From experience, I find it hard to argue with nihilists since nothing really has value for them. Although, I have yet to meet a pure nihilist (or amoralist). Fully functioning nihilsts and amoralists don’t exist. So usually it shows that they are not as nihilistic as it first seems. And I suspect you will be no exception.
Technically, and from a natural point of view, you are correct. Suffering is an evolutionary trait. But it has no bigger universal meaning or consequences other than being a stimulus which aids organisms in survival.
You argue (or rather try to show a weakness of an argument) that if all of humanity were commiting suicide, this would be beneficial for other forms of life on this planet. (Or “most” humans, to be technically adequate, since I can imagine that humans are also to some degree important parts of functioning ecosystems.) This seems logical if the only premise is environmental protection and preservation. It’s obvious that this is not the only premise which plays a role here. Vegans (and a lot of non-vegans with a similar mindset in this regard) would like to survive themselves while keeping the harm they inflict to other (somewhat sentient) forms of life as minimal as possible.
What intrigues me is that you are not advocating for sucide. You even emphasize that. Why is that? This implies that you must have some sort of moral concept, which is not rooted in Nihilism. Tell me about it!
I feel that’s […] driven by emotion/instincts rather than logic/reason. The argument being made this way is more of an emotional blackmailing […], not about giving an actual logical argument.
That’s the thing about moral and logic: it is impossible to create moral through reason alone, which is equivalent to saying that logic has no moral. You need to start somewhere and accept it as given. This will be the very first premise. Based on that you can reason away and build a logically consistent moral concept.
You may find that Veganism is an ethical framework, which has the strongest logical consistency (at least to my knowledge) if you start with the premises “I want to be alive” and “suffering is bad”.
As this is the very core, we can now discuss whether these premises are something we want to use as our ethical foundation.
Of course you can reject it and try to live as an, e.g., amoralist. But even then you would make your decisions based on your individual belief system. And that one will probably have more logic holes than my socks. So saying that Veganism aims at emotional blackmailing is rather the very same cause for the existence of most moral beliefs. This mechanism works for all moral decisions, regardless of the specific philosophical movement. As I said before, you can’t purely “logic” goals and thereby moral into existence.
Once you have this realisation, you’ll usually find that going vegan is the only logically valid step.
You call me nihilist while arguing that I’m likely not really nihilistic. I feel that’s a very fuzzy box you are trying to put me in :P …but you are free to call it whatever you want so long as it’s kept respectful.
The Universe doesn’t have morals. But humans do. And evolution has ingrained a particular set of morals in our brains.
However, in those morals the benefit (you could say “thriving”) of our species is the main theme, and it could not be other way since they emerge from natural selection.
This can be in conflict with the survival of other species too. And I do believe that all creatures with instinct are also moral beings… it’s not that wolves are behaving immorally when they hunt sheep, they are behaving in the most morally correct manner that emerges from their natural selection. Their appetite is more important for the wolf than the sheep’s suffering.
This seems logical if the only premise is environmental protection and preservation. It’s obvious that this is not the only premise which plays a role here.
Yes, my point was to show that the topic is not that simple. My first line was: “it depends on you morals”
“Suffering” and “empathy” taken as universal would not work, you’d need to draw the line at some point. So it becomes a question on where you draw the line. You can look into the eyes of a worm, speak to it and treat it like a child that has the same feelings a human would, and you’ll be sad when it dies. But I don’t see how our ability to project empathy towards an animal that has eyes justifies drawing the line there.
Don’t you find it curious that most people only seem to care about an animal when it’s relatively close in mechanism / behavior to a human? …most people don’t have second thoughts when it comes to killing a cockroach, for example. Is the desire to not have insects in the house more important than the insect’s suffering? I suspect the meme wouldn’t cause such an impact if it used that.
You may find that Veganism is an ethical framework, which has the strongest logical consistency (at least to my knowledge) if you start with the premises “I want to be alive” and “suffering is bad”.
If those 2 premises were enough to start with, then it would follow that it’s ok to eat meat (or use animal products) as long as we could be absolutelly sure the animals involved did not “suffer” (and as long as it did not put our own lives in danger, which is, imho, a better point towards going plant-based …but I won’t derail into that).
Then it becomes a matter of accuratelly determining what constitutes “suffering”. Does experiencing suffering require “pain” and a nervous system exactly like ours? Or is it possible that the only reason we experience “pain” through our nervous system is because the way we are programmed makes this the most efficient way for a mechanism of reward-punishment to emerge that is evolutionarily benefitial to our survival?
If other creatures have a different emergent mechanism to signal in their biology what’s hurtful to their survival and morally wrong for them, having a different manifestation of what (I’d argue) could also be categorized as “suffering”, shouldn’t they be included? are we just only caring for the nervous response because that’s one thing we can relate to? are we unfairly discriminating based on how similar is their biology to ours? why?
it is impossible to create moral through reason alone, which is equivalent to saying that logic has no moral. You need to start somewhere and accept it as given.
This is true, but only as the very first initial premise. You NEED logic to isolate what those premises should be (and to be able to extrapolate from those premises) if you actually want to maximize the success rate of the primal evolutionary drive that pushes our human morals.
I’d argue most crimes and acts considered immoral are driven by emotion too. You need logic if you want to form a coherent human moral that can be extrapolated to a higher abstract level. Because using emotion as a basis alone, without logical reasoning, would lead to contradictory and inconsistent results, the morals would be changing based on the circumstances in a way that is not logically sound.
This means that if you manipulate certain circumstances, you can manipulate the moral compass of someone who is driven by emotion and does not use logic. That form of manipulation is what I referred to as “emotional blackmailing”.
Why is the meme asking us to “look in the eye” to the animal? why is it asking us to “tell” it to the animal as if it could understand the words of whichever language we speak?
Because it’s trying to manipulate you into projecting your empathy towards it.
As I read your comment, you approach veganism from a nihilistic perspective, invalidating their belief system since it is driven by emotion. At the same time you seem to have missed that every ethical concept stems from similar emotional processes. I wanted to point out the contradiction you created by that, since there is and was no living “full” nihilist or amoralist (except folks like existential nihilists) who whishes to continue their existence.
In other words: There is no moral without emotion. So critisizing veganism that way you did before, is illogical.
And I do believe that all creatures with instinct are also moral beings… it’s not that wolves are behaving immorally when they hunt sheep, they are behaving in the most morally correct manner that emerges from their natural selection. Their appetite is more important for the wolf than the sheep’s suffering.
Didn’t you know that - based on our current understanding - virtually all animals besides humans lack the cognitive capacity of moral agency?
In your example, wolves are not able to contemplate their actions the way we do. They don’t have the necessary self-awareness, nor the required brain structure to even have labels such as “good” or “bad” to evaluate and prospect their (possible) actions. Their behaviour is mostly driven by instinct and training or experience. They do not “think” about whether it’s good or bad to kill and eat the sheep, they also don’t “think” that “they” are more important than the sheep. They simply do. They are not able to perform moral reasoning.
There is no moral at play here. Moral does not exist for wolves. Only beings which posess moral agency are able to do that.
We - as humans - can evaluate the actions of wolves as morally correct or incorrect, since we are beings with moral agency. But the wolves can’t. They don’t look at other wolves killing sheep and think “oh dude, maybe the sheep wasn’t so happy about that, but it’s okay, since we need to eat”.
So even though your observation is in so far correct as that wolves still have a decision making process, which allows them to hunt their prey if they are hungry, this decision making process is of purely instinctual and not morally aware nature.
Don’t you find it curious that most people only seem to care about an animal when it’s relatively close in mechanism / behavior to a human? …most people don’t have second thoughts when it comes to killing a cockroach, for example. Is the desire to not have insects in the house more important than the insect’s suffering?
I don’t find it curious, no. As you already said this is rooted in similarities of capacity to suffer within us humans and other animals.
According to my currenty state of knowledge, a lot of research shows that insects do not feel pain. Although a definitive answer is still out in the open. If I remember it correctly, there are hints that honey bees for example can experience some sort of distress when being smoked, which is why some vegans also do not consume honey.
Vegans attribute suffering as something which can (currently) only be experienced by beings with a central nervous system. And that is also nuanced in several degrees. (An example, some vegans eat oysters since those lack a central nervous system.) This is an active interpretation of the term “suffering”, and that makes sense. Why should you want to prevent damage to a being, if it is not able to feel suffering? A passive interpretation of suffering would be the presence of any stimulus which drives an organism to actions which prevent the occurence of such a stimulus. Those stimuli have evolved into incents for increasing the survival chance of an organism and its species. For example, this would also mean that plants are suffering when they don’t maximize their beneficial sunlight exposure, which is why they grow towards light. This is of course one of the factors which drives evolution. However, as you will hopefully agree, there are different levels of suffering. While reactive behaviour of, e.g., oysters or plants are simple and mere reflexes to the environment, more complex organisms like vertebrates are capable of more complex forms of suffering, like pain, fear, stress, etc…
Simply put, that’s also where vegans draw the line.
then it should be ok to eat meat (or use products from animal origin) as long as we could be absolutelly sure the animals involved did not “suffer” (you could even kill them yourself, right?)
Since you can not make sure that the involved animals do not suffer, this is not okay for vegans. Most vegans also don’t understand “suffering” as an active negative stimulus but also as the lack of positive ones. (Which also holds for what I said in the previous paragraph.)
An early end of life, the lack of “true” freedom, i.e., living in the wild as in times before humans domesticated them, the fact that most of the animals, which humans consume, are bred for optimized meat, milk or whatever yield, which decreases their natural lifespan are such lacking positives and also brings along a bunch of negatives like (hurtful) health issues. Those are all the manifestations of suffering that vegans aim to prevent.
I already disambiguated the term “suffering” as a stimulus before and where and why vegans draw a line. So I hope that this will be a sufficient response to your paragraphs which follow the quote from the last one I quoted here.
This is true, but only as the very first initial premise. You NEED logic to isolate what those premises should be (and to be able to extrapolate from those premises)
Yes, of course. Still, these premises all start with emotions. But it seems we agree on that.
if you actually want to maximize the success rate of the primal evolutionary drive that pushes our human morals.
I am not sure I completely understand you here. What do you mean by that? Which evolutionary drive’s sucess rate should we want to maximize? And how is this related to the first part of the sentence?
I’d argue most crimes and acts considered immoral have their root in emotion too. Because using emotion as a basis alone, without logic, would lead to inconsistent results, the morals would be changing based on the circumstances in a way that is not logical.
Agreed.
To dive deeper: there is no inherent need for consistent results. It’s just that most people like to respect themselves and justify their actions. They don’t want to see themselves in a bad way and therefore naturally strive for morally correct behaviour. If you then explore their moral belief system you often find that it has sometimes more, sometimes less inconsistencies which cause distress for them. They might re-evaluate their stance and correct their belief system, possibly condoning their past behaviour and views. Or they shut down, blocking arguments which might invalidate their position even though logically correct, aka “confirmation bias”.
But I see now how you originally meant your “emotional blackmailing” part. You were mainly criticizing the meme and not veganism as a whole by saying that, correct?
I would still justify such a meme format, since such emotions can be the nudge required to re-evaluate ones values and beliefs. This is why populism works, but also why it is so dangerous. The problem, and I agree with you in that regard, might then become that people don’t spend sufficient cognitive effort for thinking about this criticially enough, such that they could arrive at logically consistent conclusions. In this meme specifically I still see the incentive for that (“should ones own pleasure be evaluated with higher priority than the suffering of animals?”), it’s therefore less emotionally appealing than more radical examples, which leverage as much emotion as possible and almost completely omit the rational part.
Furthermore I feel the need to put this into perspective: This meme was posted to the german vegan community (VeganDE), the title of the post translates to: “Why did you become a vegan?”. It does not seem as if it would aim to appeal to the viewers of this post to change their lifestyle towards veganism, but I see it rather as a conversation starter within a vegan community. Also, from my experience, most vegans I met so far, have thouroughly thought about their choice to go vegan and did not made this choice irrationally based on emotion alone.
At the same time you seem to have missed that every ethical concept stems from similar emotional processes. I wanted to point out the contradiction you created by that
Have I missed it? …as I said before, emotions are needed but only as a basis. And I believe you agreed on that.
But my point was that you need logic to have a consistent/sound human moral out of that basis.
Emotions also lead people towards murder, rape, abuse and all sort of things that are considered immoral.
Emotions are just the expression of our animal instincts. I’d argue that even the most complex feelings of love are linked to deep responses to stimuli hardwired in our genes.
Without using logic to distill morality, you’d get an animalistic set of morals as wild and clueless as our emotions often are… the same kind of morality that an animal, like the wolf, would have, because that’s all it has: instint / emotion (I know you disagree with the wolf as a moral being, but I’ll get to that in the next point).
Didn’t you know that - based on our current understanding - virtually all animals besides humans lack the cognitive capacity of moral agency?
Agency? based on our current understanding, humans might not even have any real “agency” themselves. That’s something that scientists and philosophers have been discussing for ages without reaching any sort of agreement… many think that “free will” is just an illusion.
I feel there’s a fundamental diference in the way we define “Morality”. I’ll try to explain my take on it, which doesn’t involve “agency”:
In my view, if a creature (human or not) is capable of displaying a set of priorities in how it behaves, and we can notice there are rules governing the way they conduct themselves, then that set of priorities and rules is susceptible to be understood as the moral compass that governs its behavior.
To me, morality is intrinsic to any form of complex natural behavior subjected to evolutionary pressure (whether they have cognitive capacity or not). Even if there’s no “Universal” morality, there are objective moralities emergent from the way each species has been driven towards seeking some set of stimuli that might be “good” for their own survival. All that we see as “good” is only “good” because it satisfies that evolutionary drive… not because we happen to have a “thought” about it.
As I said before, in the case of humans we can use logic to test, distill and extrapolate to obtain a higher level and better defined morality. Plus our actions usually have more complex and convoluted causations that require logic.
But if you do something “bad” without “thinking” (like you said wolfs do), that does not make the act any less “bad”. At most, it just shows that your “thinking” wasn’t the cause responsible for your behavior.
I wonder what’s you position about “determinism”. I’m not sure how would you reconcile it with your idea of morality, which seems to require the need for agency.
I don’t believe in free will. But my take on morality does not require it.
there are different levels of suffering. While reactive behaviour of, e.g., oysters or plants are simple and mere reflexes to the environment, more complex organisms like vertebrates are capable of more complex forms of suffering, like pain, fear, stress, etc… Simply put, that’s also where vegans draw the line.
It seems to me that’s arbitrary. I don’t see enough reason as to why the line should be drawn on vertebrates.
Equally arbitrary would be to draw it on intelligent beings who’s suffering can be more complex and say anything below is so much less important, that the desires of an intelligent being to marginally improve one tiny aspect of one instant of their intelligent lives takes priority.
I know. It’s kinda extreme, but it’s jut as valid as any other arbitrary line. That’s not a strong case for Veganism.
Of course, defining “intelligence” might be complex. But it was just an example. And it’s a particularly interesting one because you already implied that “virtually all animals besides humans” lack some relatively important cognitive capacities.
This meme was posted to the german vegan community (VeganDE), the title of the post translates to: “Why did you become a vegan?”. It does not seem as if it would aim to appeal to the viewers of this post to change their lifestyle towards veganism, but I see it rather as a conversation starter within a vegan community.
Yes. Often with these memes the title is a question that is either answered by the meme, or a follow up from it. So I interpreted it as an answer (ie. the quote in the meme being given as a reason on “why did you become Vegan?”).
Maybe I interpreted it wrong… but seeing that the meme was not enough of an answer for me (and on top of that, it appealed to emotion), I saw it as an opportunity to engage in some conversation which I hoped would not be unwelcome.
It seems my reply got so long that lemmy won’t let me post it completely. So you’ll get it in parts.
Part 1 of 2:
Have I missed it? …as I said before, emotions are needed but only as a basis. And I believe you agreed on that.
I just wanted to explain why I said, what I said. You questioned Veganisms from a nihilistic perspective in your original comment. And yes, at first it did not become clear what your standpoint with regard to the connection of emotion and ethics is. But since we cleared that up and agree on that we can move on.
Without using logic to distill morality, you’d get an animalistic set of morals as wild and clueless as our emotions often are… the same kind of morality that an animal, like the wolf, would have, because that’s all it has: instint / emotion
You are again attributing moral as something which can exist without the capability of reasoning about it, i.e., purely instinctual and emotionally driven behaviour is already something which you understand as morality. This is a fundamental disagreement we seem to have with regard to the definition of moral. You observed this as well and provided your definition. I will deal with that later.
I say that moral can only be an attribute of a being which is capable of higher reasoning. If a being is not able to even have such labels as “right” or “wrong” and not able to attribute them to its actions, then it can not have moral.
A wolf acts instinctively, as I have detailed before. That’s why it’s not a moral agent and can’t act morally “good” or “bad”. Those are labels we put on the wolves since we have moral agency.
based on our current understanding, humans might not even have any real “agency” themselves. That’s something that scientists and philosophers have been discussing for ages without reaching any sort of agreement… many think that “free will” is just an illusion. […]
I wonder what’s you position about “determinism”. I’m not sure how would you reconcile it with your idea of morality, which seems to require the need for agency.
I don’t believe in free will. But my take on morality does not require it.
The illusion of free will, yes. I am well aware of that. There have been studies which show that we already have a decision for an action before we become aware of it. It makes sense that we could predict the actions of someone before they are becoming aware of it, if we have a detailed view of their neural circuitry. We could simulate the exchange of electrochemical signals, which are again rooted in external and internal inputs, like sensory information. There is a clear cause and effect visible on a macroscopic scale. If we could create a very well controlled environment we could even make some guarantees about our predictions.
(This will now get abstract for a while, but bear with me, you’ll see how this will become relevant.)
However, no environment is currently perfectly controllable. And it is not even possible in theory. Are you familiar with Laplace’s demon?
If not, here is a short summary: Laplace’s demon is basically the idea that there could exist a being, which is able to perfectly predict the future state of each and every particle in the whole universe, as well as to determine its past. It is the ultimate culmination of determinism and also illustrates the illusion of free will. Because, if we can simulate the interaction of each and every particle in the whole universe, given the knowledge about their current state, we basically know beforehand what decisions humans will make. If we would construct a machine which resembles Laplace’s demon, then this machine could even be able to predict it’s own predictions, which would lead to an interesting paradox.
But, as far as I know, our current understanding of the universe does not allow Laplace’s demon to exist. One of the major problems is the exchange speed of information. Einstein disullisoned us of that when he found out that there can be nothing faster than the speed of light. This includes the speed of communication. Laplace’s demon can’t exist, because it is not able to know the current state of particles which are lightyears away from it. It can’t even perfectly know the current state of particles which are one centimeter away from it, since it only sees a shadow of it, which was casted a very brief moment before.
There are more reasons why such a demon can not exist. For the sake of not making my response excessively longer than it already is, I omit them, but I will highlight another important one:
True randomness. Given our current knowledge, true randomness exists on a quantum level. If you would like to know more about that, I refer you to Heisenberg’s unvertainty principle. Even though deterministic interpretations like the de Broglie-Bohm theory exist (or the Many-Worlds-Interpretation, which I reject for now for a lack of evidence of parallel universes), those and other hidden variable theories have been deeply challenged by the findings for which three physicists were are awarded a nobel prize last year. Those basically proved that our universe is not locally real.
(Here are two resources to wrap your head around it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=emailhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txlCvCSefYQ )
So either it is real or local or none of them, but it can’t be both, if I understood that correctly. This again underlines the existence of true randomness on a quantum scale.
If we have true randomness, our universe is not deterministic, at least not entirely, meaning it is probalistic. Even though we have a certain degree of determinism on a macroscopic scale (which under the hood is just a manifesation of a high probability in that view), those processes are influenced by quantum processes which are random in nature.
Consequently, Laplace’s demon can’t exist. Furthermore, the existence of true randomness, allows room for the existence of free will. Even though “free will” is the high level product of some neural circuitry, it is very difficult to perfectly predict this product as this neural circuitry in turn is again influenced by truly random processes. That doesn’t mean we can make high probability predictions, but we can’t do it perfectly. And that’s the critical point here.
If we have free will, this supports that we have moral agency. We can evaluate whether some action is right or wrong. We can differentiate between good and bad and act to that accordingly.
Laplace’s demon is but a “thought experiment”, you could make the assumption that it knows everything without even needing to measure it. In fact, it wouldn’t even need to interact with our Universe. What it would need is to know its initial state (big bang or whatever) and extrapolate from it (using the right maths/rules) what the position of the stars are now without violating the speed of light. Note that “to know” is not the same as “to measure”.
It might be that this demon can’t exist, but that itself doesn’t disprove determinism, it depends on what reason is given.
Let’s assume for a moment that one of the non-deterministic quantum interpretations is correct and the collapse is random. I see some problems with this (I’ll enumerate them for better reference):
P1) If it’s “truely random” then it follows it cannot be controlled or predicted. This means you wouldn’t be able to use “free will” or any external force to influence it, because that would make them no longer “truely random”. Making the jump to assume that they are somehow “determined” by minds would be a claim with no evidence whatsoever. And in fact there have been experiments in this regard (people trying to consciously look into the double slit experiment to cause a tilting of the result) without finding any repeatable evidence showing the mental state of the observers influence the state of quantum particles.
Quantum mechanics exposes a gap in our capacity of knowledge, but to me, using this to explain consciousness and “free will” feels a bit like the “God of the gaps”. As soon as we reach a point in science that reveals the limits of our capacity for knowledge, people have the tendency to want to use that to attribute spirituality to it, giving it properties that have not been proven with any level of reliable evidence.
P2) This doesn’t solve the problem of determining whether animals have “agency”. Quantum decoherence occurs also in their brains, and I see no reason as to why we should expect an animal to not trigger quantum collapse (even in the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation) unless you somehow make the assumption that in order to be a conscious observer you need to be human, which seems to be kind of an arbitrary line not based in any scientific evidence I can gather.
This also leads to the famous “Schroedinger’s cat”. Many physicists agree that using a measuring device on a particle in superposition causes it to collapse, but because we can only perceive that collapse when we examine the results of the measuring, some actually believe the “superposition” of states also applies to the entire apparatus and even any animal inside of it… it’s kind of ironic that the attempt of Schrödinger to display the absurdity of the situation with his thought experiment has led to many people to use it as an example even though that was completely the opposite of what he intended. However, I can tell you that when I studied this in the University we were given the argument that you cannot extrapolate quantum superposition to the macroscopic level. Thought I have no idea if this view has changed nowadays.
P3) Quantum mechanics applies to all matter, everywhere in the Universe. Not just inside our brain… so what causes quantum decoherence in particles that are at millions of light years from any conscious human entity? are each individual particle a “free will” agent? are there consciousness on things just because they experience quantum superposition? or are you implying that most of the universe is in superposition until a conscious observer looks at it? I guess this would be the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation… sure, though this brings us back to how this is just an interpretation of it. Like you pointed out, there are also other interpretations that contradict that… and I’ll talk next about the study you linked:
hidden variable theories have been deeply challenged by the findings for which three physicists were are awarded a nobel prize last year. Those basically proved that our universe is not locally real.
Here’s an explanation by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (widely considered a “free will denier” :P): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsjgtp9XZxo …she doesn’t seem to believe the results contradict her expectations.
This starts to become complex (if it wasn’t already) since quantum mechanics reinterprets a lot what “observer” means and it’s not exactly clear to me what the experiment implies (I majored in chemistry, not physics) …but as far as I understand, even if the Universe couldn’t be simultaneously “local” and “real” at the quantum level, it could still be “non-locally real”, which is consistent with the quantum non-locality most physicists already assume.
I’m not convinced that the experiment is incompatible with hidden variable theories. But thanks for the interesting take.
if a creature (human or not) is capable of displaying a set of priorities in how it behaves, and we can notice there are rules governing the way they conduct themselves, then that set of priorities and rules is susceptible to be understood as the moral compass that governs its behavior. […] To me, morality is intrinsic to any form of complex natural behavior subjected to evolutionary pressure (whether they have cognitive capacity or not).
Either you need to rethink your definition of moral or you are making a mistake here. (Or I am not understanding you here, which is another possibility of course.)
What is moral for you? What does it require?
I was thinking that for you and me, moral - in a nutshell - means distinguishing actions between “good” and “bad”, where the exact definition of “good” and “bad” can vary as well as the ethical framework which might be built on that. I need to emphasize the “distinguish” part of the last sentence, as this involves active contemplation about possibilities entangled with an evaluation of “good” and “bad”. If I don’t misunderstand you here, you say that any influence which lead to a certain behaviour in an organism can already be seen as moral behaviour. But is it though? Take a plant for example. It will grow towards light. Is this moral behaviour? I say it isn’t. I say it is a reflex. If the plant is not able to reason about whether it might be advantageous or not and thereby “good” or “bad” for its survival to grow towards light and if it does not have the possibility to “decide” against growing towards light, it can not have moral. The plant does not care whether it is “good” or “bad”, because it can not care at all. It just does, behaving purely as a reflex. That this reflex formed at all is the result of an evolutionary process, but it does not enable the plant to make decisions, especially not moral ones.
To me, that’s also a characteristic which distinguishes us humans from most animals or other forms of life. We are able to defy our nature by reasoning about it and making an active decision. That’s a key component necessary for moral agency which virtually all other forms of life on our space potato lack.
Even if there’s no “Universal” morality, there are objective moralities emergent from the way each species has been driven towards seeking some set of stimuli that might be “good” for their own survival. All that we see as “good” is only “good” because it satisfies that evolutionary drive… not because we happen to have a “thought” about it.
There are intrinsic objectives which emerge from the way organisms evolved, plants seek light, animals seek food, and so on, but those are not “moralities”, those are reflexes, instincts, beneficial and detrimental stimuli for the survival and procreation of a species. Yes, our understanding of “good” and “bad” are rooted in an understanding of such beneficial and detrimental stimuli, but to be able to actively, willingly, decide whether we want to confront ourselves or others with a (detrimental) stimuli, is something only we humans as moral agents are capable to do. A cow will feel detrimental stimuli when it is confined on small space, suffering pain from physical damages and will strive to escape from such influences, since those are detrimental stimuli of course. But it can not think about that in such a way that it could make the decision to stay. It lacks the cognitive abilities to do that. We on the other hand can do that. We can expose ourselves to detrimental stimuli willingly. We can expose others to those as well. We can label such actions as “good” or “bad”. Cows can’t. And wolves can’t as well.
Being able to decide, given a set of different actions, is one of the major factors which constitutes a moral agent.
Even if free will was an illusion and our universe was deterministic (which I currently think isn’t the case, as I detailed before), you are still able to think about your actions before you act on them. And not only think in a goal oriented manner about that, but in an ethical manner. Even if the result of such a thought process might be determined, you can still have one. And other life forms don’t. So why shouldn’t you have it? Isn’t your deterministic stance on free will not fallable for nihilism again? Because if it is deterministic anyway, doesn’t that make life and ethics meaningless again, even creating your own purpose and ethics in an amoral meaningless universe? Why do you seek a logical consistent ethical construct at all? I argue that being able to have these thoughts and contemplations, whether their results are predictable or not, you still need to have them to come to a conclusion for your action. We are able to ask such questions. We are able to get the impression of being able to make such decisions.
But if you do something “bad” without “thinking” (like you said wolfs do), that does not make the act any less “bad”. At most, it just shows that your “thinking” wasn’t the cause responsible for your behavior.
If someone is not able to think about their actions, they are not able to do “good” or “bad” things. But that’s just another example for the same concept we are arguing about. To illustrate this, say someone suffers from a brain injury which incapacitaes their higher reasoning. Then they kill someone. Wouldn’t you argue that this is something less “bad” than someone who kills someone else intentionally? I would even say, if their reasoning abilites were really completely turned off, they are “innocent”. They weren’t aware of what they were doing. You can find such interesting examples in criminology, or psychiatry in general, think of lobotomy for example. More common are negligent homicides. Someone does not look on the street while driving, a car crash happens, someone dies. It was “bad” that the driver did not look on the street. But it would’ve been way worse if they really wanted to kill someone. Intentions matter a lot, highlighting the importance of moral agency. However, if the driver in our example had a disease like narcolepsy (and wasn’t aware of that prior to driving) and suddenly fell asleep which then leads to the deadly car crash, then they would be innocent again from my point of view, since they didn’t kill someone willingly, nor was it rooted in negligence. It was simply an unfortunate accident.
It seems to me that’s arbitrary. I don’t see enough reason as to why the line should be drawn on vertebrates.
I understand that. That’s also one of the main reasons why I am not a vegan (yet), even though you find me defending veganism here a lot.
The best counter argument I got so far is rooted in the fact that I am already distinguishing between different forms of life. To illustrate it with an extreme example: I would rather pick a flower than shoot a human. What would you do?
Given such an extreme and hypothetical example if you were given a choice to pick a flower or shoot a human, and you would have to decide for one of these options and don’t have any other. Wouldn’t you also rather pick the flower?
This has significant implications. Probably because of natural instincts, I value the life of humans much higher than the ones of plants. Therefore I have to accept that I already see a hierarchy of life forms with respect to their capacity to suffer. And I don’t want to change my view of that hierachy. Vegans draw the line there, were more complex forms of suffering can begin, which are usually vertebrates. Simpler forms of life, whose capacity to suffer is reduced to mere reflexes (like the light seeking plant), can be ethically consumed. However, some vegans I’ve got to know so far would prefer nutrients snythesized from lifeless matter. Since that is not a realistic option right now, not consuming animal products, and plant- / non-animal-based products instead, is the best they can currently do.
I would prefer such synthesized products as well. But to be honest, I am currently still struggling whether I really want to accept that hierarchy as is and I am questioning myself whether it is “good” or “bad” that I also value the life of humans much higher than others. I need to justify somehow what forms of life I destroy in order to live myself. Veganism seems to provide the best logical construct for that, as I haven’t been in contact with better alternatives yet.
Maybe I interpreted it wrong… but seeing that the meme was not enough of an answer for me (and on top of that, it appealed to emotion), I saw it as an opportunity to engage in some conversation which I hoped would not be unwelcome.
I see. Yeah, I think maybe you interpreted it a bit wrong. However, any civil discussions on that topic - and I take the liberty to say that for the community here - are of course most welcome.
I also need to thank you for our discussion here. Even though we disagree on some key aspects, this motivated me to dive deeper into the topic of “true randomness” and related topics. This has yielded some life changing results for me, even though it led me to a minor existential crisis, haha. :D
I already gave my interpretation before. Instead of repeating myself, l’ll try to respond to your points and try to clear misunderstandings.
I was thinking that for you and me, moral - in a nutshell - means distinguishing actions between “good” and “bad”, where the exact definition of “good” and “bad” can vary as well as the ethical framework which might be built on that.
Yes, this is something I also can agree with.
But I don’t agree that “distinguishing” it requires “active contemplation” to manifest in the behavior of the entity.
You imply that if we don’t “actively contemplate” the act then it cannot be “good” nor “bad”.
This is analogous to the idea of a tree in the forest emits no sound if nobody hears it.
Well, I think we simply disagree on that.
In my interpretation, acts can be good or bad regardless of how you “contemplate” them. Even if it were done without “contemplation” if it results in killing humans then it’ll be “bad” for humanity (and “good” for some other species?). There’s an objective morality emerging from natural selection, though at the same time there’s certain subjectivity when we have different species competing. Some aspects might converge, maybe even some level of “symbiosis” in which we have convergent goals that are “good” for both species, but that doesn’t make it equal.
Take a plant for example. It will grow towards light. Is this moral behavior? I say it isn’t. I say it is a reflex. If the plant is not able to reason about whether it might be advantageous or not and thereby “good” or “bad” for its survival to grow towards light and if it does not have the possibility to “decide” against growing towards light, it can not have moral.
But that’s under your interpretation of morality.
Under mine, it is “good” for the plant to exercise a behavior that helps the survival of its species. My interpretation of morality relates to natural selection.
In fact, even our “higher” level human moral is constructed on “reflexive” instincts (emotions) as a basis, the only difference is that humans react to those reflexes while applying logic and reason in their behavior, because that way we can be more logically consistent at reacting to them. But the actions are ultimately driven by the same type of low-level instincts that drive all living things.
I’m curious: why do you think emotions are the basis on morality?
We agree on that, but I feel our reason as to “why that is” might be different.
How do you know something is “Good”?
Why do you think “treating others like you would want you to be treated”, for example, is “Good”?
My answer would be: because it’s evolutionarily beneficial, it helps our survivability.
Under your view of morality: why does it often makes us “feel good” to act “good”?
For mine: because it’s a reward that increases survival, so it passes natural selection.
But it can not think about that in such a way that it could make the decision to stay. It lacks the cognitive abilities to do that.
Yes. but that’s not a problem in my interpretation. Mine does not require “thinking”, like I explained before.
This is simply a matter of definition, we can repeat it many times but it does not make it more/less true.
you are still able to think about your actions before you act on them. And not only think in a goal oriented manner about that, but in an ethical manner.
Yes. But this is just as true in your view of morality as it is in mine.
The difference is that to me, being “able to think” is an extra, not a requirement.
Also, I’d say you still are “goal oriented” when ethics are the goal.
someone suffers from a brain injury which incapacitaes their higher reasoning. Then they kill someone. Wouldn’t you argue that this is something less “bad” than someone who kills someone else intentionally?
The act is still “bad”, because it negatively affects survivability of the species.
Like I said in what you quoted: “it just shows that [this person’s] “thinking” wasn’t the cause responsible for [their] behavior”
So, what the lack of “thinking” changes is the chain of responsibility. The “thinking” of the injured person is NOT responsible of the crime. So their “thinking” should NOT be punished. Instead, other measures should be taken to prevent killings.
That doesn’t mean that the act of killing unintentionally has no moral. The act is still something that we should try to prevent. It’s a “bad” act, so we should try to minimize it. Or do you think we should not and that it’s neither “good” nor “bad”?
One might argue the lack of intentionality might have less/more impact on human survival. So it might be less/more “bad”, but that would still be consistent with my interpretation. I’m not sure it is with yours, since you said that “thinking” the act was a requirement for it to be “good” or “bad”.
I think we have reached some level of understanding on that one.
I agree that human morals place an implicit hierarchy on animals, though I feel it has more to do with which animals are closer to us (and the attempt at measuring their “suffering” only makes sense as a consequence to that, with our concern relating only about forms of “suffering” that are closer to the way we ourselves experience “suffering”… in other words, we project ourselves into other creatures and judge them based on how well that projection maps).
That’s what I meant when I asked if you did find it curious how humans feel more attached to animals the more similar they are to us. Also, the more you get to know/love the animal, the stronger the emotional attachment. Even if there were no “suffering” in their death, it would still make us sad. This is why looking at a creature in the eyes and talking to it as if it were a human makes it harder for us to wish for them something that would be “humanly bad”.
In fact, I’d argue humans can even feel attached to inanimate objects sometimes. It’s a known phenomenon called “animistic thinking”, which it’s theorized to be common in babies. And I expect there’s evolutionary reasons as to why it happens too. Perhaps it’s related to how some animal babies will get attached to whichever creature they see first when they get born as if it were their parent (probably it helps their survival), to the point that many caretakers need to use animal-looking “puppets” when caring for the babies destined to be released back to nature. So the babies get attached to the puppet (even if it’s inanimate) and not the human.
Going back to veganism: personally, I find that the strongest case for it is in the defense of our own human interests. Because I do see that Veganism is actually something “good”, under my definition of “good” understood as beneficial for our own survival & natural adaptability.
So personally, I would find a more compelling argument in that direction. Rather than appealing to empathy towards animals. Which to me requires drawing arbitrary lines based on preconceived notions of what “suffering” might be without having a way to determine how strong those “feelings” are in what can only be an anthropocentric analysis that cannot take into account experiences that humans would not be able to experience to begin with, and to which we would be biased towards protecting those who are most similar to us, not those who contribute the most to the sustainability of our ecosystem.
Imho, we should stop breeding animals for human purposes like crazy because that’s gonna destroy our ecosystem. Though I expect this might lead to compromises that don’t match the more extreme vegan ideas. but I’m not convinced that driving veganism to the extreme is something advisable anyway.
Also, note that in some cases this even applies to some plants. The Borneo island is more and more being overrun with palm tree plantations because palm oil makes so much money there… we are removing jungle and more and more ecosystems are being lost, disturbing a balance that is likely to hit us in the face… biodiversity is good for our own adaptability, and I would say that endangering so many species at this rate is gonna hit back to us at some point… it goes against our own interests to exploit nature this badly. And this can only get worse the more “developed” some countries that used to be rich in diversity & natural resources become. You used to be able to get all kinds of relatively rare tropical fruits for cheap in countries like Malaysia, but that’s becoming increasingly harder little by little, as the country “westernizes”.
Out planet is like one of those “ecospheres” that are left alone in the sun within an hermetically closed jar. You can keep it alive and well for a long time if you manage to hit a good balance… but any change that could destabilize it can end up triggering a chain of events that could devastate even the most evolutionary advanced creatures within it.
I also need to thank you for our discussion here. Even though we disagree on some key aspects, this motivated me to dive deeper into the topic of “true randomness” and related topics. This has yielded some life changing results for me, even though it led me to a minor existential crisis, haha. :D
Ow… sorry (I think? :P). And I have to thank you too. I enjoy the conversation very much. It helped put into words some things, do some introspection and look deeper into how I think the world might work, trying to challenge my model of it. You have raised some reasonable points that have made me think deeper into some of its aspects, all the while keeping it very respectful.
Spotted the nihilist.
From experience, I find it hard to argue with nihilists since nothing really has value for them. Although, I have yet to meet a pure nihilist (or amoralist). Fully functioning nihilsts and amoralists don’t exist. So usually it shows that they are not as nihilistic as it first seems. And I suspect you will be no exception.
Technically, and from a natural point of view, you are correct. Suffering is an evolutionary trait. But it has no bigger universal meaning or consequences other than being a stimulus which aids organisms in survival.
You argue (or rather try to show a weakness of an argument) that if all of humanity were commiting suicide, this would be beneficial for other forms of life on this planet. (Or “most” humans, to be technically adequate, since I can imagine that humans are also to some degree important parts of functioning ecosystems.) This seems logical if the only premise is environmental protection and preservation. It’s obvious that this is not the only premise which plays a role here. Vegans (and a lot of non-vegans with a similar mindset in this regard) would like to survive themselves while keeping the harm they inflict to other (somewhat sentient) forms of life as minimal as possible.
What intrigues me is that you are not advocating for sucide. You even emphasize that. Why is that? This implies that you must have some sort of moral concept, which is not rooted in Nihilism. Tell me about it!
That’s the thing about moral and logic: it is impossible to create moral through reason alone, which is equivalent to saying that logic has no moral. You need to start somewhere and accept it as given. This will be the very first premise. Based on that you can reason away and build a logically consistent moral concept.
You may find that Veganism is an ethical framework, which has the strongest logical consistency (at least to my knowledge) if you start with the premises “I want to be alive” and “suffering is bad”.
As this is the very core, we can now discuss whether these premises are something we want to use as our ethical foundation. Of course you can reject it and try to live as an, e.g., amoralist. But even then you would make your decisions based on your individual belief system. And that one will probably have more logic holes than my socks. So saying that Veganism aims at emotional blackmailing is rather the very same cause for the existence of most moral beliefs. This mechanism works for all moral decisions, regardless of the specific philosophical movement. As I said before, you can’t purely “logic” goals and thereby moral into existence.
Once you have this realisation, you’ll usually find that going vegan is the only logically valid step.
You call me nihilist while arguing that I’m likely not really nihilistic. I feel that’s a very fuzzy box you are trying to put me in :P …but you are free to call it whatever you want so long as it’s kept respectful.
The Universe doesn’t have morals. But humans do. And evolution has ingrained a particular set of morals in our brains.
However, in those morals the benefit (you could say “thriving”) of our species is the main theme, and it could not be other way since they emerge from natural selection.
This can be in conflict with the survival of other species too. And I do believe that all creatures with instinct are also moral beings… it’s not that wolves are behaving immorally when they hunt sheep, they are behaving in the most morally correct manner that emerges from their natural selection. Their appetite is more important for the wolf than the sheep’s suffering.
Yes, my point was to show that the topic is not that simple. My first line was: “it depends on you morals”
“Suffering” and “empathy” taken as universal would not work, you’d need to draw the line at some point. So it becomes a question on where you draw the line. You can look into the eyes of a worm, speak to it and treat it like a child that has the same feelings a human would, and you’ll be sad when it dies. But I don’t see how our ability to project empathy towards an animal that has eyes justifies drawing the line there.
Don’t you find it curious that most people only seem to care about an animal when it’s relatively close in mechanism / behavior to a human? …most people don’t have second thoughts when it comes to killing a cockroach, for example. Is the desire to not have insects in the house more important than the insect’s suffering? I suspect the meme wouldn’t cause such an impact if it used that.
If those 2 premises were enough to start with, then it would follow that it’s ok to eat meat (or use animal products) as long as we could be absolutelly sure the animals involved did not “suffer” (and as long as it did not put our own lives in danger, which is, imho, a better point towards going plant-based …but I won’t derail into that).
Then it becomes a matter of accuratelly determining what constitutes “suffering”. Does experiencing suffering require “pain” and a nervous system exactly like ours? Or is it possible that the only reason we experience “pain” through our nervous system is because the way we are programmed makes this the most efficient way for a mechanism of reward-punishment to emerge that is evolutionarily benefitial to our survival?
If other creatures have a different emergent mechanism to signal in their biology what’s hurtful to their survival and morally wrong for them, having a different manifestation of what (I’d argue) could also be categorized as “suffering”, shouldn’t they be included? are we just only caring for the nervous response because that’s one thing we can relate to? are we unfairly discriminating based on how similar is their biology to ours? why?
This is true, but only as the very first initial premise. You NEED logic to isolate what those premises should be (and to be able to extrapolate from those premises) if you actually want to maximize the success rate of the primal evolutionary drive that pushes our human morals.
I’d argue most crimes and acts considered immoral are driven by emotion too. You need logic if you want to form a coherent human moral that can be extrapolated to a higher abstract level. Because using emotion as a basis alone, without logical reasoning, would lead to contradictory and inconsistent results, the morals would be changing based on the circumstances in a way that is not logically sound.
This means that if you manipulate certain circumstances, you can manipulate the moral compass of someone who is driven by emotion and does not use logic. That form of manipulation is what I referred to as “emotional blackmailing”.
Why is the meme asking us to “look in the eye” to the animal? why is it asking us to “tell” it to the animal as if it could understand the words of whichever language we speak?
Because it’s trying to manipulate you into projecting your empathy towards it.
As I read your comment, you approach veganism from a nihilistic perspective, invalidating their belief system since it is driven by emotion. At the same time you seem to have missed that every ethical concept stems from similar emotional processes. I wanted to point out the contradiction you created by that, since there is and was no living “full” nihilist or amoralist (except folks like existential nihilists) who whishes to continue their existence.
In other words: There is no moral without emotion. So critisizing veganism that way you did before, is illogical.
Didn’t you know that - based on our current understanding - virtually all animals besides humans lack the cognitive capacity of moral agency?
In your example, wolves are not able to contemplate their actions the way we do. They don’t have the necessary self-awareness, nor the required brain structure to even have labels such as “good” or “bad” to evaluate and prospect their (possible) actions. Their behaviour is mostly driven by instinct and training or experience. They do not “think” about whether it’s good or bad to kill and eat the sheep, they also don’t “think” that “they” are more important than the sheep. They simply do. They are not able to perform moral reasoning. There is no moral at play here. Moral does not exist for wolves. Only beings which posess moral agency are able to do that.
We - as humans - can evaluate the actions of wolves as morally correct or incorrect, since we are beings with moral agency. But the wolves can’t. They don’t look at other wolves killing sheep and think “oh dude, maybe the sheep wasn’t so happy about that, but it’s okay, since we need to eat”.
So even though your observation is in so far correct as that wolves still have a decision making process, which allows them to hunt their prey if they are hungry, this decision making process is of purely instinctual and not morally aware nature.
I don’t find it curious, no. As you already said this is rooted in similarities of capacity to suffer within us humans and other animals. According to my currenty state of knowledge, a lot of research shows that insects do not feel pain. Although a definitive answer is still out in the open. If I remember it correctly, there are hints that honey bees for example can experience some sort of distress when being smoked, which is why some vegans also do not consume honey. Vegans attribute suffering as something which can (currently) only be experienced by beings with a central nervous system. And that is also nuanced in several degrees. (An example, some vegans eat oysters since those lack a central nervous system.) This is an active interpretation of the term “suffering”, and that makes sense. Why should you want to prevent damage to a being, if it is not able to feel suffering? A passive interpretation of suffering would be the presence of any stimulus which drives an organism to actions which prevent the occurence of such a stimulus. Those stimuli have evolved into incents for increasing the survival chance of an organism and its species. For example, this would also mean that plants are suffering when they don’t maximize their beneficial sunlight exposure, which is why they grow towards light. This is of course one of the factors which drives evolution. However, as you will hopefully agree, there are different levels of suffering. While reactive behaviour of, e.g., oysters or plants are simple and mere reflexes to the environment, more complex organisms like vertebrates are capable of more complex forms of suffering, like pain, fear, stress, etc… Simply put, that’s also where vegans draw the line.
Since you can not make sure that the involved animals do not suffer, this is not okay for vegans. Most vegans also don’t understand “suffering” as an active negative stimulus but also as the lack of positive ones. (Which also holds for what I said in the previous paragraph.) An early end of life, the lack of “true” freedom, i.e., living in the wild as in times before humans domesticated them, the fact that most of the animals, which humans consume, are bred for optimized meat, milk or whatever yield, which decreases their natural lifespan are such lacking positives and also brings along a bunch of negatives like (hurtful) health issues. Those are all the manifestations of suffering that vegans aim to prevent.
I already disambiguated the term “suffering” as a stimulus before and where and why vegans draw a line. So I hope that this will be a sufficient response to your paragraphs which follow the quote from the last one I quoted here.
Yes, of course. Still, these premises all start with emotions. But it seems we agree on that.
I am not sure I completely understand you here. What do you mean by that? Which evolutionary drive’s sucess rate should we want to maximize? And how is this related to the first part of the sentence?
Agreed. To dive deeper: there is no inherent need for consistent results. It’s just that most people like to respect themselves and justify their actions. They don’t want to see themselves in a bad way and therefore naturally strive for morally correct behaviour. If you then explore their moral belief system you often find that it has sometimes more, sometimes less inconsistencies which cause distress for them. They might re-evaluate their stance and correct their belief system, possibly condoning their past behaviour and views. Or they shut down, blocking arguments which might invalidate their position even though logically correct, aka “confirmation bias”.
But I see now how you originally meant your “emotional blackmailing” part. You were mainly criticizing the meme and not veganism as a whole by saying that, correct?
I would still justify such a meme format, since such emotions can be the nudge required to re-evaluate ones values and beliefs. This is why populism works, but also why it is so dangerous. The problem, and I agree with you in that regard, might then become that people don’t spend sufficient cognitive effort for thinking about this criticially enough, such that they could arrive at logically consistent conclusions. In this meme specifically I still see the incentive for that (“should ones own pleasure be evaluated with higher priority than the suffering of animals?”), it’s therefore less emotionally appealing than more radical examples, which leverage as much emotion as possible and almost completely omit the rational part.
Furthermore I feel the need to put this into perspective: This meme was posted to the german vegan community (VeganDE), the title of the post translates to: “Why did you become a vegan?”. It does not seem as if it would aim to appeal to the viewers of this post to change their lifestyle towards veganism, but I see it rather as a conversation starter within a vegan community. Also, from my experience, most vegans I met so far, have thouroughly thought about their choice to go vegan and did not made this choice irrationally based on emotion alone.
Have I missed it? …as I said before, emotions are needed but only as a basis. And I believe you agreed on that.
But my point was that you need logic to have a consistent/sound human moral out of that basis.
Emotions also lead people towards murder, rape, abuse and all sort of things that are considered immoral.
Emotions are just the expression of our animal instincts. I’d argue that even the most complex feelings of love are linked to deep responses to stimuli hardwired in our genes.
Without using logic to distill morality, you’d get an animalistic set of morals as wild and clueless as our emotions often are… the same kind of morality that an animal, like the wolf, would have, because that’s all it has: instint / emotion (I know you disagree with the wolf as a moral being, but I’ll get to that in the next point).
Agency? based on our current understanding, humans might not even have any real “agency” themselves. That’s something that scientists and philosophers have been discussing for ages without reaching any sort of agreement… many think that “free will” is just an illusion.
I feel there’s a fundamental diference in the way we define “Morality”. I’ll try to explain my take on it, which doesn’t involve “agency”:
In my view, if a creature (human or not) is capable of displaying a set of priorities in how it behaves, and we can notice there are rules governing the way they conduct themselves, then that set of priorities and rules is susceptible to be understood as the moral compass that governs its behavior.
To me, morality is intrinsic to any form of complex natural behavior subjected to evolutionary pressure (whether they have cognitive capacity or not). Even if there’s no “Universal” morality, there are objective moralities emergent from the way each species has been driven towards seeking some set of stimuli that might be “good” for their own survival. All that we see as “good” is only “good” because it satisfies that evolutionary drive… not because we happen to have a “thought” about it.
As I said before, in the case of humans we can use logic to test, distill and extrapolate to obtain a higher level and better defined morality. Plus our actions usually have more complex and convoluted causations that require logic.
But if you do something “bad” without “thinking” (like you said wolfs do), that does not make the act any less “bad”. At most, it just shows that your “thinking” wasn’t the cause responsible for your behavior.
I wonder what’s you position about “determinism”. I’m not sure how would you reconcile it with your idea of morality, which seems to require the need for agency.
I don’t believe in free will. But my take on morality does not require it.
It seems to me that’s arbitrary. I don’t see enough reason as to why the line should be drawn on vertebrates.
Equally arbitrary would be to draw it on intelligent beings who’s suffering can be more complex and say anything below is so much less important, that the desires of an intelligent being to marginally improve one tiny aspect of one instant of their intelligent lives takes priority.
I know. It’s kinda extreme, but it’s jut as valid as any other arbitrary line. That’s not a strong case for Veganism.
Of course, defining “intelligence” might be complex. But it was just an example. And it’s a particularly interesting one because you already implied that “virtually all animals besides humans” lack some relatively important cognitive capacities.
Yes. Often with these memes the title is a question that is either answered by the meme, or a follow up from it. So I interpreted it as an answer (ie. the quote in the meme being given as a reason on “why did you become Vegan?”).
Maybe I interpreted it wrong… but seeing that the meme was not enough of an answer for me (and on top of that, it appealed to emotion), I saw it as an opportunity to engage in some conversation which I hoped would not be unwelcome.
It seems my reply got so long that lemmy won’t let me post it completely. So you’ll get it in parts.
Part 1 of 2:
I just wanted to explain why I said, what I said. You questioned Veganisms from a nihilistic perspective in your original comment. And yes, at first it did not become clear what your standpoint with regard to the connection of emotion and ethics is. But since we cleared that up and agree on that we can move on.
You are again attributing moral as something which can exist without the capability of reasoning about it, i.e., purely instinctual and emotionally driven behaviour is already something which you understand as morality. This is a fundamental disagreement we seem to have with regard to the definition of moral. You observed this as well and provided your definition. I will deal with that later.
I say that moral can only be an attribute of a being which is capable of higher reasoning. If a being is not able to even have such labels as “right” or “wrong” and not able to attribute them to its actions, then it can not have moral. A wolf acts instinctively, as I have detailed before. That’s why it’s not a moral agent and can’t act morally “good” or “bad”. Those are labels we put on the wolves since we have moral agency.
The illusion of free will, yes. I am well aware of that. There have been studies which show that we already have a decision for an action before we become aware of it. It makes sense that we could predict the actions of someone before they are becoming aware of it, if we have a detailed view of their neural circuitry. We could simulate the exchange of electrochemical signals, which are again rooted in external and internal inputs, like sensory information. There is a clear cause and effect visible on a macroscopic scale. If we could create a very well controlled environment we could even make some guarantees about our predictions.
(This will now get abstract for a while, but bear with me, you’ll see how this will become relevant.)
However, no environment is currently perfectly controllable. And it is not even possible in theory. Are you familiar with Laplace’s demon? If not, here is a short summary: Laplace’s demon is basically the idea that there could exist a being, which is able to perfectly predict the future state of each and every particle in the whole universe, as well as to determine its past. It is the ultimate culmination of determinism and also illustrates the illusion of free will. Because, if we can simulate the interaction of each and every particle in the whole universe, given the knowledge about their current state, we basically know beforehand what decisions humans will make. If we would construct a machine which resembles Laplace’s demon, then this machine could even be able to predict it’s own predictions, which would lead to an interesting paradox.
But, as far as I know, our current understanding of the universe does not allow Laplace’s demon to exist. One of the major problems is the exchange speed of information. Einstein disullisoned us of that when he found out that there can be nothing faster than the speed of light. This includes the speed of communication. Laplace’s demon can’t exist, because it is not able to know the current state of particles which are lightyears away from it. It can’t even perfectly know the current state of particles which are one centimeter away from it, since it only sees a shadow of it, which was casted a very brief moment before.
There are more reasons why such a demon can not exist. For the sake of not making my response excessively longer than it already is, I omit them, but I will highlight another important one:
True randomness. Given our current knowledge, true randomness exists on a quantum level. If you would like to know more about that, I refer you to Heisenberg’s unvertainty principle. Even though deterministic interpretations like the de Broglie-Bohm theory exist (or the Many-Worlds-Interpretation, which I reject for now for a lack of evidence of parallel universes), those and other hidden variable theories have been deeply challenged by the findings for which three physicists were are awarded a nobel prize last year. Those basically proved that our universe is not locally real. (Here are two resources to wrap your head around it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txlCvCSefYQ )
So either it is real or local or none of them, but it can’t be both, if I understood that correctly. This again underlines the existence of true randomness on a quantum scale.
If we have true randomness, our universe is not deterministic, at least not entirely, meaning it is probalistic. Even though we have a certain degree of determinism on a macroscopic scale (which under the hood is just a manifesation of a high probability in that view), those processes are influenced by quantum processes which are random in nature.
Consequently, Laplace’s demon can’t exist. Furthermore, the existence of true randomness, allows room for the existence of free will. Even though “free will” is the high level product of some neural circuitry, it is very difficult to perfectly predict this product as this neural circuitry in turn is again influenced by truly random processes. That doesn’t mean we can make high probability predictions, but we can’t do it perfectly. And that’s the critical point here.
If we have free will, this supports that we have moral agency. We can evaluate whether some action is right or wrong. We can differentiate between good and bad and act to that accordingly.
Part 1: Free will
Laplace’s demon is but a “thought experiment”, you could make the assumption that it knows everything without even needing to measure it. In fact, it wouldn’t even need to interact with our Universe. What it would need is to know its initial state (big bang or whatever) and extrapolate from it (using the right maths/rules) what the position of the stars are now without violating the speed of light. Note that “to know” is not the same as “to measure”.
It might be that this demon can’t exist, but that itself doesn’t disprove determinism, it depends on what reason is given.
Let’s assume for a moment that one of the non-deterministic quantum interpretations is correct and the collapse is random. I see some problems with this (I’ll enumerate them for better reference):
P1) If it’s “truely random” then it follows it cannot be controlled or predicted. This means you wouldn’t be able to use “free will” or any external force to influence it, because that would make them no longer “truely random”. Making the jump to assume that they are somehow “determined” by minds would be a claim with no evidence whatsoever. And in fact there have been experiments in this regard (people trying to consciously look into the double slit experiment to cause a tilting of the result) without finding any repeatable evidence showing the mental state of the observers influence the state of quantum particles.
Quantum mechanics exposes a gap in our capacity of knowledge, but to me, using this to explain consciousness and “free will” feels a bit like the “God of the gaps”. As soon as we reach a point in science that reveals the limits of our capacity for knowledge, people have the tendency to want to use that to attribute spirituality to it, giving it properties that have not been proven with any level of reliable evidence.
P2) This doesn’t solve the problem of determining whether animals have “agency”. Quantum decoherence occurs also in their brains, and I see no reason as to why we should expect an animal to not trigger quantum collapse (even in the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation) unless you somehow make the assumption that in order to be a conscious observer you need to be human, which seems to be kind of an arbitrary line not based in any scientific evidence I can gather.
This also leads to the famous “Schroedinger’s cat”. Many physicists agree that using a measuring device on a particle in superposition causes it to collapse, but because we can only perceive that collapse when we examine the results of the measuring, some actually believe the “superposition” of states also applies to the entire apparatus and even any animal inside of it… it’s kind of ironic that the attempt of Schrödinger to display the absurdity of the situation with his thought experiment has led to many people to use it as an example even though that was completely the opposite of what he intended. However, I can tell you that when I studied this in the University we were given the argument that you cannot extrapolate quantum superposition to the macroscopic level. Thought I have no idea if this view has changed nowadays.
P3) Quantum mechanics applies to all matter, everywhere in the Universe. Not just inside our brain… so what causes quantum decoherence in particles that are at millions of light years from any conscious human entity? are each individual particle a “free will” agent? are there consciousness on things just because they experience quantum superposition? or are you implying that most of the universe is in superposition until a conscious observer looks at it? I guess this would be the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation… sure, though this brings us back to how this is just an interpretation of it. Like you pointed out, there are also other interpretations that contradict that… and I’ll talk next about the study you linked:
Here’s an explanation by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (widely considered a “free will denier” :P): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsjgtp9XZxo …she doesn’t seem to believe the results contradict her expectations.
This starts to become complex (if it wasn’t already) since quantum mechanics reinterprets a lot what “observer” means and it’s not exactly clear to me what the experiment implies (I majored in chemistry, not physics) …but as far as I understand, even if the Universe couldn’t be simultaneously “local” and “real” at the quantum level, it could still be “non-locally real”, which is consistent with the quantum non-locality most physicists already assume.
I’m not convinced that the experiment is incompatible with hidden variable theories. But thanks for the interesting take.
Part 2 of 2:
Coming to your definition of moral agency:
Either you need to rethink your definition of moral or you are making a mistake here. (Or I am not understanding you here, which is another possibility of course.)
What is moral for you? What does it require?
I was thinking that for you and me, moral - in a nutshell - means distinguishing actions between “good” and “bad”, where the exact definition of “good” and “bad” can vary as well as the ethical framework which might be built on that. I need to emphasize the “distinguish” part of the last sentence, as this involves active contemplation about possibilities entangled with an evaluation of “good” and “bad”. If I don’t misunderstand you here, you say that any influence which lead to a certain behaviour in an organism can already be seen as moral behaviour. But is it though? Take a plant for example. It will grow towards light. Is this moral behaviour? I say it isn’t. I say it is a reflex. If the plant is not able to reason about whether it might be advantageous or not and thereby “good” or “bad” for its survival to grow towards light and if it does not have the possibility to “decide” against growing towards light, it can not have moral. The plant does not care whether it is “good” or “bad”, because it can not care at all. It just does, behaving purely as a reflex. That this reflex formed at all is the result of an evolutionary process, but it does not enable the plant to make decisions, especially not moral ones.
To me, that’s also a characteristic which distinguishes us humans from most animals or other forms of life. We are able to defy our nature by reasoning about it and making an active decision. That’s a key component necessary for moral agency which virtually all other forms of life on our space potato lack.
There are intrinsic objectives which emerge from the way organisms evolved, plants seek light, animals seek food, and so on, but those are not “moralities”, those are reflexes, instincts, beneficial and detrimental stimuli for the survival and procreation of a species. Yes, our understanding of “good” and “bad” are rooted in an understanding of such beneficial and detrimental stimuli, but to be able to actively, willingly, decide whether we want to confront ourselves or others with a (detrimental) stimuli, is something only we humans as moral agents are capable to do. A cow will feel detrimental stimuli when it is confined on small space, suffering pain from physical damages and will strive to escape from such influences, since those are detrimental stimuli of course. But it can not think about that in such a way that it could make the decision to stay. It lacks the cognitive abilities to do that. We on the other hand can do that. We can expose ourselves to detrimental stimuli willingly. We can expose others to those as well. We can label such actions as “good” or “bad”. Cows can’t. And wolves can’t as well.
Being able to decide, given a set of different actions, is one of the major factors which constitutes a moral agent.
Even if free will was an illusion and our universe was deterministic (which I currently think isn’t the case, as I detailed before), you are still able to think about your actions before you act on them. And not only think in a goal oriented manner about that, but in an ethical manner. Even if the result of such a thought process might be determined, you can still have one. And other life forms don’t. So why shouldn’t you have it? Isn’t your deterministic stance on free will not fallable for nihilism again? Because if it is deterministic anyway, doesn’t that make life and ethics meaningless again, even creating your own purpose and ethics in an amoral meaningless universe? Why do you seek a logical consistent ethical construct at all? I argue that being able to have these thoughts and contemplations, whether their results are predictable or not, you still need to have them to come to a conclusion for your action. We are able to ask such questions. We are able to get the impression of being able to make such decisions.
If someone is not able to think about their actions, they are not able to do “good” or “bad” things. But that’s just another example for the same concept we are arguing about. To illustrate this, say someone suffers from a brain injury which incapacitaes their higher reasoning. Then they kill someone. Wouldn’t you argue that this is something less “bad” than someone who kills someone else intentionally? I would even say, if their reasoning abilites were really completely turned off, they are “innocent”. They weren’t aware of what they were doing. You can find such interesting examples in criminology, or psychiatry in general, think of lobotomy for example. More common are negligent homicides. Someone does not look on the street while driving, a car crash happens, someone dies. It was “bad” that the driver did not look on the street. But it would’ve been way worse if they really wanted to kill someone. Intentions matter a lot, highlighting the importance of moral agency. However, if the driver in our example had a disease like narcolepsy (and wasn’t aware of that prior to driving) and suddenly fell asleep which then leads to the deadly car crash, then they would be innocent again from my point of view, since they didn’t kill someone willingly, nor was it rooted in negligence. It was simply an unfortunate accident.
I understand that. That’s also one of the main reasons why I am not a vegan (yet), even though you find me defending veganism here a lot. The best counter argument I got so far is rooted in the fact that I am already distinguishing between different forms of life. To illustrate it with an extreme example: I would rather pick a flower than shoot a human. What would you do?
Given such an extreme and hypothetical example if you were given a choice to pick a flower or shoot a human, and you would have to decide for one of these options and don’t have any other. Wouldn’t you also rather pick the flower?
This has significant implications. Probably because of natural instincts, I value the life of humans much higher than the ones of plants. Therefore I have to accept that I already see a hierarchy of life forms with respect to their capacity to suffer. And I don’t want to change my view of that hierachy. Vegans draw the line there, were more complex forms of suffering can begin, which are usually vertebrates. Simpler forms of life, whose capacity to suffer is reduced to mere reflexes (like the light seeking plant), can be ethically consumed. However, some vegans I’ve got to know so far would prefer nutrients snythesized from lifeless matter. Since that is not a realistic option right now, not consuming animal products, and plant- / non-animal-based products instead, is the best they can currently do.
I would prefer such synthesized products as well. But to be honest, I am currently still struggling whether I really want to accept that hierarchy as is and I am questioning myself whether it is “good” or “bad” that I also value the life of humans much higher than others. I need to justify somehow what forms of life I destroy in order to live myself. Veganism seems to provide the best logical construct for that, as I haven’t been in contact with better alternatives yet.
I see. Yeah, I think maybe you interpreted it a bit wrong. However, any civil discussions on that topic - and I take the liberty to say that for the community here - are of course most welcome.
I also need to thank you for our discussion here. Even though we disagree on some key aspects, this motivated me to dive deeper into the topic of “true randomness” and related topics. This has yielded some life changing results for me, even though it led me to a minor existential crisis, haha. :D
Part 2: Morality
I already gave my interpretation before. Instead of repeating myself, l’ll try to respond to your points and try to clear misunderstandings.
Yes, this is something I also can agree with.
But I don’t agree that “distinguishing” it requires “active contemplation” to manifest in the behavior of the entity.
You imply that if we don’t “actively contemplate” the act then it cannot be “good” nor “bad”.
This is analogous to the idea of a tree in the forest emits no sound if nobody hears it.
Well, I think we simply disagree on that.
In my interpretation, acts can be good or bad regardless of how you “contemplate” them. Even if it were done without “contemplation” if it results in killing humans then it’ll be “bad” for humanity (and “good” for some other species?). There’s an objective morality emerging from natural selection, though at the same time there’s certain subjectivity when we have different species competing. Some aspects might converge, maybe even some level of “symbiosis” in which we have convergent goals that are “good” for both species, but that doesn’t make it equal.
But that’s under your interpretation of morality.
Under mine, it is “good” for the plant to exercise a behavior that helps the survival of its species. My interpretation of morality relates to natural selection.
In fact, even our “higher” level human moral is constructed on “reflexive” instincts (emotions) as a basis, the only difference is that humans react to those reflexes while applying logic and reason in their behavior, because that way we can be more logically consistent at reacting to them. But the actions are ultimately driven by the same type of low-level instincts that drive all living things.
I’m curious: why do you think emotions are the basis on morality?
We agree on that, but I feel our reason as to “why that is” might be different.
How do you know something is “Good”?
Why do you think “treating others like you would want you to be treated”, for example, is “Good”?
My answer would be: because it’s evolutionarily beneficial, it helps our survivability.
Under your view of morality: why does it often makes us “feel good” to act “good”?
For mine: because it’s a reward that increases survival, so it passes natural selection.
Yes. but that’s not a problem in my interpretation. Mine does not require “thinking”, like I explained before.
This is simply a matter of definition, we can repeat it many times but it does not make it more/less true.
Yes. But this is just as true in your view of morality as it is in mine.
The difference is that to me, being “able to think” is an extra, not a requirement.
Also, I’d say you still are “goal oriented” when ethics are the goal.
The act is still “bad”, because it negatively affects survivability of the species.
Like I said in what you quoted: “it just shows that [this person’s] “thinking” wasn’t the cause responsible for [their] behavior”
So, what the lack of “thinking” changes is the chain of responsibility. The “thinking” of the injured person is NOT responsible of the crime. So their “thinking” should NOT be punished. Instead, other measures should be taken to prevent killings.
That doesn’t mean that the act of killing unintentionally has no moral. The act is still something that we should try to prevent. It’s a “bad” act, so we should try to minimize it. Or do you think we should not and that it’s neither “good” nor “bad”?
One might argue the lack of intentionality might have less/more impact on human survival. So it might be less/more “bad”, but that would still be consistent with my interpretation. I’m not sure it is with yours, since you said that “thinking” the act was a requirement for it to be “good” or “bad”.
Part 3: Veganism
I think we have reached some level of understanding on that one.
I agree that human morals place an implicit hierarchy on animals, though I feel it has more to do with which animals are closer to us (and the attempt at measuring their “suffering” only makes sense as a consequence to that, with our concern relating only about forms of “suffering” that are closer to the way we ourselves experience “suffering”… in other words, we project ourselves into other creatures and judge them based on how well that projection maps).
That’s what I meant when I asked if you did find it curious how humans feel more attached to animals the more similar they are to us. Also, the more you get to know/love the animal, the stronger the emotional attachment. Even if there were no “suffering” in their death, it would still make us sad. This is why looking at a creature in the eyes and talking to it as if it were a human makes it harder for us to wish for them something that would be “humanly bad”.
In fact, I’d argue humans can even feel attached to inanimate objects sometimes. It’s a known phenomenon called “animistic thinking”, which it’s theorized to be common in babies. And I expect there’s evolutionary reasons as to why it happens too. Perhaps it’s related to how some animal babies will get attached to whichever creature they see first when they get born as if it were their parent (probably it helps their survival), to the point that many caretakers need to use animal-looking “puppets” when caring for the babies destined to be released back to nature. So the babies get attached to the puppet (even if it’s inanimate) and not the human.
Going back to veganism: personally, I find that the strongest case for it is in the defense of our own human interests. Because I do see that Veganism is actually something “good”, under my definition of “good” understood as beneficial for our own survival & natural adaptability.
So personally, I would find a more compelling argument in that direction. Rather than appealing to empathy towards animals. Which to me requires drawing arbitrary lines based on preconceived notions of what “suffering” might be without having a way to determine how strong those “feelings” are in what can only be an anthropocentric analysis that cannot take into account experiences that humans would not be able to experience to begin with, and to which we would be biased towards protecting those who are most similar to us, not those who contribute the most to the sustainability of our ecosystem.
Imho, we should stop breeding animals for human purposes like crazy because that’s gonna destroy our ecosystem. Though I expect this might lead to compromises that don’t match the more extreme vegan ideas. but I’m not convinced that driving veganism to the extreme is something advisable anyway.
Also, note that in some cases this even applies to some plants. The Borneo island is more and more being overrun with palm tree plantations because palm oil makes so much money there… we are removing jungle and more and more ecosystems are being lost, disturbing a balance that is likely to hit us in the face… biodiversity is good for our own adaptability, and I would say that endangering so many species at this rate is gonna hit back to us at some point… it goes against our own interests to exploit nature this badly. And this can only get worse the more “developed” some countries that used to be rich in diversity & natural resources become. You used to be able to get all kinds of relatively rare tropical fruits for cheap in countries like Malaysia, but that’s becoming increasingly harder little by little, as the country “westernizes”.
Out planet is like one of those “ecospheres” that are left alone in the sun within an hermetically closed jar. You can keep it alive and well for a long time if you manage to hit a good balance… but any change that could destabilize it can end up triggering a chain of events that could devastate even the most evolutionary advanced creatures within it.
Ow… sorry (I think? :P). And I have to thank you too. I enjoy the conversation very much. It helped put into words some things, do some introspection and look deeper into how I think the world might work, trying to challenge my model of it. You have raised some reasonable points that have made me think deeper into some of its aspects, all the while keeping it very respectful.