TychoCelchuuu

Just regularly touch your PC case with your elbow.

The game's not even done yet. Of course they're going to have to break things as they change it, and of course putting this information the patch notes is as much as can be expected of them. If you don't want to play a buggy, unfinished, broken, incomplete game that can potentially erase your saves, then wait until the game is done. It's explicitly not done at this point.

There's no such thing as an unmissible game, I think, because gaming is such a wide medium with so many different things it does, and what one enjoys about games determines what kinds of games one needs to have played. Tetris, Pokemon, Deus Ex, Quake III, Freespace 2, and Spelunky are all unmissible for certain sorts of people but totally skippable for other sorts of people. Someone who needs to have played Quake III might be totally fine with having skipped Pokemon, and vice versa.

Homeworld and Homeworld 2 are games I dearly, dearly love. In terms of a cohesive, highly-refined aesthetic, few video games can even touch them. I don't think anyone makes it through the opening few missions of Homeworld's campaign without getting an experience they'll remember forever. The combination of restraint in the storytelling, the deep background in (for instance) the game manual, and the brilliant colors in space plus the great art design on the ships and those amazing cutscenes really adds up to something wonderful. There are some weird things about balance in the first game and the difficulty level in each of them is sort of all over the place, but the fundamentals of the game are pretty good - they do 3d fleet combat pretty well, better than anything except Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, I think. It's tough to know without seeing it in motion and so on, but it looks like the remastering has been done pretty well, so that's exciting, and like you say it's great to have the original games too. The price is pretty reasonable too. If this leads to a resurgence in popularity that will be great - these games never got their due. There are some pretty neat Homeworld 2 mods out there, too, and since we get the original game I imagine those will work just fine. Pretty cool!

There were some pretty elaborate YTMND pages made back in the day. It was one huge weird incestuous insular culture, which means you would have a large handful of very popular basic YTMNDs (like the original "you're the man now dog!") and then a ton of things riffing on them. For instance, Bill Cosby talking about Pokemon on the Simpsons was something that got popular on the site, so a ton of YTMNDs would reference that bit. Probably the most elaborate one I ever saw was this one, which combines an animated gif which incorporates various Cosby and Pokemon things (and other stuff - I can't remember what Captain Crunch has to do with anything) with an elaborated edited version of John Williams' "The Asteroid Field" from the Empire Strikes Back, which has been turned into a partially a-capella version song with the Simpsons Bill Cosby singing all the parts. So, I think that definitely represents quite a bit of creativity. Many of the more elaborate YTMNDs were this creative. I'm still not on board with the idea that we should literally be Nazis though - I think their argument has a few holes in between "YTMD was neat" and "heil Hitler."

I'm sure this has come up in the thread before but uh, that they're literally just using a swastika as one of their logos now is uh... yeah... okay.

So, what about dolphins, whales, and great apes? Persons or not? It seems to me it either is or isn't okay, at a basic level, to kill something, absent extenuating circumstances. Like, just take a living thing that hasn't done anything particularly special, doesn't have any particular link to you, etc. It's just a thing you could or could not kill. Personhood, you say, makes it the case that you can't kill this thing. Ditto for potential personhood. It sounds like you also think there are other reasons not to kill a living thing, even if it's not a person. What might these reasons be?

Even Cowgirls Bleed Curtain Cheek 2 Cheek Digital: A Love Story AGPPBP You Were Made for Loneliness With Those We Love Alive Cooking, for lovers

Speciesism is drawing an a moral distinction between two individuals because of their species. You did not do this. You drew a moral distinction between individuals on the basis of whether they would become anxious about dying in certain situations. It's true that mosquitoes (one species) won't become anxious the way most humans (another species) typically will, but it's not the species difference that matters. If it turned out mosquitoes did become anxious, or that humans didn't, then of course you would switch your position. In fact if mosquitoes and humans were somehow the same species, your position would NOT change. You literally don't care what species anything is. So you are not speciesist according to that line of reasoning. Note that your example does NOT show that speciesism differs from racism. If your reasoning had been speciesist, like if it had been something like "it's irrelevant whether mosquitoes feel anxiety, fuck 'em anyways," this would be speciesist in the same way "fuck black people" would be racist. I guess I don't really understand how you can say "if you help one species you'll hurt another" and then say "the overpopulation of humans is another matter." Humans are a species too! If we have to trade off among various species, then so be it. I think this is a weird way to do it - surely we ought to trade off among individuals, not species, right, just like we'd trade off among individuals, not races, right? If it's a zero sum game, I shouldn't draw distinctions based on what race people are, nor should I draw distinctions based on what species someone is. Then that's all fine with me. If your position is "kill as many humans as you need to, if it leads to less harm, but thankfully this is rarely the case," and "kill as many non-human animals as you need to, if it leads to less harm" then you're being consistent. If by "ecological disaster" you only mean stuff like "a bunch of plants and animal get out-competed by possums and biodiversity goes down," then this doesn't sound like we'd get "less harm" by murdering the possums, so I'm afraid you're smuggling in speciesism in the way you assume we should calculate what a "harm" is, but aside from that issue everything you say is perfectly consistent and not speciesist. As I noted above, personhood is option #8. It leaves you unable to explain why we shouldn't be able to kill as many babies as we want, at least on the face of it. You're welcome to try to wiggle your way out of that one.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ub154EDmZoi2Yem0XhZVBHvcO_ri6tOu-M38kBiIdQ4/edit?usp=sharing

Yes, so if you're willing to endorse 4 and 7 then we can go down that route. I was simply assuming that you would find 4 and 7 wildly implausible. There are various responses to this. Here are a couple of the most popular ones. First, some infants don't - they have a disease that's going to kill them before they mature. Second, there's the kitten example I raised above - if we develop a serum that turns kittens into human-like intelligences, then at least some kittens (the ones I plan to inject, at least) have the potential for responsibility. More relevantly, though, I think I missed the place where you originally explained what "responsibility" is and why it's the sort of thing you need in order to be immune to murder. I'm a little fuzzy on what the idea is, so it would help to have a clear statement of it. Good, nor do I. We can ignore it. So if a group of people refuses to stop breeding, it is fine to refuse to give them food aid? In general, it seems to me that the ability to join a mutual understanding explains how you could come to have certain obligations, but the fact that you don't have these obligations because you can't join the understanding doesn't seem to suggest to me that therefore you don't matter, morally. In philosophy we draw the distinction between "moral agents" and "moral patients." A moral agent is a being that is morally responsible for the choices it makes, by virtue of being able to understand and act for moral reasons. You and I, for instance, are moral agents. Moral agents have moral duties to, for instance, refrain from murdering, torturing, etc. On the other hand, there are moral patients. Moral patients are things which can be treated in a moral or immoral manner but that themselves are not responsible for their choices. Moral patients include babies, people with debilitating mental illnesses that temporarily or permanently rob them of their rational capacities, people in comas, people who are sleepwalking (probably), and (almost everyone agrees) animals, or at least many animals. A cat is a moral patient because it would be wrong to torture the cat to death, but it's not a moral agent because you can't expect a cat to follow morality any more than you can expect a six month old infant to do so. These facts explain why we don't send infants or cats to jail for the bullshit they pull, but they also explain why we don't torture infants and cats to death.

No, when I say "X fits into both categories" or whatever I don't mean for real, I mean in terms of what we typically think. Our typical thought is speciesist but not racist. If you ask Racist Tycho where things fit in, he'll give you a different answer when it comes to black people and white people. So, we need some way to adjudicate disagreements, which is why we have to come up with a defensible account of what makes death bad rather than just assume that whatever we pre-theoretically think must be correct. Because I think if you pick #6 you'd be wrong. Go ahead and try. Write "#6 is correct, Tycho!" and I'll explain why I think you're wrong. I think any answer you're going to end up happy with is going to be an answer that rules out speciesism.

I agree with osmosisch, here: You're just telling me, Gormongous, that you're speciesist. Racist Tycho would tell you that he's racist. He has not been presented with a logical argument demanding he embrace the possibility of torturing and killing the white person, in order to save the black person. He has only been told, repeatedly, that it is the same thing as sexism, because black people can also suffer, which he does not find compelling on its own, for reasons in his posts above. Therefore, the lives of a white person and a black person, while both carrying moral worth, do not share complete moral equivalence to him. If that's racism and not a refutation of it, Racist Tycho is okay with that and he'll own it, because he will never be swerving his car into a white person to avoid running over two black people. He's sure this makes him just like a sexist person, but whatever. A bit more detail: Imagine that abortion actually was killing babies. Like, a fetus is the moral equivalent of an infant. Apparently there are approximately 1.21 million abortions each year in the US, and that number has been falling. If you add in the rest of the world and stretch your time horizon to the length of time the Holocaust happened, then yes, abortion is very similar to the Holocaust. In fact it's a little worse because it doesn't have an endpoint (although it's a little better because it's not specifically targeting Jews, homosexuals, and other marginalized groups). I suspect the reason you found your professor's comparison bad is not that you think it's a bad comparison given the fact that fetuses are just like babies, but only because you don't believe a fetus is just like a baby. We know, of course, what Racist Tycho is going to say. He's going to to say that he has the burden of proof to show that all races aren't equal, and then he'll say that he addressed why he thinks that blacks are lesser lifeforms because of responsibility or whatever. (I actually am not sure what your argument is - I can't find it earlier in the thread and I don't recall what it is.) Umm... what about infants, though? Did you want people to kill you when you were an infant? You obviously don't have to think killing all humans is immoral to have a fully functioning society. America got by for a while on the assumption that killing white people was bad but killing Native Americans and black people was no big deal (unless the black person was owned by someone else, in which case you owe them for the property damage). Many societies throughout history have thought it is okay to kill foreigners or people of another race or whoever loses the human sacrifice lottery or the mentally disabled or Jews or whatever. It's true that all life comes at the expense of other life, but some of that "other life" is plant life. So, you should just eat plants. Should you contribute to the overpopulation of birds even if that means more killing, down the road? Well, tell me if you should engage in famine relief and contribute to the overpopulation of humans even if this means they're going to eat animals and murder humans later on down the line!

This doesn't strike me as a correct description of what I've done. When people point out that the central criterion of physical suffering is arbitrary, my response is that this is a complex scientific question that I can't solve in the space of this thread, and that all I can say is that I promise that the best scientific evidence suggests otherwise. When someone points out that non-human animals have experiences different in certain ways from those of humans, I don't just say "racism," I say that it's not clear to me why any difference in these sorts of experiences should suggest that a difference in moral treatment is warranted. To my knowledge nobody has successfully responded to this point any more than Racist Tycho could respond to this same point except with race instead of species. I'm obviously not making these comparisons to distress people. If I thought being compared with a racist person is distressing, I would not have spent so much time explaining what Racist Tycho thinks. I wouldn't have named him Racist Tycho! He'd be Racist Strom Thurmond! Honestly, you need to take my challenge seriously, that is, you need to convince Racist Tycho that he is wrong, or at least you need to try. You NEED TO. Why? Because you are going to realize how hard it is to talk about these things without bringing in other examples, like sexism. I know (I know) that you want me to find some happy cheerful way to make my argument where I don't have to advert to racism. That would be great, if I could! I'm open to suggestions! Since you clearly think it's possible and perhaps even obligatory on my end for me to undertake this project, show me how. Convince Racist Tycho without adverting to any other *ism. Once you show me how this can be done, then I'll convince speciesist people without adverting to any other *ism. Again, you need to try to convince Racist Tycho not to be racist. Your objection here is going to completely melt away once you realize that you can't convince Racist Tycho without doing the EXACT same thing that I have been doing and that you currently have an issue with. I'm not "caricaturing" anyone. People LITERALLY ARE SPECIESIST. They LITERALLY ARE RACIST EXCEPT AGAINST SPECIES. That is LITERALLY WHAT IS HAPPENING. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration or confusion or empty rhetoric. It is ACTUALLY THE CASE. It is true that I am ridiculing them in one sense, namely, I think it's ridiculous to hold unfounded indefensible prejudices. But I've seen you ridicule sexist people on this forum before. So I'm not sure why you have an issue with this. YES. It is textbook deflection. Why am I engaged in it? Because you are 100% blind to the structure of my argument. Your prejudice has made it impossible for you to understand what I am arguing and why it is compelling.. Obviously you don't believe this. You think you're being super sensible. And the only way I can see to explain to you why this is false is to show you that actually, if you were in my position, you'd think the same thing about yourself. I can't use speciesism as the example, because it's the prejudice you're under the grips of, but I can use racism to make this point. You say I am erecting a strawman. YES. This is LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT. Racist Tycho is a strawman because HE DOES NOT HAVE ANY GOOD ARGUMENTS. Then I compare other people to this strawman because I think THEY DO NOT HAVE ANY GOOD ARGUMENTS. The fact that you disagree, the fact that you think you have great arguments that I'm ignoring for illicit reasons, rests entirely on your failure to understand that Racist Tycho can use exactly the same arguments that you think are so strong. I would love if you were self-reflective and insightful enough to arrive at this conclusion on your own. But apparently you aren't. You continue to deny that speciesism and racism are just the same thing wearing different shirts. Fine. How can I show you that you're wrong? By asking you to argue against Racist Tycho and showing you that nothing you say against him has any traction unless it also works against your own speciesist beliefs. My recourse to Racist Tycho is required by your complete failure to accept my claims that your speciesist arguments are empty and not worth addressing any more than Racist Tycho's arguments are worth addressing. I know you disagree. I know your speciesist arguments sound amazing to you whereas Racist Tycho's arguments sound silly. I wish your prejudice weren't so blinding that it caused you to make these mistakes, but that's where we're at. The only way I can see to cut through this prejudice is to make you realize how even in a case where you don't share the prejudice (racism), the arguments you love so much turn out to be awful. You won't take my word for it, and you can't figure this out on your own, so now we're stuck with Racist Tycho. Do I like it? Not really. It would be nice if I could put all the argumentative work on my back: making positive arguments is always more fun than pointing out why someone else's argument isn't working. Since my positive arguments in this thread are failing not because they're bad but because blind prejudice is making people ignore their strength, though, I need some way to cut through the prejudice. THIS IS NOT WHAT I AM DOING. I am not attacking speciesism because it has similarities with racism. I am attacking speciesism because it is wrong, completely independently of whether racism is wrong or right. Now, it just so happens that the reasons speciesism is wrong are the same reasons that racism is wrong. But racism could be TOTALLY OKAY and speceisism would still be wrong. The only analogy between racism and speciesism is that the terrible arguments that you mistakenly think support speciesism are also terrible arguments that actually support racism. I'm trying to convince you of this so that you stop thinking that these terrible arguments are anything other than terrible. This is not your only option. You could cling to the arguments and also admit that there's nothing wrong with racism. I have not ruled that out. This is probably the funniest thing I have heard in a long time. I'm "taking advantage" of the fact that people aren't ENTIRELY prejudiced to "herd them" in the direction of giving up another prejudice without doing "the actual legwork" of convincing them that prejudice is bad. Can you imagine John Stuart Mill saying this about racism? He's an ardent feminist, so you say "uh, Mill, shouldn't you not be, like, racist? For the same reasons you're anti-sexist?" Then suddenly John Stuart Mill accuses you of "taking advantage" of his feminism by failing to do the "actual legwork" it takes to convince him racism is wrong. Here's the "actual legwork" it takes to convince someone that racism is wrong: you say "racism is wrong, dumbass." That's literally all it takes. Here's the "actual legwork" it takes to convince someone that speciesism is wrong: you say "speciesism is wrong, dumbass." That's literally all it takes. Clearly you disagree in the second case. You think I need to do more legwork. What does that legwork look like? This is why I want you to convince Racist Tycho. If I had my druthers, the argument against racism and speciesism is just "don't be a shithead." Clearly that's not fine in your mind. So show me what the "actual legwork" looks like in the racism case, and I promise, I promise from the depths of my heart, that once you succeed in this legwork for the racist case, I will then undertake the actual legwork in the speciesist case. But, until then, put yourself in my position. You're asking me to provide some sort of knock down argument against one kind of *ism, randomly chosen out of a hat, even though you're fine with just assuming that two other *isms, again randomly chosen, are bad. But if I could just assume that the bad *isms are bad, then I'd say that all three are bad, because to me they are all just the same thing. I don't think it would have been a waste of time to call me a sentientist and compare me to MRAs who have no overt problems with other races but who harp on "biotruths." You see this as pointlessly inflammatory but I think it's a good point. If you were right about it, I'd be in huge trouble, right? So either you think it's correct but you aren't bringing it up because you're afraid of my precious feelings, or you think it's a false argument. If you think it's a false argument, then it's irrelevant, because I don't think "specieism is just racism by another name" is a false argument. If you think it's a legit argument, I welcome it. Go ahead and make it. It's not going to "inflame" me any more than saying "speciesism is different from racism" is going to inflame me. That latter statement is far more offensive to me than comparing me to MRAs, because the latter statement is entirely unsupported by anything you've said, whereas the MRA stuff has some potential reasons supporting it. I of course think these reasons are false, but I have to give you an argument to convince you. I don't think I have to give you an argument to convince you that speciesism is the same as racism any more than I think I have to give you an argument to convince you that sexism is the same as racism. I'm not sure what "that" refers to, but if "that" is "debunking pointless and inflammatory analogies," I actually have plenty of interest in this. If I'm analagous to an MRA then I definitely need to debunk this. It's not pointless or inflammatory. It's relevant and important. I'm allowed to do this because everyone else is able to do this also. If you can show me that I need a speciesist assumption or else morality is unworkable, I'm fucked. So show me.

Good news: that's not high enough to reach my jugular. Bad news: it is when I'm sitting down.

Yes, this is a good one. You're right that it's a variation on 6, and the main reason I left it out is because #6 only makes death bad for human beings, because human beings have these sorts of long term projects, whereas your #9 makes death just as bad for non-human animals like cats and cows, because these animals have futures just as much as we do (sometimes much more so: whales can live for a looooooong time!). I'm not sure how close adult animals eaten for meat approach a "natural death." Certainly the factory farmed ones don't. I think a lot of animals we kill for meat are killed in the prime of their lives, not at the very end when they've got one foot in the grave. Those are the ones you don't want to eat, except in like coq a vin or whatever. You've made a subtle shift here. You moved from "death is bad for someone because it cuts off future experiences" to "death is bad for someone because it cuts off future experiences that they want to have, and that they have the ability to appreciate." These give us different answers in lots of cases. For instance, a chicken definitely has future pleasurable experiences if it's living a normal life, but it almost certainly doesn't appreciate this fact, nor will it appreciate the experiences very much while it's undergoing them, and if you ask the chicken whether it wants to keep on living, it won't even understand the question. Which account is right, then? Do future experiences matter, or do future experiences that we can appreciate and look forward to matter? If we choose the former, it looks like it's hard to justify killing most non-human animals. If we go with the latter, it looks like it's okay to kill babies, unless you add some sort of complicated rider like "if at some point in the future you will become the sort of thing that will at that point in the future be able to look forward even further into the future and contemplate enjoyment of future desires, then it's not okay to kill you right now, even when you don't have these capacities." That has never struck me as super plausible, and it faces a series of issues. (One imaginative thought experiment someone once suggested is that, in the future, we develop a serum we can inject into kittens which will turn them intelligent, either immediately or in a few years. Can you kill the kitten before I inject the serum, even if I'm planning to do so later? What if I've injected the kitten, but it will take a few years before the kitten becomes smart like a human being? Etc.) But, perhaps something like #9 can be made to work. It is worth investigating if anyone finds it plausible and I'd be happy to work through it.

I'm not sure it was just "game playing" and I don't think Racist Tycho is ridiculous. Racist people exist. Racist people were the vast majority not too long ago. Speciesist people are in the same position right now. I view racism and speciesism (and sexism and heterosexism) as basically the same thing: blind, unthinking prejudiced that eventually society is mostly going to get over. We're at different stages in these various prejudices but we can only hope they eventually all disappear. The reason I made it Racist Tycho rather than Racist Strom Thurmond or some other hypothetical is because people were getting all up in arms about being accused of an *ism (in this case, speciesism) and I wanted to say "look, we've got lots of *isms, maybe I would've had serious racism issues if I had been born a few hundred years ago, that could totally be me." I think you and other still have a miscalibrated sense of how bad racism is vs. how bad speciesism is: you think the former is waaaaaay worse than the latter, so you can't imagine me ever for a moment seriously imagining myself as a racist for the purposes of the argument. But I can easily imagine this. I was a speciesist, unconsciously at least, for much of my life. I could easily have been a racist had I been born in 17XX or whatever. Am I thrilled about the possibility of being either? No. But if you think my hatred of racist people is so big that I must be joking when I bring out crazy ol' Racist Tycho, then you either think I hate basically every human being's guts with a fiery passion, or, again, you're still not understanding that I see racism and speciesism as basically the same thing with different Mad Libs answers filled in. Again, like I said, I think you are the species equivalent of a racist if "but it's a MOSQUITO BRO" is the best you can do when it comes to whether you think it's okay to kill something dead. Since you HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE racism but you're totally fine with speciesism, you took this as a massive insult. But since I see no important differences between racism and speciesism, this to me was about as insulting as saying that if you're 5 feet 12 inches tall, you're six feet tall. Look, as far as I can tell, you are still a speciesist, are you not? At the very least, you haven't given me any reason to think you aren't (I'm totally open to the possibility, of course). And if you're still a speciesist, you're basically a racist, except replace "race" with "species" (that's how we came up with the word, even...). Again, this probably makes your blood pressure go up, but if we go back to 1850 or whatever and imagine that the racist person is somehow an ardent feminist (John Stuart Mill was a racist and also one of the most forceful feminists of all time), surely the racist's blood pressure would go up if we suggested his racism were just as bad as someone else's sexism. He would say "don't insult me like that. Accusing me of sexism is beyond the pale." But all we did was point out that racism and sexism are pretty much the same, as far as we can tell, from the point of view of justifiability! And that's where I'm at with racism and speciesism.

And now I'm feeling a little guilty because I left out one of the most common options picked by philosophers: 8. Death is bad because it is the end of a 'person,' where person is a philosophical term of art that picks out a being that is self-aware, rational, reflective, and otherwise engaged in the sort of life that consists of much more than just instinctual actions. Persons form relationships, make plans, have complicated desires that can be satisfied or frustrated, and so on and so forth. Personhood is what sets an adult human being apart from a chicken. It's bad when persons die because persons are a special sort of thing that value their own lives and that, in fact, have valuable lives, because of what it is to live the life of a person. That's a tempting response for a few reasons. First, it explains why abortion is okay. Of course it's killing a human being, but we don't care about human beings. We care about persons, and obviously a fetus is not a person. It also explains why hamburgers are no big deal (as long as the meat is ethically sourced, etc.). Cows aren't persons! There are a couple caveats, though. First, some animals are likely persons. Lots of people think dolphins are persons. Great apes and whales are also good candidates. Maybe octopuses. Etc. So that means killing some animals is totally not okay. Second and more troubling, babies aren't persons. A four week old infant is as much as a person as a fetus is. If you're happy that this account makes abortion okay, you're probably going to be less thrilled that it makes infanticide okay. So that is a big hurdle you have to hop over. (This article has, among other things, a good section on personhood.)

Yes, this is a very good point. There are basically two potentially objectionable things that we do to non-human animals that we think it would be wrong to do to humans. The first is that we inflict unimaginable amounts of suffering on them, for no reason other than we want to eat hamburgers and eggs and so on. The second is that we kill them in order to eat them or otherwise make use of their corpses. The "wrong" of torture is distinct from the "wrong" of killing. Torture is wrong because of the pain and suffering it causes. Killing is wrong because it ends a life. Notice, though, that some things don't feel pain or suffer, and some things have lives that we think it's totally okay to end. Trees, for instance, fit into both categories. Mosquitos fit into the second (maybe even the first, but let's assume they don't). Infants fit into neither, and fetuses fit into both at first and later just into the second, if we are pro-choice. Adult humans (except in extreme cases, like self-defense or something) don't fit into either category. Cats usually fit only into the first, but if they have a really expensive disease, sometimes we think they fit into the second category too. If I euthanize my cat rather than pay $14,000 to cure its cancer, nobody will bat an eye. If I euthanize grandma for the same reason, my relatives are never going to stop giving me shit, plus I'll get charged with murder. What do we do with this mess? Is there a way to make it all consistent? Our first project should be figuring what makes death bad for human beings, because we're pretty sure death is bad for human beings, and therefore it's wrong to kill them. What, then, makes death bad for us? Philosophy has provided lots of answers to this question. This is a good place to start. Here are various answers you might give: 1. Death is bad because it tends to reduce the overall happiness in the world. Most people's lives are worth living. Killing them cuts off a life worth living, and makes the world a worse place. (Notice that according to this answer, if your life is terrible enough, it would be okay to kill you. This is perhaps what justifies physician assisted suicide. Or maybe not.) 2. Death is bad because people desperately do not want to die. Dying is bad because it frustrates these preferences. (Notice that if this is the right answer, someone who legitimately wants to die [and who isn't just depressed or otherwise irrational] can kill themselves, or be killed, without this being a bad thing.) 3. Death isn't bad, but killing is bad because God should decide when we go to Heaven. (Almost no philosopher endorses this, but it has been a popular option among lay people for a while.) 4. Death isn't bad, but killing is bad because people mistakenly think death is bad, and if you go around killing people, this will make the remaining living people very anxious that they too may die prematurely. Thus, the anxiety murderers and other killers cause explains why they ought not to murder. (Notice that this answer commits us to saying that if you can kill someone without making other people worry about also being killed, there is nothing wrong with killing the person.) 5. Death is bad because life is just inherently valuable and it ought not to be ended. (This is not a great answer unless you can draw some distinction between human lives and tree lives, which is tough unless you think people have souls or something else strange like that, but again this has been a popular response among non-philosophers for a while. You could also imagine why this response would be favored by people who are pro-life.) 6. Death is bad because it frustrates your ability to achieve the long-term projects that are important to you and that make life valuable: you want to raise a family or write a novel or see your team win the World Series or learn to play the oboe, and these are difficult if not impossible to do while dead. (This requires us to be committed to two things: first, we have to think that these committments, rather than other things, are what make our lives valuable, and we have to think that someone without these committments, perhaps someone who has achieved everything they want, can die without this being a bad thing.) 7. Death isn't bad for you, but it's bad for the people who care about you. It's wrong to kill someone because their family will be sad. (Notice that this means that it's open season on orphans and assholes.) Obviously which one of these you pick is going to determine what you then say about non-human animals. (Of course, there are more than these 7 options, so maybe you will pick something else.) If you pick #1, for instance, killing a happy pig is as bad (or almost as bad) as killing a happy human. If you pick #4 then you won't have much problems with killing a happy pig or a sad pig, but also it seems like you won't have much of a problem with killing a human. Happily enough, all of these answers prevent Racist Tycho from killing black people for some reason that doesn't apply to white people: none of these answers make any mention of race. They treat all people the same. Also happily, these answers make no mention of species, and even better, some of them let us kill non-human animals despite ruling out killing humans. Take #6, for instance. Pigs don't have any long term projects. I can kill a pig without frustrating the pig's desire to write the Great American Novel. I can't kill a person, though, unless they're Philip Roth, because that motherfucker is not going to write the Great American Novel. Thus we have secured an opening for explaining how we can legitimately kill non-human animals without having to rely on a speciesist justification. Instead we just rely on the fact that the thing that makes death bad only applies to some things: we look to that, rather than to species membership. So the way forward seems pretty clear: pick the account of the value of living that we think works best, and hope to hell that it lets us eat hamburgers. I don't have a fully worked out view and also my position is a little more complex than any of the above, but I will say that my favorite answers are #4 and #7 (we can combine some answers - these two, for instance, go together well). This is also probably the most implausible answer. If we go with #4 and #7, we are committed to the idea that, for instance, I could die tomorrow in a car crash and the only bad part about this would be how sad it would make my friends and family. So although you might be tempted to explore this option further, because it sounds like this would make it open season on pigs and mosquitoes, we should probably abandon this line of argumentation and switch to whatever account of the badness of death that you find most plausible, either from that list or the page I linked or you can come up with your own. Then we can apply it to non-human animals and see if their deaths are bad, and thus if we should avoid causing their deaths. (You might say "but Tycho, if you don't think death is bad for mosquitoes or pigs, why the fuck have you been acting like you think it is?" The answer is that I've been assuming nobody in this thread finds my account of the badness of death compelling, and I suspect that whatever account of the badness of death that most people favor is going to rule out killing pigs, probably, and maybe even mosquitoes.) Finally, no matter how okay it is to kill a pig or a mosquito, we can still rule out factory farming and other inhumane methods of raising animals for food, because the badness of factory farming comes from the pain it causes, not from the fact that the animals are killed at the end. Animals are killed at the end of even the most humane farming practices when they are raised for food. So no matter where we come out on the death question, that's only going to make eating animals okay in instances where you eat ethically sourced meat.

The dentist fills the cavity so as to prevent further pain. If cavities were painless, nobody would fix cavities. This is like asking "why would you ever spend money on office supplies, isn't the point of a business to earn money?" The reason you buy office supplies is because you think the money you invest in them will be outweighed by the money you earn by using them. Similarly, the reason you get a cavity painfully filled is to avoid even greater pain in the future. Notice that when we can painlessly fill cavities, like by using Novocaine, we often prefer to do so, because pain is bad. I am not talking about emotional pain. I am talking about pain as a physical sensation. It is sometimes dubbed "nociception." For more on this notion of pain, see this website. When possible, do not cause more (physical) pain than you need to, unless something more important than pain is at stake. I take it when it comes to eating non-human animals, the only thing at stake is whether you eat steak and potatoes or just potatoes. That is not more important than some animal's pain, obviously. The way to check that would be to replace the non-human animal with a human. Would it be okay to torture and kill someone so as to eat a steak? No. It would not be okay. (If you think it would be okay, then I'm fine with that, as long as you're consistent.) This can of course get complicated. Luckily I can just take whatever your answer is in the human case and use it for the non-human animal case. If you can't answer the question in the human case, that's not my problem. Consent can often legitimize pain - I suspect whatever your answer for the human case is, it's going to include something like "if someone consents to the pain, this makes it okay." This would also work for non-human animals, but as you point out, they cannot give consent, so it wouldn't tell us anything interesting in their case. It similarly wouldn't tell us anything interesting in the case of babies, or people in comas, or other human beings who cannot give consent. So whatever your answer is for them, we can use for the non-human animals. Perhaps that is the answer. I don't know nor do I care. The point is just that whatever your answer in the human case is, that ought to be your answer in the non-human animal case. Think about the case of race. Whatever your answer to "how much pain is it okay to cause white people?" should be your answer to "how much pain is it okay to cause black people?" The answer to these two questions should not diverge. If they diverge then you are racist.* That would be bad. *Before anyone gets pedantic and says "but doesn't affirmative action cause more pain to white people than black people? Affirmative action isn't racist!" Of course it isn't. But affirmative action doesn't cause pain to white people because they are white. It causes pain to them because they are not members of a group that has faced and currently faces virulent discrimination and the effects of this discrimination. If your answer to "how much pain is it okay to cause people who do not face virulent discrimination" and "how much pain is it okay to cause people who do face virulent discrimination" diverge, this is not a problem. That this happens to line up with black people and white people gives you a reason to treat black people and white people differently, but of course you're not treating them differently just because of their race. Similarly, if you have other legitimate reasons to cause pain to some humans more than others (and there are a ton of good reasons - for instance, if you have to cause pain to a robber to stop them from robbing you, we might think this is totally fine), then these reasons can also give you reasons to cause pain to some non-human animals rather than humans. That is fine. As long as you are not causing pain just because an individual is a different species (or race, or whatever), that's fine. You need a legitimate justification. What that looks like can vary quite a bit. I simply claim that it cannot look like racism, speciesism, sexism, etc.

I know lots of people who find 'lame' as offensive as 'retarded.' I also know lots of people who don't find 'retarded' offensive. It just depends on the people you know.

Because pain is bad, and so you shouldn't cause pain. Uh, no, but beekeepers don't kill and eat bees so I'm not sure what the issue is here. I think so, yes, because the berries don't feel anything, whereas cows used for milk production are often horribly mistreated and feel a lot of pain. I don't really give a shit about what all organisms "desire" unless you can explain to me why it's good to give an organism what it desires. Seeing as, for instance, Racist Tycho desires to enslave black people, I can think of at least one instance where it's not only not good to fulfill a desire: it's straight up bad to fulfill a desire. I think a berry's "desires" are neutral - it doesn't matter if a berry's desires get fulfilled because the berry doesn't experience any pain or pleasure or in fact anything when its desires are fulfilled or left unfulfilled. Meanwhile I care very much whether a capuchin monkey's desires get fulfilled insofar as they're desires for things like avoiding pain, because pain is bad, but if the capuchin monkey desires to bite my eyeball I don't see why I should give a shit whether that monkey satisfies its desires.

I've listened to much of this and I'll listen to the rest eventually - it really is tremendous, whether you're a huge fan of even the more obscure Looking Glass stuff (Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri represent!), just a fan of the most popular things, or even just interested in a lot of stuff that was both extremely formative and relatively obscure that undergirds so much of what is in video games today without much acknowledgement most of the time.

Also:

Another way to look at it is this. Imagine you show up on an Internet forum and a bunch of people are debating with each other, in various threads titled "Is it okay to rape women?" "Is it okay to enslave the blacks?" "Is it okay to stone homosexuals?" You click on these topics, and on the first page there are such illuminating replies as "raping feels great. If women weren't meant to be raped, they wouldn't feel so good when you rape them" or "blacks ain't whites, it's as simple as that" or "I stone gays because I don't like the idea of homosexual relationships." If that sounds like hyperbole go back and read the first page in this thread. Maybe you would keep it together and stay civil 24/7, but I don't see why you should get mad at someone who isn't able to keep their cool.