TychoCelchuuu

So now I am in the odd position of someone telling me "you're right about everything you've said but I don't really give a shit" and also "you really ought to give a shit about the fact that I don't give a shit, so much so that you should change your tone so you can convince me and others like me." Do you see the tension here? Somehow you're allowed not to give a shit about ethically crucial matters, like whether living beings ought to be tortured and killed for no good reason, but I have to care deeply about what a bunch of strangers think on the Internet so much that I need to pretend like I don't care about the torture and death undergone by innocent beings as much as I do in fact care, just so that these strangers stick around in the conversation longer or something. Why is it that you get to not care about actual bad stuff whereas it's my responsibility to care about what strangers on the Internet think about my tone? If anyone's on the wrong side here, isn't it you, when you admit you don't care about ethically important issues, and not me, when I admit that I don't care what a bunch of "racist except against animals instead of blacks" people on the Internet think? Even ignoring all of that, though, I still stand by everything the Geek Feminism Wiki says about tone arguments. What on that page do you disagree with, and why? Or better yet, who gives a fuck? This topic isn't "How Ought We to Argue on the Internet," it's "Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?" And I'm pretty sure we've solved #2, so who gives a fuck about #1? edit: another good article

I had a fairly long post written out in reply to you, Bjorn, but I hit the back button on accident and it disappeared, so here is the short version. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that plants feel pain. Here are our options: Option #1: We're fucked. We have to live off of fungi, plants and animals that die of natural causes, and maybe a few other food sources I haven't thought of. Life is pretty grim. Option #2: Tycho is still basically right: eat as many plants as you want, but don't kill and eat any animals. This sounds fairly implausible, given that plants feel pain, but whatever. Option #3: Somehow it must be okay to kill and eat things that feel pain: plants, at the very least, and probably animals too, because the only argument Tycho has against killing animals is that they feel pain, and that's out the door because it would keep us from eating basically anything. So the right account of the morality of food must be something different. I don't think option #1 is patently ridiculous, but let's just assume it's wrong. Now it's down to option #2 vs. option #3. I don't know what option #3 would look like. I have never thought about it and don't know how to go about thinking about it. So, now it's on you. Tell me what you think is the right answer to "what can we kill and eat (assuming plants feel pain)?" Once you give your answer, we'll compare yours, whatever it is, to mine ("eat as many plants as you want, but no animals"). There's clearly one sense in which your answer is going to be way better than mine. Mine implausibly says "kill as many plants as you want," and that's probably a horrendous answer, since plants feel pain. I think there's one sense in which I'm not too badly off, though: any animals we eat must have fed themselves either on plants, or on other animals that ate plants, etc. So it's hard for me to imagine how killing and an animal could ever be better than killing and eating a plant: either way something has to die, and it's going to kill more plants if we eat animals than if we go vegan. However, like I said, I don't know who would win that fight. It's a fight I'm happy to have (although I think it rests on the patently ridiculous assumption that plants feel pain). So, have at it! I agree 100% with all of this. I and others are in a very precarious position when we claim that plants do not feel pain. You don't have to go back very far to find not just normal people but scientists telling us that animals feel no pain, or even that some human beings feel less pain than others because of their race! So surely we ought to be skeptical of scientific claims about plant pain, especially given the circumstances you point out about how people are ridiculed for saying that plants might feel pain, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, the response to this isn't an ethical argument or even a simple scientific argument. The idea that plants don't feel pain can only be established by a lot of complicated science and philosophy. I don't think it's the sort of thing people can reasonably disagree about once they've seen the evidence, but you maybe think otherwise. That's fine, and there's nothing I can say here, in this space, that can decide the question one way or another. Like I said, it's a horrendously complicated answer. All I can do is give you an "IOU," effectively, which reads something like "I promise that plants don't feel pain. Love, Tycho." I'm sure that's unsatisfying for you. "Why," you might ask, "can't Racist Tycho give me an IOU that says 'I promise that black people don't feel pain. Love, Racist Tycho.' or something like that?" The answer (unfortunately) is basically just "science." Like, Racist Tycho is factually wrong about whether black people feel pain, but actual Tycho is (I claim) factually right when he claims that plants don't feel pain. Could actual Tycho be wrong? Could Racist Tycho be right? You have to ask the scientists (and, actually, the philosophers - this issue turns out not to be as simple as "do some science"). I know this is is deeply unsatisfying and suspicious sounding. Luckily, you can reject it all and go with the stuff I said above: elaborate option #3 and we'll see how it does vs. option #2. That's a fine project that I am happy to embark upon.

Just like the racist person is a separate life form, I guess we can consider the speciesist person to be a separate life form. However, for anyone capable of recognizing the fear and pain of animals other than humans, killing a non-human animal would be absolutely wrong while killing a tree would be just fine. Notice that this is pretty anodyne. Like, so what? It's not surprising to me that racist people think it's okay to kill black people and speciesist people think it's okay to kill mosquitos and people like me think it's okay to kill trees. You haven't told me anything interesting. You've just re-described the various beliefs that Racist Tycho, you, and actual Tycho hold. Imagine what Racist Tycho would say about this! He would explain his racist morality, according to which enslaving and killing black people is okay. When you protest, he would say "yeah, it is kind of an ugly way of looking at it but there has to be some way we can view morality that doesn't put is in the position where we are forced to accept that killing a black person is the same as killing a white person." Is there anything you can say to Racist Tycho? Or is he entirely correct? I don't think Racist Tycho is correct. I think that forcing him to accept that killing a black person is just as bad as killing a white person is no more objectionable than forcing him to accept that humans are causing global warming or that vaccines don't cause autism. Racist Tycho is just flat out wrong when he talks about his racist views. Speciesist Zeusthecat, meanwhile, is just flat out wrong when he talks about his speciesist views. I'm not talking about "convincing" people. I've previously pointed out in this thread that prejudices are deep enough that it's often impossible to convince people. You just have to wait until they die. Racist Tycho might just be so fucking prejudiced that no matter what you say, he's still going to enslave and kill black people. The best we can hope for is that the rest of society moves on and forces Racist Tycho and his fellow racists to stop enslaving and killing black people. Similarly, maybe the best I can hope for is that the rest of society moves on, and passes laws forcing speciesist people like you to stop torturing and killing animals. Is this likely to happen? You seem to think "no," but I suspect that's partially because you think it's patently ridiculous that anyone would ever give a shit about animals, so of course society is never going to come around to the anti-speciesist position. But Racist Tycho feels the same way, if we go back a few hundred years. Why in the world would we ever make slavery illegal, as long as we're only enslaving black people? What's the big deal with that? Of course I'll be fine, going forward. Luckily Racist Tycho was wrong. Society moved on. We look back a few hundred years in horror at the fact that the majority of people were virulently racist, and that only a very small number of people fought for the rights of black people. In a few hundred years, I'm fairly certain that they are going to look back in horror at the fact that so many of us see nothing wrong with torturing and killing vast numbers of non-human animals, and they're going to find it bizarre and unconscionable that only a small number of people, like me, were even willing to admit that all animals are morally equal. So, imagine that you're in society a few hundred years ago, where the vast majority endorse racism. What kind of person would you have been? Would you have been a racist? If you had been arguing on a message board back then, which side would you have picked? Racism, or anti-racism? Would you have made arguments like "there's no way you'll ever get everybody to agree that black people count as much as white people. Even if the logic is sound, it is a dead end. Whether it is logical or not, most white people do not recognize all races as equal and probably never will." Or would you have said "holy shit guys, stop enslaving black people!" Now fast forward to today. The vast majority endorse speciesism. What kind of person are you going to be? Are you going to be a specieist? You're arguing on a message board right now - which side will you pick? Speciesism, or anti-speciesism? Will you keep making arguments like "You are never going to be able to convince even a small percentage of people to buy the notion that all life forms are equal. Even if the logic is sound, it is a dead end. Whether it is logical or not, most humans do not recognize all life forms as equal and probably never will." Or will you say "holy shit guys, stop killing animals!" Right, we've definitely established this. As far as I can tell, given the way you've described your thoughts, this is for various arbitrary reasons: you can see the pain of other animals more easily, you imagine some kind of chain of being where mosquitoes are low enough that it's okay to kill them, etc. No arguments there. Racist Tycho is the same way, actually. He really hates black people, because they're subhuman savages, but he's actually pretty down with Asians. He thinks you ought to treat Asians basically the way you treat white people, although there are some edge cases where you can treat Asians worse because they're inferior in a few respects (not all of them are Christian, for instance, blah blah blah). (Historically this was a view held by many, many racists, including Acosta, whom I cited above.) I take it that you think Racist Tycho is still kind of a dick. I mean, it's great that Racist Tycho doesn't also hate Asians anywhere near as much as he hates black people, but uh, the real issue is that Racist Tycho is enslaving and killing black people so maybe he ought to stop, right? I still submit that you can't convince Racist Tycho to stop enslaving and killing black people without opening yourself up to the charge that we ought not to kill and eat mosquitoes. I may be wrong. But from what you have said so far, you haven't managed to establish that.

I'll believe it when I holo-see it.

I really like Rebellion. I can understand why people are turned off by the UI and so forth, but I spent hours and hours playing that game. It's a pretty great psuedo-4X that runs in real time and lets you send Han Solo and Chewbacca to abduct Darth Vader from a Star Destroyer.

(Also, the whole "you can just SEE the pain" thing works pretty well for mosquitos but not too well for pigs, chickens, cows, etc. In other words, the sorts of animals we eat. So as I'm sure you're already aware, this still suggests we ought to be vegan, at least until we start eating grasshoppers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like in Snowpiercer.) One further point: I tried Googling "black people animals" and "black people subhumans" to find historical examples of racists claiming this sort of stuff, but all the results were contemporary people posting that sort of shit to Facebook. Some things never change...

This is demonstrably false. You barely have to go back a few hundred years to find innumerable accounts of white people explaining, calmly and rationally, why black people feel less pain than white people, and thus it is okay to treat them harshly when they are enslaved. Even today these biases persist. You can put your fingers in your ears and pretend that actually, deep within their heart, racist people actually do care just as much about black people pain as white people pain: when they see a black person, they feel, deep down, as much empathy and can recognize just as much suffering as they feel and recognize when they see a white person in pain. This is, unfortunately, a fantasy. That is not how racism works. Racist Tycho believes, thinks in fact that he has scientific proof, I bet, that black people simply feel less pain. Ditto for fear. It is a fortunate fact of modern Western society that we rarely face bald, virulent racism, and I guess you haven't read enough 18th and 19th century writing to have been exposed to these sorts of racist claims, which were incredibly common throughout much of history, but trust me when I say that Racist Tycho for sure thinks that black people feel less pain just like you for sure think mosquitos feel less pain. Again, this just sounds like you've never really looked in to what actual racist people said and did. A black person is not "very recognizably human" to Racist Tycho. Have you ever heard racist people say things like "blacks are sub-human" or "blacks are animals" or anything like this? If you haven't, then trust me: it's an extremely common refrain. You can wish this sort of thing away as much as you want, but it's an unfortunate fact: racist people for hundreds if not thousands of years have been convinced that being of a different race removes someone from humanity. Are they right? Well obviously not, but the speciesist is also wrong when they claim that being of a different species removes someone from moral consideration.

What is biological "complexity?" Are whales and dolphins more or less complex than us? What about coral reefs? Are mice more complex than guinea pigs, or less complex, or equally complex? Are people with Y chromosomes less complex than people without them? Etc. This is not to say you are wrong. This is just to say I do not know what biological complexity means. I don't have one of those. In the context of this thread I just have one, single thing: a principle that tells us whether species membership matters morally when it comes to how we treat an animal. Notice this leaves a vast number of moral questions open and (unless I add more detail) entirely unanswerable. People have pointed out elsewhere in this thread that I'm refusing to answer a lot of questions. That is on purpose. I am not trying to provide, in your words, "a single standard, based in a biological feature, that is absolute in determining the morality of an action towards another living thing," because as you point out, we might be skeptical that such a thing can be provided. (I am extremely skeptical that I could provide it in the length of a few forum posts.) Luckily that is not what I am trying to do or what I have claimed to do. I have only claimed to tell you one thing: if it's not okay to do it to a human, then it's not okay to do it to any other species, if your reason is solely "this is a different species." Similarly, if it's not okay to do it to a white person, then it's not okay to do it to a black person, if your reason is solely "this is a different race." This is one position you can take. There is, I think, literally nothing we can say to someone who says "I don't know why the fact that pain feels bad gives us a reason not to cause pain." It's true that I have to assume that to get off the ground. Notice that if you reject that assumption, you're fucked six ways to Sunday when it comes to convincing Racist Tycho not to be racist. If you don't believe me, give it a try. So now you are left with three options. Option #1 is to say "well, I guess my account of morality cannot explain why racism is wrong. So racism must not be wrong." I take it this is a bad option. Option #2 is to say "well, I guess my account of morality cannot explain why racism is wrong. But it's wrong anyways, lol. Speciesism, meanwhile, is fine. Not sure why but eh, such is life." I don't see how option #2 is acceptable - surely Racist Tycho can pull the same move and be equally justified in his reasoning. Option #3 is "I guess I need to refine my conception of morality enough to be able to explain why racism is wrong." This is the option I think makes the most sense. I suspect that in doing so, you will also be forced to admit that speciesism is wrong. If you don't believe me, then do your best to convince Racist Tycho without opening yourself up to objections from the anti-speciesist.

Zeus, your post sounds like a (probably accurate) description of how you make decisions about killing, torturing, etc. But notice I can also give an accurate description of how Racist Tycho makes these decisions. Racist Tycho feels quite a bit of guilt when he kills or wounds a white person, very little guilt when he kills or wounds a black person, etc. If black people were white-colored he would probably feel differently. If they exhibited the same behaviors as white people, maybe he would also feel differently. But they don't, so this is why Racist Tycho enslaves and kills black people. Let's look at the way you sum up your opinion: We can go through the same exercise for Racist Tycho. In his own words: So I guess for me, I feel like what is 'right' or 'wrong' is relative to the perspective of the race. I feel like it is wrong to kill, enslave, or torture things that clearly exhibit recognizable characteristics [of white people] but I don't think it as wrong to do that to black ass people that are completely un-relatable and foreign. By black people morality, enslaving black people is clearly bad but Native Americans can go fuck themselves. Ugh, that was gross! I feel like I need to take a shower. I'm still not sure, though, what makes Racist Tycho wrong and you right. I wasn't asking for a description of what kinds of decisions you and Racist Tycho make. I already know: you make speciesist decisions and Racist Tycho makes racist decisions. I was asking for reasons to believe that these decisions are the right ones to make. It seems like you haven't given me any of these reasons for your own decisions any more than I've given you reasons for Racist Tycho's decisions. I of course think that neither you nor Racist Tycho have any good reasons to give, but you're welcome to try.

The reason I think the ability to feel pain is important is because the sorts of things we do to animals are bad because they cause pain. Hitting something with an ax is not inherently wrong. It's wrong because it causes pain. Thus if something can't feel pain, because it is, for instance, a rock or a tree, this suggests there is nothing wrong with "torturing" it, for instance (to the extent that it's even possible to torture it...). If you don't think causing pain is bad, then stab yourself in the thigh with a rusty nail until you get the picture. If you don't think the ability to feel pain matters, then you have two options. You can either say "it's okay to hit anything with an ax," in which case I'm going to stay away from you whenever you have sharp objects within your reach, or you can provide some other criterion according to which we can sort the world into "okay to hit with an ax" and "not okay to hit with an ax." I would be interested in the criterion you choose, given the skepticism you've expressed about mine.

Would you say that it is thus okay to discriminate on the basis of biological features that are not social constructs? So, for instance, I could discriminate against short people, people with darker skin (but not because of their race, just because of their skin color), people with red hair, people with vaginas, people without a Y chromosome, and so forth? Whether some feature is or is not socially constructed strikes me as literally irrelevant to whether it is okay to discriminate on the basis of it.

The issue that pops out to me is that just as you can go "down the chain" of animals, all the while being screamed at by instincts that say "this animal matters less! This one even less!" you can also go "down the chain" of races, all the while being screamed at by instincts that say "this race matters less! This one even less!" I know you wouldn't do this, but that's the most natural thing in the world to the racist. In fact the metaphor of a "chain" where something (humans, or white people) is at the "top" and everyone else is "below" is already assuming the prejudice in question. If you're allowed to assume that all animals are ranked on a chain with humans at the top, and as you go down the chain, your life matters less, then Racist Tycho is allowed to assume that all races are ranked on a chain with white people at the top, and as you go down the chain, your life matters less. Amusingly (or not so amusingly...) this literally happened. In 1588, José de Acosta ranked all the races of man (Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, etc.) and argued that as you go down from the top (which, surprise, was white people) you were warranted in treating people worse. He wasn't the only one to do this: Alessandro Valignano did the same thing, and I'm sure you could find many more examples.

I think this was totally on purpose, and it's one of the reasons I think that people who complain about the aliens are sort of silly. The first three Indiana Jones movies are pretty clearly based on the early serials from the 1910s to the 1940s, and especially the '30s, because Indiana Jones was set at around this time (30s and 40s). He was roughhousing with Nazis and so on. But then we move on to the 1950s. The world has changed. We're not watching adventure serials anymore: we're reading pulp novels about aliens, and the villains are the Communists, not the Nazis. Indiana Jones himself is now in this era, so the movie is in this era and the plot is in this era. That's not to say they handled the aliens as well as they could have ("their treasure is knowledge" or whatever the fuck wasn't exactly "he chose... poorly") but the general feel of the movie, which was different from the first three, struck me as a great change. What didn't strike me as a great change was the stupid goofy bullshit CGI gophers (and the generally terrible CGI all throughout, which was extremely surprising to me - ILM knows its stuff, doesn't it) and all the other tonal missteps, but I think in terms of the really big beats, Jones 4 was on the right track.

The reason I'm posting a bunch of questions and statements instead of just bluntly naming a few key points that I think are right, the way other people are, is that, unlike other people in this thread, I'm being very careful to make sure I only say things that are internally consistent and actually defensible. Most people in this thread are just throwing out any old bullshit they believe, and if they actually had to adhere to internal consistency and defensibility they'd probably not be posting what they're posting. Instead they'd rely almost entirely on asking me questions (which, as you'll notice, is also a lot of what is happening - indeed, you're about to do it!). There's nothing wrong with asking lots of questions. I do want to point out that it's not like I've said nothing. I feel like I have been extremely clear and extremely strident about one point, namely, that discriminating on the basis of species membership is no more or less legitimate than discriminating on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality. Even if everything else is up in the air or unclear, this single point answers the thread topic pretty well: it's wrong to eat meat if it's wrong to eat meat from humans raised and killed in the same manner, and I take it everyone thinks it would be wrong to have factory farms full of human beings. I do not think all forms of life are equal and deserve the same consideration. Trees are alive but don't deserve the same consideration as animals. I do believe basically all animals (certainly any that can feel pain) are equal in terms of basic moral standing and deserve the same basic moral consideration. I do not think swatting a mosquito is the moral equivalent of killing a person any more than I think killing a person is the moral equivalent of killing another person, which is to say, it depends on why you are swatting the mosquito and why you are killing the person. I do think that generally, if you are swatting the mosquito simply because it annoys you or killing the person simply because it annoys you, you've done something morally reprehensible. Whether they are equally morally reprehensible is not something I'm sure about or something that I care about, because once I'm pretty sure I shouldn't swat the mosquito, that solves the question for me. I can't really help you there apart from pointing out that it's much easier for us to see the pain and suffering of a mouse than that of a mosquito - mice, for all their differences from us, still run around, squeak at each other, cuddle up with friends, bleed when cut, recoil in fright, etc. Mosquitos are very alien. For the same reason that people hundreds of years ago found it very easy to ignore the pain of other races, because they found these other races very alien to their own existence, we today find it very easy to ignore the pain of insects, fish, and other non-mammalian creatures that are, for lack of a better word, "weird." Yes, speciesism does in one sense "go far beyond" the original question, but I don't know how else you would answer the original question. What if the original question were "is it wrong to enslave and torture black people?" Surely your response to that would advert to the wrongness of racism, would it not? Really, as I've asked two or three times in this thread, I think it would help a lot of you if you would answer the challenge I've posed a few times. Why is it wrong to enslave and torture black people on the basis of their race? Can you explain why racism and the practices it justifies is wrong in a way that won't also allow me to explain why speciesism and the practices it justifies is wrong? And remember one of the most important parts: you have to explain this to a racist person, just like I have to explain my position to a speciesist person. If you can't convince the racist, and I can't convince the speciesist, what might that mean?

I guess I'm a little confused what having an arbitrary line baked into oneself at childhood has to do with "isms" being a non-starter. Is the idea that "isms" can't be baked in at childhood, so therefore if you've got something baked in, it can't be an "ism"? Or is the idea that it's impossible to think of something simultaneously as baked in and as an "ism," so given that you must think of something as baked in, it won't work for you to simultaneously think of it as an "ism?" Moreover, it's not clear what exactly it means for "using isms" to be a "hard non-starter." Does it mean that any argument that uses "isms" anywhere in it won't work? Because I could certainly rephrase everything I've said without any words that are "isms." Or does it mean that any argument that avails itself of the ideas behind "isms" won't work? That seems implausible to me - it rules out literally all ethical argumentation, I think, because there's an "ism" for everything. Does it mean that arguments that contain, either overtly or in a rephrased manner, "isms" that were baked into you as a child are arguments that you can't possibly accept, regardless of how good they are? Why would that even be the case? I guess my confusion stems from the fact that everyone has "isms" baked into them as children - that's just what happens when you raise a kid. You impart various beliefs to them. Unless all moral discussion is automatically a non-starter, how can "isms" be an issue?

About that... It varies from restaurant to restaurant. Dead animals end up in all sorts of food you wouldn't imagine them in.

In most places in America you're lucky if there's a single vegan option on the menu. Most places just have vegetarian food, and even then, in many places there are only one or two vegetarian options, one of which is often a salad. In the midwest it's not unusual to be at a restaurant with literally nothing vegetarian unless you tell them to hold the bacon on your salad or something. It's especially tough if you're actually serious about being vegetarian, because many cheeses are made with rennet, which comes from dead animals, so it's not vegetarian. Thus stuff that looks vegetarian at first glance turns out to have some poor dead cow in there. Surprise! This is definitely an issue. Even if you aren't a vegetarian, and you just have issues with unproblematically bad things, like humans being tortured, enslaved, slaughtered en masse, starved to death, and so on, there's more than enough of that shit going on everywhere, every day, to make anyone want to kill themselves. I think there are, numbers-wise, more slaves right now than there were back when slavery was an accepted practice, simply because there are so many more people today and slavery is still a very big thing. Every once in a while we get a big ol' genocide and much more often it's like "oh hey, I guess Boko Haram just killed a few thousand innocent people" or whatever. In other words, you claim that if you were constantly reminded of the worldwide genocide taking place with respect to non-human animals, you'd feel shitty enough to kill yourself, but don't you feel this way about the constant genocides taking place with respect to humans? Do those not bum you out? Or does it take, like, extra SUPER genocide on the level of what we do to non-human animals for you to feel really bad? I think almost nobody, whatever their ostensible moral commitments are, ever really lives up to them on an emotional level, unless they have a pretty shitty morality that says "eh whatever, buncha people gettin' genocided over in Africa again, that's life lol." It's a defensive mechanism, I guess. Things are so bad that no matter what your rational ethical commitments are, and no matter how much you refrain from eating animals, torturing black people, discriminating against women, etc., on the emotional level it's tough to get worked up about stuff you know is super awful, like the latest genocide, without either being horrendously inconsistent or feeling bummed out 24/7. Speaking of really shitty moralities, though: That's a fat load of bullshit. Even if we grant for a moment that it's perfectly okay to do whatever the fuck we want to do to non-human animals, torture 'em, eat 'em, whatever, the idea that there's nothing wrong with the Holocaust or with mass rape or gassing a bunch of civilians with sarin gas is pretty silly. I'd like to hear someone keep up that puerile "nothing matters one way or another" bullshit while they are being tortured to death along with everyone they've ever loved. I imagine they'd be a little less blasé about morality at that point.

This is a good point. First, it brings up one clarification: when I say "all animals" I actually mean "all animals that can suffer." For a while, a fetus can't feel pain, so, for instance, there's nothing wrong with the morning after pill or other methods of abortion that occur early on. Later on, some philosophers believe that abortion would be justifiable even if the fetus had all the moral rights of a full human being. For the most famous defense of this position see this article. If Thomson is right, then even if the fetus, as an animal, is morally equivalent to all other animals, including human beings, it would still be moral to abort the fetus. Finally, in the case where the fetus is old enough to feel pain and on the assumption that Thomson is incorrect, you might think I'm in a bit of a bind. Wouldn't killing a fetus be just as bad as murdering a full-grown human being? It sounds like I have to be (somewhat implausibly) quite pro-life! I think I have an "out" here (there are actually a few options, I believe), but rather than jumping straight to that, let's flip the question around for a moment. Let's say you take the opposite position from me. You think a late stage fetus, which can feel pain, can be permissibly aborted. At what point is it not okay to kill the fetus? Can you abort one day before birth? One minute before birth? One second? If you answer "no," then it seems like you, too, have a point at which it's suddenly not okay to kill the fetus, so it's not clear why you'd have problems with my refusal to kill the fetus (if indeed I'm on the hook for this). If your answer is "yes," do you believe it would be okay to kill the fetus once it's born, in other words, once it's a baby, and no longer a fetus? If your answer is "yes," then notice we're fine: all I've been trying to do is get you to admit that all animals are morally equal, and if the only way you can be pro-choice is to admit that it's also okay to kill babies, then you're perfectly consistent when you want to kill non-human animals too. Kill all those fuckers! Eat 'em too, for all I care! Baby burgers for everyone. If your answer is "holy shit no, it's not okay to murder babies," then on what basis do you draw that conclusion? What makes it okay to kill a fetus but not okay to kill a baby? What is that magical property? Does that property apply to non-human animals? Why or why not?

I don't see why I would need to commit myself to any specific answer to this question in the context of this thread given the thesis I am arguing for, namely, the moral equivalency of all animals. As justified as I would be in stealing human children from their parents in order to set them free. I don't see why I would need to commit myself to any specific answer to this question in the context of this thread given the thesis I am arguing for, namely, the moral equivalency of all animals. As justified as I would be in the murder of a parent of a human in 2015. What if the parent treated their children well? I don't see why I would need to commit myself to any specific answer to this question in the context of this thread given the thesis I am arguing for, namely, the moral equivalency of all animals. Probably, although I can't recall having done so. I've certainly killed non-human animals in my life non-accidentally, or, more accurately, I've eaten dead animals that were killed in order to feed me. I wasn't a vegan until my 20s. I repented by saying six hail Mary full of graces and apologizing to my roommate's cat, who I had earlier that day crowned "proxy for all the animal kingdom" in a ceremony that included a crown made from a spare piece of paper and music playing from speakers hooked up to an iPad. When people ask me if I think about X, the answer is pretty much always yes. I think about a lot of stuff!

Only to the degree that I would be acting in conflict with my ethics in not freeing humans from wrongful imprisonment (more or less - there are some disanalagous features. If the pet store treats the animals well and lets them leave if someone adopts them, I'm not sure there's much of an issue there, any more than there would be if an orphanage treats its orphan children well but doesn't let them leave unless someone adopts them.). I (and anyone else) would be as justified in murdering key figures of the meat industry as we would be in murdering key figures in the in-vitro-babies-for-baby-burgers industry. I don't see why I would need to commit myself to any specific answer to this question in the context of this thread given the thesis I am arguing for, namely, the moral equivalency of all animals.

I have (and everyone else has) as much of a moral duty to stop the genocide of non-human animals as they do to stop the genocide of human beings. It is as immoral for me (and for anyone) to befriend those who contribute to it (eagerly, even) as it would be to befriend anyone who contributes (eagerly, even) to the genocide of human beings. To the same degree that I would be friends with someone who ate a human being who had been raised in similar conditions once. I don't see why I would need to commit myself to any specific answer to this question in the context of this thread given the thesis I am arguing for, namely, the moral equivalency of all animals. Only to the degree that I could post on, for instance, reddit, where everyone is sexist and racist, or on other forums where people have similar prejudices. I'm not sure what this means.

uh yeah gonna hit the quote limit like 8 times, so here comes lots of posts: I'm glad that I'm not coming off as a worthless shithead to everyone. I got shit for comparing myself to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, but I think that was a little unjustifiable and missed the point: I didn't try to say that I was as good as either of those guys or that I've done anything like what they have or that I'm a comparable person to them or anything like that. The point I made was that the stuff I'm saying sounds crazy and people call me an asshole for being strident about it in the same way that MLK and X sounded crazy to people and got branded ultra-assholes (and then shot to death). Obviously there are many differences between me and two of the most famous civil rights leaders in the history of the world, but one thing that I (and other anti-speciesists) share with anti-racists (like MLK and X) is that there are vast swathes of history in which saying things that sound very reasonable to us makes us look sound like assholes to most people, whose outlooks on life are shot through with prejudices so deep and so virulent that they cannot help but resort to negative emotion when confronted with evidence that they hold a series of morally unjustifiable opinions. But honestly, put yourself in my position. I care about animals the way you care about black people, or women, or queer people, or whatever. If literally millions of black people were being tortured, murdered, and eaten, you'd be fucking pissed off too, especially if everyone acted like it was no big deal and ignored you or made fun of you when you tried to tell them that they ought to stop torturing, murdering, and eating black people.

ahem one of the tags of this thread is very specifically "not self help."

I'm glad there's finally going to be an even more complicated version of SpaceChem. That's definitely what I need in my life. It's certainly not going to make me feel like a huge fucking idiot.

Yeah, totally. The moment in the diner where the Greasers and the Socs start fighting was fucking hilarious, and he's totally fine throughout the rest of the movie. Better than Short Round, even. Bringing back Marion was also a great idea, although I feel like the movie didn't handle her nearly as well, which was pretty disappointing.