Why do animals have moral worth?

[GeorgeNorge]

I’ve been vegan for 3 years now but have come under fire from a friend (James) who is much better read on ethics than I am and so I’m struggling to defend my position. I feel that it’s the case that this is because he is so much better informed than I am, rather than because he is actually correct, so I’ll present his arguments here and I’d be really interested to hear if anyone had any insights.

A couple of clarifying points

1. We aren't debating veganism itself, rather the question of whether animals have any moral worth at all (we do debate veganism a lot too, and have often said ok lets just agree to disagree and assume animals do have moral worth, does veganism follow (no prizes for guessing I say yes and he says no), but I'd like to try and clear up this first question first and then move onto veganism specifically in a future thread)

2. James and I both picked up the term "moral patient" from Tom Regan in "A Case for Animal Rights", who uses it to refer to animals and severely handicapped humans that both lack the rationality of a moral agent. I'm not sure how ubiquitous this term is so given we both use it I thought I'd just clarify that.

My Position

The sticking point between me and James is basically this: I attribute moral worth to sentience without justification.

James' 1st response is to this point and why it isn't self evident to attribute moral worth to animals (or humans) just because they're capable of experiencing things.

His 2nd point is then defending the view that human moral patients have moral worth, but animals do not, and that this is not inconsistent.

In my welcome post it was suggested that I clarify whether or not we're talking in deontological or consequentialist terms. James is reasoning from a Kantian view however he does contest that even from a consequentialist perspective you don't end up attributing moral worth to animals.

If phrased as a question, I'm effectively asking "why should we attribute moral worth to animals (and human moral patients for that matter)?"

James' 1st point on animal moral value

- Qualia of pain is only known to be bad because of our own past experiences

- It would be more accurate to say this "feels bad" rather than "is immoral"

- Attributing universal statement of good/bad requires further reasoning

- Personal prejudicial aversion is as baseless as the qualia (i.e. we still need further reasoning)

- Collective prejudicial aversion comes from socialisation or evolutionary psychology

- Socialisation is fickle but can apply as a temporal contract (therefore can change as the contract participants see fit)

- Evolution is directed towards the end of procreation - animal compassion never helps but sometimes hinders this end

James' 2nd point on attributing moral worth to human moral patients

- Moral agents have faculty of moral language/understanding

- Quest for morality is ultimately directed towards universal moral statements

- Though moral constituency can be gerrymandered, non-universal moral statements exist on borrowed time unless assurance can be given that excluded parties will never join the included (e.g. moral patients will never have moral faculties even when given opportunity)

- Moral agents have an interest in promoting the "common good" because this is the only language that is applicable to all potential contract holders

- The exclusion of human moral patients will undoubtedly affect the treatment of moral agents - there are psychological as well as political dangers of deciding which humans get to live or die

- Human moral patients are immediately connected to many moral agents so the knock-on effects can also be felt acutely

- It is in the long term interests of the contract-holding constituency to not discriminate between humans

Conclusion

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to reply I really appreciate it. James is a top chap and I really enjoy talking to him about this even if we do completely disagree, but like I said I do feel very out of my depth when talking to him so I think the insights from some better informed people such as yourselves would be really interesting and helpful!

TL;DR

I have assumed sentient life has inherent moral value, James contests this fact and argues I must justify this from first principles. How would one go about doing this?

[brimstoneSalad]

1. We aren't debating veganism itself, rather the question of whether animals have any moral worth at all (we do debate veganism a lot too, and have often said ok lets just agree to disagree and assume animals do have moral worth, does veganism follow (no prizes for guessing I say yes and he says no), but I'd like to try and clear up this first question first and then move onto veganism specifically in a future thread)

First it's important to establish that if he's claiming animals have no moral value, the burden of proof is on him and not on you.
Burden of proof follows a claim.

To arrive at veganism you need only admit that you *don't know* if animals have moral value or not and that you *don't know* if it's wrong to eat them if they do, because veganism follows from the precautionary principle if they even may have moral value and if it even may be wrong to eat them given it's practicable to avoid it.

To put an example:
You are driving and see a bassinet in the road. You don't know if this bassinet contains a baby or not, you may speculate on the probability, but you can not see inside. Ought you swerve slightly to avoid running over it on the off chance it contains a baby?

If your friend says no, that underscores a much deeper issue.

2. James and I both picked up the term "moral patient" from Tom Regan in "A Case for Animal Rights", who uses it to refer to animals and severely handicapped humans that both lack the rationality of a moral agent. I'm not sure how ubiquitous this term is so given we both use it I thought I'd just clarify that.

That's common terminology.

The sticking point between me and James is basically this: I attribute moral worth to sentience without justification.

See above, you do not need to justify it. That's his burden to justify their lack of moral worth.

- Qualia of pain is only known to be bad because of our own past experiences

Well no, technically speaking pain is a very specific experience in response to tissue damage or potential tissue damage: some rare people enjoy it because it elicits other pleasurable experience (such as sexual) that exceeds the pain.

But if you're speaking more generally of negative stimuli, it's not just from past experience, it's a matter of science too (does he deny science?).
It's an issue of basic negative feedback in neuroscience which is tautologically connected to being in itself undesirable

There is a step between being undesirable for an individual and *objectively* undesirable, but it's not difficult.

Here's an easy one:

Morality is about value systems.
A subjective morality would be a single subjective value system of a subject.

An objective morality would be something else; an objective value system.
We can either regard that as incoherent because the fabric of the universe has not value system, or find a coherent way to assemble what would be an objective value system; such as the sum total of all value systems in the universe.

If we do that latter (rather than dismissing objective morality as a whole), we come to understand it as considering the values of others, which is to say the sum total of their interests, preferences, etc. what they each subjectively regard as good or desirable. Roughly speaking, this is called preference utilitarianism.

We can not consider the preferences of rocks because they have none. We can consider the preferences of fish because they do have preferences (as primitive as they may be). One of those preferences for any sentient being is to not experience negative stimuli like pain and other forms of suffering, and TO experience positive stimuli like pleasure and happiness.

There are other ways to explain it, but that's an easy one.

- It would be more accurate to say this "feels bad" rather than "is immoral"

If we consider morality as an evaluation of other directed consideration, yeah, something that feels bad *for us* is not immoral. That's the distinction between utilitarianism and altruism (the latter is what I favor as an understanding of morality, which is why I said "roughly speaking... preference utilitarianism"). Rather than it being immoral to do things that make us feel bad (as actions that affect ourselves) it's immoral to cause others to feel bad on aggregate with a harmful action.

- Attributing universal statement of good/bad requires further reasoning

Well I already provided that reasoning, but in either case your friend is shifting the burden of proof as I explained before. It need only be unknown to give them the benefit of the doubt.

- Personal prejudicial aversion is as baseless as the qualia (i.e. we still need further reasoning)

Only our own feelings are irrelevant. We don't need further reasoning to not do something to Bob that Bob does not want done to him.

- Collective prejudicial aversion comes from socialisation or evolutionary psychology

That's bad reasoning. Claims of correlations are irrelevant and can not be asserted to be the sole cause of something.
I don't subscribe to theological claims of gnosis, but a pseudoscientific claim from evolutionary psychology (among the softest and most pseudoscientific of the fields claiming to be a science) as a stand in doesn't discredit the possibility of those claims.

I do find that reason, regardless of us having evolved the capacity to use it, is a very good way of creating philosophical concordance across cultures and time. The golden rule-- which I have articulated and argued for here-- is hardly new, and claims that it evolved don't undermine its philosophical credibility in morality one bit.

- Socialisation is fickle but can apply as a temporal contract (therefore can change as the contract participants see fit)

- Evolution is directed towards the end of procreation - animal compassion never helps but sometimes hinders this end

None of this is relevant.

[brimstoneSalad]

James' 2nd point on attributing moral worth to human moral patients

- Moral agents have faculty of moral language/understanding

"faculty"
That's very much like saying "potential", and it's an incredibly large amount of baggage to hide in that one word.

Either something is or it isn't. Either somebody uses moral language and understands moral philosophy, or they don't. I do. Rocks don't. Your friend also apparently doesn't in the latter case (he does not understand morality at all), much like the average rock, and is not a moral agent. Is it OK to kill him, according to his own reasoning?

If you want to talk about potential for something, you need to be very specific about the conditions in which that potential is being evaluated and the probability threshold involved.

Take a silica rock and put it in a very specific environment, and it has a much higher potential to be a moral agent as well by being transformed into a semiconductor computer running a very sophisticated neural network (a synthetic intelligence). Without that the probability is much lower (astronomically low) of enough crystals developing in just the right way with dopants in the rich places to form an analog of a brain by mere chance -- but the probability is still not completely zero.

Take a skin cell and put it in a specific environment and it can grow into a fully grown human being, and put that human being through a specific education, and again you have a moral agent.

We're dealing with environmental determinism and indeterministic probability (e.g. quantum events). The only way you can pretend make sense of faculty outside of that is by imagining supernatural concepts of free will (as opposed to naturalistic concepts of it) to offload the incoherence onto.

- Quest for morality is ultimately directed towards universal moral statements

No, not at all. And way to make an easy probably sound hard and epically difficult.

Here's the universal moral statement:
The golden rule. Which is, consideration for the interests of others (those who have interests). End of "quest"?
No, the actual quest is the science of determining which beings have interests, what those interests are, and empirically the best way to serve the interests of all beings.

(You might be noticing a pattern here, in that your friend is wrong about everything he claims)

- Though moral constituency can be gerrymandered, non-universal moral statements exist on borrowed time unless assurance can be given that excluded parties will never join the included (e.g. moral patients will never have moral faculties even when given opportunity)

Is he seriously saying we shouldn't say "Baby bob has no moral value because baby bob is not a moral agent" because baby Bob might become a moral agent some day?

First, if you kill baby Bob then baby Bob will not ever become a moral agent, so you have made the assurances yourself. Problem solved. You can kill baby Bob and then justify it by the claim "Baby bob has no moral value because baby bob is not a moral agent" without that statement being on "borrowed time".
Second, even if any of that were true, it doesn't matter if a moral claim is "on borrowed time" and tied to a particular circumstance. You can say "Baby Bob has no moral value right now because he is not currently a moral agent". There's nothing wrong with contextual moral claims. Moral claims are not useless or meaningless if they are not eternal.

It's all the same potential argument I anticipated and that has been made by countless anti-abortionists.

- Moral agents have an interest in promoting the "common good" because this is the only language that is applicable to all potential contract holders

More of this universality nonsense.

Your friend is being an amazing hypocrite pulling these things out of thin air and then saying your values aren't substantiated. He'd done a far worse job of substantiating his claims, he's only hid his contradictions in word salad.

This is pretty typical Randian Objectivist stuff, though. Sounds more specifically like a Molyneux thing. I'm guessing he's a fan?

- The exclusion of human moral patients will undoubtedly affect the treatment of moral agents - there are psychological as well as political dangers of deciding which humans get to live or die

Not undoubtedly, no, it's a question of risk.
This is, FYI, a pragmatic argument and not a deontological one. This has nothing to do with humans having moral value, and just treating them as though they do even if they don't due to convenience.

You could just as well say that because you can't prove that no cows are moral agents (or that none have moral value), you should treat them all as if they are to avoid killing one who is (which is not even an absurd proposition, social and intelligent non-human animals display signs of some moral agency).
And that's a fairly solid argument, but surely one he won't be able to appreciate. He'll probably say the chance of a cow being a moral agent is lower so presents less risk. Does it? No, not inherently. It all depends on the system you have in place and how many safety measures you have. I can tell you that allowing infanticide up until six months or so has far less risk than killing adult cows when it comes to moral agency.

- Human moral patients are immediately connected to many moral agents so the knock-on effects can also be felt acutely

Not all of them are, no. There are moral patients that nobody even knows about. Ask him how a baby farm would be wrong if nobody who cared knew it existed.
All he will probably be able to reply is "somebody might find out"
Weak, very weak.

Likewise, people very much do care about cows, pigs, chickens, and even fish. This is demonstrable. He's being entirely inconsistent by making this argument. Vegans and vegetarians the world over (and even many meat eaters) are morally offended and emotionally hurt by animal agriculture. You could try to hide it, but "somebody might find out", and they do through undercover footage and first hand as those poor souls who can find no other employment but to work in one of these facilities.

- It is in the long term interests of the contract-holding constituency to not discriminate between humans

That's a claim, and an empirical one, that attracts a burden of proof. You can't just say that. Slavery has been a pretty big boon to ancient civilizations. You think Rome was built by labor unions?
You'd have to weigh the benefits against the risks (like slave revolts).

It's particularly stable when the enslaved and devalued class looks different so they can be identified and the entitled class isn't mistaken for them. Like, say, dark skin, female gender, or even red hair.

So if your friend is white (let's say) he could plausibly be against white slavery, but he would be a hypocrite to oppose enslavement of blacks on this basis.
White people enslaving black people is not wrong because white people might accidentally get enslaved, it's wrong because it's evil and harmful to those being enslaved.

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to reply I really appreciate it. James is a top chap and I really enjoy talking to him about this even if we do completely disagree, but like I said I do feel very out of my depth when talking to him so I think the insights from some better informed people such as yourselves would be really interesting and helpful!

He has bought into some very bad ideas, and I hope you can help him. Beyond that, this stuff is also a gateway to things like white nationalism, so I hope he's not gone down that rabbit hole yet. If this is his value system, he will find it impossible to criticize things like ethnonationalism, and he'll find people who are loud voices in the wider Objectivist-esque community like Molyneux are supporters of white nationalism.

Ever heard this "joke" (I don't know what to call it)?

Question: "There are ten people sitting down to dinner, and one of them is a Nazi. How many Nazis are at the table?"
Answer: 10

The point is, aside from these being just inherently terrible and inconsistent beliefs, your friend is going to find a lot of deplorable people sitting down at this table with common core ethical beliefs regarding the social contract.

[DaBankasDaBonuses]

- Qualia of pain is only known to be bad because of our own past experiences

Well no, technically speaking pain is a very specific experience in response to tissue damage or potential tissue damage: some rare people enjoy it because it elicits other pleasurable experience (such as sexual) that exceeds the pain.

But if you're speaking more generally of negative stimuli, it's not just from past experience, it's a matter of science too (does he deny science?).
It's an issue of basic negative feedback in neuroscience which is tautologically connected to being in itself undesirable

Cells responding to stimuli is a totally neutral action. Without the knowledge of this stimulus causing pain in the self, there is no reason to think it's 'good' or 'bad'.

- Collective prejudicial aversion comes from socialisation or evolutionary psychology

That's bad reasoning. Claims of correlations are irrelevant and can not be asserted to be the sole cause of something.
I don't subscribe to theological claims of gnosis, but a pseudoscientific claim from evolutionary psychology (among the softest and most pseudoscientific of the fields claiming to be a science) as a stand in doesn't discredit the possibility of those claims.

From where else would prejudice arise but society or biology? Of course reason plays its part in influencing society but then that reason must be comprehended in its own right and lives and dies by its own merit. In other words our gut feelings (even as a collective) cannot be relied upon as the foundation of an objective moral belief unless sufficient reason is given to hold those prejudices as cornerstones of ethics.

[brimstoneSalad]

Cells responding to stimuli is a totally neutral action. Without the knowledge of this stimulus causing pain in the self, there is no reason to think it's 'good' or 'bad'.

I don't know what you're contradicting here. Neuroscience is irrelevant to a single cell. It's a large collection of nerve cells that forms a complex enough evolving information system to manifest preferences and make negative and positive stimuli meaningful as negative or positive in terms of the pressures they apply to the evolving system.

From where else would prejudice arise but society or biology?

Any combination of source assertions are irrelevant to the credibility of the thing.

Of course reason plays its part in influencing society but then that reason must be comprehended in its own right and lives and dies by its own merit.

Then if you are asserting that some reasoning is wrong, you should be able to show why that is rather than appealing to pedigree. Nobody is making claims of spiritual gnosis (in which case questioning a supernatural pedigree of direct knowledge would be valid).

I would presume you have a prejudice in favor of 1+1=2 vs. 1+1=5. The source may ultimately be biological and societal regarding the rational functions of the brain and the utility, but that's irrelevant and doesn't provide evidence for the claim that the two are equally credible. Even if we ignored burden of proof here, the null hypothesis would seem to slightly favor the premise that has survived scrutiny and proved itself valuable for so long.

If one were to assert that 1+1=2 is not credible, we should expect some kind of argument for that claim. Appealing to pedigree here is a straw-man argument because a pedigree argument isn't being made to support it.

In other words our gut feelings (even as a collective) cannot be relied upon as the foundation of an objective moral belief unless sufficient reason is given to hold those prejudices as cornerstones of ethics.

I don't agree with intuitionism and I don't think anybody is making that argument, but you can't shift the burden of proof like that.
If you don't like an overwhelmingly popular opinion like that non-human animals have moral value, you don't get to say you're right in your claim that they have no moral value until somebody proves they do. In the very least you'd need to be very rigorous about making an absence of evidence = evidence of absence claim, which would mean an extensive survey of all extant moral theory and disproving every single one logically.

In the mean time, people are only being reasonable in accepting that animals have moral value even with many of them not fully grasping the moral theory that proves it in the same way they're reasonable in accepting that the Earth orbits the sun and all of this has something to do with seasons without understanding the astrophysics.

@teo123 can probably tell you some things about his experiences with the Dunning Kruger effect. He didn't understand astro or geophysics, mistakenly thought he saw contradictions, and decided the Earth was flat. viewtopic.php?t=1829

You are of course more than welcome to argue your point here against veganism, but if you're trying to root out the source of misunderstanging, instead of going on the attack against mainstream science or ethical theories it may be more valuable to reflect and ask "What am I getting wrong?", because the overwhelming probability when you disagree with both the majority of society and the majority of experts (and most of all the trajectory of that disagreement is only increasing) is that you are wrong about something and not nearly the whole of the world being wrong and getting wronger. An appeal to popularity and authority isn't a conclusive argument, true, but in many cases it provides a good sense of inductive probability of you being wrong and gives some good advice as to the optimal direction of inquiry. Just something to consider.

[DaBankasDaBonuses]

I don't know what you're contradicting here. Neuroscience is irrelevant to a single cell. It's a large collection of nerve cells that forms a complex enough evolving information system to manifest preferences and make negative and positive stimuli meaningful as negative or positive in terms of the pressures they apply to the evolving system.

This still doesn't make it 'good' or 'bad' in the moral sense. It just means organism X undergoes a pressure which weakens it or lessens its chances of procreation. The 'good' and 'bad' still comes from personal experience or empathy (ultimately derived from personal experience).

From where else would prejudice arise but society or biology?

Any combination of source assertions are irrelevant to the credibility of the thing.

I agree, this was my point. Prejudice (in the self or from the group) is neutral, therefore we need reason to make moral claims.

An appeal to popularity and authority isn't a conclusive argument, true, but in many cases it provides a good sense of inductive probability of you being wrong and gives some good advice as to the optimal direction of inquiry. Just something to consider.

This is true. However, the fact that veganism is a minority opinion (especially in the context of human history) would surely undermine a veganism which rests on this point.

[brimstoneSalad]

This still doesn't make it 'good' or 'bad' in the moral sense. It just means organism X undergoes a pressure which weakens it or lessens its chances of procreation.

No, it has nothing to do with procreation. Synthetic intelligence also engages in the same process and doesn't procreate. I'm talking about an evolving neural network, not an evolving species. This has to do with learning and cognition.

It is a fact that there are things that a given sentient organism prefers and does not prefer, and this is not subjective: e.g. it is not up to our respective opinions what that organism wants. I do not get to decide for a dog that he doesn't like to smell poop because that's not my preference, it depends on what's going on in his brain as to what he likes and doesn't like (and he may very well like something I would rather him not like).

The 'good' and 'bad' still comes from personal experience or empathy (ultimately derived from personal experience).

Even if you could show it comes in part from that, that doesn't show that it doesn't also come from somewhere else.

The good and bad, morally speaking, comes from reasoning.
When we understand morality to be defined as consideration for others (the golden rule) it's very easy to understand that means that depends specifically on what others want for themselves and not what we want for them. Thus the important empirical issue relevant to that is what others want and which others have wants at all. None of this is subjective or based on feelings or personal experience or empathy. Following from the definition, it's all science.

When it comes to semantics you may subscribe to humpty-dumptyism, and if that's the case then there's no way I can convince you that you are misusing the term "morality" to refer to something irrelevant to the conversation, but hopefully you can at least agree that given certain definitions that morality is very much a matter of objective analysis.

This is true. However, the fact that veganism is a minority opinion (especially in the context of human history) would surely undermine a veganism which rests on this point.

Women being equal to men rather than property, slavery being wrong, and many other things you may agree with today are a minority opinion in the context of human history. Trajectory is much more relevant than history: as a society and particularly with regards to science, we have a tendency to advance and correct past mistakes, and knowledge slowly spreads to overcome superstition.

As to your claim, though, you are wrong: in undeveloped countries where people have poor standards of living and are most concerned with surviving the moral circle is very small and this is not something that's carefully considered. Where it is considered, and even more where the education is present to make that consideration most meaningful, the broad idea that veganism is good is not a minority opinion. Surveys broadly report majority support for animal rights.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/183275/say ... eople.aspx

A third of Americans want animals to have same rights as people
Support for this view up from 25% in 2008
Majority, 62%, say animals deserve "some protection"

Combined, that's 94% of people in the states who believe animals have at least some moral value. Your position that they have no moral value whatsoever, a position that it is morally perfectly fine to nail a live cat to a wall for fun (an example given by a Randian Objectivist in an essay I can find the link to if you want, but I'm guessing you know what I'm talking about), is in not just a minority. Your position is an extreme minority and a minority that is shrinking with every passing year, and it's one that is frankly pretty much only occupied by dying regressive fundamentalists who claim animals don't have souls and twelve year old 4chan edgelords who read Atlas Shrugged or watched some Molyneux videos.

I don't even think animals should have the same rights as humans (and most vegans probably do not, certainly on this forum they do not). The only important points are that: 1. animals have some moral value 2. Animal agriculture results in significant net animal suffering 3. Animal agriculture is unnecessary.

This is all that's necessary for the moral argument for veganism.

Point 1 is consensus.
Most people aren't fully aware of point 2.
Regarding point 3 most people mistakenly think eating animal products is necessary.

Point 1 is all we need to consider here, in terms of surveys, not the actual practice of people.
There are some practical considerations some people have who are ideologically vegan but not in practice, from addiction to animal products/poor impulse control to lack of availability of vegan alternatives due to food deserts or current economic conditions. Those people don't count in favor of your moral beliefs.

Point 2 and 3 are irrelevant to the opinions of the general public: these are uncontroversial objective empirical facts wherein any sensible person will accept that the opinions of experts are more relevant. E.g. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics which has a consensus statement on the adequacy of properly planned vegan diets for all stages of life including infants, pregnancy, and for athletes.

People may be ignorant of these facts, but that no more makes them false than ignorance of the shape of the Earth makes it flat. When you account for the core MORAL beliefs of people (rather than the factual misconceptions) you will find consensus is overwhelming in the developed world.

[DaBankasDaBonuses]

It is a fact that there are things that a given sentient organism prefers and does not prefer, and this is not subjective: e.g. it is not up to our respective opinions what that organism wants. I do not get to decide for a dog that he doesn't like to smell poop because that's not my preference, it depends on what's going on in his brain as to what he likes and doesn't like (and he may very well like something I would rather him not like).

I not denying that animals/other humans have experiences or preferences. My claim is that something being pleasurable to an organism is not grounds to make universal statements such as moral statements. All we can conclude is that organism X prefers Y over Z without the aid of extra reasoning.

The 'good' and 'bad' still comes from personal experience or empathy (ultimately derived from personal experience).

Even if you could show it comes in part from that, that doesn't show that it doesn't also come from somewhere else.

I would wager most people agree that without the aid of an already-established moral system, 'good' and 'bad' (in the ethical context) are subjective statements. This was my point. Of course they could come from moral facts but I dispute these have been successfully argued for.

The good and bad, morally speaking, comes from reasoning.
When we understand morality to be defined as consideration for others (the golden rule) it's very easy to understand that means that depends specifically on what others want for themselves and not what we want for them. Thus the important empirical issue relevant to that is what others want and which others have wants at all. None of this is subjective or based on feelings or personal experience or empathy. Following from the definition, it's all science.

Very convenient once you have made the assumption that the golden rule is a moral fact. Secondly, the golden rule can be interpreted in difference ways, for instance I want X but you want Y so should I give you X or Y? What I or you happen to want is not necessarily in our best interests. Do I honour these wishes anyway? This is yet more questions that need to be answered even after the leap of faith in the golden rule.

When it comes to semantics you may subscribe to humpty-dumptyism, and if that's the case then there's no way I can convince you that you are misusing the term "morality" to refer to something irrelevant to the conversation, but hopefully you can at least agree that given certain definitions that morality is very much a matter of objective analysis.

Here here.

Trajectory is much more relevant than history: as a society and particularly with regards to science, we have a tendency to advance and correct past mistakes, and knowledge slowly spreads to overcome superstition.

If you subscribe to some Hegelian view on morality then surely we should be doing more vigorous analysis than simply looking at opinion polls in the West.

As to your claim, though, you are wrong: in undeveloped countries where people have poor standards of living and are most concerned with surviving the moral circle is very small and this is not something that's carefully considered. Where it is considered, and even more where the education is present to make that consideration most meaningful, the broad idea that veganism is good is not a minority opinion. Surveys broadly report majority support for animal rights...

Your link showed a majority believe legal consideration should be given to animals. This doesn't mean these people believe animals have inherent rights. You can still argue for animal 'rights' from a pro-human angle. For instance torturing animals for fun may lead to a warped mind. This can harm the human himself and the rest of society.

Your position is an extreme minority and a minority that is shrinking with every passing year, and it's one that is frankly pretty much only occupied by dying regressive fundamentalists.

The reason we were discussing public opinion was in an attempt to determine if regard for animals was a common feeling that is inherent among man. From this we may establish if we could be pulled one way other the other from moral agnosticism. The studies you have selectively chosen do not go far enough to be able to make this conclusion about human nature, and how much we allow this affect our views of ethical veganism is yet to be established. Talk of this 'consensus' is fiction.
Notice the asymmetry in your assessment. On the one hand you wantonly disregard the meat eaters as captives of some addiction, while not even considering that first world people have been born into a culture of hedonism (thereby making the pleasure/pain analysis so tantalizing).

[brimstoneSalad]

Very convenient once you have made the assumption that the golden rule is a moral fact.

It's not "convenient", it's a question of what words actually mean regarding the concepts they refer to.

Secondly, the golden rule can be interpreted in difference ways, for instance I want X but you want Y so should I give you X or Y?

Only by morons today. The golden rule is self correcting, because people want to be given what they want, not what other people want. This is a obviously a tautology and can not be seriously argued against.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Ru ... criticisms

I'm a little surprised you would even argue this. I was by no means impressed by your other arguments, but I thought you were smarter than this and I wouldn't need to explain the self evidently self-correcting nature of the golden rule. I even rephrased it as "consideration for the interests of others" to make it more clear.

Golden vs. Platinum rule isn't an interesting discussion.

What I or you happen to want is not necessarily in our best interests. Do I honour these wishes anyway?

This is a slightly less naïve question, but still suggests you haven't spent any time reading about or even seriously thinking about this topic. It really isn't that complicated.
You don't get to decide what somebody's interests are, but obviously people want their idealized interests taken into account.

E.g. if I superficially say I want to eat a cookie, but I do not know that cookie is poisoned, then I would want you to stop me from eating that cookie because I have an interest in not being poisoned even if I do not know the cookie is poisoned.

This clearly comes back to the self correcting nature of the golden rule: you use the golden rule in deciding how the golden rule is to be applied.
This should not be this difficult.

There are some actually very interesting related questions we could discuss -- for instance, a Muslim suicide bomber who does not know Allah doesn't exist, but does not want to believe that Allah doesn't exist even if it's true. If you want to talk about that then you're welcome to start another thread on it, but it's really tangential to the issue here because it's unlikely that non-human animals have these kinds of interests that appear fundamentally irrational.

This is yet more questions that need to be answered even after the leap of faith in the golden rule.

Clearly you do not know what a leap of faith is.
A definition like that is more of an axiom, not a leap of faith.

Defining god as: "An all powerful all knowing creator of the universe" is not a leap of faith, it's claiming belief in its empirical existence beyond the definition without evidence that is a leap of faith.
However, when we're talking about conceptual constructs, their existence is proved by the definition and doesn't extend beyond that conceptually.

I can define "Yerbluffjelly" as: "The ratio of confusion to anxiety in terms of cognitive attention"
That's not a leap of faith. Nor is claiming that "Yerbluffjelly" exists, providing we accept the existence of confusion and anxiety and understand they can be measured in terms of cognitive attention. Are you more confused or more anxious? Well sit down and let's use an FMRI to find out and publish a paper on it.

Is that registering for you at all?


You may disagree with that definition, and if you do you probably think definitions are subjective (humpty-dumptyism). In that case:
1. You are wrong.
2. Even if you were right, making a subjective claim is not faith, it's floor so well golf treaty find lecture day hope illustrate.

[teo123]

This doesn't mean these people believe animals have inherent rights.

I am sure just about any current or former pet owner would agree animals have inherent rights.

You can still argue for animal 'rights' from a pro-human angle.

Sure. Factory farming inevitably causing an epidemic of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria harms humans way more than any potential benefit of eating meat (keeping that part of the economy going...).

For instance torturing animals for fun may lead to a warped mind.

Well, actually, if people believe that, they are probably wrong, since that notion is not supported by solid evidence. It is similar to the notion of violent computer games supposedly causing crime. That is not how minds of criminals work. And that is one of the annoying things when discussing politics: people have tons of notions about how minds of criminals work, almost none of which are based on science, or even common sense.

The studies you have selectively chosen do not go far enough to be able to make this conclusion about human nature

No, it is just that the vast majority of people do not agree with what you consider to be common sense.

On the one hand you wantonly disregard the meat eaters as captives of some addiction

No, I do not think that is what is going on.

while not even considering that first world people have been born into a culture of hedonism (thereby making the pleasure/pain analysis so tantalizing)

One does not need to believe in utilitarianism to think animals should have rights.
Try explaining why slavery is wrong without implying factory farming is as well. It is hard, is not it? And if you will go with "Well, slavery makes people worse off, while factory farming makes animals better off.", you go wildly against the facts. Chickens in the wild live for years, chickens in factory farms live for months if not less. Cows in the wild live for 7 years, factory farmed cows live for 3-5 years. The indisputable fact is that modern factory farming makes lives of animals shorter and worse.
Why would doing almost-always-pointless and very-often-misleading medical experiments on humans be wrong, but it would be right for governments to mandate it being done to animals?