Hanarchy Montanarchy wrote:JohnDonne wrote:Hanarchy Montanarchy wrote:
The only people who are using cruelty towards animals as a justification of cruelty towards humans are the people who are claiming there is no moral distinction between them. The rest of us humans are not so morally confused.
Now:
"but if you argue that exalting consciousness in general would degrade ethics, that's a pretty objective claim"
is followed by:
"For man is an animal, if animals are worthless, it makes it that much easier to decide that man is worthless. "
I am arguing that man is more than just an animal, and thus worthy of special consideration. It is your arguments in support of veganism that show a deterioration of empathy for humans by placing them in the same moral sphere as beasts, and making it easy for you to consider them worthless. I suffer from no such conflict. Humans are an animal, but they are an animal with unique moral attributes that put them into the moral sphere. Easily done.
I do not need to provide an 'objective basis for ethics' to argue that, deontologically speaking, humans are both the source and sensible object of moral obligation. Nor am I asking you to provide an 'objective basis for ethics' to justify the guilt you feel over consuming animals.
Clearly, believing in the 'objectivity' of your position is important to you, but you seem to rely exclusively on a version of absolute moral parity for that objectivity. Prove that parity is an objective condition for morality without resorting to a tautology, and perhaps you will have a point. Until then, we can just dispense with the pretense to objectivity when we talk about ethics.
Empathy and compassion are ethical motivations for action. Trying to carve out an objective reason for that empathy is, morally speaking, neutral, and pointless. Trying to compel me to act a certain way on account of your feelings of empathy towards animals is selfish, autocratic morality policing, and, I would argue, unethical.
If consequences are what matter, and not motivations, then you can only ever judge the morality of an action after the fact (and then, really, what is the point of establishing an ethical framework at all), and, furthermore, you can justify any depraved action as long as you can reasonably claim the results will be worth it. This is, in my opinion, a terrible basis for ethics and morality, and certainly not more objective or consistent than idealism or virtue ethics.
By way of a tl:dr:
If we agree that empathy is important to virtue and morality, animals are out of the equation, since you can not understand what it feels like to be a non-human animal. You can pretend you do by anthropomorphising them, but that is it.
"Humans are more than an animal because of unique moral attributes that put them into a moral sphere."
"Humans are both source and sensible object of moral obligation."
Okay, that's kind of like my argument, the one you called a tautology, you know when I essentially said self-valuing consciousness is both the source and sensible object of ethical value. And since we can dispense with the pretense to objectivity in talking about ethics...
Your basis for human value is no less tautological, and seems to be a differently worded version of my basis for sentience value. If you agree with laws coercing humans to respect humans because they're ethically valuable according to your tautology, then you can't be against laws that I propose for humans to respect sentience when it's using basically the exact same tautological proof. So what are you trying to pull here?
And I'm pretty sure I never said or implied that I was a consequentialist.
As for the last bit about empathy, if we were to agree empathy is important to virtue and morality the rest of the statement still doesn't follow, anymore than to say to say women are excluded from male ethics because men can never understand what it's like to be a woman.
The fact that humans are capable of comprehending and being concerned with morality puts them in the moral sphere. We only know this is true about humans. This is a descriptive statement, not a normative one.
We already agreed that any conscious being values itself, but it is not self-valuing that makes humans capable of comprehending morality, it is valuing something other than self, like virtue. This is one major difference in out arguments. One might even describe it as one of the main features and definitions of ethical behavior, and also descriptive rather than normative.
And I don't claim objectivity when I say that humans are the source and sensible object of moral obligation. I specifically make that as a claim about ethical deontology. I am arguing that this is a superior rule because it doesn't lead me into the moral absurdities that seem to attend valuing animals as much as humans, like forcibly sterilizing humans for their own good because I fail to recognize that human agency is sufficiently different from animal agency. I don't claim to know the basis for human value, I am claiming that moral rules are only relevant to humans because only humans can comprehend them.
When did I suggest laws coercing humans to respect humans because they're ethically valuable? We can talk about rules in moral deontology without talking about civics. The only time I mentioned using the law to coerce people is when Monte asked me about bear baiting, and I said I would be comfortable with democratically deciding what laws should apply to the industry. This a civic consideration, not an ethical one.
You implied you were a consequentialist when you asked me why ethics matter at all if I think motivations are more important than consequences, and when you justified forcibly sterilizing humans if the consequences of not doing so were sufficiently dire. And when you said you would suspend your moral condemnation of eating meat if it was deemed necessary for survival. Basically almost every moral argument you have made that isn't explicitly a tautology.
Early on I told you your argument looked like a tautology, and you agreed, and we moved on. If you think you can make an argument for parity being the objective source of morality that isn't a tautology, I would still be interested to hear it.
This: "women are excluded from male ethics because men can never understand what it's like to be a woman" is what some contemporary progressives argue, and, interestingly, what irredeemable chauvinists seem to believe, but I think it is absolutely ridiculous to claim that the difference between men and women is the same as that between men and beasts. As a man and a humanist, I am reasonably certain that women are still capable of moral comprehension, so my deontological claims still apply to them. But then, I don't have quite the low opinion of the fairer sex that is bandied about these parts... I am surprised to see you reduce woman to the status of animals, but I guess I should have expected it, you are a vegan, after all, with no special regard for humanity.
When defining the essence of something like ethics there's only so far in a chain of logic one can go before the terms become tautological.
So your ethics rests on the proposition that animals do not have the ability to understand moral obligation, and because of this there is no obligation for humans to treat them ethically, but you say humans can understand moral obligation and so there is obligation to treat them ethically. Okay. It would then stand to reason that a human without the cognitive ability to understand moral obligation would thus be on the same level as any animal that doesn't understand moral obligation, and any animal that demonstrates moral obligation would be on the level of a human.
Thankfully this is not society's standard for ethical value but I want to see how committed you are to this principle.
So if this isn't just a typical double standard argument, are you prepared to justify infanticide, or the murder of cognitively impaired humans, the severely retarded, or insane people, or psychopaths for nothing more than their apparent lack of understanding of moral obligation? Since your rule is partly a way to avoid your preconcluded "moral absurdities" that my rule supposedly creates, I'm curious as to your answer.
It becomes a civic a question when you and other people say that I'm imposing my beliefs on others in an immoral manner. This implies that I have some kind of legislative intent behind my arguments, which in fact I do, but to call any proposed law "forcing ones beliefs" on others is stupid. My point is the double standard hypocrisy, in that they will support legislation when
they have a moral belief, such as the belief in human ethical value.
Are you saying you don't support laws against rape and murder, that even though you value humans as the only things worth having moral obligations for, you are against legislation which enforces those obligations? It would seem strange if you don't.
I don't have to come up with an argument for animals that doesn't at some point rest on a tautology until your argument for humans ceases to be one. Because until then, inasmuch as your argument that humans are valuable is true, my arguments that animals are valuable is also true, which has always been my point.
For your last point, it may be ridiculous to claim that men and women are as different from each other as beasts and men, but your claim that empathizing with animals is at best an imaginative leap and therefore animals don't need to be ethically considered is equally ridiculous, when all of empathy is a leap. Who are you to say I can put myself into an empathetic position of a stranger more than with my cat?
