[x] content itt

This is one of the probably few times I think a discussion in the NC thread is strong enough to do well outside it instead of just fading away.

i would be fine with the topic being moved into its own thread...i also just found another debate between singer and d souza - can there be morality w/o god?...watching it now...

Link please.

Original Debate on whether or not god exists: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phgb6...eature=related

Morality Debate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy55B...F41F9A&index=1

im in the middle of the second one now...both seem to be dsouza misrepresenting singers ethical views and trying to get sympathetic reactions from the crowd on what an evil bastard singer is and it follows that since singer is evil atheism is bad etc...but i already think dsouza is a douchebag...

Quote:
Originally Posted by thirddan
i will very briefly summarize the 4 premises of the book since i don't want to plagiarize too much

1. pain/suffering is bad Sure
2. humans are not the only being capable of suffering Sure
3. the individual characteristics of a being have to be considered when deciding to take a life, not just the species I guess this means no rule you have to follow, but use judgement...ok sure.
4. we are responsible not just for what we do, but what we could have prevented (i guess this is the one that some people disagree with, i've talked to some posters in smp about this, but it seems obvious to me) OK...I have a problem with this being a bit broad

I am going to throw out a couple of ethical questons

Bears don't need to eat meat. They cause undo suffering to deer and other animals. Should we attempt to stop them from eating other animals? We have the power and they do not need meat as they are omnivores. We can prevent suffering. Should we?

Cougars(mountian lions) around here eat animals and pets. They often play with them like house cats with mice...torturing them before killing. Should we stop this suffering? we have the power to stop some. Let the cougars starve or let the deer and poodles suffer?

Cows are raised only to feed humans. In the wild they would suffer badly. If we are not going to eat them should we kill them humanly til extinct? Sterilize them and keep them til extinct? Eat them?

Humans by taking up space, polluting and paving areas cause suffering of many wild animals. Should we sterilize humans until extinct? Kill them? Eat each other humanly? However, many animals(mice, crows, rats, seagulls, etc) would suffer mass starvation and suffering if humans disappear?....??

Chickens are smaller than cows. So if I only eat chicken wings, thousands suffer. But if I eat only beef and all parts of the cow fewer suffer. So is it more ethical to eat cows? Are chicken wing lovers naturally cruel?

Damnit Merek, you beat me to the punch.

Most people actually DO believe that's the end of the argument. They reason that since we are programmed to eat meat by evolution, which is true, then it's perfectly ok to eat meat.

Of course this reasoning is fallacious and is known as the Naturalistic Fallacy

Just because we are designed to eat meat doesn't mean we ought to eat meat.



I posted this pic for amusement. I have been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since 7/1/08. What largely influenced my decision was the arguments presented by posters like Madnak. They were very similiar to Singer's reasoning. There's just no justification for causing suffering to any being in the universe capable of suffering. I have read Singer's book "Writings on an Ethical Life". I think it's one of the most important books ever written. If I had to pick a "bible" for nonreligious people it would be that book.

Edit: Nitting up my own post. I'm sure we can come up with many situations where we can justify causing suffering to another sentient being so what I just said is not strictly correct. More wisely put, most of the suffering humans cause nonhumans cannot be justified.

While I was walking home from the grocery store, and I was thinking of posting something very similar.

I've read the pro-vegan ethical arguments before in previous threads here and argued it a bit with some family members. For some reason I never realized they all came out of the same book. But that would explain why everyone was using the same arguments and examples.

I got C's in both of my college philosophy courses and had to cheat to get grades that high. So I just can't wrap my head around the arguments being made. It's easy for me to understand someone that just doesn't like the idea of killing animals so they can eat. Or even someone that finds meat disgusting. But when it's broken down into the more complex ethical arguments, I just don't get it.

Besides the bear and cougar, and cow argument, it seems that in one hand, it's claimed that humans and and non-humans should all be treated as equals and OTOH humans should be held to a higher standard than the rest of the animal kingdom.

FWIW, I've been on and off vegetarian but never vegan a few times in my life. My Mom was vegetarian the last 10 years of her life and I have a sister-in-law that is vegetarian.

tsearcher, I'd recommend reading chapter one of Singer's book Animal Liberation. He argues very straightforwardly and unemotionally: I had heard the cliffnotes before, from friends and films and PETA, but they're much less ******ed when laid out by an actual smart guy and good writer.

Thanks, I just ordered it. $10.19 at Amazon.

ill address tsearch now since its much simpler than mereks and i have to think through mereks post a bit more...

tsearcher,

nobody is arguing that humans are the same as all animals, this is obviously not the case...humans have the capability to reason and look at differnet points of view on these kinds of topics, to debate etc...in my opinion it is legitimate to think that humans should give money to charity, but not legitimate for me to ask a dolphin to give money to charity, its a category mistake...this kind of leads into the question about whether humans should prevent animals from eating each other or not, but his is a different argument from whether singer is right or not that eating causes suffering, nobody has really argued that they dont...you and merek are mainly arguing that if we accept that eating meat causes suffering then we are not doing enough to get rid of it...can you see the difference?

this is something that i've been thinking about and discussed a bit with ILOVE over PM (he introduced me to singer through rgt/smp)...if i agree that i can and should donate money and decide to give $50/month, I am obv not doing all i can because I can afford to give $51/month etc until I can no longer afford to eat/pay rent and so on...similarly, if i am convinced that im right am i then justified (required?) to take a megaphone to the streets to try and convince others that they should be vegetarians?

hopefully my responses are making sense...and let me know if they aren't...im trying to get to these during lulls in my work day so they might be rushed...but i enjoy thinking these things through and trying to really see if my thoughts make sense and are justifiable w/o just being like "well, peter singer says blah blah"...

Does this mean we have an ethical obligation to stop lions from killing gazelles?

I have read a decent amount about Singer, but never actually read any of his writings.

I tend to agree with him with regards to ethics toward humans. But as I don't believe animals are sentient, I don't believe they actually "suffer" in the same sense that humans do, so I can't agree that you should be weighing the suffering of animals on anything like the same scale as the suffering of people.

Well keep in mind, Although Singer's argument is valid in the sense that his conclusions follow seamlessly from his premises, the premises themselves cannot be justified just as Euclid's axioms cannot be justified. If you reject the premises, even a valid argument means nothing to you, and that's all you can do with premises, reject them or accept them, you can't prove or justify them.

What's interesting to note is most people tacitly accept Singer's premises but eat meat anyways due to biological/cultural conditioning. Basically if you accept the premises 1) Suffering is bad and 2) Happiness/pleasure is good, it's going to be impossible to construct a valid argument for eating meat. This argument of course refers to humans who have many nonmeat alternatives. The argument does not apply to humans who have no choice but to eat meat to survive.

I accept Singers' premises because they fit my moral intuition very well. Keep in mind, most religious people would reject Singer's argument in a heartbeat. Their logic is based on the fact that humans have souls and animals don't so there's nothing wrong with eating animals.

I have no idea how to handle the bear/cougar argument, but I don't think that invalidates Singer's reasoning one bit. Also, Singer never advocates treating humans and nonhumans as equals and I wouldn't either. He is simply saying that the fact that we belong to this club called H0mo sapiens is morally irrelevant in the same way that being white or male is morally irrelevant.

I have yet to try the vegan diet, but I hope that's where I end up someday since it is clearly more ethical than being a lacto-ovo vegetarian.

Thanks Thirddan,

I know it's kind of hard and frustrating to discuss a book with someone that hasn't read the book.

Your answer makes sense. But it's the references to speciesism that confuse me then. As that implies, to me any way, that humans and animals are equal and should all be treated equally. Maybe I'm confusing it too much with racism. I'd never say it's wrong for white people to torture and rape women but it's OK for black people to do so.

ILOVEPOKER pretty much sums it up - "natural" is not synonymous with "morally right" or "good", though most people make this mistake. Another example like this is ideas of prolonging human life artificially using robotics, or biotechnology - some people say it's "natural" to grow old and die, and therefore we shouldn't try to stop it. It's natural, sure, but how in any way is it 'good' to grow old, lose your mental/physical abilities, and then die? Going a bit OT, but just giving another example of the natural/good confusion.

Tempting.

Depends on whether you think the life of a cow has greater value than the life of a chicken. I think both have sufficient value that you shouldn't kill them - vs, say, a fly that is basically a bunch of fairly simple algorithms stuck in a biological shell - but maybe a cow does have more. Then again, humans - in my view - are just a larger number of very sophisticated algorithms stuck in a biological shell.

Not a single creature on this planet ever asked to be conscious/sentient/protosentient/self-aware etc. I would suggest it's probably evolutionarily-speaking better to not be conscious so you don't understand the unpleasantness of natural selection and the fact you - broadly - have to kill or survive. However, humans are in such a position of power on this planet I think we effectively have a moral duty to try and alleviate the suffering of the other creatures unfortunate enough to evolve an ability to feel pain.

Yeah, I've run into this one before.

It's nicer than people give it credit for. I basically just consume every kind of curry product known to man and go from there!

Being eaten by a bear isn't so bad. You get to see your parents, see the sun, breathe fresh air, move your limbs.

Being eaten by a (modern, Western) human sucks. You get to do none of those things.

The end is the same, but the life isn't, and the life is what matters.

You ever seen one animal kill another? It isn't pretty. They're already eating the animal while it's still alive.

I know there's a lot of propaganda from peta and what not regarding "factory farms". And I've spent some time on a hog farm, so I know there are examples of really ****ty conditions for livestock. But not all farms are like that at all. There's many options available as to where your dead animals are raised.

That's fair.

You'd agree, though, that bears cause less suffering in their omnivory (**** you, Google Chrome spellcheck) than we do. Even if they caused as much suffering as we do, it'd still be much more efficient for us to change our habits than to try to change theirs, if we wanted to reduce suffering.

Well yeah.

The best ethical arguments, or at least the ones that appeal to me the most, in favor of vegetarianism, veganism are the land use arguments. But that's because I freely admit to being speciest. And arguments that help humankind and put the needs of humans first make more sense to me.

Now if I understand what thirddan and others are saying, it's a sliding scale. Cows are more important than flies. And it's just a matter of how one weights the scale. And the difference between me and the ethical vegetarians is that I put a heavier weight on humans and thus a lesser weight on non-humans than they do. Is this correct?

Any one cow is almost certainly more important than any one fly, yes, but not because the cow species is innately more important than the fly species.

This is when the word "speciesism" really helps, with its correspondence to racism, sexism, etc. The difference between "importance" of cows and flies is arbitrary. A cow will have a better brain and more sensitive nerves, and that's the difference. That's the thing that matters - not that one was built by cow genes and the other was built by fly genes. (A lobotomized cow would not get the same consideration as he did when he had a full brain, even though he's still a cow.)

Singer likes to point when the categories overlap; for example, an experienced dog can be more aware than a human baby, or a person with a severe mental handicap. If you could hypothetically line up that dog next to a human with the same sentience, and you had to save one from a fire, and you preferred to save the human every time, that would be arbitrary and that would be speciesism. You're condemning a creature for no good reason except the category that he's in.

So your weighting is the second difference. The first is that you have something to put the weight on in the first place.

yes, that seems correct...since you are admitting that you are using an irrelevant determning point for your consideration...in your world view just being a h omo sapien gives you dominion/superiority whatever over all other species...we are saying that there is no justification for this if you base your ethical decisions on suffering and not species...the speciesist position is similar to the racist position, such that you have picked a specific trait and go from there...

like ILOVE stated, its whether or not your premises are accepted that will make/break any valid logical argument...

if your premise is

- whites are superior to black

then you can make valid logical arguments for slavery etc...but your premise will be rejected by nearly everyone so the conclusions you reach are meaningless...

if your premises are

- suffering is bad
- lots of beings suffer
- suffering is preventable

then the conclusion that suffering should be prevented can be reached for both humans and non human animals...and since everyone, at least in this thread (except the guy that thinks animals don't suffer), has accepted these premises as valid, then the conclusions that are reached should are useful...j

of course it still leaves the issue of: "how much should I do?" to be dealt with...

OK so you're comparing one individual animal to another, not one species to another.

Instead of saying all white people are less intelligent than all black people, you'd say, "that white guy is less intelligent than that black guy." The first is racism the second is a statement of fact.

edit / too slow this is a response to kimball

I feel comfortable in stating that there is not a single cow in existence that has a better brain than me.