dx1 @ dx1 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Experience, joy, suffering etc. are based in actual physical realities, neurological structure, electrical impulses, neurotransmitters, learning, etc. That's how. It's based on the actual demonstrable fact of animal experience.

Well, choosing an arbitrary ethical system because it happens to jive with your own selfish aims, for all intents and purposes that's basically the same as having no ethical system at all. This is why you get the analogies to things like human slavery, because the same logic was used to arbitrary exclude some from consideration (e.g., supposedly biblically-founded theories that purported to show black people were on a lower plane of existence than white people as ordained by a god). Again, we don't even apply these sort of arbitrary criteria to humans (a person who's in a coma with no end in sight, a person with a severe learning disability...). It's just rolling the dice and creating some arbitrarily high criteria for deciding animals don't deserve rights.

Well, this is the crux of it, isn't it. The principles you establish an ethical system with are indeed arbitrary (not exactly "subjective") but the actual answers you derive from any such system have a remarkable way of showing that basic recognition of rights we afford to humans (FOR SOME REASON) also extend to animals. E.g., right to life, some basic degree of bodily autonomy, consideration of wellbeing, etc. Basically the only way to construct an "ethical system" that actually "justifies" animal agriculture beyond actual life or death scenarios is one that's oriented purely around one individuals' selfish desires (commonly called "evil") or one that just axiomatically presupposes human supremacy. If you base it on something actually reasonable like, beings experiencing joy is an ideal and beings experiencing suffering is to be avoided (to be brief), you rapidly end up with an incongruency between what's right and what's happening in the world today. Even for the purely selfish case, you hit issues with health and the massively negative experience of life without the capacity for empathy. Believe me when I say I've gone over this with a fine tooth comb.

No, I don't. Do you think the behavior of animals justifies human behavior?

Except I didn't even say that.

It's interesting how much worse this works than the Linux model of just having a single continuously updating release and trying to never break compatibility. There's stable releases with distros like Debian and branching major versions (sometimes), but updating to the next version rarely creates an actual nightmare like XP -> 7 or 7 -> 10 might.

The backwards compatibility starts getting unbearable after a while. XP runs like a dream on modern hardware but the fact that everything after ~2014 or so only supports 7+, there's a limit on how mucn you can do with it.

Gave up cheese/milk/eggs ages ago. There isn't a one for one replacement, but pizza is junk food anyway, my diet shifted to replacements that were better for me in the end (and imho tastier). But yeah, the cashew-based stuff is about as fancy as it gets - you can do lasagna etc. with it, pizza just doesn't work perfectly.

The natural lifespan of a cow is ~25 years.

I did not choose one problem to focus on. This whole comment is a big "tu quoque" based on assumptions about me that aren't even true. I buy local food, I get clothes from thrift stores, etc. And I made no claim about "all meat eaters are evil", this is just the classic "take a vegan saying that eating meat is unethical and interpret it as an attack on your character", which is another pattern I've had just about enough of. The question of the ethics of your diet are an objective issue one way or the other, take your pride and your identity politics and get them out of the conversation.

And veganism is not some byproduct of privilege either. Another obnoxious myth. This weird line of reasoning is mostly seen from the US where meat is heavily subsidized and people are out of touch with the actual reality of subsistence living based on farming, in which meat is a very inefficient return on your efforts in terms of calories. People never seem to reconcile claims like these with the knowledge that countries like India have some of the highest vegetarian populations on the planet.

An animal can indicate things to a human, i.e., "I want food", "please scratch me", or "where is my baby that you just took away". They can't sign their name on a legally binding contract but that doesn't mean they're incapable of wanting or not wanting something. There is a connection between the two things, namely that their sentient experience involves wants and non-wants, likes and dislikes, joy and trauma.

JFC, it's one comment, don't reply to it with five other comments. Keep that up and you're getting blocked. 10 replies from you in my inbox just now.

Looking for moral high grounds in arbitrarily divided groups consisting of people with totally heterogenous beliefs is a waste of time in the first place. Better to use of time to identify foul plays/atrocities and identify why they're happening in the first place, then prevent them in the future.

It's incredible how this always goes the same way. Somebody points out the extreme double standard we apply between behavior that would be reprehensible to our species, and that same behavior performed to a different species (that most of us struggle with understanding or having any level of communication with), and without fail, somebody comes along and goes, "you're being misogynistic/racist by demonstrating the similarity between exploitation of animals and the same ways we exploited humans in the past, using the exact same excuses and mentality as we do for animals now!"

Let's try applying the standards of medicine here to insemination of cows. Is it consensual? No. Is it medically necessary? No. Is it necessary to produce a particular consumer good (one that we have other widely available options for)? Yes. Are those your standards for medical ethics? I hope not, because they're probably beneath the standards of the typical human trafficker.

Yeah, it is. Actual industry practice - impregnate cow mechanically without consent, bring baby cow to term, kill majority of baby cows for veal after separation after a few days from birth, repeat after cows stops producing milk, until cow is used up (around 10 years IIRC, a fraction of their normal lifespan) and also killed for meat.

As the saying goes, I don't eat, exploit or sexually abuse humans either. We just rule it out across the board, while you guys don't.

You sure do rationalize the shit out of how we're worse than you because we have stricter/consistent moral standards though! Always some twisted bit of logic to explain that one. You wouldn't really understand unless you've lived through it, but it's a little nasty little bit of discrimination in its own right - we actually sacrifice something to try to do the right thing, and get treated like subhumans for it. Having an actual rational discussion is right out the window because god forbid you engage honestly with a "militant vegan" who's lived through, rejected and moved past the thinking you're still stuck on.

I've read this reply in so many forms over the years, and it absolutely misses the point, every time, without fail.

It's not misogynistic, the point isn't to downgrade human women, it's to point out the horrendous inhuman actions we do to animals and how they absolutely fail the basic moral reasoning we apply to ourselves.

Don't confuse you not being able to obtain consent from them, with them having an inability to not want something. Doors are not sentient, cows are. This speaks to you having no clue what's going on in their heads.

I think it's both. Instead of trying to update the codebase with one new database attributes for each conceivable way to tag content, you simply put in facilities to abstract that - "show only posts with tag foobar", "hide all posts with tag foobar".