What is your excuse for killing animals?

[volatile]

There's nothing to justify.

Wow.

Just...

Wow.

You realise with this line of thinking, you're back to tacitly supporting rape, pillage and murder, right?

Despite the verbiage, there's still nothing in your position - insofar as it can even be called a position - that in any way rationally or coherently distinguishes your dietary choices from any other choice you make.

Kevin accused you of nihilism earlier in the thread. I'd go further - it's cowardly nihilism: you're a nihilist whilst pretending, perhaps even to yourself, that you're not.

Wow.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

(since is does not imply ought, no moral rules based on pure science can exist even in theory),

That's correct.
I'm sorry if you don't like it. But what ya gonna do?

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Wow.

Just...

Wow.

You realise with this line of thinking, you're back to tacitly supporting rape, pillage and murder, right?

No. I'm not. Because, guess what?: I don't support rape, I don't support pillage and I don't support murder.

Now see if you can tell me: How is this possible? How can I accept that there is no such thing as an objective moral, and at the same time not support these things?

I'm not holding my breath in you understanding this and realizing it by yourself.

 

[Morrigan]

So, killing insects is okay because they "probably" don't feel pain or have "consciousness". Glad to see the morality is based on such rock-solid foundations. I wonder, if there compelling scientific evidence of insects feeling pain surfaced, would you sanctimonious vegans start avoiding stepping on ants or squashing mosquitoes?

You realise with this line of thinking, you're back to tacitly supporting rape, pillage and murder, right?

...

Wow.

You realize you're comparing eating meat to rape, pillage and murder, right?


Wow, just wow.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Would you please expand on this? I thought about it and wondered how you made the determination that conciousness in one is likely and in the other unlikely. I thought it must have something to do with the behavior of both insects and fish. They both act to avoid predators or perceived threats. They prepare nests and care for their young. I thought this was an interesting distinction and would like to know more about it.

Insects, as far as I'm aware, behave very much like automata. I remember reading about an experiment done with a species of wasp that lives in an underground nest which it blocks with a stone when it is away. When it comes back to the nest it drops off its paralysed prey nearby, removes the stone, goes back to the prey, then pops the prey inside its nest.

When a researcher moved the stone back to block the entrance before the wasp could put its prey away, the wasp mindlessly put the prey down nearby all over again, moved the rock all over again, went back to the prey, and repeated this procedure for as long as the researcher kept putting the rock back.

Does that mean it's not conscious? I don't know for sure. I think it probably means it's not, but then again we don't know what consciousness is so I could be wrong. It's certainly a long way from Alex the Parrot.

 

[Morrigan]

Actually "objectivist" in the moral philosophy sense and "objectivist" the Ayn Rand sense are merely homonyms. I would say that it's an easy mistake to make, except that I've been explaining my views for pages now and I don't see any similarity at all between them and the views of Ayn Rand. In fact I'm pretty sure there's a fundamental incompatibility between my views and the ruthless social Darwinism Rand advocated.

So presumably you haven't read the thread, you aren't familiar enough with Ayn Rand's work to have informed criticisms of it, or both.

You're right about one thing, I wasn't aware that there was an homonym.
But the reason I said "that explains everything" isn't because your views were consistent or not with Randroism, actually; since Randroids are (in my experience) usually inconsistent and full of contradictions, that didn't even register as weird to me. No, the reason I said that is the sheer similarity in the smug, self-assured, sanctimonious tone between you and Randroids.

 

[volatile]

You realize you're comparing eating meat to rape, pillage and murder, right?

I am, yes... but not in the way you're implying.

If "Animals is animals, and we is animals" is good enough an argument to support meat-eating ("No justfication is required"), why does it not apply to other forms of animalistic (natural) behaviour?

Can you reason that one out for me without tying yourself in knots?

 

[volatile]

No. I'm not. Because, guess what?: I don't support rape, I don't support pillage and I don't support murder.

Now see if you can tell me: How is this possible? How can I accept that there is no such thing as an objective moral, and at the same time not support these things?

I'm not holding my breath in you understanding this and realizing it by yourself.

So: no justification is required, except when it is.

How... convenient.

 

[volatile]

Moral relativism is nothing more than the trivial fact that different groups of people operate according to a different set of morals. You are born with a limited and malleable set of morals, any other morals you happen to have are a result of conditioning and culture.

You're still confusing an is with an ought. You're also confusing "moral relativism" with historical contingency.

But don't let that stop you feeling smug.

 

[RenaissanceBiker]

Kevin, that doesn't seem very convincing. If a mouse did that you might conclude the mouse was very determined to feed its' young. Even if you think insects are very complex automata, can't you say the same thing about fish or even whitetail deer?

This spring, some birds built a nest under the roof on my front porch. My family enjoyed watching the parents hatch and raise four baby birds. This past weekend, the young birds began to leave the nest. We watched them fly to the nearest tree and and marveled as the parents encouraged them to go farther. They would fly to the next tree and call back to the baby to join them. They did this to each baby as it decided to try. My daughter was horrified when she saw the last baby attacked by a cat. She intervened and brought the wounded baby to me. His left leg was injured and he couldn't stand. I told her he would not survive. I let her choose whether we ended his sufffering or just put him back in the nest. She decided the nest was best because he would have a chance. Yesterday morning, I checked the nest and he was dead. Later, my wife called me to say that the parents kept bringing him food all day. They would fly away unsuccessful then later return and try again. That sounds like something an automata would do.

I respect animals and nature, but I do not give them undue moral status. When I hunt whitetails, I am very carefull to only take a shot when I have a good chance at a quick kill. I have passed up shooting more than one because I didn't want to simply injure them or cause them a slow painful death. I can sympathize with them and still want to eat them.

 

[volatile]

I can sympathize with them and still want to eat them.

Why?

That's the crux.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You're entitled to your opinion that is irrelevant, but you still haven't justified why you think it is irrelevant.

I tried to respond line by line to this rambling collection of trivially obvious claims, straw men and outright nonsense, but frankly it doesn't deserve a detailed response.

Ron, you've dug yourself into a hole of nihilism and your attempts to find a way out just aren't working. You've figured out that moral claims are value judgements made by humans rather than objectively factual claims about the external universe. Yippee for you. You seem to think that you're the first person in history this has occurred to, but let's leave that conceit aside for the moment.

So now you're in a hole. There's nothing to say from within your hole about the morality or otherwise of altruism, or serial killing, or rape, or slavery, or genocide. Anything goes, because as far as you're concerned if moral claims are not claims of fact about the external universe they have no meaning at all.

Then you try to climb out of the hole. You don't want to embrace the logical conclusion of your own position and say "Actually I, Ron, have nothing negative to say about death camps, or sex slavery, or child prostitution. Who is to say we ought not to do these things? The universe? Ha!". You want to be able to say "I'm a really nice guy, I behave in a moral way, and I get to eat meat whenever I want, and there's no contradiction".

However because you don't know jack about philosophy you'e trying to climb out of the hole using the naturalistic fallacy. You're still trying to pull an "ought" statement about how we ought to act from "is" statements about the nature of the world without realising that it's a philosophically impossible endeavour. As a result you are still in the hole.

Meanwhile Cain and I are standing around at the top of the hole while you yell abuse at us. "How dare you make moral value judgements, and demand consistency from me? That is disgusting and dishonest and arrogant! Not that I'm making any moral judgements of course, I am just making statements of fact about the external universe! Who do you think you are? The universe is ignoring you, you know! Do you think you're better than me, just because you make moral value judgements and act on them? How smug and sanctimonious!".

 

[volatile]

Ron, you've dug yourself into a hole of nihilism and your attempts to find a way out just aren't working. You've figured out that moral claims are value judgements made by humans rather than objectively factual claims about the external universe. Yippee for you. You seem to think that you're the first person in history this has occurred to, but let's leave that conceit aside for the moment.

What's really interesting is that there's another is/ought conflation going on - one that comes out of soylent's post and one which Ron has said he finds "eloquent".

The mistake being made is that accepting that morality is (self-evidently) relative is not the same thing as moral relativism. Excusing behaviours on the grounds of cultural normativity - which is what you've been so pointedly critiquing - is obviously not the same thing as pointing out that cultural normativity exists, and is geographically and chronologically mutable. Ron and soylent are confusing the latter with the former, and then declaring victory. It's entirely quixotic.

 

[tsig]

Actually now I think about it there are quite distinct parallels between Ron's position and Rand's "objectivism".

Both involve standing on the shoulders of giants, and then pretending that you are at ground level.

The Randians do this economically, by taking advantage of a well-developed economic system created by social cooperation as their starting point and then claiming they have a moral right to take whatever they can damn well get from there without giving anything back.

Ron is doing this philosophically by living within a system that was conceived of by philosophers and which is made possible by people's mass adherence to moral rules of behaviour which are based on philosophy rather than pure science (since is does not imply ought, no moral rules based on pure science can exist even in theory), and denying that those moral rules of behaviour are any better or any worse than the moral rules of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or modern North Korea.

Can you please cite one moral rule based on philosophy?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Kevin, that doesn't seem very convincing. If a mouse did that you might conclude the mouse was very determined to feed its' young. Even if you think insects are very complex automata, can't you say the same thing about fish or even whitetail deer?

No. That would be incredibly stupid.

Higher animals regularly display signs of a conscious mental life. The fact that they also sometimes do some pretty dumb things doesn't take anything away from the signs of a conscious mental life they do show. I'm unaware of insects ever doing anything that says to me they have a conscious mental life, but I'm open to new evidence. (Some of the smarter spiders are pretty spooky though).

 

[volatile]

Can you please cite one moral rule based on philosophy?

All of them, by definition.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Can you please cite one moral rule based on philosophy?

I talked earlier about Kant and Bentham's moral rules. I'm guessing that you missed it, didn't understand it, or are asking some completely different question but failing to express yourself clearly.

 

[tsig]

Once again, in yet another thread, we've determined that meat eaters are evil poopyheads and vegans/vegetarians are overbearing, self-important ninnies.

Big surprise. I, for one, am shocked to find this out, yet again.

I've never been sure just when a steak dinner with all the trimmings became a moral issue.

Now well done vs rare that's a true religious issue.

 

[volatile]

I've never been sure just when a steak dinner with all the trimmings became a moral issue.

Aaannnddd... We're back to where we came in. Care to explain why it isn't a moral issue?

Even if you conclude that it's OK to eat meat, it's still fundamentally an issue with a moral dimension. That much is unavoidable. That some people choose to behave as if it isn't does not make it so.

How we treat animals is very obviously a moral issue, and one with which most people would agree with - even those most vocally pro-meat. Bestiality, animal torture, issues of husbandry, farming, extinction are all questions which are questions, fundamentally, of morality. I haven't yet seen one person pushing the "Diet isn't a moral issue" line explain why it, and it alone, is free from even having a moral dimension to the question. If you'd care to try, rather than just assert, I'm willing to listen.

I think - and this is only my guess - that even thinking about diet in moral terms leads people to realise just how untenable that steak is in the firmament of their broader moral philosophy.

 

[tsig]

Wow.

Just...

Wow.

You realise with this line of thinking, you're back to tacitly supporting rape, pillage and murder, right?

Despite the verbiage, there's still nothing in your position - insofar as it can even be called a position - that in any way rationally or coherently distinguishes your dietary choices from any other choice you make.

Kevin accused you of nihilism earlier in the thread. I'd go further - it's cowardly nihilism: you're a nihilist whilst pretending, perhaps even to yourself, that you're not.

Wow.

Eat a steak, do a rape
All the same in your mind.