Okay.

Fwiw, I only spoke of the legality of the issue because it was in the quote I was responding to.

Sure.

Agreed (assuming, of course, that we are accounting for the punishment's effect on potential suffering caused by others).

If the necessary factors have been weighed correctly, it may very well be the case that the moral thing for me to do would be left them torture and kill one person every year. Now, obviously, if we (the other country) weight the suffering of an innocent person being tortured and killed significantly more harmful than their country being forced to stop this yearly practice, and/or we ourselves are suffering knowing that the other country is doing this such that it would outweigh their country's suffering, then the moral thing to do would be to put a stop to it.

Sure, I was (mainly) referring to breed houses, slaughterhouses, and the like. In cases such as a dog breeder where the possibility for an animal's family bonds is significantly more likely you will have to weigh the mother's fleeting suffering against the positive benefits it brings, e.g. joy to the 5 year who just got her first puppy.

I think the implications of this are too severe for us to practice this form of morality. We can come up with many scenarios where killing and all sort of crimes are allowed through this world-view. I'm not convinced this is at all feasible. Interesting discussion nonetheless.

Okay.

I can't give a full definition but I can contrast it with its opposite - the contingent. The necessary is non contingent. That draws the line for the purpose of the argument even if we can't obtain a full explanation. And one reason a full explanation of the necessary may not be possible is because it has none, or it wouldn't be necessary.

as you can probably guess, I have about as little idea what contingent means as noncontingent. We have a sort of intuitive sense of temporal causality whereby we group parts of the universe into loose autonomous sections and say things like "my bet caused him to fold", but the kind of contingent causality we are talking about here? Ya I have no idea. Clearly temporal causality isn't what is being talked about when we compare gods and universes and other such things...

Time isn't the key. Contingent means it could have been otherwise. You ate fish for dinner but you could have had steak, etc. We mean the universe is contingent because it didn't have to exist and/or could have been different.

I realize, I was giving this as an example of a notion of causality that I DO understand, unlike whatever is going on here.

...and what does the bolded mean? This is getting a bit circular, because you are essentially saying the same types of words repeatedly, while I am questioning the concept writ large.

To give an example of the difficulty: you say I could have had steak for dinner. This is a common place expression, but what do we mean by it? Typically, we mean that we had the option of steak, that we could have chosen of it. That is, we can imagine in our heads the alternate possibility of eating steak. It may well be that the universe is deterministic - that I couldn't actually have had the steak - and instead could only conceive of the alternate idea. But if we use such a "can conceive of a different possibility" as our notion, we can clearly conceive of no gods existing and so are not helped in our aim to prove the existence of god.

So its not that notion, okay, but what is it?

I don't like to put it in terms of our ability to imagine. Even if the universe is deterministic, it COULD have determined you to have steak instead of fish.

Some of this is tautological or question begging. But tautology as definition is useful. We define what we mean by contingent as it could have been different, which is just another way of saying it isn't necessary, and the necessary as it could not have been different which is just another way of saying it isn't contingent. So there are definitional concepts involved. So the argument from contingency isn't an absolute proof - it serves to clarify what we're talking about and what we are choosing. If you say the universe is necessary then you are saying it could not have been different or could not not exist- which I expect is why WLC can't find any naturalists who claim the universe is necessary.

Well, it's a vision of the future I was thinking about, and there is still going to be an order, with humans at the top of what humans care about, even my utopic idea is not suggesting equality of species. Killing an ant would not be like killing a person. But killing an ant would be different to not killing an ant, even if the difference was very very small.

I'm sure I'm also mixing together morality with ethics - you cannot empathise with a houseplant no matter how hard you try (but you might grow an attachment), but with mammals it could be rather easy.

Just to push this sidetrack even more OT, have you seen the documentary Food Inc? It's more about the effects of big business on farming, but one scene I remember from it was of baby chicks being automated throughout a processing plant in the same way as inanimate, non-living mass produced items are, and later we see dead, plucked chickens hanging on hooks, whizzing through the conveyor belts, and the camera pans out to show dozens, to hundreds, to thousands of chickens whizzing through the factory. It's shocking enough that it doesn't quite seem real.

We're getting further and further OT, but there is something about mass-consumerism and wastefulness that I find appalling when I think about it. I think this is why I find something about parents that have unusually large families to be repulsive ("Meet the Duggars" that was on TLC - a Christian family with nineteen children).

Something else we take into consideration, that would be considered harmful but not suffering (in the way has been described so far) would be removing someone's agency, their ability to make and act on their own decisions. Slavery is still wrong even if a slave is well fed and boarded, and is never struck or harmed physically. Killing someone is the ultimate, permanent removal of agency.

Well, your utopia is an interesting idea, I'll give you that. I don't think I can agree that this is the best way to flesh out morality, but I can respect this as your personal view and preference, it's not unreasonable.

Yeah, I've seen Food Inc., the conditions are pretty appalling. I'm a little less sympathetic to the animals we eat, because I spent some of my youth in a culture that revolves around killing and eating beef, but even there, the animals did not suffer, they were not caged in small spaces or force-fed, and all-in-all were treated as well as you can for an animal you intend to slaughter. From what I've seen this problem is more prevalent in North America.

Well, it's definitely strange for someone to have that many kids, I'm not sure I would go as far as calling it repulsive, but it does make you question some things.

I'm sure you can guess my response by now: and what does that mean?

or these...

You are saying the same type of thing in a variety of ways, but I don't really understand what any of these variety of ways actually means. I'm not convinced it is a coherent and meaningful dichotomy.

In a deterministic universe, what does it even mean to say it "could have been determined differently"? I don't understand this concept. You have told me it is not about us being able to imagine it differently. So what is it?

You don't find many naturalists who claim the universe is contingent on a necessary being either. The most common answer might be something like that the universe "just is" perhaps.

Well, this is obviously not moral or ethical, and part of what I was getting at when I suggested that simply defining morality in terms of harm - that there have to be other stipulations, as asdfasdf32 also noted.