An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

[brimstoneSalad]

In that they indeed differ, but if you ultimately get rid of frivolous bullshit within society, something we both agree on would be for the best, I dont think they will still be distuingishable after that

Humans are not necessarily purely rational: our lives are full of frivolous bullshit. I'm mainly focused on getting rid of the harmful bullshit: that's enough of an uphill battle without worrying about the frivolous stuff.
We may never be rid of all of the frivolous stuff. While that's not necessarily good (given that there's still harm being done in the world, it would be better for people to focus their interests on helping, so there is opportunity cost), as long as it's basically harmless otherwise (not adding to the harm in any appreciable way), it's not a particularly bad thing either.

Somebody wants to just believe in a God and Jesus and miracles and it doesn't affect him or her in a significant way to harm others or rationalize harmful behavior? Somebody wants to paint flowers or do pottery for no particular purpose other than he or she thinks it's pretty or meaningful to him or her?
That's way down on my list of priorities.

It's like you're on the sinking Titanic and people are drowning, and you're worried about somebody who got a splinter in his finger from being on one of the lifeboats.

Once animal agriculture is ended, and once people are free of Islamic extremism, and 'organic' and alternative medicine are nothing but a quaint memory of a medieval practice, then we can start focusing on the more frivolous habits and the good people could be doing instead.
Changing people's habits in this aspect is very difficult (high cost), and seems to have very limited payoff.

The idea that changing these habits first will have some kind of ripple effect, and everything else will be fixed, is a compelling one. It's a narrative we want to believe in: we want to believe in some bogeyman at the root of it all. Intersectionalist feminists make this irrational psychological principle very apparent. But there's just not much evidence of that.

You may want to read this thread: http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1943

IF you have evidence that stopping artists from making art for art's sake, or for their own interests, will be easy or have some kind of ripple effect in society to fix all of the seriously harmful social ills and make it worth the difficulty of doing, I'm all ears. I'd love an easy way to change the world. But all of the evidence tells me that there's no easy out, and it's about a gradual struggle to show people bad behaviors for what they are (one by one) and try to let them save face and identity in the process to make it easier to reform the larger population.

Still not convinced on the objectivity of it though. I still don't see why a consequentialist viewpoint of avoiding suffering should be inferior to avoiding the violation of interests themselves.

The sum total of all interests are inherently superior to one interest or set of interests alone.
The reason it's rationally superior to consider ALL of the interests, is that I'm not counting out any of them arbitrarily.

I AGREE that interests in avoiding suffering are important, in addition to all other interests. I don't throw any of them out. All interests are valuable.

You take only the subset of interests that are hedonistic, and you arbitrarily throw out the others. You don't have any rational justification for doing so.

It's like I'm saying "Apples, Oranges, Pears, and Bananas are all fruit", and you're saying "Apples, Oranges, and Pears are fruit, but I don't like Bananas so they don't count as fruit."

Just because you don't like an interest, or don't relate to it (because it's a-rational, or you aren't personally interested in what happens when you're not around) doesn't mean it doesn't count or matter to others.

I would be doing the same thing you're doing if I said that ONLY those interests which are non-hedonistic count, and things like physical suffering and pleasure don't matter at all.
I would be wrong to say that.

I'm obeying Occam's razor here. The burden of proof is on you to show why an interest doesn't count. It's not acceptable to say that we just have different views and that in your opinion it doesn't count and in mine it does, because this isn't my opinion: I simply have no basis upon which to rule it out.
I can rule out things like plants and rocks and sponges because they're not sentient, and by nature can not possess interests. I can't rule out true interests just because they are not immediate in time and space.

I went over this with Mr. Purple too. Have you read the rest of the conversation yet?

I also don't really see how even with the interests framework, you would be forced to indulge in peoples after death requests type interests like the painter. Especially in light that you already consceded earlier that one would be able to make a case for killing an animal with no concept of future.

Bear in mind that means a non-sentient animal, like a sponge, or maybe an oyster or jellyfish. Any sentient animal inherently has a concept of the future: it just varies in time. Some animals have a grasp of a few seconds into the future, some have a grasp of years. The perspective is roughly proportional to intelligence/sentience. Animals like chickens, cows, and pigs have been shown to have substantial grasp of time and causality.

A human with some kind of severe congenital retardation that made it incapable of comprehending causality or future -- being essentially brain dead -- would have no interests, so it would be OK to kill it assuming nobody would miss it and there was never an idealized interest for it to live.

Once an interest is born, it has value.
We have no basis to discount interests that are not in this immediate time and place.

So if a human has no interests today because he or she is asleep, unconscious, or has a brain injury, an interest from yesterday in surviving despite that could justify protecting that body. The important consideration for most in that case is idealized self interest, and the cost of respecting that interest (we may be able to help others more with those resources).

Time is weird, and time and space are interconnected in unintuitive ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
I'm not sure if you really want to open that can of worms.

If you read the past few pages of discussion, you'll see inator and I talked about this a little bit too.
Future interests may also have value in the present, but if we have no idea what those will be, we can't really take them into account.
We could give some general examples, though, when the probability is more clear. Like if you're doing something that will with overwhelming probability someday bring shame upon your children (when they are born and capable of having interests), that's probably going to be wrong for that reason in addition to whatever other reasons it's wrong for, even though they don't exist yet.

What's the meaning of creating a being that's interested in existing, where that interest is satisfied in the very act of creation?
Is that good? Is that Neutral? Does that logically cancel itself out?
A similar issue exists in hedonistic Utilitarianism http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
It could be like the P vs. NP problem of ethics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

While this is a very interesting topic, it's kind of irrelevant to the difference between what we're advocating, since it doesn't strongly distinguish them.

Combine that with the fact that interests are fluid and things get difficult. For instance: instead of a painter, lets take an infant that drew a picture for his dad. It is obvious that the infant has an unspoken interest in the dad not destroying the picture.
However, that infant can grow up, cultivate a mindset where he thinks such things are frivolous, find that drawing amidst a pile of other stuff from his childhood when cleaning out the attic one day with his dad, and then tell his dad to throw the picture away. He no longer has an interest in his dad not destroying the picture.

Look into idealized interests.
The child (not an infant, infants can't comprehend something like that) may have been mistaken about the quality and significance of that picture, and that misunderstanding may have informed the interest. Usually when our interests change, it's not something at the root changing, but our views of the world being refined.
He may also not want his father to destroy it because he wants his father to love him (nothing to do with the painting), and would have seen that as a sign of disregard: later he may be more confident in his father's love and pride that such an act would no longer harm him, and realizing the painting is bad (being better informed) he wants it thrown out.
This is distinct from an adult painter who has existential interest in his work.

A carnist may have an interest in being a good person, but be misinformed about the the nature of morality, believe the myth of necessity of meat eating, and have an ignorance about what harm means and how animal agriculture causes harm: once corrected, the carnist may go vegan. The same core interest is there, the information has just changed.

Why should you respect a deceased person's interests they had right before they died.

For the painter (which is why I gave that example), the interest is often existential and idealized.

If the painter was misinformed, and thought that the painting was good and would bring people pleasure and make them regard him positively (AND this is the reason he wanted it preserved), but it was actually terrible and would cause people to ridicule him after his death, then it might be appropriate to destroy it.

This all comes back to idealized interests.

Perhaps if they had lived longer they might've changed their mind about that interest themselves.

When people change on an existential level of magnitude, they may become different people. See "Born again Christians".

One could even argue that death itself is a "state of mind" where someone has no interests, depending on how you choose to define an individual.

You don't get to define people, people define themselves.
Either way, death is not a "state of mind", it's a lack of one; a corpse is not sentient or conscious, and can not existentially identify with the living body or have interests of any kind.
Only the interests people had while they were alive matter after they're dead; if there was an interest to do something in particular with the corpse or protect it in some way while alive for the eventuality of death, that would matter. A corpse can't override that interest by having an interest against that.

Another hypothetical that demonstrates the issue a little more clearly: Suppose you are on holiday for a month. Your painter friend has terminal cancer and stashed his painting of his at your house to keep safe. The first week you get a call wherein your friend asks you to destroy it after he dies because he feels his request was too self serving. The second week you get a call where he says he changed his mind and he wants you to keep it safe after all. The third week he calls and tells you to destroy it after all. The fourth week your friends wife calls and tells you he died.
You get home, are you now morally obligated to destroy the painting? Or can you just do whatever now because if he hadnt died he mightve changed his mind again?

Good question. This sounds like a confused person who was struggling with an internal conflict. Either his knowledge was incomplete, or something was seriously interfering with his emotional state or even his mind.
Ask his wife what she thinks he really would have wanted (his idealized interest), since she should probably know best.

This is actually a well established field of law, in last will and testament, including disputes which can arise due to late changes and suggestions that the person was not of sound mind, or was unduly influenced. As in many cases, the courts have already worked out most of the best ways to deal with this.

We would all like for our actual idealized interests to be protected, and those derive from our most 'sound' states of mind (look to the legal definition). The choices alternate states of mind make while temporarily insane is not something we want or value. When we're of sound mind, we want certain interests protected even from ourselves in another state of mind. This is probably a major reason why we so much more value long held interests than fleeting ones, aside from the fact that they are probably deeper and more existential.

For an even more extreme example, you could also postulate a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde scenario: In this case, we're talking about the interests of two different people residing in the same body at different times. Such a conflict could be resolved like any other between two people. Replace the Muslim with one of them.