Why should I be a vegan when non-human animals are stupid (incapable of abstract thinking and therefore no capacity for "morality") and ruthless in nature? Even stags (male deer), a herbivore that everyone thinks is so sweet and cuddly, have been documented to occasionally cannibalize other stags after fighting and injuring them to mate with the doe (female deer) standing nearby.
You are not morally superior to me just because you choose to eat a plant instead of killing a cow for meat. Bulls ram the fuck out of each other with their horns, sometimes to death (by bleeding), just so they can impregnate a cow and maintain a piece of their territory because that's all they're programmed to do. The only valid arguments for vegetarianism are environmental and resource-efficiency. If you can't understand that, you've been fed too much Disney propaganda in your childhood.
I agree entirely. There is no reason to go vegan. If you're environmentally and socially conscious in your consumption habits then you're fine. Humanity should move towards a meatless diet in the long term, but not out of a concern for the animals. It simply isn't a sustainable way to live. If everyone ate like this we wouldn't have enough resources in the world to feed them. Still, we ought to maintain good ethical standards in the meat industry. Even if animals are stupid, we shouldn't make them suffer unnecessarily.
There is no moral reason, yes. But the meat industry is still going overboard trying to push farmed meat on people that don't need it. Excessive meat eating is uncessary biologically and directly harmful to the enviroment. Trying to convert moral vegans and vegetarian is retarded even if you think they're wrong.
Anthony Moore
This is how you sound OP.
Luis Nelson
While humans do feel empathy, especially with animals biologically nearest to them, the only materialist reason why we should stop eating them is because its not an efficient energy intake system-wise.
The reason why toddlers shouldn't be killed is because society has a heavy emotional investment in humans. Killing toddlers would hurt society as a whole meaning people would hunt you down to either get you in jail or kill you. Torturing and raping people has the same effect.
William James
Animals are reactionary. Animal gulags when?
Anthony Flores
That's not a reason to go vegan. It's the same line of logic as avoiding participation in whatever miscellaneous exploitative industry. I don't buy nestle or cocacola products because my disgust with their practices far outweighs any minor enjoyment I get from their products. Gross exploitation of humans will always be beyond that of animals to me, but it's not a moral standard I'd expect anyone to follow for fear of shame. If you want to chug that potion of obesity and death, then go the fuck ahead. Capitalism isn't going to collapse by voting with your dollar. The meat industry won't be reduced to the point of drastically lowering green house gasses and poison leeching into the earth that way either.
Jayden Ortiz
Why should I not be a cannibal when humans are stupid. (Morality is a spook you cuck.) Even assholes (male human) tend to cannibalize other males females and infants in desperate times instead of rationing their food intake (as they are incapable of planning in kind without assistance of a computer)
You are not morally superior than me by choosing to eat other animals than humans. Humans kill each other in silly wars of imperialism so they can extract resources from other humans and forcibly starve them, it's just in their self interest. The only arguments against cannibalism is if it is between one of a humans own kind of both ideology and families. If you can't understand that you've been des lies since your childhood. Eat porky chef gang
is it really about "morality"? spooks lmao nerd a much more convincing arguement for veganism is sustainability. Keeping cows, for example for meat is inceredibly uneficient compared to insects, fish or even chickens. You also can't feed 7-8 billion people well with beef or pork, there's literally not enough space for that.
Dylan Baker
You're both retarded. Give animals decent living conditions. That's it. Problem solved.
Andrew Evans
Not a vegan. But what you are saying can be said for retarded folk: they have no capacity for abstract thinking, they have no capacity for this and that. Should we kill all the mentally retarded?
Nicholas Morris
I am really interested how vegans cope with the fact that their food can not be produced without animal sacrifices. Tractors are killing fuckton of small animals such as mice, rabbits, pheasants and so on. Therefore if you want to be really vegan, you have to grow your own food, and never buy anything from store.
Those are just anomalies found within homo sapiens sapiens species. Yet you can't find even rarely cow which would knowingly tend for her own grass, or calculate how much she need to stock for winter.
Eli Brooks
Those are just anomalies found within homo sapiens sapiens species. Yet you can't find even rarely nigger which would knowingly tend for his own shitting and cleaning or calculate, how much he need to stock for winter.
John Brooks
get some fine rabbit meat, dozens of them died for your bread anyway
I stated scientific fact. Vast majority of people are capable of thinking about future and prepare for it based on his personal experiences and so on and on. (You) stated that niggers aren't people, which either should have rendered my argument invalid most likely because "niggs dumb monkeys lel xDDD", or you are simply crawing some black meat.
It is a scientific fact that retards and babies are closer to cows than homo sapiens sapiens. Why would you make an exception for them, but you would happily torture and slaughter cows?
Jayden Hill
If I had cows, they would be living very good life.
because cows and human are different species. Cows can not build civilization. We can.
Brandon Moore
Yes, but neither can retarded humans, yet you turn a blind eye, because they're the same species? How far does this analogy go? We can slaughter X nation, because our nation was better at building civilization? So genociding south and north americans was ok because they were less developed?
Adrian Fisher
If there would exist nation of crab people then yes, I would be for slaughter and subjugation of them. I would even try to eat them, it sounds tasty. Americans, living in south, central or north, are unfortunately homo sapiens sapiens just like me, so no genocide, ok?.
Carter Green
Vegetarian here. I'm not interested in converting you to my diet. It is something I decided on to make peace with myself. Stop behaving like a vegan.
Enjoy your brain melting from kuru and mad cow disease.
Benjamin Phillips
Morality doesn’t exist, so you’re right
Lucas Rodriguez
Toddlers aren't anomalies. Retarded people are, but that doesn't respond to the main point: If non-human animals' lack of sapience justifies their slaughter and consumption, why should the same not be true for non-sapient humans?
Cooper Williams
True, but they are just tiny minority of mankind as whole, and they develop into fully functioning human being in some years.
humans are the worst animal and should be purged a deer never put up a sign instructing you not to give money to the homeless a cow never sent a car into space a chicken never created an economy built on severed hands a bear never destroyed social democracy
sounds like communism to me. your ingrained consumerism betrays you, and thus, to the flame!
That's an indictment of you, not cows. Look around at the decadence of our so-called "civilisation", enjoy a world where more money is spent on furry pornography than foreign aid.
A cow has never offered to pretend they're your friend if you donate to their patreon.
Kayden Peterson
I only care about humans. I'll treat animals with some respect but they aren't important to me like my fellow men.
As long as those men aren't reactionary capitalist scum.
Charles Phillips
Liberal hippie
Its not like we have whole theories by countless people that aim to the emancipation of mankind and preservation nature. Not because we think nature is inherently good or something. We actually need it to stay alive and mentally healthy.
Ian Wilson
supermarket wanker alcoholic revisionist loves his supermarkets, glug glug glug.
This is quite different; we say "it's right for the proletariat to rise up because the bourgeoisie is exploiting them", but it would make no sense to say "it's right for the bourgeoisie to rise up because the proletariat is exploiting them," as that is plainly not the current relationship between the classes. On the other hand, if we say "it's wrong to kill (or torture) a severely retarded person even though that person isn't sapient", we can say the exact same thing for non-sapient animals. Sorry but this is an argument on par with "if you don't like capitalism, you shouldn't own a phone."
Austin Brooks
It is wrong to make a being that can suffer suffer. The same way a human who is tortured suffers, or a woman who loses her baby, or a father who loses a son, or an innocent person who is imprisoned for life suffers, then you have to be a psychopath not to empathise with the animal.
I bet OP thinks eating dogs is wrong, while eating cows is fine.
Brandon Morgan
a solid third of all the land of the world has to be cleared for cattle raising, so the real question is not "should you go vegan", the real question is "will i go vegan voluntarily or will i be forced by state approved vegan death squads"
And you need 4 times the land area for cultivating plants that provide equivalent nutrition. Speaking realistically, humanity needs more land or population control. And by more land I mean we fabricate.
John Turner
I seem to recall someone saying that if we had proper land/population control that all the people in the World could live in Texas.
Eli Fisher
this is literally and physically imposible, cows are energetically inefficient, because you are using energy to grow plants. who then contain less energy than the one you put in them, and then giving the food to cows who then contain less energy than the food put in them, this is called the second law of thermodynamic, FUCKING GOOGLE IT. And even if your retarded baseless assertion was true it would still be better, since at least the land that would be used to grow plants would still absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and would not be a giant wasteland where billions of trees that would have done the same were replaced by millions of the single most polluting animal ever
Dylan Rogers
you make the assumption that the the energy needed for cattle raising is available energy we invest in this. You fucking retards have never set foot in a farm, because we feed livestock grass and hay, which are widely available, inedible to humans and waste product of our food farming. The whole vegetarian environmental argument is basically fucking retarded. Not mentioning the crazy efficiency of making a good steak + whatever carb compared to a comparable vegetarian meal which require a ton more effort and time for comparable taste, and a lot more diversity for nutritional import, which complicate both production and logistic a lot. So yeah, we would prolly use more agricultural land if we went full vegetarian
Daniel Cox
I'm more disgusted at the amount of land for Golf.
Dylan Murphy
yeah because the big problem of US is how little land they have available… No doubt all that land is crazy rich for plants too ! it's a moronic argument
Hunter Phillips
so i guess the land you use for cow pastures, that big orange patch there, isn't taken out of forests and doesn't exists righ?, and i also assume that brown patch labeled "livestock feed" that's bigger than the food grown for humans doesn't take any energy and also doesn't exist?
so that's your argument huh?, it takes less time to cook stake, and thus is better than vegetables
[citation needed]
Evan Cruz
ACKSHUALLY DON'T YOU KNOW THAT COWS FEED BY THEMSELVES
If everyone just stopped eating beef and all the current vegans/vegetarians continued to be veg it would be enough, people who try to say that everyone needs to go vegan are fucking stupid as shit
Logan Lopez
In USA ? lolno
yeah, cause the cows don't feed humans in the end I guess ?
you obviously have never been poor as fuck coming home broken and wanting a good meal that's not a pain in the ass to cook and doesn't cost much
as your for your vegan utopias
if it's so ineffective to use livestock, I really wonder how it became one of earliest form of getting food.
Oliver Gray
We grown enough food for ten billion people. And technology is advancing at a high rate. The problem is of bad systems, not of scarcity.
Read animal liberation. Your arguments are basic and already covered in the foundational document of the Vegang. Don't embarrass yourself by making "but if we do socialism, why would anyone ever work" tier arguments. Here is the book for you: my.mixtape.moe/jqabsa.pdf
Here are a few point for you if you are entirely unwilling to accept these sensible arguments: -the meat industry is doing significant environmental damage and downsizing it would benefit the goal of reducing the effects of climate change -diets high in animal produce are unhealthy. [insert that webm of the american kid screaming and crying over the prospect of eating a single pea here] this shit is giving everyone cancer and obesity -have some fucking empathy god dammit, you treat your pets fine but don't care about the suffering of other nonhuman animals at all
Are animals enlightened centrists? Because I've never encountered one with any trace of a political opinion.
Oliver Cooper
You don't have to really identify with something to be of it. Animals such as lions, for instance: Did you know lions kill each other to steal their mates, killing their children too to establish their own? The female lions just go along with it as well, the entire species as a whole abiding by the principle of "survival of the fittest" to the death. The vast majority of human fascists aren't nearly this extreme, although they are more powerful. This isn't to say they should be tortured; animals are stupid, but that doesn't mean they don't feel pain, and are really like mentally disabled humans who are extremely egotistic and even somehow sociopathic. Animals in general are reactionary, and there won't be any in communism. Inb4 hurr durr we're animals too.
Henry Sanders
ANIMALS WILL DIE NO MATTER WHAT
IT'S BETTER TO DIE QUICKLY OF PREDATION/HUNTING/SLAUGHTER THAN SLOWLY OF DISEASE/AGE/FAMINE (OFTEN DUE TO A LACK OF PREDATORS RESULTING IN A COLLAPSE OF PREY SPECIES' FOOD SOURCES)
Camden Nguyen
does that make bonobos anarcho-nymphomaniacs?
Adrian Gonzalez
No pain at all if they don't come into existence in the first place
Killing is better though. In killing, you take one swipe and wipe out all the essence of a man instantly. With working, you slowly suck it out, using him like some kind of human essence cow, damaging him severely in the process and leaving him broken and empty after decades of this torment, at which point physically, mentally and spiritually enfeebled he is finally granted the free time necessary to live. Then he's straight in and out of the hospital for a series of nasty diseases and surgery before it's off to the grave. Nearer my god to thee.
Isaiah Mitchell
again, the problem isn't with killing/eating animals (except if you're a liberal, but who gives a shit about liberals tbh famalam), it's that meat production is unsitainable at the current rate. Just look at the fucking amazonas, McDonalds is literally giving the planet lung cancer there can be meat in all of their burgers.
Christopher Martinez
Moral? No. But it goes both ways. If I decide I don't want my food to come from sentient beings then it's my fucking business. This is why I never mention it in public, I get swarmed by retarded carnists who wanna sanctimoniously lecture me on my dietary choices. But I've yet to hear a decent retort as to why we shouldn't at least reduce meat consumption in the west seeing how inefficient and straight up bad for the environment it is. Are you fucking kidding me? Are you so desperate for an excuse to indulge in your meat eating that you're willing to brush aside what an absolute blight on this planet the meat industry is?
Joseph Thomas
That sounds poetic and all, and is in truth a great problem, but if that were a fact this board would rapidly depopulate given this. Lions brutally murder other animals and begin tearing away at them as they are alive – becoming tired of going to the cube farm leaves you in a much better state than this, relatively at least, and a person in this state still has much more potential than an organism in the first scenario.
Carter Evans
Except that he agrees that meat industry is destroying the environment. In fact many people here condemn the meat industry using many kinds of objections. What is hated here is liberalism, moralism and idealist thought.
Congratulation on outing yourself as a middle class liberal. You do not care about poor people, you just want to police them and enact your holier-than-thou moralism.
When one has read Engel's Anti-Dühring, one knows how to criticize the moralist arguments of the author. Liberalism is a mental disorder, and most common symptom is mental delusion where one thinks that movement in the world follows prescriptive principles. Bluntly put, liberals are prone to put the cart in front of the horse, just like other followers of idealist thought.
Regarding the pdf file: In the first chapter, the author first constructs a concept of "speciesism", takes the concept of "sanctity of life" and then applies it to concept of the "right for life". While he is logically correct, he just plays with these abstract apriori concepts. His assesment is that he describes his observations and makes them fit his apriori conceptions of mostly idealist concepts. His wording of the basis of equality of people is weak, and Jacques Ranciere in the Ignorant Schoolmaster presents much more convincing argument.
It seems like the most vocal vegans never struggled to feed themselves on a limited budget for a prolonged period. Because then, the calculation implies to use less meat, a lot of vegetables and bulk of caloric intake are potatoes and grains, and meat, fish, seafood on rotation for all the small molecules that one cannot possibly take track of.
Yes, to have any revolutionary potential at all, one needs to be alive in the first place.
I keep trying to explain this to people but they just won't stop screaming. Well, they do stop eventually, but they expend an awful lot of energy in an entirely futile way before eventually conceding. Unfortunately their hard-wired (and very crude, I might add) urge to survive seems to overwhelm their limited reasoning capabilities, making them entirely unable to appreciate the inherent elegance of maximizing the computational capacity of matter in the universe.
Logan Richardson
Did you read an online summary or something? You make Peter Singer sound like a Kantian, while veganism is movement on a utilitarian basis. The construct of speciesism is based on equal consideration of utilitarian subjects, not on the sanctity of or right to life. The argument goes as follows: Certain animals are able to formulate preferences. Utilitarianism has as it's goal to maximize the preferences satisfaction of moral subjects. People claim that animals do not count as moral subjects because they lack some special property that humans have that makes only them able to be moral subjects. Singer shows that this view can not be maintained without excluding children and the mentally disabled from being moral actors and that it just wouldn't make sense in general. Dispelling this counterargument, the result is that utilitarian ethics needs to include the preferences of animals and those that hold to utilitarianism ought to stop eating them.
Wew lad. I guess if you talk to a vegan extremely high on liberalism, you might find them support some vegan sausages for the gaza strip program, but for leftist utilitarians, the current vegan movement is just damage control. Being a moralist means demanding of people to act against their own interests in the current system to serve some higher cause. This of course means that only somewhat affluent people are able to cut into their own flesh to be able to satisfy the moral demands, leading to all kinds of garbage as well as being not particularly effective. The problem is that while still under capitalism, this "vote with your wallets" activism and moralizing are the only avenues to actually reduce the harm to the current concentration camp population at least slightly. Any sensible Vegang member is in support of gay vegan space communism, which would enable us to be effective for once.
Dominic Bell
What are you even talking about. There is a solid argument for veganism on a utilitarian basis. I've seen a lot of edgy internet people trying to entirely discard utilitarianism, one of the big moral theories, or even the entire field of ethics, but that is at the level of Sargon trying to ban gender studies.
Jacob Smith
utilitarianism is historically considered to be suffering from problems and was discarded in favor of rights based memes and virtue memes you don't have to be edgy nihilist to reject utilitarianism, it's not all or nothing there are third options
Dominic Edwards
There are multiple schools of utilitarianism and the theorists have worked to address these issues, which is why we have stuff like rule utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism. I can see the fucking Kantians getting all high and mighty because (capitalist) governments use their theory to justify what they are doing, but I don't see how virtue ethics are particularly useful. You are basically moralizing a lot, telling people to change their behavior to become virtuous. The theory doesn't examine systematic reasons, these are all just moral failures you can fix by being smart enough to be aware of the right part and having enough strength of will to follow it. It's ruling class morality, only ever worked for rich Athenians. Even if someone reaches virtue level 100, that is not an end in itself. It's just assumed that a society full of virtuous people will produce the best results, the greatest overall happiness if you so will, which really makes you think, huh?
Julian Cooper
In fact I am sympathetic towards the utilitarian approach, but I just got carried away with nitpicking and stamping out any unmaterialist thought. The whole argument about animals not being moral subject is a sham, because the notion of speciesism was constructed before it and it was claimed that it was somehow wrong, like other isms. And then all arguments about morals as such are irrelevant, since all morals are relative and are constructed towards utility of people upholding the morals.
When certain basis for certain morals is led to its conclusion, or justifications are led to their conclusion, of course he makes the argument. And animals are just a matter organized in certain pattern just like humans are organized matter, and human brain is organized matter on highest state of complexity observed so far. And similarly suffering is merely an internal state of this matter, just like feelings are, or several states of neural networks. But the reason why one should minimize suffering can be because of love, as a way of relating to and understanding the organized lumps of matter around us. Erich Fromm probably expands more on this topic.
In fact many people would kill for an artificial steak that does not give you heart disease or clogged arteries, nor damaged kidneys from all the nitrogen in amino acids getting out. In fact moving towards food that can be considered vegan is in the material interests of most people, because it does not matter what you stuff your pie hole with, as long as it is tasty and healthy, and does not prompt you towards overconsumption, nor makes you slower as you have process harmful chemicals sometimes.
Why not use this urge to survive? Animals in meat industry are literally destroying the very environment we live in. We should kill them all and halt it, while working on more energy efficient alternatives. Their resource-hogging and energy inefficiency in fact puts them in competition for food and energy.
If any marxist is acquainted with science fiction and has some imagination, then they can see how organic highly organized matter will one day inevitably construct a self-replicating inorganic even more highly organized matter, that will then create even more organized matter, increasing the computational capability along the way. The computational capacity of matter in universe does indeed increase, as it is in agreement with the observations of materialist dialectic.
there is some way in which virtue memes can be viewed as ruling class morality, but you aren't giving it the fairest representation when you paint it as having naive dreams of achieving enlightened utopia. it is not a grand scheme socio-economic plan to organize society like communism, accusing it of not addressing systematic problems is like accusing a doctor of not addressing poverty.
the core idea i got out of virtue ethics is that there is no rigid set of rules you can follow to solve moral problems. therefore you cultivate virtue, as it's the most flexible method to adapt to many situations and do sensible things. in virtue memes, a person who obediently follows laws is a sort of child obeying his parents. it's a bit too slave morality for the greeks you see, they want you to be a well rounded sensible person, a real grown up that can balance principles and not get tied down by spooks like 'rights', 'utility', or 'wellbeing'. under greek memes, only a society of grown up sensible people has a future.
Adam Adams
If you discard ethics in it's entirety, you get into trouble. The central question of the field is "what is good" after all.
If you stick to your beliefs, you have to discard the entire normative layer. This means you can no longer formulate preferences, since you are not allowed to say anything is better or worse than anything else. This also means you can't be a revolutionary anymore, since participating there would imply you prefer socialism over capitalism. The only kind of leftist you can still be is one akin to a physicist, predicting the end of capitalism like one may predict the movement of particles. I'd still wonder why such a person would not have starved yet though, after all, in absence of the concept of good, one can not prefer life over death.
What people taking this antimoral stance are more likely to do is just to regress to a primitive moral theory. It could be primitive egoism, for example, with the only rule "everything I desire is good", or intuitive morality, where the rules are entirely unclear and the behavior is self contradictory. At this point, you still have the ability to formulate preferences, but you can no longer reflect on these preferences in reference to a theory, you can't ask "is this really right?" anymore. Another issue is that you can't convince people to use the vague moral theory you are applying, making moral arguments impossible. Good luck recruiting all those revolutionaries without the ability to formulate collective preferences and being able to argue their validity against critics.
Cooper Myers
what if all my revolutionary friends have taken the contradiction pill and are openly embracing the human condition unlike you repressed noncontradiction fags still clinging to your hopelessly naive project of constructing a unified system of philosophy
Look at your assumptions though. They are covered with Platon's jizz. Think of his philosopher kings and how only those almost saintly figures could understand the idea of good. This is still assumed here. The question of ethics is "what is good". Other moral theories give a clear answer, like "the greatest happiness for the greatest number", for example. Virtue ethics however assumes that these concepts just tie down people from reaching the real good. What this good is is something we are never told, because it's assumed to lie in the realm of ideas, accessible only to the ascended. Under this assumption, the best society can't just tell people what good is, but instead has to maximize the number of ascended members who are able to view the idea of good and act on it. You may think I'm misrepresenting you here, but read your second paragraph. You are assuming that all those virtuous people know what is sensible and good and act on it, yet we do not. Morality requires a greater good, yet we don't know under what greater good these people are operating, only that they are "grown up sensible people", aka people whose claim to goodness is based on authority, the authority of the philosopher king who has seen the truth.
Hudson Bell
Sure, an entire field of academia that has existed for millennia has been blown out by a meme internet position and should no longer exist, only continuing to do so because they refuse to accept the obvious truth. What you are really doing is just running away from having to think. You still formulate preferences so you still have a moral theory of some kind, you just refuse to reflect on it and reject any attempt of others to do so.
Ayden Cook
shut up i just ended philosophy in 1 proposition
Jonathan Cook
It's almost adorable how people high on scientism and similar hackfrauds declare philosophy dead by making bad philosophical arguments.
the anglosphere has become a horrible seth macfarlane parody of itself
Benjamin Brown
multiple philosophers share my view on contradictions, so assuming some kind of pro philosophy mantle to paint me scientism opposition man is not going to win you this argument by default
i love philosophy, that's why i want to end it and ruin it for everyone
i wrote many long posts and deleted them multiple times because they were not to my satisfaction. i must go to work now goodbye
Evan Torres
Remember when Youtube "scpetics" flipped their shit because Bill Nye made a segment on the modern understanding of gender on his new show? You had people talking about how he "betrayed science". Burgers have reached the point where a children's entertainer calling himself "The Science Guy" has somehow become the representative of all of science, as well as being able to commit betrayal towards science by informing people about a certain branch of science concerned with gender.
Lincoln Evans
I'll keep this thread pinned, cya later, assuming it's not been pruned. Don't take my banter too seriously, it's just shitposting by someone terrible at philosophy at the end of the day.
Robert Powell
m8, epistemology is very complicated. metaphysics is very complicated. even ontology is hard. as i learn these things i’m always confused and sort of half committed to multiple contradictory things, dipping one foot in the water. i’m not fully at ease chastising my opponents for committing logical contradictions, even though that is the de facto win condition in argument and i hypocritically do it. maybe the law of noncontradiction is wrong, or maybe human nature of wrong and that’s just how it is, and it never really goes away. maybe the truth of reality is mind shattering absurdity and agony and we’re all striving to forget it at all costs so we try to build systems or we go insane. maybe philosophy is a long journey towards undermining all the defense mechanisms that protect us from the truth until the raw absurdity and chaos of existence is laid bare before our eyes and we kill ourselves in horror. i don’t know about contradictions anymore ;_;
Parker Powell
Sounds like you are having some good lovecraft kush. I think objective reality makes more sense if it follows consistent rules. Hard to imagine what reality breaking it's own rules would even look like. Still, making sense of the stuff we mind users add to the whole mix is harder and I can see how it would lead to multiple contradictory positions seeming to make sense at the same time. I, for example, use postmodernism for my SJW stuff but marxism for economics, despite those two fields being ideological opponents, and I haven't felt like reconciling that yet. To use this tendency to claim that reconciliation isn't just hard but impossible seems to be jumping to conclusions though.
Brandon Hall
Congratulations on not even reading my post.
Angel Sanchez
Ehhh I won’t defend veganism, but the argument against animal cruelty, really relies on the face that we personify and project our own humanity on to animals culturally, so when someone shows cruelty to animals, it signifies a capacity for the same to humans. It’s why serial killers begin by killing small animals often.
Jeremiah Cruz
all these dumb discussions are based on "prove to me X is wrong but under the premise that X is right" retard thinking
James Cook
Regarding the question what is good, the book Grapes of Wrath provides a good answer.
But the point you are trying to make is ridiculous, despite being logically correct, as you would not be trying to peddle something wrong. Altruism, empathy are usually what is at play at determining whether something is good or bad. And most of the time, people are good at making that distinction.
Arguments against capitalism are not formulated along the lines of morals or ethics. Just like the wrongness of parasites in animal bodies is not because of morals or ethics either, it is the extraction of nutrients, detrimental to animal's life. Economic exploitation is a different kind of parasitism. And similarly, veganism should not be argued for using morals or ethics, just like opposition to capitalism is not.
People are usually good at formulating their interests, collective and individual, without the explicit use of morals or ethics. Or with primitive understanding of them, and the primitive understanding is most of the time sufficient.
Yes. Instinctively moving your hand from a hot object is incredibly good (for example). Instinctively jumping away from a car that was about to hit you as well.
No. It is I, who thinks good is what's good for human nature.
But why don't you tell me more about your instincts lmao.
Gavin King
Appealing to nature is pretty fascist though, that's kind of the premise of their entire ideology, that this is the natural order and so should things be done. Acting based on your instincts won't get you as far as acting based on knowledge – instincts are just intuition to provide a sense of skepticism to things, which is good in proper amounts but pales to the reasoning humans have evolved to have. Fee-fees and dialectics are diametrically opposed, in fact.
Carson Carter
No, it is not what I think at all. You should reed some Marx, tovarish. Human nature has nothing to do with feefees.
"First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self."
Xavier Taylor
what a nice quote maybe i should read books one day
John Nelson
Altruism and egoism are concepts that only came about under capitalism. In earlier human societies, any action contained both selfish and selfless elements in it. Graeber talks about this in Debt at length. Only by introducing capitalism came the concept of absolute selfishness about, as part of how economics function, with the concept of selflessness being created to oppose it. In reality, no saint is without personal desires and, what is often forgotten, no capitalist is without altruism. By trying to distance yourself from moral theory, you are injecting large amounts of ideology.
This is a moral argument, just as Marxism is one: Extracting what belongs to someone is evil. Parasites/capitalism is doing such extraction. Thus, they are evil.
It's just not a particularly sophisticated argument. Once you ask why parasitism is evil, you need a moral theory with it's greater good to base your claims upon or they fall flat.
Why? You've made a claim about what is good and what isn't but you haven't made any arguments for why we should believe this. Let me give a somewhat outrageous example where your theory disagrees with most moral theory. Human females can be fertile below the age of consent. It lies in human nature to reproduce. Thus, pedophilia is okay and laws against it are immoral.
