OK, so you refuse to answer my questions about the optimum temperature and CO2 levels.

At least we have established that you are wrong in describing me as "alone" in suggesting there are benefits to higher CO2. Certainly farmers across the world experience this in higher yields and in less need for irrigation. It is estimated that in temperate latitudes an increase of 10% is achieved, freeing more land for wildlife. — tom

And we have established the that you are refusing to answer my question as to why you are trying to push this point. What are you trying to say? I don't get it. Do you think climate change is a good thing?

The reason I have "refused to answer" your questions as you put it (though I am quite certain I did in fact adress them) is because I cannot give you exact numbers. If you have them, why don't you share them with us.

(edited for punctuation)

The reason I don't believe animals other than humans have rights is that they can not articulate anything about their rights. Pigs can not object that their rights are being trampled. — Bitter Crank

Ok, that's a good point I actually hadn't considered. I agree with a lot of what you say in this post. However, I still think some rights can be inherent, whether or not the being the rights are attributed to is aware of them or not. For example, when slavery was still widespread, some slaves may not have been aware of the fact that they had such things as human rights, which they could demand to be honoured.

What is your reason for proposing that the optimum CO2 "range" is lower than it is today?

Plants disagree: — tom

I granted you the fact that higher CO2 levels may be positive - at least short-term - for plants, simply because it's a fundamental part of photosynthesis. But what are you trying to say here? Plants are part of the planet as a whole and the planet is deteriorating due to the rise of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It's simply a fact that this gas, among others, upsets the balance of the earths atmoshpere, which sends it into a spiral where water vapor in the air is accumulated (which is a massive part of the warming effect) which in turn by raising the temperature of the air allows even more vapor to be absorbed, and so on and so forth. A NASA article on the matter states: "Increasing water vapor leads to warmer temperatures, which causes more water vapor to be absorbed into the air. Warming and water absorption increase in a spiraling cycle."

But this is kind of off-topic anyway and I honestly don't feel like discussing the truth of climate change.

The combined weight of humanity is today ten times the weight of everything else running around wild – all the world’s different mammal species from wombats to wildebeest, marmosets to rhinos.

And then our livestock, the tame four legged meals soon to end up on our dinner table, outweigh that true wildlife by 24 to 1 all over again.

That's truly staggering. Thanks for the excerpt, very interesting.

That's a philosophically shallow approach. It boils down to the view that others who didn't grow up my way, in my culture, are probably wrong when they seem to disagree with my socially inherited belief system. They are wrong because I am right. — apokrisis

I don't think that's what I said. It's certainly not what I meant. Would you agree that the major disagreement between our views comes from you leaning more relativist than me?
And I don't think relativism and realism are as divided as many seem to claim. It seems like there's a bit of a false dichotomy there. Some truths can be established definitively, while others cannot. Perhaps the reason for that is even that we haven't discovered the underlying truths of most things. If I remember correctly, Sam Harris uses the example of showing maximum well-being through Neuroscientific methods. If we can clearly show that a certain thing creates the most well-being and well-being is the thing we optimize for, then we have established a moral truth. I am butchering Harris' point here but you are probably familiar with it anyway.



To be honest with you, I think we've reached the point where I've exhausted my current knowledge of the underlying philosophical concepts as well as my own beliefs and thoughts. It's been very interesting to think about and discuss this!

What is the best temperature for the earth? What is the optimum level of CO2 for life? — tom

Hi. I'm not sure what you're alluding to. Are you implying that recent climate developments may in fact not be negative? I think you would be quite alone in that assumption. We can show that changes in climate are harmful to species, especially if they are as rapid as human made climate change of the past two centuries. I don't think there's an "optimum" CO2 level as such either, though I would propose that the optimum 'range' for CO2 is lower than the current levels. Yes it may be good for trees technically, but the planet as a whole, as a system, does not benefit from such high levels.

If we're simply talking about the planet earth itself and not including living things, there probably is no "best temperature", but that is a largely irrelevant thought experiment anyhow.

Do animals have rights if they don't have responsibilities? — inquisitive

Cruelty to farm animals might be way down that moral list, for example — inquisitive

Hold on, those aren't my quotes, they're from apokrisis.

Humans have the capacity to create things such as rights, other animals don't, and we have granted those rights to ourselves, and not other animals. — Bitter Crank

That makes sense in a way, but it also sounds selfish. Imagine saying: "western society has created rights and we have granted those to ourselves, and not other civilizations (i.e. natives on colonized continents)."

I'm all in favor of expanded national parks and humane farming, but the two are separate issues — Bitter Crank

Yes, my phrasing was bad there. I was merely trying to show that there is clearly still a lack of caring for nature.

I don't think that savage mistreatment of large animals is routine, but the way chickens are raised amounts to something pretty close to abuse. — Bitter Crank

You'd be surprised what you can find with some Googling. From a certain scale onwards (and depending on the country and its laws/policing) most farm animals receive bad treatment.

I am not ready to give animals rights, but I am ready to accept that we have responsibilities to the ecology we live in — Bitter Crank

I have trouble with the fact that you don't see animals as beings that deserve rights (maybe limited compared to ours). However, your admission of responsibility seems 'good enough' to work with as a strategy. I think that's what a lot of the argument comes down to - a complete shift is probably impossible, but we need to move in this direction I believe.

My guess is that workers who mistreat animals are themselves being mistreated by the owners. — Bitter Crank

That may be true and it's part of the reason I specifically excluded judgment of those people. It's a result of the need for very high productivity.

But unless you can make some argument about morality being an objective fact of nature, or some divinely-ordained reality, then moral relativism applies. Our discussion of how things go for animals is going to be framed within that particular understanding of rights and responsibilities. — apokrisis

I don't believe complete moral relativism is a useful concept. Perhaps this is where our divide lies. I think there has to be a certain amount of moral realism in the world. Would you not agree that there are things that are objectively bad? I don't like to use extremes, but consider rape or genital mutilation.
It seems to me that one can reasonably argue that any moral framework which justifies these acts is not a moral framework that should be applied. You can relativize issues like veganism, because the circumstance that animals eat one another is a natural truth. I'm not an expert on the subject, but it seems that a sudden change of diet to exclude all animal products can be harmful to ones health because certain nutrients aren't present in a purely plant-based diet.

Likewise, farming practices are changing at a gallop where I live - New Zealand. Cow sheds are now being built with cow back-scratchers. The cows choose when to come in and get milked by robotic milkers. Stuff that would be unthinkable ten years ago is becoming the norm, such is the pressure to be "ethical" when selling to an increasingly informed middleclass public. — apokrisis

That's a great development, I hope we can continue to move in that direction. Maybe purely "ethical" pressure isn't enough though? It seems to me that government regulations are still too lax here.

Infants grow into adults. And they can't become well-formed moral beings unless they are treated as beings which can learn to grow into their responsibilities within a moral order. — apokrisis

So the reason for giving infants rights is purely of a pragmatic nature?

First off, thanks for your long and thoughtful comment. It's clear you've thought about this a great deal more than me so bear with me here.

Do animals have "exactly the same" rights here? I don't see a good argument that they do. — apokrisis

I don't see a good argument that they don't. What sets us apart in a way that would grant us more rights over an animal? Do we not have the same right to the land and resources as them? Do they not have the same right to pursue their own interests as we do? Theirs may stem from a more instinctive place, but I don't see how the capability of rational thought grants us more rights.

Or Nature's most successful expression of its true self? So far at least? — apokrisis

Well, I suppose that depends entirely of one's definition of nature's true self and whether this is a successful version of it. One could argue that it is the least successful, for example if you propose that a successful expression would be organisms living in relative balance to one another as they do in many ecosystems. Humans have clearly upset any such balance.

The problem you have is that only humanity has any moral choice here. It is only us who can act according to some agreed insight. — apokrisis

Yes, it is only us that can act like that, but does that not put a great deal of responsibility on us that we are simply dismissing?

Largely we are comfortable with an anthropomorphised planet - one where all wildlife has been domesticated or put in a reserve. We can love our pets. We can farm our meat humanely. We can have a few wildlife parks to preserve a tamed version of the untamed past. And that is what would make the majority of the world's population happy enough. So a new morality could be built around fostering those objectives. And that has already been happening. — apokrisis

I think you are being too optimistic here. How many people really care about farming humanely? The president of the US is in the process of reducing the number and size of natural parks right now. Clearly there are a great number of people that still don't care.

Do animals have rights if they don't have responsibilities? — apokrisis

Do infants? I am not sure I understand why the absence of responsibility precludes one from having significant rights.

Cruelty to farm animals might be way down that moral list, for example. — apokrisis

I agree with that, I was mainly using it as an example for the atrocities we commit without even noticing it most of the time.