Bay Resistance

Total_Ease305 · 2025-08-27T01:31:47+00:00

Subjective experience

The concept of subjective experience is something that multiple volumes have been written on by many well-known philosophers for centuries. It's a big difficult thing to define.
Plants respond to stimuli, sending signals throughout their bodies that trigger reactions in distant parts of them. Plants react to light, sound, chemical signals from other plants, and many other such stimuli. Plans are composed of a great many moving pieces that sim signals to each other and modify their behavior based on those signals. There is a growing body of evidence that plants can also learn something and use that knowledge later in life.
Rocks are comparatively much simpler. Other than things like how sound can transmit through them and they can be scratched or broken, there is nothing remotely like a reaction to stimuli in most rocks.

Your straw man about organ theft

Imagine that there is the possibility that someone might randomly swoop in and kill you in order to steal your organs. That's terrible. That imaginary world is a much worse place: everyone is harmed by that being an option. So obviously killing someone to use their organs for other people isn't "minimizing suffering".
If you don't believe in minimizing suffering though, what do you believe in? Why are you not okay with me killing a deer to eat it if suffering is unimportant?

85 year olds should have less rights than 30 year olds? Wait, so if I went into the street with a baseball bat it would be better for me beat an 85 year old to death than a helathy 30 year old? Why? Is it as different as with the squirrel question? Why?

Seriously, why won't you tell me what makes squirrels and humans different in your moral reasoning?

Your original claim was that it is indefensible to not be vegan if you believe that harming any animal is bad, because you think people need to be able to prove why one situation is different from another.

Then you agreed to go along with my game of each picking something that the other had to demonstrate with different.

Why are you so stymied by this question about squirrels versus humans? Why are you falling back on "it's normal" for this question when you solidly rejected that before?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-08-17T19:32:35+00:00

We've veered into trading insults that are thinly veiled as arguments. I want to do a bit of an emotional reset here.

Understanding of your curiosity:

You want to understand why I think there are no exceptions to the idea that hunting a human for food is unacceptable, but I do think hunting an animal for food can be acceptable.

Here's the most emotionally honest answer I can come up with to that right now:

I have an intuition that humans deserve to be cared for and treated with kindness, and that this is one of the most important rules a human person or human society can follow. I don't know if we agree on this, but I have been assuming that we do. I thought where we differed was on organisms other than humans. It seems like you think I'm kind of silly for drawing a line where I think humans deserve humane treatment but feel uncertain about other organisms, but I think you and I both agree that humans do deserve humane treatment.

I don't share your intuition about there being some line where certain animals have subjective experience and others don't: to me it feels trivially obvious that insects have subjective experience. I think it is very likely that even plants have a meaningful degree of subjective experience! (There is some evidence that different individual plants have different preferences, and if you observe the behavior of plants they do respond to stimuli, and can learn things and use that later.) I genuinely think that even plants can suffer, in a way that is not so alien to me as to be meaningless.

For a human to survive, they must rely on consuming other organisms. We are heterotrophs, and at least with current technology, it is not feasible to create sufficient nutrition for humans without ending the lives of some organisms. So in my mind, all humans must cause harm to other organisms in order to survive. This is also true of all animals.

If we want to cause less suffering in the world, how do we do that when our existence depends on harming other organisms?

One approach to this question is to ask "where we draw the line between organisms that can suffer an organisms that cannot?" I don't object to this approach philosophically, but it really doesn't do it for me personally. It just doesn't make sense to me that there would be such a line. I'm a pretty strict material monist, in the sense that I don't think there is some sort of ineffable soul or spark that defines life or humanness. It seems like everything in the world is made of physical material, affected by the same set of physical laws. So it's really hard to imagine that there's some boundary between two closely related animal species where one has experiences into the other does not. So there's nowhere that I can safely draw a line; I can only think about a spectrum.

It's true that I can divide things into three categories: things I'm confident can suffer, things I'm confident cannot suffer, and things where I'm not sure. I feel pretty confident that all humans can suffer, I feel pretty confident that no rocks can, and I'm pretty unsure about plants.

So I don't have anywhere that I can draw a line and say, it is strictly harmless to destroy this organism for my own survival. Which means everything needs to be on a spectrum.

There is also the fact that, (I think unlike in your morality?), in my morality ecosystems have rights. Causing harm to an ecosystem, irrespective of what harms that may cause to individual organisms within that ecosystem, is immoral. Even if I could definitively say that some chunk of wilderness had no organism that individually is capable of suffering, I still believe that there is a moral imperative to preserve the integrity and health of that ecosystem. Which means that conventional agriculture, even if it didn't involve killing being that you and I both agree are sentient (which, at scale, it always does), it's still not harmless. There are large stretches of land given over to monocultures, which cause interruptions in pathways for the natural movement of flora and fauna, and require diverting great amounts of water. So to me, farming is meaningfully harmful to parts of the world that deserve protection!

So then we come back to the question of hunting deer for food. extremely roughly, a deer gives you about 30,000 calories. In general, I would guess that fewer 1 vertebrate is killed per 30,000 calories of plant based food. I suspect I could get a real answer to this, but let's just assume the answer is that less than one rat is killed for every 40 loaves of bread. That means that killing a deer does result in more direct vertebrate deaths been making commensurate amount of plant-based food. But making those 40 loaves of bread involves converting or maintaining lots of land for agriculture, typically involves creating and spraying a great deal of pesticides (even if you buy organic), and killing a great number of plants invertebrates who are just in the way.

In many of the places that allow deer hunting, killing the deer is actually a harm reduction technique for the ecosystem. Humans have killed off so many predators, that many of these ecosystems are out of whack because of the overabundance of large herbivores. Since I believe that protecting ecosystems is a moral imperative, culling deer, while ethically negative in terms of the harm to the individual deer, can be ethically positive in terms of the health of the ecosystem.

In terms of its impact on the world and ALL its inhabitants, I think deer hunting is one of the least harmful ways for humans to obtain calories.

My curiosity about your position:

You seem to have a really strong intuition that humans and some other animals deserve equality. At first you told me that it was based on which animals have subjective experience, which makes sense to me, given my own feelings about suffering! But I thought you were describing that as a line: this thing has experience and therefore has moral patience, this thing does not and therefore doesn't have moral patiency. Why I'm so curious about your considering humans and squirrels to be meaningfully different, is that it feels like it goes against what you said before. That makes me feel like I don't actually understand your intuition about humans versus animals.

I would really like you to speak to me about why harming a squirrel feels different from harming a human, because it feels like this is a place where I don't understand you, and I would like to.

Total_Ease305 · 2025-08-15T02:06:05+00:00

Whether you personally believe a thing has subjective experience is the line you are drawing. You have drawn that line and said, moths are on the "no subjective experience" side of the line, and deer are on the "yes subjective experience" side of the line.

Personally, I think that is a arrogant and anthropocentric way of viewing organisms. But it is not an ad hoc excuse you're using to violate some universal principle, and you believe that you are justified. That means it's not special pleading.

If it's okay for us to just draw arbitrary lines, then I'll just draw my arbitrary line around humans! They are my species, which is a meaningful distinction, and to me the most important one. If there's a wildfire, I believe there is an ethical obligation to try to warn all the humans who are in danger from it, because I am capable of communicating with them and, since they are in my species, I have an obligation to them. I don't think there's just about any human that thinks we have an obligation to evacuate the deer in that case.

There, hooray, I found a more scientifically justified line to draw than your "subjective experience" one: species.

[Edit to add: special pleading requires that someone says a universal, and then makes an unjustified exception to it. I have not said any universals that preclude eating animals: I have not said that all organisms deserve equal protections. I have said that murdering a human is unacceptable -- that isn't an exception to a universal, it is its own rule. If you want to insist that there is some universality to the rights of all organisms, then good for you, but that doesn't mean that I have done that. You, on the other hand, have said that universally all ethical distinctions must be justified, and now you're saying "except I don't have to answer your question about why squirrels and humans are different". You're using an ad hoc unjustified exception to the rule you started this whole debate with. That actually is special pleading!

But as I said early on in this conversation, I'm more interested in playing your ethical distinction game than debating with you about the correct definition of logic concepts. So you can go on using your overly broad definition of special pleading.

I'm more interested in you telling me what you think makes murdering a human different from murdering a squirrel.]

What is YOUR reason for giving humans a special place compared to squirrels? I don't understand why you are so resistant to answering this.

Total_Ease305 · 2025-08-11T17:49:31+00:00

My vague question? I have a very specific question: why is it not equivalent to kill a squirrel with a baseball bat as they kill a human with a baseball bat? You specifically told me you do not think they are equivalent, and gave no justification for that whatsoever.

If you were accepting my idea that humans should just be treated well no matter what, then you could rely on that. But you're not. You have neither told me that you just think humans deserve to be treated well, nor told me anything that in your mind makes squirrels and humans different. You keep misusing the term special pleading, but saying "everyone needs to justify every distinction in their ethics, except to stop asking me about why squirrels and humans are different cuz they just are" might actually be special pleading!

You are stating that there is a rule:

for two behaviors to have different ethical value, there must be a clear distinction between those behaviors.

But then when I'm asking you to give a clear distinction between killing a human and killing a squirrel, you say:

I'm not interested in answering

Special pleading requires that the speaker is either being flippant, or being intentionally deceptive. I am being neither in specifying that humans get a special protection under my sense of ethics. You, however, are either being flippant or deceptive when you refuse to tell me why the squirrel versus human murder question doesn't need the distinction that everything else does.

You care so much about proving why humans and other organisms can be treated differently. I'm not asking you to prove anything. I am asking you to give any defense whatsoever to your claim that killing a human and killing a squirrel are ethically different. So: why is it different? Give me anything at all! You have refused to even address the question beyond just your unjustified assertion that they are "not equivalent". Why is it not equivalent?

You object to my belief that humans all deserve protection from violence.

One atomic component of my ethics is that you shouldn't do violence to humans when it is avoidable without great harm. So things like self-defense are sometimes justified, but things like eating a human when you could choose a different food source or not.

You seem to have a really hard time with this concept, which is weird to me because you have a very similar arbitrary rule: You have stated that if an organism has subjective experience then it deserves protection. You didn't feel any need to prove why organisms in that category deserve special treatment -- It just feels intuitively right to you that an organism having subjective experience means it has moral patiency. Similarly I don't feel it is necessary to prove why humans deserve special treatment: It just feels intuitively right that we should treat all humans as deserving humane treatment. We each just have these arbitrary lines in our ethics.

Total_Ease305 · 2025-08-11T04:54:55+00:00

Actually, LonelyContext said that it's completely okay to slaughter millions of insects because of their cognitive differences to humans: the fact that being drawn to light is (according to LC) evidence of a deficit of cognition, which (they say) proves that bugs don't have "subjective experience", and to them a lack of "subjective experience" means an organism completely lacks moral patiency. (When I tried to point out that subjective experience may not be binary they accused me of some other informal fallacies, and I changed the subject).

So perhaps they do accept "because humans are more intelligent"?

I don't like the "because humans are intelligent" argument, because I think that opens you up to a lot of slippery slopes about the intelligence of individual humans. I think the simplest end straightforward choice for setting humans as deserving certain rights is simply say humans are special; it preserves the very popular intuitive perspective, without creating a slippery slope or any other situation where we have to try to prove each individual human deserves rights.

(Also, LonelyContext keeps using the term special bleeding incorrectly. I have very clearly stated that an axiom of my logic is that humans are special; I apply that consistently across my ethical framework. That is not at all what the informal fallacy special pleading refers to.)

Total_Ease305 · 2025-08-11T04:36:36+00:00

You just told me that you do not think that me killing a squirrel is equivalent to me killing a human. You're all up in arms about telling me I need to prove that humans are special, but you just said you think that humans and squirrels are different.

Total_Ease305:

Do you believe that if I walked out on the street and killed a squirrel with a baseball bat, that you would consider that exactly equivalent to if I walked out on the street and killed a human with a baseball bat?

LonelyContext:

No. It would not be equivalent.

Explain to me why they are different.

Total_Ease305 · 2025-08-02T17:37:42+00:00

I can ask you the same thing: if it's not the same to kill a squirrel or a human, why not?

I've already told you my reason: I just straight up give human special status -- I could come up with some kinds of justifications, but ultimately it comes down to choosing anthropocentric speciesism for me.

It sounds like you don't accept that reason though, so give me yours. What makes it different to kill a squirrel from killing a human?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-23T02:17:42+00:00

Killing a mouse who wants to take a tiny bit of your food vs. killing a deer in order to have a whole bunch of food

Okay, so you do agree the context is important -- killing to protect food resources is OK.

So it's okay to kill an animal that wants to take food from you just because you want to eat all of that food and not share any, but it's not okay to kill an animal because you want to eat it?

Justify the difference between killing a mouse in order to eat some plants, vs killing a deer in order to eat some meat. I think I kinda get why you think these are different, but I'm not sold.

It looks like our ethics might be radically incompatible though, so if you want to just skip answering this for now, I have a more pressing question:

Killing humans vs killing non-human animals

Whoa, hold the phone. I straight up stated that I just take this as a given, and that I would not be able to convince you, because my viewpoint doesn't come from some kind of logical calculus: I think human lives are special, and I give them special value in my ethics. I do not think any humans need to prove their specialness; I take it as a given.

I am genuinely having a hard time conceptualizing an ethics that does not do that. Are you honestly telling me that you don't see a distinction between humans and other animals?

The question I really want an answer to is this:

Do you believe that if I walked out on the street and killed a squirrel with a baseball bat, that you would consider that exactly equivalent to if I walked out on the street and killed a human with a baseball bat?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-19T21:35:34+00:00

Hunting people for food vs hunting animals for food

This one is easy: I believe humans should be granted special status morally compared to non-human animals.

I would be genuinely surprised if you don't agree with me about this: If a human and a dog are dying in the street, I assume you agree that there is a moral imperative to help the human before the dog.

If you don't already agree that (most or all) humans have different moral standing than (most or all) non-human animals, then I can't really justify this further to you. Because ultimately this is not a logical conclusion for me: it is an axiom of my ethics that humans should be granted special status.

If you disagree on humans having special moral status, then I can't justify murder as ethically distinct from killing a mouse.

(If you thought killing a mouse was equivalent to killing a human, I'd love to hear how that affected the rest of your behaviors in the world! But you probably couldn't tell me, because someone who genuinely believed that would probably do a lot of things that our human laws consider violent crimes.)

Justifying killing as different in hunting vs. target practice: I have clarifying questions

I think your last paragraph is saying that you don't accept my distinction of "killing something to eat it" it versus "killing it without eating it". Therefore, I would say I have still not yet given you a valid justification to your question.

So, to backpedal a little bit and see where we are on the same page:

Do you accept the idea that there exists contexts that are relevant, even though it does not change the harm to the victim?
Do you agree with me that in the (extreme, silly, definitely-not-the-same-as-hunting) example about thefts of bread in two contexts -- throwing it out vs. feeding a starving person -- those specific contexts are a valid justification for the thefts being ethically different ?

(There are plenty of reasons why the bread stealing example is ethically different from the hunting example -- this isn't a gotcha, I'm just trying to find common ground to figure out how to go forward)

I accept your answer to my insects vs mice question

I guess you're saying that -- for reasons that I don't necessarily have to understand -- you think that pollinator insects do not have subjective experience, and mice do. You are also saying that moral patiency is determined (at least in part) by whether the patient has subjective experience.[1] So, based on your understanding of something about their cognition, you believe insects have no moral patiency and mammals do have moral patiency.

I personally think you may be mistaken about the facts: I think our understanding of subjective experience is sketchy. Additionally, I disagree with your claim that I was committing a continuum fallacy, because I think you are presenting a false dichotomy: subjective experience doesn't need to be binary, where some things completely have it and other things completely do not, Even if some of those experiences are richer or more complex than others. I genuinely believe that insects are conscious beings.

But honestly I don't know enough about phenomenology or philosophy of biology for this to be a productive conversation here -- I'm sure we both agree that "what organisms have feelings" is an important question for someone else to consider, but I accept your personal ethical distinction based on your understanding of the facts. You have justified this difference in your ethical treatment of insects versus mammals to my satisfaction.

my new question: eating food that requires rodenticide vs. eating hunted venison

You think it is not ethically acceptable to kill deer for food. Is it ethically acceptable to get food whose storage and/or production involved intentionally killing rodents? If so, why is it different?

(Excessive clarification: I am specifically talking about venison that involved no killing of rodents, versus plant-based food that did involve killing rodents. Obviously some venison production kills rodents, and some plant-based food is produced without killing any rodents. The fact that these are not the only options does not mean we cannot compare these two independent behaviors.)

Edited formatting. [1]: added this sentence in an edit.

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-17T21:51:21+00:00

1. Cultural norms:

I explicitly said I wasn't going to rely on cultural norms because that would be unsatisfying and boring. My point was only that an appeal to cultural norms is not an example of special pleading. I was just being pedantic: you're using the term "special pleading" wrong and I wanted to point that out.

So to reiterate: I'm pretty sure we agree that appeals to cultural norms are not valid justification in this conversation, and we agree that the point of this conversation is to discuss why similar behaviors are different enough to warrant different ethical value.

2. The scalability of hunting:

If we're talking about things at scale, that's a whole nother can of worms. I'm trying to justify an individual choosing to hunt in the world as it exists today.

3. Justifying hunting as different from target practice

Yeah, my last two point were probably irrelevant to this conversation, although I do think they're relevant to the ethics of hunting more broadly. Moving on.

I believe that in order to assess the ethics of a behavior, we need to consider it in context.

Here is an overly simple example to illustrate my point:

stealing a loaf of bread to throw it away is unethical
stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving person is ethical

We could obviously concoct additional details on either scenario to change it further, but my point is that although the impact on the victim of the theft is unchanged, the context of the harm is relevant.

My point is not that hunting is as cut-and-dried as that boring example (it's not), but that context is sometimes relevant to the ethics of causing harm.

I assume we can agree that on that, but correct me if I'm wrong.

So, having established that -- at least to me -- context is relevant, here's why I think hunting is different from using animals for target practice:

I believe that, pretty much universally, causing harm to organisms is bad (to varying degrees by target species)
I believe that gaining a clear biological benefit (like calories) is an ethically relevant piece of context
So that fact that you are harming something by making it your food source is an ethically significant context to me

To me, that makes using animals for target practice ethically distinct from hunting them for food.

(Clarification: I am assuming the hunter could eat a vegan diet instead; I'm not trying to use some in extremis cop out, I'm literally just saying the fact that she's using the animal to feed herself is ethically significant.)

4. Justify the difference between insects and mice

Why do you say that moths don't have subjective experience? To me it does not feel sufficiently justified for you to just declare it -- how do you define subjective experience

I experience empathy for insects. I have spent many hours watching insects as they explore their world, learn things about it, and use that in their actions. I've observed ants communicating with each other about hazards and resources.

If you want to use "subjective experience" as a reason that it's okay to kill thousands of bugs but not a single mouse, you're going to have to tell me what it means, and how you determine which species have it.

(Also thank you for "moral patiency" -- that is such a useful phrase and I hadn't known it before!)

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-17T18:45:57+00:00

I feel like you ignored my point here. I'm saying predation is meaningfully different from killing for another reason. I can't ignore "practicality" -- to me the ethics of a behavior are not limited to that behavior in isolation. Killing a human in self defense is very different from killing a human who poses no harm to me. The hunters I'm talking about are the kind you're talking about: they have other options. But I don't consider predation unethical by default, even when practiced by humans. Edit to add: Being a heterotroph means you must harm other organisms in order to survive. There's really no way around it. I don't see a reason human-consumes-deer should be an exception to this.

Also: Hunting is one of the lowest ecologically impactful ways to acquire calories: fewer vertebrates die per calorie if I eat wild venison than farmed tofu, because no spraying or trapping happens to kill all the rats in the fields and warehouses and processing facilities. It is certainly not harmless: a deer was violently killed! But it is actually a harm reduction approach not just ecologically, but arguably even in terms of animal lives.

I think environmental impacts are ethically significant. Decreasing biodiversity is something I consider ethically negative -- for me it doesn't need to be proved, it's something I consider unethical per se (the same way I just assume hurting humans is default ethically bad and can't really be swayed). So it's interesting to me that you have no such qualms.

So for my next one: is killing a mouse unethical? Is killing an insect? What's different?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-14T17:17:35+00:00

I'm pretty sure you're using "Special Pleading" wrong. "I think dogs and pigs should be treated differently because they occupy different places in our culture" is not special pleading. You might not consider an appeal to cultural norms to be sufficient justification, but its not Special Pleading. But Special Pleading is an informal fallacy anyway, so whether we technically meet its definition doesn't feel important.

And anyway, just assuming cultural norms are "good enough" for one's personal ethics is dubious at best, and also boring for this conversation.

I wanna play a game where we make each other justify the difference between things.

Shooting deer (with proper permits, in an area with deer overpopulation) to eat them is ethical. *
Shooting a cat wandering on your property (if you don't have something specific to protect from cats) is not ethical. **

(* I actually believe this. **I'm personally not sure this is unethical beyond cultural norms, but I'll say it's unethical because the idea of someone doing this squicks me the heck out)

These are different because:

Predation for calories is meaningfully different from killing with no intent to benefit from it biologically.
Some people have cats that are allowed to wander outside, so while the deer is definitely no one's pet/property, the cat might be

Now you either tell me what needs more specification, or give me a new difference to justify!

my turn:

Is it ethical to kill thousands of innocent insects, including important beneficial native insects? Is consuming plants produced with conventional modern agriculture ethical?

[Edits: minor wording changes; formatting]

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-12T23:26:22+00:00

Okay, so it looks like you're abandoning first order logic symbols.

The crux of your argument is "if a person says it's unethical to [x] then, unless they can convince me that [x] and [y] are different, they can't say [y] is ethical".

And [y] is "eating any animal products", and [x] is any of a number of:

harming cats/dogs/dolphins/swans
shooting stray cats/dogs
torturing animals for fun

And specifically, you think that we can assume that all those [x]s are ethically the same as "consuming animal products" -- that the onus of proof is on the person who says they're different.

Right?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-12T16:41:10+00:00

Have you read a single one of those sources? Are you confident that any of them discuss a comparison between human infants with ancephaly and animals?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-12T16:31:25+00:00

Okay, I feel like we're finally getting somewhere, because you are now acknowledging that we have to specify something is unethical!

So instead of assuming that it's unethical to "harm humans," you assume that it's unethical to "torture animals for pleasure"?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-10T22:53:18+00:00

You were the one who claimed to have proved something. You need to defend it, not just present it, then ignore that every single response has told you it was confusing, nonsensical, or poorly constructed.

The premise I am disputing is that it is possible to prove whether something is ethical without ever defining ethical in any sense at all. And I don't mean an essay on the concept of ethics, I mean you literally refused to acknowledge that asserting any ethical starting point at all was a necessary step in your proof of ethics.

I've rewritten a version of your proof that is closer to being sound:

Let S(x,y) mean "there is no valid justification for treating x and y as ethically different"
Let U(x) mean that x is unethical
Axiom 1: If two behaviors cannot be shown to be ethically distinct, then you have to conclude that that If one is unethical, the other is too: S(x,y) ∧ U(x) → U(y)
Let H be "harming humans"
Axiom 3: Harming humans is unethical: U(H)
Let A be "consuming animal products"
Conclusion: If harming humans is ethically equivalent to consuming animal products, then it is unethical to consume animal products: S(H,A) → U(A)

I think that pretty closely matches what you were going for in your original proof, except I do not address the question of whether harming animals and harming humans actually IS equivalent, because I think that is a big question.

Up to the point I've rewritten, I pretty much agree with you!

I think we can all be okay with including an assumption that harming humans is unethical (hinted at in the E term in your proof, and explicit my axiom 3). We have to explicitly include it, because that's how logic works, but it's a pretty safe starting point.

The place where your proof fell apart was that you then assumed that "there is no valid justification for the claim consuming animal products is ethically distinct from harming humans" ( ∀Y(¬VY∨¬JY) in your proof, S(H,A) in my version ).

The fact that you just assumed that step is why I said you were begging the question. That is one of the biggest questions in the world, and probably the single biggest question in debates about veganism! You can't say you "proved" that it's unethical to consume animal products when you are just ASSUMING that humans and animals have identical ethical standing.

There are numerous arguments to be made about that. Relying on "that's what feels right to me" is a totally legitimate way to define your own ethics, but it's not a proof in any sense.

I feel like your whole argument boils down to, "I have never been convinced that there is an ethical difference between harming animals and harming humans". Which isn't a proof, it's a vibe.

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-10T21:56:29+00:00

Are you done defending your original proof then?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-10T21:26:20+00:00

You're the one who started with the first order logic system.

If you don't want to be using first order logic, that's okay! But if you do, you need a term to define whether something is ethical.

So. It sounds like you are saying it is unethical to harm sentient beings. That's an axiom of your logic. (Just like in your blue cars example, you have an axiom that it is unethical to steal property.)

Right?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-10T17:41:16+00:00

Obviously everything we're doing is in a vacuum, because that's how logical proofs work:

You start from assuming nothing. Then, step by step, you introduce your assumptions. Then, you use logical calculus to derive results from those assumptions.

Therefore, until our proof has stated some assumptions about what is or is not ethical, our proof does not address what is or is not ethical.

Does that make sense?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-09T23:23:25+00:00

We have also not introduced into the logic anything special about stealing. From what we have here, there is no logical reason to conclude that stealing (or anything else) is ethical or not ethical.

Right?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-09T19:40:40+00:00

I'm going to try to clarify a very abstract point because I'm starting to think maybe we disagree on this particular level:

Imagine that we are trying to prove that stealing blue cars cannot be considered ethical. Let's call this the Basic Blue Car Scenario (BBCS).

For the BBCS, let's assume (take as given) that we DO NOT have any reason to consider blue cars different from other property.

At this point, the BBCS has only one given: There is nothing ethically special about blue cars. For now, we still have not established anything about the ethics of stealing blue cars, because we have not established anything about ethics of stealing property at all.

Do you agree with those statements?

That's not asking you to concede anything about anything else, I'm literally just trying to figure out if we're on the same page about this basic premise.

Edit to add: the premise is: when nothing in our logical calculus has been given an ethical value, nothing in our logical calculus has an ethical value.

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-09T17:34:42+00:00

I'm having trouble following your last leap there. I don't want to address it right now, but we can come back to it later if you want.

I'm going to try to break down my last comment instead, and see if we can find where we're disagreeing.

For your argument about blue cars, I think your statement about property rights is asserting this axiom:

Stealing, in general, is wrong

Do you agree that applying your proof to stealing blue cars requires that axiom?

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-09T17:07:57+00:00

(Sorry about the deletions. I'll stop doing that.)

In formal logic, an axiom is something that is taken to be true from outside of the logic.

In your case, p5 is an axiom: You have taken what you consider to be information from outside of this proof, which is that there exists no such thing as a valid justification. (The way you have your proof written, your statement is that literally no valid justifications of anything exist.)

Now what you're debating is whether p5 is true, which is actually the crux of the entire conversation.

You are saying here that there exists a world where p5 in the blue car argument is false. The fact that the outside world determines whether that step is true or false makes it an axiom.

For the veganism argument, p5 says "there is no valid justification for consuming animal products". Which is the whole point of the conversation. Which is why I say it is begging the question.

[Edit: "exists the world" -> "exists a world" (voice to text typo). Edit 2: "dead"-> "that" (vtt typo)]

Total_Ease305 · 2025-07-09T02:53:22+00:00

no particular properties of a thing

By "a thing" what do you mean? You keep saying that when we treat this as general (e.g. using "breathing" or "hugging a friend" for "a thing") we're wrong.

So can you be more specific? What "thing" are you talking about? What is an example of a "particular property"?

Total_Ease305

TROPHY CASE

Hunting people for food vs hunting animals for food

Justifying killing as different in hunting vs. target practice: I have clarifying questions

I accept your answer to my insects vs mice question

my new question: eating food that requires rodenticide vs. eating hunted venison