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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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I don't think you need full moral equivalence for vegan arguments to work. You just need a sufficient ratio. Even of chickens have only 1% of the moral value of humans the suffering we inflict upon them in factory farms is a great evil. On the other hand if chickens have 10^-100 times the moral value of humans its trivial. Unfortunately we are far from the point where we can actually compute such a ratio with any authority (though many have tried) so often the arguments fall back to intuition and emotion.

I reject even putting it on the same scale. It implies what you then go on to exploit, that they are at all fungible - this would require some kind of argumentation.

Even of chickens have only 1% of the moral value of humans

In practice, it's not even close to this.

Anyone who would direct a trolley problem trolley at one person to save 100 chickens is someone I would consider an aberrant moral monster.

Personally, I would be extremely suspicious of anyone who would save ANY number of chickens over a single human. But anyone who puts the number at anything less than 100,000 is actually mind-boggling to me.

You don’t have to go even that far. Eating a lot of meat is a luxury (I think some small amount is necessary for health) so given that the choice is wants vs morals, there’s no good moral reason to choose to eat large portions of meat.

I don’t think that requires the trolley directed at humans, and I wouldn’t do that.

There is. The moral reason is that I want to, and anything I want to do is more moral than anything I don't. I have an overwhelming moral responsibility to myself to maximise the enjoyment of the single, limited lifespan I have. A life un-lived is the most immoral thing imaginable; it is a waste of the single most precious gift any of us can ever receive.

Maybe I’m not understanding you but I’m not sure how not having meat as the main dish of your meal is that much of a diminished enjoyment. Most of the time, for me, I don’t miss it. I don’t say no entirely to meat, I’m just not making it the star of the meal.

I don't think there's a valuable moral lesson to be learned from me sending a trolley at 7.888 billion humans to divert it away from my children.

In a society where everyone was raised from birth to be vegan it’d be equally obvious a chicken is worth more than 0.1% of a human and anyone who said otherwise would be considered morally abhorrent.

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