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

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Margaret Hayek
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by Margaret Hayek »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Feb 06, 2018 6:52 pm
I'm not sure I parsed all of that correctly, but I don't think so. I don't know for certain where his claims of moral virtue come from, but his explanation of saving a child from an oncoming truck seem to suggest it's a matter of personal difficulty and it's not distinguished in fundamental type.

Not that I think it matters much but I think that basic moral views 1-3 would handle this straightforwardly as follows:
(a) Empirical / axiological assumption 1: optimific sets of rules won't demand extreme self-sacrifice (e.g. very riskily saving a child from an oncoming truck - in part due to the degree of personal difficulty)
(b) Extreme self-sacrifice is not morally required (given a & basic moral view 3)
(c) Empirical / axiological assumption 2: Extreme self-sacrifice is (in virtue of the very strong moral reasons constituted by the very great expected benefits to those one is attempting to save) more strongly favoured by moral reasons than the minimum that is morally required. (given b & the further assumption of greater expected moral reasons)
(d) Extreme self-sacrifice is morally virtuous (given c & basic moral view 2)


Margaret Hayek wrote: Mon Feb 05, 2018 4:22 am I strongly disagree [which your claim that it matters that Dillahaunty isn't a desire-fulfillment theorist], and I really don't see why you think that.
Because that allows him to circumvent all of the issues with killing animals who want to live as an act in and of itself, and it breaks down the rest of his moral claims by generating the same kinds of exceptions that allow him to kill animals -- creating ignorance to avoid anxiety, which is his only cited reason preventing the painless killing of humans. Surely we could talk about lost productivity and other matters, but these are all variable. There would always be people whom it's fine to kill in certain ways for any reason, because the only thing he could appeal to is consequence of causing anxiety or trouble for others, not any loss for the one being killed.

Oh, I see what you're thinking now; thanks very much for the clarification. I think that you are making assumptions about population ethics and / or the ethics of what matters in survival / death's harm that are very very false, in some ways that resemble those in which views that have been proposed by Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse were very false. First, you seem to be assuming either:

(1) that one has to accept the implausible impersonal total view according to which one has most moral reason to cause the existence of well-being, regardless of whether it benefits anyone or not (or that coming into existence is a benefit proportional to the degree of well-being one has while alive), and that somehow this supports the view that one only has moral reasons to omit killing those who have future-directed desires, or

(2) that, if we take an individual / person affecting approach (and hold that our moral reasons to benefit and omit harming are moral reasons to benefit & omit harming individuals, and also hold that coming into existence isn't a benefit proportional to one's degree of life-long well-being), and we don't accept a desire-fulfillment theory of well-being, then there are no moral reasons against painlessly killing individuals who don't have future-directed desires.

Both of these assumptions are very, very false. For a helpful discussion of how to deny the implausible impersonal total view (while, if you like, remaining a consequentialist), see especially the work of Melinda Roberts (e.g. her "A new way of doing the best that we can: Person‐based consequentialism" - just let me know if you can't find it without a pay wall and I can send you a copy) - or more generally her Stanford Encyclopedia entry on The Non-Identity Problem (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/).

The reason that (2) is false is that, even if you accept some version of the desire fulfillment theory, the conclusion that there are no moral reasons against killing individuals who lack future-directed desires follows only if you accept the radically implausible CURRENT desire fulfillment theory, according to which morally relevant benefits and harms to someone at time t are determined only by her desires at time t, and regardless of the extent to which death would deprive her of things that she would very much desire in the future / at the time they would come. For criticism of this current desire fulfillment theory see e.g. Appendix I of Parfit's Reasons and Persons ("What Makes Someone's Life Go Best" - e.g. you can get the full text pdf at http://www.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-Parfit-Reasons-and-Persons.pdf), Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (let me know if you can't find it without a pay wall & I can send it), and Kris McDaniel & Ben Bradley's "Death and Desires" (http://krmcdani.mysite.syr.edu/deadesir.pdf). Philosophers have developed many variants of the alternative and much more plausible deprivation account of death's harm: that death harms you to the extent that it deprives you of future goods that would have been yours (where what would have been yours can e.g. be a matter of degree determined by the degree of one's psychological continuity with one's future selves) - see e.g. the aforementioned books by Parfit and McMahan. Given such an account of death's harm in terms of deprivation of future goods, it does not really matter much to what's at issue here what one takes to be the best theory of well-being / future goods: desire-fulfillment, hedonism, objective list, etc.

Moreover, if you are assuming (1), you be making an egregious mistake of assuming that there are no moral reasons not to painlessly kill someone who lacks future directed desires on the impersonal total view. But even Singer knew that THIS was false -if you kill someone who lacks future desires and don't immediately replace them with someone else who will be at least as well-off, then you cause there to be less well-being in the world, which is something that you have more moral reason not to do. What would be better is if you made the mistake that Singer made, of assuming that given the impersonal total view, future-directed desires make those who have them "irreplacable" (i.e. such that it isn't morally neutral to kill them and replace them with someone else just like them - or at least more irreplacable in this sense) while those who lack them are "replacable" (i.e. such that it is morally neutrla to kill them and replace them with someone else just like them - or at least more replacable in this sense). Of course, even if this latter mistake were not a mistake it would not support your contention that it matters that Dillahunty doesn't accept a desire fulfillment theory - since here we would already have to admit that there are moral reasons against killing without replacement regardless of our theory of well-being, and since animal agriculture destroys far more wild animals than it replaces with farmed animals, it indeed falls afoul of the moral reasons against killing without replacing. But in any event many, many authors have pointed out how Singers views about the influence of future-directed desires on irreplacability fail miserably (as I recall Joel Feinberg was one of the first to make this point in a review of Singer's Practical Ethics for some popular publication like the New York Review of Books or something). If you kill someone with future-directed desires then (assuming a desire-fulfillment theory of well-being) you deprive the world of the well-being that she could have had by fulfilling those (and the rest of her) desires. But if you replace her with a new individual who has future-directed desires and these get fulfilled, you don't actually make the world worse than you would have had you not killed her and replaced her. In this respect killing and replacing someone with future-directed desires with someone else who has future-directed desires is exactly morally equivalent to killing and replacing someone who lacks future-directed desires with someone else who lacks future-directed desires (you deprive the world of the well-being from the first fulfilling her desires, but then you give the world the well-being from the second fulfilling her desires, and it cancels out).
Margaret Hayek
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Re: Reg Flowers' Response to the debating efforts of VG

Post by Margaret Hayek »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:01 am Great post Margaret, and thanks for cross-posting so this didn't get lost in the youtube comments void.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 12:31 am This is because much, much weaker and less controversial ethical premises are entirely sufficient to support veganism
I would try to avoid the term "weaker" because it may be interpreted as something undesirable, when I think what you mean is that the premises are not making such strong claims?
Thanks. Yes, by 'weaker premises' I mean logically weaker premises, or premises the content of which requires less to be true of the world in order to be true. Because (simply in virtue of the axioms of probability theory) logically weaker premises are always more likely to be true than logically stronger premises, logically weaker premises are always better to employ than logically stronger premises in defense of the same conclusions. But thanks very much for observing that many people will not always understand that this is what I mean by 'weaker' - in the future I'll just say 'less controversial'
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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: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 am Not that I think it matters much but I think that basic moral views 1-3 would handle this straightforwardly as follows:
Of course. There are definitely ways to explain it, so it's not really relevant beyond the empirical claims.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 am Oh, I see what you're thinking now; thanks very much for the clarification. I think that you are making assumptions about population ethics and / or the ethics of what matters in survival / death's harm that are very very false, in some ways that resemble those in which views that have been proposed by Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse were very false. First, you seem to be assuming either:
Are you saying I'm missing the possible avenue of opportunity cost for future goods?
I almost edited to clarify. Matt does not consider this.

His outline for why it's morally fine to kill animals is that it provides them no well-being benefit in the life they lead. He's not considering the goods they will be denied, and I can understand roughly why:

If death literally doesn't matter at all, then the life that follows (with the assumption that you're replacing the animal with a comparable one, as you would be in animal agriculture) plausibly compensates for the loss of one happy life by filling the same well being niche.

Adding the same amount of well-being points to the universe, if you want (I don't think he takes an agent-centered approach, since he typically follows Harris' moral landscape ideas which look at things very broadly).

This is only easily avoided by recognition of the intrinsic harms of death via violating interests. We see more interests being violated in animal agriculture, even in an ideal case where they are as happy as could be, due to the turnover. The empirical argument a hedonist has to make is more complicated.

In the ideal situation, you kill one happy cow painlessly and then immediately replace it with a new cow with an equally happy life. You don't have to miss a beat.
The question then becomes one of resources. And if you ignore global warming and you focus on extant infrastructure and the transformation of agricultural waste back into food, it's a more complex discussion that involves at least hours of research and citing scientific papers to show how it's impeding human progress.

And I don't think Matt takes global warming very seriously.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amjust let me know if you can't find it without a pay wall and I can send you a copy
Thanks, I'd be glad to read it if you still think it's relevant it's not very long.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amor more generally her Stanford Encyclopedia entry on The Non-Identity Problem (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/).
If a person’s existence is unavoidably flawed, then the agent’s only alternatives to bringing that person into the flawed existence are to bring no one into existence at all or to bring a different person – a nonidentical but better off person – into existence in place of the person whose existence is flawed.
This. We have to ask questions of opportunity cost, in the big picture.
I could be mistaken about his views, but I'm fairly certain Matt understands and agrees with that.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amThe reason that (2) is false is that, even if you accept some version of the desire fulfillment theory, the conclusion that there are no moral reasons against killing individuals who lack future-directed desires follows only if you accept the radically implausible CURRENT desire fulfillment theory, according to which morally relevant benefits and harms to someone at time t are determined only by her desires at time t, and regardless of the extent to which death would deprive her of things that she would very much desire in the future / at the time they would come.
I'm not sure why you're bringing this up. Matt doesn't care about desires, and I don't care only about immediate desires (past desires still matter, and future also matter in terms of opportunity cost). Even if we did take an "individual/person affecting approach" as described (which we don't) rather than a more global one that is capable of considering opportunity cost, I'm not sure how this is relevant.

This is more relevant, but I think I already addressed it:
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amPhilosophers have developed many variants of the alternative and much more plausible deprivation account of death's harm: that death harms you to the extent that it deprives you of future goods that would have been yours
Plausible, sure, but also not useful since another comparable individual in line is being given those precise things. And it's definitely not useful to a hedonist who is only concerned with experienced states; the "good" states are still being experienced either way.

We can also say they would not have been yours, because you would not have existed if you weren't to be killed at that time. Of course it's unnecessary to even go there from Matt's perspective.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amGiven such an account of death's harm in terms of deprivation of future goods, it does not really matter much to what's at issue here what one takes to be the best theory of well-being / future goods: desire-fulfillment, hedonism, objective list, etc.
I hope I've explained how it does matter.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amMoreover, if you are assuming (1), you be making an egregious mistake of assuming that there are no moral reasons not to painlessly kill someone who lacks future directed desires on the impersonal total view. But even Singer knew that THIS was false -if you kill someone who lacks future desires and don't immediately replace them with someone else who will be at least as well-off, then you cause there to be less well-being in the world, which is something that you have more moral reason not to do.
Not if this person had equal measures of satisfaction and misery, or caused other people enough misery to offset the marginal satisfaction he or she had: which is probably pretty common of people nobody would notice were gone.

A perfectly neutral person can just be killed painlessly for any reason, as long as it doesn't bother anybody by them being made aware.

The kind of person a preference considering system would permit killing would have to be MUCH worse than perfectly neutral.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amWhat would be better is if you made the mistake that Singer made, of assuming that given the impersonal total view, future-directed desires make those who have them "irreplacable" (i.e. such that it isn't morally neutral to kill them and replace them with someone else just like them - or at least more irreplacable in this sense) while those who lack them are "replacable" (i.e. such that it is morally neutrla to kill them and replace them with someone else just like them - or at least more replacable in this sense). Of course, even if this latter mistake were not a mistake
Singer was mistaken on his fixation on current desires (we still have value while sleeping, even if not currently harboring active desires), and his underestimation of what qualify as future directed desires. It's also a mistake to limit those desires to strictly hedonistic wants for all but the simplest organisms and imagine that only humans can desire not to be killed - a desire violated by death and not fulfilled by a desire to be born which doesn't exist.

But even if you limit it to the strictly hedonic:
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amIf you kill someone with future-directed desires then (assuming a desire-fulfillment theory of well-being) you deprive the world of the well-being that she could have had by fulfilling those (and the rest of her) desires. But if you replace her with a new individual who has future-directed desires and these get fulfilled, you don't actually make the world worse than you would have had you not killed her and replaced her. In this respect killing and replacing someone with future-directed desires with someone else who has future-directed desires is exactly morally equivalent to killing and replacing someone who lacks future-directed desires with someone else who lacks future-directed desires (you deprive the world of the well-being from the first fulfilling her desires, but then you give the world the well-being from the second fulfilling her desires, and it cancels out).
The bites of grass an extant cow is taking satisfy the future directed desire the cow had to eat grass in the past and the desire to eat grass in the present.
The bites of grass a new cow will take only satisfy the present desire to eat grass and don't fulfill a longer standing desire from the past.
These are not equal.

You can't continue seamlessly without missing a beat because you can't retroactively give a being a future directed desire in a past it did not have. The more deaths, the more that continuity of desire and fulfillment is broken until you end up with a simple series of beings that do live only in the present, and ultimately less moral value being realized because they become incapable of having desires and merely act.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amsince animal agriculture destroys far more wild animals than it replaces with farmed animals, it indeed falls afoul of the moral reasons against killing without replacing.
This has equally been used as argument in favor of animal agriculture based on claims of wild animal suffering.
If you're only after lived experience and you care nothing for preferences things can be weighed in bizarre ways.

I've made the argument that wild animals are happier, and it's not impossible to make but it's a hard one. And it also has limits: there's a point at which a very very happy farmed animal could be better off in terms of experiences.
Margaret Hayek
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

Post by Margaret Hayek »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 8:36 pm Are you saying I'm missing the possible avenue of opportunity cost for future goods?
I almost edited to clarify. Matt does not consider this.

His outline for why it's morally fine to kill animals is that it provides them no well-being benefit in the life they lead. He's not considering the goods they will be denied, and I can understand roughly why:

If death literally doesn't matter at all, then the life that follows (with the assumption that you're replacing the animal with a comparable one, as you would be in animal agriculture) plausibly compensates for the loss of one happy life by filling the same well being niche.

Adding the same amount of well-being points to the universe, if you want (I don't think he takes an agent-centered approach, since he typically follows Harris' moral landscape ideas which look at things very broadly).
Good to see that you seem to be talking about 'no in-principle moral reason not to replace' (assuming the impersonal total view) rather than 'no in-principle reason not to kill absent replacement'. That's better; that's what Singer thought.

Maybe worthwhile noting: this doesn't support e.g. hunting relative to vegan gardening (and you can do the math to show that hunting is worse on a per-calorie / nutrient / serving / what have you basis than the collateral damage from large-scale plant agrciulture).

This is only easily avoided by recognition of the intrinsic harms of death via violating interests. We see more interests being violated in animal agriculture, even in an ideal case where they are as happy as could be, due to the turnover. The empirical argument a hedonist has to make is more complicated.
(i) I don't know what you mean by 'intrinsic harms of death via violating interests', but it can be easily avoided on an individual-centered approach on which death harms individuals by depriving them of future goods.

(ii) I think it's pretty clear that the empirical argument is not complicated at all. Maybe watch Cowspiracy / look at the 2016 position statement of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietics / read Oppenlander's book (and just bear in mind that even though the 51% GHG figure from Cowspiracy is overblown, there's good reason to think that the 14.5% is a safe lower bound, and that even with a lower figure (or ignoring GHGs entirely) animal agriculture is hands-down a massive depriver of goods, for both humans and animals, whether those are understood in hedonistic terms or something else

If a person’s existence is unavoidably flawed, then the agent’s only alternatives to bringing that person into the flawed existence are to bring no one into existence at all or to bring a different person – a nonidentical but better off person – into existence in place of the person whose existence is flawed.
This. We have to ask questions of opportunity cost, in the big picture.
I could be mistaken about his views, but I'm fairly certain Matt understands and agrees with that.
That is the non-identity problem. There are individual affecting solutions. See more in Roberts's entry and the Roberts papers I'm sending you for these.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amThe reason that (2) is false is that, even if you accept some version of the desire fulfillment theory, the conclusion that there are no moral reasons against killing individuals who lack future-directed desires follows only if you accept the radically implausible CURRENT desire fulfillment theory, according to which morally relevant benefits and harms to someone at time t are determined only by her desires at time t, and regardless of the extent to which death would deprive her of things that she would very much desire in the future / at the time they would come.
I'm not sure why you're bringing this up. Matt doesn't care about desires, and I don't care only about immediate desires (past desires still matter, and future also matter in terms of opportunity cost). Even if we did take an "individual/person affecting approach" as described (which we don't) rather than a more global one that is capable of considering opportunity cost, I'm not sure how this is relevant.
I brought it up to show that you'd be wrong to assume that there are no moral reasons not to kill individuals without future-directed desires on an individual-affecting approach, regardless of your theory of well-being. Since from what you are now saying it seems that you aren't talking about the individual-affecting approach and you aren't saying that the impersonal total approach supports the idea that there are no moral reasons against killing - just none in principle against killing and replacing - I don't think that it's as relevant (except to the relative merits of the impersonal total vs. the individual-affecting approach, in conjunction with various theories of well-being).

This is more relevant, but I think I already addressed it:
Nope, you didn't address this in any way whatsoever. I can't see how on earth you would have thought that your above remarks did anything of the sort.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amPhilosophers have developed many variants of the alternative and much more plausible deprivation account of death's harm: that death harms you to the extent that it deprives you of future goods that would have been yours
Plausible, sure, but also not useful since another comparable individual in line is being given those precise things.
Nope; that's what Roberts calls a 'won't do better' problem (like Kavka's slave child), and it's easy to respond to it, including on an individual-affecting approach (basically: just because you brought her into existence with the intention of depriving her of future goods, now that she exists, and you can omit depriving her of future goods, the history of how she came to exist is irrelevant. This may be strengthened by the view that coming into existence isn't a morally relevant benefit but a precondition for morally relevant harms and benefits). See for instance the relevant sections of the Roberts's entry (e.g. 3.4) and her paper on the Non-Identity Fallacy

And it's definitely not useful to a hedonist who is only concerned with experienced states; the "good" states are still being experienced either way.
Nope. It's entirely useful to a hedonist (or proponent of whatever theory of well-being you like) who is an individual-affecting theorist (who doesn't hold the implausible view that coming into existence is a morally important benefit in the way that securing benefits for those who exist - at some point, independent of our choices - is a morally important benefit) and is also deprivation theorist about death's harm, since there are very strong moral reasons against depriving individuals of experiential goods but no moral reasons to create new individuals in order that they experience future goods.

We can also say they would not have been yours, because you would not have existed if you weren't to be killed at that time. Of course it's unnecessary to even go there from Matt's perspective.
Nope; as I explained that's a non-identity fallacy like Kavka's slave-child. Again, just because you brought her into existence with the intention of depriving her of future goods, now that she exists, and you can omit depriving her of future goods, the history of how she came to exist is irrelevant. This should be especially clear given that coming into existence isn't a morally relevant benefit but a precondition for morally relevant harms and benefits). See for instance the relevant sections of the Roberts's entry (e.g. 3.4) and her paper on the Non-Identity Fallacy

Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amGiven such an account of death's harm in terms of deprivation of future goods, it does not really matter much to what's at issue here what one takes to be the best theory of well-being / future goods: desire-fulfillment, hedonism, objective list, etc.
I hope I've explained how it does matter.
Nope, you didn't - maybe you tried but failed for the reasons indicated above.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amMoreover, if you are assuming (1), you be making an egregious mistake of assuming that there are no moral reasons not to painlessly kill someone who lacks future directed desires on the impersonal total view. But even Singer knew that THIS was false -if you kill someone who lacks future desires and don't immediately replace them with someone else who will be at least as well-off, then you cause there to be less well-being in the world, which is something that you have more moral reason not to do.
Not if this person had equal measures of satisfaction and misery, or caused other people enough misery to offset the marginal satisfaction he or she had: which is probably pretty common of people nobody would notice were gone.

A perfectly neutral person can just be killed painlessly for any reason, as long as it doesn't bother anybody by them being made aware.
You're right that I was assuming that (i) the individual would have more goods than bads, and (ii) the individual's life wasn't having negative effects on third parties that were greater than the net goods experienced by the individual who kept existing. But both of these assumptions seem entirely correct, regardless of the theory of well-being. I have absolutely no idea why you would think that the negation of (i) and (ii) is 'probably pretty common of [individuals] nobody would notice were gone. That sounds like massively unwarranted pessimism.

The kind of person a preference considering system would permit killing would have to be MUCH worse than perfectly neutral.
Nope. If you're allowed to randomly assume that:

(H) there are many hedon-wise-neutral individuals for whom either (a) their intensity-weighted pains outweigh their intensity-weighted pleasures, or (b) they cause harms (qua pains or deprivations of pleasures) to others that are at least as great as the difference between their intensity-weighted pleasures and their intensity-weighted pains, whom it's at least morally neutral to kill on the impersonal total view,

then the desire-fulfillment theorist is equally justified in assuming that:

(D) there are correspondingly as many desire-wise-neutral individuals for whom either (c) their intensity-weighted aversion-fulfillments outweigh their intensity-weighted desire-fulfillments, or (b) they cause harms (qua aversion-fullfillment or deprivations of desire-fulfillments) to others that are at least as great as the difference between their intensity-weighted desire-fulfillments and their intensity-weighted averstion-fulfillments, whom it's at least morally neutral to kill on the impersonal total view.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:35 amWhat would be better is if you made the mistake that Singer made, of assuming that given the impersonal total view, future-directed desires make those who have them "irreplacable" (i.e. such that it isn't morally neutral to kill them and replace them with someone else just like them - or at least more irreplacable in this sense) while those who lack them are "replacable" (i.e. such that it is morally neutrla to kill them and replace them with someone else just like them - or at least more replacable in this sense). Of course, even if this latter mistake were not a mistake
Singer was mistaken on his fixation on current desires (we still have value while sleeping, even if not currently harboring active desires), and his underestimation of what qualify as future directed desires. It's also a mistake to limit those desires to strictly hedonistic wants for all but the simplest organisms and imagine that only humans can desire not to be killed - a desire violated by death and not fulfilled by a desire to be born which doesn't exist.

The bites of grass an extant cow is taking satisfy the future directed desire the cow had to eat grass in the past and the desire to eat grass in the present.
The bites of grass a new cow will take only satisfy the present desire to eat grass and don't fulfill a longer standing desire from the past.
These are not equal.

You can't continue seamlessly without missing a beat because you can't retroactively give a being a future directed desire in a past it did not have. The more deaths, the more that continuity of desire and fulfillment is broken until you end up with a simple series of beings that do live only in the present, and ultimately less moral value being realized because they become incapable of having desires and merely act.
Haha; that's kinda cool to appeal to past desires, and I'm not sure that I've seen that before. That said I doubt that it works, because:

(i) desires held by an individual in the past don't seem ethically relevant; e.g. it's not morally important for the desire of my 8-year-old self to become an astronaut to be fulfilled, as I no longer have that desire, and probably much more importantly

(ii) the view would still allow for a certain form of replacability - not frequent replaceability I suppose, but at least one-off replacability, and probably more. E.g. suppose that at tn you have individual x who has lived from t0 to tn with sets of desires d0 to dn for various things in her life from t0 to tn+m (where m is something like her natural life expectancy, or how long she would live if you didn't kill her). If you kill x and replace her with a new individual y who will have the same life expectancy [i.e. if absent your killing x, x would be expected to live from t0 to tm; then absent your killing y, y is expected to live from tn to tn+m], you will deprive the world of the fulfillment of x's desires d0 to dm for various things in x's life from tn to tm. But if you don't kill y, you will give the world d'n to d'n+m for various things in y's life from tn to tn+m, which, so long as n > 0, will actually be strictly greater than what you lost by killing x. Indeed, this will allow you to kill y at some point after she has lived for at least n and still gain something or break even (relative to not killing x and replacing her with y).

That seems about as bad as the simple form of replceability that actually follows on Singer's view (regardless of whether we were desire-fulfillment theorists and regardless of whether the individuals in question had future-directed desires) without appealing to past desires. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but some form of replacability is an inherent feature of accepting the impersonal total view (at least so long as we reject absolutist constraints on killing). Since hopefully we all agree that we should reject absolutist constraints on killing, then the only way to avoid replaceability is to reject the impersonal total view (and, I think it's pretty clear, accept some version of the individual-affecting view).

If you're only after lived experience and you care nothing for preferences things can be weighed in bizarre ways.
I think I've explained why this is false, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about desire fulfillment or experiences.

I've made the argument that wild animals are happier, and it's not impossible to make but it's a hard one. And it also has limits: there's a point at which a very very happy farmed animal could be better off in terms of experiences.
Given the ecological damage (which harms both humans and wild animals) and the enormously greater numbers of wild animals who are lost by doing animal agriculture instead of plant agriculture, I don't think that the exact difference in relative degrees of well-being between a given farmed animal and a given wild animal matters very much to the overall case, and that this is true whether or not we adopt the impersonal total view, whatever we say about in-principle replacability, and whatever theory of well-being we hold.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

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Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pm Maybe worthwhile noting: this doesn't support e.g. hunting relative to vegan gardening (and you can do the math to show that hunting is worse on a per-calorie / nutrient / serving / what have you basis than the collateral damage from large-scale plant agrciulture).
Very plausibly.

As I've said before, the empirical argument is usually the right one to make, but it's also the hard argument to make because it requires actual legwork. And there's also a large enough degree of uncertainty in some of these cases that it's a very frustrating one to make.

For example, there was a recent and very frustrating argument in this thread:

http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3471

Many times it can not be avoided because most people aren't very responsive to philosophical arguments, but IF it can be avoided, and in some cases it can when the opponent is making a philosophical argument and will likely respond to philosophical criticism (as is the case with Matt) then it's a good idea to try.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pm(i) I don't know what you mean by 'intrinsic harms of death via violating interests', but it can be easily avoided on an individual-centered approach on which death harms individuals by depriving them of future goods.
It's an interesting idea, but I'm far from convinced that the individual-centered approach works at all.
It's something I think needs to be strongly justified to avoid running afoul of Occam's razor for being an overly complicated ad hoc solution when we could just assess preferences instead, and I think it has a number of serious contradictions and issues.

One being of course the Asymmetry, which you sent a paper on to me which I'm reading over now, but doesn't look hopeful.
The Benatar case is debunked here (http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?t=2215) and I don't think the individual centered approach offers any real advantages, but we'll see, I'm not done reading.

The preference approach, as I explained, solves that issue much more naturally as a consequence of the nature of time and the fact that a new being can't have past interests.

Beyond that, there are very serious existential questions of what an individual is when we don't have a supernatural soul to go by. The preference approach has a natural solution in the preferences themselves, whereas with any other approach you have to arbitrary define the limits of a being; you can look at what it thinks those limits are but this can create conflict with no clear resolution.

And finally, if you're going based on a hedonistic system, which is what I think you're arguing the advantage of the individual-centered approach is (that it permits hedonistic frameworks) then we have problems innate to hedonism itself which you're probably familiar with, e.g. the suggestion that the greatest good we could do for somebody would be to abduct him or her and drug or plug electrodes into the brain to stimulate euphoria, strapped into a bed and tube fed until dying of old age, living a non-life in a mindless stupor of pleasure.

We can solve the problems created by hedonistic metrics by switching to something else; either some very specific ad hoc definition of happiness (something that's going to be an up-hill battle to justify without appealing to interests), or just admitting it's interests we're interested in.

But if we admit we're interested in interests, that seems to in itself solve the problem that the individual-centered approach was trying to tackle and makes it superfluous, and avoid the other issues I mentioned.

Maybe the individual-centered preference approach offers additional advantages?

Anyway, I'll keep reading, and I will reply at more length to the rest of your post soon.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

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Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pm read Oppenlander's book (and just bear in mind that even though the 51% GHG figure from Cowspiracy is overblown, there's good reason to think that the 14.5% is a safe lower bound
A bit off topic: We need to do a wiki article discussing the GHG emission figures. Did you mention somewhere you'd read some papers suggesting it was higher than previously estimated? Could be a good place to start.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pmThat is the non-identity problem. There are individual affecting solutions. See more in Roberts's entry and the Roberts papers I'm sending you for these.
I found Roberts' arguments on the asymmetry about as insightful as Benatar's, and they come to the same implicit conclusions.

Variabilism is just a form of dismissal and buck passing:
Roberts wrote:Variabilism thus emphatically implies that each person matters morally at each possible
future or world that exists as an alternative for agents, regardless of whether that person is existing, future, or merely possible relative to that world.7
I don't think it does, no. You can't say a possible person matters, acknowledge a loss, and then say it has no moral significance.
Roberts wrote:Moreover, accepting Comparability, we can easily recognize that losses (in a comparative, worse off sense of thatterm) may be incurred (and gains accrued) at worlds where the subject never exists at all.
We thus recognize, not just Hans’ loss at w3 but, critically, Meg’s loss at w1 as well.
Finally, then, we simply note that Variabilism implies that Meg’s loss at w1 has full moral
significance for purposes of evaluating both a1 and a2, while Hans’ loss at w3 has no
moral significance whatsoever for purposes of evaluating either a3 or a4. Meg’s loss at w1
counts against, in other words, a1 and, in a roundabout way, in favor of a2, while Hans’
loss at w3 counts not at all against a3 or in any roundabout way in favor of a4.
The only distinction here from Benatar is that you say there is a loss and then call it not morally significant and pass the buck to "permissibility theory".

Roberts wrote:Facts about the moral significance of a given loss do not, in themselves, tell us anything
at all about permissibility
, of course.
Like hell they don't.
Roberts wrote:But once we are clear on which losses do have moral significance and which do not, it seems that any otherwise plausible permissibility theory can step in and complete the picture on the Asymmetry. Such a theory will surely instruct that a1 is permissible, indeed, obligatory, and that a2 is wrong, and that a3 is just as permissible as a4 is.8
...This is why a lot of people don't like philosophy. :roll:
Why do this? Why say it tells us NOTHING at all, and then tell us what it SURELY tells us given the context of a plausible permissibility theory?

It's like saying an object's mass tells us nothing about its weight, except it does if we're talking about things on Earth within a certain range which is obviously what anybody interested in these things is talking about.

Anyway, Roberts' claims are perfectly in line with ideological anti-natalism.

If having an unhappy child is wrong and impermissible, and having a happy one doesn't matter, that's as good as Benatar's arguments, it just applies to action evaluation instead of directly to relative states of goods.

This does nothing to make the individual-based model more compelling.

This asymmetry argument can be pretty easily deconstructed (assume a merely neutral person will be born and then ascribe morally relevant positive value to the things you do that make that person happier/better off) so I don't think it's damning of the individual-based approach if the philosopher is willing to surrender the asymmetry claims, but again it kind of defeats the purpose of the argument as you were presenting it here.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pmNope, you didn't address this in any way whatsoever. I can't see how on earth you would have thought that your above remarks did anything of the sort.
Regarding opportunity cost.
Sorry, I'm trying to be brief.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pmNope; that's what Roberts calls a 'won't do better' problem (like Kavka's slave child), and it's easy to respond to it, including on an individual-affecting approach (basically: just because you brought her into existence with the intention of depriving her of future goods, now that she exists, and you can omit depriving her of future goods, the history of how she came to exist is irrelevant. This may be strengthened by the view that coming into existence isn't a morally relevant benefit but a precondition for morally relevant harms and benefits). See for instance the relevant sections of the Roberts's entry (e.g. 3.4) and her paper on the Non-Identity Fallacy
I'll check out what she has to say on it and post back, I've just read on her "bright future" solution to the asymmetry problem so far and found it a bit dimmer than advertised. ;)

Intention is distinct from necessity of process, however. The question is more where the wrong was done. Locking yourself into something wrong is wrong at the time of doing, and undoing it (where possible) can be a good that partially compensates for that, just having the general intention of something that open ended is pretty different. I'm sure there's a spectrum between the two, but animal agriculture falls on the more "locked in" side of things so I'm not sure if the analogy is appropriate.

As I said, I'll read what she has to say and post back.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pm You're right that I was assuming that (i) the individual would have more goods than bads, and (ii) the individual's life wasn't having negative effects on third parties that were greater than the net goods experienced by the individual who kept existing. But both of these assumptions seem entirely correct, regardless of the theory of well-being. I have absolutely no idea why you would think that the negation of (i) and (ii) is 'probably pretty common of [individuals] nobody would notice were gone. That sounds like massively unwarranted pessimism.
Not sure why you think that is pessimistic. There are plenty of people living marginal lives as drug addicts or with mental illness, and lack of social productivity and presence of petty crime can easily tip those scales.

That said, an interest based approach isn't so permissive, because regardless of anything else they want to live and do not want to die... unless they do.
If somebody legitimately wants to die it's very permissive.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pm
The kind of person a preference considering system would permit killing would have to be MUCH worse than perfectly neutral.
Nope. If you're allowed to randomly assume that:

(H) there are many hedon-wise-neutral individuals for whom either (a) their intensity-weighted pains outweigh their intensity-weighted pleasures, or (b) they cause harms (qua pains or deprivations of pleasures) to others that are at least as great as the difference between their intensity-weighted pleasures and their intensity-weighted pains, whom it's at least morally neutral to kill on the impersonal total view,

then the desire-fulfillment theorist is equally justified in assuming that:

(D) there are correspondingly as many desire-wise-neutral individuals for whom either (c) their intensity-weighted aversion-fulfillments outweigh their intensity-weighted desire-fulfillments, or (b) they cause harms (qua aversion-fullfillment or deprivations of desire-fulfillments) to others that are at least as great as the difference between their intensity-weighted desire-fulfillments and their intensity-weighted averstion-fulfillments, whom it's at least morally neutral to kill on the impersonal total view.
Think about what D means; we're talking about people who don't want to live, who barely want to live or don't care, or who are basically suicidal on balance.
And in terms of harms, the preference to live increases the amount of harm they must do to outweigh that.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pmHaha; that's kinda cool to appeal to past desires, and I'm not sure that I've seen that before. That said I doubt that it works, because:

(i) desires held by an individual in the past don't seem ethically relevant; e.g. it's not morally important for the desire of my 8-year-old self to become an astronaut to be fulfilled, as I no longer have that desire, and probably much more importantly
Why did you desire that? To a very significant extent we can see changing desires in light of new information to be better idealized.
I think that's why people would generally not feel them to be ethically relevant; we have the sense that we have refined or improved on our ambitions.

Otherwise, I would say that intuition is incorrect, and there are times when it is wrong.
Sometimes people just give up on things, becoming jaded or otherwise just don't care any more about things that are of legitimate importance. People can change so radically that the shift in interests is almost like a kind of personality death.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pm(ii) the view would still allow for a certain form of replacability - not frequent replaceability I suppose
There's always a break-even point. If the death is a condition of the new individual ever existing at all, there will be a point where that exists so long as life is good in any way.
I covered something a bit different here: http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2583&p=26377#p26377
The point is that the harms of death via violating certain interests shift that point to a non-zero number, so death is never morally irrelevant. It is always better, so long as it's possible and doesn't have opportunity costs or negative returns I discussed in that other thread, to have longer lives and fewer deaths all other things being the same.

If people even have to take seriously the question of the harms of death we've already done an important job of getting people to admit it's wrong/less right and getting them thinking about the topic.

Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pmI'm sorry to have to tell you this, but some form of replacability is an inherent feature of accepting the impersonal total view (at least so long as we reject absolutist constraints on killing).
This isn't news to me. I'm not worried about some measure of replacability; there are always cases where that will be required for greater goods. The important point is establishing the undesirability of so many deaths; it adds a weight to the conversation otherwise impossible to get people to recognize when we have perfect replacability and no harm of death at all.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pmSince hopefully we all agree that we should reject absolutist constraints on killing, then the only way to avoid replaceability is to reject the impersonal total view (and, I think it's pretty clear, accept some version of the individual-affecting view).
I don't find the individual-affecting view at all credible, and I think it has a lot more serious problems than the supposed solution it offers to replacability.
Margaret Hayek wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:40 pmGiven the ecological damage (which harms both humans and wild animals) and the enormously greater numbers of wild animals who are lost by doing animal agriculture instead of plant agriculture, I don't think that the exact difference in relative degrees of well-being between a given farmed animal and a given wild animal matters very much to the overall case, and that this is true whether or not we adopt the impersonal total view, whatever we say about in-principle replacability, and whatever theory of well-being we hold.
The argument is that wild animals are in a state of perpetual suffering, and do NOT live lives worth living, not that their lives are less worth living.
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Re: Recent Videos from and to Matt Dillahunty on Veganism

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Some light hearted comments from the video:

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