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We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
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2018-06-28 at 6:34 PM UTC
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2018-06-28 at 6:41 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe Ok. I still don't understand what that has to do with morality being relative or objective.
interpretation of morality comes from the same place as any other one of your thoughts or desires; I think he was trying to use that as a parallel to discuss the difference between objectivity and subjectivity
I had to dig too far back to get through all the retarding so I don't know exactly what the original point of contention was -
2018-06-28 at 6:58 PM UTC
Originally posted by aldra I had to dig too far back to get through all the retarding so I don't know exactly what the original point of contention was
dont waste your time.
this whole thread is a matting ground and all its posts are matting call for people with an above average IQs. real or imagined.
this is how ''intellectuals' and their wanna be counterparts look for potential mates.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-06-28 at 7:04 PM UTC
Originally posted by benny vader dont waste your time.
this whole thread is a matting ground and all its posts are matting call for people with an above average IQs. real or imagined.
this is how ''intellectuals' and their wanna be counterparts look for potential mates.
I was actually going to mention that the language lanny and falcor use is difficult to follow for anyone who doesn't get a boner reading philosophy papers, and that it's likely a large part of the conflict here
oh, looks like I just didThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-06-28 at 7:17 PM UTC
Originally posted by aldra interpretation of morality comes from the same place as any other one of your thoughts or desires; I think he was trying to use that as a parallel to discuss the difference between objectivity and subjectivity
I had to dig too far back to get through all the retarding so I don't know exactly what the original point of contention was
Thanks for trying to help but still don't understand... if individuals are "interpreting" morality is that not subjective?
If one person interprets a behavior as moral and another person interprets the same behavior as immoral... to me, that means morality is obviously relative. It's all in an individual's mind. To assume morality is objective must mean that one of those individuals are incorrect in their interpretation. So ... what do we look at to see who is incorrect? What is the objective part of morality Lanny and Falcon are claiming exists?
Do you understand what they are trying to explain to me Aldra? Can you explain it in a way dumb ol' Obbe might understand? -
2018-06-28 at 7:47 PM UTC
Originally posted by Zanick it's because you're so eager to decry ours as faulty, while apparently holding no position of your own regarding how it should work
That's not it.
Obbe's interjection was that morals are irrelevant because they are not objective. By the logic of rejecting everything that is not objective, we will literally reject anything except pure truth claims, and this includes rejecting truth claims that have any subjective components.
Essentially, Obbe is denying anything except pure descriptive claims where all elements are having any "relevance". But... relevance to what? The core problem here is, no part of our operation within this universe is exclusively objective. Even a mathematical idea such as a triangle, needs subjective elements to exist beyond a pure, non visual, mathematical idea. There is no conception of the universe outside of pure logos inside your mind, that does not involve some form of subjective framing. We are talking about operating within the universe.
More importantly, any sort of "should" statement is a normative statement. Any suggestion of what one should do or what should happen, any form of inferred cause and effect, essentially comes from subjective judgement. You are literally not capable of talking about the universe without introducing non-objective aspects into the equation. This includes "genetics interacting with the environment".
Somehow Obbe has stapled materialism/material determinism together with objectivity, which is an absurdly childish understanding of either concepts. He does not understand that the statement that "it is irrelevant because it is not objective" literally rejects 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999...% of everything, ever. -
2018-06-28 at 7:57 PM UTCI only said morality is irrelevant. I think it's fine to say "vanilla ice cream is the best". But I don't think saying "we have a moral obligation to not eat meat" is very useful for anything.
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2018-06-28 at 7:58 PM UTC
Originally posted by aldra I was actually going to mention that the language lanny and falcor use is difficult to follow for anyone who doesn't get a boner reading philosophy papers, and that it's likely a large part of the conflict here
Kind of a dumb way to frame it when we're literally in a thread discussing philosophy, objectivity and formal logic.
What Obbe is doing is literally like if someone rolled up to the weapons forum acting like they were interested in or knew a lot about weapons, then insisted on talking about things like how to put a semi automatic extended 5.56 clip into their assault heckler and glock UMP90 while simultaneously acting like what he was saying made absolute sense and kept avoiding basic and reasonable requests/questions, such as "show me any evidence for the existence of a company called Heckler & Glock" or "what do you think semi automatic means?"
The conflict is that Obbe is a dumbass and would rather be an ignorant fuckwit than educate himself on the subject, and still claims that he is in fact interested in the subject. It is borderline trolling, except he isn't doing intentionally, it is literally just an otherwise pointless conversational hole that I entertain purely to illustrate how entertainingly silly he is. -
2018-06-28 at 8:02 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe I only said morality is irrelevant
Why would only morality be irrelevant? You are literally making a logically incoherent statement here.
You gave subjectivity as a sole and direct reason for why morality is irrelevant (irrelevant to what?). If subjectivity makes morality irrelevant, why doesn't it make anything else irrelevant? -
2018-06-28 at 8:09 PM UTC
Originally posted by Captain Why would only morality be irrelevant? You are literally making a logically incoherent statement here.
You gave subjectivity as a sole and direct reason for why morality is irrelevant (irrelevant to what?). If subjectivity makes morality irrelevant, why doesn't it make anything else irrelevant?
Because if morality is subjective nobody necessarily agrees with any one individuals preferences, so to say "you have a moral obligation" is like me saying you have an obligation to love vanilla ice cream because it's my favorite. -
2018-06-28 at 8:35 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe if individuals are "interpreting" morality is that not subjective?
Why would that make it irrelevant? You're not making any A/B conection to why subjectivity makes morality "irrelevant" (to what?)If one person interprets a behavior as moral and another person interprets the same behavior as immoral… to me, that means morality is obviously relative. It's all in an individual's mind.
If one person interprets 1+1 as 3, we call that person "wrong". I'm not even necessarily even asking you to accept any objective basis for morality in this particular sentence, you're just simply failing to follow through on your opinions rationally.To assume morality is objective must mean that one of those individuals are incorrect in their interpretation.
I mean no, not at all. We have already addressed this. Morality has nothing to do with correctness or incorrectness, and neither does objectivity.
To be strict about it, if you want to make a pure logic truth claim, you have to derive it from an analytic statement, for example "a cat is not a dog" (in this case we also need to make subjective judgements because we are considering non objective elements in the statement,for example the definition or identification of what a dog or a cat even is, for example, but we can still make an objective statement about these subjective elements, whatever we may decide them to be) and we can say that that's an analytic truth because if a cat was a dog then it would not be a cat, but would be a dog. It essentially eliminates the possibility of a cat being a dog, because that would be a self contradiction. We essentially construct formal logic from such tautologies. truths that must be exactly the way they are and cannot logically be any other way. To see this very directly applied in mathematics, google Russell's Paradox.
We can judge for consistency though, and consistency is literally how analytic statements (AKA the basis for pure logic, maths etc) work. I don'tSo … what do we look at to see who is incorrect?
Correctness is irrelevant to the discussion of morality.What is the objective part of morality Lanny and Falcon are claiming exists?
Talking about the necessity and "relevance" of normative statements is a whole other discussion that I'm not going to get into with you, I am tired of you failing to do the basic groundwork necessary for your own rational abilities. The universe outside of us is inherently known to us (in every possible way) non-objectively. You cannot represent the concept of the number one in any possible way, even within your own thoughts, without a subjective element to that representation.
However, the cool part is the we can completely "black-box" your entire decision making process and apply it to a completely logical system without a problem, the same way we can completely black box environmental influences through controls in any experiment, or the same way we don't really need to have a discussion about the definition of a cat or a dog: we could be trying to discuss the difference between an apple and a ballsack, jam and jelly, a goat or a ram, it is literally irrelevant, you can still accept the logical structure that A=A and A!=B and apply it to these elements.
I don't need to tell you the definition of every individual case. I am giving you an objective and logically derived system that you can plug your subjective situation and all the relevant information into, and have it poop out the same output if the input is the same, the same way a math equation can. You can arrive at the same conclusion as many times as you want, until the information changes. -
2018-06-28 at 9:05 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe Because if morality is subjective nobody necessarily agrees with any one individuals preferences
You don't need to agree on anything in my moral system, you just need to be able to justify what you do or why you shouldn't have it done to you, and if you cannot do so, then you "should" (moral claim) not do it, because for whatever reason you've decide to listen to your "wants" and all of that, you judge that thing to be "bad" and so you shouldn't do it, and if someone tries to do something to you that you would not do to someone else and do not want to have done to you, my moral system allows you to remain perfectly morally consistent in defending your own right to not have done something to you. You can use this prescriptively to give you a prescription for action despite what you might or might not "want" impulsively, and you can use whatever basis you damn well please for the information that you plug into it.
It is a moral system. It is consistent. It is derived from pure logic. The elements you plug in can be as subjective for either of you as you want, you don't have to agree, you just need to be able to be able to justify it to yourself by any means you please. You don't need to worry about agreeing to anything, you just need to be aware that you're not special, and any justification that you can use, so too can anyone else. It works itself out no matter what.so to say "you have a moral obligation" is like me saying you have an obligation to love vanilla ice cream because it's my favorite.
I have derived my system for pure logic.
In my system, you have a moral obligation to not do anything you wouldn't want done to yourself, because you don't have any rational justification for why someone else shouldn't do it to you, if you are willing to do it to someone else. You are the one judging that thing to be a negative, you don't want to have it done to you by someone more powerful than you, so purely on the basis of your self, you can say that someone more powerful than you doing that thing to you is bad, undesirable, or something that you would want done to yourself is good. You're making that judgement, and it doesn't really matter how.
If your justification is simply the power/ability to actualize your desire, then your concession is that someone with more power than you is not only able to do the same to you, but also justified in doing the same to you. To say otherwise would be a contradiction.
If an insane psycho now says that I "want" to kill people, but doesn't want to be killed himself, he has no justification for why he should be allowed to do so and not anyone else. If his justification is that he has the power to do it, then he accepts that someone like the police would also be justified in hunting him down and doing the same to him.
I don't need to know your subjective standpoints, you can plug it into my basis for decision making, and you can generate what you "should" do based on what you find justifiable or good or bad, and you don't need to worry about making the wrong choices, if you make a bad enough one then society will attempt to remove you by other agents wh oact on roughly the same principle. -
2018-06-28 at 9:53 PM UTCI know you're trying Falcon.
I still don't understand.
How am I morally obligated to not eat meat? I feel no such obligation exists. -
2018-06-28 at 10:22 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe How am I morally obligated to not eat meat? I feel no such obligation exists.
Whether or not you feel it doesn't matter here, neither does what you feel on this specific issue. It doesn't matter because you don't even know what it means to feel a moral obligation. This entire conversation is meaningless unless you can surmount this particular hurdle.
I'm not necessarily in favour of Zanick's argument in specific, what I am trying to explain to you is how you could feel a moral obligation to do anything, and then you can actually have a rational conversation with Zanick or Lanny.
In my system, you can feel a moral obligation to not eat meat if you believe that your justification for eating meat will somehow be a degradation of your own ethics or rights, or if eating an alternative to meat would somehow lead to a greater expression of your own freedoms.
So for example if you think that the practice of eating meat (or any other relevant activity, maybe driving a gas guzzling truck) will increase the chances of someone being flooded, and you do not want others' to raise your own chances of being flooded any higher than they are through their meat eating (or other activity), you have created a moral obligation to not eat meat, because if everyone ate meat and used the justification that they'll do it because they can and because it's tasty, like you do, then your chances of being flooded go up, and you have now hurt your own interests if your behaviour was generalized. You've made that determination of bad and good, but you've made it through consistency and self interest.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-06-28 at 10:32 PM UTCnigger
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2018-06-28 at 11:59 PM UTC
Originally posted by Captain Whether or not you feel it doesn't matter here, neither does what you feel on this specific issue. It doesn't matter because you don't even know what it means to feel a moral obligation. This entire conversation is meaningless unless you can surmount this particular hurdle.
I'm not necessarily in favour of Zanick's argument in specific, what I am trying to explain to you is how you could feel a moral obligation to do anything, and then you can actually have a rational conversation with Zanick or Lanny.
In my system, you can feel a moral obligation to not eat meat if you believe that your justification for eating meat will somehow be a degradation of your own ethics or rights, or if eating an alternative to meat would somehow lead to a greater expression of your own freedoms.
So for example if you think that the practice of eating meat (or any other relevant activity, maybe driving a gas guzzling truck) will increase the chances of someone being flooded, and you do not want others' to raise your own chances of being flooded any higher than they are through their meat eating (or other activity), you have created a moral obligation to not eat meat, because if everyone ate meat and used the justification that they'll do it because they can and because it's tasty, like you do, then your chances of being flooded go up, and you have now hurt your own interests if your behaviour was generalized. You've made that determination of bad and good, but you've made it through consistency and self interest.
Why do you assume I don't know how it feels to feel morally obligated? Just because I think morality is relative doesn't mean I don't feel like things are right or wrong. I just don't feel like the things I feel are right or wrong necessarily applies to other people and vice versa. -
2018-06-29 at 12:45 AM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe Why do you assume I don't know how it feels to feel morally obligated? Just because I think morality is relative doesn't mean I don't feel like things are right or wrong. I just don't feel like the things I feel are right or wrong necessarily applies to other people and vice versa.
I never said you don't know how it feels. I said you don't know what it means. Which, from your comments here, is obviously true, because nothing you have said, either as criticism or suggestion, makes coherent sense in the context of morality. -
2018-06-29 at 1:26 AM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe I have not been interested in what you've been saying this entire time. I'm just waiting for Lanny to reply to me.
This was the post last directed at me:
Originally posted by Obbe If you believe that the truth of a statement like "X is immoral" depends on the situation and is not always true, then you seem to believe that morality is relative.
And Captain pretty much covered anything I wanted to say on the subject. When we talk about relativist ethics, we're not talking about an ethics where right action is relative to the state of the world. Almost any realist ethical position holds that right action needs to take the state of the world into account. Like helping people may be generally good, but helping people in the act of murder probably isn't. This is not a problem for almost anyone (a notable exception being Kant, with situations like "killer at the door" mentioned earlier, but even this isn't unresolvable). It's primarily not an issue because the facts of the world are fixed: there is single answer to the question "is <concrete, situated action> ethically acceptable?". The answer may be contingent on the facts of the situation, but there's only one set of facts, so there's one moral status.
The issue happens when we say something like "what's right is what you believe is right" or "what's right is what's best for you", since we often find people believe contrary things to be right and have conflicting interests. If we accept these maxims then we can no longer say "<concrete, situated action> is right" without qualification, and in fact it stops even qualifying as a normative statement per the usual formulation.
Originally posted by ohfralala Meanwhile children everywhere are starving and do not have the luxury of such debates.
We've gone over the third world situation many times in the last one and a half thousand posts. It poses no real issue to ethical vegetarianism. -
2018-06-29 at 1:39 AM UTCThe real question of morality is how does a person without a set of guiding princples attatch himself to a set of guiding princliples? If there are more than one set of princples one can affix to himself, which set shall he choose, and is there only one set that is true, rendereing all other sets false, null, and void, or are there multiple differeing coexistant sets that are mutually exclusive yet all valid?
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2018-06-29 at 1:43 AM UTCWhat is the difference between the views A is A (Aristotle) and A is not not A (Kant)?
