Olwen said: Yes. It just so happens that people do typically feel guilt, and there are other impediments. And it is precisely those realities, encased over time in the form of culture, that creates ethical standards. However, must you be absolutely obedient to culture? No, there is nothing stopping you to do whatever you want. Transcendental morality and "magic" simply has no effect.katsucats said: .............are you ok with this conclusion?Suppose there is no empirical impediment (you are not too lazy, the distance isn't an issue, there's no legal issue or difficulty in carrying it out, etc.)... Nothing. |
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Wyzdm said: rjimenez said: Than that gives me the right to kill mentally handicapped people by that logic. My point was that OP was deciding that just because plants are not conscious it's okay to kill them even though they are living so then I could make my own reason for killing animals. Basically I'm disagreeing with OP saying it's more moral to kill plants just because they are not conscious. It's in our nature to eat animals and plants for our own survival, nothing more and nothing less. Yes I agree, personally I don't like meat, but dislike when people use ethics for anything really. |
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| Do people seriously think that "hurrrr ethics don't exist" is a worthwhile or insightful post in the slightest? That kind of skepticism is a complete waste of time to dwell on. |
katsucats said: marriage said: No comment on his posts, but analogies aren't equivalents. Otherwise whenever you hear "roses are red as violets are blue", you'd say "because roses are equivalent to violets..."because children and the disabled are equivalent to chickens and plants Hes using extreme analogies, so its clear he thinks theyre similar enough to compare. Its the same as PETA people who think the life of a human is equal to a chickens life |
Solipsistic said: It's absurd being a thing that has no "well-being" has no "being", and is not an agent. So basically, you're challenging someone to do something to something that is not itself, which is self-contradictory.It's not about intelligence, consciousness, sentience, or whatever the fuck else. It is about suffering. If you disagree, please give me one example where it would be unethical to do something to a being that is incapable of suffering/well-being. You won't be able to, because it's absurd. |
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katsucats said: Olwen said: Yes. It just so happens that people do typically feel guilt, and there are other impediments. And it is precisely those realities, encased over time in the form of culture, that creates ethical standards. However, must you be absolutely obedient to culture? No, there is nothing stopping you to do whatever you want. Transcendental morality and "magic" simply has no effect..............are you ok with this conclusion? You are nuts. A logical solution would be to come up with objective ethics via subjective axioms. Believe it or not, this is what we do in mathematics all the time, and everyone accepts math as objective and true. For example, in Peano arithmetic (used to derive all of mathematics), we have the following axioms: 1. Zero is a natural number. 2. The successor of a natural number is a natural number. There's 3 more axioms, but you get the point. These are not objective. There is no evidence for them and they are completely made up. But they allow us to derive an objective mathematics which is very handy. Why can't we do the same with ethics? |
Wyzdm said: but not illegal to kill a chicken and eat it is because we wish to protect our own species. There would be underground chicken killing and shady black markets for chicken meat. Families would hide it in brown paper and smuggle it into their houses to have a family meal. Then the police would burst in and arrest them all for chicken smuggling and consumption regulation breaking. The parents get life in jail and the children sent into adoption agency to be abused because they caused secondary suffering to a chicken by consuming it for substance. |
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Olwen said: Because ethics is an empirical proposition, and mathematics is purely rational/institutional.katsucats said: Yes. It just so happens that people do typically feel guilt, and there are other impediments. And it is precisely those realities, encased over time in the form of culture, that creates ethical standards. However, must you be absolutely obedient to culture? No, there is nothing stopping you to do whatever you want. Transcendental morality and "magic" simply has no effect. You are nuts. A logical solution would be to come up with objective ethics via subjective axioms. Believe it or not, this is what we do in mathematics all the time, and everyone accepts math as objective and true. For example, in Peano arithmetic (used to derive all of mathematics), we have the following axioms: 1. Zero is a natural number. 2. The successor of a natural number is a natural number. There's 3 more axioms, but you get the point. These are not objective. There is no evidence for them and they are completely made up. But they allow us to derive an objective mathematics which is very handy. Why can't we do the same with ethics? |
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DaejWo said: marriage said: Hes using extreme analogies, so its clear he thinks theyre similar enough to compare. Its the same as PETA people who think the life of a human is equal to a chickens life Well,I have not seen any meat from PETA people in the supermarket yet. Hypocrites. Its called 'strange meat'  |
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Because ethics is an empirical proposition, and mathematics is purely rational/institutional. *facepalm* ethics is not empirical. Where's your proof for this claim? The source of our ethical knowledge is the same as the source of our math knowledge: intuitions. I have a strong intuition that the successor of any natural number is also a natural number. Very strong one in fact. Doesn't matter if it's 10000 or 100403050236026, its successor is also a natural number. I also have a very strong intuition that murdering human beings is wrong. So they're both rational. |
| I think eating animals in itself is not unethical, but the way we raise them just for eating is. I have worked in a lot of farms with different kinds of livestock, and what I saw there made me stop eating industrial meat alltogether. One thing is to read about it on the internet, it's a different world experiencing it first hand. I live in a country were the living standards of livestock is one of the world's highest. But I have still seen so, so many things I can only describe as torture. It's sickening. However, I do eat wild animals- They have had a chance to live their lives, fulfilling their natural behaviour and so forth. The hunting process is usually much more humane than the carnivor killing process. |
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| Ethics is something manmade & I doubt we could ever come up with anything objective. |
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Olwen said: I also have a very strong intuition that murdering human beings is wrong. So they're both rational. So is nature and nature demands species eat other species for substance, unless we are to assume nature knows less than man. |
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Zergneedsfood said: I'm wary of a pure objective system of ethics primarily because I think any system of ethics needs to be subjective and flexible to account and accommodate extreme and new types of circumstances that challenges our ethical paradigms, which seems antithetical to an objective set of rules. Or maybe it's not. I don't know. Taking an axiomatic view of ethics where maximizing utility as an axiom WOULD be flexible enough to account for any kind of circumstance. Utility isn't enough though. Suppose there were a million people at a colosseum, and they got huge pleasure out of one innocent woman getting eaten by a lion. The decrease in utility from that woman dying is far lower than the amount of pleasure the million people get from watching her get eaten by a lion. We need something more obviously. |
| Everyone will naturally find a way to justify their actions, whether you eat animals or not chances are you're still going to place yourself on a moral high ground. It's a scary world for us vegetables, if you want to buy salsa you might have to worry about trace amounts of anchovies, if you want to buy digiorno pizza you have to worry about the cow enzymes they use as the catalyst in their cheeses. DaejWo said: Because it's not legal or socially acceptable.Well,I have not seen any meat from PETA people in the supermarket yet. Hypocrites. |
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Solipsistic said: You're mistaking correlation and cause. Even if it were so that every ethical assertion in the world agrees to the idea that one does not harm beings capable of suffering, it does not mean that it would be wrong because it is wrong to harm beings capable of suffering.It's not about intelligence, consciousness, sentience, or whatever the fuck else. It is about suffering. If you disagree, please give me one example where it would be unethical to do something to a being that is incapable of suffering/well-being. You won't be able to, because it's absurd. Solipsistic said: Suppose there was a being highly sensitive to suffering. For the sake of expedience, we'll call them "women". These creatures, women, feel 10 times the pain when you call them fat than cutting off all 4 legs of a puppy. Therefore, according to your theory, we should cut off all 4 legs of 9 puppies before we call a woman fat, if indeed they feel that much pain from it.Now, we know from neuroscience certain ways of measuring a being's capacity to feel pain. That is, we can scientifically demonstrate (beyond any reasonable doubt) that an amoeba simply is incapable of the same pain as a human. There is a sliding scale of pain-capability, with rocks/plants/amoebas at the bottom, things like cows around the middle, and creatures like humans and other Great Apes at the peak. The invariant of this scale is this: The higher the being on the scale, the more unethical it is to harm them. Suppose, then, that there is an alien species, Martians, that feel 10 times the pain when it is killed than we do. Therefore, we should allow them to kill 9 of us before we entertain the thought of killing one of them. |
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Olwen said: When you propose that in a certain situation, in the physical world, that I should act to some effect on the physical world, how is that not empirical? Using intuition a priori to solve a posteriori problem is exactly your problem, and the problem of all religion.Because ethics is an empirical proposition, and mathematics is purely rational/institutional. *facepalm* ethics is not empirical. Where's your proof for this claim? The source of our ethical knowledge is the same as the source of our math knowledge: intuitions. I have a strong intuition that the successor of any natural number is also a natural number. Very strong one in fact. Doesn't matter if it's 10000 or 100403050236026, its successor is also a natural number. I also have a very strong intuition that murdering human beings is wrong. So they're both rational. |
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DaejWo said: You can't rule out possibility of taught dogmatism,or at least,it's influence. Well 200 years ago public hanging was a family day out, none of them felt it was wrong to watch a crimminal hang, they had food carts and everything. Now we wouldn't even entertain the idea so clearly society opinion as a whole changes over time. IN fact humans as a society have entertained watching people die for fun longer than we have condemned it. |
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Solipsistic said: It's not about intelligence, consciousness, sentience, or whatever the fuck else. It is about suffering. If you disagree, please give me one example where it would be unethical to do something to a being that is incapable of suffering/well-being. You won't be able to, because it's absurd. Now, we know from neuroscience certain ways of measuring a being's capacity to feel pain. That is, we can scientifically demonstrate (beyond any reasonable doubt) that an amoeba simply is incapable of the same pain as a human. There is a sliding scale of pain-capability, with rocks/plants/amoebas at the bottom, things like cows around the middle, and creatures like humans and other Great Apes at the peak. The invariant of this scale is this: The higher the being on the scale, the more unethical it is to harm them. HOWEVER, one thing that (to my knowledge) has not yet been demonstrated is whether animals (aside from those at the top of the scale) can not merely feel pain, but actually suffer. That is, does their lack of self-awareness preclude them from conceptualizing of painful experience as "negative"? Or is it more accurate to just understand their pain response in a behaviorist light, where they simply respond aversely to negative stimuli? Some have argued that it's just a neutral reaction, similar to how clapping hands in front of someone's eyes will cause them to blink. So, it's not clear that eating animals is truly immoral, yet. However, I would say it is more likely than not that they would suffer, though I don't have a scientific basis for that. If anything, one could make an argument like "it is better to err on the side of not inflicting suffering in the unknown case". Are you still going on about neuroscience? Neuroscience has nothing to do with ethics. It's not discussed in the philosophical literature. All neuroscience can tell us is how much pain/pleasure people go through for each action. This doesn't tell us _what axioms we should take_. And that is what ethicists are actually concerned with.. they don't give a crap about how sad a baby gets when you take their lollipop away. What they care about is WHY taking a lollipop from a baby is wrong, not that it makes them upset. Is it because of sadness? Or is it because of some kind of a violation of duty? |
katsucats said: Olwen said: When you propose that in a certain situation, in the physical world, that I should act to some effect on the physical world, how is that not empirical? Using intuition a priori to solve a posteriori problem is exactly your problem, and the problem of all religion.*facepalm* ethics is not empirical. Where's your proof for this claim? The source of our ethical knowledge is the same as the source of our math knowledge: intuitions. I have a strong intuition that the successor of any natural number is also a natural number. Very strong one in fact. Doesn't matter if it's 10000 or 100403050236026, its successor is also a natural number. I also have a very strong intuition that murdering human beings is wrong. So they're both rational. Dude.. by your reasoning, math is also empirical. Because we use math to act to some effect in the physical world, in physics for example. And then your distinction collapses. >_> Sorry katsu, but you made another bad argument! |
| Because we need protein. And not just any protein omega 6 protein like cow meat. We are omnivores, just look at our teeth. Don't be stupid. Just look at the hierarchy of needs, we need food before we can think about 'ethics'. Plants breathe and are living too. So yeah your argument is invalid. |
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| We knowingly select known liars and con-artists to lead us and you question how ethical it is to eat animals? |
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Pictured, an asshole Lion been an unethical criminal: Those assholes start young:  I think we need to start making lions into vegetarians to help them understand our ethics  so much suffering so much un-natural unethical suffering but we can't blame them they know not what they do, unlike us so evolved we have evolved past the need for substances we have evolved ETHICALLY beyond our very meat eater bodies, fuck our teeth what kind of evidence that meat eating is normal and acceptable is that when we have some social morality we only started making up in the past few decades. Thats more real than anything. |
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Olwen said: We apply the ideas derived from math to some effect in the physical world, we don't conceive of math in terms of anything physical (it is possible to derive all geometric proofs without actual measurement of anything). I'll clarify that ethics are prescriptive and involve action. It would be absurd to intuit anything about the wrongness of murder if not for the undesirable empirical effects of it. Suppose in an alternate universe where stabbing someone in the heart causes them immense pleasure, after which causes no lasting effect. Then stabbing someone in the heart would not be considered morally wrong. On the other hand, mathematics are subject only to other institutions like language, and the only thing that would change in this alternate universe are the mathematical constants (e.g. speed of light), which isn't math but an input (but if you'd like to argue that that small portion of math is empirical, I don't care enough to disagree).katsucats said: Dude.. by your reasoning, math is also empirical. Because we use math to act to some effect in the physical world, in physics for example. And then your distinction collapses. >_>When you propose that in a certain situation, in the physical world, that I should act to some effect on the physical world, how is that not empirical? Using intuition a priori to solve a posteriori problem is exactly your problem, and the problem of all religion. Sorry katsu, but you made another bad argument! If you'd like to argue, though, that it is possible to derive ethical intuitions without any regards to empirical consequences, then I feel that's solipsistic and I cannot envision how that's possible. It would be like the psychic ability to guess pictures blindfolded. |
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yhunata said: We knowingly select known liars and con-artists to lead us and you question how ethical it is to eat animals? Priorities we have none for we are modern first world society. People are dying in warzones, little children crushed under falling buildings from airstrikes but nope fuck them animals need protecting from humans so they can be eaten by every other carnivore instead and they eat them alive. |
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-shotz said: marriage said: i'm not gonna sit here and tell people what to do, but it should be obvious that it takes much less farmland to produce plants than meat. The WHO encourages people to center their diets more around plant-based foods for this reason. next time use a little common sense before you go about spouting out shit.animals eat other animals, are we going to make them go on vegan diets too? because we totally have enough farmland to feed 7 billion people extra food to replace meat without them being malnourished Not really. Steer (meat cows) have a ton of meat (430 pounds= 1720 1/4 pound burgers) and only require 3 acres for like 50 of them. Chickens have a pound of meat (like two meals worth) and only require one big coup to house 100s of them. Fish is just caught and most of them have a huge population throughout streams, and the ocean. Farm fish is bad for you. But that's besides the point. Pig farmers get 150 pounds of meat from 300 pound pigs, and they only require a little space too. |
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katsucats said: A superintelligent computer/AI would be a candidate. What I'm saying is that if we have a robot that has intelligence/awareness equal to human beings, but that cannot actually suffer, I think most people would agree it's absurd to say you could act immorally towards it. It's absurd being a thing that has no "well-being" has no "being", and is not an agent. So basically, you're challenging someone to do something to something that is not itself, which is self-contradictory. katsucats said: Dude, can you give me some credit already? You think I don't realize this, or know what the difference is between correlation/causation? I already have admitted before that moral skep is true and you can't actually derive ethics from pure reason. At some point, you need axioms, which come from things like intuition and consensus.You're mistaking correlation and cause. Even if it were so that every ethical assertion in the world agrees to the idea that one does not harm beings capable of suffering, it does not mean that it would be wrong because it is wrong to harm beings capable of suffering. katsucats said: If we consider those cases in a vacuum, yes. Obviously you're ignoring things that factor into a real ethical calculation like the suffering of the dog's owner, or the families/society of the 9 humans killed, etc., but I'm sure you're aware of that.Suppose there was a being highly sensitive to suffering. For the sake of expedience, we'll call them "women". These creatures, women, feel 10 times the pain when you call them fat than cutting off all 4 legs of a puppy. Therefore, according to your theory, we should cut off all 4 legs of 9 puppies before we call a woman fat, if indeed they feel that much pain from it. Suppose, then, that there is an alien species, Martians, that feel 10 times the pain when it is killed than we do. Therefore, we should allow them to kill 9 of us before we entertain the thought of killing one of them. Olwen said: You too, assuming I don't realize the obvious. No shit neuroscience doesn't give us the axioms. I agree with you that we tease out the axioms using intuition, thought experiments, consensus, etc. Stop manufacturing debate where there is none.This doesn't tell us _what axioms we should take_. And that is what ethicists are actually concerned with.. they don't give a crap about how sad a baby gets when you take their lollipop away. What they care about is WHY taking a lollipop from a baby is wrong, not that it makes them upset. Is it because of sadness? Or is it because of some kind of a violation of duty? As for what ethicists are "actually concerned with", I would argue that really they are all rule utilitarians that are simply arguing about which rules are best. How can we possibly make sense of a valid "duty" which is totally divorced from the well-being of conscious creatures? We can't. Ultimately, when people talk about duties, those duties are still constrained by whether they would, if universalized, lead to a good society. If not, then even people like Kant would say they are not valid duties. |
| For more than two million years we were primarily meat eaters. Only in the last 10,000 years did the human diet shift, with the cultivation of grains and legumes. Our genes were developed before the agricultural revolution, when we were not only meat eaters, but enthusiastic ones at that. On top of that, the human genome has changed less than 0.02% in the last 40,000 years. Our bodies were genetically programed for optimal functioning on a diet including meat, and that programming has not changed. |
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| Solipsistic, if you're talking about animals suffering, I've heard that turtles can cry from pain. Does that count? I don't have any link to source that, it was something I heard from my dad. Apparently, one certain island resort in Maldives served turtle meat, cut from it while it was still alive (don't know who they were, but I can't imagine them being in business for long after that became known). It had tears coming out it's eyes. |
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rjimenez said: Wyzdm said: Other animals being less intelligent than us gives us the right to kill them then. Also plants cannot give us vitamin B12. My mom is a vegetarian and she has a deficiency in that vitamin. A deficiency in B12 can cause a lot of problems and since she's so hellbent on never eating meat she has to take B12 capsules. Than that gives me the right to kill mentally handicapped people by that logic. "But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies." Not only is it frowned on, cannibalism causes mad cow disease in humans. Which causes the brain to slowly deteriorate and then you die. |
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We apply the ideas derived from math to some effect in the physical world, we don't conceive of math in terms of anything physical (it is possible to derive all geometric proofs without actual measurement of anything). I'll clarify that ethics are prescriptive and involve action. It would be absurd to intuit anything about the wrongness of murder if not for the undesirable empirical effects of it. Suppose in an alternate universe where stabbing someone in the heart causes them immense pleasure, after which causes no lasting effect. Then stabbing someone in the heart would not be considered morally wrong. On the other hand, mathematics are subject only to other institutions like language, and the only thing that would change in this alternate universe are the mathematical constants (e.g. speed of light), which isn't math but an input (but if you'd like to argue that that small portion of math is empirical, I don't care enough to disagree). If you'd like to argue, though, that it is possible to derive ethical intuitions without any regards to empirical consequences, then I feel that's solipsistic and I cannot envision how that's possible. It would be like the psychic ability to guess pictures blindfolded. We do conceive of other instances of math as something physical, though. When I imagine 1+1=2, I think of two rocks moving together to become.. well, two. When I think of Peano's second axiom, I think of 3 rocks, and adding one to get 4 rocks. So parts of math can be conceived physically. It would be absurd to intuit anything about the wrongness of murder if not for the undesirable empirical effects of it. It may sound absurd to you, but on Kant's view of ethics, this is not the full story. Mere empirical effects are NOT enough to establish that something is wrong. On Kant's view, you have a duty to protect your family, and murdering someone to fulfill that duty would actually be moral. On the other hand, if you don't have such a duty and you do it just for fun, then that would be immoral. Two identical actions, two completely different answers, meaning that you are wrong about ethics being completely reliant on undesirable empirical effects. But I think the biggest problem with your argument is this: why is it relevant if we don't conceive of math as something physical? Why does that mean ethics can't be axiomatized? It just doesn't follow. Even if you have found the difference, even if I grant that argument to you, it just doesn't follow that ethics can't be axiomatized. I don't see why it's even relevant. The burden of proof is on you: you have to demonstrate why ethics can't be axiomatized BECAUSE of this fact. |
| I suppose some people see that as unethical, and others do not. This is totally based on your opinion, but let me state this. Animals eat other animals, plants decompose other animals, we eat plants, bacteria decompose things and such. So, when all food sources share energy in some shape or form, then it's just energy. Now, you can take it the moral way and say that life on planet Earth is a gift, and we are all equals. However, the idea of being equal is a lie of sorts, so eating animals are fine. There's my bullshit opinion. |
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DaejWo said: Olwen said: But I think the biggest problem with your argument is this: why is it relevant if we don't conceive of math as something physical? Why does that mean ethics can't be axiomatized? It just doesn't follow. Even if you have found the difference, even if I grant that argument to you, it just doesn't follow that ethics can't be axiomatized. I don't see why it's even relevant. The burden of proof is on you: you have to demonstrate why ethics can't be axiomatized BECAUSE of this fact. Well,they can be. Why should they? Why should math be axiomatized? To be able to use that laptop you're on right now. Why should ethics be axiomatized? So random people don't come to your house and kill you right now. |
| screw ethics. |
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marriage said: katsucats said: No comment on his posts, but analogies aren't equivalents. Otherwise whenever you hear "roses are red as violets are blue", you'd say "because roses are equivalent to violets..." Hes using extreme analogies, so its clear he thinks theyre similar enough to compare. Its the same as PETA people who think the life of a human is equal to a chickens life People Eating Tasty Animals? |
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Solipsistic said: How can a self-aware robot not feel anguish when you kill it? Is it moral to kill someone in their sleep?katsucats said: A superintelligent computer/AI would be a candidate. What I'm saying is that if we have a robot that has intelligence/awareness equal to human beings, but that cannot actually suffer, I think most people would agree it's absurd to say you could act immorally towards it.It's absurd being a thing that has no "well-being" has no "being", and is not an agent. So basically, you're challenging someone to do something to something that is not itself, which is self-contradictory. Solipsistic said: lol No. You seem to think you deserve your podium on MAL. I don't think you realize the difference between correlation and causation, between inductive and deductive arguments, given the number of times you've repeated arguments with underlie your misunderstanding of them, despite the terms being pointed out. But that is that and this is this.katsucats said: Dude, can you give me some credit already? You think I don't realize this, or know what the difference is between correlation/causation? I already have admitted before that moral skep is true and you can't actually derive ethics from pure reason. At some point, you need axioms, which come from things like intuition and consensus. You're mistaking correlation and cause. Even if it were so that every ethical assertion in the world agrees to the idea that one does not harm beings capable of suffering, it does not mean that it would be wrong because it is wrong to harm beings capable of suffering. Axioms are axioms in philosophy when they must be accepted true. You do not just arbitrarily decide that something is to be presumed as an axiom just because you notice a correlation. If everyone in the world had the consensus that the world is flat, that the world is flat should not be an axiom. It would be treated as such, but people (like me) would be free to criticize it without logical (or empirical) contradiction. Solipsistic said: Then I'm sure you'd also agree that people who are depressed, or insecure, have higher life priority than people who have a thick skin, such that it is more wrong to insult an insecure man than it is to insult a well-grounded man. Likewise, it would be less wrong to kill someone in their sleep (assuming they cannot perceive it) than punch them in the face when they're awake.katsucats said: If we consider those cases in a vacuum, yes. Obviously you're ignoring things that factor into a real ethical calculation like the suffering of the dog's owner, or the families/society of the 9 humans killed, etc., but I'm sure you're aware of that. Suppose there was a being highly sensitive to suffering. For the sake of expedience, we'll call them "women". These creatures, women, feel 10 times the pain when you call them fat than cutting off all 4 legs of a puppy. Therefore, according to your theory, we should cut off all 4 legs of 9 puppies before we call a woman fat, if indeed they feel that much pain from it. Suppose, then, that there is an alien species, Martians, that feel 10 times the pain when it is killed than we do. Therefore, we should allow them to kill 9 of us before we entertain the thought of killing one of them. |
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Daconator said: Are you being serious with this painfully relativistic post? If it were true that animals suffered immensely from being killed and eaten, are you actually saying that that wouldn't change the discussion at all? Once we agree on some objective standard (i.e. axiom), we have a reference point for showing which side is "wiser" than the other.The ethics of animal eating is always an insipid discussion. Logically and emotionally both sides are reasonable. No side is wiser than the other in the same way the right arm is not better or worse depending insofar the person is left or right-handed. |
| Everything that's not your race is accepted, from my perspective. |
zoroppMay 3, 2015 2:05 PM
Olwen said: Math can be conceived physically, but it does not require it. We can define the rules to a game, Chess, which is completely arbitrary. And then we can picture those rules in writing, which involve observation.We apply the ideas derived from math to some effect in the physical world, we don't conceive of math in terms of anything physical (it is possible to derive all geometric proofs without actual measurement of anything). I'll clarify that ethics are prescriptive and involve action. It would be absurd to intuit anything about the wrongness of murder if not for the undesirable empirical effects of it. Suppose in an alternate universe where stabbing someone in the heart causes them immense pleasure, after which causes no lasting effect. Then stabbing someone in the heart would not be considered morally wrong. On the other hand, mathematics are subject only to other institutions like language, and the only thing that would change in this alternate universe are the mathematical constants (e.g. speed of light), which isn't math but an input (but if you'd like to argue that that small portion of math is empirical, I don't care enough to disagree). We do conceive of other instances of math as something physical, though. When I imagine 1+1=2, I think of two rocks moving together to become.. well, two. When I think of Peano's second axiom, I think of 3 rocks, and adding one to get 4 rocks. So parts of math can be conceived physically. If you'd like to argue, though, that it is possible to derive ethical intuitions without any regards to empirical consequences, then I feel that's solipsistic and I cannot envision how that's possible. It would be like the psychic ability to guess pictures blindfolded. Olwen said: Of course observation is not the full story of ethics. It is also not the full story in physics or any other science. In sciences, you make a hypothesis based on observation, do further experiments, and derive generalized laws to further understanding. If we merely stopped at observation, we would learn nothing besides the occurrence of a particular instance.It would be absurd to intuit anything about the wrongness of murder if not for the undesirable empirical effects of it. It may sound absurd to you, but on Kant's view of ethics, this is not the full story. Mere empirical effects are NOT enough to establish that something is wrong. On Kant's view, you have a duty to protect your family, and murdering someone to fulfill that duty would actually be moral. On the other hand, if you don't have such a duty and you do it just for fun, then that would be immoral.Two identical actions, two completely different answers, meaning that you are wrong about ethics being completely reliant on undesirable empirical effects. Kant's view that murdering someone versus protecting one's family is grounded in empirical effects: the consequence of the well-being of one's family, and the well-being of the assailant. All this demonstrates is nuance with respect to the factors. Much in the same sense that plants do better with sunlight, but only when it's also given the right amount of carbon dioxide. We could say that sunlight is good for the plant, but we shouldn't give plants sunlight if it doesn't have enough carbon dioxide. Nuance does not make this somehow unempirical. Olwen said: Because the only way in which we could know anything about the empirical world is through observation. You cannot logically derive a tree without having observed it.But I think the biggest problem with your argument is this: why is it relevant if we don't conceive of math as something physical? Why does that mean ethics can't be axiomatized? It just doesn't follow. Even if you have found the difference, even if I grant that argument to you, it just doesn't follow that ethics can't be axiomatized. I don't see why it's even relevant. The burden of proof is on you: you have to demonstrate why ethics can't be axiomatized BECAUSE of this fact. |
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
| It's not so much the eating of animals as the treatment of animals for me |
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unethical plants. |
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katsucats said: Uhh, the hypothetical robot is being stipulated as such. It is incapable of anguish. It might just be self-aware in the sense that it can monitor its own state and inner workings, but that doesn't mean it has any kind of self-preservation instinct.How can a self-aware robot not feel anguish when you kill it? katsucats said: There are 2 possible models that could follow from my earlier pain-scale point, and I have not necessarily committed to either one: 1) avoidance of suffering is paramount, 2) avoidance of suffering has to be weighed against acquisition of pleasure/well-being. In the 1st case, I would have to concede that, if you were in a TOTAL vacuum, where the asleep's death would have no effect whatsoever on you or any other being (besides the asleep), then yes, it's permissible to kill them painlessly. In the 2nd case, no, because you're also depriving them of the opportunity to have positive experiences that they can only get while alive.Is it moral to kill someone in their sleep? katsucats said: Go read my response in Auto's thread, so you can stop spewing that inductive/deductive idiocy already.lol No. You seem to think you deserve your podium on MAL. I don't think you realize the difference between correlation and causation, between inductive and deductive arguments, given the number of times you've repeated arguments with underlie your misunderstanding of them, despite the terms being pointed out. But that is that and this is this. katsucats said: If only your strawman had a brain, katsu. Consensus (or something similar) is necessary, not sufficient, for an axiom. Also, in the case of the flat earth, that would be empirically false with respect to other prior axioms we already adhere to (e.g. "our senses are generally accurate"). From that axiom it follows logically that the earth is not flat, because we could walk/fly around it and see there's no edge.Axioms are axioms in philosophy when they must be accepted true. You do not just arbitrarily decide that something is to be presumed as an axiom just because you notice a correlation. If everyone in the world had the consensus that the world is flat, that the world is flat should not be an axiom. It would be treated as such, but people (like me) would be free to criticize it without logical (or empirical) contradiction. Tell me, how should we come to our axioms, then? Or should we remain edgy skeptics with no way to condemn wanton torture? katsucats said: Yes, I would agree with those, again ONLY IF we assume that there are no larger repercussions/societal implications for doing so/implementing that behavior on a large scale. (And to the sleep-murder case specifically, see my point a few paragraphs above.)Then I'm sure you'd also agree that people who are depressed, or insecure, have higher life priority than people who have a thick skin, such that it is more wrong to insult an insecure man than it is to insult a well-grounded man. Likewise, it would be less wrong to kill someone in their sleep (assuming they cannot perceive it) than punch them in the face when they're awake. |
| Eating meat isn't the problem it's just we eat too much. It would be sustainable if people ate meat once a week or something but at current rate of demand the supply keeps increasing. |
 Anime is good, fucking deal with it. |
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