Philosophical Vegan Forum

Im on my phone right now and it's simply easier to type rather than fiddle with quoting. So ill give a general response here,if i miss anything, bring it up.

1. Morality IS subjective. It is an entirely human created comstruct. One cannot try to scientifically determine if something is good or bad. A human mind must make a judgement, it must assign "good" or "bad" to it. This is not the same as numbers or shapes - these concepts describe things that actually, objetively exist/are true in a way that allows us to understand them. No, technically they dont exist, but they allow us to understand reality.

Morality says nothing at all about the objective state of anything. It assigns the values of good/bad to events/ideas we observe or can conceive of. These qualities are not intrinsic properties that have been objectively verified as real and true like the mass of the sun or the speed of light, we simply assign them in the same way we assign things aesthetic values, for instance - aesthetics, whether we think something looks good, are not objective facts. Things appear the way they appear, any value assigned to their appearamce is an entirely human construction. "The chair is red" is an objective fact. "Red looks bad" is subjectively determined by a human who sees red. The same is true of events and whether they are good or bad.

2. Following from this, your assertions that even if one only cares about people we should still be vegan for health reasons are also false.

One is that it is perfectly possible to live a live healthy life while eating meat, people do it all the time. You can say why take the risk, and this brings me to my second point:

Every time i make a decision to do something, im making a value judgement in my head. Do i value the pleasure i get from doing this more than possible negative consequences if i do it? If yes, then i do it even if i know it could harm me in some capacity in the long run. This is also an arbitrary value judgement just like my morality, because if you get down to asking why i value doing something that could harm me down the road more than my long term well being, the answer, like with questions of morality, eventually becomes, "I just do".

3. Nihilism is correct in an overall sense, since it is impossible to know anything with absolute certainty. To get past it you must acknowledge near certainty as an acceptable substitute. In the same way, to make morality at all useful as a concept you must accept that ultimately no moral axiom is objective. Both of these concessions are necessary, otherwise the concepts are utterly useless.

The question then becomes, what do we do with these arbitrary axioms? Do we go with near universals, like not killing, stealing or raping? The majority opinion doesnt make those any less arbitrary, but picking something most people can in some respect agree with is the only way to make the concept of morality useful.

OneQuestion wrote:Im on my phone right now and it's simply easier to type rather than fiddle with quoting. So ill give a general response here,if i miss anything, bring it up.

You're missing everything. As such, it's probably a better idea to take these topics one at a time.

OneQuestion wrote:2. Following from this, your assertions that even if one only cares about people we should still be vegan for health reasons are also false.

That was not the claim. You have repeatedly ignored the challenges to meat-based diets from an environmental perspective.

It's NOT that you are hurting YOU. You are. But you can fuck up your own health all you want. Go snort coke if you want, or huff paint. Your business.

It's that YOU are hurting OTHER PEOPLE. Your selfish and destructive consumerism is destroying the environment that others rely on for life and well being -- other human beings.

You're a hypocrite. You do not care about other human beings. Either that, or you're so stubbornly ignorant that you can not admit basic scientific facts that every major environmental organization acknowledges clearly.

So, clearly, which is it?

1. Are you a hypocritical asshole who doesn't care that you're harming other humans beings, since these people you are harming are "out of sight" and dark skinned, poor, etc.?
Or:
2. Are you just as ignorant as any theist who thinks the Earth is five thousand years old and flat, because it's inconvenient to your world view to accept science on this topic?


The fact that these actions ALSO hurt you are what make them OBJECTIVELY wrong.
Educate yourself on game theory.

There is some case to be made for "lose-win" behavior. It's a matter of perspective. "win-win" behavior is objectively good. YOU are callously engaging in "lose-lose" behavior, and it's fully irrational.

If you have enough intellectual honesty to address the real issue rather than continuing to blatantly ignore it out of convenience -- You harming other human beings through your ignorant destructive actions -- then we can start getting into the philosophy of ethics, and I can school you on game theory, and why you are so profoundly wrong on your first point as well.
If you won't even acknowledge basic scientific facts, then I'm talking to a complete moron, and there would be no use getting into economic or ethical theory.

And then later, if you can grasp those concepts, we can talk about your misunderstanding of nihilism and relativism, and how to make morality useful.

Like I said, one at a time. This way maybe you can follow the discussion, and stop making straw-men arguments and ignoring every meaningful point made.

Am I being a bit harsh with you? Maybe. But you're being incredibly dense and blatantly ignoring everything people are saying to you. You have ignored the points I have been making from the first post. Obviously being nice wasn't working. Maybe too many topics were just distracting you and making it impossible for you to keep up, so we'll try just the one topic at a time.
If you can't make a coherent argument and address the points made on one single topic, then you obviously aren't serious about learning and having a real conversation.

As a little meta commentary:

I find the one-by-one method of focusing conversation and narrowing points very effective. The draw back is it requires a lot of patience and self-restraint, since there's a strong tendency to want to school the ignorant on the other points as well.

One of the reasons for its usefulness seems to be people's poor attention spans and general stupidity, but I think the issue may be more exacerbated by what they assume they know more so than ignorance.
When people falsely assume that the opposition will be making certain kinds of arguments (like his assumption that we would be making some kind of poor "it's harmful to health therefore unethical" argument), it sets up a bias in their recollections of the argument, and even the reading of it. The expected points will seem to light up when they're hit (even if falsely being read into a place they don't exist), and the other words will seem to fade into background noise, then when replying (since a poster is usually already formulating arguments when reading -- the internet equivalent of waiting to speak instead of listening) recollection of anything else of note being said at all will be completely missing.

The other reason for its usefulness, for those who seem to be evasive and intellectually dishonest (this tends particularly the be the case with Muslims and New-Age who like to ignore points -- Christians and Carnists usually try to engage more with attempted justification rather than ignore -- I don't know why this is, but it's something I have observed in the past), is that by presenting only one thing that demands a single and focused reply, it leaves no room to evade or avoid that point.
This is also why I like to break down the options, and even number them, as per #1 and #2 above.
When there's more going on, somebody trying to be evasive has plenty of cover, and without even making a straw man argument can simply address something else and avoid commenting on it entirely (as creationists [among Christians, who make a special exception to the philosophical theists] do when they can't think of anything to say, and which is recorded in court transcripts).

Of course, another drawback, and why I wouldn't be inclined to insist upon it initially despite its usefulness, is that the point-by-point method is potentially insulting. Telling people flat out that they don't have the attention or intelligence to comprehend multiple points presented at once can seem a bit drastic (although it seems to be true for a lot of people). It seems better to only use the point-by-point method as a last resort, after the opposition has repeatedly dodged issues and ignored the actual argument, and there doesn't seem to be any other practical way forward. Three times seems reasonable, although I don't know how many times he ignored it here (at least twice from me, and at least once from another, but probably more).

You said you're only concerned with human suffering, so taking that into account:

- An omnivorous diet requires 18 TIMES the land required to feed a person on a vegan diet. that means that your choosing to cause that much more deforestation to feed a small number of people.It's much less productive so for the same amount of land you get much less food available for people to eat. That's how you contribute to global HUNGER, since you could feed 18 vegans but now you can only feed 1 meat eater.

I'll draw a parallel, imagine if you have land to grow food, there are starving people around, you grow food enough for 18 people to eat, when they beg for food you incinerate 17 peoples worth of food, then eat your share and say I've done nothing wrong.

The amount of water, oil used are also much less on a vegan diet, so effectively that means more resources available for many persons on a vegan diet vs much less resources for only a few people on a nonvegan one, the rest have to starve cause you clearly don't give a shit, you don't care about deforestation and spexies extinction either, for instance animal ag is responsible for 91% of amazon deforestation. These two videos are rather short so please go through them:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWJa--XL274
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wM4q6bNHpU8

The greenhouse gas emissions are much more for a meat based diet, and animal agriculture is the HIGHEST single contributor to green house gases. Global warming is going to wreck agriculture and inundate regions causing huge number of refugee situations (eg Bangladesh) and in a world with a growing population put further demands on food availability, which again your nonvegan choice will further limit.

Here are the facts, keep scrolling down in the link http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

Regarding fishing global fisheries collapse is predicted to happen by 2048. But why care?

- your other issue has not changed though, you are almost the Deepak Chopra when it comes to morality. You keep using "morality is subjective" in some wishy washy profoundly banal way as the go to standard excuse for ignoring the animal suffering angle because "morality is subjective is a license to be indifferent about issues while I can still be considered rational and moral because of this license" circular logic much? Nice loophole you made there - include option for indifference in the definition of morality/rationality, hence proved. The Bible is true because it says so in the bible.... have you watched darkmatter2525's video called god of the paradox? You were made in his image. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jClyinERY
It doesnt just affect nonhuman animals, it does hugely affect humans as well. Even if you're not opting to give it up, you could at least reduce?

Again you use the same excuse to justify your behavior by appealing to popularity. Thats just herd mentality.

garrethdsouza wrote: The greenhouse gas emissions are much more for a meat based diet, and animal agriculture is the HIGHEST single contributor to green house gases.

Please stop saying that without qualifying it.

https://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewt ... 9785#p9781


It's worth noting, too, that people are suffering and dying now due to climate change. Mostly the homeless and the elderly poor, in disproportionate amounts due to freak weather (extreme highs and lows in places that used to have more moderate weather). Fairly large populations have also already been displaced (mostly islanders) due to rising sea levels.

^animal ag is at 16-18% vs transport at 13% so its still the HIGHEST contributor?

brimstoneSalad wrote:

OneQuestion wrote:Im on my phone right now and it's simply easier to type rather than fiddle with quoting. So ill give a general response here,if i miss anything, bring it up.

You're missing everything. As such, it's probably a better idea to take these topics one at a time.

OneQuestion wrote:2. Following from this, your assertions that even if one only cares about people we should still be vegan for health reasons are also false.

That was not the claim. You have repeatedly ignored the challenges to meat-based diets from an environmental perspective.

It's NOT that you are hurting YOU. You are. But you can fuck up your own health all you want. Go snort coke if you want, or huff paint. Your business.

It's that YOU are hurting OTHER PEOPLE. Your selfish and destructive consumerism is destroying the environment that others rely on for life and well being -- other human beings.

You're a hypocrite. You do not care about other human beings. Either that, or you're so stubbornly ignorant that you can not admit basic scientific facts that every major environmental organization acknowledges clearly.

So, clearly, which is it?

1. Are you a hypocritical asshole who doesn't care that you're harming other humans beings, since these people you are harming are "out of sight" and dark skinned, poor, etc.?
Or:
2. Are you just as ignorant as any theist who thinks the Earth is five thousand years old and flat, because it's inconvenient to your world view to accept science on this topic?

Eating meat is not going to cause mass environmental disaster. And I know you're going to respond with links and things pointing to all the environmental damage the meat industry causes etc etc. As with many 'necessities' - police, the NSA, the military - we broadly accept the possibility these things can go wrong in exchange for the benefits they give us. We want meat - and no amount of environmental damage is going to stop us from getting it. Could it clean up it's act sometimes? Yeah, it could, and should. It is perfectly possible to raise livestock without damaging the environment in any unmanagable way.

The fact that these actions ALSO hurt you are what make them OBJECTIVELY wrong.
Educate yourself on game theory

There is some case to be made for "lose-win" behavior. It's a matter of perspective. "win-win" behavior is objectively good. YOU are callously engaging in "lose-lose" behavior, and it's fully irrational.

Game theory has nothing to do with moral axioms. "Win-win" behaviour is only objectively good if we agree on what a "win" is.

If you have enough intellectual honesty to address the real issue rather than continuing to blatantly ignore it out of convenience -- You harming other human beings through your ignorant destructive actions -- then we can start getting into the philosophy of ethics, and I can school you on game theory, and why you are so profoundly wrong on your first point as well.
If you won't even acknowledge basic scientific facts, then I'm talking to a complete moron, and there would be no use getting into economic or ethical theory.

And then later, if you can grasp those concepts, we can talk about your misunderstanding of nihilism and relativism, and how to make morality useful.

I know exactly what Nihilism is. In the moral context we're discussing, it refers to the idea that there is nothing inherently right or wrong. I'm a relativist - there IS right and wrong, but what things are right or wrong are entirely based on the opinion of the person making the judgement.

Like I said, one at a time. This way maybe you can follow the discussion, and stop making straw-men arguments and ignoring every meaningful point made.

Am I being a bit harsh with you? Maybe. But you're being incredibly dense and blatantly ignoring everything people are saying to you. You have ignored the points I have been making from the first post. Obviously being nice wasn't working. Maybe too many topics were just distracting you and making it impossible for you to keep up, so we'll try just the one topic at a time.
If you can't make a coherent argument and address the points made on one single topic, then you obviously aren't serious about learning and having a real conversation.

I guess I should have addressed the environmental argument for veganism, but the fact is that the world itself proves most people are willing to accept possible environmental damage if it means they get to eat meat. We don't NEED to damage the environment to do so, but the point is that just because the industry does cause some environmental damage does not mean that people would be better off going vegan - because they value eating meat as well, very much so in fact.

garrethdsouza wrote:^animal ag is at 16-18% vs transport at 13% so its still the HIGHEST contributor?

I don't think that takes into account the methane released while drilling for oil (for transportation), which you can't ignore, given its potency.

If I recall correctly, the methane released from drilling oil is comparable to animal agriculture in magnitude, although divided up among several industries, I think it pushes transportation up over animal agriculture.

I haven't looked at the numbers in a while though.

OneQuestion wrote: Eating meat is not going to cause mass environmental disaster.

A climate change denier, of course. Then you're an idiot who has no interest in scientific fact; you only care about your faith. You aren't here to be rational, you're here to make shit up and deny evidence.

OneQuestion wrote: And I know you're going to respond with links and things pointing to all the environmental damage the meat industry causes etc etc.

No, I'm going to call you a moron, as bad as any young Earth creationist. I'm no more going to try to 'prove' climate change to you than I'm going to waste my time trying to argue why evolution is true to an IDiot.
You can look it up for yourself if you have any respect for science at all (although you have made it pretty clear that you do not).

You could watch the documentary garrethdsouza references named Cowspiracy (although I'm critical of a few minor mistakes in the documentary, as you can see by a number of my posts, from what I've seen it's mainly accurate -- just reference my corrections, which I have noted on this forum, and if you have any concerns I can address them).

OneQuestion wrote: As with many 'necessities' - police, the NSA, the military - we broadly accept the possibility these things can go wrong in exchange for the benefits they give us.

First, no, if we have any sense of morality (even the one you pretend to have which only cares about humans), we broadly criticize civilian and non-civilian casualties rather than supporting them with indifference, funding them through our taxes, and worst of all voting for them at the polls and with our purchases. And, if we are at all rational, we accept our part of responsibility for them rather than pretending we're blameless little angels prancing around harmlessly on the eggshells that are human lives under our feet.
We all have various amounts of blood on our hands, the difference between a good person and a bad one is that the former tries to reduce that harm, and the latter (like you) doesn't give a shit, or makes irrational excuses to pretend like he's not responsible for any of it.

Second, it's not just a "possibility" or a chance of these things happening. They're inevitable, and they're inevitable at a certain rate statistically. It's not hard to calculate, a middle school student could do it.
Given the premise that the wars in the Middle East are about oil (this isn't 100% true, but it's close enough to true for these purposes), for example, you could (if you were so inclined) calculate the number of lives lost per a certain number of barrels of oil.
You could then calculate how much oil you use in a given year on transportation, and compute your guilt in the matter. How many lives, or what percentage of a life's blood is on your hands per year?
This is not a "possibility" of things going wrong, it's a statistically reliable metric of blood for oil.
In the same sense, the human blood on your hands for each steak you eat can also be calculated.
This isn't some abstract agent acting outside of the bounds of your control. It's your choice to drive rather than take public transit or bike, and it's your choice to eat meat rather than plants. You make these choices for convenience and personal pleasure, and the consequence is that there is blood on your hands for doing it.
If you in any way consider human death and suffering a bad thing, you have to acknowledge that, all other things being equal, a person who for purposes of pleasuring and convenience his or herself consumes more fossil fuels and eats more meat is a worse person based on a value system as described.

Third, your pleasure, in exchange for the suffering and death of other human beings. If you think that's a good trade in principle, then you're a bad person, indulging in the same excuse a pedophile may use to cause suffering to children to get his orgasm on.
Anybody can arbitrarily rank the importance of their own personal pleasure as infinitely more important than anybody else's suffering; any "moral" system that permits that is inherently broken -- it is not a true system at all, because in order to be a system it must restrict actions to consistency within its parameters, if those parameters are infinite, arbitrary, or undefined that simply does not work.
It's not a good thing to harm others to gratify yourself -- you won't understand that concept, though, it's a little too high level for you.
So, I'll dumb it down even more and grant the moronic assumption that a hedonistic prerogative has positive moral value:
What you're doing is much worse and even more irrational than just that, because you're completely ignoring the fact that you could get pleasure doing something else entirely, and causing much less harm.

Let's do a thought experiment in attempt to make you less ignorant (which I expect won't work, but I have to try):

There are two cakes, equally available, accessible, edible, etc. (every pragmatic consideration)
Cake A and cake B are also equally delicious and pleasurable to eat in every way. (every hedonistic one)
Cake A is attached to a pressure mechanism, such that when you lift it to take it, it will kill a million children. (assume this is not a good thing)
Cake B is not attached to any such mechanism, and will harm nobody.
You can choose to take one cake, the other will be destroyed (and any pressure mechanisms diffused without triggering if they have not already been triggered by your choice of cake).
You estimate, in your perversely inflated sense of self-importance, that the pleasure you will receive from eating one of the cakes is greater than the minor misfortune of killing a million children.

Which cake should you eat?

According to your twisted sense of reasoning and mathematical incompetence, it doesn't matter, since your pleasure exceeds the wrong of killing the million children, so cake A and B would both be fine (in both cases, according to you, you are doing a GOOD thing by eating the cake and pleasuring yourself, so whichever you elect you are a clearly a cake eating saint).
Anybody with half a brain and the capability to reason, however, can understand that given the option, eating cake A would be WRONG because cake B will provide the same pleasure while harming nobody (so overall, much greater good).

Can you understand even that basic concept?
If not, you're probably completely hopeless.

OneQuestion wrote: We want meat - and no amount of environmental damage is going to stop us from getting it.

Don't worry about what other people do, that's not your responsibility. You are responsible for YOUR actions. You could stop eating meat now, today, if you gave a shit about other human beings. But you don't.

OneQuestion wrote: Could it clean up it's act sometimes? Yeah, it could, and should.

Why should it? You don't care.
If you did, you'd stop eating it now, and then pick back up eating it only if and when it "cleaned up its act". A lot of vegans are actually in that position, boycotting animal products until there's a way to produce them ethically. That's how economics work. Unless you make that kind of commitment, you're fully responsible for all of the harm you're doing to get your jollies (when you know FULL WELL you could easily get jollies doing something much less destructive, which I ALSO mentioned in my first post and that you ignored).

OneQuestion wrote:It is perfectly possible to raise livestock without damaging the environment in any unmanagable way.

Hurr durr, and it's perfectly possible to wage war with teleportation guns that upload the enemy soldier into a computer matrix internment camp with the luxuries of a five star hotel to wait for the war to be over instead of killing them.
Therefore war is good and we should support it and not feel guilty about killing people!? YAY!!!?

What kind of moronic argument is that supposed to be, exactly?
This is one of the stupidest things I've seen on the internet, congratulations.

Speculating on some bizarre science fictional future technology or infrastructure that doesn't currently exist in no way changes the current situation, or your culpability for the harm done by the current system which you wholeheartedly support.

OneQuestion wrote:Game theory has nothing to do with moral axioms. "Win-win" behaviour is only objectively good if we agree on what a "win" is.

You missed the point. I will school you on this later, assuming you can prove you have enough functioning brain cells to understand everything above, and the honesty to admit your mistakes.

OneQuestion wrote:I know exactly what Nihilism is [...]

You don't understand what you're talking about. As I said, if you prove you can understand what I have already explained and have the honesty to admit your mistakes, we can move onto this topic, and those like it.

OneQuestion wrote:I guess I should have addressed the environmental argument for veganism, but the fact is that the world itself proves most people are willing to accept possible environmental damage if it means they get to eat meat.

I repeat, it's not just "possible", that's incredibly ignorant.

Also, it's irrelevant what the world does. Stop worrying about what other people are doing beyond your control. Whether or not YOU are a good person is about what YOU choose to do.

The world might fuck itself anyway, but what you can do is choose whether or not you're going to be one of the dicks.

OneQuestion wrote:We don't NEED to damage the environment to do so,

Then don't. Help invent the magnificent technology that will produce green meat. And go vegan until it's ready to start churning out sustainable meat.

OneQuestion wrote:but the point is that just because the industry does cause some environmental damage does not mean that people would be better off going vegan - because they value eating meat as well, very much so in fact.

I have already covered this. Something you don't seem to grasp is that the people who are suffering the consequences are not the ones eating the vast majority of the meat.

It's not one person going "Oh no, it is le hot. But oh the meat is yummy, so it's worth having to walk across the room and turn on the air conditioning."

It's one person going "Oh god fuck no my house is gone and I'm drowning in this flood, and starving from the fall of local government and agricultural infrastructure, and dying of cholera, who is doing this?"
And another person going "Oh meat is yummy, crank up the AC, change the channel the news is depressing."

You're the latter fucker.
The only consequences rich apathetic fuckers like you will probably see will be economic, where stuff gets a bit more expensive but you can still afford it. You might have to live in a smaller house, because real-estate will go a little crazy. Also, you won't be able to travel, since the borders to a lot of countries will be closed. It may actually get pretty shitty (like World War shortages shitty), but otherwise, you'll just change the channel and ignore billions of people suffering and dying the in developing countries and the third world.

But that's OK, because who cares about poor brown people. Certainly not you, you have better things to worry about like complaining about these fucking vegans trying to make you feel bad for eating steak just because it's killing stupid poor brown people. Man, what a drag.
Whatever, you don't care, and that's your ultimate checkmate "you can't argue with this" rebuttal.

From the fb group "Skeptic Vegans Discussion Group " https://www.facebook.com/groups/skeptic ... ment_reply

From someone who had an MA in metaethics and pursuing a PhD in it:

There is no consensus among philosophers as to what the nature of moral facts is - whether or not they're subjective or objective, relative or absolute. There's also a small but significant minority of philosophers who don't believe there are any moral facts. These are very live issues in metaethics, which is a relatively new field.

The most problematic aspect of the question is that there isn't consensus on what morality means. Most philosophers hold that a moral reason for action must be 1) inescapable (it applies to people regardless of their interests and desires) and 2) authoritative (it is something that they must be motivated by if they are rational); but a significant minority of philosophers disagree that those conditions are necessary for a reason for action to be a moral reason. (There are plenty of other issues in contention, but that seems to me the most fundamental one.) There are then questions as to whether any reasons exist that are inescapable and authoritative. The most important thing to realize is that anyone making any confident assertions about the nature of morality is unjustified in doing so, unless they've read quite a bit of contemporary philosophy.