I have a friend who makes that exact argument.
Yeah, I've got plenty of friends who take that as gospel. They are some really, really hardcore vegans. Some of them basically work it around to the other side, like Frankists or whatever, they care so much about animals that, since we're all so despicable as humans, they just eat meat and stuff anyway because we're damned and damned utterly.
That has the feel of something Lichtenberg would say, but AFAIK he never says exactly that.
Well, I don't personally subscribe to that view. But these are folx who've spent 20 years fighting animal oppression, and they're often pretty burnt-out.
2: I've made the argument before, on this very blog, that cannibalism is the only truly ethical diet.
Any woman above the age of reason has inevitably sinned, and no fetus has. Therefore...
My kid for real got into a (verbal, but apparently heated) fight with some seven year old vegans when they were doing a "build a city" school project together and she was advocating for a large animal pen so that the residents could eat meat. Sometimes it's just not possible to be more proud.
You realize she's totally going to become a vegan in ten years. Probably a libertarian too.
At the same event where I found out about that incident, I got into a conversation with some randoMom about feral cats and advocated my view, which is that the city should start reducing the population and making it illegal to feed them. I got an "OMG it it literally Hitler" look and a quick excuse me I need to go over there.
11: If you were really ethical, you would have suggested recipes for tastily preparing the feral cats.
I have a half-baked post somewhere that I started writing after yet another "We thought no animals did this defining human thing and then one did! And now we have to redefine humans!" I think that is the dumbest conundrum in the world, that there must be some behavior uniquely human, although it's probably just a journalism gimmick to discuss very advanced behaviors in other species.
I mean, you want something uniquely human? We have Nintendo Playstations and etale cohomology. Done.
In what respect do we "have" etale cohomology?
It is a thing that people write fancy papers about.
I think that is the dumbest conundrum in the world
Some "what if we created robots that are exactly like humans?" stuff seems dumber to me.
The "coho" in "coho salmon" stands for "cohomology".
I suppose I shouldn't put dumb conundrums in a box. There can be many.
Some "what if we created robots that are exactly like humans?" stuff seems dumber to me.
"So", he says, "you have accommodated yourself to the friend, have you? You have learned how to treat him. Your attitude towards him is your attitude towards a 'soul', is it? You hedge his soul, do you?" Then he rips open my shirt and snaps off my chest to reveal (I glance down) some elegant clockwork. You cannot imagine my surprise.—Can I?
I tried to find out how many clicks it would take to get from the "etaie cohomology" Wikipedia article to a Wikipedia article that used terms I could understand that would help explain it but I gave up after a while.
I tried to find out how many clicks it would take to get from the "etaie cohomology" Wikipedia article to a Wikipedia article that used terms I could understand that would help explain it but I gave up after a while.
THREE! THREE CLICKS TO GET FROM THE "ETALE COHOMOLOGY" WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE TO A WIKIPED ARTICLE THAT USED TERMS YOU COULD UNDERSTAND!
I have no idea what etale cohomology is, either, but it was the fanciest math off the top of my head.
10: Becomes a legal ethics professor and writes essays in favor of copylefting everything.
A legal ethics professor at the U of Chicago. Takes up baking as a hobby because kneading, in addition to being great exercise, helps her relax. And besides, yum.
You can't spell "troll" without TRO.
Nah to the OP.
If reason (wha "will"?) is irrelevant, we can still be left as maybe we should, with animal values or the values of animals. They don't deal in universals.
So some animals, some people have value, based largely on affect.
And I just watched Daenerys leave the blood-stained civil war arena of human cruelty and competition, after Drogon had come to save her at the risk of its life and torched her enemies, and fly away (abandoning her allies...fuck it all) on her dragon.
There are also humans with pig hearts and artificial limbs. What percentage of the "being" has to be pure, unadulterated human before it's alright to put it in a stew, flavor concerns aside?
I suppose I shouldn't put dumb conundrums in a box.
But if you did, would they really understand Chinese?
If you're more than 80% pig, I can eat you. Done and done.
The sophisticated accounts of personhood take it for granted that that the possibility of being moral comes with the possibility of being immoral. This has been a basic theological idea since at least Augustine.
Animal rights people in the West are mostly pushing back against the Christian doctrine which equates being biologically human, having a soul, the possibility of sin and the possibility of salvation. So all this stuff has been thoroughly thought through.
10: Becomes the world authority on the collected works of George R. R. Martin.
33: Aren't our genomes at least 80% identical to pig genomes?* So go for it, TRO.
* That's why they call it "long pig," imirite?
What is the evidence that smart animals don't have reason and will? Chimpanzees are certainly capable of basic reasoning. Will is such a squishy thing I can't see how you exclude animals from having it.
Anyway, limit yourself to eating things that are either already dead or are fixing to die on short order like the Jains* and you'll be fine. No need for cannibalism, though if people will their bodies to culinary experimentation (as I would like to do), that would presumably be fine.
*I think the Jains are fixing to die in short order, but that's not the reading I mean.
Wait? There's a tenet of Jainism that says you can eat meat if the animal was really old? That doesn't sound right.
36.1: It depends on the person, but an easy version* is that actual reasoning, as opposed to various kinds of proto-reasoning, requires propositional attitudes. And without a syntax you can't pick them out propositions in a fine-grained enough way to do that to have actual propositional attitudes.** "Will" is trickier because no one uses the word the same way, but usually it means something like 'rational will' at which point it's the same problem.
*Going with Davidson because it's fairly straightforward and also it's the one I know off the bat.
**So, e.g., if a dog chases a squirrel up a tree and then kind of props itself against the base of the tree straining at it they're clearly pursuing something motivated in a certain way, etc. But the desires involved (and especially the intentions involved) have to differ from ours because the dog doesn't have the apparatus to distinguish between a desire to catch the squirrel, a desire to catch the squirrel with its teeth, a desire to catch a small fast moving animal in the tree, a desire to catch a small moving animal, a desire to catch a small tree climbing rabbit***, and so on. You'd think that's all the same thing, but the consequences for what reasons you'd give if someone asked you why you were doing it would vary. So, acting according to reasons requires being able to justify those actions using reasons and reasons come with this fine of a grain and animals don't have the cognitive capacity to capture it.
***being able to be wrong in this way is really important, actually. It's in the general vicinity of stuff like believing "phosphorus is rising in the sky" doesn't entail believing "hesperus is rising in the sky" even though hesperus and phosphorus are the exact same thing (the planet Venus). You can't have that feature without the right kind of cognitive capacity, it's critical in reasoning because of their different implications and the fact that you can know one without knowing the other, therefore....
Aren't our genomes at least 80% identical to pig genomes?* So go for it, TRO.
ISTR being told at university that, because of the Y chromosome, a male human is genetically closer to a male chimpanzee than he is to a female human.
On a very rough basis, you share (in the sense of homology) about 75%-90% of your genes with any other mammal, 50% with any other animal, 25% with a fungus, and 20% with a plant.
37: No, but you can eat stuff like wheat, where the plant is going to die anyway and harvest just speeds the process along. You can't eat potatoes due to it killing the plant, for example. I'm no expert on the restrictions they have, having learned about them only through casual conversations with lapsed Jains, so this may all be bullshit.
the possibility of being moral comes with the possibility of being immoral
Yeah, but that's just one part of the argument I'm talking about. Does anyone invert the usual "and people are the best! which some animals might aspire to" and make it "people are potentially the worst; some of their lives are worth less than other creatures'?"
some of their lives are worth less than other creatures
Peter Singer definitely thinks this. But he bases it on whether or not the people are disabled, not on whether or not they are bad.
38: A standard of rationality that many otherwise normal humans would fail.
The viewpoint I'm waiting for someone to advocate is the one that says "You only count as a rational agent if you are capable of appreciating Quine's thoughts on reference."
I think I've met people with that view, even if it's mostly implicit.
But also sure, there are people who don't have reason in more or less the same way that animals don't have it. That's not too surprising - certainly there's a few years for everyone right at the beginning where it's not there.
Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
45:
Thanks for that; I was guessing a contemporary of Pope, Dryden or Addison, and was off by a century.
I first came across it in a great little Aldous Huxley story, The Bookseller, which is one of my absolute favorite short pieces:
I often think it would be best not to attempt the solution of the problem of life. Living is hard enough without complicating the process bv thinking about it. The wisest thing, perhaps, is to take for granted the "wearisone condition of humanity, born under one law, to another bound," and to leave the matter at that, without an attempt to reconcile the incompatibles.From the same collection as "Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers."