Any Intuitions?

Imagine the following totally crazy scenario:

Assume that you're house is terrorized by a lot of rats. The only way how you could get rid of them, would be to flood your whole house with a deadly gas which kills mammals in seconds (I assume for this case that killing the rats would be permissible). Assume further that your house is build on a spot were the normal natural laws are crazy in a certain respect: You know that if you will use the poisonous gas this would result in 10 normal human beings spontaniously and instantly being created in your house, who will then immediatelly die from the poisionous gas. What do you think? Is it permissible to use the poisionous gas?
I think rather not.

This crazy scenario came up into my mind, when I thought about what we owe to future generations. The problem with future generations seems to be the following: How can it be that non-existent beings can make moral demands on us?
My position is that we do not owe anything to any individual in particular. This is of course the case, because future individuals do not yet exist (4-Dimensionalism left aside...) and we can't owe anything to an individual who doesn't exist. For example, I do not owe my potential children that I bring them into life, because my potential children do not yet exist and therefore there is nobody whom I could owe anything. But, since we know that there will be individuals who exist in the future we still have to consider that fact in our moral considerations. That is we have to take account morally of the fact that there will be people in the future although we owe nothing to any person in the future in particular.

Just some random thoughts...

On Vegetarianism

This is one I always wanted to get clear again and haven't thought about for a long time. I think the main argument for vegetarianism is surely something like the following:

Protect the valuable interest:

P1. If someone has an interest which is worth to protect, then she has a moral right that his interest be respected. [Premise]
P2. An interest which it is worth to protect is the interest to avoid pain. [Premise]
K1. If someone has and interest to avoid pain, then she has a moral right that his interest be respected. [From P1 and P2]
P3. If someone can feel pain, then she has an interest to avoid pain. [Premise, I think true by definition]
P4. Most animals can feel pain. [Premise, undeniable Empirical truth]
K2. Most animals have an interest to avoid pain. [From P3 and P4]
K3. Most animals have a moral right that their interest to avoid pain be respected. [From K1 and K2]

Note that the argument is not necessarily utilitarian. Everybody who accepts premise one can use it in his moral theory.

So, what can we say about the premises?
I think P1 can be pretty much to be hold to be true which mostly follows because it is nearly an analytic truth that an interest which is worth to protect generates a moral claim by the holder of the interest to protect the interest. The question is of course, whether there are interests worth to protect. But that seems obvious.
P2 seems to me also undeniable: That pain is a bad thing and that being which suffer should be relieved from the suffering and that we should abstain from inflicting pain on beings (as far as it is possible) seem all very uncontroversial moral claims.
P3 I also hold to be true and nearly true by definition. I seems to me that the very definition of pain includes that the being who suffers it exemplifies pain avoiding behaviour.
You will surely ask: But what about the masochist? Maybe I would say that he is not in pain. Surely he might have the same qualia, but his reaction on them is totally different. So, maybe we shouldn't describe his mental state as pain in a strict sense, only in a qualia sense. At least it wouldn't be wrong to inflict pain on the masochist, because he prefers pain to non-pain (at least on some occasions), while it is wrong to inflict pains normally, because the avoiding behaviour clearly shows that beings prefer non-pain to pain.
P4 seems to me to be an empirical truth.
Some people might question this premise by saying that we can't know anything about how animals feel, because first they are different from humans and second because they can't tell us what they exactly feel. (I call this the Gunther-Argument)
But, I mean, facing the problem of other minds with regards to humans, how can we tell that a human is in pain? Obviously through his behaviour. So, we infer from certain kinds of behaviour that humans feel pain. But, most animals also exemplify obvious pain related behaviour. So, we have no good reason to think that these animals can't feel pain. And if we accept evolutionary theory, what good reason do we have to believe that animals which are "closely related" to us like mammals, do not feel the same when they show certain kinds of behaviour???

So, maybe one could say something against the premises, but I don't see what. This argument can't really establish vegetarianism in a full sense. This because if we kill animals painless and they didn't suffer before because they serve as our meatproducing facilities and if we can assume that most animals we want to eat can have no concept of what it means to be dead and can therefore have no interest in being not dead, we could eat the meat of such animals and would not violate any of their interest. Still it establishes vegetarianism under circumstances we now live in, because it seems very improbable that the animals whose meat we consume lived under happy conditions and were killed painless. I don't know if cows have a conception of what its like to be dead, but I seriously doubt it.

Another argument which we might bring up is the following:
Shift the burden of prove: It seems obvious that killing animals and inflicting pain on them is morally suspect. We think that killing or being cruel to animals at least needs some justification. So, the non-vegetarian has to give us a good argument why killing and being cruel to animals to get their meat is morally o.k.. This shifts the burden of proof to the non-vegetarian. My further claim would then be to say that there are no good arguments the non-vegetarian could bring up (at least everything I heard so far was crap), so non-vegetarianism is unjustified.

Social Choice and Dictatorship

I have thought a little bit about the question why Non-Dictatorship might be a reasonable axiom for Arrow's Theorem or in other words what might be bad with Dictatorship defined as in Arrow's Axiom. Here are my thoughts:
I take it that the focus of Arrow's theorem is finding a plausible voting-rule for social decisions. I know that this is not what Arrow intended, but Sen's article has convinced me that this is the most plausible interpretation or in other words the only interpretation in which the results actually hold.

The axioms of Arrow's theorem are the following (According to Heap et al. The Theory of Choice, Blackwell 1992, p. 210):
Collective rationality: The collective choice should be represented by an ordering of all alternatives. An ordering is complete: every pair of alternatives can be ranked against each other, even if the ranking is one of indifference. The ordering should also be transitive, so that for any alternative, x, y and z, if x is preferred or indifferent to y and y is preferred or indifferent to z, then x is preferred to z.
Universal Domain: The function mapping a statement of individual preference into a statement of collective choice should be capable of taking as its domain of operation all logically possible orderings by individuals.
Pareto inclusiveness: If all individuals prefer x to y, then society should prefer x over y.
Independence of irrelevant alternatives: The social preference between two alternatives is restricted to information solely on how individuals rank these alternatives.
Non-Dictatorship: No named individual should be able to determine the social choice in all circumstances in the sense that the social ordering coincides with the ordering of that individual whatever others might think.

The task is finding a rule to determine a social preference function from the individual preference functions which satisfies these axioms. The famous conclusion is that there is no such rule.

We all know that the majority-rule can't fulfill the Arrow's axiom's because it leads to intransitivities in the social prederence (which violates the collective rationality axiom) in cases where the preferences of the individuals have a structure like the following (where set of individuals is {A, B, C} and the set of alternatives is {x, y, z}:
A: x > y > z
B: y > z > x
C: z > x > y
The Social Preference would be according to the majority rule:
x > y (since for A and C x > y) y > z (since for A and C y > z) and z > x (since for B and C z > x)

So, we can rule out the majoritiy rule as a rational rule for collective decision-making (as long as we want to uphold all the axioms). If we now turn to other rules. we can stipulate that these rules will hace at least one feature: They will violate the majority rule at least on one occasion that is they will determine that at least in one case something is preferend to another thing although the majority prefers them the other way round. We can stipulate this of course, because otherwise the rule would just be the majority rule! Now, Arrow's Theorem shows that if we have at least one violation of the majority rule then, by the pareto condition and collective rationality if follows that there will be a dictator defined in the following way:
Dictatorship: "The social ordering coincides with the ordering of that individual whatever others may think."
Now, on first sight there seems to be nothing problematic with a Dictator defined in such a way: He could be just a lucky person for whom it just happens to be the case that all his wishes are fullfilled without him having any causal power over this. So, why should we uphold the Non-Dictatorship axiom? Why not exchange it for a much weaker axiom?
Here is a reason why we might want to uphold Non-Dictatorship: First there has to be some feature of the rule which determines why someone is the dictator. This feature is either something people can influence or it is one which people can not influence. But, if it is a feature people can influence then the rule which allows Dictatorship in the weak sense, also would allow Dictatorship in the causal sense. On the other hand, if it is a feature which people cannot influence, it might seem unfair that the rule favours people with features like that on which they have no causal influence. If the rule favours the biggest person, it might seem unfair that this person is favoured for a property which he just happens to have. If the feature becomes something arbitrary (like winning a flip of a coin), then it might seem irrational to base a social decision on something arbitrary like this. Remember that we are talking about voting rules.
The second horn of this "dilemma" is obviously the weaker one. There might be at least some features on which people have no causal influence which might be a good base for social decision making. The rule could - for example - include that the least favoured group has their hearing sometimes even if the majority is against it. But then again: If this allows that the social ordering is sometimes always determined by the preferences of the least favoured group, this might seem like an unfair or arbitrary rule.