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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Why do you think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals?

That's a pretty unusual viewpoint for a modern westerner to espouse (though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common). Christian background, Cartesian background, contrarianism, Chinese background.... how come?

I believe that the Great Chain of Being is more or less true. Also this

though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common

is part of it. I try to be honest with myself even when it sounds ugly. If someone showed me a video of chickens in cages overlaid with dramatic music and anthropomorphizing narration ("the newborn chicks are kidnapped from their mother mere minutes after hatching...") I might feel sad for a few minutes, but I would also know I was being manipulated, that chickens don't actually experience motherhood or childhood, or really much of anything, probably, and I'd recall my belief that it's part of human nature (in the philosophic sense) to eat other animals, and so it wouldn't sway my behavior.

All of that said, there's room for nuance. While I wouldn't sacrifice a single human infant to save a billion cows, I would definitely be willing to spend a small amount of extra money to buy meat that could somehow be proven to be "more humane" (probably in that the animals' living conditions were more like their natural habitats, although I'm no expert). But I'm also very cynical about greenwashing, "organic" labelling, and other tricks to prey on the wallets of ethical consumers, so I'd need some pretty good proof that it's actually qualitatively different than a cost-minimizing factory farm.

Chinese background

I lol'd, that's a good guess, but no. They don't just value human lives over animals lives, they also think animal lives have roughly zero value and so they can be treated rocks or dirt. The gifs you've seen online aren't uncommon occurances.