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.