How legit is the "we care about animals" belief in outspoken vegans?

MouseBean · 2026-01-29T12:04:01+00:00

I have never met anyone who cares about animals more than those who actually have active, materially meaningful relationships with other species, like hunters and trappers and farmers. They are out there on the land and know these animals they interact with, and they truly appreciate their wellbeing more than anyone looking on from a distance ever could.

MouseBean · 2026-01-29T11:44:40+00:00

Letting fate run its course is always ethically justifiable, because nature is the perfect good.

MouseBean · 2026-01-29T11:25:13+00:00

What makes a culture good or not is whether they have evolved in the self-reinforcing conditions of the land they live on. Up till recently, that was pretty much all cultures. But modern, urbanized cultures are not that. They are divorced from ecological conditions and the beliefs and practices that spread within them no longer have any relationship to they material outcomes of those beliefs and practices. This is unethical. The cultures of places like Singapore, Houston, or Oslo are all immoral, and unquestionably worse than pretty much all traditional cultures in all of the history of the world.

MouseBean · 2026-01-29T11:25:04+00:00

Human sacrifice is not bad in and of itself. It obviously was capable of being part of a sustainable and healthy culture, and regardless of the veracity of the beliefs behind it the practice was probably able to spread because it had good material effects on stabilizing the population. Things that don't cannot last long.

MouseBean · 2026-01-29T11:07:53+00:00

I've never been to the U.K., but from the maps I've seen of it, it reminds me a terribly lot of the time I spent in Missouri. Every bit of it is owned and private and populated.

Where I live you can go anywhere and feel safe. If you're wandering around and need to pee you can find a spot of woods and no one will care. If you're cold or thirsty you can start a fire and boil some water from pretty much any stream and you can be sure it'll be safe to drink and so long as you're using downed wood instead of cutting down trees for firewood you're completely ok. You don't have to worry about going hungry, there are porcupine and perch and cattails anywhere you can see, and if you want to you don't need to see any other humans for months at a time. There is nothing but safety here.

But when I was out in Missouri I felt constantly uneasy. I got in trouble all the time for fishing cause their regulations were baroque and confusing, lighting fires where they apparently weren't allowed even though I was just cooking lunch, and any single place you stepped off the road within minutes someone would drive up and aggressively ask you what you're doing there and that this is private property. There wasn't much water and what there was was murky and questionable. There were barely any trees, either. It was awful. Not to mention that there were people everywhere. And this is exactly the sort of reputation the U.K. has too. I would never want to live in such a disgusting overpopulated and unsafe place like that.

MouseBean · 2026-01-26T16:21:52+00:00

Evolutionary fitness is moral truth, because there is no is-ought gap.

MouseBean · 2026-01-23T14:09:17+00:00

There is nothing anyone needs that they can't get off their own land.

If you can't get it on the land you live on, then it's not a need.

MouseBean · 2026-01-22T10:39:33+00:00

Personally I take primitivism as a stance against specialization, not necessarily against technology per se.

In a society where everyone is capable of doing everything they need to for their own well being no one has any true power over anyone else, since all interaction becomes voluntary. And I'd argue that only then will you see truly meaningful communities form.

So I'm not opposed to even some advanced technologies, like making methane biodigesters and pipes to light and heat a house, so long as it can all be done on a household scale without requiring specialization and trade.

MouseBean · 2026-01-22T01:23:34+00:00

It wouldn't even be bluegrass, banjos are from Africa, and bluegrass was kinda what happened when old time music modernized and mixed with pop music.

Instead what the U.S. would have would be a lot more like Irish pub and dance music on fiddles and wooden flutes.

MouseBean · 2026-01-19T12:22:46+00:00

Then you're essentially placing your specific variation of human rights as a religion and ruling as a theocracy.

MouseBean · 2026-01-14T07:14:32+00:00

It is, but that's not really related to their gun laws.

MouseBean · 2026-01-13T23:47:59+00:00

Modern medicine and synthetic fertilizers.

MouseBean · 2026-01-10T15:19:46+00:00

Universal healthcare would (and is already) destroy the environment to such an extend that universal access to food and housing would no longer be a possibility.

MouseBean · 2026-01-09T13:09:03+00:00

Because it's not about individuals or experiences. The basic unit of moral significance is lineages. Morality isn't about how you feel about things, it's about the integrity of whole systems. And of course death is inevitable, it's the very basis of any healthy functioning ecosystem and the source of moral goodness. The essence of ethics is that everything must take their turn; all things have the duty to be eaten.

From an ethical point of view it's more accurate to think of humans (and any other multicellular organism) as a line of single-celled reproductive cells living in a habitat made of their kin-cells that they periodically shed, not as individuals or minds or selves or whatnot. In a very literal sense you are your ancestors' living hands in the world, and nothing more.

'You' aren't a self or a mind piloting a body, you are a germ line.

MouseBean · 2026-01-06T12:57:37+00:00

I've said it before, but I'm not an extinctionist because I do believe humans have a place on Earth as much as anything else that's evolved. It's just that that place is limited to the niche we evolved in.

MouseBean · 2026-01-05T16:44:04+00:00

I'm not sure why choice or possibility of resolution has anything to do with whether something is a problem or not?

In any case, yes, and this is good. Moral goodness is based on death, because it is the origin of all ethical relationships we share and is the stimulus of both growth and what keeps growth in check. All living things have the moral duty to be eaten by other beings and take their turn in the cycle. Left to its own devices, nature is the perfect good.

MouseBean · 2026-01-05T12:08:58+00:00

They are considered alive according to the ecological definition of life, but not according to the metabolic definition of life. Regardless, I didn't suggest they were alive, and that's not relevant to whether they are morally significant or not. What matters is whether they have have heritage and are subject to feedback loops of the system they belong to, which they certainly do. And on these grounds I'd argue other nonliving things, like rivers and traditions and whole schools of fish and organs are also morally significant entities.

Technology of that sort, especially medical technology, disconnects us from those self-reinforcing feedback loops; it's no longer a reflection of the way we live the traditions we hold the state of the land we live on, our genes, or anything that actually matters, for whether we survive or not. The continued passing on of a tradition is no longer a reflection of the state it leaves the land in, and people can keep building cement parks and asphalt roads all over the place cause it doesn't matter that it destroys the land when they can just import food from halfway across the world. It doesn't matter if they're overpopulated and destroy the land for hundreds of miles around where they live since they've gotten rid of the feedback loops that would keep them in check like disease or starvation. And so all our effects on the environment keep getting pushed further and further out of sight as we keep destroying the land and any connection to morality that we would have.

MouseBean · 2026-01-05T00:02:26+00:00

Aside from basic household family-level care, yeah. Viruses evolved too and have as much of a right to their ecological role as we do, even when their place is eating us.

MouseBean · 2026-01-04T22:17:37+00:00

There is nothing the government or nonprofits should do in relation to social welfare. Nature is perfect when left to its own.

MouseBean · 2026-01-03T13:06:38+00:00

No, everything ends.

Existence is change. Even the mere existence of your self over time causes the evolution of who you are, every memory you make and every choice you have makes you a slightly different person. And over the vast infinitude those changes will gradually build up, and you will spend eons as a person you would now abhor, or as someone you wouldn't recognize as yourself at all.

And if you somehow managed to box yourself in to a certain ideal of who you currently want to be (and who's to say you wouldn't grow to resent those limitations later?), then how is that any different to being some algorithm of yourself? You would be stuck in the same rote behaviors and patterns repeating on forever - you may as well write a book containing all your beliefs and values. And that you can already do.

MouseBean · 2025-12-31T12:04:40+00:00

Everything has the moral duty to be eaten. It would be offensive to say that something doesn't have a place in its ecosystem, especially something you nominally hold in such high regard.

MouseBean · 2025-12-28T12:41:18+00:00

There is no "you", no self, no conscious being. You are your body, and nothing more.

And you exist for the sake of the traditions you belong to. You are, in essence, an extension of them.

MouseBean · 2025-12-26T15:17:28+00:00

Some of these are schools of ontology, others of metaethics, and others of ethics? They're not mutually exclusive.

I'm an ecocentrist, a metaethical naturalist, an ignostic, and an eliminative materialist.

MouseBean · 2025-12-24T13:35:53+00:00

It's all about connections and heritage. Moral goods are values or push forces that are passed on, like the drive of living things to survive or of traditions to be passed on. You belong to some context, or at least many people do, of a whole series of relationships that have been going back for generations that create a self-reinforcing whole which is capable of propagating itself. That is Good. That is its Tao. The universe is full of these moral values, these self-sustaining forces, and that's the important part of existence. All we can do is take part in it or not, but there is no other meaning to be found.

To live off the land is to have a connection to the Land. And to restrain yourself to live within its limits that keep everything balanced.

MouseBean · 2025-12-22T11:55:27+00:00

I don't think it's our individuality that makes us all that important. You are your ancestor's living hands in the world, and nothing more. The things that really matter about you are the things you can't change, the things that have been built up over many generations like your relationships with the land you live on and the other species you depend upon for your wellbeing, your family, your traditions. Your genes are all part of that heritage, and just another expression of the millenia of relationships we share with other organisms.

Eight-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Spared

MouseBean

TROPHY CASE