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

[brimstoneSalad]

I can agree with that. Emperically that is true, life and death are pretty much the most choice limiting situations. However, one could make the same argument about abstaining from meat. An incredibly small percentage of people is vegan, and not only that, a large percentage of the people who at some point become vegan, later relapse back in to eating meat.

A large part of what makes people go back to eating meat comes down to:
1. Them going vegan for deontological reasons (having to do with irrational concepts of rights, and extremes, rather than a recognition of suffering and interests). Something built on such shaky philosophical foundations will not stand up to scrutiny.
2. Them buying into dogmas such as HCLF, and not getting enough fat and protein in their diets from nuts and beans, or not taking B12. The appeal to nature fallacy and dubious health claims are common in veganism, and that's unfortunate.

With sound philosophy based on consequentialism and scientific evidence, and good nutrition, recidivism would be expected to be much lower.
You may overestimate the effects of peer influence, and underestimate how stupid and irresponsible a lot of people are with their beliefs and diets.
A large part of why vegans fail is because they're doing it wrong.

That said, back to the point of choice limiting:
I think you recognize that eating meat, which is not nutritionally necessary but more of a social convention, is not choice limiting in the extreme way that a life or death situation is. Some people are cowards and bend to peer pressure more easily than others.
There is a gradation involved, and we can say it involves how much will power a person puts in. We're not all the same, and for some what is relatively easy could be very hard for others. It's quite an extreme suggestion that giving up meat would not be regarded as a choice in most developed countries.

You make it clear here that you agree you could, and you choose not to:

What if there is a person with a serious addiction prone personality who has repeatedly tried to give up meat, and only manages to decrease it to 1 piece per day. Then we would have to call that person, who eats meat every day, a vegan, and someone like me, who in reality COULD give up meat completely, but chooses to eat meat once a week, not a vegan

You're not actually trying to go vegan. Nobody succeeds in being 100% perfect, the point is in trying.
Such a person would not be vegan if he or she was not trying to be, but just accepted eating meat every day.

A person who was trying, but caved to cravings often due to an inordinate addiction (a level of addiction which doesn't exist for animal products in reality), would be a different situation. If animal products were crack, it would be possible.

Ok, if that is your definition, and I claim to not be able to live completely meat free, then me going on a conscientious meat eating diet of 1 steak per week means Im a vegan. Because I excluded it "as far as possible and practicable". (assuming for a second I legitimately tried complete meat abstinence repeatedly and failed repeatedly at keeping it up for any meatfrequency lower than 1 steak per week)

Sure, if you really physically could not. But you could. And if you could not, you wouldn't just give up, but you'd be trying other ways.
For example, if there was something wrong in your body that needed animal products, you would try to eat oysters instead, since they are probably not sentient and their cultivation is better for the environment.

With regards to the extremes of choice:

Because after all, also in the case of life and death situations we have a small percentage of people who are able to go against the current for a cause they believe is greater than themselves (i.e buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in protest, suicidebombers,...)

These people are widely insane/delusional and think they are not dying, but going to some kind of paradise. With very rare exception, people can do much more good alive than dead. Examples of atheists killing themselves are usually depressed and suicidal anyway, not advancing some greater good.

Talking about the extremes of human will and ability is fine, but we also have to understand what is most useful. Morality isn't about blind absolutism, but about consequences.

I link this often, and for good reason:
http://www.peta.org/living/food/making-transition-vegetarian/ideas-vegetarian-living/tiny-amount-animal-products-food/
Likewise this:
http://www.mercyforanimals.org/v-word

Vegans and organizations promoting veganism aren't all the absolutists you assume.

If you tell people to be absolute, or you lead by example by being too obsessive yourself, you aren't necessarily doing more good. Convincing two people to go vegetarian does more good than convincing one person to go vegan, and convincing 14 people to do meatless Monday does more good than convincing one person to go vegan.
Likewise, things like this are not useful:

The one about unless you are living in a commune using as little resources as possible

We need to remain part of society, not isolating ourselves as hermits, and we need to model lifestyles people will consider practicable and viable.

Public perception is essential to that:

(granted the commune thing is a little bit of an extreme sacrifice, public opinion would (nonetheless rather arbitrarily) accept the argument that it fails the requirment in the definition of being "possible and practicable", especially compared to just cutting specific types of foods out of your diet (meat, dairy,.. all animal products).

Generally speaking, reducitarians are important allies as long as they are not demeaning and arguing against veganism and vegetarianism as you have been doing, or denying the wrong of killing animals.

If they aspire to be better people, though, they should continually work to reduce and ultimately eliminate animal product consumption: if not, they may not be as big of jerks as complacent full on carnivores, but they're still being much bigger jerks than vegetarians, who are being bigger jerks than "vegans" (pure vegetarians), who are being bigger jerks than vegans who recycle and in other ways reduce and avoid harmful plant products etc.

Is it a spectrum, but if you're not trying to do better, you're still a complacent jerk.
I try to do a little better every year; never giving up, never being complacent. I still do some harm, albeit less, and I want to do less still.
Morality isn't something you do overnight and then you're done with, it's an ongoing project of becoming a better human being.
I don't judge people on whether they're vegan or not, but how they're working on improving. Even a "technical vegan" can be a complacent jerk if he or she has no interest in ever doing better or being better -- that's not the kind of person who really fits with the spirit of the term.

Or better yet, suppose there is someone who completely abstains from animal products. That person has done research comparing the impact of 2 plantfoods and found eating one plantfood overall kills more animals than eating the other. Suppose he has immense willpower, so he could easily give the more impacting plantfood up, but considering the, to him seeming, relatively low difference in impact, he chooses to consume both foods regardless of the results of his research. That person can no longer be called a vegan whereas the addiction prone daily meat eater described above, can be called a vegan. Absurd.

Not absurd at all. I quit eating palm oil some time ago for just this reason.

"Vegan" is not a word I consider that useful, because of how it's used to also describe dietary practice, and things that simply lack animal products regardless of anything else. I'm more concerned with moral progress, avoiding complacency, and positively influencing others.

ps2: with the difference in impact between different plantfoods in mind, I would also argue that by your definition, the large majority of self-proclaimed vegans aren't vegan, leading back to that point I made before.

However, only eating the most caloriedense- and resource-efficient plantfoods is NOT an extreme sacrifice and is in effect also just cutting specific types of foods out of your diet. And Im pretty sure 99% of self-proclaimed vegans refuse to go that far, using the exact same excuses as meat eaters use for justifying their behavior)

I don't know what the statistics are, but this is why I strive to avoid plant foods that are harmful like palm oil.

I wouldn't like to consider Durianrider and Freelee to be vegans. They're rather terrible people, they advocate a harmful and unsustainable diet of a ridiculous amount of fruit which is nutrient deficient, makes people unhealthy, and DR even eats palm oil which unnecessarily damages the environment.

You'd probably be a better influence than they do if you'd just stop trying to justify killing animals, admit it's wrong, and work on reducing as much as you can over time rather than asserting an arbitrary nature of morality as a defense.

Only thing you can say is "hey dude, we're being dicks, but you are being a WAY bigger dick than I am, mind toning it down a little?"

There is such a thing as "neutrality" which some people aim for. Zero footprint, as a moral baseline. We can talk about that if you're interested, and I think it's meaningful, but there are better ways to judge character, because a really good person doesn't want to stop at neutral.

So, in terms of better ways to judge character: If we were both complacent and had no interest in becoming better people, that might be true. But I'm not. I recognize my shortcomings, and I'm trying to do better.
If you were, likewise, on a continual path of trying to be a better person, I would have no basis to judge you if you were still eating meat given that you're working on stopping, and you'd have no basis judging me for using non-renewable electricity given I'm working on stopping. If you're trying to go veg, and I'm trying to save up for solar panels, we're both on a trajectory to become better people. You're behind me, but we're on the same path, and the only metric of judgement would be whether somebody is sprinting along that path or dragging his or her feet (because I was once where you are) -- and in that respect we can both encourage each other and hold each other accountable for meeting our goals.

So to summarize:

There's a moral road running from South to North, from the city of Demons to the city of Saints, there is a town in the middle called Neutrality.

Some people on that road are moving to become better people -- traveling North. Whether they're currently North or South of Neutrality, it is only this direction of movement that indicates their character, to make effort at self improvement.
People who are moving faster than others may have better characters, or they may just have more willpower and support from others.
As long as you're moving at a meaningful rate, you're probably a good person at heart.

Some people are complacent, and just napping by the road: they don't care about being better people.
The people who are napping South of Neutrality are complacent, harmful jerks -- to varying degrees of harm. The people napping North of Neutrality are harmless or helpful, but still complacent and the fact they have no interest in doing more may make them something like jerks, but not quite jerks. The difference is like that between drowning somebody by pushing that person in the water and letting somebody drown because you didn't throw in a lifebuoy -- both are arguably dick moves, but with a distinction in action.

Make sense?

Just because morality is nuanced and complex, does not mean it is not useful or that it doesn't exist.

This last part kind of goes beyond the topic, since you've already admitted that you DO have a choice, and I think you understand that when it comes to eating meat, for most people it's a pretty simple choice (not being forced based on fear, or addicted to an extreme as to crack, but wanting to and choosing to).

If morality is only relevant as a metric to judge character in the context of choice, then its going to be incredibly difficult to label the majority of nazi's or participants in other genocides as immoral considering the immense social pressure, fear,... they are subjected to.

I'll start off by saying that this si a bad analogy, because it's a job, and in a consequential sense there's a good argument to be made that at least for the lower down workers, if they didn't do it somebody else was. The wrong in eating animals is rooted in increasing the demand, not fulfilling it.

That aside, about the Nazis: they were widely considered to have a choice in the matter, and prosecuted and punished for their crimes. When it comes to free will, this opens a big can of worms. The important thing with respect to choice is not actual and technical ability of a brain to select an alternative, but the perception of that ability in light of unknowns.
In absolute terms, perhaps none of us have "free will", but in terms of a black box and the illusion we labor under, we all do.
Enough people refused to participate (and without being harmed) as to make it clear that we must call it a choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Even in Milgram's experiments, 35% refused to administer the final shock. And that's an extreme situation: few people are in situations where they're being commanded to eat meat in that way; not even the Nazi party was that assertive: it was a job that they were largely free to leave if they didn't like it.
Anyway, in terms of obedience, now that we're more familiar with these psychological mechanisms, we're better equipped to fight them than ever before.

Six years later (at the height of the Vietnam War), one of the participants in the experiment sent correspondence to Milgram, explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress:

While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority… To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself… I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience…[14][15]

one example being the kind of psychology studies where a large percentage of people say a line is longer than another one that is obviously shorter because the other people in the room claim it to be

This is a matter of subjectivity of perception, and not a violation of ethical beliefs. The Milgram experiments are much more relevant.

And if you cant say a nazi that has killed a jew was immoral in doing so, then whats the use of that word?

It can mean something relative to a person's willingness to admit something is a choice. But the bigger question you may be getting at is whether free will, and thus "choice" mean anything at all.

In terms of what free will means, you may be interested in this article:
https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/reflections-on-free-will

I define choice and culpability quite in the same way courts do, which is something that has had practical function for centuries.
Courts found the Nazis guilty, and by any reasonable and useful metric they had a choice in their actions.
Judgment, whether legal or moral, serves much the same utility.

[IslandMorality]

In addition to the degree of sentience. If an insect wanted something with all its being, like to bite somebody, and such a thing would mildly annoy a human being, that interest multiplied by the difference in sentience could easily put the total magnitude of the human interest above that of the insect.

Ok, clear.

Yes, but only in an either-or situation with no outside consequences.

Much like the sensitive social justice warriors who want safe spaces, giving people what they think they want isn't always what they really need from a psychological standpoint. There's something to be said for looking at idealized interests, because your friend is ultimately ignorant of the full consequences of indulging his OCD and the effects upon his life.
By letting your friend destroy the painting, you would be enabling him.

Things become much more complicated and nuanced when we look at the full range of consequences.

I know that's why you like to try to simplify things down to the "island" as a thought experiment, but the problem with this is that those thought experiments no longer reflect what morality is in a social context. It no longer resembles reality or gives us any insight into what is right or wrong for us in the here and now.

We could theoretically just alter this question and make my friend a devout muslim (that ive already unsuccesfully tried reasoning out of his retarded religion) and the painting to be one depicting muhammed. What would your answer be in that case?

Well, an obsession isn't properly treated by gratifying it.

Are you familiar with virtue ethics?
From a consequential perspective, it can be much more meaningful to change our habits.

Let's assume the would-be rapist, however, also had terminal cancer and was going to die tomorrow, so this action had no meaningful effect on the rapist's future behavior because he has none, and the victim (as you described) was something like a prostitute and rather accustomed to being raped to the point it wouldn't be particularly traumatic.
And let's assume we remove the whole situation from the social and legal context that would make it necessary for you (or the law) to intervene as a matter of rule consequentialism.

In that case, an argument to stay out of it could be made.

The rapist is doing wrong by raping the prostitute (it is never moral to solely gratify yourself at the expense of others), but it's a small wrong, and the prostitute might also be doing a kind of wrong by not gratifying this dying man's last wish when it's so easy for her and wouldn't particularly inconvenience her to give a freebee.

The wrong the prostitute does in this situation is much like the wrong done when you refuse to slightly inconvenience yourself to throw a drowning man a lifebuoy. It's different from pushing a man in the water the drown.
There are some arguments to be made about the distinction between acting and not acting (Is it more wrong to drown somebody than to not save somebody from drowning? Yes.), but it's hard to deny somebody is doing a wrong when that person refuses to make a small effort to do such a significant good.

Suppose you have three people (person A, person B, and person C) with B and C having two mutually exclusive interests. Lets also suppose person B's interest outweighs that of person C by whatever method of weighing you find acceptable. Suppose person A is by some means granted the power to decide whose interest gets realized. Does person A commit an immoral act by choosing the realization of person B's interest?

Now eliminate person A from the equation and grant person B the power of decision. Does person B commit an immoral act by choosing the realization of his interest? If so and you answered no to the first question, why is the same decision suddenly immoral because it concerns his own interest?

It is never moral to gratify yourself at the expense of others, as I explained above with the rapist. It only may be justified if you do so to defend yourself, not for pleasure.

The appropriate behavior is to overcome your addiction to meat -- as your OCD friend needs to overcome his obsession that has him going around and destroying paintings. If you really think you crave meat more than another animal desires to live, you have a problem and you should aspire to overcome it.

That statement was not a reflection of my craving for meat being so immense, it was rather a reflection of how low of an interest I think animals have in living.

You could assert the same unfalsifiable claim about human beings.

No, you couldnt. As I think you stated yourself earlier in this thread somewhere. The beautiful thing about interests (especially when involving humans), you can just ask people.
Plus someone choosing to undergo chemotherapy is pretty much undeniable evidence that humans have an interest in living itself, irrespective of pain avoidance. (disregarding that whole 'sum of other interests' thing for second and focussing solely on a measurable distinction between an interest in pain avoidance and an interest in life, however you choose to define the latter)

Non-human animals seem to have an understanding of death that at least rivals most humans:
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/04/11/176620943/when-animals-mourn-seeing-that-grief-is-not-uniquely-human

Occam's razor would make you attribute that behavior to a million other interests before an interest in living itself.

Death, however, is not just death: it is an ending of all other potential fulfilment of interests the animal has. Life isn't just being alive (I have no interest in being technically alive if I'm in a vegetative state): it is an interest in doing all of the things associated with living.

If you kill an animal (human or otherwise), you have interfered with his or her interest in eating, in having sex, in sleeping, in playing, and in doing all of the things that animal does.
You have violated a HUGE number of interests in the killing which you can't argue away.
Only in an animal with no sense of time and future could this be credible, and that doesn't even apply to insects, which have a basic sense of causality and progressive behavior toward a goal (although limited). Sentience and operant learning is inherently linked to interests and an understanding of causality across time.

A greater variety and depth of interests is why most humans' lives are more valuable than most non-human animals. But there are people who live for nothing but getting drunk and watching football and have no deeper ambitions.

Hmm, ok. That kind of leads me in a different direction. I have a couple of questions before I can move the argument forward.

Is it morally acceptable to kill someone/something that at a point in time is completely indifferent to what happens to him/her/it? i.e a hypothetical interest-free person. Im assuming yes?
What about if there is a possibility that individual might cultivate an interest in the future?
Is conscious experience of an interest thus a relevant factor?
Is it ok to kill an unconscious person/animal? Why or why not? In what way are they different from the hypothetical interest-free person with the potential to cultivate an interest in the future? In other words, how would you go about claiming they have an interest? Because they have the potential to experience it at some point in the future?
If so, doesn't this, in combination with inaction having the potential to be immoral as you stated earlier, not make it immoral to not breed livestock (assuming a nice living environment)? You are denying potential beings from fulfilling potential interests they might experience. Why should it be a relevant factor that the entity that could experience an interest at a future point in time is already alive?

If you are driving along the road in a large vehicle, and you see a fragile wicker basket with a bundle in it on the road that may or may not be a baby, do you swerve ever so slightly to avoid it, or do you just smash it and its contents to bits because you think the "burden of proof" to show that it's not a baby is not on you?

There are many things we're not certain about in morality, and given that uncertainty, a moral person uses the precautionary principle.

If there is a meaningful chance that something is wrong, and you can change your behavior to not do it, then it's not justified to do it based on your whim or uncertainty.

Totally agree. However to me this particular situation is more like it being a rolled up carpet (having the potential to contain a baby in it) im seeing on the road. I see no reason to swerve.

While it's silly, some vegans do care about plants.

Only relevant question to this discussion is do you? And Im guessing no?

However, more plants are killed by eating animals than by eating plants directly. Thermodynamics dictates substantial amounts of energy are lost on conversion from plant to animal. You can confirm this, as I have done multiple times, by looking at FCRs, the portion of the animal eaten, it's calories, and the nature of the feed.
You get more calories and more protein from plants than from the animals those plants were fed to.

WOW, really? No fucking shit sherlock. Why the fuck are you saying this? That has literally nothing to do with the point I was making with that statement about plants. This is exactly the sort of thing that pisses me off in debating you.

That said, it's not just that there's no evidence for plants being sentient; there's no mechanism for them to be sentient, and no evolutionary reason for them to be sentient (it would be wasteful of resources and energy to be so).
In motile animals, on the other hand, there is a clearly available mechanism (a brain which already expresses many interests and could easily express another), and an evolutionary reason for animals to innately not want to die. There's also behavioral evidence of avoidance, which while you could make currently unfalsifiable claims of excuses for it, still by their simplest interpretation suggest animals do not want to die.

'There is an available mechanism' isnt a sufficient condition. 'There is also an evolutionary reason for a desire' is not a sufficient condition. And by their simplest interpretation behavioral evidence just demonstrates pain avoidance.

There is, but you just disregard it and make excuses for it.

nope

The fact that you do not find it conclusive does not negate it.

Completely agree, however again a question of you seeing a wicker basket and me seeing a rolled up carpet.

However, as I already explained above, that's irrelevant: simply being alive or technically living is not something most humans probably have an interest in (aside from an innate and likely instinctive horror around death, which is probably shared by social non-human animals, that we have to overcome with our rational minds). It is the "living" itself, the sum total of actions associated with living a life, that have meaning and are clearly expressed by interests in humans and non-human animals alike.

potentially

[Red]

WOW, really? No fucking shit sherlock. Why the fuck are you saying this? That has literally nothing to do with the point I was making with that statement about plants. This is exactly the sort of thing that pisses me off in debating you.

You're certainly more of an asshole.

[brimstoneSalad]

WOW, really? No fucking shit sherlock. Why the fuck are you saying this? That has literally nothing to do with the point I was making with that statement about plants. This is exactly the sort of thing that pisses me off in debating you.

I didn't say it had anything to do with your point, but it does have to do with consequences if you're too ignorant to know that.
Your argument was morally irrelevant to the practice of eating meat, if you had realized that already then you shouldn't have even brought up plants, or you should have made it clear that you already understood that, otherwise you're making the implicit suggestion that the supposed experiences of plants are somehow relevant to your decision to eat animals.

If you don't like my clarifying something in advance, you can fuck off. I can and will take a couple sentences to explain something you or other readers may not understand in case you or other readers don't understand it.
It's better to make something clear now rather than wait until it causes confusion later.

You are not the only one reading this thread.


The answers to your other questions are available throughout this thread in the conversations between myself, inator, Mr. Purple, and Jaywalker.
If you can't be bothered to read the rest of this thread as I suggested, and you insist on making insulting outbursts like that, maybe I shouldn't be bothered to repeat myself.

We could theoretically just alter this question and make my friend a devout muslim (that ive already unsuccesfully tried reasoning out of his retarded religion) and the painting to be one depicting muhammed. What would your answer be in that case?

Enabling and appeasing Muslims is not the way to desensitize them to cultural insults and teach them to respect freedom of expression.
Draw Muhammad day is controversial, but may be one of the most powerful tools for liberalizing Islam there is.

You might not like your medicine, but it's good for you, and it's better off in the long run for the rest of the world.

Suppose you have three people (person A, person B, and person C) with B and C having two mutually exclusive interests. Lets also suppose person B's interest outweighs that of person C by whatever method of weighing you find acceptable. Suppose person A is by some means granted the power to decide whose interest gets realized. Does person A commit an immoral act by choosing the realization of person B's interest?

Now eliminate person A from the equation and grant person B the power of decision. Does person B commit an immoral act by choosing the realization of his interest? If so and you answered no to the first question, why is the same decision suddenly immoral because it concerns his own interest?

Asked and answered multiple times in this thread.

I'll answer them again if you'll behave yourself and abstain from making such outbursts because I've taken a couple sentences to clarify something for everybody reading this.

Anybody who has read this far in the thread is bound to already know the answer to this one.

That statement was not a reflection of my craving for meat being so immense, it was rather a reflection of how low of an interest I think animals have in living.

This is because you are simultaneously ignorant of animal behavior and intelligence, and extremely biased by your desire to kill animals.

A rapist may also like to believe that girls actually don't mind being raped so much, or even secretly want it. Also unfalsifiable.

Also, infidels don't really have an interest in living, they think they do but that's only because they don't know Allah. And Allah's interest in them dying is infinitely greater. Also unfalsifiable.

You can believe anything you want if your biases are strong enough.
You are just not a reasonable person capable of questioning your own biases, but rather let them rule you through rationalization.
This is something you have to overcome if you want to be a good person, at this point I doubt you have any interest in that.

No, non-human animals are not a rolled up carpet. You're just short sighted and delusional, seeing what you want to see to justify your behavior.
You'd be perfectly happy imagining the basket was a tumbleweed (roughly the same shape and color) instead if it meant you didn't feel compelled to swerve.

Plus someone choosing to undergo chemotherapy is pretty much undeniable evidence that humans have an interest in living itself, irrespective of pain avoidance.

Observation is more useful than asking (which helps for hypotheticals, but is obviously less reliable).
That doesn't prove anything, as Mr. Purple would say, because those humans could just imagine death to be more painful than the chemotherapy, or the fear of death produces so much psychological pain than the chemotherapy which is less painful.
If you're dead set on making elaborate and unfalsifiable assertions as you do, you can see things any way you want (and you will ALWAYS see things in a way that justifies your immoral behavior).

Non-human animals will also undergo greater pain to avoid a relatively painless death -- such as scrambling with injury to avoid a death from a great fall. You could make yet another unfalsifiable assertion and say they don't know the fall is going to be a painless death or that they're avoiding the pain of fear of that death (or the falling/fear of heights), but neither do most humans know shit about their own deaths, and neither are most humans capable of being rational about fear of death.

Plenty of people choose to just die rather than undergo chemo. You could argue that only these people have true rational perspective on death.
Permit absurd and unfalsifiable claims about subconscious motivations, and you can say anything you want.

(disregarding that whole 'sum of other interests' thing for second and focussing solely on a measurable distinction between an interest in pain avoidance and an interest in life, however you choose to define the latter)

Even in just those terms, it's easy to stack the scales by making shit up about invisible subconscious motivations, fear, knowledge of death, imagined pain, etc.
Human and non-human animal behavior is fundamentally very similar.

Occam's razor would make you attribute that behavior to a million other interests before an interest in living itself.

You do not understand Occam's razor, and you misuse it as just another tool in your toolbox of rationalizing your immoral behavior. We could say the same thing about humans very easily.

Is it morally acceptable to kill someone/something that at a point in time is completely indifferent to what happens to him/her/it? i.e a hypothetical interest-free person. Im assuming yes?
What about if there is a possibility that individual might cultivate an interest in the future?
Is conscious experience of an interest thus a relevant factor?
Is it ok to kill an unconscious person/animal? Why or why not? In what way are they different from the hypothetical interest-free person with the potential to cultivate an interest in the future? In other words, how would you go about claiming they have an interest? Because they have the potential to experience it at some point in the future?
If so, doesn't this, in combination with inaction having the potential to be immoral as you stated earlier, not make it immoral to not breed livestock (assuming a nice living environment)? You are denying potential beings from fulfilling potential interests they might experience. Why should it be a relevant factor that the entity that could experience an interest at a future point in time is already alive?

Another set of questions that have been asked and answered already. You can read the rest of this thread which I already recommended. If you want me to repeat myself, you can be a little more polite. Other people reading through this thread have already seen these matters discussed. If anybody else has any questions about them, I'd be glad to answer.

'There is an available mechanism' isnt a sufficient condition. 'There is also an evolutionary reason for a desire' is not a sufficient condition.

It's the same we see in humans, and it's sufficient to see a basket instead of a carpet. Nothing said about animals in this respect can not also be said about humans.
I made clear that these are the reasons we should not believe these things about oysters (which lack the latter and are weak on the former) and certainly not about plants (which lack both).
The fact that's it's a very real possibility is all you should need to know to be motivated to avoid it just in case. In addition to all of the other known reasons to avoid it, there's no sensible reason to participate in the practice of animal agriculture.

And by their simplest interpretation behavioral evidence just demonstrates pain avoidance.

You can unfalsifiably assert the same thing about humans, as I have explained.

Either we're all rolled up carpets to you and you're some kind of solipsistic nihilist who has no problem with cannibalism, or we're all wicker baskets to be mindful of the very probable baby inside.

[IslandMorality]

A large part of what makes people go back to eating meat comes down to:
1. Them going vegan for deontological reasons (having to do with irrational concepts of rights, and extremes, rather than a recognition of suffering and interests). Something built on such shaky philosophical foundations will not stand up to scrutiny.
2. Them buying into dogmas such as HCLF, and not getting enough fat and protein in their diets from nuts and beans, or not taking B12. The appeal to nature fallacy and dubious health claims are common in veganism, and that's unfortunate.

With sound philosophy based on consequentialism and scientific evidence, and good nutrition, recidivism would be expected to be much lower.
You may overestimate the effects of peer influence, and underestimate how stupid and irresponsible a lot of people are with their beliefs and diets.
A large part of why vegans fail is because they're doing it wrong.

A similar argument could be made for handling life/death situations, with the only difference being it's a little less intuitive. Most people view themselves as unique little snowflakes that are independent entities in and of themselves, whereas in reality they are just a complex interaction of informationpatterns.

Suppose you have an advanced alien race with capabilities to fully scan all information of what makes up a living being, and possesses some kind of molecular-assembly nanotechnology that can heal any injury. For instance, you get crushed by a steamroller, the nanotech uses the last blueprint of your intact body and rebuilds you from scratch. (Both assumptions aren't that unrealistic to be technologically feasible in one form or another at some point).
In that society they have made it a sport to do shit like fighting alien-tigers with their bare hands, basejumping without a parachute, etc, and just getting killed and rebuilt constantly for fun. They dont get taught to avoid pain, on the contrary they learn to view it as a thrill (which is not too hard to imagine possible when such technology is available and considering we know even in the human species we have sadomasochists).
Now they kidnap 1000 human children and raise them as one of their own. I would argue there is a good chance a lot of those kids will look at life/death situations completely differently than people like us.

That said, back to the point about the island.
Suppose now one of those kids goes back to earth, lands on an island with the psychopath. That psychopath tells the kid he wants to kill him when he fals asleep. The kid will say "go right ahead bro", considering he has his aliveness-sensor-chip in him and will get "reset" to an earlier state by the nanotech in his ship the moment his head gets bashed in. He will be dead in the exact same way the "normal person" in the original hypothetical would be dead, only he will not give a shit. So why is it justifiable for the normal person to prevent the psychopath from realizing his interest? If that normal person only had a correct view on things (i.e that a human being is just an information pattern) he would not be "denied practical choice".
Even if the alien kid would let the normal person use his nanotech to reset him after death, even then 99% of the population would still refuse.

One could thus say a large part of why people would fail to let the psychopath kill them is because they are viewing it wrong.

Ps: that it is impossible in our society to attain this state of mind due to lack of such technology and similar pain/death-seeking culture shouldn't be a factor in determining the morality of the act itself.

Ps2: though this argument kind of accomplishes nothing except addressing the side point of justifiability, considering you already granted that it could be viewed as altruistic to let him kill you. Feel free to ignore it, although Im kind of curious to know whether or not you agree that this renders your statement of it being justifiable to kill him in self-defense incorrect.

That said, back to the point of choice limiting:
I think you recognize that eating meat, which is not nutritionally necessary but more of a social convention, is not choice limiting in the extreme way that a life or death situation is. Some people are cowards and bend to peer pressure more easily than others.
There is a gradation involved, and we can say it involves how much will power a person puts in. We're not all the same, and for some what is relatively easy could be very hard for others. It's quite an extreme suggestion that giving up meat would not be regarded as a choice in most developed countries.

Agree up until the last sentence. I really really believe a lot of people (probably most) are literally incapable of giving up animal products indefinitely.

Such a person would not be vegan if he or she was not trying to be, but just accepted eating meat every day.

We could theoretically lower the extreme of 1 piece per day and then make it so that there is a certain number that when he goes below it, it results in binge-eating later on, which after years of measuring showed that he would have a higher meat intake than if he were to just accept having a certain number of steady meat-intake.

A person who was trying, but caved to cravings often due to an inordinate addiction (a level of addiction which doesn't exist for animal products in reality), would be a different situation. If animal products were crack, it would be possible.

To the point of 1 per day I agree, but as stated above, its not that unrealistic to imagine a certain number that compensates later binges and results in overal less meat intake.


rest ill reply to later

[brimstoneSalad]

Ps2: though this argument kind of accomplishes nothing except addressing the side point of justifiability, considering you already granted that it could be viewed as altruistic to let him kill you. Feel free to ignore it, although Im kind of curious to know whether or not you agree that this renders your statement of it being justifiable to kill him in self-defense incorrect.

The concepts that answer this question were already covered in this thread.

Agree up until the last sentence. I really really believe a lot of people (probably most) are literally incapable of giving up animal products indefinitely.

If that's true, then for them vegan would be giving them up as much as possible. The argument over whether those people are vegan or not would come down to the argument over whether it is or is not possible for them.

I don't think there's any scientific evidence of a mechanism that would produce this result, so it's probably a psychological issue, and such a person needs therapy rather than meat.

HOWEVER, I will admit, like Jack Norris, it is possible that there may be a small number of people who have trouble synthesizing certain compounds, like Carnitine or whatnot which typically occur in animals and less so in plants. Much like cats cannot synthesize Taurine and must be supplemented (even meat based food is supplemented with taurine for cats).
The effect, as Norris suggests, would probably be something like a headache, or possibly fatigue or something like that.
In these cases, it would be more advisable to supplement on these compounds, or simply eat oysters (which are probably non-sentient and should generally be considered morally equivalent to vegan).

http://veganhealth.org/articles/amino

Carnitine

Carnitine is a non-essential amino acid found primarily in animal products. If you are eating enough protein, your body should make what you need. While there is no reason for most vegetarians or vegans to be concerned with carnitine, there have been cases of vegans who do not thrive unless they are taking carnitine supplements.

A carnitine metabolic problem has been linked to migraines. If you are a vegan who started getting migraines after becoming vegan, you might consider talking to your health professional about carnitine supplementation. The average person consumes 100 - 300 mg of carnitine per day (2).

Taurine, Carnitine, Carnosine, Creatine, and pretty much anything else you can imagine are available as vegan supplements. Or anybody experiencing health problems or cravings could eat oysters.

We could theoretically lower the extreme of 1 piece per day and then make it so that there is a certain number that when he goes below it, it results in binge-eating later on, which after years of measuring showed that he would have a higher meat intake than if he were to just accept having a certain number of steady meat-intake.

If that were true, and the person could literally not control his or herself and had no other options, then that would be the most vegan thing to do. But that person should also be eating the type of meat that causes the least possible harm: like oysters.

This is often reflected in fiction, whether with a vampire who has to feed now and then to keep from bingeing on human blood and committing a massacre, or a serial killer like "Dexter" who has an irresistible urge in him that he has to feed (which he fulfils by killing 'bad guys' to keep from killing innocents).

To the point of 1 per day I agree, but as stated above, its not that unrealistic to imagine a certain number that compensates later binges and results in overal less meat intake.

Sure. And it's also realistic to expect that supplements or oysters would solve any legitimate chemical/biological issue causing it, or that otherwise it was a matter of psychology that needed therapy.

[eloine]

So lets get started...

Veganism or vegetarianism because of the moral belief that unnecessarily causing (or contributing to the) suffering of sentient beings for what is ultimately just for pleasure is wrong and thus striving to live a life trying to minimize suffering

For my part I am not vegan for this reason.
Mostly because I want the end of discriminations, diseases and sufferings in the world and so I believe that stoping consuming animal products is the first step to acknowledge that suffering and discrimination is unacceptable, and also it is said to be healthier so maybe it is also the solution for the end of diseases as well as it seems consuming animals products can gives many health issues

[IslandMorality]

.

Dont really have time today to address the rest of the points, but I was thinking about the interest-based morality today and I wanted to get your input on what I came up with.

It concerns that hypothetical example of the OCD person who wanted to destroy the painting, and you replied something along the lines of it not necessarily being the moral thing to do, because letting him indulge in such compulsive thinking you are enabling him in his OCD, making it not be in his interest in terms of the long term consequences.
I remembered back in januari when you first presented me with the painter example, I replied to you asking me why they would want a painting to outlive them with "Mostly because they're idiots with a fucked up sense of values of what should be important in life.".
That is basically me making the same argument. In my opinion you would be enabling him by granting his request because of it having an extreme OCD type quality to it. Not unlike the OCD person, if there is such a painter, chances are he's gonna have a lot of anxiety in his lifetime about whether or not people will indulge his request and take care of his painting.
That was also basically my entire point when I said people SHOULDN'T care about being painlessly killed when noone outside of themselves is affected (such as on the island). In my opinion it is an counterproductive way of being that actually causes more harm than it does good in the grand scheme of things to let people indulge in such frivolous bullshit.

Come to think about it, I actually think we have the exact same view when it comes to morality and we are just using a different word for the same thing. I use avoidance of suffering and you use avoidance of violation of interests (which has a direct one to one relationship with avoiding suffering, because as I have stated many times before, I dont equate suffering equal to pain).

[brimstoneSalad]

That is basically me making the same argument. In my opinion you would be enabling him by granting his request because of it having an extreme OCD type quality to it. Not unlike the OCD person, if there is such a painter, chances are he's gonna have a lot of anxiety in his lifetime about whether or not people will indulge his request and take care of his painting.

I agree that while he's alive the best option may be therapy, or trying to get him to overcome his obsession, this is particularly true because of societal consequences of perhaps this artist redirecting his efforts. I don't think it has the same level of societal danger that enraged Muslims have in demanding to destroy others' property.
The most important point is that the painter has died, so there's really no future to preserve, so it's good to respect that painter's interest.

HOWEVER, if destroying his painting might help other so troubled painters overcome their obsessions and realize that everything is transient, so they should focus more on things of greater value in this life, it could be justified for the greater good in helping many others.

We have to look hard at the consequences, though. If an obsession or interest is only affecting one's own life, they are certainly more entitled to hold it, and it's hard to make a strong argument against respecting it.

That was also basically my entire point when I said people SHOULDN'T care about being painlessly killed when noone outside of themselves is affected (such as on the island).

Nor should they NOT care; if it affects only themselves, they can hold an non-rational interest. It being non-rational does not make it OK to violate it: what makes it justified is greater consequences to many others' interests. People can have idealized self interests that are non-rational.

In my opinion it is an counterproductive way of being that actually causes more harm than it does good in the grand scheme of things to let people indulge in such frivolous bullshit.

Well, not on the island it doesn't.
But there is a good argument to be made against frivolous bullshit within society.
If you're an artist, you should probably spend your time on something educational with real and immediate social value rather than some painting that may or may not really survive you or inspire anybody.

But, we can't make people spend their time on or care about things that we want. Not respecting their interests when we easily can, and when it does not do harm to do so (e.g. the alternative might not be doing good, but doing nothing instead), is a wrong.

I see a substantial order of magnitude difference in the consequences of Muslims being respected and enabled in their iconoclastic rage vs. fulfilling a dead painter's interest in his beloved art surviving after him. It is this difference that makes the painter's interest trump the Muslim's in this instance.

Come to think about it, I actually think we have the exact same view when it comes to morality and we are just using a different word for the same thing. I use avoidance of suffering and you use avoidance of violation of interests (which has a direct one to one relationship with avoiding suffering, because as I have stated many times before, I dont equate suffering equal to pain).

I don't think they're quite the same.
Can a person suffer after death?

I would say that 99.9% of the time they have the same outcome.

[IslandMorality]

I agree that while he's alive the best option may be therapy, or trying to get him to overcome his obsession, this is particularly true because of societal consequences of perhaps this artist redirecting his efforts. I don't think it has the same level of societal danger that enraged Muslims have in demanding to destroy others' property.
The most important point is that the painter has died, so there's really no future to preserve, so it's good to respect that painter's interest.

HOWEVER, if destroying his painting might help other so troubled painters overcome their obsessions and realize that everything is transient, so they should focus more on things of greater value in this life, it could be justified for the greater good in helping many others.

We have to look hard at the consequences, though. If an obsession or interest is only affecting one's own life, they are certainly more entitled to hold it, and it's hard to make a strong argument against respecting it.

Nor should they NOT care; if it affects only themselves, they can hold an non-rational interest. It being non-rational does not make it OK to violate it: what makes it justified is greater consequences to many others' interests. People can have idealized self interests that are non-rational.

Well, not on the island it doesn't.
But there is a good argument to be made against frivolous bullshit within society.
If you're an artist, you should probably spend your time on something educational with real and immediate social value rather than some painting that may or may not really survive you or inspire anybody.

But, we can't make people spend their time on or care about things that we want. Not respecting their interests when we easily can, and when it does not do harm to do so (e.g. the alternative might not be doing good, but doing nothing instead), is a wrong.

I see a substantial order of magnitude difference in the consequences of Muslims being respected and enabled in their iconoclastic rage vs. fulfilling a dead painter's interest in his beloved art surviving after him. It is this difference that makes the painter's interest trump the Muslim's in this instance.

I agree with the large majority of everything you said.

I don't think they're quite the same.
Can a person suffer after death?

I would say that 99.9% of the time they have the same outcome.

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

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

I also don't really see how even with the interests framework, you would be forced to indulge in peoples after death requests type interests like the painter. Especially in light that you already consceded earlier that one would be able to make a case for killing an animal with no concept of future.
Combine that with the fact that interests are fluid and things get difficult. For instance: instead of a painter, lets take an infant that drew a picture for his dad. It is obvious that the infant has an unspoken interest in the dad not destroying the picture.
However, that infant can grow up, cultivate a mindset where he thinks such things are frivolous, find that drawing amidst a pile of other stuff from his childhood when cleaning out the attic one day with his dad, and then tell his dad to throw the picture away. He no longer has an interest in his dad not destroying the picture.
Why should you respect a deceased person's interests they had right before they died. Just because in their lifetime they haven't (yet) been in a state of mind where they changed their feelings on their interest and just because they coincidentally were in that particular state of mind right before they died? Perhaps if they had lived longer they might've changed their mind about that interest themselves.
One could even argue that death itself is a "state of mind" where someone has no interests, depending on how you choose to define an individual.

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