Vegan message board for support on vegan related issues and questions.
Topics include philosophy, activism, effective altruism, plant-based nutrition, and diet advice/discussion whether high carb, low carb (eco atkins/vegan keto) or anything in between.
Meat eater vs. Vegan debate welcome, but please keep it within debate topics.
PsYcHo wrote:But who is to determine what is moral?
A consistent system.
PsYcHo wrote:Did he do the morally correct thing? The child still lived.
No, he didn't. His intentions and understanding of the usual consequences are what is relevant.
Both of these examples are based off of stolen examples from brimstoneSalad...
This is why I consider his arguments rational, not moral. You and I presumably would both save the child. If my reasons differ from your reasons, but the conclusion is the same, an outsider who cannot read minds would say we both acted morally.
If morality was merely consistent, the reasoning behind it should not matter.
(and brimStone has a lot of examples worth stealing! I considered the fat man/ train wreck scenario as an example... )
He could modify them to be rational of course. But conjuring arbitrary and downright false postulates out of thin air and drawing inconsequent conclusions from them is not rational.
I'd like to leave a comment regarding working with meat too: I worked as a waiter at three different places, and I had to serve meat and dairy all the time. It was very uncomfortable, and it may have been the wrong thing to do depending on if others interpreted as condoning meat eating. It did lead to some interesting conversations. I think vegans shouldn't work at such places if they have other options.
PsYcHo wrote:If my reasons differ from your reasons, but the conclusion is the same, an outsider who cannot read minds would say we both acted morally.
The outsider is being presumptuous. He can accurately determine the intentions of the child saver by either looking for patterns of behavior in the person's past or simply asking the child saver. Alternatively, the outsider could admit that he or she doesn't know.
PsYcHo wrote:If morality was merely consistent, the reasoning behind it should not matter.
Are you talking about moral dogma?
Morality is an axiomatic system, like Geometry. Reasoning is required to prove something in axiomatic systems.
The problem with the current Vegan propaganda is that it focuses too much in comparing animals with humans, and regard us as the same. My particular view is that, although we might be similar, we humans have always disliked the idea of this comparison, despite our current behavior or the apparent current carelessness in which we compare ourselves with animals. The thing is, that I do not. I might have no empathy for animals. But I believe in ethics among us humans, a logic that cannot be applied to animals. We by humans have moral and ethical obligations to ourselves. The problem now is that we love animals so much, that we depend on them, and we seem not to be able to break that dependence. And by telling people to threat animals better is something that confuses them. Because they already threat animals very well due to that feeling of dependence.
PsYcHo wrote:If you see a bus full of children flip over on the interstate, the argument could be made it is rational do nothing.
Like I said, you confuse my lack of ethic and moral to animals with having the same position with humans. I would try to save children from a flipped bus. I wouldn't go try to save pigs nor water them from a truck full of them. There is a difference, and by the vegan movement not recognizing it, hurts the movement itself.
PsYcHo wrote:If you see a bus full of children flip over on the interstate, the argument could be made it is rational do nothing.
Like I said, you confuse my lack of ethic and moral to animals with having the same position with humans. I would try to save children from a flipped bus. I wouldn't go try to save pigs nor water them from a truck full of them. There is a difference, and by the vegan movement not recognizing it, hurts the movement itself.
I merely find it interesting you have no ethical objections to killing animals. I am by no means judging. I eat them, after all. Yet I would try to save a truckload of overturned pigs. I hate to see any creatures suffer. Hypocritical, I know, but most of us carnist put the source of our food out of our minds.
The main topic I do disagree with you is your approach to the vegan movement. As a non-vegan, it is really the ethical argument that made me consider it at all, and reduce my meat consumption considerably. By advocating that (as your argument appears to me) animals don't matter, then why should it matter if I eat their corpse? Health concerns do not concern me, and judging by the obesity epidemic among other things it does not concern a large portion carnist. So why would your argument hold more sway to people who eat animals, but still hate to see one suffer or die?
hence the postulate for humanist veganism. We should care not to eat meat. If we fail to see it as a non-necessity, as a vice, instead of as a binding social must, the society will fail innevitably, no matter what, and blindly to its own selfdestruction. They don't see it because people don't care to take it into consideration.
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