Help me debate!!!

[esquizofrenico]

3. being human/a disability ( the knowledge of the fact that if it weren't based on the disability it would have formed these capacities)

I have never understood this argument, it couldn't be more arbitrary. By this logic we should treat corpses as moral subjects: ok, he's dead and starting to smell, but if it wasn't for that he would have these capacities. Of course they will argue something like that death is a essential change, while having a damaged brain beyond any repair is not (God knows why).

And this of course shows that every person agrees that having a conscious experience is the condition we expect for someone to be given moral consideration. When we say someone is dead, he's not really dead, at least not according to the biological definition of life: "state of chemical instability which state of equilibrium is death". A corpse is still alive, cells continue taking nutrients and breathing for several days, so it's far away from equilibrium. When we say someone is death, we mean that he no longer has a personal experience.

[carnap]

I’ve explained multiple times in this very thread how and why sentience is relevant to moral consideration, you’re just ignoring it.

Its not a matter of an explanation but rather an argument. You need to argue that sentience is relevant to "moral consideration". Now if you did that and I missed it by all means could you quote your argument or otherwise point to it?


By encouraging you to connect factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation to moral value I’m trying to drive home the point the they are all irrelevant. You haven’t even attempted to do this, so you either agree or don’t have a good enough response.

Again, how does this address the issue? You're making a claim but not providing any justification. To say it again, you'd need to show that it is the only morally relevant characteristic.

Taking an individuals interests into consideration means understanding that nonhuman animals can be harmed and benefited, and avoiding actions that cause unnecessary suffering.

All living systems can be harmed and benefited, what does that have to do with "interests"? In terms of the last part, how do you determine whether some action is unnecessary or not?

If the animal is sentient then they can be harmed or benefited. Their interests to avoid harm can be violated. This isn’t the same as saying if an animal sentient then it can feel pain. Or that all sentient beings feel the same kind/degree of pain.

To say it again, all living systems can be harmed or benefited and that has nothing to do with sentience but instead that they are alive. You keep using the term "interests" without providing a clear definition of what precisely you mean in this context. All living systems have an "interest" in avoiding harm in a crude biological sense the greater question is whether some set of animals has "interests" in an intentional sense. But before you can evaluate that, you have to be clear about what you mean.

I assume you mean "moral value" here. Why? You should justify why sentient non-human animals with intrinsic value should only be given “indirect rights.”

For the reason mentioned in the OP, they lack moral agency.

Where do you think rights come from? And again, do you agree with the OP’s friend that children are only to be given rights by virtue of their relationship with "human society" i.e. their parents? If so, why??

I think rights are a human construct, as such they don't even need to be consistent they just need to be socially (or legally) useful. In terms of children I would point out that its only very young children that seem to lack moral agency, sometime between 2~3 children start to exhibit moral reasoning. I don't see anything problematic about deny direct rights to very young children. But, as I said, I don't subscribe to a deontic notion of "rights" so my views aren't going to be the same as the OP's friend. I was trying to keep the discussion within that framework.

[carnap]

The same for children. However, you'd have to bite the bullet on that one and say if the parents or guardians of the child/mentally retarded person/etc. want to sell the being into slavery or kill it for meat that's perfectly OK because they inherit protection only from their owners' citizenship status.

You don't have to bite that bullet for two reasons. Firstly indirect rights aren't just derived from the guardians but society as a whole. Also denying an entity direct rights doesn't mean the entity should be treated however you wish. Laws that protection a class of people or animals aren't inconsistent with a denial of rights from these groups.

[carnap]

A child who is denied the opportunity to learn language & socialize will never grow to respect social contract.
And pretty much any intelligent animal could be trained to respect social contract with enough work (whatever simple rules there are: don't bite, don't poop there, etc.).

Most intelligent animals would find it difficult to learn even basic rules but being a moral agent isn't a matter of following rules but instead being able to reason morally. You may be able to train your dog not to attack birds but this will just be a conditioned response, not because he believes its "wrong" to kill the bird for his enjoyment.

Also children have a special relationship to society, a society only functions if children are given the resources they need to grow-up properly, etc and as such you can justify protections for children even if you deny that very young children have direct rights.

It would be far easier and more honest to accept that children are sentient individuals with interests of their own to be respected. Likewise with (most) nonhuman animals.

The term "children" here is misdemeanor, nobody is arguing that children as a whole aren't moral agents. The question is about infants or perhaps toddlers and in those cases the issue of sentience is not clear. When does an infant become sentient? That is an empirical question we cannot currently answer. But its unlikely the answer is at birth or some time prior to birth, at birth human infants have very little cognitive function and what little behaviors they do exhibit are largely innate.

[brimstoneSalad]

You don't have to bite that bullet for two reasons. Firstly indirect rights aren't just derived from the guardians but society as a whole.

Ah the classic Motte-Bailey.

Well now you're shifting into cultural relativism. If rights derive from the culturally subjective opinions of a group of people, that's very different from theories of morality that attempt to be objective by appealing to some notion of idealized social contract.

What is it you're trying to defend? Something like Randian Objectivism, or cultural relativism? The two are not remotely similar.

Also denying an entity direct rights doesn't mean the entity should be treated however you wish.

It does in social contract styled theories, such as Randian Objectivism, and that is was implicated in this thread.

Cultural relativism is off topic for this thread. If you want to discuss it further, you should start a new thread and link it.

Laws that protection a class of people or animals aren't inconsistent with a denial of rights from these groups.

Sure they are, in the context of these attempted objective frameworks. Again, on topic please in this thread. The OP isn't asking about how to argue against cultural relativism.

Most intelligent animals would find it difficult to learn even basic rules but being a moral agent isn't a matter of following rules but instead being able to reason morally.

Most people don't reason morally, they follow mindless social rules and call those morality.
If you're promoting cultural relativism, you're doing just that.

You may be able to train your dog not to attack birds but this will just be a conditioned response, not because he believes its "wrong" to kill the bird for his enjoyment.

Dogs are social creatures, and there's every reason to believe they developed similar emotions of shame that humans did.
They know pooping on the floor is bad in the same way most humans know any arbitrary social rule is bad; it feels bad (and some are just afraid of punishment, but the same is true of some humans).

If you're just going to make more assertions, you don't need to bother.
The default assumption is not that dogs and most humans are profoundly different in their crude notions of moral feeling, which have roots in the evolution of social animals.
Please bring in some evidence in your next post if you want to double down on this claimed distinction.

Bear in mind: I don't deny that *some* humans have concepts of morality fundamentally more complex than that of dogs, but my experience has been that most humans do not; their 'thoughts' on morality are very much emotional conditioning that they haven't thought about.
If you deny dogs rights on that basis, you'd be excluding 99% of humanity as well who fell short of your preferred ideological epiphany.

Also children have a special relationship to society, a society only functions if children are given the resources they need to grow-up properly, etc

Sure, but that's irrelevant to social contract based objective frameworks. Either it's treading or somebody, or it isn't. You don't have any obligations in those frameworks beyond that, which is the whole point of them.

That said, even in a culturally relativist framework where keeping society populated was considered important, you could always do whatever was acceptable to surplus children.

Again, start a new thread please if you want to talk cultural relativism. I don't think it's relevant to the OP's issues.

and as such you can justify protections for children even if you deny that very young children have direct rights.

You can justify whatever you want if your concept of "justification" means appealing to arbitrary social norms. That's not what social contract theorists are doing; they're trying to build some objective basis for social ethics, not appeal to arbitrary cultural standards and preferences.

Again, if cultural relativism is as advanced as your moral thinking gets, you haven't fundamentally surpassed the dog in this particular domain.
You're mixing your systems here (social contract objectivism & cultural relativism), and I think you need to get a better grasp on the distinction.
This thread is apparently about addressing the former objective attempts at moral frameworks through idealized social contract, so let's stick to that here and if you want to talk cultural relativism please start a new thread.

[esquizofrenico]

You don't have to bite that bullet for two reasons. Firstly indirect rights aren't just derived from the guardians but society as a whole. Also denying an entity direct rights doesn't mean the entity should be treated however you wish. Laws that protection a class of people or animals aren't inconsistent with a denial of rights from these groups.

The only other possible consideration you can have about something if it doesn't have rights is with respect its relationship with other beings that have rights. All moral obligations can be reformulated in terms of someone's right. So I think that at the very least you would have to accept that rules about mentally ill people or animals are because aesthetic or utilitarian reasons, if they have not direct rights. You could say: People should not torture animals/mental ill people because some people do not enjoy watching animals being tortured, or because it is generally bad for society when those things occur. But those kind of rules fail to give solid moral obligations on a personal level, if I personally do not get affected when I torture mentally ill people and I do it in the privacy of my home, I should not care about either of those arguments.

[DAVEWISHENGRAD]

All of this is already solved. I have been doing this over 35 years. Believe me when I tell it is all solved. Some of the things I write you may not understand right away, but please do me the favor of listening to the truth resonating. If you can hear that the things I say are truth, or should be true, or know are true, and can't understand completely, give it the time to think about it. It's all for all of you. You don't have to learn all this the hard way.

Start with, "Life is Most Important in Life". That means life, the first self-evident truth, is most important, and that truth is also the most important truth we have. That's where it all starts.

That's the only truthful reason for any valid cause, including veganism.
That's the one truth that all other truths depend on to be true themselves.
That's the only truthful reason we are ALL most important.
That's the only truthful reason we are equal.
Nothing is truthful that disagrees.

Those are the words. Whether we take a life or save a life, we always most important.
The truthful action is to HONESTLY do what is in the best interest of life in general. Each situation is different. It doesn't make any life more or less important. So, when you must take life to live, take the life that has the least intelligence, so that you can do more for life in general than the life you took ever could. It doesn't make that life less than most important, it just means you have done the best you reasonably can to uphold the truth above.

[DAVEWISHENGRAD]

When a person does not agree, "Life is Most Important in Life, they cannot, or will not, honestly debate, and the debate is over. They conceded.

Back to the basics.

[Gxt59z2U3aF]

Thank you guys! I've read it all and it gives me much more to work with. No I wouldnt identify as a consequentialist but I'm gonna work on the "life is most important to life" strategy.

Again, although it doesnt seem possible, if someone could make a deontological argument, that would be cool.

[carnap]

Well now you're shifting into cultural relativism. If rights derive from the culturally subjective opinions of a group of people, that's very different from theories of morality that attempt to be objective by appealing to some notion of idealized social contract.

Theories of indirect rights have nothing to do with relativism. Indirect rights aren't based on the "subjective opinion" of people but instead derived from the rights of others. Children are seen as patients of society at large so their rights can be seen to be derived from the society at large not just the guardians.

It does in social contract styled theories, such as Randian Objectivism, and that is was implicated in this thread.

Social contract theories aren't necessarily deontological, we are discuss deontology here. Within that framework, there is no reason why denying rights to some group would force you to accept that you can treat that group however you wish. This is why I brought up indirect rights, its way one of explaining why non-rights holders would have some protections in a deontological system.

Cultural relativism is off topic for this thread. If you want to discuss it further, you should start a new thread and link it.

I agree....but you're the one discussing it. I haven't brought it up once.

Sure they are, in the context of these attempted objective frameworks. Again, on topic please in this thread. The OP isn't asking about how to argue against cultural relativism.

"Sure they are" isn't an argument. Why does denying rights force one to accept "anything goes" treatment for non-rights holders? Again, that is the point of theories of indirect rights. You need to argue that any theory of rights MUST accept "anything goes" for non-rights holders.

And, once again, I haven't said anything about cultural relativism......I have no idea why you keep pretending that I have.

Dogs are social creatures, and there's every reason to believe they developed similar emotions of shame that humans did.
They know pooping on the floor is bad in the same way most humans know any arbitrary social rule is bad; it feels bad (and some are just afraid of punishment, but the same is true of some humans).

Dogs have similar emotional systems as humans because we share ancestry as humans but this says little about how they experience the world. You can train a dog not to poop on the floor by exploiting their innate behaviors, namely, dogs naturally don't poop in their dens. Just like cats pooping in a litter box. This is much different than humans using a toilet, we do that for specific reasons and those reasons can be understood where as a dog doesn't understand the reason they shouldn't poop on the floor of your house. They do it merely because they've been trained.

But we are discussing moral thinking, dogs do not reason morally. Humans clearly do.

Bear in mind: I don't deny that *some* humans have concepts of morality fundamentally more complex than that of dogs, but my experience has been that most humans do not; their 'thoughts' on morality are very much emotional conditioning that they haven't thought about.

Just because core moral beliefs may be innate or taught via culture doesn't mean people don't reason morally, they very clearly do starting at around 2~3 years old. In this sense you can think of the underlying moral system as a set of axioms that people reason with, how that system is obtained doesn't change the reasoning from it.

You can justify whatever you want if your concept of "justification" means appealing to arbitrary social norms. That's not what social contract theorists are doing; they're trying to build some objective basis for social ethics, not appeal to arbitrary cultural standards and preferences.

Honestly....are you confusing my comments with someone else? I haven't discussed social contract theories....nor have a discussed cultural relativism. But you keep insisting that I'm talking about these things? I don't get it.....I've been discussing indirect-rights which is related to deonotological theories of ethics.

Its funny, you always seem so hell-bent on attacking/insulting me yet I'm not even discussing my personal views. I'm discussing a topic from the OP, namely, what the OP thought was a key issue with her friends argument. The OP wants a good deontological argument for veganism but part of that is going to be understanding the common objections one may give.