Supposing I am a chicken. Certainly, you can choose not to recognize that my life is valuable to myself, but that would be untrue since it is, and thus your ethical considerations would be founded on a false premise.Hanarchy Montanarchy wrote:Since we are dealing with the moral universe of subjective experience, I think it is safe to say that your life is only intrinsically valuable to you. To me, it is merely another extrinsic value.JohnDonne wrote:For some reason my brain got stuck on this one. Anyway, I would say the life being threatened example is not arbitrary because a conscious life is the only source of the concept of value at all, it creates value and it values itself, therefore it is an intrinsic value, whereas something like a diamond is valuable only in relation to other intrinsic values. If you are trying to take away my intrinsic value for an extrinsic value, like my pocket change, or destroying a chicken's intrinsically valuable consciousness for the extrinsic value of cheap protein then that is an uneven bargain and not justifiable.Hanarchy Montanarchy wrote:
It is arbitrary in the sense that you value it a great deal more than I do, as I value my life a great deal more than you do (probably... I don't know you, you might be pathologically empathetic or something).
And I agree, the chicken's bad long division and its nutritional value aren't related. You brought up the idea of killing something for failing to live up to my arbitrary values. I was suggesting harvesting the chicken's nutrients in the pursuit of something I value more than the chicken's life, and suggesting that was morally defensible behavior.
I will give you this: It is defensible for you to kill the chicken because you value its protein more than its life in precisely the manner that it is defensible for me to kill you for the loose change in your pocket because I value that loose change more than your life. That is, not very.
So the real question is, is it actually morally accurate to suggest that a human omnivore in pursuit of animal protein is equivalent to avarice.
For example, if you are starving, is killing me for my pocket change in order to buy vegetables morally equivalent to killing a chicken directly for it's delicious protein? I really don't think it is, because I think I can make a case that humans are superior in morally relevant ways. I would even suggest that a human is so superior, that it is more immoral for you to steal from me without harming me, than it is to kill and eat a chicken.
If you admit that I value my life, but assert that you do not hold it to be valuable to yourself, you've still admitted that my life is of value, at least to me. Your lack of value for my life does not negate the value I have for my own, anymore than non-existence negates existence.
The foundation of any value is the conscious determiner which deems things to matter or not. The chicken valuing its own life is valuing the mechanism by which value is created, a matteringness, so to speak.
Either my life being of value to itself is enough to create an intrinsic value, for moral value is only in relation to consciousness, or there is no intrinsic value. If there is no intrinsic value there is no ethical considerations. But your premise that humans are superior to chickens admits an ethical dimension. So there is intrinsic value and there is ethical considerations. Now your consideration is whether you are justified to kill the chicken for protein. You claim to have the justifications by reason of some measure of superiority which you have yet to outline. I am quite certain the criteria you will choose for judging chicken consciousness as less ethically considerable than human consciousness will amount to a distinction without much difference, but will rather be an exercise in rigging the game to turn up human.
(That last part came off as rude I think, my apologies). I am trying to say, the idea that murder is wrong being cast aside for a moment, the balance being weighed is the chicken's value of it's own life,(if anything like our own, immeasurable) versus ones value for chicken Mcnuggets, which can be confirmed at you local mcdonalds.