forum or anything that gets traffic, please copy and paste this into the forum so that this company loses as much business as possible.
Ben
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Hey guys,
Ok, so, I enjoy poker writing and talking and blogging and video-making. But there's a few problems. First, to make an excellent instructional video, I think I would need to spend at least 4 hours preparing for every 1 hour of content. I feel guilty about putting out sub-par videos- and increasingly in my videos I've had to either be vague or terse in order not to give away too much, which I've decided is worse than making no videos at all. In any case, if I make a video, that is all time I could be using to study poker on my own, or to play poker for lots of money where I have a large edge. Second, the more excellent my video, the more I make my opponents play better, both in general and against me personally. So, that makes video-making both pure $/hour EV bad, and also future EV bad. I can't possibly put an exact number on how much money (including opportunity cost) I think I lose making a video, but I'd guess it's something like 20k for a mediocre vid, and upwards of 50k for a good one. And let me tell you, Leggo ain't paying me that kind of money.
Right but so I'd still like to do something for the community occasionally. I think a good compromise might be to make a more fun video, but one which has interesting strategic content. Specifically, I'm inspired by the professional video gaming community's practice of 'live-streaming' (where you watch a pro play in real time) and of DayNine's video series 'Funday Monday' (where people submit videos of themselves playing the game with special rules- e.g. only using one type of unit, or not using a certain resource etc). So, I'll make a video for Leggo on the condition that it's fun and kind of goofy. This gets me off the hook on both the integrity side (since the video is for fun, the strategic content doesn't have to be my absolute best effort), and gets me off the hook on the EV side (if my opponents see my thought process for playing a 100% VPIP, this isn't exactly the end of the world). I also think that if you guys watch closely and read between the lines a little, you will learn a lot of important stuff about strategy- but I like the idea of keeping the strategy component a bit subtle and lighthearted.
So, if this is a good idea, please post in the comments section, and maybe Aaron will allow me to make it so. I have a few ideas for the video(s) which I'll post here, but if you think of something awesome just leave a post in the comments section and I'll do that instead.
Some ideas:
HU nlhe with no folding preflop
HU anything with showing my cards to my opponent every hand
HU or 6max with no call button
HU or 6max with only overbetting
6max where I can only VPIP for a limp or for a call
Only donk bet or checkraise OOP
No cbetting
Or some combination thereof.
I'd like to pick something where I have some decent chance of booking a win, or better yet a decent chance of beating the game. I think all of these qualify in the very short term if my opponents don't expect it, and if I have a decent sized skill edge on my opponents.
Ben
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Today while biking over to play squash I got to musing about the meanings of the ubiquitous poker terms "TAG" and "LAG" which we use to rapidly describe players. I think the terms are pretty much anti-helpful; that is, they DO tell us something about a player, but what they tell us is probably worse than nothing at all. I actually like the descriptions though- we need some kind of snappy term to describe a player qualitatively- and TAG and LAG are handy acronyms. And so I don't think they need be thrown out completely but instead just repurposed a bit.
So rather than assume everyone has the same usage of these terms (which I suspect they don't) I'll just establish one to start off with. I *think* TAG and LAG were probably coined before I played poker, but as I was learning poker they were being repurposed to loosely correspond to certain ranges of preflop stats. As I first used the terms, a TAG was around 18 VPIP/ 15 PFR / 5 3bet to 24 VPIP / 19 PFR / 7 3bet, and LAG occupied a higher end somewhere before maniac. Nit was anyone less than an 18 VPIP. Keep in mind this is all 6max, and these criteria seem a bit on the tight side now. I suppose they have since been adjusted, although now we often substitute HUD stats for the TAG or LAG description for greater precision, making the terms less frequent on the forums.
The confusion crept in, both historically and currently, because people seemed to think that a preflop description either entailed or strongly suggested a corresponding postflop strategy. So, for example, the TAG player was supposed to play his TAG game preflop and then follow up with aggressive flop play to exploit his tight image (hence tight-aggressive with the aggro part supposedly corresponding to postflop). Similarly the LAG was the guy who wouldn't put on the brakes postflop. This assimilation of preflop and postflop play did a huge amount of harm to the poker community as a whole, and led to an untold amount of mistakes both in hand criticism on forums and in actual play- because of course preflop stats entail absolutely nothing about postflop play aside from the range of hands which the player has to work with after he sees the flop. Even stranger, if the 'T' in 'TAG' was to indicate the preflop strategy, and the 'AG' was to indicate the postflop strategy, then apparently the community ran out of acronyms, because almost never on the forums would a poster admit to playing the dreaded 'LAP' or 'Tight Passive,' and so in almost all cases the postflop types got lumped together and the discussion was dominated by preflop play.
I wonder if this rigid terminology helped some fundamentally unsound, and to be honest not all that tricky styles win a lot of money during the heyday of TAG and LAG's usage. A few players come to mind especially- Punketty, ADZ, on the "LAG" side, and SamH and EmpireMaker on the "TAG" side (there are players still exploiting this preflop-postflop blindness people have, but I won't mention currently active ones). The first two players were really playing loose passive- opening a ton of pots and then waiting for the nuts to put money in. The second two did indeed play tight preflop- but they played just as tight postflop, waiting for the nuts to get money in. Against the former, winning was as easy as 3betting a bunch pre and then folding to raises post, and against the latter, winning was as easy as playing reasonable hands pre and then betting when checked to.
The insensitivity to hybrid styles is why I find the terms worse than useless, because just about everyone is some sort of hybrid style! They fail to capture all of the gradations in preflop and postflop play, and miss all of the subtle differences which are critically important. Instead, people just use some "standard" set of reads with TAG and some other set with LAG, not realizing that the standard reads they employ do more harm than good.
So I found it interesting that from a game theory perspective, TAG and LAG can actually come to have an interesting and useful meaning. So, if tight is read as a deviation from optimal play on the side of being too tight with some action(s), and aggressive is read as a deviation from optimal play on the side of being too aggressive with some action(s), then TAG gets a new meaning. If I elect to play too few hands preflop, then my optimal aggression frequency postflop will increase (relative to postflop aggression frequency for an optimal preflop range) provided I'm playing an optimal opponent. So, if the 'AG' is to have meaning as an exploitative strategy, then I have to elect to play exploitably aggressive postflop even given the fact that my handrange is stronger than it should be. So, TAG means to play an exploitative strategy such that I elect to exploit my opponents by playing too tight pre, and then decide to exploit them in the exact opposite way by playing too aggro post. Weird! LAG can be analyzed the same way. I decide to play suboptimally aggro both pre and postflop to exploit my opponents.
Even this more precise way of using TAG and LAG doesn't help much. First, these are kind of weird strategies to play- where once we used to use TAG or LAG to describe pretty much everybody, now TAG and LAG just describe some kind of wacky of strategies to be employed in rare circumstances. Second, the breaking up of reads into preflop and postflop is pretty imprecise- it's fairly common for a player to be aggressive on a given street, texture, or vs a certain line, but not to be aggressive postflop as a whole.
So I suppose the way that I find TAG and LAG interesting these days is to describe the psychology of certain player types. Take for example how Ivey plays on TV cash games. If Ivey had to write down his strategy on a piece of paper, or play it online, he would probably be something like 65/30/8 playing 9 handed. In effect then, he's offering a challenge, saying "I'm gonna play so bad preflop that any .50/1$ grinder should be able to crush me. But I'm going to play so much better than you later that I'll make up for it." The attitude of playing bad and knowing it, but doing so calculatedly as bait for your opponents to me is the psychology of a LAG player. The psychology of a TAG is more like that of, say, Dan Harrington, where he's saying "I'm going to play too tight, and I know that you know that I'm playing too tight. But there is going to be some really big pot later where I have nothing, and theoretically shouldn't bluff, but I'm going to bluff anyways because I think you'll fold too big hands to me." So the TAG is the psychology of betting and raising too little in small pots in order to be bluff too much in huge pots, and to make those huge pot bluffs +EV enough to make up for all the folding. To me at least, these represent two fairly common types of players, and using the words to point at attitudes rather than stats makes them useful qualitatively, instead of being shorthand for something quantitative, and misleading shorthand at that.
Me? I just play solid.
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Hi guys,
I'm just linking here to a thread I posted on 2p2 in the general marketplace looking for a PA. I've gotten a few pms so far but not as many I would like. I realize it might be a bit weird to post this kind of request on a blog, but since not many people read the marketplace, I'm hoping someone who would be interested might read this instead.
Here's the thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...-area-1188045/
Ben
ps: I'll be out of town for a few days spending Easter weekend with family, so don't expect me to respond to pms until early next week. |
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Hey all.
Consider this blog as practice for my poker book (in the somewhat unlikely event I decide to write it). The format is going to be "Hands with Sauce", borrowed wholesale from the classic bridge book "Bridge with Reese" written by the renowned bridge pro Terrance. The idea is that I take the reader through my thought process, such as it is, in intriguing hands, stopping along the way to touch on various theoretical topics of interest and then, upon further reflection, dissect the plays which result. Without further ado then,
Hands with Sauce #1: 6bet shit-flinging vs AARookie
Stakes: 40/80nl 6-Max. Game was 5-handed
Hero (SB): $33,739.5
(BB): $42,479
UTG: $19,498
CO: $47,508
BTN: $16,000
Pre-flop: 9c6c dealt to Hero (SB) ... UTG folds. MP folds. BTN raises to $178. I 3-bets to $720. Villain 4-bets to $1920. I 5-bet to $5127. Villain 6-bets to $9055. I called.
Flop ($18,288): 8s 2s As … I checked. Villain bets $6650. I called.
Turn ($31,588): Qc … Check check.
River ($31,588): 4c … I shoved. He called with 4d6d.
This hand seems to be fairly infamous across the internetz, and I still get pms asking about it fairly regularly. In the past I've given some one or two sentence answers which seemed to satisfy basically nobody, so here I'll try to do you guys a bit better and go through things piece by piece.
First, in order to get into character for this hand, you have to understand just how insanely aggro AARookie was playing during this session and previous sessions. As far as opening pots and 3betting, Rookie was unspectacular, playing maybe 15% 3b vs steal and then something like 40% steal himself. However, it seems as if Rookie felt he had found the holy grail in the positional 4bet, as I have never seen a sober person 4ball as much as AArookie did during the 20k hands of 40/80 he played in the couple months surrounding this hand. My HUD had him 4betting something in excess of 40%, and while I don't have a stat explicitly counting cold 4bets versus 4bets after opening, it was unmistakeable that his cold 4betting frequency was even more off-kilter than his 4bet after steal frequency. In order to combat this, of course, me and everyone else with half a brain at the table had tightened up our 3betting ranges significantly whenever AARookie had position (even if he was halfway across the table) and yet he was undeterred, and continued to 4bet seemingly everytime he hadn't checked the auto-fold button.
Judging from the opening size of $178 (although I don't remember explicitly), I'm guessing that the opener in this hand was Takechip, aka FLIPokerHer on Full Tilt Poker. At this time, Takechip was playing a curious strategy of opening nearly 100% of buttons, and then folding over 75% of the time to 3bets. He also seemed strangely unresponsive to punishment, so I was laying it on pretty thick and playing a strategy of 30% or so 3bet from the small blind, depending of course on the predilections of the particular bb. In this case I held 9c6c and so I was torn- on the one hand Takechip had offered me 2.2 bbs, but on the other AARookie was lurking behind me. Taking the hand from Takechip's perspective, I decided that he was likely to be especially loose from the button in this exact situation as Rookie was nitty versus steal in the bb, playing something like 40% of hands vs a minraise. Takechip was the type to pick up on this, but he wasn't the type to realize I would pick up on him picking up on this, so I decided to throw in $720 and see what happened.
Unfortunately, Rookie woke up behind me and made it his customary $1920. At this point you could argue that I got overly stubborn; there are certainly more ideal hands to 5bet bluff with than 9c6c. Previous to this action I had made three 3bets at the table, and on all 3 of them Rookie 4bet me, and finding myself with nothing I elected to fold. I believe 2 of 3 were cold 4bets, and I had witnessed a few other cold 4bets made by Rookie. Appraising Rookie's range in light of today's play and his overally splashiness I was confident it contained plenty of fluff and I could justify 5betting. To put a number on it, I guessed he was 4betting this spot with between 12% and 35% of hands. Quantifying my own strategy, my Rookie-avoidance plan was to go ahead and 3bet a fairly polarized 10-14% vs steal. As a rule of thumb, when the guy who puts in the 4th bet has a wider range than the guy putting in the 3rd bet, either the 3bettor plays awful or the 4bettor is putting too much money in too often. So, I knew I would be 5betting a frequently with my range in this spot for high profit, but not having tested Rookie's expansive range yet with one of my bluffs, I decided the time was going to be now since if he gave me credit he could be folding as much as 85% of his range. I made it $5127.
After a bit of thought, Rookie made it $9055. At this point your guess is as good as mine as to his range. I have my particular way of strategy-reading, and one thing I am uncomfortable doing is making intuitive leaps with regard to a range I have never encountered before, and I had never encountered a Rookie 6bet before, certaintly not one with over 300bb stacks. Interestingly, many people who I have talked to about this hand thought Rookie's 6bet was obviously a bluff, but I have to admit that I don't think I could ever make that read, or would want to. But taking his incredibly wide 4betting range as an assumption, I could envision various ways in which he might decide to play, and which were consistent with his overall approach. So I ruled out a strategy where he would fold everything but QQ+ AQs+ to 5bet; he was probably an aware enough player to realize an opponent like me would be coming for him with bluffs at least occasionally and that if he didn't play back his strategy would be easily exploitable. This statement is not in contradiction with my previous paragraph where I conjectured he might fold 85% (all his non premiums), as once I saw the min 6bet against my first 5bet, the Bayesian probability of him playing fit or fold against 5bet goes down a little bit, and perhaps even more than the bare probability sugggests since it was the very first time I had ever 5bet and Rookie might be tempted to draw a line in the sand now in order to continue his putative exploitation of me in the future. I decided to attribute to him a strategy of playing back with between 20% and 80% of his bluffs (quite the wide confidence interval!), roughly 15% of his ATs-AJs, 99-JJ, AQo combos, and then roughly 80% of his QQ+ AQs+ combos. However, since his postflop strategy was also weak, and since occasionally Rookie's strategy might be very tight for 6betting, and since I held a hand with poor equity all in preflop without blockers, I decided not to jam. This was probably not the right choice incidentally, since I risk $28,612 to win $14360 if I jam preflop, and if I have 27% vs a calling range, I must succeed at least 58%. Taking a weighted average of my assumptions, he should fold at least 58%, making a jam +ev. Still, a call may very well be even better. Getting $3928 to $14360, or 3.65 to 1, and being only a 2.57 to 1 dog against a nightmare scenario of TT+ AK+, I felt I couldn't fold, needing to realize only around 2/3 of...
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Check out 0-2:00 for Rand Paul's speech, the rest of it isn't really worth watching. I suspect that the 'seven days of food' criterion is probably a bit hyperbolic, but the bottom line is that we are giving our government the power to suspend the liberties of persons suspected of a crime, whether US citizens or not. A good measure of the freedom of a country is how it treats its dissident members, and therefore US is well on its way towards being much less free.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK0pEFSX7Ns |
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First- there's a famous article by Peter Singer from which most of the arguments in this blog are directly taken or at the very least inspired by. See it here: http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1979----.htm
Peter Singer is a utilitarian. Very broadly speaking, this means that 'the fundamental moral principle is to take actions which maximize general happiness.' What I want to distinguish from the outset here, though, is that whether you are a utilitarian in general or Singer's particular version, or anything else, one of the main arguments in Equality for Animals still holds for you.
That was to get your attention. I mean something a bit more precise. First, if you choose to accept Singer's utilitarianism, then it's abundantly clear that you are committed to not eating meat, at least of "sentient" creatures. Sentience means something like 'the ability to feel pain or pleasure' and presupposes some type of central nervous system with which feeling gets done. Sentient: cows, pigs, goats, chickens, probably some fish. Not sentient: rocks, potatoes, kale etc. Probably not sentient: clams, mussels, bees etc. It should also be noted here, that not all sentient things get "counted" equally here; it's worse to harm a cow than a chicken in virtue of the fact that the cow has a more developed nervous system/emotional apparatus. Singer also makes a strong case that if you call yourself a utilitarian of any flavour, then you are going to be committed to considering the interests of (sentient) animals in some fashion (which might be slightly different from his own).
I don't care (for the purposes of this blog) about any of Singer's arguments which suppose any form of utilitarianism as premise. What I am concerned with is a more modest argument from Equality for Animals which I'll call here the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC).
The AMC is an example of a type of argument I'm calling (and this might be standard, I'm not sure) an argument from consistency. Arguments from consistency take as premises beliefs we already hold and derive from them a contradiction. If we are rational people, we are faced with a dilemma: either one belief or the other leading to the contradiction must go (after all, we can't say we believe 'X and not X'). I think I like arguments from consistency because of my empiricism (their premises are taken from a description of our actual beliefs). They also tend to be straightforward to argue, without a lot of logical filigree.
Preamble aside, here's the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC):
First premise: Making moral judgments on the basis of purely physical properties is unjustified and constitutes a moral wrong. By 'purely physical properties' I am trying to string together some words to gather up all of the "isms" - racism, sexism, etc which we think are wrong. For an example of an unjustified judgment 'Only white males should be able to vote.' Being white and male does not endow one with any praise or blameworthy features (note: you should separate physical characteristics like 'whiteness', 'maleness' from cultural characteristics in order to make this clear) in of itself - for instance white males do not have larger and more sophisticated brains or some special talent at voting well on the basis of their whiteness or maleness. As a corollary to this, we may sometimes assign praise or blame on the basis of other properties (for instance, mental development, intelligence etc). To use the voting example again, we might say that only people who can pass a test on citizenship should be able to vote. Note though, that this corollary is not necessary for the argument, I'm just adding it to round things out a bit!
Second Premise: It's wrong to torture, kill, or eat a mentally disabled human or a human infant.
Third Premise: Eating meat is morally permissible in the ways we currently consume meat: for example buying ground beef in the supermarket for dinner.
Argument: Many of the animals we habitually eat (pigs, cows) have equivalent mental capacities to severely disabled humans and infants/young toddlers. I want to make it clear that this is just a fact- if you want to disagree here go read the relevant science. If we accept premise two, we think it's wrong to do things like factory farm mentally challenged humans for our gustatory pleasure. But if we accept premise three, we think it's totally OK to factory farm things like cows for our gustatory pleasure. But if cows have the same relevant mental capacities as the marginal humans we don't factory farm, then the property with which we decide what to factory farm and what not to factory farm seems to be the property that cows look like cows, and mentally challenged humans look like humans. 'Looking like Cow-ness' and 'Looking like human-ness' are clearly purely physical properties. But if we accept premise one, purely physical properties are not acceptable for making moral judgments (and what/what not to kill for our gustatory pleasure certainly constitutes a moral judgement!).
Conclusion: So by P1, either it's acceptable to grow and eat marginal humans and all animals, or it's acceptable to grow and eat neither. But we hold P2 and P3, which says that it is acceptable to grow/eat all animals but not all marginal humans. Therefore, holding P1, P2 and P3 results in contradiction.
So here's the difficulty. We can resolve our contradiction by giving up P1 P2 or P3, or we can resolve the contradiction by finding a flaw in the argument. Which premise is it easiest for people to give up and remain rational/consistent? Where is the flaw in the argument? |
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