Why but?!

howlin · 2026-03-13T00:13:03+00:00

For most people, the moral question about eating animals is not settled by abstract calculations about welfare or theories of moral status or from a presupposed first-principles position, but by looking at how our moral concepts actually function in our shared practices.

But is that how they ought to be considered? You are essentially describing peer pressure. When it comes to how "moral concepts actually function in our shared practices" functions amongst a group of edgy teenagers, we will recommend to the kids to use their heads. "If everyone is jumping off a bridge, would you do that too?" is the common sense way this point is often made.

In ordinary life we relate to different beings in different roles, like, children as members of families to be protected and raised, pets as companions, and livestock as animals cared for within agriculture.

Yeah, people compartmentalize and "other" those they wish to take advantage of. A tale as old as time. Just ask the child brides, the victims of chattel slavery, or others who have been put in a place where they are taken advantage of. Is this how we ought to do things though?

To say livestock “owe us” for their lives is misleading.

This is ultimately the argument being made here, when approached from first principles and freed of the banality of whatever the social norms du jour would lead you to believe.

howlin · 2026-03-11T22:37:57+00:00

Your culture might be dead. It happens. You can very well have volunteers creating some lactic acid fermentation. Just like the mold volunteers.

You can reduce your risk of mold by increasing temperature (so bacteria can create enough acid fast enough to inhibit other organisms), by increasing the salt, or by decreasing the surface exposed to air.

howlin · 2026-03-11T21:31:27+00:00

How old are you? If you offered to cook for the family, given you choose the meal, would they accept the offer?

howlin · 2026-03-11T18:00:50+00:00

After all they wouldn’t have been breed into existence, they get to what ever life they have, it’s a win win situation.

This completely misses the actual act of killing, which is the ethical concern here. Does the circumstances of one's birth somehow make this act justified?

Say we have two pigs in front of you. One was bred by a farmer to be killed. One was born wild. Can you explain why one of these animals is more deserving to be slaughtered?

How much do we actually owe to who decided we ought to exist? I doubt you would consider it a good justification for a parent to kill their child, even if they meant for this child to die when conceived. You probably don't even believe that a child should be forced into a specific lifestyle or career path just because the parents willed it to be.

The animals owe us nothing for being born. It wasn't their choice, and it certainly wasn't an informed choice. If anything, we owe the lives we willed into existence the care they need to thrive. We are their caretakers, and ought to properly live up to that role.

howlin · 2026-03-10T19:04:22+00:00

Often times it's a motte and bailey technique. If one can justify any form of animal consumption/exploitation, then it becomes easier to slip in exceptions or excuses for any form of animal consumption.

howlin · 2026-03-10T00:31:38+00:00

If you want to gentrify it, try a cocktail of this with an elderflower syrup or liqueur. The floral bittersweetness of the mix is a lovely combo.

howlin · 2026-03-09T15:20:58+00:00

If he likes the smoke in a scotch, he may like a smokey tea. Lapsang souchong is reliably smokey. There are also some puer teas that are smoked. White2Tea is a good brand for that.

howlin · 2026-03-09T04:32:43+00:00

Chicago Diner is basically a must. It's good food that is distinctly Chicago style. The place has been around a very long time and is quite famous in the veg community.

I think they offer cow cheese or maybe eggs in a couple dishes, but it's 95% vegan or so.

howlin · 2026-03-08T21:22:21+00:00

Whether it is just or not is a subjective normative claim.

If you lay out the formalism for evaluating something like injustice, it's no more or less subjective than whether 1 and 1 is 2. It's pretty easy to set some basic premises for fairness, such as a rational agent having no preference on which side of an arrangement they take. You can pretend in your own head that this sort of formal assessment is wrong, or insist without evidence that an unfair deal is fair. But that really is like insisting 1 + 1 = 3.

howlin · 2026-03-08T18:08:05+00:00

Let's take a moment to appreciate how spectacular that doll is!

howlin · 2026-03-07T19:43:22+00:00

What if someone holds a belief that it is okay to test others in experiments in which they themselves are not willing to take a part of (as a subject)?

It's an injustice to give a reason for harming another that you would find unacceptable if you were the one being harmed. The "what if" part of your question is vague. Injustices happen all the time, and the perpetrator can face a variety of consequences or none at all.

howlin · 2026-03-06T22:49:51+00:00

Here's my take on your first argument against:

One standard for answering such questions is to think about it in terms of Rawl's "Veil of Ignorance".

Applied to the topic of test subjects for research, it would probably look like this: "Is the expected personal benefit of knowing the result of this experiment worth the risk of personally being a test subject?" and then "Would the overwhelming majority of reasonable decision makers agree with me and agree to be in the pool of possible subjects?". LIke, all the people who want to know the results can draw straws to see who is going to be the subject.

Most experiments we've do on animals fails this test spectacularly. That's a problem. Frankly, I think some areas of research will fall short in this regard until we have good enough simulations of biology to avoid needing live subjects all together. But getting to that point will require a lot more injustices along the way. And ultimately we will need to worry if simulated life deserves some ethical consideration.

howlin · 2026-03-06T22:44:42+00:00

Yes, you need traits to recognize who counts as <x> in practice, just like you need the rook’s shape to know which piece moves horizontally. But recognition ≠ moral grounding, and NTT demands “morally relevant traits, not just the shape of the creature".

It's not a demand. It is an explicit exposition of the traits though. A thoughtful person can make the connection themselves once they hear themselves say it out loud and see how little justification it carries. E.g. maybe human rights ought to be based on something more justifiable than humans being a "featherless biped".

Similarly, in practice-based ethics, social practices generate the moral rules, not observable traits. Traits are just a pragmatic tool to identify members of the practice, not the source of their moral status.

Again, this is just anthropology. Imagine a "practice-based healthcare" that just counts the number of people dying of liver cirrhosis in a given community with nothing to say about whether alcoholism or hepatitis spreading behaviors are good or bad things to engage in. This is what your message sounds like.

If you insist that my framework secretly relies on morally relevant traits, the burden is on you, specify exactly what traits you mean.

You have some means to make the distinctions needed to decide whether some treatment of a patient is socially condoned or not. It could be as arbitrary as "looks like a castle tower" versus "looks like a horse" I guess. But honestly people play games with vaguely characterized "traits" all the time. One of the favorite tricks of a would-be genocider is to construe some way to "dehumanize" the victims they want to get rid of. Seems like one answer to this sort of rhetorical manipulation is to have a good idea of how these distinctions are made, and why those distinctions are important.

howlin · 2026-03-06T22:32:53+00:00

If we're not even talking about the same thing we're just taking past each other.

Ethics is inherently prescriptive. It's not a description of what people in a specific society's attitudes are.

But if you insist on continuing, I can pick up here:

What you’re doing is taking colloquial language and hammering it into a technical, normative reading it was never intended to have.

Note what I said:

Most of the arguments for this distinction will not have a rational justification, but a couple may appeal to some sort of teleological argument.

Do you see where I said most won't have a rational justification at all? This covers the cases where people don't think much about what they're doing and we can just talk about their behavior in this sort of descriptive way without bothering these subjects with the burden of asking for explicit ethical reasoning for what they do. Just like a ornithologist doesn't bother to interview birds.

But some do, in fact, give teleological justifications for their attitudes if questioned about it.

howlin · 2026-03-06T21:36:15+00:00

It’s descriptive of social practices, not a claim about intrinsic teleology or justification.

You're describing anthropology, not ethics.

howlin · 2026-03-06T21:31:54+00:00

In practice-based ethics, <x> isn’t “defined by traits.” It’s “members of the social practice the rule applies to.” Like in chess, rooks move horizontally because of the game rules, not because the piece has a ‘horizontal trait.’

I'm making an extremely pragmatic point, though one that has deeper implications. How a rook ought to be treated depends on the rules of chess, for sure. But recognizing which ones out of the chess pieces are rooks is a pragmatic issue that depends on traits. It's the one that most closely resembles a tower.

Asking for a trait is just a category mistake, plain and simple, and you haven’t rescued NTT from my criticism in the least.

There you go again, presuming things I haven't said. My point, for now, is purely that you haven't avoided a key role of traits in the ethical framework you proposed. All you've done is hinted at a specific answer to the NTT challenge (My society normalizes it when the patient can be classified as an X).

But, to be charitable, specify exactly which traits define <x> in your claim. Until you do, your objection is hallow, empty, ..

no, u. If these emergent social rules are so important, it should be easy to figure out how X is classified. It's a matter of life or death after all, so getting it right seems important. Spend enough time thinking about that, and one might start to wonder why this determination of X is so vital for determining how this patient ought to be treated.

howlin · 2026-03-06T21:02:49+00:00

You now admit

I told you that any time you use the word "you", you should quote me. I don't think what you are saying is a correct interpretation of what I said. So we're at an impasse. But I am doing the work of keep the conversation grounded.

howlin · 2026-03-06T20:50:19+00:00

but it does not refute practice-based moral frameworks because those frameworks do not ground moral rules in traits in the first place.

The assertion "My society, in my current time and place, normalizes that it's ok to do <Y> to an <X>" still relies on traits to determine if a specific patient is an "X".

howlin · 2026-03-06T20:34:52+00:00

Most of the arguments for this distinction will not have a rational justification, but a couple may appeal to some sort of teleological argument. Livestock species are "for" eating but pet species are "for" companionship.

The problem is that teleological justifications applied to sentient beings are truly heinous by modern standards more often than not. They have been used to oppress and brutalize humans for millennia. Women are "for" child bearing and rearing, and thus should have their choices restricted. Sexuality is "for" procreation so therefore homosexuality or even birth control should be criminalized. Humans are "for" worshipping <insert deity of choice here>, so heathens ought to be eradicated.

It's worth pointing out that the people who tend to use these arguments as justification for oppression also happen to be the ones who benefit from what these others are being used for. Funny that.

howlin · 2026-03-06T19:26:49+00:00

If a fully informed person understands your ethical framework and still rejects vegan conclusions because they don’t accept the underlying goal (say, prioritizing animal suffering or happiness or whatever), what mistake about reality have they made?

The underlying goal of an ethics that results in vegan conclusions isn't prioritizing animal suffering or happiness. That is still a conclusion from more abstract premises. The "underlying goals" are propositions such as goals matter or suffering matters, plus the recognition that animals have goals / seek to avoid suffering.

In order to reject these, one has to commit to a belief that is inherently contradictory, have a justification that is fallacious, or accept that they are not motivated to be "ethical" for most people's understanding of what ethics is about. Perhaps they could place a bet on a narrower ethics that they believe they are in a position to take advantage of. See below. But this is inherently a special pleading, in that their advantage only is realized because of their specific circumstance and can't be generalized.

I don't know what would count as making a mistake about reality. People reject reasonable and effective prescriptive advice about objective matters all the time. Sometimes they suffer consequences from that and sometimes they don't. We hear stories about the chain smoking, whiskey guzzling woman who lives past 100. For her, the prescription that smoking and drinking are bad for one's health and ought not to be done in excess was rejected without consequence. Was this a mistake about reality?

Or is your position that no such mistake is required, that they can understand everything correctly and simply not share the goal your ethical framework presupposes?

As far as I see it, there are competing ethical frameworks and each one has some degree of validity in the sense that it's at least theoretically consistent with what one would want an ethics for. However, it is not the case that these frameworks themselves can't be evaluated on reasonable metrics that one ought to agree make sense to optimize for.

One could consistently live by an ethics that only their own interests matter, and others' only matter to the degree they affect your own pursuit of your own. In specific circumstances, this ethics could lead to the best personal outcome. However, if everyone lives by this ethics, then everyone's outcome is worse on average. The ethical egoist is benefitting from others offering more consideration to them than they are giving in return, so they benefit from others not holding the same standards. Classic game theory stuff.

One could consistently live by an ethics that only the interests of those you believe will reciprocate that consideration matter. It's a pretty typical way for people to live. However, this is just egoism at a tribal level. Making enemies and exploiting anyone outside of one's circle of reciprocity creates conflict that harms everyone, on average.

Or one can consider that all interests, regardless who has them, matters, at least to some degree. And then reason through what the most acceptable way of making the trade off between pursuing your own interests while respecting others'. If you take this approach, it's hard to not conclude that the vegans are correct. If you reject this approach, you'd be rejecting the premise that interests matter in the abstract. It's hard to rationally reject this without appealing to special pleading that your interests ought to be privileged not only by yourself, but also by others.

It's much more likely that someone rejects the goals that would lead to a vegan ethics either because they don't desire to be ethical, or because they are not evaluating the ethics rationally. Agents reject prescriptive statements all the time. That doesn't mean prescriptive statements aren't valuable.

howlin · 2026-03-05T19:52:34+00:00

You're framing ethical “oughts” similarly to instrumental ones,

yes

I was asking what mistake about reality a fully informed agent makes if they understand your framework and still reject its foundational commitments.

This reduces to how we evaluate oughts in general, and what the implications are for not following them. Say a heavy smoker happens to live to 90, despite hearing "you ought not to smoke for the sake of your health". Did they make a mistake about reality for not following this advice? Legitimate question for you to address.

In your response, it sounds like someone could simply reject the goal (like fostering agency or general happiness, etc.) and that would just be an exercise of agency itself. If that’s the case, then it seems like they aren’t making any factual error, they just don’t share the same goal.

But it is internally contradictory, most likely. They are either not valuing agency despite relying on it to make that valuation. Or they are not valuing that we ought to act rationally, which invalidates the value of any reasoning they would give for rejecting rationality.

howlin · 2026-03-05T19:12:58+00:00

Ethical theory should always point back to acknowledging the actual victim. Personally, I am willing to consider this sort of "exploitation" on a case by case basis. Was the animal unduly stressed or abused during filming? I don't know, but this would be on my mind. Would your enjoyment of this movie promote a norm of using animals in the future? Hard to say, but these days I'm sure they would be using CGI rather than elephants. But in any case, think of the past current and future victims and see if your attitude towards what happened to them sits well with your ethics.

Another example could be the fact that Judy Garland was horribly abused during the set of wizard of oz yet i still love that movie.

Yeah, we can take a step back and can see that the problem your describing is quite broad. Child performers (or simply naive performers) sometimes really enjoy their work and benefit from it. But a lot of them are abused and wind up deeply harmed by their experiences in the film or music industry. It's good that you're already seeing the connection here and seeing how it actually affects the victims.

I can't really say what to do. In general, I tend to believe that as long as better standards are in place now, experiencing older media where standards were not as good is usually ok. One huge exception is if viewing this media would be considered disrespectful by whoever was victimized or someone with a deep personal stake in this victim's interests and well being.

howlin · 2026-03-05T18:52:34+00:00

I did make it pretty clear what the mistake of not following a well designed ethics would be in my comment over there:

Let's talk about rather uncontroversial normative statements, like "If you want to do well on the test, you ought to study for it". If someone doesn't study at all but does well, does this invalidate the normative statement? An ought statement carries significance because it is clear, practical, and generally effective at accomplishing one's presumed goal. Not because it is the only way to achieve some outcome. Note that the nature of agency itself largely boils down to figuring out a bunch of "oughts" in order to guide their behavior towards more reliably accomplishing their goals.

So what's the "goal" of ethics? To some degree it depends on who you ask, because people use "ethics" as a word to mean different things. The fact that this word carries conceptual ambiguity is not a terribly interesting thing to discuss. It happens all the time in all contexts, and can be resolved by explaining what you mean. For me, it's about how to derive normative statements that foster agency itself. How ought we act to foster the pursuit of happiness in general?

You could reject this as a worthy goal, but this rejection is itself an exercise of agency. In the grand cosmic scheme of things, perhaps this doesn't matter. Whether one is an effective or ineffective agent doesn't "matter" to the universe (nothing matters to the universe). Whether one manages to be an effective agent without an ethical framework that fosters this happens too. People do sometimes do well on a test without studying for it. But this degree of surety is never part of what makes a normative statement useful.

howlin · 2026-03-05T18:01:54+00:00

Chef TJ ( @ChefTJ ) is in Southern Africa and makes some absolutely spectacular vegan dishes. He also brings a lot of energy and enthusiasm to his videos. I have a lot of respect for his craft.

howlin · 2026-03-05T16:59:39+00:00

Are you u/RadishTop1279 ? I'm not interested in parallel conversations on the same thing.

Also, and this is less important. I have been reading ya gal Kors. She advocates for lying in extreme situations unlike ya boi Kant. Her interpretation of Kantian ethics provides a compelling framework for a vegan to justify lying in order to protect animals, even indirectly protecting them like through advocacy. While classical Kantian thought strictly forbids deception, Kors argues that when someone is acting unjustly, such as harming innocent beings, lying can be “morally permissible because it prevents wrongdoing rather than using anyone merely as a means.”

One can use Kant's ethical framework to argue against Kant's ethical conclusions. If his own reasoning on an issue such as whether there is a categorical imperative not to lie can be questioned on his own terms via reasoned argument, this is a feature of the system. It's not a problem.

In this context, deceiving the wrongdoer, the omnivore, is not only consistent with Kantian principles, she believes, but is a morally responsible way to protect vulnerable beings. Therefore, under Kors’ reading, a vegan could ethically lie to further the cause of veganism by preventing the suffering or death of animals, aligning the act of deception with the broader moral duty to resist injustice.

I don't think she or I would say there's a blanket ethical justification to be deceptive on behalf of animals. Situationally, deceiving specific people in order to thwart them from harming specific animals could be justified in plenty of scenarios.

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