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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44948 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Not sure if this is better for SQS but - What is the steelman argument against vegetarianism/veganism? I am especially interested in claims that aren't health-based, as I know quite a few very intelligent and well-sourced vegans who have thoroughly convinced me that most health based claims are false.

I'm not a vegetarian myself but I'm reasonably convinced that I should be one, it's more of a moral failing on my part that I eat meat, not a logical stance.

Moral vegetarianism is ethically backwards in that it accords far too much moral value to powerless creatures that are unable to participate in human society. Moral value is a social construct, and cows are part of economy, gastronomy, landscape or perhaps someone's personal pets, but they are not part of society.

Ahh perfect - this is the type of answer I was looking for. I do find this compelling, although I hope we move into the direction of including animals in society in the future. Especially if or when we can figure out how to substantially increase their intelligence/sapience.

figure out how to substantially increase their intelligence/sapience.

But why?

Because I think it would be fun, and add beauty to the universe I guess. We could also directly ask them a lot of questions, potentially even create a bridge of slightly-more-sapient beings to understand lower levels of consciousness than our own.

If you think a sapient version of the beings you see as animals today would have anything to do with those beings in terms of experience I challenge your understanding of existence.

I don't think a fully sapient version of those beings would be similar, no. But I do think they would be different enough from us to get an understanding.

I also don't see a logical reason why, again, we couldn't have a chain of beings with slightly higher sapience levels, and at least get some form of information from that chain.

Someone really wants a doctoral thesis on the different flavors of grasses?

Suppose that a mother didn't want her child, and planned to abort it. I suggested that I would instead pay her a fee for her to carry it to term, and give the baby to me. Clearly, the baby is outside society, in that it wouldn't exist but for my intervention, and in that the only way it interacts with society is through me. What moral restrictions apply to the baby? Why is this different from the moral restrictions on an animal?

For the time being, no moral restrictions that you do not impose. If nobody save you knows the baby exists, and you are perfectly amoral, then the baby has no actual morality to count on. So much for the first question.

As to the second, the main difference is that the question of the moral value of animals hinges on the animal's permanent biological inability to influence society, whereas the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society and people assign some to it, or it grows up and becomes able to assert some for itself.

That's just an extremely silly equivocation between morality as a social norm and morality as the actual prescriptions of the norm. A vegan dictatorship that microchips recalcitrant carnivores would thus insulate itself from the admonishment of "ethical backwardness" -- just not in the sense anyone cares about.

the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society

So as long as I don't do that, I can do whatever I like to the baby. Got it.

Yes. I don't see what any amount of theoretical morality will do for the baby in that situation - the buck stops with you in that scenario; if you are the Fritzl type then very unfortunately your morality is all that will have a tangible effect, and the only questions left to ask revolve around whether you assign moral weight to the baby and how you will act on it.

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