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Zeusthecat

Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?

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On 1/22/2015 at 3:21 PM, Zeusthecat said:

Okay, how about this. I am speciesist. My views towards mosquitoes are morally equal to a racist person's views towards black people. You have convinced me and I am fine with this. I continue to feel, however, that it is wrong to kill and eat the animals that we kill and eat because of the arbitrary criteria I have chosen for life forms that I deem important. And I mean this sincerely.

 

So what now? Where has this gotten us? It was a fun thought experiment and I thank you for challenging me to really examine why I see things the way I do but I don't think we really accomplished anything and this exercise has resulted in a dead end. You may not see it as such but by belligerently trying to hammer your point home and taking it to the extreme, you have effectively alienated just about everyone else in here. I am honestly pretty irritated with your method of arguing and even though I don't think you intended it, you have come off as condescending and disrespectful to everyone here who has tried to argue with you. Sorry man, no hard feelings but you are really getting under my skin. This is one of those cases where I think this particular conversation is not very well suited to this format.

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

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I don't think you ought to give a shit at all. I'm just letting you know how I and others feel in case it wasn't obvious to you. You may not care about your tone but if you are truly passionate about convincing others of the importance of protecting all forms of life, I would think you might want to make some consideration for how best to keep people engaged while not compromising your points.

 

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?

 

I think you are being reductive of my argument but I am sure you will disagree. I do give a shit about ethically crucial matter like whether living beings ought to be tortured and killed for no good reason and I am agreeing with most of what you say. But mosquitoes man. I may not have a logical basis to argue this or I am just not as good at probing my logical thought process as you are but I just cannot convince myself that a mosquito is as important as a human. Based on your criteria I am wrong and that's fine.

 

And I'm sorry for saying mean things. You said stuff that elicited an emotional response from me and I typed it and hit Post because I was frustrated.

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

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As a slight aside, here is the Mimosa plant which has been shown to exhibit learning behaviors, including learning more quickly under stressed conditions.

 

 

And sorry to jump on the questions bandwagon but...Why is the ability to feel pain the deliniator here? (Or is it just being used throughout as an example?). Many organisms will endure pain and go so far as to kill themselves for the chance to reproduce, or the in the very act of reproduction. E.g. are we in a position to say a hive of bees doesn't trade the stressors a beekeeper puts it under taking its honey for the reproductive advantage the hive is given by the keepers attention? Are we in a position to say that eating berries from a hedgerow and flushing the seeds into our sewers is better than breeding a cow and using her milk? I kinda picked this point up watching the video that someone posted a while back. The presenter said that all organisms shared a desire to "live", but i don't think he demonstrated that in any way. I think it has been observed many times in the animal kingdom that many organisms demonstrate a need to reproduce, and that them being alive is only a vehicle for this.

 

I can see ahead what implications this will have for Racist Tycho, but I'm interested in your response.

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

 

And in that case, sure I probably wouldn't be able to keep it together and stay civil but I also wouldn't expect that anyone would consider my point of view. I think as soon as I start drawing analogies between their behavior and other things that they would see as extreme, I should expect that the only people left listening to me are those that aren't too strongly invested in that viewpoint to begin with. At which point I am just venting and preaching to the choir.

 

And I guess this is a good time to announce that this thread just got Waluigi'd

 

:waluigi:  :waluigi:  :waluigi:  :waluigi:  :waluigi:

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On 1/22/2015 at 4:21 PM, dibs said:

And sorry to jump on the questions bandwagon but...Why is the ability to feel pain the deliniator here? (Or is it just being used throughout as an example?)

Because pain is bad, and so you shouldn't cause pain.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 4:21 PM, dibs said:

Many organisms will endure pain and go so far as to kill themselves for the chance to reproduce, or the in the very act of reproduction. E.g. are we in a position to say a hive of bees doesn't trade the stressors a beekeeper puts it under taking its honey for the reproductive advantage the hive is given by the keepers attention?

Uh, no, but beekeepers don't kill and eat bees so I'm not sure what the issue is here.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 4:21 PM, dibs said:

Are we in a position to say that eating berries from a hedgerow and flushing the seeds into our sewers is better than breeding a cow and using her milk?

I think so, yes, because the berries don't feel anything, whereas cows used for milk production are often horribly mistreated and feel a lot of pain.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 4:21 PM, dibs said:

I kinda picked this point up watching the video that someone posted a while back. The presenter said that all organisms shared a desire to "live", but i don't think he demonstrated that in any way. I think it has been observed many times in the animal kingdom that many organisms demonstrate a need to reproduce, and that them being alive is only a vehicle for this.

I don't really give a shit about what all organisms "desire" unless you can explain to me why it's good to give an organism what it desires. Seeing as, for instance, Racist Tycho desires to enslave black people, I can think of at least one instance where it's not only not good to fulfill a desire: it's straight up bad to fulfill a desire. I think a berry's "desires" are neutral - it doesn't matter if a berry's desires get fulfilled because the berry doesn't experience any pain or pleasure or in fact anything when its desires are fulfilled or left unfulfilled. Meanwhile I care very much whether a capuchin monkey's desires get fulfilled insofar as they're desires for things like avoiding pain, because pain is bad, but if the capuchin monkey desires to bite my eyeball I don't see why I should give a shit whether that monkey satisfies its desires.

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Because pain is bad, and so you shouldn't cause pain.

 

 

I think your reasoning throughout this discussion has mostly been solid, but this doesn't strike me as true. Apologies for the syllogisms here, but when a dentist fills a cavity it can cause pain, so is therefore the procedure immoral? Similarly there is emotional pain. If I breakup with my significant other, I am causing that person pain. Is it wrong therefore to break up with people? I am certain we all have the same moral intuition that the answer to these questions is no.

 

So what is the correct standard then?

 

Is it don't cause pain unless it serves a purpose? But that is problematic because then nearly any pain aside from that committed by sociopaths could be justified, including the slaughter of animals for purpose of eating.

 

Is it don't cause pain unless the pain has been consented to by the victim? That might justify the example of the dentist, but it wouldn't justify the breakup, and it wouldn't justify a necessary medical procedure to someone in a coma (for instance), or protect animals who are unable to give consent.

 

Is it don't cause pain unless the alternative would cause a greater pain? I suspect this might be a moral calculus that you subscribe to (maybe not), but I don't really like this answer either because it leads to even murkier concepts in my mind.

 

I have no answers, I'm just mulling this all over at the moment.

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On 1/22/2015 at 5:25 PM, sclpls said:

I think your reasoning throughout this discussion has mostly been solid, but this doesn't strike me as true. Apologies for the syllogisms here, but when a dentist fills a cavity it can cause pain, so is therefore the procedure immoral?

The dentist fills the cavity so as to prevent further pain. If cavities were painless, nobody would fix cavities. This is like asking "why would you ever spend money on office supplies, isn't the point of a business to earn money?" The reason you buy office supplies is because you think the money you invest in them will be outweighed by the money you earn by using them. Similarly, the reason you get a cavity painfully filled is to avoid even greater pain in the future. Notice that when we can painlessly fill cavities, like by using Novocaine, we often prefer to do so, because pain is bad.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 5:25 PM, sclpls said:

Similarly there is emotional pain. If I breakup with my significant other, I am causing that person pain. Is it wrong therefore to break up with people? I am certain we all have the same moral intuition that the answer to these questions is no.

I am not talking about emotional pain. I am talking about pain as a physical sensation. It is sometimes dubbed "nociception." For more on this notion of pain, see this website.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 5:25 PM, sclpls said:

So what is the correct standard then?

When possible, do not cause more (physical) pain than you need to, unless something more important than pain is at stake. I take it when it comes to eating non-human animals, the only thing at stake is whether you eat steak and potatoes or just potatoes. That is not more important than some animal's pain, obviously. The way to check that would be to replace the non-human animal with a human. Would it be okay to torture and kill someone so as to eat a steak? No. It would not be okay. (If you think it would be okay, then I'm fine with that, as long as you're consistent.)

 

On 1/22/2015 at 5:25 PM, sclpls said:

Is it don't cause pain unless it serves a purpose? But that is problematic because then nearly any pain aside from that committed by sociopaths could be justified, including the slaughter of animals for purpose of eating.

This can of course get complicated. Luckily I can just take whatever your answer is in the human case and use it for the non-human animal case. If you can't answer the question in the human case, that's not my problem.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 5:25 PM, sclpls said:

Is it don't cause pain unless the pain has been consented to by the victim? That might justify the example of the dentist, but it wouldn't justify the breakup, and it wouldn't justify a necessary medical procedure to someone in a coma (for instance), or protect animals who are unable to give consent.

Consent can often legitimize pain - I suspect whatever your answer for the human case is, it's going to include something like "if someone consents to the pain, this makes it okay." This would also work for non-human animals, but as you point out, they cannot give consent, so it wouldn't tell us anything interesting in their case. It similarly wouldn't tell us anything interesting in the case of babies, or people in comas, or other human beings who cannot give consent. So whatever your answer is for them, we can use for the non-human animals.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 5:25 PM, sclpls said:

Is it don't cause pain unless the alternative would cause a greater pain? I suspect this might be a moral calculus that you subscribe to (maybe not), but I don't really like this answer either because it leads to even murkier concepts in my mind.

Perhaps that is the answer. I don't know nor do I care. The point is just that whatever your answer in the human case is, that ought to be your answer in the non-human animal case. Think about the case of race. Whatever your answer to "how much pain is it okay to cause white people?" should be your answer to "how much pain is it okay to cause black people?" The answer to these two questions should not diverge. If they diverge then you are racist.* That would be bad.

 

*Before anyone gets pedantic and says "but doesn't affirmative action cause more pain to white people than black people? Affirmative action isn't racist!" Of course it isn't. But affirmative action doesn't cause pain to white people because they are white. It causes pain to them because they are not members of a group that has faced and currently faces virulent discrimination and the effects of this discrimination. If your answer to "how much pain is it okay to cause people who do not face virulent discrimination" and "how much pain is it okay to cause people who do face virulent discrimination" diverge, this is not a problem. That this happens to line up with black people and white people gives you a reason to treat black people and white people differently, but of course you're not treating them differently just because of their race.

 

Similarly, if you have other legitimate reasons to cause pain to some humans more than others (and there are a ton of good reasons - for instance, if you have to cause pain to a robber to stop them from robbing you, we might think this is totally fine), then these reasons can also give you reasons to cause pain to some non-human animals rather than humans. That is fine. As long as you are not causing pain just because an individual is a different species (or race, or whatever), that's fine. You need a legitimate justification. What that looks like can vary quite a bit. I simply claim that it cannot look like racism, speciesism, sexism, etc.

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Okay, I'm re-energized and ready to put another thought out there. I might regret this...

 

I am not convinced that the ability of an organism to feel pain is necessarily the best criteria for whether or not it is wrong to kill that organism. If the crux of the argument is that we shouldn't cause pain, then wouldn't it be fine to kill things in a way that doesn't cause them pain? So if I kill an organism in its sleep or drug it first to remove its ability to feel pain is it still wrong for me to kill it? When I swat that mosquito, if I do it so fast that it is instantly crushed and there is not enough time for the pain to even reach its brain, have I just done a thing that is totally fine? Of course, Racist Tycho would respond by asking me if it is okay to kill a human in a way that doesn't cause pain and I would respond "of course not".

 

So that leads us to an obvious question. If killing an organism without inflicting pain is still considered wrong, than which organisms is it okay to kill? Is it still fair to say that any organism capable of feeling pain deserves to live and that we should strive not to kill those organisms? Why, even if pain is not inflicted during the killing, does the mere fact that it can feel pain mean that we should not kill it?

 

And if we are going to hold on to that and argue that that is the most important criteria, do we really know that we aren't causing pain to certain plants when we harvest them and eat them? When we brush our teeth, do we know that the bacteria in our mouths that we are killing don't feel pain?

 

If the pain criteria doesn't hold up to this scrutiny, what would that magical criteria be?

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On 1/22/2015 at 7:52 PM, Zeusthecat said:

I am not convinced that the ability of an organism to feel pain is necessarily the best criteria for whether or not it is wrong to kill that organism. If the crux of the argument is that we shouldn't cause pain, then wouldn't it be fine to kill things in a way that doesn't cause them pain? So if I kill an organism in its sleep or drug it first to remove its ability to feel pain is it still wrong for me to kill it? When I swat that mosquito, if I do it so fast that it is instantly crushed and there is not enough time for the pain to even reach its brain, have I just done a thing that is totally fine? Of course, Racist Tycho would respond by asking me if it is okay to kill a human in a way that doesn't cause pain and I would respond "of course not".

Yes, this is a very good point. There are basically two potentially objectionable things that we do to non-human animals that we think it would be wrong to do to humans. The first is that we inflict unimaginable amounts of suffering on them, for no reason other than we want to eat hamburgers and eggs and so on. The second is that we kill them in order to eat them or otherwise make use of their corpses.

The "wrong" of torture is distinct from the "wrong" of killing. Torture is wrong because of the pain and suffering it causes. Killing is wrong because it ends a life.

 

Notice, though, that some things don't feel pain or suffer, and some things have lives that we think it's totally okay to end. Trees, for instance, fit into both categories. Mosquitos fit into the second (maybe even the first, but let's assume they don't). Infants fit into neither, and fetuses fit into both at first and later just into the second, if we are pro-choice. Adult humans (except in extreme cases, like self-defense or something) don't fit into either category. Cats usually fit only into the first, but if they have a really expensive disease, sometimes we think they fit into the second category too. If I euthanize my cat rather than pay $14,000 to cure its cancer, nobody will bat an eye. If I euthanize grandma for the same reason, my relatives are never going to stop giving me shit, plus I'll get charged with murder.

 

What do we do with this mess? Is there a way to make it all consistent? Our first project should be figuring what makes death bad for human beings, because we're pretty sure death is bad for human beings, and therefore it's wrong to kill them.

 

What, then, makes death bad for us? Philosophy has provided lots of answers to this question. This is a good place to start. Here are various answers you might give:

 

1. Death is bad because it tends to reduce the overall happiness in the world. Most people's lives are worth living. Killing them cuts off a life worth living, and makes the world a worse place. (Notice that according to this answer, if your life is terrible enough, it would be okay to kill you. This is perhaps what justifies physician assisted suicide. Or maybe not.)

2. Death is bad because people desperately do not want to die. Dying is bad because it frustrates these preferences. (Notice that if this is the right answer, someone who legitimately wants to die [and who isn't just depressed or otherwise irrational] can kill themselves, or be killed, without this being a bad thing.)

3. Death isn't bad, but killing is bad because God should decide when we go to Heaven. (Almost no philosopher endorses this, but it has been a popular option among lay people for a while.)

4. Death isn't bad, but killing is bad because people mistakenly think death is bad, and if you go around killing people, this will make the remaining living people very anxious that they too may die prematurely. Thus, the anxiety murderers and other killers cause explains why they ought not to murder. (Notice that this answer commits us to saying that if you can kill someone without making other people worry about also being killed, there is nothing wrong with killing the person.)

5. Death is bad because life is just inherently valuable and it ought not to be ended. (This is not a great answer unless you can draw some distinction between human lives and tree lives, which is tough unless you think people have souls or something else strange like that, but again this has been a popular response among non-philosophers for a while. You could also imagine why this response would be favored by people who are pro-life.)

6. Death is bad because it frustrates your ability to achieve the long-term projects that are important to you and that make life valuable: you want to raise a family or write a novel or see your team win the World Series or learn to play the oboe, and these are difficult if not impossible to do while dead. (This requires us to be committed to two things: first, we have to think that these committments, rather than other things, are what make our lives valuable, and we have to think that someone without these committments, perhaps someone who has achieved everything they want, can die without this being a bad thing.)

7. Death isn't bad for you, but it's bad for the people who care about you. It's wrong to kill someone because their family will be sad. (Notice that this means that it's open season on orphans and assholes.)

 

Obviously which one of these you pick is going to determine what you then say about non-human animals. (Of course, there are more than these 7 options, so maybe you will pick something else.) If you pick #1, for instance, killing a happy pig is as bad (or almost as bad) as killing a happy human. If you pick #4 then you won't have much problems with killing a happy pig or a sad pig, but also it seems like you won't have much of a problem with killing a human.

 

Happily enough, all of these answers prevent Racist Tycho from killing black people for some reason that doesn't apply to white people: none of these answers make any mention of race. They treat all people the same. Also happily, these answers make no mention of species, and even better, some of them let us kill non-human animals despite ruling out killing humans. Take #6, for instance. Pigs don't have any long term projects. I can kill a pig without frustrating the pig's desire to write the Great American Novel. I can't kill a person, though, unless they're Philip Roth, because that motherfucker is not going to write the Great American Novel. Thus we have secured an opening for explaining how we can legitimately kill non-human animals without having to rely on a speciesist justification. Instead we just rely on the fact that the thing that makes death bad only applies to some things: we look to that, rather than to species membership.

 

So the way forward seems pretty clear: pick the account of the value of living that we think works best, and hope to hell that it lets us eat hamburgers.

 

I don't have a fully worked out view and also my position is a little more complex than any of the above, but I will say that my favorite answers are #4 and #7 (we can combine some answers - these two, for instance, go together well). This is also probably the most implausible answer. If we go with #4 and #7, we are committed to the idea that, for instance, I could die tomorrow in a car crash and the only bad part about this would be how sad it would make my friends and family. So although you might be tempted to explore this option further, because it sounds like this would make it open season on pigs and mosquitoes, we should probably abandon this line of argumentation and switch to whatever account of the badness of death that you find most plausible, either from that list or the page I linked or you can come up with your own. Then we can apply it to non-human animals and see if their deaths are bad, and thus if we should avoid causing their deaths.

 

(You might say "but Tycho, if you don't think death is bad for mosquitoes or pigs, why the fuck have you been acting like you think it is?" The answer is that I've been assuming nobody in this thread finds my account of the badness of death compelling, and I suspect that whatever account of the badness of death that most people favor is going to rule out killing pigs, probably, and maybe even mosquitoes.)

Finally, no matter how okay it is to kill a pig or a mosquito, we can still rule out factory farming and other inhumane methods of raising animals for food, because the badness of factory farming comes from the pain it causes, not from the fact that the animals are killed at the end. Animals are killed at the end of even the most humane farming practices when they are raised for food. So no matter where we come out on the death question, that's only going to make eating animals okay in instances where you eat ethically sourced meat.

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And now I'm feeling a little guilty because I left out one of the most common options picked by philosophers:

 

8. Death is bad because it is the end of a 'person,' where person is a philosophical term of art that picks out a being that is self-aware, rational, reflective, and otherwise engaged in the sort of life that consists of much more than just instinctual actions. Persons form relationships, make plans, have complicated desires that can be satisfied or frustrated, and so on and so forth. Personhood is what sets an adult human being apart from a chicken. It's bad when persons die because persons are a special sort of thing that value their own lives and that, in fact, have valuable lives, because of what it is to live the life of a person.

 

That's a tempting response for a few reasons. First, it explains why abortion is okay. Of course it's killing a human being, but we don't care about human beings. We care about persons, and obviously a fetus is not a person. It also explains why hamburgers are no big deal (as long as the meat is ethically sourced, etc.). Cows aren't persons!

 

There are a couple caveats, though. First, some animals are likely persons. Lots of people think dolphins are persons. Great apes and whales are also good candidates. Maybe octopuses. Etc. So that means killing some animals is totally not okay. Second and more troubling, babies aren't persons. A four week old infant is as much as a person as a fetus is. If you're happy that this account makes abortion okay, you're probably going to be less thrilled that it makes infanticide okay. So that is a big hurdle you have to hop over.

 

(This article has, among other things, a good section on personhood.)

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So let me re-iterate my stance then:

 

 

Using the term 'instinct' was a poor choice in getting my point across. To state the way I feel about it more clearly, I guess I see there being two factors that my brain primarily uses when deciding whether a life form is 'important' or not: size and how similar it is to me. Like you said, even with something as small and foreign as a mouse, I would feel some level of guilt if I ended its life because there are enough things about the dying process that are similar enough to humans. I feel like I can recognize that I am causing it pain, I can see that it avoids things that scare it and gravitates towards things that it likes. So even though it is small, there are enough things about it's behavior and state of being that I can relate to.

 

With a mosquito, I don't feel this way at all. First off, it's fucking tiny. Even if I could recognize it was in pain or scared or whatever, I would need a magnifying glass to do so and it would take some conscious effort. Second, I just can't relate to it at all. It is such a foreign life form to me. I have no way of telling whether it is in pain or not, I can't tell if it experiences fear, and as far as I can tell, it is more similar to a plant than it is to any of the more 'important' animals that I've observed. Because of these differences, I guess I just don't care and don't value its life. But if either of these factors were different, I would feel differently. If it were human sized I would probably feel differently. And if it were the same size but exhibited recognizable behavior that I see in humans, I would also feel differently.

 

So I guess for me, I feel like what is 'right' or 'wrong' is relative to the perspective of the life form. I feel like it is wrong to kill, enslave, or torture things that clearly exhibit recognizable characteristics but I don't think it is as wrong to do that to tiny ass things that are completely un-relatable and foreign. By mosquito morality, killing mosquitoes is clearly bad but single celled organisms can go fuck themselves.

 

First Tycho, that last post of yours was quality stuff and I have a lot of respect for the fact that you were willing to back down a bit and consider my counter-argument.

 

Second, I think it's worth pointing out that you dismissed my criteria posted above as 'arbitrary' and proceeded to repeatedly insult me and compare me to this ridiculous 'Racist Tycho' character to prove some kind of point which you later admitted was basically just a little game you were playing. I made it clear that I was strictly talking about life forms on the level of a mosquito and yet you accused me of being speciesist and tried to prove that I was no better than a racist for feeling the way I did about fucking mosquitoes. That was poor form man. It was condescending and disrespectful and as I said before, it was a fucking dead end. I would ask you for an apology but I guess after seeing your last post all is forgiven.

 

Just please, don't do that to me again.

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I've been observing this thread from the side for a long time, but I wanted to drop in to comment on this bit.

 

For disclosure's sake before beginning:

- My girlfriend of 7 years is vegan, but I myself do eat meat. I attempt to source it ethically whenever possible and eat veg/vegan about 3 or 4 nights a week.

- I am very sympathetic to veg/vegan arguments, but not enough to ever buy into it completely.

 

You left out the view on killing that I always actually thought was most compelling, so I'd like to add a 9 to your list. It could conceivably be seen as a variant on 6, but I think it has enough differences to bear mention.

 

9. Killing is wrong because it robs the victim of their future. The act of killing is unethical not because there is anything inherently wrong with ending a life, but because that entity had other experiences left to have that you are now depriving it of. Regardless of plans or ambitions that the victim may have had, in killing you are not just frustrating existing plans, you are also preventing any new ones from forming and denying any potential future joys the victim may have had. As you were generous enough to provide the problematic aspects of the other 8, I'll point out that this means that the closer someone is to a natural death the less unethical it would be to murder them under this rule. This aspect of it is why I will eat meat from adult animals but never touch lamb or veal. Also, by this a fetus may or may not qualify as an "entity" at different stages of development, so abortion may be a thing that is up for more debate than otherwise (I'm still fine with it though).

 

On top of this, believing it opens up a further debate about which animals have the potential/ability to appreciate their continued existence and these joys and whether that should be something we take into consideration (can you rob a future from something that doesn't give a shit about the future?). Kind of the opposite of the "can it feel pain" criteria, following this would subscribe you to a "can it appreciate pleasure" one. However, recognizing and appreciating pleasure would seem to require more complex mental faculties than having pain receptors, so some animals would begin to be included on the list.

 

...man, sometimes I miss the days when I was a philosophy major.

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On 1/22/2015 at 9:13 PM, Zeusthecat said:

Second, I think it's worth pointing out that you dismissed my criteria posted above as 'arbitrary' and proceeded to repeatedly insult me and compare me to this ridiculous 'Racist Tycho' character to prove some kind of point which you later admitted was basically just a little game you were playing.

I'm not sure it was just "game playing" and I don't think Racist Tycho is ridiculous. Racist people exist. Racist people were the vast majority not too long ago. Speciesist people are in the same position right now. I view racism and speciesism (and sexism and heterosexism) as basically the same thing: blind, unthinking prejudiced that eventually society is mostly going to get over. We're at different stages in these various prejudices but we can only hope they eventually all disappear. The reason I made it Racist Tycho rather than Racist Strom Thurmond or some other hypothetical is because people were getting all up in arms about being accused of an *ism (in this case, speciesism) and I wanted to say "look, we've got lots of *isms, maybe I would've had serious racism issues if I had been born a few hundred years ago, that could totally be me." I think you and other still have a miscalibrated sense of how bad racism is vs. how bad speciesism is: you think the former is waaaaaay worse than the latter, so you can't imagine me ever for a moment seriously imagining myself as a racist for the purposes of the argument.

 

But I can easily imagine this. I was a speciesist, unconsciously at least, for much of my life. I could easily have been a racist had I been born in 17XX or whatever. Am I thrilled about the possibility of being either? No. But if you think my hatred of racist people is so big that I must be joking when I bring out crazy ol' Racist Tycho, then you either think I hate basically every human being's guts with a fiery passion, or, again, you're still not understanding that I see racism and speciesism as basically the same thing with different Mad Libs answers filled in.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 9:13 PM, Zeusthecat said:

I made it clear that I was strictly talking about life forms on the level of a mosquito and yet you accused me of being speciesist and tried to prove that I was no better than a racist for feeling the way I did about fucking mosquitoes. That was poor form man. It was condescending and disrespectful and as I said before, it was a fucking dead end. I would ask you for an apology but I guess after seeing your last post all is forgiven.

Again, like I said, I think you are the species equivalent of a racist if "but it's a MOSQUITO BRO" is the best you can do when it comes to whether you think it's okay to kill something dead. Since you HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE racism but you're totally fine with speciesism, you took this as a massive insult. But since I see no important differences between racism and speciesism, this to me was about as insulting as saying that if you're 5 feet 12 inches tall, you're six feet tall.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 9:13 PM, Zeusthecat said:

Just please, don't do that to me again.

Look, as far as I can tell, you are still a speciesist, are you not? At the very least, you haven't given me any reason to think you aren't (I'm totally open to the possibility, of course). And if you're still a speciesist, you're basically a racist, except replace "race" with "species" (that's how we came up with the word, even...). Again, this probably makes your blood pressure go up, but if we go back to 1850 or whatever and imagine that the racist person is somehow an ardent feminist (John Stuart Mill was a racist and also one of the most forceful feminists of all time), surely the racist's blood pressure would go up if we suggested his racism were just as bad as someone else's sexism. He would say "don't insult me like that. Accusing me of sexism is beyond the pale." But all we did was point out that racism and sexism are pretty much the same, as far as we can tell, from the point of view of justifiability! And that's where I'm at with racism and speciesism.

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On 1/22/2015 at 9:38 PM, miffy495 said:

9. Killing is wrong because it robs the victim of their future. The act of killing is unethical not because there is anything inherently wrong with ending a life, but because that entity had other experiences left to have that you are now depriving it of. Regardless of plans or ambitions that the victim may have had, in killing you are not just frustrating existing plans, you are also preventing any new ones from forming and denying any potential future joys the victim may have had. As you were generous enough to provide the problematic aspects of the other 8, I'll point out that this means that the closer someone is to a natural death the less unethical it would be to murder them under this rule. This aspect of it is why I will eat meat from adult animals but never touch lamb or veal. Also, by this a fetus may or may not qualify as an "entity" at different stages of development, so abortion may be a thing that is up for more debate than otherwise (I'm still fine with it though).

Yes, this is a good one. You're right that it's a variation on 6, and the main reason I left it out is because #6 only makes death bad for human beings, because human beings have these sorts of long term projects, whereas your #9 makes death just as bad for non-human animals like cats and cows, because these animals have futures just as much as we do (sometimes much more so: whales can live for a looooooong time!).

I'm not sure how close adult animals eaten for meat approach a "natural death." Certainly the factory farmed ones don't. I think a lot of animals we kill for meat are killed in the prime of their lives, not at the very end when they've got one foot in the grave. Those are the ones you don't want to eat, except in like coq a vin or whatever.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 9:38 PM, miffy495 said:

On top of this, believing it opens up a further debate about which animals have the potential/ability to appreciate their continued existence and these joys and whether that should be something we take into consideration (can you rob a future from something that doesn't give a shit about the future?). Kind of the opposite of the "can it feel pain" criteria, following this would subscribe you to a "can it appreciate pleasure" one. However, recognizing and appreciating pleasure would seem to require more complex mental faculties than having pain receptors, so some animals would begin to be included on the list.

You've made a subtle shift here. You moved from "death is bad for someone because it cuts off future experiences" to "death is bad for someone because it cuts off future experiences that they want to have, and that they have the ability to appreciate." These give us different answers in lots of cases. For instance, a chicken definitely has future pleasurable experiences if it's living a normal life, but it almost certainly doesn't appreciate this fact, nor will it appreciate the experiences very much while it's undergoing them, and if you ask the chicken whether it wants to keep on living, it won't even understand the question.

 

Which account is right, then? Do future experiences matter, or do future experiences that we can appreciate and look forward to matter? If we choose the former, it looks like it's hard to justify killing most non-human animals. If we go with the latter, it looks like it's okay to kill babies, unless you add some sort of complicated rider like "if at some point in the future you will become the sort of thing that will at that point in the future be able to look forward even further into the future and contemplate enjoyment of future desires, then it's not okay to kill you right now, even when you don't have these capacities." That has never struck me as super plausible, and it faces a series of issues. (One imaginative thought experiment someone once suggested is that, in the future, we develop a serum we can inject into kittens which will turn them intelligent, either immediately or in a few years. Can you kill the kitten before I inject the serum, even if I'm planning to do so later? What if I've injected the kitten, but it will take a few years before the kitten becomes smart like a human being? Etc.)

 

But, perhaps something like #9 can be made to work. It is worth investigating if anyone finds it plausible and I'd be happy to work through it.

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Tycho, the problem is that you haven't proven anti-speciesism to be a compelling or totalizing philosophy. Whenever someone points out that your central criterion of physical suffering is arbitrary, especially since it excludes plants, or when someone points out that the experience of humans is quantitatively or qualitatively different from the vast majority of animals, you immediately resort to analogies to racism. You might think that this is an effective means of debate, but I assure you that it is not, because:

  • Whatever else, you are implying that people who disagree with you are effectively racists. It might be true, in your eyes, but it is almost certainly not true in their eyes, of which you have to be aware by now. Therefore, you are making the comparisons to distress people who disagree with you, because there is no other possible effect in these circumstances. In that case, I am not thrilled by your putative motives for having this conversation.
  • You have been consistently unable to establish, on a moral level, why being a different species of animal is no different from being a different gender or race within the same species of animal, but totally different from being a different kingdom of life or from being an inanimate object or a intangible concept. When people ask these questions, you caricature them, ridicule them, and then reiterate your analogies to racism and sexism. See my first point.
  • Inventing a hypothetical racist person that you insist other people in the conversation ought to interrogate, without owning the beliefs you put forth through him, is extremely problematic for discourse in good faith, not least because it is textbook deflection. You are not presenting things you believe or even things you used to believe. You are quite blatantly erecting a strawman of a person who may or may not exist, but whom you are free to define, and it is up to everyone else to avoid resembling the arguments of that strawman. Again, see my first point.
  • Defending or attacking a set of beliefs because it has similarities or differences with other sets of beliefs generally agreed to be immoral or unethical does not make an effective case that the first set of beliefs is or is not immoral or unethical. Continuing to force the conversation back toward analogies with those other sets, rather than evaluating the first set on its own merits, is derailing behavior, in addition to ensuring that people who disagree with you must continually confront the immorality and unethicality of those sets. Again, see my first point.
  • Overall, you keep using racism and sexism to shut down dissenting viewpoints within this thread. You are taking advantage of the Thumbs here as liberals with tendencies towards social justice in order to herd them in the direction of your conclusions without doing the actual legwork of convincing them. As you've said repeatedly, no one wants to be called a racist or a sexist, but you're the only one who keeps doing it. When you dismissed my questions about plant suffering out of hand, I could easily have started calling you a sentientist and making comparisons to MRAs who have no overt problem with other races but who harp on "biotruths" about how women (plants) have important biological differences from men (animals) that make discriminating against them (eating them) okay, but I didn't, because I didn't want to waste your time obliging you to debunk my pointless and inflammatory analogy before getting to how you actually feel. You seem to have zero interest in that from the vast majority of people in this thread, which makes me wonder why you're even here, unless it's just to call people out and make them feel bad for believing what they do. Again, see my first point.

I'm also just incredibly disappointed by your response to Bjorn's latest post, which was incredibly thorough and thoughtful. Your response was effectively, "Either I'm right or my entire morality is unworkable. Therefore, I'm going to act on the assumption that I'm right until it's proven otherwise." Why are you allowed to have this attitude about what you believe but everyone else is not? Why is talking to you about this topic even worth my time, when you repeatedly do the above things over more than a half-dozen pages?

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I strongly disagree that what Tycho is doing boils down to your interpretations, Gormongous. The racist-speciesist equivalency is a basic assumption that so far has not been refuted and therefore is completely valid to make in my opinion. I find it hard to understand why it's so hard for people to own that they're speciesist, and the amount of noise it generates disrupting an otherwise fascinating discussion is very irritating to me.

I do find it disappointing that the plant sentience discussion has been left largely out because there's some very cool research there.

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I strongly disagree that what Tycho is doing boils down to your interpretations, Gormongous. The racist-speciesist equivalency is a basic assumption that so far has not been refuted and therefore is completely valid to make in my opinion. I find it hard to understand why it's so hard for people to own that they're speciesist, and the amount of noise it generates disrupting an otherwise fascinating discussion is very irritating to me.

I do find it disappointing that the plant sentience discussion has been left largely out because there's some very cool research there.

 

The refutation that I have been seeing the most, which Tycho has repeatedly rejected, boils down to this.

 

There is a room with two containers, each connected to a button in front of you, with a third button connected to both. One container holds a human being, maybe twenty years old. The other holds a mosquito, one day old. You must press a button. Pressing the button connected to a single container will cause the creature in that container to suffer horribly and then die, while setting the other free. Pressing the button connected to both will select a container by an entirely random process for the aforesaid effect. In a vacuum, the argument against speciesism is that it's a straightforward decision to press the randomized button, content in the knowledge that there's a fifty-percent chance that the human being will suffer and die, while the mosquito is freed to live out its remaining thirty-six hours. I just can't buy that. If it were a black person and a white person or a man and a woman, the moral choice is obviously to leave it to chance when context is lacking. They are both people. However, I have yet to be presented with a logical argument demanding that I embrace the possibility of torturing and killing a human being, in order to save a mosquito. I have only been told, repeatedly, that it is the same thing as racism, because mosquitos can also suffer, which I do not find compelling on its own, for the reasons in my post above. Therefore, the lives of a human being and a mosquito, while both carrying moral worth, do not share complete moral equivalence to me. If that's speciesism and not a refutation of it, I'm okay with that and I'll own it, because I will never be swerving my car into a pedestrian's path to avoid running over an ant (or into a cat's path, for that matter, because I'm not all about human beings). I'm sure that makes me just like an antebellum slave owner or something, whatever.

 

More generally, I agree that suffering is bad and killing is wrong for all life, even plants and fungi, but I do not see by what principle condemnation of intra-species distinctions invariably remains valid when generalized between species, especially when not all species apparently count. While equally regrettable, not all systems of bias and discrimination are morally interchangeable, and acting like they are, especially just to score rhetorical points, ignores and erases the historical and societal structures that brought the systems into being and give them their power. It's a creepy kind of moral equivalency to say that racism and speciesism are functionally the same on the sole basis that both involve discrimination based on arbitrary biological differences. It brings to mind a professor for whom I worked, who loved comparing the "infant genocide" of abortion to the Holocaust. Things can be similar while not being the same.

 

 

 

We got the professor to stop eventually, by the way. It was, thus far, the longest and most awkward meeting of my professional career.

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I've always thought of it along the lines of the train dilemma. If a train were to run over a person, but I could change the tracks to run over 5 chickens or chimpanzees or frogs, I wouldn't even consider it for a moment, I'd pull the lever. 

While I feel the burden of proof that all animals are equal is on those claiming they are, I believe that I addressed why I think all other animals to be a lesser life forms and that is entirely based on responsibility. 

 

The argument of potential responsibility has a flaw - mentally incapacitated people can never be responsible to anything - but as a fully functional human, I would want to be euthanised if I had late stage dementia or brain damage. I've seen what it has done to my family members, and I do not want that, nor can I understand why someone would be OK with that.

 

This starts to break down when you look at intermediate stages of dementia/development/brain damage, and depending on your moral code those who are born with a high level mental incapacity; however I think that's a separate issue. 

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The refutation that I have been seeing the most, which Tycho has repeatedly rejected

I wouldn't call that a refutation, so much as a good test scenario to determine whether one is speciesist (I am).

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10. Killing isn't inherently immoral, but it needs to be (with regards to humans) in order to have a functioning society.

 

Even if I don't believe that, the point is that there are practical aspects to morality and morals are largely arbitrary. We humans are not completely rational beings and so you cannot use a fully rational approach to deduce the personal rules we're supposed to follow. What I mean by that is that you're never going to get a set of workable morals by trying to have a rational argument whether killing mosquitos is okay or not. I try to let flies and such out. One year there was a massive boom of hoverflies, they inevitably got stuck indoors and I caught hundreds of them, one by one, because I felt like it. I've also had a moth problem (small ones) and killed every moth I saw, even the younglings. It's a practical issue.

 

All life comes at the expense of other life, so you cannot live by a set of morals that says all life is equal. Should I feed birds during the winter? If I don't, more will starve to death. If I do I'll contribute to an overpopulation of certain birds. Not to mention that they get stressed and fly into windows, having them congregate makes it easier for sparrowhawks to come grab them and in the spring/summer a single bluetit can eat 1000+ insects per day! That's a lot of killing. It's a zero sum game, and nature doesn't have morals. Those are our own construction and we can't reconcile them.

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On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

Tycho, the problem is that you haven't proven anti-speciesism to be a compelling or totalizing philosophy. Whenever someone points out that your central criterion of physical suffering is arbitrary, especially since it excludes plants, or when someone points out that the experience of humans is quantitatively or qualitatively different from the vast majority of animals, you immediately resort to analogies to racism.

This doesn't strike me as a correct description of what I've done. When people point out that the central criterion of physical suffering is arbitrary, my response is that this is a complex scientific question that I can't solve in the space of this thread, and that all I can say is that I promise that the best scientific evidence suggests otherwise. When someone points out that non-human animals have experiences different in certain ways from those of humans, I don't just say "racism," I say that it's not clear to me why any difference in these sorts of experiences should suggest that a difference in moral treatment is warranted. To my knowledge nobody has successfully responded to this point any more than Racist Tycho could respond to this same point except with race instead of species.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

Whatever else, you are implying that people who disagree with you are effectively racists. It might be true, in your eyes, but it is almost certainly not true in their eyes, of which you have to be aware by now. Therefore, you are making the comparisons to distress people who disagree with you, because there is no other possible effect in these circumstances. In that case, I am not thrilled by your putative motives for having this conversation.

I'm obviously not making these comparisons to distress people. If I thought being compared with a racist person is distressing, I would not have spent so much time explaining what Racist Tycho thinks. I wouldn't have named him Racist Tycho! He'd be Racist Strom Thurmond!

 

Honestly, you need to take my challenge seriously, that is, you need to convince Racist Tycho that he is wrong, or at least you need to try. You NEED TO. Why? Because you are going to realize how hard it is to talk about these things without bringing in other examples, like sexism. I know (I know) that you want me to find some happy cheerful way to make my argument where I don't have to advert to racism. That would be great, if I could! I'm open to suggestions! Since you clearly think it's possible and perhaps even obligatory on my end for me to undertake this project, show me how. Convince Racist Tycho without adverting to any other *ism. Once you show me how this can be done, then I'll convince speciesist people without adverting to any other *ism.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

You have been consistently unable to establish, on a moral level, why being a different species of animal is no different from being a different gender or race within the same species of animal, but totally different from being a different kingdom of life or from being an inanimate object or a intangible concept. When people ask these questions, you caricature them, ridicule them, and then reiterate your analogies to racism and sexism. See my first point.

Again, you need to try to convince Racist Tycho not to be racist. Your objection here is going to completely melt away once you realize that you can't convince Racist Tycho without doing the EXACT same thing that I have been doing and that you currently have an issue with. I'm not "caricaturing" anyone. People LITERALLY ARE SPECIESIST. They LITERALLY ARE RACIST EXCEPT AGAINST SPECIES. That is LITERALLY WHAT IS HAPPENING. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration or confusion or empty rhetoric. It is ACTUALLY THE CASE. It is true that I am ridiculing them in one sense, namely, I think it's ridiculous to hold unfounded indefensible prejudices. But I've seen you ridicule sexist people on this forum before. So I'm not sure why you have an issue with this.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

Inventing a hypothetical racist person that you insist other people in the conversation ought to interrogate, without owning the beliefs you put forth through him, is extremely problematic for discourse in good faith, not least because it is textbook deflection. You are not presenting things you believe or even things you used to believe. You are quite blatantly erecting a strawman of a person who may or may not exist, but whom you are free to define, and it is up to everyone else to avoid resembling the arguments of that strawman. Again, see my first point.

YES. It is textbook deflection. Why am I engaged in it? Because you are 100% blind to the structure of my argument. Your prejudice has made it impossible for you to understand what I am arguing and why it is compelling..

 

Obviously you don't believe this. You think you're being super sensible. And the only way I can see to explain to you why this is false is to show you that actually, if you were in my position, you'd think the same thing about yourself. I can't use speciesism as the example, because it's the prejudice you're under the grips of, but I can use racism to make this point.

You say I am erecting a strawman. YES. This is LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT. Racist Tycho is a strawman because HE DOES NOT HAVE ANY GOOD ARGUMENTS. Then I compare other people to this strawman because I think THEY DO NOT HAVE ANY GOOD ARGUMENTS.

 

The fact that you disagree, the fact that you think you have great arguments that I'm ignoring for illicit reasons, rests entirely on your failure to understand that Racist Tycho can use exactly the same arguments that you think are so strong. I would love if you were self-reflective and insightful enough to arrive at this conclusion on your own. But apparently you aren't. You continue to deny that speciesism and racism are just the same thing wearing different shirts. Fine. How can I show you that you're wrong? By asking you to argue against Racist Tycho and showing you that nothing you say against him has any traction unless it also works against your own speciesist beliefs.

 

My recourse to Racist Tycho is required by your complete failure to accept my claims that your speciesist arguments are empty and not worth addressing any more than Racist Tycho's arguments are worth addressing. I know you disagree. I know your speciesist arguments sound amazing to you whereas Racist Tycho's arguments sound silly. I wish your prejudice weren't so blinding that it caused you to make these mistakes, but that's where we're at. The only way I can see to cut through this prejudice is to make you realize how even in a case where you don't share the prejudice (racism), the arguments you love so much turn out to be awful. You won't take my word for it, and you can't figure this out on your own, so now we're stuck with Racist Tycho. Do I like it? Not really. It would be nice if I could put all the argumentative work on my back: making positive arguments is always more fun than pointing out why someone else's argument isn't working. Since my positive arguments in this thread are failing not because they're bad but because blind prejudice is making people ignore their strength, though, I need some way to cut through the prejudice.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

Defending or attacking a set of beliefs because it has similarities or differences with other sets of beliefs generally agreed to be immoral or unethical does not make an effective case that the first set of beliefs is or is not immoral or unethical. Continuing to force the conversation back toward analogies with those other sets, rather than evaluating the first set on its own merits, is derailing behavior, in addition to ensuring that people who disagree with you must continually confront the immorality and unethicality of those sets. Again, see my first point.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I AM DOING. I am not attacking speciesism because it has similarities with racism. I am attacking speciesism because it is wrong, completely independently of whether racism is wrong or right. Now, it just so happens that the reasons speciesism is wrong are the same reasons that racism is wrong. But racism could be TOTALLY OKAY and speceisism would still be wrong. The only analogy between racism and speciesism is that the terrible arguments that you mistakenly think support speciesism are also terrible arguments that actually support racism. I'm trying to convince you of this so that you stop thinking that these terrible arguments are anything other than terrible. This is not your only option. You could cling to the arguments and also admit that there's nothing wrong with racism. I have not ruled that out.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

Overall, you keep using racism and sexism to shut down dissenting viewpoints within this thread. You are taking advantage of the Thumbs here as liberals with tendencies towards social justice in order to herd them in the direction of your conclusions without doing the actual legwork of convincing them.

This is probably the funniest thing I have heard in a long time. I'm "taking advantage" of the fact that people aren't ENTIRELY prejudiced to "herd them" in the direction of giving up another prejudice without doing "the actual legwork" of convincing them that prejudice is bad. Can you imagine John Stuart Mill saying this about racism? He's an ardent feminist, so you say "uh, Mill, shouldn't you not be, like, racist? For the same reasons you're anti-sexist?" Then suddenly John Stuart Mill accuses you of "taking advantage" of his feminism by failing to do the "actual legwork" it takes to convince him racism is wrong.

Here's the "actual legwork" it takes to convince someone that racism is wrong: you say "racism is wrong, dumbass." That's literally all it takes.

 

Here's the "actual legwork" it takes to convince someone that speciesism is wrong: you say "speciesism is wrong, dumbass." That's literally all it takes.

 

Clearly you disagree in the second case. You think I need to do more legwork. What does that legwork look like? This is why I want you to convince Racist Tycho. If I had my druthers, the argument against racism and speciesism is just "don't be a shithead." Clearly that's not fine in your mind. So show me what the "actual legwork" looks like in the racism case, and I promise, I promise from the depths of my heart, that once you succeed in this legwork for the racist case, I will then undertake the actual legwork in the speciesist case.

 

But, until then, put yourself in my position. You're asking me to provide some sort of knock down argument against one kind of *ism, randomly chosen out of a hat, even though you're fine with just assuming that two other *isms, again randomly chosen, are bad. But if I could just assume that the bad *isms are bad, then I'd say that all three are bad, because to me they are all just the same thing.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

As you've said repeatedly, no one wants to be called a racist or a sexist, but you're the only one who keeps doing it. When you dismissed my questions about plant suffering out of hand, I could easily have started calling you a sentientist and making comparisons to MRAs who have no overt problem with other races but who harp on "biotruths" about how women (plants) have important biological differences from men (animals) that make discriminating against them (eating them) okay, but I didn't, because I didn't want to waste your time obliging you to debunk my pointless and inflammatory analogy before getting to how you actually feel.

I don't think it would have been a waste of time to call me a sentientist and compare me to MRAs who have no overt problems with other races but who harp on "biotruths." You see this as pointlessly inflammatory but I think it's a good point. If you were right about it, I'd be in huge trouble, right? So either you think it's correct but you aren't bringing it up because you're afraid of my precious feelings, or you think it's a false argument.

 

If you think it's a false argument, then it's irrelevant, because I don't think "specieism is just racism by another name" is a false argument.

 

If you think it's a legit argument, I welcome it. Go ahead and make it. It's not going to "inflame" me any more than saying "speciesism is different from racism" is going to inflame me. That latter statement is far more offensive to me than comparing me to MRAs, because the latter statement is entirely unsupported by anything you've said, whereas the MRA stuff has some potential reasons supporting it. I of course think these reasons are false, but I have to give you an argument to convince you. I don't think I have to give you an argument to convince you that speciesism is the same as racism any more than I think I have to give you an argument to convince you that sexism is the same as racism.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

You seem to have zero interest in that from the vast majority of people in this thread, which makes me wonder why you're even here, unless it's just to call people out and make them feel bad for believing what they do. Again, see my first point.

I'm not sure what "that" refers to, but if "that" is "debunking pointless and inflammatory analogies," I actually have plenty of interest in this. If I'm analagous to an MRA then I definitely need to debunk this. It's not pointless or inflammatory. It's relevant and important.

 

On 1/22/2015 at 10:19 PM, Gormongous said:

I'm also just incredibly disappointed by your response to Bjorn's latest post, which was incredibly thorough and thoughtful. Your response was effectively, "Either I'm right or my entire morality is unworkable. Therefore, I'm going to act on the assumption that I'm right until it's proven otherwise." Why are you allowed to have this attitude about what you believe but everyone else is not? Why is talking to you about this topic even worth my time, when you repeatedly do the above things over more than a half-dozen pages?

I'm allowed to do this because everyone else is able to do this also. If you can show me that I need a speciesist assumption or else morality is unworkable, I'm fucked. So show me.

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On 1/23/2015 at 2:21 AM, Gormongous said:

The refutation that I have been seeing the most, which Tycho has repeatedly rejected, boils down to this.

 

There is a room with two containers, each connected to a button in front of you, with a third button connected to both. One container holds a human being, maybe twenty years old. The other holds a mosquito, one day old. You must press a button. Pressing the button connected to a single container will cause the creature in that container to suffer horribly and then die, while setting the other free. Pressing the button connected to both will select a container by an entirely random process for the aforesaid effect. In a vacuum, the argument against speciesism is that it's a straightforward decision to press the randomized button, content in the knowledge that there's a fifty-percent chance that the human being will suffer and die, while the mosquito is freed to live out its remaining thirty-six hours. I just can't buy that. If it were a black person and a white person or a man and a woman, the moral choice is obviously to leave it to chance when context is lacking. They are both people. However, I have yet to be presented with a logical argument demanding that I embrace the possibility of torturing and killing a human being, in order to save a mosquito. I have only been told, repeatedly, that it is the same thing as racism, because mosquitos can also suffer, which I do not find compelling on its own, for the reasons in my post above. Therefore, the lives of a human being and a mosquito, while both carrying moral worth, do not share complete moral equivalence to me. If that's speciesism and not a refutation of it, I'm okay with that and I'll own it, because I will never be swerving my car into a pedestrian's path to avoid running over an ant (or into a cat's path, for that matter, because I'm not all about human beings). I'm sure that makes me just like an antebellum slave owner or something, whatever.

I agree with osmosisch, here:

On 1/23/2015 at 2:59 AM, osmosisch said:

I wouldn't call that a refutation, so much as a good test scenario to determine whether one is speciesist (I am).

You're just telling me, Gormongous, that you're speciesist. Racist Tycho would tell you that he's racist. He has not been presented with a logical argument demanding he embrace the possibility of torturing and killing the white person, in order to save the black person. He has only been told, repeatedly, that it is the same thing as sexism, because black people can also suffer, which he does not find compelling on its own, for reasons in his posts above. Therefore, the lives of a white person and a black person, while both carrying moral worth, do not share complete moral equivalence to him. If that's racism and not a refutation of it, Racist Tycho is okay with that and he'll own it, because he will never be swerving his car into a white person to avoid running over two black people. He's sure this makes him just like a sexist person, but whatever.

 

A bit more detail:

On 1/23/2015 at 2:21 AM, Gormongous said:

More generally, I agree that suffering is bad and killing is wrong for all life, even plants and fungi, but I do not see by what principle condemnation of intra-species distinctions invariably remains valid when generalized between species, especially when not all species apparently count. While equally regrettable, not all systems of bias and discrimination are morally interchangeable, and acting like they are, especially just to score rhetorical points, ignores and erases the historical and societal structures that brought the systems into being and give them their power. It's a creepy kind of moral equivalency to say that racism and speciesism are functionally the same on the sole basis that both involve discrimination based on arbitrary biological differences. It brings to mind a professor for whom I worked, who loved comparing the "infant genocide" of abortion to the Holocaust. Things can be similar while not being the same.

Imagine that abortion actually was killing babies. Like, a fetus is the moral equivalent of an infant. Apparently there are approximately 1.21 million abortions each year in the US, and that number has been falling. If you add in the rest of the world and stretch your time horizon to the length of time the Holocaust happened, then yes, abortion is very similar to the Holocaust. In fact it's a little worse because it doesn't have an endpoint (although it's a little better because it's not specifically targeting Jews, homosexuals, and other marginalized groups). I suspect the reason you found your professor's comparison bad is not that you think it's a bad comparison given the fact that fetuses are just like babies, but only because you don't believe a fetus is just like a baby.

 

On 1/23/2015 at 2:49 AM, Griddlelol said:

I've always thought of it along the lines of the train dilemma. If a train were to run over a person, but I could change the tracks to run over 5 chickens or chimpanzees or frogs, I wouldn't even consider it for a moment, I'd pull the lever. 

While I feel the burden of proof that all animals are equal is on those claiming they are, I believe that I addressed why I think all other animals to be a lesser life forms and that is entirely based on responsibility.

We know, of course, what Racist Tycho is going to say. He's going to to say that he has the burden of proof to show that all races aren't equal, and then he'll say that he addressed why he thinks that blacks are lesser lifeforms because of responsibility or whatever. (I actually am not sure what your argument is - I can't find it earlier in the thread and I don't recall what it is.)

 

On 1/23/2015 at 2:49 AM, Griddlelol said:

The argument of potential responsibility has a flaw - mentally incapacitated people can never be responsible to anything - but as a fully functional human, I would want to be euthanised if I had late stage dementia or brain damage. I've seen what it has done to my family members, and I do not want that, nor can I understand why someone would be OK with that.

Umm... what about infants, though? Did you want people to kill you when you were an infant?

 

On 1/23/2015 at 5:43 AM, eot said:

10. Killing isn't inherently immoral, but it needs to be (with regards to humans) in order to have a functioning society.

 

Even if I don't believe that, the point is that there are practical aspects to morality and morals are largely arbitrary. We humans are not completely rational beings and so you cannot use a fully rational approach to deduce the personal rules we're supposed to follow. What I mean by that is that you're never going to get a set of workable morals by trying to have a rational argument whether killing mosquitos is okay or not. I try to let flies and such out. One year there was a massive boom of hoverflies, they inevitably got stuck indoors and I caught hundreds of them, one by one, because I felt like it. I've also had a moth problem (small ones) and killed every moth I saw, even the younglings. It's a practical issue.

 

All life comes at the expense of other life, so you cannot live by a set of morals that says all life is equal. Should I feed birds during the winter? If I don't, more will starve to death. If I do I'll contribute to an overpopulation of certain birds. Not to mention that they get stressed and fly into windows, having them congregate makes it easier for sparrowhawks to come grab them and in the spring/summer a single bluetit can eat 1000+ insects per day! That's a lot of killing. It's a zero sum game, and nature doesn't have morals. Those are our own construction and we can't reconcile them.

You obviously don't have to think killing all humans is immoral to have a fully functioning society. America got by for a while on the assumption that killing white people was bad but killing Native Americans and black people was no big deal (unless the black person was owned by someone else, in which case you owe them for the property damage). Many societies throughout history have thought it is okay to kill foreigners or people of another race or whoever loses the human sacrifice lottery or the mentally disabled or Jews or whatever.

 

It's true that all life comes at the expense of other life, but some of that "other life" is plant life. So, you should just eat plants. Should you contribute to the overpopulation of birds even if that means more killing, down the road? Well, tell me if you should engage in famine relief and contribute to the overpopulation of humans even if this means they're going to eat animals and murder humans later on down the line!

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Notice, though, that some things don't feel pain or suffer, and some things have lives that we think it's totally okay to end. Trees, for instance, fit into both categories. Mosquitos fit into the second (maybe even the first, but let's assume they don't). Infants fit into neither, and fetuses fit into both at first and later just into the second, if we are pro-choice. Adult humans (except in extreme cases, like self-defense or something) don't fit into either category. Cats usually fit only into the first, but if they have a really expensive disease, sometimes we think they fit into the second category too. If I euthanize my cat rather than pay $14,000 to cure its cancer, nobody will bat an eye. If I euthanize grandma for the same reason, my relatives are never going to stop giving me shit, plus I'll get charged with murder.

What do we do with this mess? Is there a way to make it all consistent? Our first project should be figuring what makes death bad for human beings, because we're pretty sure death is bad for human beings, and therefore it's wrong to kill them.

 

Does this not provide some evidence for why speciesism is not the moral equivalent of racism? I am willing to admit that I am speciesist because I am willing to kill a mosquito but I am not willing to admit that that is the moral equivalent of killing a black person on the basis of their race. You said it yourself: "Mosquitos fit into the second, adult humans don't fit into either category". A sub category under adult humans would be adult black people. 

 

Happily enough, all of these answers prevent Racist Tycho from killing black people for some reason that doesn't apply to white people: none of these answers make any mention of race. They treat all people the same. Also happily, these answers make no mention of species, and even better, some of them let us kill non-human animals despite ruling out killing humans. Take #6, for instance. Pigs don't have any long term projects. I can kill a pig without frustrating the pig's desire to write the Great American Novel. I can't kill a person, though, unless they're Philip Roth, because that motherfucker is not going to write the Great American Novel. Thus we have secured an opening for explaining how we can legitimately kill non-human animals without having to rely on a speciesist justification. Instead we just rely on the fact that the thing that makes death bad only applies to some things: we look to that, rather than to species membership.

 

So why are you still saying that killing a black person is the moral equivalent of killing a mosquito? Why do I need to convince racist Tycho that he is wrong when you basically laid out multiple philosophies that one could follow that would allow them to not value the life of a mosquito while showing that the same logic should not apply to a black person?

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Does this not provide some evidence for why speciesism is not the moral equivalent of racism? I am willing to admit that I am speciesist because I am willing to kill a mosquito but I am not willing to admit that that is the moral equivalent of killing a black person on the basis of their race. You said it yourself: "Mosquitos fit into the second, adult humans don't fit into either category". A sub category under adult humans would be adult black people.

No, when I say "X fits into both categories" or whatever I don't mean for real, I mean in terms of what we typically think. Our typical thought is speciesist but not racist. If you ask Racist Tycho where things fit in, he'll give you a different answer when it comes to black people and white people. So, we need some way to adjudicate disagreements, which is why we have to come up with a defensible account of what makes death bad rather than just assume that whatever we pre-theoretically think must be correct.

 

 

So why are you still saying that killing a black person is the moral equivalent of killing a mosquito? Why do I need to convince racist Tycho that he is wrong when you basically laid out multiple philosophies that one could follow that would allow them to not value the life of a mosquito while showing that the same logic should not apply to a black person?

Because I think if you pick #6 you'd be wrong. Go ahead and try. Write "#6 is correct, Tycho!" and I'll explain why I think you're wrong. I think any answer you're going to end up happy with is going to be an answer that rules out speciesism.

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