Vegan Gains on the Atheist Experience and most recent videos on veganism from or to Matt Dillahunty

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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Margaret Hayek wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:45 pm Interesting. First, just to clarify, I take it that Dillahunty is NOT, like Frey, engaging in a silly and fallacious denial of ethically relevant mental states to non-human animals
Correct.

I will try to summarize his position to clarify for anybody, since I don't have much time:

He's a hedonist, so he doesn't recognize preferences as valuable in themselves.
So, causing suffering = bad.

He adds onto this provisions for social contract, because it reduces people's anxiety while they're alive to believe that their preferences will be followed. But because animals can't understand social contract, they don't receive those extra benefits.

Humans can not be killed painlessly because it's in violation of social contract which gives living humans peace of mind.
Non-humans can be killed painlessly because they don't understand social contract enough to receive any benefit from it in terms of relieved anxiety. Whether or not they have the rights, they won't know it and thus can't be happy about it.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:45 pmSecond, I don't think that you've actually spoken to whether Dillahunty considered a case in which the profoundly intellectually disabled human's parents AND OTHERS don't care about her.
I think he would be forced to admit then that it was OK to painlessly kill the child. He would still not be OK with torture as he is presumably not OK with it of non-human animals either who are given negative mental states by that (whereas not by painless death).
I don't think he could really object to humans killing their own cognitively normal children *painlessly* before they reach the age of reason either, beyond pragmatic opposition... but that would probably only count as a virtue in his reasoning.
He could only say that it might bother other people, but we could retort that it bothers us that he's killing animals and I don't think he'd have a good argument for that unless he appeals to a popularity contest which starts to be a very dangerous thing, and wouldn't apply as long as it were done in secret.
Thus his "default" should be that it's OK to kill children before they can reason, provided they are your own and you do it painlessly and don't bother your neighbors with that upsetting information. He might object on practical grounds, but I think any objection he could have would be pretty weak.

It not being a moral obligation to not kill your own three year old children painlessly in their sleep as long as you don't tell anybody about it is a problem for his system.

Although a bigger problem is the problem all hedonistic systems suffer from: the pleasure pill scenario.

EDIT: By the way, welcome back! Sorry if our other conversation frustrated you.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by Margaret Hayek »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:04 pm
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:45 pm Interesting. First, just to clarify, I take it that Dillahunty is NOT, like Frey, engaging in a silly and fallacious denial of ethically relevant mental states to non-human animals
Correct.

I will try to summarize his position to clarify for anybody, since I don't have much time:

He's a hedonist, so he doesn't recognize preferences as valuable in themselves.
So, causing suffering = bad.

He adds onto this provisions for social contract, because it reduces people's anxiety while they're alive to believe that their preferences will be followed. But because animals can't understand social contract, they don't receive those extra benefits.

Humans can not be killed painlessly because it's in violation of social contract which gives living humans peace of mind.
Non-humans can be killed painlessly because they don't understand social contract enough to receive any benefit from it in terms of relieved anxiety. Whether or not they have the rights, they won't know it and thus can't be happy about it.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:45 pmSecond, I don't think that you've actually spoken to whether Dillahunty considered a case in which the profoundly intellectually disabled human's parents AND OTHERS don't care about her.
I think he would be forced to admit then that it was OK to painlessly kill the child. He would still not be OK with torture as he is presumably not OK with it of non-human animals either who are given negative mental states by that (whereas not by painless death).
I don't think he could really object to humans killing their own cognitively normal children *painlessly* before they reach the age of reason either, beyond pragmatic opposition... but that would probably only count as a virtue in his reasoning.
He could only say that it might bother other people, but we could retort that it bothers us that he's killing animals and I don't think he'd have a good argument for that unless he appeals to a popularity contest which starts to be a very dangerous thing, and wouldn't apply as long as it were done in secret.
Thus his "default" should be that it's OK to kill children before they can reason, provided they are your own and you do it painlessly and don't bother your neighbors with that upsetting information. He might object on practical grounds, but I think any objection he could have would be pretty weak.

It not being a moral obligation to not kill your own three year old children painlessly in their sleep as long as you don't tell anybody about it is a problem for his system.

Although a bigger problem is the problem all hedonistic systems suffer from: the pleasure pill scenario.

EDIT: By the way, welcome back! Sorry if our other conversation frustrated you.
Cool, thanks very much for this. What you say is much like what I thought he'd need to say, although I think that he would still have problems with defending the view that it is permissible to not be vegan even if he does grant that painless killing of comparable intellectually disabled humans in the right social contexts is OK, since virtually all killing of animals to obtain food is (or in the case of hunting at the very least risks being) very far from painless, and so on. I think what he'd be required to say on these assumptions is that it would be permissible to kill these children / disabled individuals in the sort of ways and for the sort of reasons that we kill animals, which isn't going to look good (and that's before getting to how implausible are the grounds for excluding non-agents from being patients who it is impermissible to harm under these circumstances barring some further defense of why they should be barred, and the problems with the Kantian and Contract-theory attempts to provide such reasons).

All of this said, Dillahunty's very recent response to VG might seem to suggest some different ideas than the ones you and I were assuming he has:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1DLg-DAsmU&t=921s

There is some really weird stuff in there about reciprocation being important but only on the basis of "kinds" which for some reason are supposed to be biological species (why not broader "kinds" - e.g. subphyla like vertebrata or even kingdoms like anamalia? Why not more narrow "kinds" like humans of a given age or ability range?). I guess there's an interpretation according to which this is all just because all human moral agents happen to really care about and only about the biological species membership of moral patients who are not moral agents (which is obviously false), but he seems in places to be doing something else. In fact I think that it's very unclear what position Dillahunty is trying to advance. In all honestly (although I know that it's dangerous to try to read minds in this way) I think that Dillahunty is in no way clear at all in his own head about what sort of position he is trying to advance, and I actually think that it seems pretty transparent that he is not engaging in anything like careful ethical argument, but rather flailing rationalization, trying to grab onto anything that might defend the permissibly of purchasing animal products and then asserting that that's the way morality has to work, yelling at anyone who questions the plausibility of the view that it should work that way and calling them names, and doing so without any regard to whether the ethical ideas he is articulating have any credibility.

Also in light of the recent response I should now take back what I said to non-zero-sum about my not hearing anything from Dillahunty that clearly invokes social contracts. He seems clearly to have invoked them in some sort of way, but what exact role they are supposed to play in his views seems very unclear.


PS I haven't posted here for awhile primarily because I haven't had much time recently; no worries about anything before.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by NonZeroSum »

I've done some editing wizardry to show Vegan Gains and Matt side by side, roughly the same size. I'm going to upload it to my channel with maybe 2 clips from UV at the end (can do the PV Channel also). Or if anyone has any post-debate reflections they want to put on video or audio, I can include that to/instead.

Transcript of the debate is now in the first post:
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3800
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:45 pm Interesting. First, just to clarify, I take it that Dillahunty is NOT, like Frey, engaging in a silly and fallacious denial of ethically relevant mental states to non-human animals (For arguments against this preposterous view that ethically relevant mental states depend upon the internalization of public languages like English, see e.g. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on things like Animal Cognition, Belief, Higher Order Theories of Consciousness, etc.).

Second, I don't think that you've actually spoken to whether Dillahunty considered a case in which the profoundly intellectually disabled human's parents AND OTHERS don't care about her. You've suggested that he's made a claim about what kind of society "we want" to live in - which I suppose at least involves "us" (whoever "we" are supposed to be) caring about the profoundly intellectually disabled child (because of some muck in our heads regarding freaking out about it being our child and perhaps also some crazy view about why we want to parent human children that involves thinking that bare biological species have underivative ethical significance - in which case our reasons for caring about all of this just go back to that indefensibly arbitrary view anyway? I'm not charging Dillahanty with actually thinking this, I'm just trying to make sense of the view that you're saying he holds). But if NONE of us care about the profoundly intellectually disabled, then the reason to give us what "we" want no longer supports not harming the profoundly intellectually disabled. Societies as wholes have surely done this; e.g. the Spartans. I meant to be asking after what Dillahunty would say about whether there is any reason not to harm the profoundly intellectually disabled in such circumstances - or whether we are morally required not to do so for relatively trivial reasons (like eating things that we do not need to be at least as healthy as if we don't eat them - cf. we can be at least as healthy vegan as not vegan - etc. ).
I think brimstone dealt with this, but I think you're right that it's not actually dealing with the ethical question and proposing to kick the ball down the court for future societies intuitionist whims to arbitrate.

_____
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:45 pm By the way I don't know what evidence you have of Dillahunty appealing to social contractualist / contractarian views. From everything I've heard him say he hasn't yet invoked any, although they would be a natural home for his views about moral agency being necessary for underivative moral patiency (or moral patiency of the kind that involves others having not only some moral reason but moral requirements to not harm one). But if Dillahunty or others are trying to push the social contract argument in interesting and initially somewhat plausible (but of course ultimately mistaken) ways that actual philosophers like

Jan Narveson and Peter Carruthers have pushed it, Mark Rowlands, Alastair Norcross, and Jennifer Swanson have a pretty good discussions and responses to this in their respective:

"Contractarianism and Animal Rights"
http://fewd.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/inst_ethik_wiss_dialog/Rowlands__Mark_1997_Contractarianism_and_AR_1468-5930.00060.pdf

"Contractualism and the Ethical Status of Animals,"* and Contractualism and the Moral Status of Animals (http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1171&context=bts).

As I remember, one of the main problems with this literature in general is that people tend to run together a contract theory motivated by trying to give self-interested reasons to be moral (as embodied by philosophers like David Gauthier) and a distinct sort of contract theory trying to explain morality in terms of fairness (as embodied by philosophers like John Rawls). For an argument that the Gauthier project fails in its own terms, see e.g. Holly Smith's “Deriving Morality from Rationality”* and Anita Superson's “The Self-Interest Based Contractarian Response to the Why-Be-Moral Skeptic."*

"A Kantian Case for Animal Rights"
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CMK.Animal.Rights.pdf

Another way someone might try to push the view that moral agency is necessary for moral patiency of the kind that involves others have moral requirements to not harm one would be to adopt a version of Kant's ethics, to which Christine Korsgaard has a nice response in her "A Kantian Case for Animal Rights" (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CMK.Animal.Rights.pdf). I think that this whole project of trying to show that one is committed to being moral just by doing anything for any reason is deeply misguided, but I think that Korsgaard does a decent job explaining how it's supposed to work, and how it can be argued that if it actually justifies duties to other deliberating agents, it also justifies duties to non-deliberating but sentient beings.

*Sorry, I can't seem to find links to these free of a pay wall. If you want a copy just PM me.
These all look like really interesting reads, and would be really useful to discuss at some point and work into wiki articles. I've got the 25 most influential moments in history for veganism video lined up and then we can make more videos tackling philosophical approaches as we cover them in the wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights

1 Historical development in the West
1.1 Moral status and animals in the ancient world
1.2 17th century: Animals as automata
1.3 Treatment of animals as man's duty towards himself
1.4 18th century: Centrality of sentience
1.5 19th century: Emergence of jus animalium
1.6 20th century: Animal rights movement
3 In religion
3.1 Islam
4 Philosophical and legal approaches
4.1 Overview
4.2 Utilitarianism
4.3 Subjects-of-a-life
4.4 Abolitionism
4.5 Contractarianism
4.6 Prima facie rights theory
4.7 Feminism and animal rights
4.8 Transhumanism

Some papers I've put on the forum linked here: http://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/User:NonZeroSum#Ethics

And proposed wiki table of contents:
http://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Table_of_Contents

Ethics
Objective-subjective distinction
Proving Formal Arguments‎
Universalism
Consequentialism
Altruism, The Golden Rule
Utilitarianism
Rule Based
Egoism
Evolutionary Ethics
Virtue Ethics
Deontology
Divine Command Theory
Relativism
Nihilism


_______________

Some clipped together debate reflections from the Ask Yourself discord:

BernieBro a.k.a Tristan
Dilahunty is the Fred Flintstone of atheism
That's what it comes to
Moral Obligation
The NTT argument will be dismissed as Virtue Ethics
Look into Aristotle

Zayzo
Dillahunty plays mental gymnastics. He says it is ethical to kill animals because they are unable to comprehend or show rights. Points out mental retardation and then switches the criteria to being part of a group that can comprehend rights
like he just keeps switching the arguments to fit his agenda

BernieBro a.k.a Tristan
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
Matt has a two tier setup. The first tier is virtue ethics, the second tier is based on ability to reciprocate social behavior.
Matt's argument:
1.) Veganism is good in terms of Virtue Ethics
2.) It isn't mandatory, since animals lack the capacity for social responsibility & self reflection.
His beliefs about the faculties of animals aren't true, but they weren't properly challenged.
Instead, VG was focused on turning it into NTT
Rather than working with what he was given
So all attempts at creating this NTT argument were deflected with, "yes, I agree, it's good virtue ethics, but it's not obligatory"
"Sure, the dog can feel guilt, but should we allow it to vote etc." Matt
"even if we assume it feels guilt, it lacks the utility to extend our considerations to it"

Do not call me Isaac, I'm Will
@BernieBro a.k.a Tristanhis whole argument for distinguishing between virtue and baseline was having to do with freedom...
Veganism is virtuous, but not obligatory cuz freedom to stabbystabby. Love how he thinks this freedom default doesn't apply to animals.

BernieBro a.k.a Tristan
"it doesn't apply to animals for the same reason we don't extend certain responsibilities to animals."

Do not call me Isaac, I'm Will
@BernieBro a.k.a Tristansame reason why we don't extend certain responabilities with alzhimiers, severe autism, or various other disabilities and mental disorders

BernieBro a.k.a Tristan
"it'd be nice to be good to them, but they lack the capacities to justify endowing them with the same consideration. These people with naïve faculties being treated with respect is earned through their family's value that is placed on them. Since there are always exceptions to the rule, we draw the line at humanity."
"let's look at the age of consent laws. Some people are ready for sex at a much younger age, but for the sake of protection, we draw the line where we do."
"same is true with species"

Kelley
I think that a good way to approach matt with this the whole veganism thing would be health & climate change
at first I said just climate change but then aiu mentioned the health thing and he’s right
especially since if you follow matts fb I'm pretty sure he's mentioned reducing his meat consumption for health reasons as recommended by his doctor
I might be pulling that out of my ass but I am at least 40% sure that he said that
but yeah the health & climate change arguments would both fit into his wellbeing thing
the climate change one would be your best bet probably but you would need to have some sources on hand for it

B]BernieBro a.k.a Tristan[/b]
NTT is perfect for some circumstances, but this isn't one of them. There are more direct ways of navigating. Like Kelley said, the environment argument would have been a great starter

Do not call me Isaac, I'm Will
@B]BernieBro a.k.a Tristan[/b] yeah I get where he is coming from, but he makes so many mistakes and incorrect assumptious that there are many ways to tackle it
I am not sure if he would actually make those arguments online tho, even tho I know that is the standard crap you'd get from anarcho types too, does Matt Dillhunty actually let himself say cringe shit like "your mentally disabled loved ones have no inherent moral value and their suffering and wellbeing is irrelevant"

Tay 💊
So I think how fat boy dillahunty says he bases moraly on wellness, and says you can't murder PEOPLE because it will cause anxiety to the persons life, he's not taking into account that murdering animals is effecting everyones wellbeing who care for the wellbeing of animals. that's his contradiction i don't think VG caught on to
i'm trying to make my own conclusion and opinion from the debate and that's what i've figured so far
he makes a remart saying 'you have to understand rights in order for it to be immoral to needlessly kill you'
and i think that contradiction is that retards can't understand rights
so i think the high kind sr should nail him on retard holocaust
so VG did bring up retard holocaust, i was able to forsee that one
now fat boy dillahunty said 'categoriacal reciprocation'
then back to wellness
then after wellness and categorical reciprocation failed
he said 'rights shouldnt be extended to animals because they can't go past thinking and feeling'
as in they can't understand rights
so that would go back to retard holocaust
but he would then say humans don't accept retard holocaust now, therefor its wrong
but retards weren't always given rights
so i think essentially fat boy dillahunty is basing his morals on what's currently accepted norms rather than what should be
which is fallacious
'its like you can't hear me'
'you arent listening'
these are all such underhanded debate tactics
'you think it's infringing on your freedom to needlessly kill and eat animals that can think and feel, just like you'
'bye'
beep
i'm confused at why VG asked 'you think its infringing on your freedom'
can someone explain why VG thought that's what fat boy dillahunty meant?
as far as i can tell, fat boy dillahunty would be against retard rights if he was in [the majority of human history] when they didnt
that would fall in line with his arguement as far as i can tell
because A. they didnt have rights in that period [collectively thought as retards to not be worth life]
if you strip away all of the philisophical jargon you can simply take his viewpoint and apply his rules [doesnt understand rights, collective populus accepts rights for social contract], he would therefor not support retards right to life in a different time period
and if you extrapolate that, he would also not support animal rights in this time period because [collective populus doesnt accept rights for animals]
and that also means he would accept animal rights in the future when it happens
he's basically fallaciously arguing bandwagon ethics and morals
i think it's an is/ought and bandwagon issue that VG didnt get a chance to call out

Lox
I think the debate/skeptic community will eventually catch up with the vegan arguments and develop some more challenging counter-arguments. Their validity is not certain -- personally I don't see how such arguments could be valid, but I estimate that they will be far more challenging for the vegan community. Right now, we have the element of surprise, as society has never been expected to formulate arguments against animal ethics as a general, logically consistent principle.
In this light, we'd do well to get ready for a nastier second round.

Ask Yourself
Debate reaction vid done, should be out soonish.
MY response is 1h 15 min...
That's how listening to this made me react..
Cause Richard spent the whole time trying to assess his position. And he asked some things that derive from NTT type thinking.
If that continued long enough for Richard to actually get matt to clearly spell out his position it would have gotten pretty brutal.
Ricahrd is like mayweather
he doesn't come in strong
he spends a long time just pace matching you and probing till he gets clarity on your view then he dummies you
just go watch his debate with JF first chuck is richard asking questions, this one never got out of that phase cuase of how fucking evasive matt is
I expose it pretty well in this vid..
I mean in a logical sense it's always on the person making the claim
but by our own moral standards it would be insanely inconsistent to suggest he doesn't have to take a burden of ethical justification
Really helps people understand what you value

Daz
What is the best response when you bring up the retard question and the person replies that they deserve rights because they're a member of a group who deserves rights?
the category thing

Ask Yourself
That's where NTT is a good deal more useful than marginal cases
Marginal cases you are semantically stuck there because by definition you can't name a siutation where a marginal case is the normal
(that argument is called species normality)
You ask them if 51% of the population were retarded do humans lose rights
and burden of ethical justification are a bit separate imo
I would say he does have a burden of ethical justification
By species normality logic it would justify murdering the non retards also daz
If the argument is that rights derive from the general character of the species as opposed to the individuals

also my comment on uv vid is over double as liked as next most popular
I like setting her straight when she bullshits
her vid today had some real silliness in it
I mean, she actually tried to say richard was appealing to nature
Philotards love to do this
they pretend you are making some obvious error then pretentiously explain a basic logical fallacy to you
it is so obnoxious if you see through it
as if she would mistake him describing the biological basis of morality for an appeal to nature

Banana Warrior Princess
I had afeeling the debate would go that way because the air time is short and Matt used that to his advantage
I'd abandon the socratic approach and just go full Gary Yourofsky
yeah tell him in no uncertain terms and lay out the contradictions up front before he speaks
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Re: Vegan Gains on the Atheist Experience and most recent videos on veganism from or to Matt Dillahunty

Post by NonZeroSum »

---

Matt Dillahunty vs. Vegan Gains with a summary from Unnatural Vegan
https://youtu.be/sPw920Df2Ns

Clips taken from Unnatural Vegan's video were published before this debate, but I still found them relevant here.

Timecodes:
1:18 Debate starts.
18:40 Matt Dillahunty hangs up, gives closing statement.
24:00 Unnatural Vegan gives a summary of both sides positions.

Sources:
Atheist Experience 22.03 with Matt Dillahunty and Don Baker
https://youtu.be/NbKfBTNPvvY?t=1h22m
Matt Dillahunty vs VeganGains Atheist Experience Call
https://youtu.be/F1DLg-DAsmU
Matt Dillahunty is Wrong, But So is Vegan Gains
https://youtu.be/QlORoDPSL5E

---

Made mainly to practice editing skills, I goofed up one irreversible thing which was after splitting up all the clips and putting them on top of each other, cropped and zoomed to fit, there was a sound delay on vegan gains picture, I thought I'd matched both soundtracks perfectly overlaying before deleting one, but I guess each were just too different or something, so had to move half of the clips which were overlayed with others, which meant the transitions are pretty clunky. Next time will make 100% sure sound and picture match before cutting up into segments.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Margaret Hayek wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 3:01 am What you say is much like what I thought he'd need to say, although I think that he would still have problems with defending the view that it is permissible to not be vegan even if he does grant that painless killing of comparable intellectually disabled humans in the right social contexts is OK, since virtually all killing of animals to obtain food is (or in the case of hunting at the very least risks being) very far from painless, and so on.
That is very true. It would be up to questioning where he's getting his meat.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 3:01 amI think what he'd be required to say on these assumptions is that it would be permissible to kill these children / disabled individuals in the sort of ways and for the sort of reasons that we kill animals, which isn't going to look good
I somehow doubt he would be willing to go there, so he would probably be forced to admit that he shouldn't purchase factory farmed meat or hunt given the inevitability and high risk of suffering.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 3:01 amAll of this said, Dillahunty's very recent response to VG might seem to suggest some different ideas than the ones you and I were assuming he has:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1DLg-DAsmU&t=921s
I'd watched that before I posted (the original version).
Margaret Hayek wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 3:01 amThere is some really weird stuff in there about reciprocation being important but only on the basis of "kinds" which for some reason are supposed to be biological species (why not broader "kinds" - e.g. subphyla like vertebrata or even kingdoms like anamalia? Why not more narrow "kinds" like humans of a given age or ability range?).
I think he's arguing some kind of pragmatic approximations.
He wasn't making much sense there, but he was more so in his other points.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 3:01 amIn all honestly (although I know that it's dangerous to try to read minds in this way) I think that Dillahunty is in no way clear at all in his own head about what sort of position he is trying to advance, and I actually think that it seems pretty transparent that he is not engaging in anything like careful ethical argument, but rather flailing rationalization, trying to grab onto anything that might defend the permissibly of purchasing animal products and then asserting that that's the way morality has to work, yelling at anyone who questions the plausibility of the view that it should work that way and calling them names, and doing so without any regard to whether the ethical ideas he is articulating have any credibility.
That's very possible. I just picked out from what he said what I saw as the most plausible steel man version of his position. He may very well be all over the place, but of course this wasn't a structured essay outlining his views so he could have easily misspoken about something (like the reciprocity thing).
Margaret Hayek wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 3:01 amHe seems clearly to have invoked them in some sort of way, but what exact role they are supposed to play in his views seems very unclear.
I suspect he invokes them on the grounds of instrumental utility, in helping society function (thus alleviating suffering and producing "well being"), and where those rules go beyond affecting suffering then in terms of providing members of that society (who can comprehend the protections it offers) peace of mind (his example of following a will despite the person not being alive, because knowing it would be done gave him peace of mind during life).

His real problem is his fixation on experiential states rather than preferences.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by vdofthegoodkind »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:11 am I somehow doubt he would be willing to go there, so he would probably be forced to admit that he shouldn't purchase factory farmed meat or hunt given the inevitability and high risk of suffering.
The easiest solution for him is just to highlight the fact that right now, we as a society also go out of our way to take care of mentally disabled people to provide them with a secure and stress-, hunger-, thirstfree life with full access to health care and other 'luxuries', yet vegans dont do a similar thing for animals nor care to do so.
So even though his position leads to one edge-case odd conclusion of supposedly having to accept random childmurder as morally permissible, the standard vegan position of equating a being's moral value with its sentience level leads to it being acceptable to leave (at least a subset of) the mentally disabled out in the woods to fend for themselves, which is equally absurd and unacceptable in terms of our current collective values.
There is no single moral framework in existence which coincides completely with all beliefs currently held by society, because everybody's framework is biased, arbitrary and self-contradictory in some ways. So there's no reason for him to adopt the vegan framework just because of one edge-case oddity in his own framework, given that the vegan framework itself contains other equally absurd edge-case oddities.

Not to mention the objection from a practical point of view. How would you go about implementing that in terms of the law. There would have to be all kinds bureaucracy involved: applications for termination of the child with both parents' consent, paternity testing, a notary would definitely have to be involved, etc.
Given the extremely small amount of people that would be willing to engage in this practice, even purely from a cost-benefit point of view it makes more sense to just outright forbid this practice and force the parents to just leave the child in fostercare and/or give it up for adoption. Not to mention if those laws and bureaucratic protections turn out to be flawed in some way (as is often the case) and some psycho gets away scott-free with murdering their kid to spite their ex.

His real problem is his fixation on experiential states rather than preferences.
As if basing his morality on preferences would produce a different result. You can't just baldly assert that an animal has a preference to live rather than to die. An understanding of the concept of ones own mortality is a prerequisite for one to have a preference for either and you'd have a hard time showing that animals have such an understanding.
Last edited by vdofthegoodkind on Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Vegan Gains on the Atheist Experience and most recent videos on veganism from or to Matt Dillahunty

Post by NonZeroSum »

NonZeroSum wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 2:15 pm Matt Dillahunty vs. Vegan Gains with a summary from Unnatural Vegan
https://youtu.be/sPw920Df2Ns
^wow 1,266 views and climbing fast. Just shows what good editing can do to give visual ques to follow like talking heads, getting UV's message out there a little bit more, and starting some good discussions.

---

https://www.facebook.com/groups/atheistexperience/permalink/1006052846215253/
Aaron Zeugirdor
To some of the vegan atheists in this forum:

Why are you compelled to insist that the rest of us not eat meat?

Theo Slade
It helps advance the cause of rationality and secular morality, to not draw an arbitrary line at the level of species.

Unnatural Vegan really puts it best, I put together the two videos from the Atheist Experience and Vegan Gains video so you can see each other's expressions side by side. Matt Dillahunty's closing statement is matched with Unnatural Vegan's critique of both sides positions:
https://youtu.be/sPw920Df2Ns

Travis Hipp
Very nice

Andy Allwood
good video Unnatural Vegan makes some good points

---

David Loza
Dishonest summary of Matt's position by unnatural

Activist Journeys
How so David? Do you think his fall back on thinking beings is really objective when it means the only protection against a mentally handicapped holocaust would be social contract? The risk/learning curve of changing diet is so minimal compared to the suffering, if we choose to be moral in other circumstances we should also want to move towards veganism, otherwise we are drawing arbitrary lines and not promoting a good image of secular morality for Matt's brand of hedonism.

David Loza
lol wow, Activist Journeys you're just like VG, dishonestly misrepresenting matts position and relying on a misleading definition of social contract. This is why Matt said that vg starts by poisoning the well, and unnatural conveniently skips through half of the conversation. Just pay attention to his definitions and not the trigger words that automate knee-jerk reactions.

Activist Journeys
No that's my position that social contract shouldn't be used to escape a moral obligation. There should be universal laws on animal welfare protecting against the paying for the slaughter of animals for taste pleasure. And Matt should be arguing for that change over time based on consistent objective morality. Not trying to defend a status quo subjective arrangement where we just happen to treat our mentally disabled citizens well because they are of our own species, whilst sending highly intelligent animals with a will to live, family of their own to slaughter.

David Loza
that's cool, go put it up on a blog somewhere, all I was saying was she completely missed the point that vg also missed.

Activist Journeys
And yet you failed to provide a valid reason why you think that to be the case. If you'd read the description or followed what she was saying at all closely you'd have understood the comments were made in reaction to the two previous videos from the atheist experience on moral obligation vs. virtue, and vegan gains reaction video. But since points were repeated in the debate, the counter-arguments are still relevant here.

David Loza
I'll give you an easy one right at the end of the conversation. VG, right at the end of Matt demonstrating the burden of proof, again attempts to sneak in his "needlessly". She failed to notice that and instead agreed with VG regarding the "arbitrary" line.

Activist Journeys
Matt was talking about going against his own morality based on well-being by not extending welfare concerns to animals (where there is no risk, which he appeals to earlier). He is a hedonist who wants to arbitrarily protect the right for humans to do inordinate harm to animals, irrationally inconsistent with their desire to do good actions in other parts of his life. He is failing to meet the burden of proof, that veganism is not a morally good obligation, when he promotes secular objective morality and also gives "arbitrary" justifications for the "needless" killing of animals, to be healthy, live a good life, etc.

David Loza
Activist Journeys lol i just told you and now you are assuming his position. Matt has not asserted that it's not immoral to eat animals (or moral to eat animals, however vg or you want to phrase it), VG just shifted the burden of proof with his illdefined use of "needlessly". Its slopy and it warrants hanging up on him.

Activist Journeys
It is not assuming to accurately label a philosophical approach as hedonism, wanting to guarantee maximum rights for your own group arbitrarily. VG just didn't do a good job of explaining his points, he wanted to take the time to try to understand Matt's positions and thought the conversation was moving in the direction of personal rights to do immoral acts even if they are completely needless and harmful to ourselves and the planet. You started out this discussion by saying I was triggered by use of the word social contract, you and Matt don't like the rational clarification that we're talking about a needless act, when Matt tries to use tu quoque fallacy at every turn to say there can't be a rational obligation to principally reject the killing of animals for taste pleasure.

David Loza
Activist Journeys now neither you, nor vg, nor unnatural know what Matt's position is. You keep asserting without evidence what moral obligation should be without demonstarting and keep misrepresenting Matt's position.

guitarlemondave
David Loza okay then. Stop leading us on and explain this so called position that Matt has that we fail to see. I listen with my ears and analyze with my brain. If I'm missing something, point it out. You're acting unbelievably childish by leading Activist Journeys on, and not specifying. I've scrutinized Matt's claims, but find that his are unreasonable at best. So. Please. Elaborate on Matt's argument.

David Loza
guitarlemondave the issue seems to be where the burden of proof should be and whether or not it is morally obligatory to not eat animals according, to vg. That is all that was discussed, aside from the tap dancing around the word "needlessly". Matt's position is still and has been unclear, you people have established his position before he has had a chance to respond. That is intellectual dishonest.

Activist Journeys
Moral obligation is just not harming another sentient beings interests where there is no risk to yourself in doing so. Matt wants to restrict application of morality to reciprocation between thinking beings only, this means getting tied in some very irrational subjectivist contractarian knots e.g. killing mentally disabled people if everyone no longer cares about them. If his life's about promoting secular morality and showing how we can decide to be moral without following a 2000 year old book, then he should promote consistent objective morality, not say it's okay to only care about an arbitrary species in-group.

David Loza
Activist Journeys "it's like you can't hear me" was Matt's quote right at the end. Last time, and I'm gonna go enjoy some rib eye. Its is up to some savior vegan to demonstrate that people have a moral obligation to not eat meat. It is not enough to keep misrepresenting Matt's position and dishonestly shift the burden of proof. This is where Matt talked about freedom, and how much of that freedom should be restricted and for what reasons. Convince people like Matt with a sound foundation, don't begin with "needlessly killing animals".

Activist Journeys
I have done many times, Matt has the burden of proof for promoting as an antidote to religion, secular objective morality which to be rational includes veganism (the obligation not to harm where there is no risk to you) and yet only standing up for the well-being of those within his own species like women's rights. Matt's affinity for thinking beings to do moral wrong to nonhuman animals who can't conceive of reciprocating rights is his position, and it's one that goes against objective morality and should be discarded on that basis. We can have many diverse intuitively/descriptively/behaviorally interesting social contractual levels above the basics of respecting consequential interests, but we shouldn't do harm where there is no risk to ourselves, that is what being ethical means and yes it's an obligation if you don't want to be a bad person.

---

Brad James
What is your line for harm? Where is the specie cut off?

Activist Journeys
If it's easy to do after a small learning curve we can take the principled decision to not eat any animals which have a will to live and can suffer, as well as for our own health and to limit the environmental damage.

Activist Journeys
There are ostro-vegans who eat rope-grown oysters or feed them to their obligate carnivorous cats because there is no evidence of neural capacity and they are easy to grow on ropes and not damaging to the environment if produced right.

Race Lever
OstroVegans = NonVegan

Vegans do not eat animals...

Oysters nervous system includes two pairs of nerve cords and three pairs of nerve ganglia, which are like “mini brains”... ;-)

Brad James
Activist Journeys Ok so your line is neural activity....is there a level of neural activity that passes? ...let me say this is a tough issue and I don't want to be pedantic but the very issue you raised as arbitrary is kind of the point, from a societal stand point.

Activist Journeys
No I don't think there is a level of neural activity that passes for okay to cause suffering for taste pleasure. There's grey areas, so Oysters might have nerves, but no central nervous system to feel pain, so some ethical vegans make the cut off above Ostreoidea, whereas most will just use the category animalia for simplicity/coherency/ethos. But fundamentally we want people to take the principled decision to not go against the interests of sentient animals with a will to live their own lives for taste pleasure, in the long-run this means breeding less into suffering, less harm to ourselves and the planet and allowing for more dense wildlife habitat.

Do you understand that? It's not my line, it's objective morality to respect the well being of sentient animals.

From my comment in a discussion below: Matt has the burden of proof for promoting as an antidote to religion, secular objective morality which to be rational includes veganism (the obligation not to harm where there is no risk to you) and yet only standing up for the well-being of those within his own species like women's rights. Matt's affinity for thinking beings to do moral wrong to nonhuman animals who can't conceive of reciprocating rights is his position, and it's one that goes against objective morality and should be discarded on that basis. We can have many diverse intuitively/descriptively/behaviorally interesting social contractual levels above the basics of respecting consequential interests, but we shouldn't do harm where there is no risk to ourselves, that is what being ethical means and yes it's an obligation if you don't want to be a bad person.

Activist Journeys
Race Lever: There are many competing definitions of veganism, I think we just need a plurality of terms. Some are dietary vegans for health so might pay for multibag products at the store and throw out the animal part, some are ethical vegans who might sometimes practice freeganism/eat cultured meat/oysters. The jury is still out on oysters feeling pain and until then I'm happy for people to reduce all animal consumption bar this one because there are benefits like cheap, easy source of protein, B12 and amino acids. It would also be more ethical than eating many plants like grains where animals die in crop production or almonds which rely on honey bees. But this is really into the weeds, and I understand the ethos of adopting a principled position for yourself of just not wanting to ingest directly species which might possibly feel pain.

Race Lever
Activist Journeys...

OstroVegans = NonVegan

Vegans do not eat animals... NO VEGAN EATS ANIMAL ON PURPOSE and the attempted muddying of the waters about it leads to more suffering of sentient beings not less and the more the waters get muddied as our adversaries love to try to do the more suffering will occur in the future...

Oysters nervous system includes two pairs of nerve cords and three pairs of nerve ganglia, which are like “mini brains” and oysters will shut their shells when they sense danger...

ganglion definition

noun, plural gan·gli·a [gang-glee-uh] /ˈgæŋ gli ə/, gan·gli·ons.

Anatomy.

a mass of nerve tissue existing outside the central nervous system.

any of certain masses of gray matter in the brain, as the basal ganglia.

... ;-)

Race Lever
Activist Journeys... All Vegans are Ethical Vegans or they are not Vegans and something else... The is no real definition that includes eating animals... The concept goes way back before the word Vegan was invented and always had to do with ethics as did the invention of the word itself...When someone calls themselves a dietary Vegan or an ostro-Vegan the word preceding Vegan actually reveals their separation from being a Vegan... I'm a "dietary" Vegan for health but I still buy leather and go sport hunting with my friends to go kill animals for fun on the weekend but I'm still a Vegan... That just doesn't cut it and if you are being honest you'll admit it's pretty ridiculous... I understand someone calling themselves Dietary Vegan for convenience and less confusion about their eating habits and ordering food but they still aren't a Vegan... Freeganism isn't Veganism either with the exception of a real Vegan also being a freegan... A freegan who eats oysters isn't Vegan since Vegans DO NOT EAT ANIMALS...

"The jury is still out on of oysters feel pain so until them I'm happy to reduce all animal suffering"... Um you realize your statement reveals that you are happy about something you admit you aren't even sure is happening???... Would you not be happier to be sure about it???... If a doctor told you that there was a person they weren't sure could suffer you would feel fine with inflicting damage on them??? Doubtful but under your reasoning you should be happy about it...

There are plenty of Vegan cheap easy sources of protein (amino acids) and cheap easy sources of Vegan B-12 there is zero need of oysters which likely can feel pain since "ya know" they have nerves and ganglia... Your claim that it would be more ethical than other things would depend on if the oysters can suffer or not which you admit you do not know so therefore you cannot state that claim as fact... It would be your strongest point though if you could state it as fact in the way and level we can about plants... Plus we can lessen (and are) the harm, suffering, and death caused by crops... You can't lessen harm suffering and death by tageting things to harm and kill that likely can suffer and it is actually more likely that they can feel and suffer instead of things that can't although I'll grant you that it's not likely to be in the same way or at the same level as more complex animals but still suffering...

Black Metal Chef, who happens to have a neuroscience degree stated about this very topic that clams, mussels and oysters have nerve ganglia, which are like “mini brains”, similar to the nerves of our own nervous system. “So that's just f-ing weird and bullsh*t,” he concluded...

I get where your coming from and comprehend your position but if your goal is the reduction of suffering in the long game and overall and not just the short game (and without even being sure) then muddying the waters will work against what seems to be your actual goal... Even if you are guessing correctly about oysters (more likely you are wrong) the muddying of the waters about such things will still work against your end goal... We draw a line drawn in the sand for good reason... Some are on the wrong side of the line even though they have good intent... ;-)

Activist Journeys
Race Lever: Heya, sorry for the delay, your comments keep getting flagged as 'likely spam' by youtube, I don't know if you've had problems on other channels, it might be having the word race in your username, but I don't know.
I'm a "dietary" Vegan for health but I still buy leather and go sport hunting with my friends to go kill animals for fun on the weekend but I'm still a Vegan... That just doesn't cut it and if you are being honest you'll admit it's pretty ridiculous…
I agree that veganism finds it’s most coherent form through ethics, someone is more likely to consistently stick with it if they understand the ethical arguments. A dietary vegan is more like a pure vegetarian, but I still value them calling themselves vegan when talking about diet, health and recipes. Freeganism is more ethical than veganism for reducing harm so I think someone who agrees with the arguments for ethical veganism, should be able to go out and rep for veganism, call themselves a vegan and on other days practice freeganism, call themselves freegan and rep for the cause of food waste. I think if we restrict the definition to the act of not using animals, then it’s no longer about rational arguments and ethics.
"The jury is still out on if oysters feel pain so until them I'm happy to reduce all animal suffering"... Um you realize your statement reveals that you are happy about something you admit you aren't even sure is happening???...
You missed the meaning of the sentence by only quoting half of it. I’m talking about people being able to go from a meat eating diet to cutting out all animal products bar oysters because it’s easier for whatever reason. Whether that’s an allergy to a broad array of vegan food stuffs like legumes, nuts and fruit, or because of a convenient oyster stall at the end of their street, or because they’re used to having a meaty sea food thing on their plate that gives them some irrational peace of mind that no replacement can do the same for. Or developing some low sentience food stuffs for obligate carnivorous animals that are endangered species hanging around in zoos or cats in our homes.
Even if you are guessing correctly about oysters (more likely you are wrong) the muddying of the waters about such things will still work against your end goal... We draw a line drawn in the sand for good reason... Some are on the wrong side of the line even though they have good intent... ;-)
I don’t think we need lines in the sand, I think we need a plurality of terms to rep for in different situations to pragmatically get arguments across. I’m an ethical anti-speciesist first, vegan/freegan/zero-waste lifestyler second. I want long-term an end to domestication and total liberation for the most amounts of animals to exercise their full capabilities in dense wildlife habitat.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by brimstoneSalad »

vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pm The easiest solution for him is just to highlight the fact that right now, we as a society also go out of our way to take care of mentally disabled people to provide them with a secure and stress-, hunger-, thirstfree life with full access to health care and other 'luxuries', yet vegans dont do a similar thing for animals nor care to do so.
Well, that would just be straw-manning vegans, many of whom are concerned with wild animal suffering. So Matt would just be walking himself into another fallacy if he tried to do that. I don't think he's that dishonest, instead he asks what people believe. It might work as a debate tactic on specific vegans, but isn't a defense of his position.

Either way, it doesn't matter what most (or even all) vegans want; what matters is Matt's inconsistency. Tu Quoque is not a valid argument (I don't know why you think it is).
He could easily be the first logically consistent vegan if there were in fact no vegans advocating that already.

The only question is whether logical consistency on this point is possible at all, and it clearly is.

AND more importantly, if it is not possible then Matt's claims that there exists an objective morality at all or false. So he'll have to walk back something on way or another.

vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pmSo even though his position leads to one edge-case odd conclusion of supposedly having to accept random childmurder as morally permissible, the standard vegan position of equating a being's moral value with its sentience level leads to it being acceptable to leave (at least a subset of) the mentally disabled out in the woods to fend for themselves, which is equally absurd and unacceptable in terms of our current collective values.
Such an argument would be incredibly ignorant of the differences between a mentally disabled human (incapable of caring for his or herself, especially in the wild) and a fully functioning wild animal who has the instincts and capacity to survive in the wild within a niche to which it is well adapted (humans are not well adapted to any niche, we rely on intelligence and if so lacking that would be like turning loose a declawed defanged animal to die).
We DO care for and rehabilitate baby wild animals until they are able to fend for themselves (wildlife rehabilitation centers are popular, although perhaps not widespread), and we consider it cruel to release domesticated animals like cats and dogs into the wild on the basis that they don't have the skills to survive in the wild.

If there were such a mental disability which made the person incapable of functioning in society but very adept at surviving in the wild for some reason, that might be an argument and I don't think it would strongly violate "collective values" in the way you claim (even if that mattered as much as you seem to think it does).

vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pmThere is no single moral framework in existence which coincides completely with all beliefs currently held by society, because everybody's framework is biased, arbitrary and self-contradictory in some ways.
Why would that matter? Why would that be desirable?

There's no physics framework that corresponds to all beliefs about physics.
Some people are just wrong, and need to be informed of that and corrected.
vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pmSo there's no reason for him to adopt the vegan framework just because of one edge-case oddity in his own framework, given that the vegan framework itself contains other equally absurd edge-case oddities.
Congratulations on the false dichotomy.

He can construct his own that is actually consistent if no options exist already (which isn't true, as I've said obviously some vegans care about wild animal suffering).
vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pm Not to mention the objection from a practical point of view. How would you go about implementing that in terms of the law. There would have to be all kinds bureaucracy involved: applications for termination of the child with both parents' consent, paternity testing, a notary would definitely have to be involved, etc.
Practical reasons are sound arguments to not implement things as policy for lack of resources.
However, social policy does not equal ethics. Not having the money to do something doesn't mean it's not good to do it. Dillahunty wasn't arguing that laws equal morality and either has anybody here, so I don't know where you're getting that from.

vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pm Given the extremely small amount of people that would be willing to engage in this practice, even purely from a cost-benefit point of view it makes more sense to just outright forbid this practice and force the parents to just leave the child in fostercare and/or give it up for adoption. Not to mention if those laws and bureaucratic protections turn out to be flawed in some way (as is often the case) and some psycho gets away scott-free with murdering their kid to spite their ex.
One can be perfectly capable of admitting something should be illegal for practical reasons while still maintaining that it is ethical.

Many vegans hold that animal agriculture should not be illegal because of the black market it might create, yet that doesn't mean it is ethical to participate in.

Plenty of things are illegal but acceptable or even morally right, and plenty of things are legal but immoral.
vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pm As if basing his morality on preferences would produce a different result. You can't just baldly assert that an animal has a preference to live rather than to die. An understanding of the concept of ones own mortality is a prerequisite for one to have a preference for either and you'd have a hard time showing that animals have such an understanding.
You don't need to understand mortality to have a preference violated by being killed, since being killed tends to make doing anything whatsoever impossible. It violates all preferences with a natural prerequisite of being conscious.
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Re: Vegan Gains on the Atheist Experience and most recent videos on veganism from or to Matt Dillahunty

Post by brimstoneSalad »

NonZeroSum wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:41 pm
NonZeroSum wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2018 2:15 pm Matt Dillahunty vs. Vegan Gains with a summary from Unnatural Vegan
https://youtu.be/sPw920Df2Ns
^wow 1,266 views and climbing fast. Just shows what good editing can do to give visual ques to follow like talking heads, getting UV's message out there a little bit more, and starting some good discussions.
Wow, that's awesome! :D

Has it been shared somewhere big?
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by vdofthegoodkind »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 9:54 pm Well, that would just be straw-manning vegans, many of whom are concerned with wild animal suffering. So Matt would just be walking himself into another fallacy if he tried to do that. I don't think he's that dishonest, instead he asks what people believe. It might work as a debate tactic on specific vegans, but isn't a defense of his position.

Either way, it doesn't matter what most (or even all) vegans want; what matters is Matt's inconsistency. Tu Quoque is not a valid argument (I don't know why you think it is).
It's not a tu quoque fallacy. Matt holds behaviors x, vegans (like richard, if you dont like me generalizing) hold behaviors y. Those vegans have a burden of proof to prove their lifestyle y is superior. They say "your behavior leads to undesirable thing A, so you should go vegan and adopt behaviors y". It is then very relevant for matt to say: "your behavior also leads to undesirable thing A, so going adopting behaviors y is not a good solution to countering the problem of my behaviors x leading to undesirable thing A"

He could easily be the first logically consistent vegan if there were in fact no vegans advocating that already.
We've had this conversation before, the only way for him to do that would be to become some kind of insanely altruistic person. A life not at all unifiable with a life in western society. In all other cases those vegans are just paying lipservice.

The only question is whether logical consistency on this point is possible at all, and it clearly is.
Disagree

AND more importantly, if it is not possible then Matt's claims that there exists an objective morality at all or false. So he'll have to walk back something on way or another.
That's false. It says nothing about the existence of an objective morality. It only says something about matt's compliancy with that so called objective moral standard.

vdofthegoodkind wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:19 pm Such an argument would be incredibly ignorant of the differences between a mentally disabled human (incapable of caring for his or herself, especially in the wild) and a fully functioning wild animal who has the instincts and capacity to survive in the wild within a niche to which it is well adapted (humans are not well adapted to any niche, we rely on intelligence and if so lacking that would be like turning loose a declawed defanged animal to die).
First of all, there is a wiiiiide range of mentally disabled people that are not able to function on their own in society and keep a steady job. A very large subset of those people are still miles ahead in intelligence when compared to the brightest nonhuman animal. If this is truly your objection we can just keep caring for the ones that we have a decent enough reason to assume they would die instantly (like your baby animals example above) and just ditch the ones that we know would be "fine" (i.e their quality of life would be equal to that of wild animals).
Second, Animals as a species are well adapted to surviving in the wild within its niche. Individual animals die young, experience hunger, thirst, stress, etc all the fucking time. So yeah, even though there's a good chance the mentally disabled people we drop off in the woods arent gonna make it long term there's nothing fundamentally different about their circumstances when dropped in the wild.
Third, If you drop them with some clubs, clothes, etc in a well-selected area with few large predators, a lot of naturally growing food and drinkable water, chances are they're not gonna die any time soon.
OR... there's no requirement to drop them on their own. We could put them with some bear grills type motherfuckers, let's say 1 for every 10 retards. A lot more cost-effective than keeping an entire facility with nursing staff operational, and takes care of the majority of your (false) objections to my analogy, while still being a completely absurd scenario in the eyes of every "normal" person.
We DO care for and rehabilitate baby wild animals until they are able to fend for themselves (wildlife rehabilitation centers are popular, although perhaps not widespread), and we consider it cruel to release domesticated animals like cats and dogs into the wild on the basis that they don't have the skills to survive in the wild.
Wow, baby wild animals. Oddly specific response to my general example of the mentally disabled receiving completely stress-, hunger-, thirstfree benefits. Problems which all animals, baby or not, have to deal with all the time.
If there were such a mental disability which made the person incapable of functioning in society but very adept at surviving in the wild for some reason, that might be an argument and I don't think it would strongly violate "collective values" in the way you claim (even if that mattered as much as you seem to think it does).
It doesn't matter to me personally. It's just the thing that vegans like Richard use to corner people like Matt. He knows full well that Matt's reputation/career would be stained/ruined if he publicly said it was ok to just kill mentally disabled people for food provided they are only intelligent to the same extent as a pig.
That's something that you cannot say in our society as a public figure.


And I'm done again. Your gish-gallop style of argumentation is fucking exhausting.
Last edited by vdofthegoodkind on Wed Jan 24, 2018 5:04 am, edited 5 times in total.
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