TychoCelchuuu

This episode was absolutely hilarious. I hadn't heard of Outer Wilds before, I think, so now I'm excited for that to get finished whenever it's finished. And, just to add to the chorus, ThumbsDB is amazing.

Sure. The reason I present everything in this thread as if it's dead simple is not because I think that's actually the case - it's because typing up a 14,000 word manifesto or whatever that answers every conceivable question is a stupid idea for like eighteen reasons. The idea is to present the basic skeleton of the view, the most important part of which is the moral equivalence of all animals, and let people complicate it in whatever way they wish with various objections. Nothing in the world is simple but we can't just start off every conversation with a fully worked out philosophical framework, because even the tiny amount I've written here has already scared a bunch of people away. I imagine the number of people who would read a detailed explanation is pretty small, and if anyone like that exists, they can go read Peter Singer or something rather than bother finding out what I think. The value of this thread is that there can be a conversation, and there can't really be a conversation if I post blocks of text far more massive than what I already post. So, to reiterate, I agree that this is a complicated issue. (Although I don't think the fact that it's complicated suggests that it's okay to keep torturing and murdering non-human animals for food. I know you didn't mean to make that claim, but it's worth keeping that central point in mind.) Yes, definitely. The two options are eat the babies or don't eat the pigs, and as you point out, not a lot of people are sanguine about the "eat the babies" response. In this thread I don't think I've committed myself one way or another: if you want to be anti-baby-eating, that's fine, but for the purposes of my argument it's just as fine with me if you're pro-baby-eating. (The third option is to come up with some other reason it would be wrong to eat babies, which I think is not viable, although plenty of people have tried it and I'm perfectly happy to have that conversation.) The main thrust of my argument is that all animals are equal, not that eating animals is always wrong: the "don't eat them" part follows from some very natural assumptions I think people make (like "don't eat babies") but if people are willing to give up those assumptions then they don't have to draw the conclusion that eating animals is wrong. I've been supposing that most people in this thread are anti-baby-eating, which is why I often sum up my point as "it's not okay to eat animals," but if I'm mistaken about what most people believe then probably I should be more careful and put things in terms of "it's not okay to eat animals solely on the basis of the fact that they are a different species from us." Because that is the basic point. Similarly, being anti-racist actually doesn't say anything about whether you are anti-slavery. It just tells you that you're anti-slavery if the slavery is based on a racist justification. Since I assume most people think there aren't other ways to justify slavery, it's probably also a safe assumption that anti-racism entails anti-slavery, because without the racist justification, you're out of luck. But of course if someone thinks slavery might be justified in non-racist ways, then non-racism might be perfectly compatible with endorsing slavery. Meanwhile, anti-speciesism may be perfectly compatible with eating animals, if there's some other justification for it. (I actually don't think it's too ridiculous to come up with some kind of justification, and thus endorse the position that it would be okay to eat the babies, but again, since I've been assuming most people find this ridiculous, I haven't been saying much about this option in this thread.) Definitely, that is exactly what my point has been throughout this thread, with one small difference: instead of saying "some animals are okay to eat, some are not," I would say "some animals are thought to be okay to eat, and some are thought to be not okay to eat." Similarly, if human beings are just human beings, then (at least for the racist person) some human beings are okay to enslave, some are not, and the distinction is kind of arbitrary and seems based mostly on unconscious visceral reactions. Since we typically think that making moral decisions based on unconscious visceral reactions, like "man I just don't like black people" or "man I just don't see an issue with killing and eating a pig," is a bad idea, this suggests that we ought to examine the conclusions we've drawn on the basis of these prejudicial, visceral reactions and potentially abandon them. Okay, if you think that justifications for slavery fall apart under some kind of scrutiny, let's see you prove it! Here is my justification for slavery: "black people are morally different from white people in one specific way, namely, it is moral to enslave black people but not to enslave white people." Now, explain to me why I'm wrong, and in doing so, try to avoid explanations that wouldn't also work against someone who says something like "pigs are morally different from human beings in one specific way, namely, it is moral to kill and eat pigs but not to kill and eat human beings." Do you feel the same way about racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of prejudice?

Okay, I think that is the best. It reminded me of the Super Time Force trailers:

A book repository!

Of course it's fine just to hold various internally contradictory beliefs. When you then proceed to unnecessarily torture, murder, and consume living creatures on the basis of these beliefs, I don't think it's fine anymore. Just like a racist, sexist, or heterosexist person can't excuse themselves by saying "we all hold contradictory beliefs!" because their prejudices entail not just inconsistency but also mistreatment of others, I don't see how a speciesist person can get off the hook by saying "we all hold contradictory beliefs!" If there is some difference between the speciesist person and the racist, sexist, or heterosexist person, I would be interested to know what that difference is. It's almost impossible to "completely refute" an ethical argument, even one as seemingly obviously wrong as "it is totally okay to enslave, torture, and kill black people, but it's totally not okay to do this to white people." The best you can do against an ethical argument is to show that it conflicts with OTHER accepted ethical arguments, and that, given this conflict, we have to give up one or the other on pain of incoherence and inconsistency. For instance, to refute the racist argument, you would show that this conflicts with a principle that we tend to think is pretty reasonable, namely that morally differential treatment of individuals is justifiable only on the basis of morally relevant differences, and there are no good reasons to think that skin color is a morally relevant difference. Thus, you either have to give up that pretty reasonable principle, or give up the racist belief. I take it that, at least ideally, we would imagine the racist person saying to themselves "huh, now that you point that out, I guess it's true that I don't have much of a justification for the racist belief, whereas I do feel fairly certain that the other moral belief you mention sounds pretty convincing. I guess I ought to give up the racist belief." Notice of course that this strategy only works if the person you are talking with thinks that they ought to have consistent ethical beliefs. If the racist person says "okay, well, I agree with that, but ALSO I guess I just hate black people, whoopsie! Inconsistency is a funny thing!" then you're pretty much fucked. Nothing you say or do is going to convince the racist. It may be the case that we all have certain prejudices that we're just never going to clear up, even when they are explained to us in tedious, exacting detail. Many racist, sexist, and heterosexist people appear quite incorrigible, and I think a quick glance through this thread or perhaps into one's own mind will provide ample evidence for the incorrigibility of speciesist people. Absent some way of convincing people that irrationality that leads to potentially unethical actions is an issue, often the best we can hope for is that, over time, society comes to reject racist, sexist, heterosexist, and speciesist positions. If people don't get indoctrinated with these prejudices as children, they tend not to affirm them quite as much as adults. Current Western society, for instance, does much better against racism than it did a few hundred years ago. I think this is not because people are better at logical reasoning or that they care more about avoiding inconsistent moral beliefs. Instead I think it's just that virulent racial prejudice became less socially acceptable over time. I'm basically certain that in a few hundred years, people will look back on us today and say "holy shit, they were TORTURING AND KILLING ANIMALS and they saw NOTHING WRONG WITH IT!" just like we look back a few hundred years and say "holy shit, they were ENSLAVING HUMAN BEINGS and they saw NOTHING WRONG WITH IT!" When it comes to speciesism we're in the same position. The way to attempt to refute the "happy animal" argument would be to look at the case of humans: would it be permissible to raise, kill, and consume happy human beings? Specifically, happy babies grown in test tubes? (We use test tube babies because a baby's intelligence is around the level of other animals we eat, so if we think intelligence is relevant this gets rid of that variable, and the test tube part makes sure that no parents are going to be sad when we kill the baby. We could also use orphan babies for similar reasons.) If you think it would be wrong to raise, kill, and eat the babies, it's tough to see why it would be any more ethical to raise, kill, and eat a pig.

It's not analogous because...? I thought the idea was that games are interestingly different from other forms of media because they can be a hobby, and I was pointing out that some forms of media apart from games can work as a hobby. Did I miss some different or broader point that the Shakespeare example doesn't throw any helpful illumination on?

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the best films ever made. Crystal Skull has a ton of awful bullshit in it, and I enjoyed it largely because I have a preternatural ability not to get pissed off by many kinds of awful bullshit. My opinion on Temple of Doom wavers constantly. Last Crusade is fun and goofy. I thought the discussion about video games as hobbies was interesting. The main point was that video games are sort of fundamentally different from movies and books, in that you can basically just sit down and play a video game in the way you can't really make a hobby out of reading a book or watching a movie. I think one possible counterexample/complication here would be Shakespeare - Shakespeare can be a hobby. I have The Complete Shakespeare sitting right next to me, and sometimes I'll just go through and read some Shakespeare. Or maybe I'll watch one of the films made of his plays, or I'll go see Shakespeare at the local theater or drive up to LA to catch it there. The way I interact with Shakespeare's ouvre is pretty similar to how I interact with games that I play as hobbies. Just like I might fire up NEO Scavenger or Teleglitch or Proteus or Quake Live or Flotilla and play for a while, I might crack open Shakespeare and read for a while. I think poetry is like this too. I k now someone who just keeps Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson around, reading one or the other every once in a while. Lots of people do this with other poets they like. Maybe the key is that poems, plays, and games are the sorts of things that you can experience in smaller chunks, if you want, although TV and even movies are like that but I don't know if anyone watches a TV show or a movie in the hobby-like way described in the cast. I'm not sure I'm going anywhere with this. I just thought it was interesting.

Maybe, like, a library?

If you don't like opinion pieces on major gaming sites about how "gamers" are dead and about how gamer culture is regressive and blatantly misogynistic, don't read them! Checkmate, #GamerGate.

I haven't listened to Serial at all because it has struck me as sort of sketchy for a variety of reasons, some of which have been raised in the thread and others which come from what a few of my friends have said about it, but I did find this interview with Jay Wilds pretty interesting, given what little I know about Serial, the case it covers, and so on. In the context of the specific discussion from the podcast and in this thread, I think it's definitely worth thinking about the incredibly important role that race and racism played in Wilds' actions - from what I can tell, this seems like something the podcast doesn't cover very well (although like I said, I haven't listened to it myself). And here's part 2 and part 3.

This is what I thought too. I'm definitely on the same page as Junior Mints and Scoops with respect to the kind of lackluster year for big games and stuff. My GOTY list has one AAA game in the top 10, and in fact only one AAA game in the top 35 (the one that's at #10!). Out of the rest of the games on the list, only Transistor, NEO Scavenger, The Floor is Jelly, and Broken Age (and maybe KR0) are games that take more than an hour or two, max, to play. A small part of this is not having played some of the other options - I don't think my computer can quite handle the latest Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 4, and Wolfenstein, and I definitely don't have 4,000 hours to work my way through Dragon Age: Nobody Expects the Spanish, I haven't gotten around to trying Shadows of Lord of the Rings, and I'm too scared to play Alien: Isolation. But at the same time, these are the sort of excuses that I can only really pull out because the AAA releases this year weren't so off-the-heezy that I had to find some way to play a bunch of them, and even on the indie side, as Danielle and Patrick point out, we didn't have the bevy of medium-length heavy hitters like Gone Home, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, etc. Not that I mind - in fact, with the relatively scant time I have to play games these days, it's really nice to be able to play something like Curtain or Bernband or Jazzpunk or Universal History of Light and be done in a couple hours or even a couple minutes. Games as poems as opposed to novels is an area that got a lot more exploration this year than it has in the past, for me, especially when it comes to games as KICKASS poems as opposed to "eh this is okay."

I'm glad we got the cat cheese gif - I had seen it before, but it is indeed majestic and tremendous - but I really want the other gifs. Anyone know where they are at? edit: I guess maybe it was episode 189 with the discussion of the other gifs. That's what happens when you binge-listen, folks.

why hello there, today I started listening to my massive backlog of Idle Thumbs episodes, so here are my belated thoughts I feel like Demolition Man is extremely underrated. Lots of people like it, but the most common opinion I see is that it was bad or even terrible. But it totally isn't! It's amazing! Wesley Snipes is just going fucking nuts, everyone in the future is adorably goofy, Sly Stallone is getting shit done, there's satire around every corner, and it's just plain funny! I mean, yeah, it's not flawless, and for an action movie the action is generally pretty anemic, but still. Definitely a classic. White dudes could stop making so many games. Like, I'm pretty sure at this point I know what large groups of mostly white mostly straight mostly Western mostly men think about basically every conceivable scenario in which you might want to murder six hundred people for whatever reason. I'm not sure the progress of video games as a medium would be seriously retarded if a lot of the white guys gave it a rest for a little while. We've had hundreds of years of white dudes dominating the canon in pretty much every aspect of culture, and although games are by far younger than everything else, there's still way more homogeneity in gaming than we really need, I think.

I don't see why you think the scenario where the non-human animals can communicate is a meaningless hypothetical construction. Surely if this were the case, we ought to reason with the non-human animals rather than just murder them, right? That seems like a no brainer to me. I'm of course also trying to discuss the details of our actual reality, but I don't think doing so by having people consider hypothetical examples is at all illicit. This is because the point of the hypothetical example is to get people to think about the grounds upon which they are making their decision. If people would just come out and be honest about the way they're making decisions, we wouldn't have to use any hypothetical examples. You would simply tell me on what basis you think it is okay to kill humans, on what basis you think it is okay to kill non-humans, and then I could tell you whether I agree or disagree, and why. Since neither you nor anyone else is really up to giving a straight answer, I'm offering examples where things that are contrary to fact occur, so we can tell how your response would change in these contrary to fact situations. By figuring out whether and how your response would change, we can figure out the basis on which you're making decisions. Note that there's nothing particularly bad about not being able to state, clearly and decisively, your basis for making these kinds of decisions, or any ethical decisions, really. Our society generally does not encourage people to think forthrightly or in any great detail about their ethical commitments, or about any of their philosophical commitments at all. You probably can't tell me what your epistemological, metaphysical, or logical commitments are either, because there's not really much reason to ever delve into the kind of introspection and study it takes to be able to articulate one's belief on these esoteric questions in any detail. I happen to be a philosopher, though, which means I'm used to both being able to articulate my own beliefs and also being able to tease out the beliefs of my students in order to get them to understand the philosophical topic I am asking them to study. In this case, we're trying to figure out what you think about ethics, and one of the best ways to do this is to ask what you would do in certain situations. If you're not a fan of this method, you're welcome to suggest other ways for us to figure out what you believe about the issue of eating non-human animals and about any other issue. I'm welcome to any method of inquiry that's likely going to prove fruitful, and if I could get away from the hypothetical examples, I certainly would. Would your answer be the same or different if the group weren't a group of humans but rather a group of rabbits or toads? Why or why not? As I noted earlier in the thread, being anti-sexist or anti-racist does not entail thinking that you ought to treat all sexes or all races literally the same, to the point where you couldn't only hit on women or men because this would display a prejudice to one sex or the other, or where you couldn't join the NAACP because this would entail giving preferential treatment on no basis. Instead, what anti-racism and anti-sexism imply is that there is no fundamental moral difference between the races or the sexes: in a perfect world, for instance, we would want to treat people such that we don't do anything morally reprehensible to someone simply on the basis that their race or sex is one race or sex as opposed to another. Since we are not in a perfect world, sometimes there are reasons to do morally reprehensible things to people on the basis of their sex or race (we might deny them a spot in college, for instance, in favor of someone of a minority race). The reason we do this, though, is not just for the BARE REASON that their race or sex is different. The reason we do these things is that some groups, on the basis of their race or sex, face discrimination, and we think we need to remedy this. So, analogously, anti-speciesism does not mean we have to treat all animal species literally the same: feed the same food to cats as we do to dogs and as we do to birds, give the same medicine to cows and to whales when they are sick, etc. Anti-speciesism simply entails not doing something morally reprehensible to an animal (including a human) SIMPLY on the basis of the fact that their species is one thing rather than another. The BARE REASON that I am a human as opposed to a dog does not make it any more or less okay for you to torture me. Yes, indeed, this is all perfectly fine. What the anti-speciesist like myself argues is not just that it's okay to have different views about various species on the bases of justifiable differences - we further argue that there are no such differences that would legitimate differing moral treatment of the kind that would allow us to torture, kill, and eat the species that we currently torture, kill, and eat, like pigs, cows, chickens, etc. Language is one route speciesists often pick to justify different treatment because it's one feature that humans definitely have that many other animals do not, and certainly no other animals come close to our aptitude with language. Teaching an ape or a parrot a few hundred words is obviously nowhere near what your average human can do. There are a few worries I have with this approach, though, which suggest to me that it doesn't do the work you would want it to do. First of all, there seem to be a lot of animals with no capacity for language which we nevertheless think it would be wrong to torture, kill, and eat. In Western society these animals include cats, dogs, horses, and so on. In fact, most people tend to agree that, regardless of their inability to speak with each other and with us with any degree of complexity, it's wrong to torture ANY animal. They also tend not to care that the hamburger they are eating came from a cow that lived its life in extreme pain, but this I think is mostly just a combination of ignorance and inconsistency rather than evidence of some sort of weird ethical view they have vis a vis cows. If they saw the cow face to face I suspect they would be horrified by the treatment of the cow. This is why ag-gag laws exist - the meat industry understands that if people actually saw what was going on, we wouldn't be as sanguine as we currently are about eating so much meat. Another issue with the language difference is that there are some human beings who do not have the sorts of language abilities that most humans do. Infants, people in comas, and people with brain damage or various psychological issues all lack the various communication and reasoning capacities that you advert to, but I take it our intuitions that it would be wrong to torture, kill, and consume infants, people in comas, brain damaged people, and mentally damaged people are just as strong as our intuitions that it would be wrong to kill hale human beings like you or I. A further issue is that although I'm quite willing to grant that there is a vast difference in language capacity between human beings and other animals, it's not very clear to me why this has any moral import. For instance, imagine a heterosexist man says to you "put simply I think the capacity of men to impregnate women (as well as countless other factors) privileges heterosexuals over others, and allows for avenues of interaction that for example are ethical in the heterosexual context, but arguable not ethical when applied to homosexuals, and vice versa." I suspect your reply would be something like this: "I of course agree with you that there is a natural, biological difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals, such that heterosexuals can impregnate each other via sexual intercourse whereas homosexuals cannot. Thus it's true to say that there are certain avenues of interaction (biological ones) that are only possible for heterosexuals. What I disagree about is that you have drawn an ethical conclusion from this. I don't think homosexual sex is ethically wrong, even though it differs in one natural way from heterosexual sex. In fact, I think that sex between consenting adults is obviously ethically unproblematic, and I'm basically just in a state of utter confusion as to why you would think that the possibility of pregnancy is of any ethical import." This is the same reply I would give in the animal case. It's true that there is a natural difference between human beings and other animals, namely, that we have advanced powers of communication which make possible various interactions with other human beings (except infants, the mentally disabled, etc.). What's not clear to me is why this difference in communicative power would influence the morality of torturing, killing, and eating someone. Just like you are, I imagine, confused as to why the heterosexist person thinks a biological fact about reproduction has moral import when it comes to sexual intercourse, I am confused why you think a biological fact about language and reasoning abilities has moral import when it comes to torturing, killing, and eating something. A final issue with this line of reasoning is that although there is a vast gulf between us and other animals, it's simply false that we're the only ones with a language (and it's even more false that we're the only ones who can reason). Animals other than humans communicate with each other in lots of ways, and non-human animals can even communicate with humans, and vice versa. Please note that I don't share CollegeBaby's concerns here. I don't think anyone in this thread has been arguing in bad faith. I do think people in this thread have been trying to construct ethical dilemmas to force a contradiction, but I agree that I've been the one doing most if not all of this. I of course thus don't think there's anything wrong with this. We construct dilemmas to force contradictions all the time when we're engaged in the process of reasoning. This is, for instance, broadly the scientific method: you construct a hypothesis and thet attempt to falsify it. Faced with the impossibility of offering any dilemmas to falsify your hypothesis, you accept the hypothesis. This how I (and philosophers more generally) test my own ethical beliefs. I construct ethical dilemmas for myself and try to force myself into a contradiction. If I fail, I'm left with the conclusion that my ethical beliefs must be non-contradictory, and thus in the clear on one very important avenue. Indeed, if I have a set of non-contradictory beliefs that also seem right to me for no special reason apart from some sort of intuitive plausibility, this is enough for me to hold these beliefs with a pretty large degree of confidence, as long as I have rigorously tried to find contradictions amongst the beliefs. I use the same process on others, not because I'm trying to "trick" anyone but because I think this is a fruitful way to investigate things. You're more than welcome to try to force me into contradictions - I think this is a valuable process for making sure our reasoning is sharp. I find the whole idea of thinking that trying to "force a contradiction" is a bad thing to be completely alien. Surely if it's possible to force a contradiction amongst one's beliefs, this is something that it would be very valuable to know, right?! We don't want to hold contradictory beliefs! That would be a paradigmatically irrational situation to be in. If I have any contradictory beliefs, I want people to help me ferret them out. I'd like to help others ferret their own contradictory beliefs out, too. That's what I do in the classroom all the time with my students. Things get a little messier when, on the basis of beliefs I believe to be contradictory and in fact unfounded, people are torturing and murdering various innocent beings, but probably it's clear that I'm emotionally invested in this so I don't exactly have to reiterate that point. Did anyone ever claim that all killing of animals is unethical? This doesn't sound like anything I have written, at the very least, so to the extent that this is meant to be a criticism of my position, I think it's a little misguided. Since I guess this means you aren't even going to read the thread, I suppose I can vent my frustration without worrying about offending you. That people are constantly pulling this bullshit is expected, of course: how long would you expect a slaveowner to hang around when they're being harangued for racism or a misogynist to hang around when they're being harangued for thinking women shouldn't be able to vote? But I feel like if I were being accused of something as ethically problematic as racism or sexism, I wouldn't duck out of the conversation after, like, four posts or whatever. At the VERY LEAST I'd try to cut out what other people tell me is the offending action, if at all possible, until I had investigated the topic further, especially if the offending action is something I can so easily avoid just by not buying hot dogs.

Josh Sawyer, a developer on (among other things) Fallout: New Vegas, talked a bit about why he decided they should show dialog options you couldn't really use in New Vegas (which does it slightly differently - you can select the option, but you fail the skill check and the NPC you're talking to thinks you're an idiot or something). Check it out. Obviously the reasons he gives aren't didactic, the way they are in Depression Quest, but it's an interesting topic to think about from all the various angles.

And you come off as a prejudiced murderer of innocents for no reason other than pleasure and who is scared by stretches of text longer than a Buzzfeed article! So perhaps you can understand why I might act like an asshole. As someone who themselves feels like an asshole surely you can have some sympathy for a fellow asshole.

I agree 100%. For an extensive discussion of the topic that occurred before #GamerGate was even a thing, check out this thread. As you might notice glancing through that thread, I took a ton of shit from people for (among lots of other things...) claiming that a lot of the reason behind the whole "this is not a game" sentiment is typically just veiled sexism. Fast forward to #GamerGate blowing up, and some people thought back to that original thread and said that #GamerGate had finally convinced them that I was right and that this was and is all about sexism as opposed to what games actually are or journalistic integrity or whatever stupid label the sexist shitheads have come up with lately. It was super gratifying. Unfortunately I never bookmarked the public posts where people said this, but I do still have a PM someone on that forum sent me, which reads in part "I used to think you were extreme and maybe even a little wacky on your views about sexism in games. I don't think so any more. I wish I had supported you in this sooner, but I just didn't want to look into this ugly corner of playing and caring about games and stuff." I have a reputation on those forums for being one of the people who won't fucking shut up about sexism all the time, and one of the few silver linings on this #GamerGate cloud is that they're so obviously evil and sexist and stupid that, finally, they're pushing some gamers to realize how fucked up our hobby is, even though #1reasonwhy and the backlash against Feminist Frequency and so on and so forth didn't manage to do it.

I'll grant for the sake of the argument that there is a difference and that in this case I have not just used an unhelpful tone but also crossed into the realm of being an asshole. (I don't think this is true, but that's beside the point.) If we grant this, though, I still find your point about as convincing as a #GamerGate supporter saying something like "stop being an asshole to me, feminists!" Because let's be honest, we are assholes to #GamerGate supporters. Over in the #GamerGate thread we consistently say horrible things about those people. I don't really have any problems with this any more than I have a problem being an asshole to people who are prejudiced in other ways: racism, heterosexism, speciesism, etc. (Think about it from my perspective: the worst a #GamerGate sexist person does is harass women. The worst a specieist person does is murder and eat the species they are prejudiced against!) Let's also grant for the sake of the argument that I had an "aggressive stance earlier." (I'm really not sure about this - if you quote some of the putatively "aggressive" stuff and replace "non-human animals" with "queer people" or "women" I suspect it will sound much less aggressive to you, and if you were racist, sexist, and heterosexist in addition to being speciesist I suspect you would find much anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-heterosexist rhetoric to be overly aggressive when in fact it's perfectly acceptable, but I digress.) That my aggressive stance succeeding in nothing but pissing you off is not really a revelation for me. This is what many advocates of equality have faced for centuries (millenia, even). This is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US, so we can use him as an example. There are many people for whom Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches did nothing but "piss them off." They were never convinced to give up racism, even by someone as articulate, unthreatening, and (in my view) clearly correct as King. Now imagine how those people felt about Malcolm X! Like holy shit, if King didn't have much success in doing anything other than pissing off the racists, Malcolm X wasn't going to have much luck either. So, I fully agree that the sorts of things I say will often do little other than piss off speciesists. If you replace "non-human animals" with "black people" in what I write, I suspect the sorts of things I say will often do little other than piss off racists. I turn out to be okay with this, although the racists aren't (they're pissed off), and as you point out, as a speciesist, you're not okay with what I've said in this thread - you're just pissed off. C'est la vie.

Finally, one more point I missed: I'm not really worried about whether people "fully engage" with me. I find tone arguments as helpful in regards to specieiesm as I find them in regards to sexism, which is to say, I don't find them helpful at all. I agree 100% that people won't "fully engage" with me if I don't sugarcoat my beliefs about speciesism in a way so as to hide their full extent or make them sound more plausible to people who are prejudiced or whatever. I just don't think this matters. Analogously, think about feminism. These forums are very good for people who believe that sexism is wrong. You can go into the feminism thread, or any other thread, and just take for granted that if you say something like "this is wrong because it treats women badly for no reason other than prejudice," you won't get much or any bullshit from other posters. Much of the Internet is not like this, though. On many forums, especially gaming forums, if you want people to "fully engage" with you, then being straightforwardly anti-sexist is a very, very bad idea. People are not going to "fully engage" with someone who says "I am a feminist" or "I am against sexism and thus against treating women worse than men because of their gender" or something like that. Does this mean that you ought not to profess anti-sexism with a strength equal to the degree to which I've been professing anti-speciesism? I don't think it does. Perhaps you disagree - this is fine. You are more than welcome to follow your route of anti-speciesism, and I would never criticize you for being more soft-spoken and indirect than I am on this issue. (As I noted above, I find tone arguments unhelpful in this context.) I don't even mind that you and others fail to show me the same respect. Police my tone all you want; it's fine with me! I just want to highlight the reasons that I don't find your statements convincing enough to make me change my tone, and I wanted to highlight this by way of saying that I would also find your statements unconvincing if we were in the feminism thread and you were telling me that I might be having a better time if I weren't so stringent and strident on the topic of women and men being morally equivalent. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "the desert island question," because I think I've forgotten what that is and I can't find it earlier in the thread. I'm also not sure what the phrase "could just as easily feel as poking holes in someone's logic to undermine their whole idea." The grammar on that one is a little messed up and I'm not sure if the "someone's logic" is supposed to be my anti-speciesism logic, or the speciesist logic of various other people in the thread, or whether it applies to both equally. In any case, I think your point here might be something like "when prejudiced people are prejudiced, it's easy to mistake their prejudice as an active attempt to dissuade you of your opposition to prejudice rather than just a lack of interest." If that's your point, I totally agree. Earlier in this thread I said something like "basically nobody is racist/sexist/etc. on purpose." I made the point that prejudice is almost always unconscious, habitual, unexamined, and uninterested. The vast majority of racist people a few hundred years ago didn't actively profess racist beliefs: they were just, on the whole, more or less uninterested in the idea that we ought not to enslave black people. The vast majority of human beings today, including many in this thread, don't actively profess speciesist beliefs: they're just, on the whole, more or less uninterested in the idea that we ought not to torture and kill pigs and cows for food.

As noted above, I don't think you're hearing this argument from me, although I may be mistaken. My position in this thread, which I hope I have been consistent about, is that I have not told you what I think about these questions except that our answer to the Alien case or the Kharaa case ought to be basically the same as our answer to the human-beings-whose-actions-have-the-same-results-as-the-Alien case and the human-beings-whose-actions-have-the-same-results-as-the-Kharaa case. I too find this to be gross. I do not believe I have ever said we ought to prioritize domestic animals, though. If you could quote anything I say where I express the opposite sentiment I'd be happy to either recant it or explain why I don't think it has the implications you are imputing to it. I don't think I denied this. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, I agree that there is a moral burden with pretty much any industrialized food source. I do not think this makes it okay to eat hamburgers, though. Given that the title of this thread is "is it wrong to eat meat?" and given that I think the answer to this question is "yes," I'm not sure why you think the point about industrialized food sources is particular relevant, especially considering the other stuff I have said on this topic. I actually can't see this. I don't see, anywhere in this thread, where you've said anything like "ecosystems matter more than individuals." If you're willing to say this, you are more than welcome to, and it sounds like you are committed to this viewpoint. If you are, that's fine (although then I think you're fine with the murder of lots of human beings, it seems like, if this is necessary for the preservation of an ecosystem, which is a position many don't want to commit themselves to). If you aren't, that's also fine. In either case this seems more or less irrelevant to the question "is it wrong to eat meat?" the answer to which I think is typically "yes." Yes, this sounds like a good summary of the issue. Meanwhile, my position would be something like "ethical farming of pigs is no more or less immoral than ethical farming of human babies for consumption." I use babies rather than human beings more generally because you would probably have to kill someone when they are a baby in order to prevent them from acquiring additional interests in life that come along with a level of intelligence that might be beyond what a pig ever reaches, namely, the level of intelligence adult human beings have.

I have to break up my reply to keep from exceeding the quote limit in one post. Various posts follow: I know this is what "ideally" works for humans, which is why we do these things for humans, and I know this wouldn't work for non-human animals. That's not really the point, though. Simply imagine that these things didn't work for humans, or at least that we have a case where these things don't work. Perhaps the humans refuse to be transplanted, or it will cost too much, or they'll all kill themselves for religious reasons if they have to live anywhere else, or whatever. We're trying to answer the ethical question here, so we need to stipulate away as many of the irrelevant practical details as we can. Of course, if the practical details aren't morally irrelevant then we definitely don't want to stipulate them away. You might think that really it just comes down to how easy it is to relocate people: the reason we relocate rather than kill human beings, perhaps, is not because murder is wrong but rather because it's relatively easy to avoid murder. The reason we kill rather than relocate non-human animals, perhaps, is not because murdering them is okay but rather because it's much easier than relocating them. This would be a consistent position but I don't find it very convincing, especially not in the human case. I don't see how any this is relevant to the question of speciesism. Surely these kind of considerations apply to human beings just as much as they apply to non-human animals. Human beings destroy ecosystems like the Amazon, and species like... all sorts of species just as much as (probably more than?) invading non-human animal species or invading plant species. Whether this means it's okay to slaughter human beings in order to preserve the possibility that we find some awesome fungi is an interesting question but it's not one that I think is different for humans compared to non-human animals. I don't understand how the third sentence you type matches up with the first two sentences. Just because many species do go extinct doesn't mean that it's a bad thing that this happens, and much more relevantly, it doesn't mean it's okay to murder human beings who ignore the responsibility they have to mitigate the risk. This is not to say the opposite is the case: maybe in fact it is bad that species go extinct, so bad, in fact, that it's okay to murder people who fail to respect the obligations they have to prevent extinction. This doesn't seem obvious to me, though, and just as we might not think it's okay to murder human beings to save a species, it's not clear to me that it's okay to murder non-human animals to save a species. This is true, yes. In fact, if I want to help against climate change, then eventually maybe I'll have to kill some humans (this is a pretty easy way to cut down on oil consumption). And maybe to help against the destruction of my local ecosystem I'll also have to kill some humans. This doesn't suggest to me that it's okay to kill humans to prevent climate change or to prevent the destruction of an ecosystem. (It also doesn't suggest to me that it's not okay to kill the humans.) My point is just that you're saying all these things as if they answer the question "can I murder non-human animals" but it seems to me they don't answer this question at all. They tell me whether I'll need to murder the non-human animals given a certain set of goals, but they don't tell me if these goals are important enough to justify the murder. One way to help me out would be to answer these questions for human beings, so that I know what you think about that case. Then I could tell you whether, given these assumptions about human beings, what the answer would be for non-human animals. (As you might expect, I think typically the answer is the same.) So, do you think it's okay to murder human beings to avoid either climate change or the destruction of a local environment? If your answer is yes, then (assuming you're right) then I think for similar reasons it's okay to murder non-human animals. If your answer is no, then (again assuming you're right) I suspect that for similar reasons it's not okay to murder non-human animals. If you're not sure what answer to give, then that's fine, but the point here is that it's not obvious to me what the answer is for non-human animals. Do you think this changes the ethical situation at all (as opposed to just the practical situation)? Could you imagine a case where, for instance, we'd have to murder human beings to preserve the entire web of an ecosystem rather than just one isolated species of plant or animal? If this were the case, would it be okay to murder the human beings? I find many of the sentiments expressed in that article to be confused, false, or otherwise unhelpful. This is not the place to have that discussion, though - if you found the article I linked unhelpful, that's fine, and I apologize. I was simply aiming to give you some resources to answer some of the questions you're asking. If you found those resources unhelpful you'll have to have recourse to other resources to answer questions like "is it morally permissible to murder human beings to preserve an ecosystem?" and so on. I'm unclear as to why things are no longer "fine and good" when we move to the question of genocide. It seems to me just as "fine as good" when we move to this question. It's slightly unusual because we don't often (perhaps ever) encounter instances where human beings unwittingly commit genocide, so most of the thinking we do about genocide presupposes that the people responsible for it are responsible in the moral sense, too, because they know what they're doing. Just because the case of non-human animals committing genocide is different, though, it doesn't strike me as particularly morally problematic from the perspective of the anti-speciesist. We can simply replace the non-human animals with human babies and ask ourselves what the answer would be. So for instance if invasive rabbits and toads are committing genocide against various Australian plant and animal species, and we want to know whether we can kill the rabbits and toads, we would just ask ourselves what the appropriate response would be if instead of rabbits and toads we were killing human infants (orphaned human infants, of course, who aren't going to make it to adulthood, because this is more or less the position the rabbits and toads are in). I don't think I ever professed support for a "hands off" position to these questions anywhere in this thread. This is why the passage you quote starts with the sentence "Nothing in the basic argument against speciesism commits anyone, including myself, to any given position on the value of the existence of plant species themselves." This sentence is meant to show that the arguments I have been given in this thread, as far as I can tell, don't commit me one way or another to answers to your questions about genocide, biodiversity, invasive species, and so on. It would definitely help if you would quote the relevant stuff that you think expresses this "hands off" position and I could either recant it or explain why it doesn't mean what you think it means. I don't think I have expressed any particular viewpoint on this question in this thread. The only ethical position I have committed to myself in this thread is anti-speciesism on the basis of speciesism's shared issues with racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination, as far as I can recall. Another sentence in the chunk you quoted, the last one, is "That's not to say I don't have any thoughts on the matter, it's just to say that I don't need to commit myself to any given position for the article against speciesism to go through, I think." I still think this is correct: I don't think I have committed myself one way or another, or that it's necessary to commit myself one way or another in order to answer the question this thread is asking, namely, "is it wrong to eat meat?"

The number's in my cell phone, even.

It's not a "recent" turn. It goes back at least to Pythagoras, circa 500 BC. It's probably more venerable than anti-racism, in fact, and almost certainly much more venerable than anti-sexism, anti-heterosexism, and other recent turns towards toleration, understanding, equality, and kindness to our fellow living creatures. One very common thought about moral responsibility is that you have to have the ability to understand morality in order to be morally responsible for something. So, for instance, an infant or a lion or a hippo is not morally responsible for anything bad it does because it doesn't understand that it it is doing anything bad. The moral equivalence of non-human animals with humans is definitely not subject to any simple, pat reductio ad absurdum articles, or one of the many philosophers who have argued for it over the past few hundred years would have noticed. I find the worms story about as relevant as someone telling a story about how they went to an abolitionist convention and all these white people were getting all weepy about African slaves and so on and they're just like "lol, abolitionists." There may be a case to be made that worms don't really feel pain the way, for instance, dogs and pigs and humans and whales do, so that might explain why it's actually legitimate to laugh at people who give a shit about worms, but since I can't really think of any reason to go out of our way to kill worms we might as well err on the side of caution and not slaughter them for no reason, right? To make them comparable you just have to imagine that one group of people is needed in order to keep the ecosystem going, whereas the other will destroy it. Imagine for instance that a group of Native Americans is living in a sustainable fashion whereas a group of European settlers desires to alter the ecosystem by introducing various non-native plant species, implementing agriculture on a large scale, diverting rivers, etc. Now typically it's not a kill or be killed case when it comes to people, because it's much easier to reason with human beings than with other invasive species, but there are of course instances of groups of people who refuse to compromise and leave, so whatever you think ought to be done about this, you could use this to reason analogously about the case of non-human animals. Note also that if we do face the prospect of the reduction of the endemic plant and/or animal species of an area, it's not clear why this is bad. This is not to say it isn't bad. It's just to say that if we had to choose between a group of human beings or an endemic plant species, I'm not really sure that the plant species is the obvious choice, and if we have to choose between an invading animal species and an endemic plant species, or even an endemic animal species that is just going to fade away over time because it is evolutionarily out-competed, it would at least be worth hearing the case for why we ought to care about the existence of a species as opposed to individual animals. I have a lot of reasons for caring about individual non-human animals, namely, the same reasons I care about humans. None of these reasons apply to plant species or animal species considered as a whole. This whole topic gets into some of the thorniest ethical issues - anyone interested in it would do well to start with this article and the various things it cites. Nothing in the basic argument against speciesism commits anyone, including myself, to any given position on the value of the existence of plant species themselves. ("Speciesism" as a term makes this a little confusing to talk about, because speciesism is the idea that some animal species ought to be privileged for no reason except that they are different species - it has nothing to do with plants. "Racism" is actually a crummy term for similar reasons, because we also use "race" to talk about different species, like "the human race." So try not to get hung up on the words.) The basic argument against speciesism neither tells you that the forests or the hibiscus plants matter, nor does it tell you that they don't matter. Answering this question isn't even really a question of animal ethics! It's the more broad case of environmental ethics, and we'd answer it by figuring out our stances on the various considerations adduced in the article I linked above. That's not to say I don't have any thoughts on the matter, it's just to say that I don't need to commit myself to any given position for the article against speciesism to go through, I think. Yes, and I take it our response to this ought to be the same as our response to the other awful things that farmers do, which have been brought up a couple times in this thread already. Namely, we ought not to be thrilled about it, but this doesn't suddenly make it okay to eat hamburgers. I think this is a pretty good summary, yes. Sure - this is the same thing we would say about a group of orphaned human children who were raised to be slaves. We wouldn't want to just shut down the orphanarium and scatter the kids to the four winds. If you're asking the practical question, like, what do I think is going to happen, then I think "phased out" is the clear answer - it's never going to stop on a dime. If you're asking what I think ought to be done, I don't really have an answer, because the question depends as much on complicated factual questions (what would happen if we immediately shut it all down, etc.) that I am in no position to answer. As the example above about the orphanage points out, though, probably some kind of phase out would make more sense.

That's pretty far afield from "is it wrong to eat meat?" but in any case, questions like this are always tough, whether we're talking about non-human animals or humans. If you need to kill one group of people to save another, is it okay to do so? That's a really tough question! If you can answer that, then I'd probably be inclined to use your response to answer the question for non-human animals. At least, that would be the place to start, I think.

I have determined my 2014 GOTY list, which will hold steady at least until I play Eidolon, 80 Days, CONSORTIUM, Door Kickers, Heavy Bullets, Luftrausers, NaissanceE, Roundabout, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Sluggish Morss: Ad Infinitum, The Talos Principle, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and Valiant Hearts, if indeed I ever do. Games are listed in order of how GOTY I found them, and the formatting is from this poll (which is why the platform is listed after each game): Kentucky Route Zero Act III (PC) Here And There Along The Echo (PC, Telephone) Threes (iOS, Droid, XBO) Jazzpunk (PC) Harmony Summer Hardpack Tape 11-in-1 (PC) 50 Short Games (by thecatamites) (PC) Universal History of Light (PC) Transistor (PC, PS4) Cooking, for lovers (PC) Titanfall (PC, XBO, X360) With Those We Love Alive (PC) Hoplite (iOS) Lost Constellation (PC) tripgate (PC) Bernband (PC) Skulljhabit (PC) Roguelight (PC) The Floor is Jelly (PC) Mouse Corp. (PC) Journal (PC) Petrichor (PC) Glitchhikers (PC) NEO Scavenger (PC) Cyber Lasso (PC) Broken Age Act 1 (PC, Ouya, iOS) Hernhand (PC) The Rapture Is Here And You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Home (PC) Curtain (by dreamfeel) (PC) offline (by Pol Clarissou) (PC) Abstract Ritual (PC) 'Til Cows Tear us Apart (PC) You're Pulleying My Leg (PC) The Domovoi (PC) Secret Habitat (PC) Dust City (PC) So it was a good year for: indie games, low-fi first person exploration games, Cardboard Computer (they've occupied the top slot on my GOTY list for three years now, and the runner up slot for two), Thecatamites, and for the first time in my life, really, a couple mobile games.