FlyOnTheWall
9mo ago
I'm not convinced it is actually cognitively possible for non-sapient animals to conceive of suicide, certainly not in the rational, goal-oriented way of a suffering human opting for assisted dying. Is it possible for human babies, even? I don't think "torturing an infant" is an oxymoron, but it would seem to fail your criterion.
So I did consider animals when I wrote the definition, which I why I carefully worded the condition as: "want[ing] to die" instead of the more sophisticated "wishing to commit suicide", etc. For animals, I am working on the assumption that they will express a death wish as going crazy and just thrashing about / attacking people / etc.
It's not a perfect solution, but unfortunately once an entity is unable to communicate verbally, it's hard to definitively rule out that it is not in some kind of terrible agony (see also: "The anesthesia only partially worked. The patient is unable to control their body, but feels everything"), so I think this is the best we can do.
I didn't really consider babies. I don't think it is an oxymoron either. But I think my definition still works, because we can try and reasonably infer if it is in agony, primarily by asking if the thing we are doing to it is painful (and, as I mentioned, there is the caveat of if you love the entity and are trying to help it, so medical procedures on newborns is not torture) - this is even less cut-and-dry than the animal case, but again I think it's just a hard problem to evaluate suffering on a living thing that cannot communicate its thoughts (and in fact probably doesn't even have "thoughts" in the way normal humans do)
If people from those two groups are put through the exact same torments, and experience the exact same amount of pain, but the first remains steadfast in wanting to get through this while the other starts shouting "oh for God's sake just kill me now", is it reasonable to say that only the second guy is being tortured? Seems weird and contrived to me
Actually this is an intended aspect of my definition. The primary goal of my definition is that I find it disturbing that intelligent beings are able to inflict extreme "unnatural" levels of pain on living things, and sometimes it is in their benefit to do so.
In general, it feels "unnatural" to ban a state from inflicting any kind of suffering on someone, because a "baseline" level of suffering just exists without states (people/animals starve to death, creatures get eaten by stronger ones, etc), so why just disallow inflicting suffering in just this particular kind of circumstance.
But for torture, this is a thing that only happens if you have civilisation (lions don't torture gazelles or other lions, they can't because they are too stupid) - so I think it should be considered always immoral to torture.
As you yourself have mentioned, sometimes there are good and necessary reasons to kill someone (a criminal just starts attacking people and refuses to surrender), so we can't go so far as to ban killing for any reason (plus what about killing animals, etc)
So my definition comes out as the best coherent imperative that can actually be adhered to in any circumstance, but also rules out a particularly egregious class of suffering: i.e. a fate worse than death (if whatever is happening to someone is truly a fate worse than death, under this rule, they have the right to choose death instead)
In your particular comparison - the strong willed person is personally experiencing whatever is happening to them as a fate not as bad as death. As long as they are always given the option of choosing death (consent can always be taken away at any point, etc, etc) - I don't think I can do any better without my axiom becoming non-universal.
Well, that's rather the problem. It suggests that he views the dog as property, as a living prop for his livestream, rather than a living being he loves and enjoys the company of.
I think you're right, I went too far with my previous statement. What I do believe is that this is less worrying than wanton suffering, but still, being able to actually act on the philosophy I propose for animals with a real animal, even for a useful purpose, is still worrying because he was able to ignore its suffering / lacked the empathy to realise its suffering.
but I don't think a Piker who was simply a principled Cartesian of that kind would have any reason to own a pet dog in the first place. Having a pet dog visible in his livestreams at all is a signal of "I'm the kind of person who enjoys the company of our four-legged furry friends", and if that's not actually how he thinks of dogs then the signal is deceitful and his whole moral character becomes suspect, never mind that he tried to cover up the shocking
I agree, it is quite slimy he lied that way. I already mentioned it was bad he covered up his rule breaking, but you're right he also went out of his way to mislead people into thinking he was pro animal rights by having a pet.
Though I think misleading people into thinking you hold a particular ideological stance is less egregious than actually breaking a rule (thought crimes vs physical crimes)... but I guess I'm biased, since (like many others on this forum, I imagine) I personally mislead the people around me to believe I am on-board with progressive ideology (but in my defence, I will say I have tried to keep this deception implicit, I don't go around with dyed hair and pronoun pins)
FlyOnTheWall
9mo ago
A lot of people would say that they find suffering to be more terrible than death, and thus, torture to be more wicked than murder
In general, I am also unequivocally opposed to "torturing" animals.
But "suffering" is a spectrum, ranging from getting wet in the rain to the kind of stuff drug cartels do.
My actual practical resolution for this is to say torture is any situation where you make the victim want to die and then do not allow them to die. With an exception if you sincerely love and care for them (to avoid classifying extremely painful things that eventually lead to something good for the "victim" as torture)
And this situation does not seem to be torture. If it were really on the level of torture, I think the dog would just wig out and attack Hasan. A dog that sits still in discomfort for a long time is just suffering a "reasonable" amount. I think it still prefers living, and does not wish to die to escape the shock collar.
And actually, I think the "a torturer probably has something wrong with them" bit is important too, particularly here
As I said, I don't think this particular thing amounts to torture. But I agree that it is causing suffering to the dog, and it should make us worried about a person if they wantonly cause suffering to living things because of what it says about their ability to empathise, but:
- This doesn't mean the person is actually doing anything morally wrong. It's just that they are actively doing something that makes the people around them (who cannot access their true state of mind) update their priors to think they will later do a separate thing, that is morally wrong.
- In this case, I don't even think we should be worried* He wasn't shocking the dog for fun, he was trying to make his property stay in the right place for his livestream. In your teddy analogy: your guy is not ripping teddy bears apart with his teeth, but decided to use one of the button eye as a spare for his jacket. No need to worry about a missing empathy response - he probably did feel a little uncomfortable but understood the discomfort was irrational.
[*] Well, at least not worried he's a Ted Bundy. It is antisocial behaviour for him to break a rule and then hide his rule-breaking behaviour (even if the rule itself is bogus)
FlyOnTheWall
9mo ago
There are animals that we let trained people butcher for meat and do not think much of it, or otherwise subject to harsh conditions for our utility, and there are animals that we cherish and pamper, or at least respect.
I find the whole ranking of animal species business pretty suspect morally.
But fine, that is a self-consistent framework that justfies meat eating but not pet abuse (assuming you would be okay with someone abusing a pet from a "meat" species)
In principle - I have no good answer to the whole animal rights conundrum, namely:
A: They are living beings, even if they are not as smart as humans. It is not okay to kill them - would you be okay with a human cattle ranch of mentally retarded people?
B: This is indeed an ugly thing: I don't want to live in a world where the weak and stupid have no right even to their life if their death would cause some positive utility to one of their biological superiors (especially when "weak" and "stupid" are relative terms...)
B: But sadly, there is no good resolution to this. If we really wish to avoid this ugly notion of biological inferiority/superiority, "a great chain of being", etc - then we are forced to extend our compassion forever downwards, below the cattle and dogs, below the rats, below even the ants, bees and wasps - down to the level of unicellular organisms: on just your fingertip lies millions of bacteria, each time you wash your hands is a genocide. The only way to avoid actively harming innocent beings is the death of the entire human race, each breathe we take to prolong our murderous lives is an atrocity.
B: So, if we wish to continue living, and wish to retain some coherent notion of morality - we must accept the drawing of a line somewhere. So we must be able to say X is so low on the "chain" it is acceptable to take its life. And yes, this unfortunately puts the question of whether I deserve my own life onto the table.
This is a self-consistent rebuttal (and is the argument I personally believe in), but it's also exactly what an evil person trying to justify their evil would say in order to continue being evil ("Look, maybe being a cartel hitman is actually not a nice thing to do. But also, it's the only life I know, and I'd probably be killed myself if I stopped, and also coincidentally I have this neat philosophy that actually makes it kosher!"), so I often have doubts about this.
I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this (I have seen similar things written elsewhere, but never exactly this)
But - to go back to the original point: wider (meat-eating) society accepts the fact that animal lives are lesser than a human's. In particular, we kill and eat animals (okay, more realistically - we sponsor their killing by buying their meat in a supermarket), and not even for survival reasons. It seems that if we value a "life" so little, making said life have to stay still for a while and get shocked whilst being housed and fed and not slaughtered is pretty marginal in comparison ("it was one thing to kill and eat all those people, but when you trespassed into that lady's house to hide in her shower, you crossed the line")
I don't think it makes sense to oppose mild animal abuse unless you are a vegetarian (and even then there are other issues, but being vegetarian seems the bare minimum for holding this sort of position)
By the same logic, if I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) put a bag over your head and chained you to a bed, you would still be doing better than, say, a migrant labourer in the UAE who is worked to death in the blazing sun. That may be true, but we are talking "lesser of two evils" and not "this is fine, this is okay, what is everyone making a fuss about?"
If I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) kidnapped you from your home (and also a bunch of other humans), put you on a farm, eugenically bred you with other humans with the goal of making succulent offspring, and eventually slaughtered you, butchered you, and sold your flesh for a profit... you'd actually be worse off than even the migrant labourer. Actually this is the plot for an especially disturbing horror movie - so if we're comparing animals to humans this way, you (and I, and everyone else who eats meat) are at an off-the-charts level of bad.
First, I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)
The leftists at my workplace (the kind of place where "Trump is [generally] bad" is just in the groundwater) were very unsympathetic to Kirk. But none of them actually celebrated his death, they (quietly) discussed how he was a bad person, and that he had sort of brought it upon himself (I'm given to understand this is because he was pro-guns) To cherrypick the very worst things said (I'm paraphrasing):
But everyone to my recollection affirmed that it is bad that a human being died. And this general direction of discussion was lightly shut down by another progressive.
But Charlie Kirk was an individual, who personally held the "misogynistic" and anti-LGBT beliefs of a "modal Charlie Kirk" - not all Palestinians share the sentiments (or crimes) of the mode. I'm not saying group punishment is axiomatically immoral, but it is clearly a gray area because it involves punishing innocents. I think it is much more straightforward morally to support punishing a bad person for personally doing a bad thing (I'm not saying Kirk / Muslims do a "bad thing" by holding these views, just addressing this particular line of inference you drew)
But the above is my own disagreement to your logic. If we are looking at the world through a progressive lens:
The bathroom stuff is only one of the flashpoints. Respecting pronouns, concerns about the growing anti-trans (or "transphobic", if we are pathologising it) sentiment, access to hormones, trans children, trans men, non-binary individuals - these are all pretty clearly "flashpoints", and none involve males in female spaces.
As I suspect you are aware, progressives assign a different meaning to the word "woman" and "man" than you do. It is a reference to one's gender identity, and can be unrelated to their chromosomes, sex organs, appearance, etc (i.e. "transgender")
None of these policies benefit men - they benefit (trans) women (at the expense of cis women) One can argue that this is a bad definition, but it is the definition used by progressives - it is what they mean when they say "man" and "woman". So there is absolutely nothing "incoherent" about being feminist and pro trans rights.
Also, on top of that, it's not even incoherent to oppose violence against AFABs and support trans rights. It is possible to have multiple moral goals, for those goals to come into conflict, and to have to choose one over the other:
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