The philosophy thread general discussion

I'd probably argue veganism is not innately leftist. At the extreme end, certain National Socialist figures cared about animal welfare. In fairness, that's a pretty extreme example.

Going to a less cray-cray example: You'll want to fact-check me on this matter, but my haunch is that a lot of vegans are probably wealthier-than-average. I'd also imagine veganism isn't really viable to the global poor.

In fact, I'd argue this sort of thing is part of where the "Smug Liberal"-stereotype comes from: Basically, conscientiousness taking on the form of status symbol.

I think with Veganism: Most people do find harming animals to be unethical. For example, I would say that Mike Vic's dogfighting rings were vile. If we just take that logic a bit further, then we arrive at veganism.

I believe this is what motivates most vegans, they see cute widdle chicks and don't like the fact that they get thrown into a masticator en masse. I'm not myself a vegan or anything like that, but I do at least get it.

Having said that, yes, there are people who basically use animal welfare as a weapon to view themselves as superior to other people. I would say that this is exactly what motivates PETA. It's why, for example, they attacked Steve Irwin, because the goal isn't really to help animals but to flex on other people.

• There is a substantial bloc of the "global poor" who cannot regularly obtain meat, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't if they were able to. In that sense, you are correct that veganism is an ethos of choice that is only available to those affluent enough to make said choice. It definitely doesn't help the "ivory tower" perception of left liberalism that many people hold.
• "Harming animals is unethical" is too vague to be useful. We may agree that dogfighting is wrong while still eating beef because there is no utility to dogfighting. It's not like we'll eat them afterwards. Gaining prurient enjoyment from seeing creatures hurt each other is very different from consuming them for food.
• As I've pointed out before, animals eat other animals, and we're animals. There's nothing unnatural or evil about it. Yes, we have the conscious ability to choose, unlike a wolf or lion, but it doesn't axiomatically follow that we must stop killing animals for food. It is, as stated previously, a choice.
• "I don't wanna hurt the widdle cows," is a child's view of the world. I'm much more responsive to arguments about the environmental impact of meat farming, but that's a complex global problem whose solution is not as simple as, "What if we all stopped eating meat?" It's just not going to happen, certainly not without adequate substitutes.

I've eaten a few Impossible Burgers. They're fine. But that's simply not an option for enough people to make any real difference.

Edited by Fighteer on May 3rd 2024 at 8:00:59 AM

@Fighter this is what I mean about the quality of response being bad. I know that you can do better than this.

I can fix the axiom argument from last page. Blindly extending the apparent trend is a weak argument. The trend can also be explained historically as down trodden groups simply fighting until they win their rights eventually. Moral truth doesn't need to be invoked for that. There is also a feasibility concern for the global poor.

Those are the only two decent arguments so far. There have been as many ad hominems as arguments. The "widdle cow" comment and the PETA mention.

The "animals eat other animals" is a waste of text. Other animals sometimes eat their own children, there are species where forced sex is the norm, plenty of species kill their own kind on the regular. Even "other people do it" is a famously bad argument.

Of course to vegans the feasibility concern sounds like "unfortunately some people are too poor to choose not to sometimes commit murder cannibalism."

I'm not vegan because I think Sapience is required to have a right to life. But, that is the point that needs to be addressed. Why is sapience what matters? Why is eating a cow not morally equivalent to murder cannibalism. Just appealing to sapience without explanation sounds like saying "because we are so much smarter than them". Which is dangerously close to "because we can".

"The trend can also be explained historically as down trodden groups simply fighting until they win their rights eventually."

So when the cows can arm themselves and fight back, we will give them moral consideration. You can't prove to me that a cow is worth the same as a human.

I'm flippant about this because it's all subjective arguments. "Because we can" is the only objective one in the whole mix. Vegans take their moral philosophy very seriously, but I like to eat meat, so we appear to be at an impasse.

The only solution that is even remotely feasible in my mind is for technology to give us a meat-equivalent that is scalable, as cheap or cheaper than the "real" thing, and fully substitutable. Nothing else will convince people who want to eat meat to change. Shame self-evidently doesn't work at a sufficient scale.

At a personal level, I'm much more interested in the environmental argument than the emotional one. Livestock is less efficient at land utilization per calorie, as I understand it, but that's a very complicated issue to put before a consumer at the grocery store.

There's also the "minor" problem of billions of livestock and trillions of dollars in agricultural investment that would have to be destroyed, but that's an issue we face with any phasing out of animal meat consumption, so it's philosophy-neutral. We're not just going to let all the cows, pigs, and chickens free.

Edit: You invoke "murder cannibalism" as a purely emotional argument. Historically and socially, there is no reason to consider a cow or pig the equivalent of a human when it comes to such terms. So it's redefining a word to add shame to an act that many if not most people consider to be unremarkable. (A Google search gives anywhere from 0.5 percent to 4 percent of Americans who identify as vegan.) You can do better.

Heck, many societies have considered dogs and/or cats to be food animals. There's no obviously correct answer here.

Edited by Fighteer on May 4th 2024 at 10:52:42 AM

Veganism predates the "right and left" definition; there were people discussing this in ancient Persia and India.

I am not a leftist, yet I am a vegetarian. I don't eat meat or harm living beings to the best of my ability.

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As Terry Pratchett once said, this is an argument often presented by humans.

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Logically and morally, it really doesn't matter.

If a living being doesn't want to die, killing it is wrong, unless it is for self-defense.

Saying that "it is okay; he doesn't have sapiens" is a self-serving excuse; it is basically saying, "I am entitled to do what I want, because I am me, and it is that way because I say so".

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That, of course, will not change; the cycle of life is built in a way, that encourages living beings to exploit and victimize each other; sapience is not even necessary; ants conquer and enslave other smaller insects just like humans do.

Those who don't want to be victimized, must simply get stronger, it is a Might Makes Right sort of universe.

If cows don't like to be eaten, they have to get smarter and kill humans; it is their fault for slacking in evolution, while primates were inventing weapons.

Edited by jawal on May 3rd 2024 at 5:51:09 PM

A somewhat frivolous argument I might make is that pigs are quite willing to eat humans, so it's only fair.

More seriously, every argument that tries to, logically convince humans that they should abandon their privileges without anything in exchange, except morality, is doomed to fail.

You either offer something in return, you force them to comply; or a mix of the two, there is no fourth option.

Edited by jawal on May 3rd 2024 at 6:35:01 PM

So funnily enough I had stated that in the handbook, about the bit of some philosophers believing that other regions like India and China have no philosophy because it is a Greek word with finding the reasoning absurd. Well the next chapter in the handbook (by a different author than thd previous chapter) talks more about why current scholars advocate that and claims that it has not much to do with eurocentrism but the idea that philosophy is not so well defined with proper criteria, so it makes less sense to use that term for other intellectual traditions in other regions, mostly bringing up why scholars of China today increasing ask whether there is a real home grown Chinese philosophy or if even if that question itself is correct. Though it also states that the reasons why scholars of China ask these questions may not applicable to India as Chinese intellectual traditions like confucianism focus solely on ethics and statecraft to the exclusion of logic, epistemology and metaphysics which were prominent in Indian traditions. But then again, ethics is definitely philosophy too and as it also brings up that what makes a good state and how one should live are also philosophical questions that are also taken by other Indian works too like Arthashastra.

So how true is it that what counts as philosophy doesn't have a proper criterion other than genealogy?

The chapter still states that Indian philosophy was definitely that stating that unlike the parallel case in China, where the translation for philosophy zhexue was itself only borrowed in the nineteenth century as a calque of a Japanese neologism tetsugaku (that itself was a term coined to describe a non indigenous activity), and the term was then retroactively as applied to confucion thinkers as part of self styling traditional Chinese thinking to being more in line with western philosophy. While in post colonial India, the effort had been more to revitalised old philosophical traditions and not restyling them. And that it was pre modern Asia's source of systematic speculation about the nature of reality and limits of human knowledge that was exported to other regions vis buddhism.

I am not sure how accurate that is, since Indian thinkers also tried to reinterpret ancient scriptures and traditions in line with their modern ideologies and beliefs too. And I do think it is overexagerating to call India pre modern Asia's source of such thinking of the nature of reality. Did Persia and zoroastrianism not have philosophical traditions that pondered on such questions or are they not that well researched?

Edited by xyzt on May 4th 2024 at 9:56:23 PM

Is morality just a social game? If so than it matters that other animals can't play.

I'm not convinced that that is the standard use of the word though. Game theory/social contract theories of morality shouldn't care if a player is sentient. Indeed you could potentially have a situation where sentience is very rare and very inconvenient to the non-sentient super intelligent super majority. Under this it might be perfectly okay for sentient life to be erased one way or another.

I think most animals have a concept of continued existence that they could have preferences about. If they don't care why should I? However, suffering seems like it may be common enough among our farm animals.

We're just repeating previous conversations. Organisms attempt to stay alive and many exhibit fear reactions when threatened with death; this is an evolutionary adaptation for survival, not a moral choice.

"If so than it matters that other animals can't play."

[citation needed]

You haven't established this prior; you are merely asserting it. Why must animals (other than humans) "contribute to the moral discussion" if they are unable to understand or express the ideas in question?

I've tried asking my cat what he thinks about these things but he just wants to get petted and fed, and occasionally treat my arm like a chew toy.

Edited by Fighteer on May 4th 2024 at 5:12:18 AM

"You haven't established this prior; you are merely asserting it. Why must animals (other than humans) "contribute to the moral discussion" if they are unable to understand or express the ideas in question? "

That is the opposite of what I meant. If morality is a social game, then doesn't cover animals.

Well then, veganism as a moral choice is something we do exclusively to please ourselves. The animals don't know or care. That's the difference between it and, say, abolishing slavery. Which is why I brought up PETA earlier.

(I am not counting veganism because of dietary limitations and/or concerns about the environment, which have objective criteria.)

Edited by Fighteer on May 4th 2024 at 7:46:16 AM

There's a difference between game-theoretic approaches and social contract theories regarding this, though. Social contract theories assumes 'agreement' as the proper foundation of morality, and therefore it is a requirement that the parts are capable of agreement (and thus, sentient). Also game theory involves strategic interactions between rational agents, in theory; yet, since the outcome is judged not in terms of agreement but in terms of objective gains and losses, it can and it has been applied also to non-rational agents (for example, in the study of evolution).

One of the main arguments of anti-specism in general and ethical veganism in particular is that animals can feel pain. If one starts from the assumption that it is morally wrong to inflict pain (assumption that should be properly grounded, of course, but let put aside this for a moment), then the fact that the animals are not 'moral agents' (that is, capable of moral choices) is indifferent. It is their status as moral patients that matters.

An obvious answer to this - even if one accepts the assumption - is that avoiding sufferings to animals as long as they're alive is compatible with consuming them after their death. To which, a vegan could respond that, in the current technological and economical landscape, the consume of animal products is necessarily linked with a productive system which inflicts pain on the animals. This line of thought would change the focus from the morality of consuming animals in abstract to the morality of the current system, and probably this could merge with the question of the sustainability of the system, that is with environmental veganism.

The "inflicting pain" argument is an interesting one. It has been suggested that factory farming inflicts greater suffering on animals than free-range farming and is therefore morally inferior. However, from an environmental standpoint, factory farming produces less emissions per unit output (food calories). This fact places the two ethical positions in conflict.

I am someone who is very skeptical of a utilitarian "minimize suffering" ethos because it's super easy to reduce to absurdity. I guess I should let that colony of spiders take over my house because removing them would "inflict suffering". I shouldn't ever deny my child something they want because that would "inflict suffering". Human existence inherently produces suffering: therefore, humans should stop existing. We should put all humans into a Lotus-Eater Machine from birth so they're eternally happy and inflict no harm on others.

We can amend this somewhat by adopting a long-term view of "net suffering", in which case slaughtering animals for food could be said to offset human food insecurity and thus reduce overall suffering. Depriving my child of discipline makes them less fit for later life, which is a net harm. If, in the above example, we weigh spider suffering as less important than human suffering, why wouldn't we do the same with cows and humans? How do we calibrate our scale?

I generally support reducing the use of meat animals, not for moral reasons but because it's a major pollution sector. But I recognize that we can't do this without bringing in acceptable, mass-market substitutes. Telling everyone to start eating veggie burgers so cows don't get killed is a lost cause and there's no point in fighting lost causes.

Edited by Fighteer on May 5th 2024 at 2:24:19 PM

"there is no clear set of problems or methods that a given thinker must take on in order to be held to be doing philosophy. Pythagoras, Paracelsus, and Quine are united only by loose tradition, not by an overlap of interests or of ideas about how these interests should be pursued."

I think this goes a little too far. Like Art or Religion, Philosophy is such broad range of human activity that it defies a precise definition, but there are definitely discernible themes. Philosophy debates conceptual issues of life and living on Earth, which have no objectively correct answer or solution. This definition is loose enough to include what we tend to think of as classic European philosophy, but also includes other approaches. When Confucious proposes the ideal virtues of a gentleman, or when Zen is equated with a certain state of mind, or when Arjuna and Krishna debate the ethics of going to war with one's relatives, this is all clearly "doing philosophy." Philosophy therefore is distinct from related activities like religion or art both by it's focus and it's methods.

Genealogy has nothing to do with it.

Edited by DeMarquis on May 6th 2024 at 5:21:04 AM

seconded

@Your Bloody Valentine by "sentient", I mean they have subjective experience. I'm using "sapient" to refer to human-like reasoning.

@negative utilitarianism. By default the position doesn't advocate temporal discounting. Some form of species discounting usually is insisted on. Usually, it is implied that smarter animals are somehow more sentient. Dolphin suffering counts more than cow suffer, but enough cows could be more important than one dolphin. This is a fuzzy and suspicous idea.

I would be less surprised if spiders just weren't capable of feeling suffering, than I would be if cows weren't. Another idea is that "suffering" is a loose category of neurological processes and some of those are more ethical important than others.

Since negative utilitarianism isn't an agreement-based ethical system, I think it's fair to ask if it is an accurate account of extrapolated human moral values. I really don't think it is. Any plausible answer is probably going to be more complicated than that.

We know of no other animals that exhibit "human-like reasoning", but that is necessarily somewhat tautological. Dolphins may indeed have complex inner lives, but to label them "human-like" is kind of silly. Dolphins reason like dolphins, not like humans, and holding them to our standard is irrational.

I feel like any attempt to expand the category of sapience to include additional creatures lacks scientific rigor in that we remain unable to communicate at a rational level with them, and so we cannot help but anthropomorphize these interactions. As I said earlier, my cat is not using human language when he meows. Any "inner world" he has is inaccessible to me, and vice versa.

For the same reason, I believe that trying to determine the "importance" of sentience is a fool's errand because there are no feasible objective criteria upon which people can agree. Is a human's pain really equivalent to the pain of four cows, or whatever? How would one go about proving such an idea?

We can find objective criteria, but they're almost entirely anthropocentric. Mistreating dogs is bad because (a) it makes us feel bad about ourselves, (b) mistreated dogs are less beneficial companions for humans. Some people choose to value the suffering of cows because it makes them feel better about themselves, not because the cows care. If the people pushing these ideas were more honest about their motives, we could at least have more reasonable conversations.

Edited by Fighteer on May 6th 2024 at 11:19:35 AM

There's really no point. You think morality is subjective so how am I supposed to debate that. On top of that, I don't even think your dietary behavior is wrong. I'm just really annoyed with your arguments because I'm coming at this from a quasi-moral objectivist position where they sound like weak excuses. Of course since you're not treating this as an objective issue, that makes sense. We aren't really talking about the same thing.

If you don't recognize that morality and ethics are fundamentally subjective, then you're ill equipped for any debate on the matter.

That said, I've already given you several potential points of agreement. Farming livestock for meat is extremely bad for the environment, for one thing. These are objectively measurable criteria and reasons in and of themselves to transform our consumption.

But people are always the problem. People like to eat meat. They won't change out of shame, certainly not enough to dismantle the livestock industry.

Found this on You Tube the channel name and topic (S-Risks, a category of scenarios to avoid because they entail widespread suffering) makes it as adjacent to stiff like Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism, but I think there is meric to the ideas that people should try to lessen factors that encourage suffering (like say, poverty).

The S is presumably for Suffering and not a redundant case if Rank Inflation. Because there is also mention of X-Risks. Human eXtinction scenarios

Thoughts?

Edited by MorningStar1337 on May 10th 2024 at 8:59:48 AM

Needs a little more detail. What points exactly are made? Most people don't want to watch a random video in order to have a discussion.

From what I gather it focuses on risks though two factors. Scope and Severity. S-Risks are hypotheticals (currently) that both exceed in both fronts without being X-Risks (again human extinction threats)

An archtypal dystopia for example is an S-Risk because people there suffer in droves, but do not die in proportionate amounts. The inhabitants are collectively in a Fate Worse than Death.

I guess the idea behind the concept is to ask which is preferable between death and suffering. A dynamic that informs tropes like Driven to Suicide (to an prolly minor extent. Mental health is the dominant factor there), Mercy Kill and And I Must Scream imo.

Again it does seem adjacent to the Less Wrong style of philosophy. So to those that subscribed to those notions (namely that engrams and clones count as a continuation of your existence) then Roko's Basilisk would be considered a S-Risk (though that is a can of worms already explored)

Edited by MorningStar1337 on May 10th 2024 at 9:37:07 AM

If we're going about this in a completely abstract manner, any philosophy that leads to the annihilation of consciousness/self-determination must be classified as the highest risk because there would no longer be the potential for eliminating suffering. Infinite future people will be deprived of a possible joyful existence.

Edited by Fighteer on May 10th 2024 at 12:49:10 PM

This is why I don't put much stock in Less Wrong style philosophy or even utilitarianism. You can't break down complex topics like suffering or pleasure into linear metrics, and the assumptions made when that is done may result in some group of people being systemically screwed over