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

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

Post by Mr. Purple »

inator wrote:Whether a preference or hedonistic framework is more relevant for morality is another question.
I think that's for each individual to figure out about themselves. For me hedonistic impulses are what make things intrinsically good or bad, so that's the only side i can see as relevant for morality.
inator wrote:It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it's an example that makes sense evolutionarily. Pleasure and pain signals exist precisely in order to create a competing system of preferences/incentives in favor of a certain evolutionarily advantageous behavior.
Of course it doesn't make sense evolutionarily. That was the entire point of making the example about a robot that we build.

inator wrote:the preference is what makes the experience positive or negative. I guess it wouldn't be suffering, just some sort of neutral sensory stimulation.
Those articles definitely didn't give me this impression. It sounded like what they were calling "wanting" or incentive salience was a biologically separate mechanism that simply got you to focus on, and led you towards something. It didn't seem to be part of the experience of pleasure. It didn't hint that the experience of pleasure would change depending on your wants. What are you using to say that without wanting, pleasure becomes neutral sensory stimulation?

"‘Wanting’ is psychologically and neurally distinguishable from ‘liking’, even if they often happen together."
inator wrote:The main idea is that hedonistic sensations are always accompanied by preferences, but preferences are not always accompanied by hedonism.
They seemed to make it a point in the article to say that this is correlation. Liking something biologically creates a corresponding want for that thing, so of course they will be more tightly correlated in that direction.


If it turned out that the experience of pleasure and suffering remained exactly the same regardless of what the robot wanted, would you still say that wanting was the morally significant part?
inator wrote:I'd rather know a hard truth (even if it doesn't lead to any personal benefit) rather than believe a comforting lie which leads to higher life satisfaction. Under these circumstances, I think that the moral thing for you to do is to tell me the truth and make me unhappy.
But to me this example works fine with an less simplistic definition of pleasure. I recognize the feeling I get knowing the truth and being right about the world as a very positive mental state. It may come with lots of pain, but the positive outweighs the negative most of the time because of how much (non-simplistic)satisfaction I get from knowing my views line up with reality. If knowing my views lined up with reality gave me a terrible feeling itself, apart from the separate consequences of things like losing life after death, I doubt i would still be seeking truth. You may look at that sentence and think that you would still choose it, but like in singer's talk, you may not be compensating for the fact that you looking at this example from the perspective of someone who is getting satisfaction from knowing the truth or thinking about a world in which you learn the truth. It's hard to subtract that from the equation. If you are different enough from me that this doesn't apply to you, then we could need different moral systems for our difference in biology.
inator wrote:If you can grasp that an outcome can be positive even if it leads you to be worse off, then you're not in line with egoism.
of course i initially think that outcomes would be good even if i'm worse off, but that's under that simplistic definition of worse off. What makes that seem moral in the first place is that i'm being rewarded for thinking about the world in that way. If it gave me extremely negative feelings thinking about a utilitarian outcome(negativity towards the fact that the outcome was utilitarian, not negativity towards the consequence of the outcome), I doubt I would think it was good in the first place. Sorry if i'm not explaining myself well enough.
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by inator »

Mr. Purple wrote:I think that's for each individual to figure out about themselves. For me hedonistic impulses are what make things intrinsically good or bad, so that's the only side i can see as relevant for morality.
If morality is to have any objective truth value, then there should be a right answer. We'll figure it out eventually.
Mr. Purple wrote:Sorry if i'm not explaining myself well enough.
You are, I understand what you mean. I'll get back to you next week with a hopefully better explanation (I'll be travelling for a few days and won't be able to answer)
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by brimstoneSalad »

IslandMorality wrote:I will however say that there is a nice parallel that can be drawn between the nature of logic(s) and our inability to come to an agreement.
There is no "logic" (unless ofc you're talking about the combined field of all logics). There are different kinds of logics (i.e propositional logic, predicate logic), each based on different kinds of axioms.
No, there is just "logic" in its most common and general sense, expressed in terms of the underlying premises behind all systems. It's a misconception that there are really different "kinds" of logic that are equally valid but legitimately different: such claims are founded in ignorance of the underlying premises, and championed by people who are incapable of making or unwilling to make actually logical arguments (usually due to delusion or intellectual dishonesty).
There are different ways of writing or expressing logical statements, and some "systems" impose additional rules for certain purposes (which are in addition to logic, and usually superfluous), but logic at core is about avoiding contradiction all while saying something meaningful.

See also, law of thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_thought

1 Law of contradiction. 2 Law of excluded middle. 3 Principle of identity.

These are not subjective, but inherent to thought and discourse. If you don't accept them, you can't participate in discourse (it's the first forum rule).
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2115

IslandMorality wrote:Same goes for morality. Your type of subjective morality holds interests as the basic axiom, my type of subjective morality does suffering.
You're simply wrong.
You should go back and read from our last posts onward, and follow the ongoing discussion with Mr. Purple. He's arguing for your position. Maybe you will gain some insight from that discussion, and find more questions to ask that could be valuable to the conversation.
IslandMorality wrote:Im arguing that there is no objective standard for choosing one axiom over the other and that it's a matter of preference.
I know what you're arguing, and you're absurdly wrong.

It's as if we asked about what mass is, and I measure it in absolute physical terms of rest energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_mass#Rest_energy ), and you arbitrarily disqualify charged particles without explanation, or by merely claiming they have no mass in your system because you don't accept them. For you, it's just a different kind of subjective "mass". No, no it isn't. It's arbitrary.

Inator explained this quite eloquently above. I would go further in terms of certainty in saying suffering has no meaning outside the contexts of interests, but is just an arbitrary nerve cluster firing, and not even suffering (it could just as easily be labeled pleasure for all it means).

IslandMorality wrote:And as far as I can interpret your posts, the only thing you have done so far is just state that your axiom is objective
I'll do the same for logic, and the same for mass. It's more important for you to understand how your arbitrarily redefining it makes it meaningless; a key part of my explanation you seemed to have missed.
IslandMorality wrote:with your only evidence being providing one anecdote of something you feel is morally right (not destroying the painting after the painter has died) that isnt covered under my system with the axiom of suffering.
And to that I replied with an anecdote of my own for which your system falls short for a large majority of people's feelings (giving bob the injection against his interests most people would not consider to be morally wrong)
If that's how you see the conversation, you completely missed the point. You need to read the rest of the posts in their thread, where Mr. Purple carried on the conversation in your stead, including inator's above.
IslandMorality wrote:ps: I read the majority of your reply so I'm aware you tried to divert the argument I was making with that anecdote by trying to include other people (mentioning that bob could infect others).
However to avoid that we can just replace "virus" with "an advanced alien race is holding the whole world hostage and will kill each person that hasnt had a needle stuck in his/her body within 24 hours, with advanced nanotechnology in a horribly painful way, just for the lulz because they can".
In other words... bob is the only one that will suffer :)
And Bob has no family or friends. Nobody will miss him. Nobody cares about him. He doesn't have an important job. He leeches from society precisely as much as he contributes, and has no negative or positive impact upon the world, and his death will impose no burdens, and he won't change his mind in the future or change his relationship to society.

If Bob, knowing the consequences of not taking the shot, prefers to be killed as such (horribly, as you say) than take the shot, and in that preference is in his right state of mind (not temporarily depressed, etc.), then that's his business, not yours. You have no business forcing the injection upon him, and you would be likely be immoral -- not moral -- for doing so.

Again, you should really read the posts that have been made while you've been gone.
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by IslandMorality »

I made a genuine effort to keep reading and refute your comments but you make so many false analogies it's just completely impossible to debate you. Pretty much every single thing you say is wrong in some way. (not even mentioning the fact that in our discussion months ago, in contrast to my manner of discourse, every time I refuted something you said you leave that part out in your quoting, never even acknowledged you were wrong, and just threw out the next pseudo-argument, which rendered me completely frustrated)

But considering I'm not saying WHY you are wrong, and WHY your analogies are completely ridiculous, you win the argument by bullshit overload. Congrats!
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by brimstoneSalad »

IslandMorality wrote:I made a genuine effort to keep reading and refute your comments but you make so many false analogies it's just completely impossible to debate you.
I'm not making false analogies, you just aren't understanding the analogies because you do not understand what I'm arguing and do not understand the point of disagreement. You think we're both arguing different equally valid subjective interpretations, that's not the case.

See my analogy about logic and mass above -- that's spot on to what you're doing.
Because you seem not to believe in logic, of course you can't understand the analogy (likewise, you probably don't know anything about physics).

Or I could put it even more simply, if you have a highschool grasp of mass:

I'm defining mass in the proper sense, you're defining it as weight and saying an object doesn't have mass, but it depends on what planet it's on (due to variable gravity). That's not as accurate an analogy, but it gets to the root of the semantic problem.

There is also a fundamental misunderstanding on your part of what objectivity means, how it differs from relativity, and it may all stem from your notion that reality itself is somehow subjective and the rules of logic are not concrete (what is real is just opinion? No.). That's something I can't fix. You need to decide on your own to accept logic (at least tentatively) before you attempt to engage in discourse with intelligent and sane adults.
IslandMorality wrote:Pretty much every single thing you say is wrong in some way.
You just don't understand what I'm saying. This is why I encouraged you to continue reading the other comments, and discussion with Mr. Purple. Others have continued the discussion in different ways.
IslandMorality wrote:every time I refuted something you said you leave that part out in your quoting, never even acknowledged you were wrong, and just threw out the next pseudo-argument, which rendered me completely frustrated
What reasoning do you think you've refuted? You have done plenty of denying, but no refuting of the relevant arguments.

If I left something out, it was probably because it wasn't an actual argument.
IslandMorality wrote:But considering I'm not saying WHY you are wrong, and WHY your analogies are completely ridiculous
THAT would be a refutation if you did that. Yes, if you don't actually refute what I say by explaining why it is in error, but instead just say, like a child, "nuh uh" you have not actually refuted anything.

You don't seem to even understand how conversation works. Maybe this is the root of your problem.

Find something I have said you disagree with, and actually try to refute it for once. Then maybe we can get somewhere.
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by Jaywalker »

IslandMorality wrote:Your type of subjective morality holds interests as the basic axiom, my type of subjective morality does suffering.
Great, at least you don't consider "don't be a dick" to be a "consistent set of moral values" anymore. That could be a suggestion, which is the approach taken by many animal welfare organisations (meatless mondays etc), but it's not the ultimate aim and it's not morality.

But suggesting that to people who are already comfortably doing much more than that was ridiculous.
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by IslandMorality »

brimstoneSalad wrote:...
So sick of this interests vs suffering based morality sidedebate. For the sake of argument, lets grant your position. Lets grant interests are the only thing that make sense to base morality on. Lets grant destroying the painting for no reason is immoral because it unnecessarily violates the painters interest.

We're still left with the same situation basing this on interests as if we based this shit on suffering. It then just becomes the weighing of interests that determines whether or not something is moral.
Let's take the painting example. Suppose for instance that painting is of something completely symmetric, except for 1 single thing that breaks the symmetry. Suppose me being the moral person that I am, I put it up for display in my living room because I didnt wanna unnecessarily violate the painter's interests.
However, one day my friend with severe OCD drops by, he sees the painting and wants to destroy it because that single assymetry triggers his OCD. I have no reason to stop him from doing so, because I cannot put the interests of someone who isnt alive to suffer by the destruction of the painting before the interests of someone that would suffer (probably for weeks/years) if I kept it from being destroyed.
Hell, if someone just randomly had a legitimate desire (nothing as intense as severe OCD) to destroy the painting, I would not stop that person from satisfying his interests. Because again, I would have a hard time prioritizing the interests of someone who is dead, over the interests of someone who is alive.
And that goes for me too, if for some random reason/feeling(/interest) I didnt want to look after that painting, I wouldnt consider me prioritising my interests over that of a person who isnt alive to experience his interest not being "satisfied" as immoral.

Same goes for the hypothetical psychopath im trapped on the island with in a postapocalyptic world where everyone else is dead. I have an interest in living sure, but he's a psychopath and has an interest in killing me. If he does it painlessly when Im asleep, based on what am I gonna say its immoral? Because he violated my interest?
Every night I fall asleep in my sealed steel enclosure to prevent him from bashing in my head, Im violating his interest. Night after night, year after year.
How would you go about defending the position that my interest should get priority over his in this scenario?

(the lack of ever having heard a good defense for that question is ultimately why I believe the concept of veganism is bullshit, because I really dont see how killing an animal painlessly is wrong if it had a good life)
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by brimstoneSalad »

IslandMorality wrote:For the sake of argument, lets grant your position.[...]
However, one day my friend with severe OCD drops by, he sees the painting and wants to destroy it because that single assymetry triggers his OCD. I have no reason to stop him from doing so, because I cannot put the interests of someone who isnt alive to suffer by the destruction of the painting before the interests of someone that would suffer (probably for weeks/years) if I kept it from being destroyed.
The bolded statements make clear that you have not, in fact, granted the position for the sake of argument.
You can't say you'll grant it for the sake of argument, then clearly violate that a couple sentences later and go back to your original position.

If you actually granted the position, you would only need to weigh which interest was stronger.

If the painter only kind of cared about the painting, but your friend was severely troubled by it in a way that could not be better resolved by therapy and medication (which would probably be more in your friend's best interest than just destroying people's paintings which does not resolve the underlying problem your friend has but just enables his condition), then it might be appropriate to destroy it.
IslandMorality wrote:Because again, I would have a hard time prioritizing the interests of someone who is dead, over the interests of someone who is alive.
Which is because you have not granted the position, even for the sake of argument.

IslandMorality wrote:If he does it painlessly when Im asleep, based on what am I gonna say its immoral? Because he violated my interest?
Assuming you had an interest in staying alive and not dying, yes.
IslandMorality wrote:Every night I fall asleep in my sealed steel enclosure to prevent him from bashing in my head, Im violating his interest. Night after night, year after year.
How would you go about defending the position that my interest should get priority over his in this scenario?
Typically, being killed by a psychopath is not in the interest of the greater good, since it inhibits you from doing other goods. In any realistic scenario where the world has not ended, this is not a good thing to do, so your example is meaningless.
However, if everybody else in the world is dead and there's no good to be done except for the psychopath, and we assumed that before they all died nobody cared one way or another what happened later, you might reasonably consider it altruistic to let him kill you if you couldn't change his mind about it and the decision was made with full informed consent.

However, it is justifiable to prevent him from killing you, even if you must kill him to do so. Violating the interests of others is harmful to them, but in defense of your life you are typically denied practical choice. Morality is only relevant as a metric to judge character in the context of choice, and life or death situations are pretty much the most limiting ones there are.

Likewise, if you have nothing else to eat and you would starve, you can justify killing animals (human or otherwise) for food. You can also justify killing animals in a medical experiment to create a life saving drug. This justification only exists in so far as there is no possible and practicable alternative.

Maybe you don't actually know what "vegan" means:
vegan society wrote:Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
IslandMorality wrote:(the lack of ever having heard a good defense for that question is ultimately why I believe the concept of veganism is bullshit, because I really dont see how killing an animal painlessly is wrong if it had a good life)
If you actually accepted my position for the sake of argument, then you would.

You should not have needed a "good defense" to that question because it's not based on reality (so has no bearing today in the context of not living after a global apocalypse), but I provided an explanation anyway.
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Re: An open invitation to stop your misinformed fad and start making an actual difference in the world.

Post by IslandMorality »

brimstoneSalad wrote: The bolded statements make clear that you have not, in fact, granted the position for the sake of argument.
You can't say you'll grant it for the sake of argument, then clearly violate that a couple sentences later and go back to your original position.

If you actually granted the position, you would only need to weigh which interest was stronger.
Poor choice of words, my bad. Has more to do because I had no idea how you would go about weighing the strength of someone's interest in your system.
If the painter only kind of cared about the painting, but your friend was severely troubled by it in a way that could not be better resolved by therapy and medication (which would probably be more in your friend's best interest than just destroying people's paintings which does not resolve the underlying problem your friend has but just enables his condition), then it might be appropriate to destroy it.
Ok, if im understanding this correctly, its about intensity of desire/preoccupation/... with the interest that determines the strength? If that painting occupies the painters whole world and its just really annoying to my ocdfriend but not the center of his world, its immoral to destroy it, whether or not the painter is alive?
However if my friend is visibly more preoccupied with it than the painter was, then its immoral to stop my friend from destroying it? Have I correctly interpreted your position?

If so... In your system, doesnt that make it moral for a person completely (sexually) obsessed with another person to rape that person, provided that other person would hate being raped but it wouldnt affect him/her to the extent that his/her life would be forever influenced? (and in some way the will-be rapist has a way of obtaining that information that his will-be victim will only be affected to a certain extent)

edit: And in that system, I still dont see how it's wrong to kill a cow for meat. I am visibly more preoccupied/interested with/in eating its meat than it is with/in living. Because I would argue its preoccupation/interest in life is rather limited (if not non-existent).
Granted if you threatened it, it will react fiercly, but I think a more viable explanation for that reaction is the interest in avoiding pain, not that the cow is thinking "i wanna live". Analogous to how I would argue that it has an interest in having sex, but not in making babies.
Or instead, I'd rather just say there is no good evidence to assume that it does have an interest in life, so the burden of proof is not on me. And considering for the same reason vegans dont give a shit about eating plants (no evidence to assume sentience => no interests => ok to eat), if there is no evidence to assume an interest in living, I dont see see why I, or anyone else defining morality by your standards, should give a shit about killing a cow painlessly.

Assuming you had an interest in staying alive and not dying, yes.

Typically, being killed by a psychopath is not in the interest of the greater good, since it inhibits you from doing other goods. In any realistic scenario where the world has not ended, this is not a good thing to do, so your example is meaningless.
The example serves to make a more accurate comparison between the circumstances in which animals are killed painlessly and a human would be, so no, I wouldnt call it meaningless.
However, if everybody else in the world is dead and there's no good to be done except for the psychopath, and we assumed that before they all died nobody cared one way or another what happened later, you might reasonably consider it altruistic to let him kill you if you couldn't change his mind about it and the decision was made with full informed consent.

However, it is justifiable to prevent him from killing you, even if you must kill him to do so. Violating the interests of others is harmful to them, but in defense of your life you are typically denied practical choice. Morality is only relevant as a metric to judge character in the context of choice, and life or death situations are pretty much the most limiting ones there are.
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.
So one could start to wonder how much "choice" is involved for the same reason we dont question the lack of choice in life and death situations (i.e empircal data).
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,...)

edit: by the way, turning this back around to my claim that the concept of morality in general is bullshit and its better to just "try not to be a dick". 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.
Its hard to claim THEY had a choice, when we see countless examples of social pressure influencing people to absurd extents, even in situations where there are no consequences to non-confirmism (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)
And if you cant say a nazi that has killed a jew was immoral in doing so, then whats the use of that word?
Likewise, if you have nothing else to eat and you would starve, you can justify killing animals (human or otherwise) for food. You can also justify killing animals in a medical experiment to create a life saving drug. This justification only exists in so far as there is no possible and practicable alternative.

Maybe you don't actually know what "vegan" means:
vegan society wrote:Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism

If you actually accepted my position for the sake of argument, then you would.

You should not have needed a "good defense" to that question because it's not based on reality (so has no bearing today in the context of not living after a global apocalypse), but I provided an explanation anyway.
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)

ps: just like morality did before it, also veganism loses pretty much all meaning/utility with this definition. 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 :lol:
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.

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. The one about unless you are living in a commune using as little resources as possible for selfish reasons, you have no non-ridiculous basis to judge meat eaters for drawing their line at another random point. Just like a murderer of 100 people/year doesnt have a non-ridiculous basis to judge a murderer of 10.000 people/year.
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?"

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

Post by brimstoneSalad »

IslandMorality wrote:Ok, if im understanding this correctly, its about intensity of desire/preoccupation/... with the interest that determines the strength?
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.
IslandMorality wrote:However if my friend is visibly more preoccupied with it than the painter was, then its immoral to stop my friend from destroying it? Have I correctly interpreted your position?
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.
IslandMorality wrote:If so... In your system, doesnt that make it moral for a person completely (sexually) obsessed with another person to rape that person, provided that other person would hate being raped but it wouldnt affect him/her to the extent that his/her life would be forever influenced? (and in some way the will-be rapist has a way of obtaining that information that his will-be victim will only be affected to a certain extent)
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.

IslandMorality wrote:edit: And in that system, I still dont see how it's wrong to kill a cow for meat. I am visibly more preoccupied/interested with/in eating its meat than it is with/in living. Because I would argue its preoccupation/interest in life is rather limited (if not non-existent).
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.
IslandMorality wrote:Granted if you threatened it, it will react fiercly, but I think a more viable explanation for that reaction is the interest in avoiding pain, not that the cow is thinking "i wanna live".
You could assert the same unfalsifiable claim about human beings.
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

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.
IslandMorality wrote:Analogous to how I would argue that it has an interest in having sex, but not in making babies.
This can actually be demonstrated through human use of birth control. That's a very different kind of claim.
I would agree that for this reason it's acceptable to neuter and spay animals, particularly since it has beneficial consequences.
None of this applies to death, though, which I have demonstrated above goes beyond an interest in merely not being dead to the sum total of the interests an animal has in actually living.
IslandMorality wrote:Or instead, I'd rather just say there is no good evidence to assume that it does have an interest in life, so the burden of proof is not on me.
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.
IslandMorality wrote:And considering for the same reason vegans dont give a shit about eating plants (no evidence to assume sentience => no interests => ok to eat),
While it's silly, some vegans do care about plants. 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.

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.
IslandMorality wrote:if there is no evidence to assume an interest in living,
There is, but you just disregard it and make excuses for it. The fact that you do not find it conclusive does not negate it.
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.
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