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I'm not sure veganism or moral vegetarianism is subject to rational argument; it's a matter of axioms. If you don't give a shit about chicken and cow deaths, no one is going to argue you into doing so. And if you do, nobody's going to argue you into meat-eating.
Anti-car people pop up often enough. There are arguments, they don't really convince anyone, but that's not unusual. Personally I think you've inadvertently provided one of your own arguments against the anti-car people:
Most "axioms" are not axioms at all. A chicken with human-level intelligence and values would have moral worth, so the true axiom is something like "intelligence grants moral worth." Starting from that axiom one could argue that chickens have some intelligence and thus some non-zero moral worth.
I disagree; a theoretically intelligent chicken would not have moral worth because it is not a human, and ‘humans have sufficiently more moral worth than animals to justify eating them’ is a statement I consider a postulate. It doesn’t matter if whales are as smart as people the japs still have the right to eat them, and it doesn’t matter if chickens are as smart as chickens or as smart as people, I will still fry and eat them.
If chickens were as smart as people there would be absolutely no justification to fry and eat them, if only because their equal intelligence implies there will probably be a time in the future when the tables are turned on who has power and you absolutely wouldn't want the chickens to start eating humans.
Of course intelligence gives rise to moral worth, and yes I will bite the bullet and freely say that some people are worth more morally than others (this doesn't mean that intelligence is the only thing behind moral worth, but it absolutely is one of them).
Wouldn’t have expected you of all people to bite the bullet and say whites can be presumed to be morally worth 25% more than Indian people, but that’s what ‘some people are worth more than others’ means when intelligence gives rise to moral worth.
Sure, I'll happily say that the average white gets more moral points than the average Indian on the intelligence portion of what determines moral worth, but there are other things which also contribute to moral worth.
Plus India is very very divided along caste lines, there has been minimal interbreeding between the high and the low over the last few thousand of years, there are identifiable genetic subgroups where the average intelligence is higher than that of white people as a whole.
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In one factor. He said there are others, potentially many others. If you score 25% less than me on an assignment worth 1% of our final grade, that might not even make a perceptible difference in the end.
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It doesn't, though. If that's your argument, then you have to explain why unintelligent humans have any moral worth. Profoundly retarded people are arguably less intelligent than squid, which at least have the ability to survive on their own , but I don't think anyone would argue that they have the same moral worth.
I would. I think all such people should be euthanized. They aren't really people. They're worthless sacks of flesh that just happen to have human DNA
I wouldn't go that far. Those people are still human, with a human soul. It is a sin to kill another human, regardless of how stupid they may be. You can make arguments about withdrawing intensive care if they are a vegetable who can't survive without it, but killing extremely stupid people who are no danger to anybody else when you can keep them alive at minimal cost kills a part of us as well along with it.
Even if religion isn't true, a society where everyone believes they will be questioned by God for their sins on the day of Judgement is better than one where nobody believes this. This is yet another basic "moral fact" that has been lost by the modern west when it threw away the trappings of religion.
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We literally kill some brain dead people. On the limit, perfectly unintelligent (not)people have no moral worth.
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He gets only the moral benefit of avoiding needless suffering, which is a lower bar of morality, applicable to animals. And he probably has people who care about him, like family, or catholics, so his value by proxy cannot be ignored by other humans.
Would you say that an intelligent alien has less moral worth than a retarded human? On what basis, genetic kindred? The alien can understand cooperation and retaliation, while the retard is morally incompetent and therefore cannot be trusted to cooperate. His own behaviour is random, morally meaningless, so our behaviour towards him loses moral meaning too. It is futile to wait for a dangerous wild animal to ‘defect’ before killing him, as we would if he were intelligent.
Completely agree with this.
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Because multiple things grant rise to moral worth as I said in my post not just intelligence. You could have a model of the form: moral_worth = b_1*intelligence+b_2*is_human + ... + error where the ... includes other things that dictate moral worth where b_2 > 0. In this case profoundly stupid humans have a 1 for is_human and so get some moral worth from just that, while profoundly stupid chickens have a 0 for is_human so have less moral worth (according to a human, a chicken may well want to reverse things).
I can well assume that an equally intelligent human has more moral worth to an equally intelligent chicken, this is no different from the belief that an American has more moral worth than an otherwise equivalent Egyptian that so many people seem to hold without it affecting them very much at all. That doesn't mean a highly intelligent chicken has so low moral worth it's fine to eat it.
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I am prepared to say that there is an IQ/functionality threshold below which a biologically-human entity could have scarcely more moral value than a squid.
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Yes but veganism can also be bad outside of the direct moral issue. The refusal to care about second order effects and the broader consequences of an ideology over the more direct ethical rights issue is a general weakness of left wing ideology that claims it advocates for the rights of a certain group. Which rights can also undermine the rights of others. Maybe not as much tactically, but when it comes to getting desirable results for humanity as a whole it does matter. Tactically, unfortunately many people are susceptible to myopic vision and getting bullied by this kind of moralism. I am not against moralism myself, but I oppose myopic moralism.
The onus should be on vegans to convince us that humanity adopting veganism is realistic, workable and good. Not only as an end point but also that the process will be successful and not more akin to say the communist project of ending "exploitation of workers" and promoting a "classless society".
It is hard for me to oppose some weaker suggestions like reducing animal cruelty in factory farming, but I am much more suspicious of more ambitious left wing movements in general, including veganism in particular.
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