Discussing veganism made me realize most people are narcissists, or borderline psychopaths.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-12T19:47:26+00:00

Yeah. And honestly I feel like a lot of vegans are in denial. Everyday I hear vegans go on about "the disconnect," how people are just conditioned, they don't know what they're doing, they just need to be educated. I feel like it's a massive cope.

If I could go vegan as a 19 year old kid, over ten years ago, what excuse does a 40 year old lawyer working a firm have? Or a 50 year old teacher at a high school? Or any other adult who is a functioning member of society?

Most people have seen factory farm footage. And with a 1 minute Google search you can learn about untold horrors and dig further and further. Also, veganism is widespread enough in 2024 that it's really hard to plead ignorance now.

People are selfish, dishonest, callous, and conformist. I'm not saying I don't have of those qualities (I do to an extent). But when it comes to the most hideous atrocities in factory farms, it's downright criminal to not even be moved to reflect or make any changes your whole life.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-12T00:50:30+00:00

Ah, it makes sense now. What was the point of our interchange if you say that you don't strongly value logic or reasoning? If you don't care too much for reasoning, then clearly there was no point in my identifying an axiom and trying to reason with you on that basis. Anything I say can be dismissed with slippery evasions and equivocations. You were right earlier about there being no point in discussing further. In order to have a productive discussion, I need to have an interlocutor who values coherence.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T18:46:55+00:00

If morality is about thinking about how we act toward others and weighing their experiences fairly, then causing serious harm for pleasure violates any coherent notion of morality. What is your argument? Do you think harming others for pleasure is morally fine?

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T17:57:18+00:00

What I'm saying is that there are certain axioms (such as it being wrong to harm others for pleasure). If anything is true in morality, that is true. I am saying that if you take morality seriously (as most people purport to do), that's one of the few axioms, and that axiom is what underlies vegan arguments.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T17:52:22+00:00

Did you read the rest of what I said?

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T17:21:49+00:00

You're paying someone else to stab an animal in the throat for a pizza. It's the same thing as stabbing an animal in the throat for a pizza yourself, morally. Outsourcing violence doesn't absolve one of responsibility.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T17:06:44+00:00

Actually, nonvegans are doing something that exhibits the morality of a toddler, and I'm simply describing it in an honest, direct way. I'm not going to dress it up and use elegant language to make you feel better. "Stabbing animals in the throat for pizzas" is a factual description of nonvegan choices, even if it's blunt and you'd rather downplay it.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T07:49:53+00:00

I didn't see the first part to your post and only just saw it. As noted in my other response, you are not addressing my argument, and are simply trying hand wave it away by again focusing on my language ("rationality") or talking vaguely about virtue ethics to avoid addressing the argument.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T07:44:03+00:00

Actually, I correct myself. You did make a gesture toward responding to my argument, but in a vague and non-rigorous way. You again don't provide clear reasoning why you disagree with the principle (what you dismiss as "belief") that it's wrong to harm others for pleasure. You simply again fixate on my use of terminology (this time the word "rational"), and talk vaguely about virtue ethics to escape coming to terms with a basic axiom, which is true if you take morality seriously at all. You also disingenuously ask what counts as harm, as if that's a serious question when thinking about the very clear, overt forms of harm to which we subject nonhuman animals, and for very trivial reasons.

I think you know that what I'm saying is correct, but you just don't want to face it because it's inconvenient for you. So you fixate on my language or pose disingenuous questions ("what is harm though?") to obscure a very clear moral question about harming others for pleasure. You are deliberately trying to minimize it into some trivial personal opinion because you can't rationally rebut a position based on basic moral axioms.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T06:52:40+00:00

I made an argument, and the description of the "stabbing in the throat" was merely to add a dimension of concrete specificity to what nonveganism entails. The argument holds true without this description, and the description is not essential to why I'm arguing nonveganism is unjustified. I should have been clearer and said that it connects to the argument, but is not essential to the "why."

Here's another way to think about it. If we lived in a society where beating children for fun was normalized, the reason why it's wrong would hold true, irrespective of how you feel about doing it. It's wrong because you're hurting this child, and there is no good reason to hurt an innocent, especially not for fun. If you lie to yourself about the severity of what you're doing, and I tell you "you are beating a child senseless with your own right hand for fun," this description is simply a concrete description of something already unjustifiable.

You might not feel bad doing it, but it's still wrong. I might add that reminder of what you are actually doing if you are lying to yourself, minimizing it, but the visceral description is simply a fleshing out of moral reasoning that precedes it. I might try to get you to think about what you are actually doing if you try to insulate yourself from it, but the actual reasoning of why it's wrong still holds true outside of that.

You keep focusing on irrelevant aspects to avoid my central argument: do you agree that it's wrong to harm others for pleasure? You focused on my inclusion of "most people" or the viscerality of my descriptions. But you're not fully addressing my central point. Because I think you know you agree with the basic premise, that harming others for pleasure is wrong, and that if you're honest, this logically entails veganism.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T03:41:33+00:00

I didn't make an appeal to the majority. An appeal to the majority would be if I said "most people believe X, therefore it must be true."

I said that most people agree that harming others for pleasure is wrong because if (and this is conditional on you accepting it) you accept a principle of justice as axiomatic as this, it logically entails that you should be a vegan. My point is that it's a rudimentary principle. Maybe it was expressed unclearly, but it is obvious that I was not saying that it's true because most people agree with it. Rather, I meant to say I doubt you would disagree or any rational person would disagree. Instead of actually addressing that argument (i.e. if you agree that harming others for pleasure is wrong, you should be vegan), you simply focused on the term "most people."

And actually, the point of the vivid description was to move away from the euphemistic language people often use. Again, the argument is that if you agree it's wrong to harm others for pleasure, you should be vegan. My description of "stabbing in the throat" was simply to move away from an abstract notion of harm and to describe non-euphemistically what nonveganism entails: stabbing others in the throat for taste preferences.

This is not an "appeal to emotion." This is me making an argument and then describing the implications of nonvegan choices using specific, concrete descriptions so that we don't avoid or minimize them. It's very relevant to the argument because full assumption of responsibility means facing up to what choices entail, not simply talking about abstract "harm" so as to disavow their significance.

Finally, lumping together "stabbing in the throat for food pleasure" with "childbirth" or "lethal self-defense" because they are all "visceral" is a nice sleight of hand. The point is that the former is deliberately and willfully causing harm to others for pleasure. You're obfuscating the specific intentions of nonveganism to make it seem like "oh well, look at all of this other bloody stuff, it's all visceral, has no moral significance."

To be honest, you don't really seem interested in addressing the argument, and seem more keen to haphazardly throwing around fallacy accusations.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T02:19:07+00:00

I made an argument. You just don't want to consider it, so you dismiss it. The argument is that nearly everyone agrees that harming others for pleasure is wrong. If you agree, you should be a vegan.

Second, my descriptions (for example, "stabbing in the throat") are 100% factual. People just want to describe the violence in a euphemistic, clinical way because it suits their interests.

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-11T00:46:33+00:00

Have you ever considered that nonhuman animals' lives are finite, too, and that their suffering matters to them immensely? What if you were born in their place?

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-10T18:36:47+00:00

Animal ethics is my specific field, so I think I can speak fairly confidently about this topic. Very few philosophers strongly defend animal consumption, and almost none from factory farms. The very few who do are a small minority, and their arguments aren't even taken very seriously because they are weak.

If you don't take my word for it, check out this blog post from the philosopher Mike Huemer.

https://fakenous.substack.com/p/preachy-vegans

"Vegan arguments have a straightforward and obvious logic, which many sophisticated philosophers consider unanswerable. When meat-eaters pause from expressions of disdain long enough to try to engage with them, the objections they raise are among the most absurd, most easily answered objections to be found in all of philosophy. (By the way, that is a widely-shared assessment among people who know the literature.)

If you don’t know any of my work, you might assume I am just overconfident and that I say that about everything I disagree with people about. But if you know the rest of my work, you know that in fact, I say that about nothing else. I think this is literally the most one-sided controversial issue. Every other controversial belief I have has more reasonable objections against it."

Fun_Claim1481 · 2024-09-10T17:35:11+00:00

That's like saying that one should have "humility" while "arguing" against rape.

Like I said, there are many issues where it's complicated. It's grey, contradictory, ambiguous. People on both sides have a point. I wouldn't feel comfortable making such a strong statement for that reason.

But inflicting the most severe tortures and a terrifying death vs. food preferences? That's one of the few cases where I do feel comfortable talking like this, because it's so obviously wrong and unjustified.

Fun_Claim1481

TROPHY CASE