Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amYou are not aware of what you are saying here..
I'm quite aware, you're just not seeing the forest through the trees.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amThere are a certain amount of people/animals killed every year accidentally from manufacturing shoes. And televisions. And your clothes that you wear. And your electricity that powers your lights. And the system in place for water to come out of your tap on call. And your computer you are typing on. And your phone. And the construction of homes and apartment buildings, the wood that must be chopped down to go into that, or the concrete that must be manufactured. You, i am sure, are aware of this.
You could throw in growing vegetables in there, and producing meat.
Which harms are we obligated to avoid? The ones that are not necessary? Because most of those are not necessary in the strictest sense.
There is a baseline of harm that occurs from supporting our lives.
AND when we can, it's good to reduce that harm.
Do you deny this?
The question of whether having a TV (which lasts maybe 10 years) is more harmful than driving to the movie every week (doing it over 500 times) is relevant.
IF you regard entertainment as
necessary at all.
There's also the option of doing neither and doing even less harm.
All the harm you cause for entertainment is done for pleasure. Not necessarily the pleasure of harming others, but just the pleasure of pleasing yourself.
As I said, most meat eaters aren't exactly taking pleasure in the idea that animals have died, they just enjoy eating meat.
Talking about all of these harms as if there's no way to prevent ALL of them so we shouldn't even try to prevent SOME of them is an appeal to futility. That's what you're doing.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amNo different from the driving example. Even the money you make, how do you think they manufacture that, what do you think happens in that process and how many people/animals do you think are killed?
Very very few; that's the important consideration, and what I'm trying to explain to you.
When we work on changing our lives and society (and it DOES take work), we have to focus on the things that do the MOST harm for the LEAST benefit.
We focus on addressing the low hanging fruits like animal agriculture (we advocate reducetarianism and vegansim) and grid power (we must go nuclear).
Those are the biggest issues.
Beyond that we have things like human poverty, disease, and wild animal suffering. Worrying about people smashing bugs on the way to see movies is too far down the list to spend time on.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amIf you have any of these things or participated in any of these processes you're equally knowingly putting their lives at risk for your "entertainment" with the "knowledge you will probably kill some, and you did it for nothing but your own pleasure"...
Correct. And we're not perfect people.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amNOT a valid comparison to directly and purposely stabbing/shooting, exploiting, abusing, torturing, confining and killing animals (or humans) or paying directly for any of these things to happen, for pleasure.
You're just making things up now.
1. Most people who eat meat are
literally NOT directly doing those things.
2. What the hell is "paying directly"? And why does that matter?
No they are not handing a slaughterhouse worker money and telling them to do this. They are paying indirectly (in a clear chain), through the store, through the distributor, through to the producer. There are probably more middlemen there than between you and some movie productions.
There is a causal chain there, and it doesn't actually matter how long that chain is, whether it's one link or a hundred. The fact is that you're causing harm by your actions. The relevant question is
how much harm vs. the benefit.
With meat, it's a lose-lose proposition.
It's harming YOU (or us as humans), and it's harming the environment and animals.
With going to see a movie, you may be smashing some insects, but you're enriching your own life without significantly harming your health, and you're providing very enriching and fulfilling employment to a lot of people, and the environmental and animal harm are pretty small.
There's a much weaker argument against doing the latter than buying meat.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amI'm sorry but you are so confused here. You are appealing to the futility of doing literally anything. . Good luck with that.
I'm not appealing to futility. I'm saying we should act against the worst harms whatever they are.
You're the one appealing to futility and then drawing an arbitrary line and making up sophistic excuses to justify not caring about some harms.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amAnd, just as a side note, of course the odds play a role. If I knew that I would kill someone EVERYTIME I drove, or even every few times, or every ten times, or even once a year guaranteed, I wouldn't do it.
Then you understand it's wrong to do other things for pleasure too, when they put others at risk.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amYou are seriously saying the odds have no moral relevance to the situation?
No, I'm saying precisely the opposite.
Odds DO matter. And everything we're talking about is statistical.
If you go to the deli and purchase one slice of salami a year, for pleasure, that could have lower odds of killing an animal than driving to the movie theater once a week, for pleasure.
Calculate your total odds.
You can say eating meat is generally worse than seeing movies, but you can not say that eating a very very small amount of meat is worse than driving to see a large number of movies. The question is amount and total odds.
It's a valid comparison, that doesn't mean the two are equal.
Just like it's a valid comparison to compare animal agriculture in some ways to slavery, and that doesn't mean we're asserting they are equal.
Doing harm to others for pleasure is doing harm to others for pleasure; in greater amounts it is a greater wrong, in lesser amounts it's a lesser wrong.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amBut same thing goes for when I take a walk in the park and accidentally step on a snail, or ants.
Right, we do things for our enjoyment which harm animals.
The fact that they are orders of magnitude less than the act of eating meat is what matters. But they still can be compared. Denying that comparison rather than addressing amount of harm is not helpful.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amPoint is, we must live, and we are free to move. Things will die by accident as a result and certainly not just from driving (this is laughable that you focus in so hard on this while so many other things right in front of you cause similar accidents).
I'm not focused just on that. I don't know how you could have gotten that idea from what I wrote. It's just one example.
This claim of yours is an appeal to futility.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amPurposely and knowingly engaging in cruel practices of direct death, torture, suffering, exploitation, confinement and pain is a completely different thing,
If anybody was actually doing this, then that might be a different thing from a virtue ethics perspective. Do you subscribe to virtue ethics?
Somebody could buy meat without purposely engaging in any of that, they could do it reluctantly and with the hope it won't hurt animals. They could want for it not to happen, and just know there's a risk of it.
When you drive to the movies, you aren't purposely killing insects, are you? And yet it is inevitable. You know this and you do it still.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amif I can show you that you will cause significantly more (accidental) harm in the world as a result of a lifetime of living freely, compared to whatever immediate harm you may cause by killing yourself right now, would you go ahead and jump off a tall building?
No, because negative utilitarianism is nonsense.
The
good you do matters too.
You would have to show that somebody was going to do so much more harm than good in their lives that the surplus of harm outweighed the harm of suicide.
Daz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:27 amWould you think it a moral obligation to do so and that you are behaving in an immoral way if you don't?
Of course you wouldn't and it's ridiculous to entertain this line of thought.
Another straw man, and in the form of a false dichotomy.
That's not a yes or no answer.
What do you think a "moral obligation" is? You're using deontological reasoning here.
We can easily say that something is bad or good in outcome, that some action is good or bad.
Do people have an obligation to always act in maximally good ways and never do anything bad, no matter how small? Does the smallest wrong just make somebody a bad person?
Or should we assess character with consideration of circumstance? And even consideration of the consequences of assessment?
These are important questions which you have not considered.
