And what if ideas about self awareness, growth and meaningfulness would ultimately provide the solution to economic well-being? — Possibility

I have a feeling that if everyone were highly developed along those lines, the economy would be a lot smaller.

I'm a gen-Xer, and I've never been under the impression that my generation considers boomers the worst. I always admired much about the boomers. And the 1960s look like a good time in many ways! Not the 1950s though. Yuck. Do lots of people in my generation really want all that? Not the gen-Xers I know. I really can't imagine women wanting to go back there.

I am an oddball though. My parents had me at quite a late age, so I wasn't raised by boomers. My older brothers and sisters, with whom I did not grow up, were boomers. So I was a gen-Xer raised by silent generation parents. My parents were still clinging to 1950s values when I grew up. So my life in some ways was like that of a delayed boomer. I often felt like that, like I was the last of the boomers or something, and not really fitting in anywhere. So my perspective might be skewed.

My peers never had to resist such an old-fashioned, conformist father. My dad still hated rock music and long hair on men perhaps more than anything! Naturally, I was a headbanger! And if he didn't get The Beatles, he really didn't get Metallica! But he was old and tired by then and so at least didn't beat me over it all like he did my older brothers. He was pretty much retired to the recliner and TV. And seeing what happened with my elder siblings, I never let him find out about my drug experimentation. That might have gotten him out of the chair!

Well actually that’s exactly what you claim. But you’re right it’s very planned, but not for the reasons you assume.. — Brett

It seems I must not have explained myself clearly. With regard to the question of planning, I wasn't alluding to the sort of planning you seem to have in mind. Obviously, the education system is full of planning of the sort you describe! When I denied claiming it was planned, I was talking about whether or not there was some kind of group of people in a room somewhere that decided to create the education system for the purpose of sorting us into slots in the economic machine or some such, some "evil plan" by the elites to enslave us or something. You made several comments such as these:

But it seems to me that everyone who writes about this suggests, by their comments, that they have escaped the planned control — Brett

Well that’s a change from being a victim of the Capitalist system. — Brett

You seemed to me to be perceiving posts like mine as indicating some kind of anti-capitalist conspiracy theory involving some powerful people setting all this up to control us. Maybe I misread what was behind those comments. Regardless, I was denying that I made any such suggestion. I never claimed that this was conscious on anyone's part. I was saying that regardless of whether or not this was planned, that's how it functions, at least in part. Obviously, that's not all that it is.

The corporations are somehow held responsible for the standard of education that is developed only for their purposes — Brett

That's not what I am saying either. Education system as sorting machine occurs in pretty much every kind of modern society, be it capitalist, communist, socialist, or whatever. It serves the economic machine. Even communist societies have economies. I was never expressing any anti-capitalist sentiment as you seem to have suspected. I am not motivated here by some kind of politico-tribal identity thing.

A mass education system like ours prepares and sorts the mass of newly available human resources in such a way as to serve the economy. All of this is simply how it ends up working, regardless of whether any human in any power position ever intended for it to work this way. And it isn't a left/right battle here. This happens both in left and right leaning systems. Not every comment amounts to shots fired in the culture war.

This all may have nothing to do with any kind of aim. It isn't necessarily the aim of any government leaders or CEOs. And it certainly isn't the aim of the system itself. The system isn't conscious. It has no conscious aims. This sort of situation probably simply self-organizes because of various selection pressures, as I pointed out earlier.

You probably take for granted what you learned at school, you may even be unaware of how much you did learn. — Brett

I'll grant you that. Yes. I probably learned more than I remember learning. It's irrelevant to my point. Perhaps it even supports my point, depending on how you look at it.

Whatever the case, the education system functions as a sorting, standardizing, normalizing, and so on, machine for the economic machine, regardless of what else it might do, beneficial or not. It simply does sort people by aptitudes and other attributes. And it's probably a good thing that it does! Imagine if we had no such sorting machine and that people running nuclear reactors were selected completely at random, regardless of aptitude, never having been tested in any way! Imagine if our smartest and physically least fit were set to do the manual labor and our least intelligent and strongest were set to govern and control the missiles and so on! The economy works best if the people best suited to do the various jobs somehow are actually placed in those positions. A sorting machine of some sort is needed to make that happen. If we have no way of determining what each person new to the job world is likely to perform well at, the economy will seriously suffer.

Further, the economic machine works best, since it involves people performing various tasks, if those people have been trained to effectively follow instructions with a minimum of resistance.

Consider the military. To perform well, it needs chain-of-command to work quickly and nearly flawlessly. It is like a body. The brain needs all the nerve cells downstream to take orders without hesitation and to not think for themselves. The generals need to be able to direct the forces as they see fit in order to apply various strategies. Imagine if every soldier were to be encouraged to do at any time whatever they like! Imagine if every nerve cell in your body were to question whether or not it should follow your orders! What if I don't want to fire? It would be like having some horrible disease of the nervous system! Your body would fail to function and you'd probably die. The whole system would collapse. Selection pressures will generally remove such systems from existence, favoring those with more effective forms of organization, usually including power hierarchies.

That's just how it is. There may be no need for anyone to consciously design it this way. Selection perhaps is enough to shape things this way. Societies with no such structures would never have gotten this large in the first place and would almost certainly have been conquered or absorbed by societies featuring them.

...they have escaped the planned control... — Brett

I never claimed any of it is planned. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Perhaps this is just a pattern of organization that tends to evolve simply because of selection pressures. It works and contributes to the strength, size, and competitive advantage of a society. Whatever the case, to at least some extent, that is how most education systems function for the larger society.

Unless they regard themselves as psychological cripples, unable to act reasonably and reach out for what they want, then the education system they went through was either okay, or failed to impose its normalisation on them. — Brett

You seem to suggest here that the only way of becoming something other than a psychological cripple is to be educated in such a system. Not so.

I probably got more out of my public school education than I realize (and even if I did, this doesn't conflict with my essential point), but for the most part, I don't feel that I learned by way of it much of what it purported to teach. I was always an autonomous learner. Curiosity was and is probably my primary trait. I spent countless hours in libraries, in nature, and later on the Internet learning about the things that interested me. I still do that. It might well be the thing I do most! And of course, I learned much just by experiencing life and by observation. I learned a great deal in school, but most of what I learned there wasn't part of the intended curriculum. Being subjected to such an institution and exposed to that sort of social environment taught me much about the world.

I can clearly remember my first day at school. We were each given a xeroxed sheet of paper with an outline of a completely uninteresting tree, something very much like this:



We were also given boxes of crayons, with which we were instructed to color the tree. I colored the tree as I saw fit and got bored and set my paper aside to go play with some blocks I saw, which seemed more interesting. I'll never forget my shock when the teacher yelled at me for both stopping coloring before exactly filling the outline with an even, flat patch of unbroken, green color, and for coloring some outside the lines. At home, coloring was something I sometimes did for fun. And my coloring books had much more interesting outlines to fill, such things as this:



This place was different. It was menacing. "Get in line!" seemed to be its directive. Already, on day one, my self-direction, creativity, and curiosity were being punished. This event was emblematic of the rest of my public school experience.

I remember a time in high school when I wrote a paper for a class on government and was docked something like 30 percentage points for not adhering to explicit instructions about how the cover page was to be written. Among other things, my spacing wasn't exactly right. Most egregious though, apparently, was that I put the first name of my teacher before his last name rather than "Mr.". The content of the paper, which I like to think was of rather high quality, was hardly considered.

To put it in Dostoevsky's terms, I am not a piano key. I always bristled at being treated like one. And my tendency to resist authority and follow my own lights has cost me greatly in my adult life. I have never been "well-adjusted" and probably never will be. People like me can succeed (whatever that means) in this world, but it is much safer to get in line and do as one is told or as one does. But to me, such has always seemed a kind of sleep-walking.

And some of the greatest educational experiences for me have been the occasions where I broke through the lies I was told. Santa Claus comes to mind as an early experience of this sort. I think it was a good experience to be taught that he exists and then to realize for myself that it was a lie. Life is full of such lies, from beginning to end. Some, especially the values inexplicitly given by the society, or even those given by our biological instincts, are very difficult to come to see through.

Those who do as the education system tries to get them to do hardly question authority. Their understanding of the world is therefore rather impoverished. But they generally do okay. They get enough to eat. They stay warm. They get retirement benefits. They see their grandchildren grow up. But their lives are hardly their own.

That's not the law of identity. — MindForged

You're right. It isn't. I am not claiming that "2+2=4" is actually the law of identity itself as traditionally given. The law of identity says that "A = A". "A" is identical with itself. What I am suggesting is that "2+2=4" or any other correct mathematical expression like it where two expressions on opposite sides of an equals sign are in fact equal is perhaps regardable as an instance of this law. The law itself is more abstract and covers all possible cases.

"2+2=4" is just another way of saying "4=4".

"2+2" and "4" are just different ways of expressing the same thing.

There is a reason it works to replace one expression with an equivalent one in an algebraic operation. You could replace "2+2" with "4" or "8/2" or "1+1+1+1" or "2*2" or "sqrt(16)" or "12-8". You get the idea.

And besides which, there's some evidence that quantum objects are individuated so there is metaphysical leeway here.

You're going to have to explain that to me. And if quantum objects are individuated as you say, what does that mean for pure mathematical quantities like "4"?

One severely underappreciated function of our education system is that it acts, for good or ill, as a big sorting machine. Think of how after digging potatoes from a field, farmers use either people or machines on a conveyor belt to sort them by size, rottenness, and so on. They are diverted to different destinations. The rot goes to the starch plant. The big potatoes go for french fries. And so on. The potatoes literally get letter grades. The education system does for the economy the same thing with the mass of human material that parents continually provide it.

As children, we too ride the conveyor belt. The education system is part assembly line, part produce sorter.

We get tested and then directed toward various slots in the big machine. It is like the ASVAB in the military. Is this recruit suitable for nuclear engineering or is he best used as machine gun fodder? Is this kid capable of working in medicine or is he best sent to the warehouses to heft sacks of vegetables onto pallets? Other kinds of testing determine such things as willingness to follow orders.

I noticed while going to school that the main thing I was constantly being tested on was my ability and willingness to follow instructions. I was consistently found lacking. And attempts were often made to increase my compliance.

It was seemingly less about what I knew or understood or about my growth as a person than it was about how readily I could be programmed by superiors to perform tasks.

School is at least partly about normalizing and standardizing us and making us behave in a way that serves economic growth. Behavior not consistent with such ends is systematically shamed and punished. Lots of smileys and stars go to those who do as they are told.

Should this system be serving other ends?

If you give love, is something in you or something of yours thereby diminished?

"Can artificial intelligence be creative, can it create art?"

Several questions immediately come to mind. Is all creativity art? Is all art creative? What is art anyway? Is consciousness, or subjectivity, important on the part of the maker of the thing in question? Can a non-conscious thing "express" anything? Can a non-conscious thing demonstrate aesthetic insight?

It seems to me that the question of whether AI can be conscious is critically important here. And that is a very tough question, perhaps forever unknowable with any certainty, since subjectivity, by its very nature, cannot be verified objectively.

Of course an artificial intelligence can do anything a human brain can, because an artificial intelligence can be as similar to a human brain as you want. — zookeeper

Is this true? As similar as you want? What about exactly identical? In that case, it would have to be an actual human brain.

Are we talking a physically instantiated neural net approximating the function of a brain or a simulation of a neural net running on a conventional computer?

At this point in our understanding, it isn't at all clear to any of us what consciousness is or how it comes about, no matter what anyone on any side of the ever-raging debate likes to think. When something is clearly understood, like the basic shape of the planet, there is usually a strong consensus. When there is no consensus even among the so-called experts on the subject, we can be reasonably sure that the issue is not well understood. I can't think of a feature of the actual world more puzzling at this point to us humans than our capacity for everyday, subjective, conscious experience. And my puzzlement here and claim that we don't know what it is or how it can be, contrary to what some might suspect, has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, a need to believe in an afterlife, or any such thing. I am mostly an atheist, mostly hostile toward religion. And I do not believe that my personal identity and point of view will survive the disorganization of my brain. Regardless, I have considered and researched the problem of consciousness for many years and am completely baffled by it and am aware of the general failure to understand the matter among the experts.

We simply don't know yet if a brain is all there is to consciousness. Second, even if there is nothing in addition to the brain, we don't know if the actual substance of brain tissue matters. It could be the case that the architecture of the neural net isn't all there is to it. The suspicions of some that there might be something more going on inside the neurons, for example, or that some kind of quantum effects (knee-jerk reactions to my use of the word "quantum" fully expected) or some other unknown factor might be important can't be completely ruled out at this point. If any such thing is important, even if the functional architecture of the neural net exactly copies the connections and neuron-firing behavior in a human brain, it may be that such a neural net simulation written in Java and running on a smartphone is missing some critical condition for actual consciousness.

In the first example I showed this was a program that learned what things were and is then instructed to produce an image of that thing based upon what it has learned.
I think it is fair to say that is an example of genuine creativity because there is some motive there to succeed at producing the thing in question as an image.
It does not simply copy and paste an image...it starts from nothing and eventually converges upon an image that resembles what it has learned is that thing. — m-theory

I am someone who has often been called an artist. I paint pictures. Sometimes I get paid for them. I can paint a very convincing likeness of whatever it is that I am looking at, including subtle human faces, perhaps the most difficult thing to convincingly represent. This is very impressive to most people who see what I have painted. But when I am fairly accurately copying appearances and making an oil painting that resembles a photograph of someone, I don't feel that I am being particularly creative. And it doesn't feel like art. Slavish copying of appearances, in my mind, is precisely the sort of painting that lacks creativity and art. The more accurate I am, the more stiff and the less artistic it feels.

When I am doing that, I am a human camera, a human copy machine. It is a kind of algorithmic surveying. Imagine that you are given some line diagram and then you use rulers, protractors, and other tools to measure every point, every angle, and so on, and you painstakingly reproduce that on a sheet of paper, such that you get a convincing copy that is accurate to within very small tolerances. That's what I am doing mentally. I have developed a mental procedure for comparing and reproducing relative angles, distances, colors, and so on.

People often breathlessly tell me about some of the portraits I have painted that I have "captured his soul!" They often comment that I must really have deep insight into the sitter to be able to capture their character like that. In my mind, I roll my eyes. They simply don't understand how I did it. I have done nothing so mysterious as that. A camera can do better than I did at reproducing a bunch of geometric relationships and it has no insight into the person's character. No insight is needed. I can convincingly copy any visual appearance. It is largely an algorithmic, mechanical process. It is generally no more artistic that what a surveyor does at a construction site.

Further, all of this that I can do can be taught to most anyone, given some time. It is nothing magical. I haven't been touched on the head by the gods. It is a skill that can be learned and has nothing to do with talent, whatever that is supposed to be. It just happens to be a skill that few spend the time acquiring. Most people are skilled at reproducing complex mouth sounds that they have heard others produce. We don't call them creative or artistic, and we aren't terribly impressed, I think, mostly because such skill is almost universal.

All that said, I do think that artistic things can happen in a painting, a musical performance, or some such thing. But this isn't to be found in the preciseness, the accuracy, the perfection, the detail, the amount of time it takes, the convincingness of a representation, or any such thing. As I see it, it happens when aesthetic feeling gets involved in a certain way. There is a kind of feedback loop between the piece and the creator. A machine can play a bunch of notes in precise time and with perfect pitch. It can play a Beethoven piece given the score. Even a player piano can do that. But can it do that with feeling? Sure, even a mechanical performance of a Beethoven piece can make us feel something, but can a computer hear and feel the music while playing it and expressively adjust the sound to enhance the feeling impact for an aesthetic effect that it desires to communicate to an audience, or even just to feel itself?

There is something in a Jimi Hendrix guitar performance that I think a computer would be hard-pressed to pull off. A human guitar player hears the sound being produced and feels the emotional effect it is having and then further modulates the sound to steer that feeling in a desired direction to express yet more feeling. A painter, if not a complete slave to the subject matter and the need to be perfectly accurate, can do the same thing. There is feeling even behind the movements of your hand as you make those flourishes while signing your name. The art, at least in part, is in the endless micro-adjustments made throughout your gesture-making which are part of a feeling feedback loop.

Feeling. It seems to me that a true experiential subject, a feeling agent, must be involved in anything that we might call art.

Do computers feel? In the history of computing, do we have any reason to believe that a computer has ever felt even simple pain, for example? How might you program a computer to feel pain? Computers follow instructions. They execute procedures. Can you write a step by step program that would produce a subjective feeling of pain in the computer executing that program? Is there a way that you could arrange a gazillion dominoes such that when you set them falling, the domino arrangement feels pain?


The Grand Canyon is beautiful and it moves us. But is it art? It was generated unconsciously by certain processes. You might even say that there is a certain complex algorithm behind it. Is it art? I don't think so. That which created it didn't intend for it to be felt that way and had no capacity to feel the effect of experiencing its form. This, I think, is somewhat analogous to anything a computer might do that might move us.

Besides, it is humans that are programming the computers or training the neural nets to give a certain effect. We write the algorithm that generates something that looks like poetry. But was the computer moved by something and inspired to express its feelings? Did it carefully and feelingfully choose words for just the desired effect? Did it understand what it was saying?

While performing Bach's Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott, can a computer feel the contrition?

Listen to this performance by David Gilmour, especially the guitar solo at 4:37:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTseTg48568

If a computer "composes" or plays a series of sounds like that, is it pouring out its "heart"? Is it feeling all that emotion it is communicating? And how can there be communication of feeling if that which produces it doesn't feel it? Notice that all of those performers are apparently feeling something while they are playing. That, I think, is key.

I suppose I'll need to! But does it put things that way? I'll have a look.

Isn't the whole reason for the new equation that you can't simply add relativistic velocities as in the old equation? In relativity, c is a relativistic velocity. And you can't add relativistic velocities directly as in c+c. To put c+c on the left side of the new equation would be to try to make the old equation equivalent to the new one, which it isn't. Right?

Play with this graph I made here:
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/yejpszq9ev

y = (u+v)/(1+4/x^2)

Now test to see if y ever equals u + v.

I put in x instead of c to show that no matter the value of x, for any sum of nonzero values for u and v, y never equals u + v. As the value of x increases, the y value asymptotically approaches u+v, but never reaches it.

My physics and math education are so limited and rusty! I am not sure how to deal with this. I've been trying to read and think about it, but I am just way out of my depth here. And my mental blocks are difficult to surmount.

Is "c + c = c" actually a valid expression? Do physicists actually ever put it that way? If they do, we should be able to find a discussion about this oddity somewhere. I don't even know how to Google it. I tried and didn't come up with anything relevant. If you can point me somewhere, I'd appreciate it!

I noticed that if you plug c in for u and for v in that equation, the result is just c. But we aren't really putting c+c on the left side of the equation, are we? It seems obviously problematic to do so, as u+v simply does not equal (u+v)/(1+4/c^2).


There simply must be something wrong with looking at it this way, but at the moment, I just don't have the requisite understanding to see what it is.

In your original post, I believe there are some problems with your analysis. I don't know how to format the math expressions properly here like you did, and my math and physics are both very weak, so please bear with me as I fumble about here.

When you say that 2+2 = 4/(1+4/c^2), if we take your expression just as you put it, with no units, no vectors, and so on, if we do a bit of simplification here, if my rusty basic algebra skills have not led me astray, we can show that you are saying that 16/c^2 = 0, or even 16=0, which is not true. Such a result shows not that the law of non-contradiction and law of identity are wrong, but rather that there is something wrong with your equation.

I looked up velocity addition and the formula I found is different from yours. Have a look here:
https://web.pa.msu.edu/courses/2000fall/phy232/lectures/relativity/vel_add.html

You seem to be saying that u+v = (u+v)/(1+4/c^2)

And you then put in 2 for u and for v. This is apparently where you get 2+2 = (u+v)/(1+4/c^2). But this seems not correct. v', not u+v, is what equals (u+v)/(1+4/c^2).

In the relativistic theory, v' does not equal u+v, so you can't put u+v on the left side of that equation in place of v'.

It seems that you are trying to make equivalent the Newtonian and relativistic formulas, as follows:



and



and therefore, you seem to be saying, using the first formula to replace v' with u+v in the second,

u+v = (u+v)/(1+4/c^2)

But this isn't correct since the Newtonian and relativistic formulas are different as they involve different considerations. The v' in one formula is not the same as the v' in the other. So you have never shown that 2+2 equals anything other than 2+2 or 4.

And we aren't talking about simply adding two velocities. The apparent times and distances in question are different with different frames of reference.

The way we talk and think about the truth that something is identical with itself or simply is itself is a convention that perhaps requires our minds. Maybe all abstractions require minds. But something's actually being identical with itself, or the impossibility of it being not itself does not seem to require our minds. But the abstractions we make seem to reflect something about the world in itself even though abstractions as we make them are not exactly found out in the world. The whole problem of universals is actually rather perplexing.

But let's not get derailed talking about consciousness here. That's a whole other issue. What we are talking about here is really whether or not the law of identity gets violated, whether 2+2 can ever equal something it isn't equal to.

I don't think the OP has properly demonstrated 2+2 not equaling 4. I'm in the process of trying to exactly identify the problem with the attempted demonstration.

With relativity, it requires a conscious observer with a particular location. Aliens are conscious as well. Without observers, would “location” even make any sense? — Noah Te Stroete

I am not sure questions about consciousness and whether relativity requires it are particularly relevant to the topic of this thread. If we pursue those questions, it would likely prove a distraction.

Isn't 2+2=4 just an instance of the law of identity, A=A? Any something is itself. How could it be that anything in actual physical reality could be not itself?

"2+2" is just another way of saying "4". "2+2=4" is just another way of saying "4 is 4". "This rock is this rock" is an instance of A=A or "this is this". Any time you put two expressions on opposite sides of an equals sign, you are declaring identity. If they are not equal, your equation is simply false.

As for physics, aren't conservation laws just the same sort of thing? This much stuff is always this much stuff. It can't be not equal to itself. No matter what you do, you can't make it not equal to itself.

If you ever discover that what you had put on one side of an equals sign is in fact not equal to what you had put on the other side, this simply indicates a prior failure to understand what you are dealing with, maybe what the basic stuff being conserved in fact is. If something like mass-energy equivalence seems like it is a statement that something is not itself, this just means that you fail to understand what mass and energy are at a more fundamental level.

Einstein's theories don't involve violations of basic conservation laws or the law of identity or the law of non-contradiction. If they were to involve such violations, they'd be wrong.

With regard to speed, isn't it just the case that Einstein gave us a deeper understanding of what it is that is being conserved? Regardless of the frame of reference, the spacetime interval is invariant, no?

If you show that a previously believed equation doesn't hold, you haven't demonstrated an actual instance of A in fact equaling non-A or 2+2 equaling 5. Rather, you are showing that what you had put on one side of the equals sign is in fact not the same as what you put on the other.

With regard to relativity, a difference in the frame of reference is what makes two things previously believed to be equivalent in fact non-equivalent.

Imagine a train of a certain length seen from two different perspectives on the ground. The apparent length as seen from each of the two perspectives will naturally vary. If the train is in fact 10 miles long but you view it from directly behind the caboose, it will appear to be only 11 feet long. If you view it from the side, it will appear much longer. Have you discovered an instance of A=A being violated? No. What you have discovered is that the apparent length from perspective A is not equal to the apparent length from perspective B. The situation is more clear as seen from high above. Einstein's theories give us that different vantage point where we can see just how the two perspectives are related and how they don't in fact disagree about any objective actuality. The mistake was in thinking that the apparent length from a given ground-based perspective was the actual length and that therefore, all apparent lengths of a given train must be equal.

If the law of identity is just a matter of convention and doesn't say anything about physical reality, then we are quite lost! The fact that logic and math are so applicable to physical modelling suggests pretty strongly that they aren't merely conventional. They have something to do with physical reality, surely!

It seems to me that mathematics is just an abstract way of stating universal truths that physical reality must obey. Physical reality cannot, for example, involve an actualized contradiction. Perhaps you could say that math is all about the laws of substance itself.

Didn't we get our math in the first place by abstracting from or generalizing about physical reality? We started making marks to stand for physical things. Obviously, the particular marks and sounds we make are simply a matter of convention. One could imagine, for example, that an alien civilization has a different way of representing these universal truths. But would you suppose that aliens could have a mathematics or logic that is simply irreconcilable with ours?

In at least some cases, it is probably just regression toward the mean, a phenomenon that often fools us.

However bad we might think life is for humans or animals, that doesn't give us the right to do bad things to other sentient beings. On the contrary, we ought, as much as possible, to bring some kindness into the world. The worse the world is, the more this is needed! Why add bad to bad when it isn't necessary?

I am sorry you've suffered so. And I too have a sibling with progressive MS who is quite disabled. It is a horrible disease for sure. But what does this have to do with vegan ethics? How does any amount of suffering in the world justify adding to it?

Yes, but you're still confusing them with what they're not, namely other animals, like chickens or pigs. I wouldn't treat humans like we do chickens or pigs, and I wouldn't treat chickens or pigs like we do humans, and there's nothing wrong about that.

Given that chickens and pigs are not like humans, it's a different argument. That they're useful to us, and can be farmed, is not to suggest the same of humans. — Sapientia

X are useful to us

X can readily be made use of

Therefore, it is right for us to use X

I hope you aren't making that argument.

Do you think that their usefulness to us and the fact that it is possible to farm them justifies our using and farming them? Consider the possible consequences of such a line of justification. Slaves are useful too. And people can be enslaved. It worked for many centuries. Does that justify anything?

Like us, these animals have the capacity to suffer. And they have interests. They may not the have the potential to become mathematicians, but they are better off not being in such conditions as the following and we have no right to do such things to our fellow sentient beings. The idea that our pleasure justifies all this is monstrous.

No one is free really because no one asks to be born and we are it seems forced into existence. — Andrew4Handel

If you are born against your will, does that negate any interests you might have once alive? Does that make ridiculous any argument that I ought to respect your rights? Does your being born against your will give me a right to exploit you, to steal from you, to cage you, to torture you, to eat you? Don't you in some sense belong to yourself and not to me? Is there nothing wrong with putting you in a cage?

Animals appear to act more on instinct than rational goals or desire. — Andrew4Handel

Humans are driven more by instinct than I think most appreciate. And most desire is instinct.

I don't know what purpose there is for animals that we can thwart. — Andrew4Handel

I am not sure about purpose. That's a thorny issue. But consider a porpoise instead. In one case, a porpoise is out engaging in all its natural behaviors unmolested by humans. In another, it is put in a tiny enclosure where it can barely move, separated from its kind. No difference worth caring about? Are we not thwarting this animal's interests by capturing it and putting it in such an enclosure? Would this animal not rather be out swimming in the open ocean with its own kind, doing what it is instinctually driven to do?

Do I have a right to just take any number of porpoises out of the ocean and place them in enclosures and poke and prod them for my amusement? Is there no sense in which they, as sentient beings, have a right to be left alone by people like me?

What if we take a chimpanzee and lock its head in a vise and stick needles in its eyes? Do you think there is nothing here like an interest belonging to the chimp that we are really thwarting? Is it simply okay to do absolutely anything to animals? If yes, why? Because they don't reason at a sophisticated level?

Can you imagine being a cow wandering around eating grass drinking water and not much else? — Andrew4Handel

Cows do more than just that. They actually have a richer social life than most realize, for one thing. Regardless, cows are constituted such that they enjoy wandering around freely eating grass and drinking water, just as we enjoy eating and drinking and moving around freely. Don't you think it would be a drag to be a cow confined in a tiny enclosure in which you can barely move, indoors, packed amidst many other such enclosures among a multitude of distressed cows, prodded, branded, and so on?

Is it the case that the fewer the options for cognitive pursuits and diverse behaviors, the more it is okay for us to take possession of and abuse a creature? Do more intelligent and complex humans have more rights than those with serious disabilities and cognitive deficits?

I consider domesticants animals too. — charleton

Where did I suggest that domesticated animals are not animals?

You said that "Without meat eaters there would be no animals on the land at all." I tried to be charitable in assuming you meant by "animals" only animals domesticated for human food, as obviously, without us eating any animals, even if there were no angus cattle for example, there would still be deer and rabbits and bears and so on. Or by "meat eaters", did you mean carnivores in general, including non-humans? Was your claim that without carnivore animals there would be no animals on the land at all? And by "on the land", do you mean to say that there might still be some animals in the ocean? What the heck are you trying to say? Taken on its face, what you said in that sentence is utterly absurd! But I read some implied qualifiers in there: human meat eaters and domesticated animals. And I was asking for clarification to see if that was indeed what you meant.

I consider domesticants animals too. Your problem seems to be that you confuse them with humans. — charleton

It might be argued that many humans aren't so different from domesticated animals! :wink:

I read the rest of your tiatribe and you failed to even begin to address a world without meat animals and what would happen putting more land under the plough, and destroy the environment with more domesticated vegetables production. — charleton

Environmental impact is a whole 'nother issue! And if you look into the matter, you'll see that it comes down in the end strongly in favor of plant-based diets. Many advocate plant-based diets not because of animal rights but because animal production is so bad for the environment. Cows produce lots of greenhouse gases and contribute in a big way to global warming. And we raise plants on farms to feed animals in feedlots, remember? Most of what we feed to animals consists of plants edible for humans that are grown on farmland that could be used for a variety of crops. We mostly feed our domesticated animals corn, even some in fish farms, of all things! Sometimes, we even feed the animals candy (derived from farmed plants)! It isn't like the cows are created ex nihilo! And there are inefficiencies in converting food we could otherwise eat into cow flesh. It takes less land to produce the same amount of food for humans if we eat it directly than it takes to first feed it to cows.

False analogy.
You are confusing humans with animals. — charleton

Humans are animals. Or do you subscribe to the idea that we have some special magical difference that makes our interests matter and theirs not, or leaves them without interests? Descartes thought we have souls and animals don't. Do you share a similar view?

Why? — charleton

If my enslavement and eating of a group of humans were to make their lives less painful, more secure, and their deaths sudden and painless, would that justify it? Would that make it okay? Why? Is comfort all that matters?

I've said it before and I'll say it again, these other beings simply do not belong to us to do with as we please.

I'm not making an argument for factory farms. I'm supporting the natural right of a human to eat meat. — charleton

Factory farming and humans eating meat these days pretty much go together. It is arguable that at current human population levels, factory farming is the only way to supply enough meat. At the very least, factory farming makes meat far more affordable.

making your point about factory farms completely irrelevant. — charleton

There isn't one single issue here. The evils involved are multiple. I said that if all the cattle were free-range, it would be better (less confinement, less pain, less fear, more natural behavior allowed, etc), but would still be wrong (they still don't belong to us and we have no right to take possession of them in any way).

You are ignorant here.
Please compare with natural death by predator or disease. — charleton

In the case of enslaving, abusing, and slaughtering them, I am the one responsible. In the case of natural death, I didn't cause it. But it isn't that it is all about me. Rather, it is about what I should do and what I have a right to do to other beings with interests of their own, and perhaps rights of their own.

Suppose soldiers are being wounded and killed on a battlefield in gruesome ways. If I go out and capture them and put them in pens and fatten them up before painlessly killing them before I eat them, even if their deaths are less painful under my "care", do I have a right to do this to them? Am I their benefactor?

It seems that you think we are eating meat in order to do all the animals a favor! And let's not forget, as you pointed out, these animals arguably wouldn't even exist in the first place if we weren't raising them for food, so we arguably aren't even saving them from some natural death that they'd otherwise have suffered. Perhaps the matter is different for hunters who hit their mark with a clear head shot.

But if you are going to defend eating meat by arguing that they suffer less when we eat them, is it really the case that you care about their suffering? Is this why you eat them? Supposing it were clear that they suffer more when we raise them for food and eat them, would you then think our eating them is still justified?

...they live in far better comfort and security than their natural cousins; they die cleanly, with no pain. — charleton

I forgot to address this. Even if all that were true, it wouldn't make it okay. It would be wrong even if we fed them a constant supply of pleasure drugs.

Put humans in their place and see if you think it would be okay. Round up all the homeless struggling for survival and do to them what we do to food animals. Would this be right?

And do they really live in far better comfort? Have you looked into what conditions are like in factory farms, which supply most of the animal products these days? Do you really think that these conditions are better and more comfortable? Secure? Seriously? You sound like you believe all the animals live on Old MacDonald's Farm. Where are you from? The big city? I've lived in rural America most of my life and have spent time around farms and ranches and have seen some things. I even worked as a kid on a sheep ranch. I frequently drive by a dairy on the edge of a nearby town where right by the road, you can see all the veal calves confined in their little hutches. I've seen animals being branded. I've helped put the little rubber bands around the scrotums of young male sheep, as well as clipped notches into their ears with a tool not unlike a leather punch. I've seen the male chicks put through grinders or suffocated en masse in large plastic bags. But I never personally saw a factory farm operation. Everything I've encountered directly is tame in comparison to what I've learned about factory farms.

Sure, I realize that animal rights activists, when they make their shock videos, are concentrating the worst footage they have. They are trying to make things look as grim as possible. But if you just look into how factory farms are designed to operate, if you have the least empathy for living beings, you should be shocked that our society does this systematically. Would people stand for humans or even dogs being treated in this way? (And don't get me started about how dogs are treated elsewhere in the world as food animals) The factory farm is a reality that is largely hidden from public view. And now, with all the ag-gag laws, it is harder than ever to educate the public about it.

If all the cattle were free-range cattle, it wouldn't be quite so bad, but it would still be wrong.

And do they die without pain? Some methods are fairly quick, but there is a lot of fear and often struggle involved.

Suppose they do die without pain and fear. Should we go around painlessly euthanizing homeless people that will otherwise likely die slowly and uncomfortably?

A big part of this is the question of who and what rightly belongs to us. If animals have more painful and frightful lives in nature, does this give me a right to exploit them and use them for my pleasure, so long as their pain and fright level is lower under my subjection of them?

If you don't intend to eradicate pain then it is somewhat arbitrary what pain your try and eliminate. — Andrew4Handel

It seems like it might make sense to avoid unnecessarily causing pain where it doesn't obviously serve a greater good.

Am I being arbitrary if I choose to pet a dog or even just leave it alone instead of kicking it in the face?

Also, let's be clear. For me, the pain issue seems secondary to the idea that other sentient beings belong to themselves and not to me. They simply aren't mine to do with as I please. It would be wrong for me to use them as a means to my ends like that without some serious justification even if I cause them no pain or even if I cause them pleasure.

Imagine that I enslave a population of humans and use them for my purposes while using brain implants to make all of this very pleasurable for them. Is this then a good, since the overall pleasure in the world has been increased? I think not. The simple pleasure=good, pain=evil thing is too crude.

There is something that I have often found puzzling that might reveal a problem for mind-brain supervenience. But it probably depends on mind-brain supervenience entailing epiphenomenalism. It seems to me that epiphenomenalism would have to be the case with mind-brain supervenience, but I'll have to give it more thought. Anyway, here's the gist of the idea:

If my behavior is entirely explained by a series of microphysical causes, without appeal to any extra mental causes, then how does my behavior come to refer to my mental states? We know about our minds and we talk about them. Can information about something get into a system without that something somehow influencing that system?

If mental states depend on physical states, but physical states depend only on other physical states, the mental has no influence on the physical and minds cannot declare their existence in behavior.

Consider that if the behavior of a brain is entirely explained by pure physical causes, whether or not there are any accompanying mental states, those mental states would make no difference to that behavior. The brain would behave the same whether or not mental states exist. The mental states would put no evidence of themselves into the physical system. There would be no reference to them in behavior. And so behavior that seems to refer to mental states doesn't really refer to them. When we talk about mental states, we are talking nonsense. In other words, if I say that I am conscious and I describe what it is like to experience seeing the color red, my behavior would be the same whether or not there really was any such experience. The behavior has nothing to do with the presence of mental states, since they have no causal efficacy.

If epiphenomenalism were true, and mind-brain supervenience seems to entail epiphemenalism, we'd never know anything about our minds or ever say anything about them. Whatever it is we are talking about, it surely isn't our causally inefficacious mental states.

If the physical brain state is what determines the form of the mental state, the mental state won't contain any information about itself or other mental states. Mental states would have no effect on mental states. So the mind, while there might well be an experience, would never refer to itself or its experience. It would have to have some sort of causal influence on its own form in order to come to contain some reference to itself. At least partly, its form would have to depend on the mental and not the physical. And the physical, since physical behavior is involved in our talking about mental states, would have to partially depend on mental states and not fully on physical states.

We could diagram the causal chain as being like the following in the case of epiphenomenalism:


M1 M2 M3
^ ^ ^
P1 > P2 > P3


The mental states are strictly effects, having no causal outflow. And we could remove the mental states without changing the physical.

If, however, mental states were to have some sort of causal influence on the physical state, there would have to be a gap in the physical causal chain. If the behavior is partly explained by the mental states and not fully explained by the physical, then the physical isn't causally closed. But if the physical is causally closed and all physical happenings are fully explained by physical causes, any causal influence of a mental state would have to involve overdetermination.

Consider that for a mental state to come to refer to experiential qualities, to contain any information about mental states, its form must be partly determined by the mental and not fully determined by the physical. In other words, the mental state would have to be partly underdetermined by and independent of the physical and so perfect supervenience wouldn't hold. It would be somewhat independent of its physical base. The underlying or previous physical states wouldn't fully explain the form of the mental state.

So if the mind supervenes on the brain perfectly, how do you explain the existence of discussions of the puzzles involving the mind?

This seems a serious problem for mind-brain supervenience, no?

My point was that it is not a bad thing in the sense that it aids survival. The idea of no one experiencing pain sounds positive until you hear about people who don't experience pain and suffer severe injuries. So do you want to eradicate pain or preserve pain for its survival value? — Andrew4Handel

Yes, pain often serves a beneficial function. Could it be that while pain is an evil, some pain is justified if it serves a greater good?

Is suffering ever intrinsically good, without appeal to any extrinsic benefit?

Since the following objection has a bit of substance, I'll address it.

Domesticated animals exist because of humans. Without meat eaters there would be no animals on the land at all.
Far from living at their expense; we guarantee their survival and they live in far better comfort and security than their natural cousins; they die cleanly, with no pain. And provide good shit for the soil. — charleton

Without meat eaters (human meat eaters or carnivores in general?), there would be no animals on the land at all? What?!!! Surely, you mean that these domesticated animals wouldn't be on the land. I'll assume that's what you meant to say. If that's what you meant, it is likely the case that some of them could not survive without our help if we were to let them all go (potentially ecologically problematic, obviously) and it is very obvious that these animals would never have existed in their current form absent our practices. Do you suppose this is something no animal rights advocate has ever considered?

How does this pose a problem for the position that we ought not enslave or eat animals? And how does this pose a problem for the idea that we live at their expense? I have a hard time seeing the existence of a typical factory farm animal as a desirable one, as something there ought to be more of in the world.

To get X at another's expense doesn't always mean that the other in question ceases to exist or would have existed otherwise. If I get pleasure out of torturing you, my pleasure is at your expense, even if I created you just to torture you.

Let's suppose that there is some society that practices cannibalism and finds Danish people to be tastiest. Suppose these people conquer the Danes, or at least some of them, and enslave them and begin some eugenics program to select for more of whatever quality it is that makes them so tasty and less of any capacity to resist, perhaps reducing their intelligence substantially to the point where they are too dumb to even understand their situation. Suppose the Danes here change form over time and become a sort of human that can't breed or otherwise survive without the help of the people who have made them this way. And suppose their lives are utter misery. They are kept in small cages, deprived of sunlight and fresh air, prodded, branded, harrassed with dogs, and so on and so forth, until the day when they are led to slaughter.

Should this practice continue? Does the fact that the continued existence of this new strain of human being relies on this practice justify it? Does the fact that these people would never have existed at all without this practice justify it? I think not. It is monstrous. If the only way for these people to exist is to exist like this, they shouldn't exist. And yes, regardless of the fact that without the cannibals breeding them, they wouldn't exist, the cannibals still live at their expense.

And it seems to me that regardless of the fact that these people wouldn't exist without their "masters", the masters don't rightly own them. As soon as there is someone with interests of their own, they are not the sort of thing that can rightly be considered property. They aren't rightly considered things at all.

As for the animals, it isn't really their existence or nonexistence that is at issue. And the problem with enslaving and slaughtering them involves much more than just causing these particular slaughtered animals to cease to exist, though once they do exist, it becomes a factor.

I think we ought to concern ourselves here with beings that already exist rather than concern ourselves wih potential beings that might exist if certain practices continue. We have this situation, and there are these real beings with their interests. What should we do with them in particular?

If I created you to torture you and you rely on me to be fed, if I decide what I am doing is wrong, now I am probably rightly held responsible for your well-being. I probably ought to provide for you and go to great lengths to make sure the remainder of your life is as positive and free as possible.

If we say that it is wrong to kill someone at least partly because we are robbing them of the remainder of their lives and all their future potentials, are we also saying that they ought to exist and that therefore, more like them ought to exist, and therefore, that we ought to breed as many of them as possible? Is failing to breed as many of them as possible then a serious wrong, the same as killing an equal number? No. Talk of beings who don't exist is fraught with problems. We should concern ourselves here with the rights of existing beings who have real interests. And if we brought them into existence, now that they are here, we are obliged to consider their interests.

Do your potential unborn children have a right to exist? Are you wronging them by not bringing them into existence? If so, that would open a huge can of worms! But any children you happen to have already had are a different matter, aren't they? Those you can't rightly kill. Killing a living being and failing to create a potential being are two very, very different things.

I think your mistake might be the assumption that vegans and vegetarians have some sort of coherent moral standpoint. This is not the case. — charleton

You might be surprised if you cared to talk to one. Sure, our position may not be as well justified as the pythagorean theorem, but it is at least as well justified as any objection to murder, slavery, and so on. Maybe you ought to give Peter Singer's book a read. Many vegetarians/vegans have been influenced by it. I personally have not read it.

First is that there is many local ecosystems that cannot reasonably offer humans survival without the use of meat and other animal products. And that to impose veganism or vegetarianism in such places would be seriously injurious in terms of pollution from the energy to bring food to those places. — charleton

And there may be an argument for the greater good there involving the eating of meat. I think humans should exist at the expense of lower animals when necessary. Humans are more valuable for sure, in my way of looking at all this. But the level of complexity/consciousness of the food sources should be minimized and only the minimum number needed should be taken. The minimum level of sentience might be higher in some situations. I certainly can't justify my own eating of meat in this way, however. There may be circumstances where I could even justify eating human flesh. But I won't eat it when the situation doesn't practically force this.

Secondly, is the real reasons that people take on these unnatural practices. These fall into two categories, both emotional and not logical or moral, being basic squeamishness about blood and death, and the other being the anthropomorphisation of animals, particularly that concurrent with the rise of vegetarianism in the 20thC which I have called the Disney Effect. — charleton

Some vegetarians might well be squeamish about blood and death and that might motivate their dietary choices. That isn't true of most vegans/vegetarians that I've known, though it seems to be partly true of one. It wasn't a big factor for me. My decision to stop eating sentient beings unnecessarily came after a lengthy, rational deliberation on the matter. And it was a difficult change to make for many reasons. And of course, feelings were part of that too, feelings such as empathy, a recognition of another mammal's inner similarity to me, and so on. Feelings are unavoidably a part of it. Feelings motivate most action, even yours. When I see what is done to animals in factory farms, I feel a sense of horror much like what I feel when I see videos showing what the Nazis did, not that I hold these two things on quite the same level. But reason is involved as well in a big way. I would guess that most vegans/vegetarians have rationally examined their dietary practices to a significant degree.

As for anthropomorphisation, it is actually hard to know just what it is like to be an animal, and when we try to understand what they are going through, we do try to occupy their perspective in our imaginations. We place ourselves in their position. Some humanization is inevitable. However, I think it totally reasonable and rational to infer from the behavior of an animal like a dog or pig, with whom we share much, including much similar neurology, that when it squeals and tries to get away from someone cutting into its flesh, its inner state is much like mine would be in a similar circumstance. I've spent enough time with real animals, not Disney cartoons, to have come to have a good sense of just how similar to us they are in many emotional respects. It is harder when it comes to more alien creatures like squid, as their body language is very different. But dogs aren't so far from us. I am confident that I understand them pretty well. And it was partly my experiences with real dogs that led me to realize that I couldn't in good conscience kill and eat my dog, knowing what I knew about her, and a pig is no different.

I assure you that no Disneyesque image of a talking, dancing animal ever came into my mind in the examination that I went throught that led me to stop eating meat.

I think it is probably better to err on the side of thinking an animal more like us than it really is than the opposite. If I don't ascribe any of my inner experiential qualities to an animal, and I assume it is nothing at all like me, lacking even the most basic experientiality, I am likely making a grave mistake and might be systematically causing great suffering without even recognizing it. Descartes made this mistake in a big way when he insisted that animals are automata. If I can decrease the chances that I am causing a lot of undue suffering and harming the interests of other beings while not inconveniencing myself in a big way, I will.

And as it happens, making this change improved my health, my self-discipline, my strength in my ability to live my beliefs regardless of what others around me think or what they say (I am surrounded by people who are quite hostile to this choice as I live in a rural, conservative area), and so on. And it felt great to actually bring my behavior into alignment with my conscience.

If it helps you to feel better to think of vegans/vegetarians in the way you seem to, by all means...

How would you know that the child's suffering mattered if it didn't bother you at all? — Andrew4Handel

Its mattering and badness don't depend on me knowing or caring. This situation is awful even if nobody else exists to know or not know about it. Even if I know about it and enjoy it, it is still a bad thing in the world. There is still suffering and a loss of all sorts of other value. My knowing about or not knowing or liking or disliking this child's torture all make no difference to the reality of what it is.

Pain is essential for survival. People with congenital pain deficit die younger and cause themselves lots of injury. — Andrew4Handel

Certainly. And interestingly, this pain brings a message of ought-not. It dissuades. When you are learning to get around in the world, you need both the encouragement and dissuasion. When you hurt yourself, you know what not to do in the future.

I think a notion of goodness such as what causes least harm will have to reference nature because harm is natural/biological. — Andrew4Handel

It seems to me that to say that goodness is what causes least harm is like saying that warmth is what is least cold.

When there are two possibe states of affairs, such as a child being tortured or that same child happily swinging in a park with friends, there is a sense in which one state is better than another. It would be better if one happened rather than the other. But how do we decide the better? To know the answer to that, to understand what it is that makes all better conditions preferable to the worse, is to know what the good is.

And if you condemn life as being bad in some way, or the world overall as being bad, you are evaluating it according to some criteria of goodness. You have to have a sense of what is good in order to find the world falling short.

Also, what do you mean when you say that harm is natural/biological? Do you mean to refer specifically to something like damage to an organism? If so, when we call that a harm, aren't we attaching a value judgment to it? To harm is to in some sense wrong someone, to make their condition worse. That involves valuation. And if there is a worse, there is also a better. The two arise together. If you know what makes things worse, you also know what makes them better. You must know what the good is in order to know when real harm has been done.

One reason you can't derive an ought from an is, is because you really never do, even when it looks like you are. You are simply failing to put a tacit assumption into words. — NKBJ

I appreciate the attempt to clarify the matter for me. But what I am trying to get at is something a little different from I understand you to be addressing. And I am quite unsure about it. If subjective experience is taken seriously as something real, and if, intrinsic to serious pain is an intolerability, a badness, an ought-not-ness, or really, if pain is an ought-not in itself, then there is perhaps a sense in which an ought-not can be said to exist in reality. Reality might well contain objective shoulds and shouldn'ts. Maybe it isn't deriving an ought from an is. Rather, maybe this ought-not is an is! And so then we can derive a further is from that is.

Normally, we tend to think that there is a world of things and then we apply value judgements to them, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily. We feel some way about the things that are. If we feel that some state of affairs is wrong, that is simply our feeling about it. But in this way of looking at the matter, the wrongs are not themselves real objects in the world. We are just basically saying that we don't like X. We can say, and be simply stating a fact, that we would prefer for things to be otherwise than they are. Joe disapproves of X. This is a fact. But to make the claim that things really ought to be other than they are is a different sort of claim.

But the usual way in which we talk about facts sort of assumes that the only place to find facts is in the value-free world of objective states of affairs out there, basically just things and their configurations or states among what is third-person verifiable. But if we take subjective experience seriously and realize that it is just as real as anything, the world gets more complicated. Suddenly, it contains not just particles and energy states and so on, but also other things like interests and perhaps selves and rights and maybe even matterings. Maybe there is a way to look at something like a harm as being a real harm, a wrong that actually exists objectively in the world. Maybe it isn't just that I feel it is wrong. Maybe a wrong actually is.

Consider that a rock and its existence seem to us a value-free state of affairs that just is. We can regard this objective state of affairs in a detached manner or can assign value to it, positive or negative, depending on our preferences. But if you have an extreme headache, the situation is quite different. There is now an all too real headache-experience in the world. And that headache experience is intrinsically intolerable. Intolerability is essential to what it is. You can't have this headache and regard it in a detached manner as just a thing in the world while not suffering it. A headache is a state of suffering. That suffering is real suffering and really exists in the real world. A headache experience, which is a real state of affairs happening in the world, has an intrinsic badness to it. It can't cease to be bad or intolerable without ceasing to be what it is or ceasing to exist altogether. The negative value aspect of it is inseparable from it, is essential to it. So there is maybe a sense in which value is objective.

Maybe we could argue in a manner like the following:

Painfulness is badness

Headaches are painful

Therefore, headaches are bad

Bad things ought not exist

Headaches are bad

Headaches ought not exist


I am not sure if any of this really makes any sense. But I have the suspicion that we are so habituated to only considering as factual the usual objective, third-person verifiable things in the world that we are overlooking some very important things about the subjective side of the world. The world doesn't just contain things like quarks, tables, and cells. It also contains things like awfulnesses and interests. The subjective world is perhaps rightly seen as intrinsically value-laden. Here, there is no gap between the ought and the is. They are one thing. Maybe value is something of the very substance of the subjective world.

Maybe? I don't know. I haven't thought all this through very much.

I think that it is arbitrary what you define as natural. I don't think the phrase natural picks out a concrete concept but then I didn't coin the naturalistic fallacy. — Andrew4Handel

Sure, it is rather arbitrary. But if you yourself are going to appeal to this concept in some way, you need to clarify what you mean by it and be consistent. The people who call others out for committing the error that is the naturalistic fallacy are not the ones guilty of appealing to nature. They are responding to those who wrongly appeal to nature.

If someone attacks homosexuality by saying that it is unnatural and then someone else defends it by trying to show that it is indeed natural, the latter appears to be accepting the former's idea that if something is unnatural, it is bad. If they don't accept this, why this defense? Why not just say "So what if it is?" to the claim that it is unnatural? It isn't clear that its being natural or unnatural has anything at all to do with whether or not it is good!

The only point I want to make here is that there is not another realm for goodness (or pleasure to come from) — Andrew4Handel

That depends on what you consider nature to include. If you consider nature to include everything that is actually real or true, that might include ideal numbers, absolute beauty, subjective states, the intolerability of pain, the pythagorean theorem, and all sorts of things. Objective value could be part of reality. If you consider nature to include only what is physical, objective, third-person verifiable, testable, measurable, concrete, and so on, then there might indeed be something outside of that to appeal to. And if that is all you'll permit as real, you might find it hard to justify anything like value and will likely end up with an Alex Rosenberg style moral nihilism, where you see everything as nothing more than valueless collections of fermions and bosons and ask how it is possible for one arrangement of fermions and bosons to be better than another. Jews being gassed versus Jews thriving unmolested are then just one particular arrangement of fermions and bosons compared to another, no arrangement being any better or worse than another. Either way, it is just particles occupying certain positions in the void!

I am not claiming eating meat is good because it is natural because at this point we are just discussing where goodness comes from. — Andrew4Handel

I don't think I took you to be making that claim. I took you to reject the idea of the naturalistic fallacy and I was defending the idea of the naturalistic fallacy by saying some things showing why it is problematic for people to argue that eating meat is good because it is natural or homosexuality is bad because it is unnatural. What I was attacking wasn't in every case what you were saying, but what others often say. I was in part trying to show that you should accept the naturalistic fallacy as being a true fallacy, as representing a kind of faulty thinking. Naturalness shouldn't be used to justify or condemn anything.

I believe unnatural often means man made and/or deviating from natures supposed purpose. The point then is that some things originated solely from humans and we can be held accountable for them. — Andrew4Handel

Yes. That's how many seem to understand it. And here we have all that crypto-theological stuff. God made us to do such and such and will get mad at us if we deviate from his intentions.

My reasoning is that if something is a necessary part of nature there is no reason to alienate ourself from it. — Andrew4Handel

Is this sound reasoning? What is the connection between something being natural and something being okay?

What does it mean for it to be a necessary part of nature? Suppose it is a necessary part of nature for some eagles to survive by pulling goats off of cliffs. Does that justify you doing the same? Just because you can find examples of animals doing something, that makes it good for you? Why? And if you can't find any examples of animals doing something, does that mean it is wrong for you to do it? Why? I simply don't see the fact of animals doing or not doing something as a relevant consideration for whether or not we ought to do it.

Also, when you do the thing an animal does, you aren't doing the same thing really. And you are probably doing what you do for far different reasons. If you kill a gazelle, that isn't the same thing as a lion killing a gazelle. Lions can't subsist on beans, for one thing, as you can, nor are they even in a position to examine their behavior and evaluate its goodness. Your awareness and rationality, and presumably freedom, shoulders you with moral responsibility that a lion can't be reasonably expected to carry. And with a lion, it is less of a question of ought, as lions don't make such considerations. We do. Lions simply do eat gazelles and will continue to do so as long they can. The question of whether or not lions should be allowed to kill gazelles might be a question for us to ask though! ;)

A human killing a gazelle probably is doing it for sheer sport and trophy anyway. Pretty crass, if you ask me!

What if a human just goes around biting and tearing apart every living thing he comes across? And what if he defends his action by pointing out that sharks behave in this way and that it is therefore natural? Yes, sharks do do that and their doing that is part of nature. Why does that make it okay for you? And does its being natural for shark make it natural for you?

I think nature is innately harmful and cannot be improved. — Andrew4Handel

Then why are you looking to nature to justify human activity? And if harmfulness is real and can be predicated of nature, doesn't that open another can of worms? Doesn't that point to a domain of objective value? By what measuring stick are you finding nature to be in some sense bad? What are you appealing to?

I can see no reason why we should alter our bodies and use supplements to make ourselves as if Herbivores. To me that is an unnecessary sacrifice. (To an imaginary moral standard/realm) — Andrew4Handel

Why would we have to alter our bodies or even use supplements? And aren't supplements just food? Is pea protein concentrate any less real or natural than beef jerky? Why? And our diet is flexible. We can be carnivores, herbivores, or omnivores.

And as for reasons, I can think of more than a few for becoming a vegan. For one, not violating the autonomy of or doing harm to other sentient beings. For another, reducing your carbon footprint.

I was a vegan for a number of years and probably will become one again. I never had to become inhuman or unnatural, not that it would obviously be a bad thing to do so. The most difficult part is dealing with a world that relies heavily on animal products. It is hard to eat out with friends for example. And meat-eaters complain about judgmental vegetarians and vegans, but you should try to be a vegan among meat-eaters in rural America. You'll encounter some serious judgment, even hate, even threats of violence. I am sure it is not as bad as the way homosexuals are treated, but it can be trying for sure. You constantly have to justify your food choices. People will attack you for it. They sneer. They call you a freak or a nutjob. Even my own brother speaks of "those vegan nutcases" to me, knowing that I was a vegan for a long time. I've been in sporting goods stores where the walls are full of t-shirts and bumper stickers talking shit about people who care about animal rights. These are the same stores with boar heads on the walls.

But as I have said from near the beginning I am a moral nihilist and I find no moral claims convincing.

If I was looking for someone to ultimately blame for harm it would be whatever force created life. — Andrew4Handel

It is strange to hear such thoughts coming from a person who was defending the idea that moral claims can be defended by use of appeals to nature, that to say something is natural is therefore good. In rejecting the naturalistic fallacy, you seem to be defending appeals to nature as establishing goodness.

I think that finding homosexuality in nature is a positive thing for people who have faced prejudice and persecution and vilification. — Andrew4Handel

Why? Because people call it unnatural? Because at some level you agree with their feeling that unnatural things must be bad?

It is the equivalent to the support any minority gets to discover they are not alone or alien or not an aberration but just a part of nature, your own normal. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, it is comforting to be normal, to be not unusual, to feel a sense of belonging, to not be seen as a freak. This is typical and it is instinctual. It is understandable. There is the warmth of feeling yourself to have a safe place in the group. Our primitive ancestors might have died if they weren't accepted by the group, so we evolved feelings of discomfort when we perceive signs of the disapproval of the group. But such feelings don't justify rejecting the naturalistic fallacy. They don't justify a claim that all natural things are good things or that all unnatural things are bad things. After all, many deviations from normality come to be seen as positive. Socrates certainly wasn't normal. And I don't think you'll find any examples of animals in nature behaving like him! And his people killed him! Was his behavior then something we ought never to imitate? Was it really bad? If we need to find animals doing something to consider it okay, what about doing mathematics? Any animals doing that? Looking through telescopes? Enjoying a beer over a campfire?

Is your comfort partly derived from the idea that finding it in nature, where there is presumably no choice, shows that it is probably not your choice either, and is the way you were born, and is therefore nature's or even God's responsibility and not yours, thus freeing you of any taint of possible sin and assuaging you of guilt? After all, you grew up in a culture that calls it a sin. You are made to feel that what you do is evil and is frowned upon by God Almighty. Your very parents might have disapproved or regarded it as sinful or aberrant. And sin is seen as depending on free will, there only being moral responsibility where there is choice. Maybe that contributes to the eagerness to show that it is not a choice. Perhaps?

Something's being automatic and not chosen seems to remove it from the realm of should and shouldn't, doesn't it? You can't justly be called a bad boy for being short or having brown eyes, right? It's not my fault!

But suppose it is a choice. Maybe it really isn't, but suppose it is. What then? Does that really open it up to be rightly considered a sin? On what grounds? Its chosenness alone doesn't confer this, as we often consider some chosen things to be laudable. What makes a behavior evil? The disapproval of the herd? An old, superstition-riddled book full of primitive ideas from a pre-rational and pre-scientific era (when people thought thunder was the angry gesture of an annoyed and powerful guy in the sky) saying bad things about it and claiming that a big man in the sky disapproves? These are people who also thought they could cleanse their sins by offering a bloody substitute to the bloodthirsty gods in order to appease those abusive monsters. To this day some people try to pass their guilt into chickens or other animals, which are then sacrificed. This creature will die in my place! What madness! The theology surrounding the death of Jesus and its salvific capacity is another example of this kind of crazy thinking. God was pissed and needed blood! But he so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son! (read: sacrificed his only or firstborn son as was the greatest sacrifice sometimes offered to the gods by men) And by feeding the blood of his son to himself, he appeased himself and bought our pardon. Our guilt passed into Jesus. And the Father is consubsantial with the Son, and is in some sense the same being. So basically, he sacrificed himself to himself to buy himself off to not punish us. But he is going to punish most of us anyway for not believing in this in exactly the right way or demonstrating it with the proper rituals and professions of faith.

I hope that the beliefs of the same people who believe this crap don't disturb your sleep. These are people who still believe in the efficacy of blood sacrifices to appease big angry men in the sky who are annoyed by the activities of the noisy humans on the ground. Very primitive people thought this way. Why are things going badly for me? I must have done something to offend the powerful spirits that command the forces affecting me. So I must offer them something and say some soothing, apologetic things. "Ooh you are so big! So absolutely huge! We are all very impressed down here! Please don't put us on the barbecue! Please don't boil us in hot fat! We offer you gifts! We praise you! Glory, glory to thee oh all-powerful one! Please have mercy on us! We submit to thee! We kneel! We show submission! We say uncle! Uncle! Uncle! Please don't hurt us! You are good! You are the greatest! We serve no other! Please stop hurting us! Please stop! We'll pay more! We'll be your slave! We'll do anything!" This is the way you talk to a benevolent entity?

Why is homosexuality bad? Is it that it is non-procreative? So what?!! Many heterosexuals practice non-procreative sex and most don't call it an abomination. Infertile heterosexuals who are Christians are not condemned for having sex, at least inside marriage. And many heterosexuals practice most of the same physical acts, including anal and oral sex, and they don't suffer the same stigma. People are just looney about this stuff and are probably driven by some kind of primitive instinct to attack it. Or maybe much of this attitude comes from the culture. The Greeks didn't find it so bothersome. Much of it seems to be based in religious taboo for whatever reason. And I think we can safely reject the abomination of human thought that is Christian theology! How they can believe their theology and also that their God is just and good at the same time, especially with Hell and eternal torment there for finite sins such as masturbation, I can't begin to imagine. Yes, masturbation has been considered a mortal sin, one warranting your eternal damnation! A world in which their God doesn't exist and death is just the end would be better than one in which most people go to eternal torment in the fires of Hell, especially for such small and innocent things! That being the case, how can their God be good?

Be at ease about their charges of sin. They project their own guilt complexes. They probably masturbate and worry about God disapproving. They protest too much! Their religion is basically all about their guilt. They are some neurotic people! Why the hurricans and the floods? People have displeased God and he is punishing them! What a bunch of nonsense!

The question of whether or not homosexuality is bad or good must be evaluated on grounds other than its naturalness. It must be asked whether or not it causes harm to non-consenting sentient beings. Does it violate anyone's autonomy? Rape certainly does, whether heterosexual or homosexual. But does homosexuality involve any such harms? I don't see that it does. Some sexual acts might involve some such violation, but heterosexual sex is probably more likely to have it with all its male domination of women.

What makes something evil, in my estimation, is that it makes life hell for other sentient beings. What Christians do to homosexuals is evil if anything is. What was done during the Spanish Inquisition was evil beyond all imagination, and it was done in the name of God! They should listen to the golden rule given by their Jesus. I've rarely seen more stones thrown than by the Christians who claim to follow the wise man who told them to throw no stones and to judge not. They are the ones who want to condemn. Hell for those who are not them is their fantasy. Many of them are sick puppies! Don't listen to them! Their Jesus did supposedly have some nice things to say though! If only they would listen to those things! Be nice! Isn't that basically what his message was? If only they would hear it. And I think that applies to our treatment of animals as well.

Be nice! Respect the interests and autonomy of others! Treat any other sentient being not merely as a means, but also as an end. That includes animals.

you're supposed to avoid trying to derive an ought from an is altogether no matter what side you're on.... — NKBJ

I am not sure I accept the idea that an ought can never derive from an is. Let me explain. It is hard to see why an ought would follow from an objective state of affairs. But what if we take seriously the idea that subjective experience is real? I think part of the problem stems from the fact that many over the years have acted as though what is objective and third-person verifiable is real and what is subjective is somehow not real. When we say that something is objective, we seem to mean that it is "really out there", beyond our imaginations, beyond our dreams, beyond our hallucinations, or in other words, beyond the seemings or appearances in our subjective experience. This is problematic. It opposes the subjective to the real.

My subjective experience is as real as anything. I really do experience pain and so on. My pains are real. And they really do hurt. We need be careful though. To say that my subjective experience is real is not to also say that appearance equals reality. For example, I can hallucinate that there is a tiger in my room. My hallucination doesn't correspond to the reality beyond my mind. In other words, there is no real tiger in my room. But my experience is real in the sense that there really is an experience of having that hallucination. My experiences might not reflect reality, but the experiences themselves are really happening and are part of reality. And in a sense, they are objective. Joe really does feel pain. Joe's pains are real. Joe really does dream of winged rhinos. The experience is real. And Joe's experiences are happening beyond the appearances in my mind. They are in that sense, along with rocks, "out there" in the real world.

What does all this have to do with morality? What are we to do with a situation where, for example, someone is torturing a child? We tend to say that this is bad and that this child's suffering matters. Why? Is there really no more to this than my distaste for it, or maybe an evolved, instinctive response of mine to the sound of a child screaming? No, I tend to think that this child's suffering matters regardless of whether it bothers me or not. It would matter even if nobody existed but the torturer and the child. Even if I feel nothing when witnessing it, it is still bad. The badness of it simply doesn't rely on my feelings about it. It seems that the fact that the child's well-being matters to the child, beyond my concern, is possibly a factor. That child's suffering is real. It is not an illusion that the child is suffering. There seems to be something about such suffering that intrinsically involves badness, intolerability, or some kind of ought-not. Subjective states are different from objective states of affairs in this way. They seem to be intrinsically value-laden. It doesn't seem possible to separate the feeling of intense pain from some sense of intolerability or badness. Perhaps pain, in itself, is sort of a real ought-not. When you stab me, the hurt is real. The injury is real. You have added to the intolerability in the world. Maybe, somehow, we can here find the beginnings of a connection between what is and what ought to be.

If the very nature of pain is that it is a sort of ought-not, then if a pain is, an ought-not is.

Isn't pain curious? Notice how when you have a really bad headache, you can't seem to simply observe it as a pure sensation without also suffering from it. It seems that to the extent that it loses its intolerability, it ceases to be a pain or simply ceases altogether, as if it is, in itself, a state of intolerability. Might we say that if pain is real, there is a sense in which intolerability, or badness, is part of reality and is therefore objective?

Some experiential qualities like blueness are real, in that we really do experience them. Blue experiences are part of reality. But they seem not to carry an intrinsic desirability or undesirability the way pain and pleasure seem to.

But then some pleasures seem to us bad or shallow or sacharrine or whatever, and indulgence in pleasure seems problematic in some ways. And some pain seems beneficial. This certainly complicates what I am saying.

I am not quite sure how to think about it properly, but there is a sense in which I think that the suffering of the child really matters, objectively, that somehow the very mattering of it is part of reality. It matters regardless of whether I care or not, whether it matters to me or not. At the very least, it matters to that child. That child's interests are violated or harmed. Are her interests real? Is there really a better and a worse for her, even beyond her own feeling about it? Isn't it truly better for a child to be happy and thriving than to be harmed and incapacitated? My strong intuition says yes. Some conditions in the world really are better than others. But how to justify this rationally? I am not sure. Here, I am rather baffled, quite honestly. But it seems obviously absurd to me when I consider that it might be the case that no particular state of affairs in the world can ever rightly be considered better than any other. For now, I guess, I'll hold to it as an intuition not rationally justified, and risk being in error.

If we deny the reality of subjective experience, of selves, of interests, and all the rest, obviously, all of this sounds like nonsense. But I find it absurd to deny that which I experience so directly in every moment. I take subjectivity seriously. And I suspect that maybe such things as selves and interests belonging to them might have a sort of reality not usually recognized. It might even be that selves have rights. Maybe selves properly belong to themselves.

Getting back to the issue of the ethics of eating animals, I have often had the feeling that it isn't simply a problem of causing them pain, as we could conceivably raise them for food, enslave them, or otherwise take possession of and exploit them while causing them no pain, perhaps even while causing them intense, continuous pleasure with drugs or brain implants. Still, something seems not right about all of this to me. I don't think it would be right for us to do this to a group of humans. Why is it okay with animals?

My feeling is that to the extent that a being is a self and has interests of its own, it simply doesn't belong to me to do with as I please. It has a sort of autonomy that I have no right to violate.

I once saw a pig being pulled by the ears down a ramp, off a truck, toward the spot where it was to have its throat cut, after which it woud be cooked and served as food. When the men were pulling it by its ears, it was squealing loudly and resisting the forward motion with its feet. Its will was clearly being violated. The pig had interests! I found myself thinking that part of what is wrong here is that the people were taking what was not rightly theirs, and were violating the interests, or perhaps even rights, of another sentient being.

Something struck me about the killing. Before the killing, there was a self, a set of interests belonging to that self, goods, bads, fears, perhaps hopes, and so on, and after the killing, there was only tissue. This subjective world had been destroyed and now there was only food, only flesh. Previously, there was an objective and a subjective in that pig. After, there was only the material, just a bunch of physical resources to be incorporated into other bodies.

This, I think, is also reflected in how we talk about meat. We call the living animal a pig. We call what remains after it is killed and cut to pieces pork. Cows become beef. Sheep become mutton. Is this is a way for us to insulate ourselves from the reality of what we are doing when we eat these animals? We don't eat cows. We eat this stuff called beef. But notice that we only seem to do this with higher mammals that we regularly eat. We don't do it with chicken or fish.

I think eating animals is a kind of theft, a kind of dishonorable banditry, worse than parasitism. To overpower another self and to forcibly take for yourself what it has labored to collect and build, and to totally disregard its interests, especially when this isn't necessary for you, especially when it is for the sake of your pleasure, is evil.

Most would consider it evil for a kid to go out on Halloween and knock over another kid and steal all his candy. How is predation any different in principle?

Why do we admire predators and despise parasites? It is because, I think, at some instinctual level, we admire power. Our default, evolved, animal values are as Nietzsche described as the sort of power-based morality that preceded Christianity. The more powerful is the better. This is partly because some of our animal ancestors were polygynous mammals with a certain kind of power hierarchy with an alpha male at the top. And we were arboreal. And to be higher in the trees was better. And those with higher status were literally higher in the trees, eating the choicest fruit, safe from predators. Our whole vertical value dimension seems to stem from this instinctual pattern. Higher is better. Stronger gets you higher. Stronger is better. God is the strongest and also the best. And God is the highest. Heaven is at the very top and Hell is at the very bottom. Good people go up. Bad people go down. The word aristocrat literally derives from "best". The upper class rules over the lower class. Elevated people stand above lowly people. High-brow versus low-brow. Feeling high versus feeling low. Moving on up versus falling to rock bottom. Notice also that at the bottom of a dense forest, it is nearly dark. And there are reptiles and cats and things down there that might eat you. At the very top of the forest is sky and sun and birds. Look familiar? Heaven and Hell. Notice our cities, with the wealthy up in their towers and the untouchables down on the street, exposed to the elements. And they deserve it, right? We tend to see a dimension of virtue associated with vertical position. Contempt is a kind of looking-down.

Humans killing and eating cows or rabbits is just another case of the strong stealing from the weak. We admire a lion in the way it masterfully takes down its weaker prey. What about a mugger robbing an old lady? Why is he not similarly admirable? Who is worse, a parasite or a thief? Predators are thieves. That is their strategy for survival. It is one of a number of successful strategies. One can be a thief and also be a biological success. Many successful businesses are based on predation.

Much warfare is the predation of one superorganism upon another. One nation eats another weaker one and steals its resources. Many early societies saw nothing wrong with this, largely because of the tribal mentality, our people being the only real people, the others being fair game or put there for our use. Our interests first! Isn't that what drives the thief? Me first. My family first. My tribe first. My nation first.

Predation is profiting from the misfortune of another.

But if we want to get at what ought to be the case objectively, we need to look at everyone's interests. We have to evaluate the situation from beyond our own perspective, as if we don't know which of the parties involved we happen to be. What ought to happen in a situation, what is for the best period, is the case regardless of which of the persons involved I happen to be. The difference between my personal preferences and what really ought to be the case beyond appeal to my personal preferences requires this sort of view-from-nowhere appraisal of the situation and of the relative values of different outcomes.

Should I eat the porpoise? I meet my needs and serve my interests, but what about the interests of the porpoise? Or is it the case that no non-humans have any interests? If we have interests and they don't, what makes for this difference? If I were that porpoise, what then? Should the human eat the porpoise? What if I don't know whether I am the human or the porpoise? How would I answer? What if the human could survive just as well by eating beans, assuming bean plants have no consciousness and thus no interests? Then we seem to be weighing the added momentary pleasure for the human of eating porpoise over beans against all the interests of the porpoise and any other sentient being whose interests are tied to the well-being of that porpoise, such as that porpoise's friends and family. The small, momentary, added pleasure for the human seems pretty petty by comparison, doesn't it? That rich, beautiful creature enjoying its life, with its complex inner universe of feeling and its playful life in the sea is something that alive, is of far more value than it is reduced to some rubbery stuff to chew for a human, all its complexity lost, its inner world destroyed, its relationships severed, its friends left bereaved, its future annihilated.

In light of consideration of the porpoise's end of things, or even of the overall value in the world, what do humans who justify eating that porpoise sound like when saying that they will continue to eat porpoise because it tastes good? Totally oblivious to anything but crass, short-term self-interest. In other words, rather unaware and lacking in moral development. Reptiles have a similar level of regard for interests beyond their own.

I have often thought that the very definition of evil is to not merely cause, but to literally enjoy the misfortune of another being, especially to enjoy that misfortune for its own sake. It is the very opposite of love. In the way I see it, justifying your harm to another being by the pleasure you derive from your exploitation of that being or the complete theft of everything belonging to that being, is almost the worst possible justification. What would we say to a pedophile who says that he will continue molesting children because he enjoys it and insists that his enjoyment is enough to justify his behavior?

If you believe that you have no choice but to do something that harms another, but you regret it and it pains you to do it, it is a little more forgivable.

If it is the case that you must eat meat to survive, then we have another matter to explore. For one thing, we have to justify your survival in the first place before we can justify your eating that meat in order to survive. Why is it good that you should continue living? Is the value of your life greater than that of all the beings you destroy in order to live? And is there no way to live without diminishing the harm you do? If your life does have greater value and there is no way to reduce your harm, then perhaps you have justification for continuing.

But of course, as many a vegetarian or vegan has demonstrated, it is possible to survive without eating meat. Can one achieve optimal health on a vegan diet? That is another question. If not, then we have to determine the value of that added health and decide if overall, in the world, it is more important to have a human with ideal health than to have all the animals that he might eat spend their lives unmolested by him.

I think that unconsciously, most people think meat-eating is okay because of a kind of cultural inertia, with underlying beliefs and attitudes that derive from a primitive religious worldview in which God put all of the plants and animals here for our use (usually our local tribe). And why did he give us sharp teeth and an appetite for meat if he didn't approve of us eating it? After all, we sacrificed animals to the gods! God likes meat too! That wonderful aroma of the burnt offering rising to Heaven! We are made in God's image after all! He is like us! He is our Father! As the bumper sticker says, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, why'd he make 'em out of meat?" All the stuff on the earth is what he gave to us, right? And meat wouldn't taste so good if we weren't meant to eat it!

Most of our unexamined ideas of good and bad are probably unconsciously about being a good-boy/girl for Mommy and Daddy, God just being the parent or alpha male pattern projected onto the sky. We grow up as children with "good" and 'bad" being associated with behavior approved of or disapproved of by parents, and punished and rewarded. So at some level, we approach questions of good or bad with all of that unconsciously at work. Will Daddy get mad? If not, it's okay. Should I shoot the squirrels? Daddy says "good shot!" if I do! Or at least, Daddy doesn't get mad. And since good and bad derive from Dad's approval/disapproval, if there is no Dad, then everything must be okay, right? "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." And here we get the thoughtless moral nihilism of the atheist. If there is no big judge in the sky to disapprove of my actions, then I can do no wrong. Is that really so?

And we imagine that God, with all his might, must be right, and so if he made us to eat meat, as our bodies and instincts seem to indicate, how could he justly disapprove? Isn't this what many seem to be thinking at some level, even atheists, perhaps while not being quite conscious of it?

Also, if we are instinctually driven to do something, we are biased to think it good. There is a positive valuation attached to our experience of it. Eating meat feels good. So it can't be all bad, can it? Yum! Yum!

But if we are ready to grow up and assume responsibility for our choices and evaluate the situation according to what is actually for the best, considering the interests of all parties involved and the overall beauty, richness, and goodness in the world, things start to look rather different.

It is not the case that everything that is natural is good but that things that are good are natural processes. — Andrew4Handel

Okay, so all A are B, but not all B are A. That's fine. All dogs are mammals, but not all mammals are dogs. All good things are natural, but not all natural things are good. This last seems to be what you are saying. But first of all, if some natural things can be not good, then you can't say that something is natural and that it is therefore good, since not all natural things are good things. If your position is instead that all good things are natural, this won't help make the case that any X is good. It is backwards. Here is what that argument might look like:

What is good is natural

Eating meat is natural

Therefore, eating meat is good

Even if the premises are true, the form of this argument is not valid. Here is the form in question:

All A are B
X is B
Therefore, X is A

This is invalid. Let's plug some other things in there, with true premises, to show this more clearly. We get an absurd conclusion.

Every dog is a mammal.

Elephants are mammals.

Therefore, elephants are dogs.

If it is the case that all good things are natural, but not all natural things are good, it is completely pointless to talk about whether or not something is natural when trying to show that it is good, since some natural things might well be non-good, and this something in question might well be one of these natural but non-good things.

Also, if you claim that all good things are natural, can you not think of any good things that are unnatural? Does anything actually happen in reality that is unnatural in the way that you understand nature? Some people consider what humans do to mark a break with nature, so for example, they say that plastic is unnatural or C-sections are unnatural or brain chip implants are unnatural. Do you agree with that line of thinking? If you do, are no such unnatural things good? If there are unnatural good things, they would be exceptions to your claim that all good things are natural. If everything that actually happens is natural, well, then, everything humans do is natural, no matter what that might be, and it is pointless to try to show that it happens elsewhere in nature.

If you do accept that common idea that what humans do can be unnatural, and you also accept your claim that all good things are natural, then since unnatural things are not good, then all unnatural human activity would have to be non-good.

When people argue about whether or not meat-eating or homosexuality or whatever is natural, this seems to always implicitly involve an understanding of the concept of the natural that allows that some things that humans do can be unnatural. If not, then what are they talking about? In the other case, so what if something is unnatural? Even if eating meat or abstaining or practicing homosexuality or something else is unnatural, I don't see why that automatically makes it bad. I don't see any reason to believe that just because it is unnatural, it must therefore be non-good. In other words, I don't see why I should accept your claim that all good things are natural. Why can't some unnatural things also be good?

I consider natural just to refer to anything that happens in nature as opposed to a supernatural realm that we either have no access to or doesn't exist — Andrew4Handel

First of all, it seems tautological or circular to say that what is natural is what happens in nature. What is nature? Does anything happen not in nature?

Do you see yet how all this talk of whether or not something is natural is basically irrelevant to the question of its goodness?

premise 1: What is A is B.

premise 2: X is A.

conclusion: Therefore, X is B.

This is a valid argument form. The conclusion follows.

premise 1: What is natural is good.

premise 2: X is natural.

Conclusion: Therefore, X is good.

This is valid in form. The problem is in premise 1. It isn't clear that what is natural is good. Is this premise true? Why should I believe it? Another argument is needed to show the connection.

premise 1: What is A is good.

premise 2: Everything natural is A.

conclusion: Therefore, everything natural is good.

What is A? That's the missing connection. Why is what is natural also good? In order to show that natural things are good things, it seems to me that you are going to have to appeal to some principle other than naturalness to show why the natural is good. And before we can decide whether or not natural things are good, we need to know what goodness is! Do you know what it is?

But then due to the naturalistic fallacy you can't argue homosexuality is good just because it is widespread in nature.

I don't think it makes sense to argue that anything is good just because it is widespread in nature. It isn't at all clear why there would be any necessary connection between frequent occurence and goodness. For one thing, I think we can all find counterexamples to the argument that X occurs widely and is therefore good.

You can use fallacious argument if you like for pure rhetorical purposes. This is common practice. But if you want to get closer to truth, fallacies must be avoided. It doesn't matter whether you like the conclusions of a fallacious argument or find a fallacious argument useful in persuasion. If the conclusion doesn't clearly follow from the premises, the premises simply cannot be used to justify the claim. If you allow arguments where conclusions don't obviously follow from the premises, pretty much any conclusion could be claimed to be a consequence of pretty much any premise.

Thank you! Good to be here!

I don't agree with the concept of a naturalistic fallacy because... where else but nature can we get moral guidance from?

There are all sorts of other possible sources of moral guidance, reason for one. To argue that you know of no alternatives to nature as a source of moral guidance and that therefore, nature is a reliable source of moral guidance and is the only source, is rather problematic. A lack of imagined alternatives doesn't establish the one thing you can think of as the correct or only one.

Consider a simple and common alternative, one that is flawed for sure, but often accepted: What maximizes pleasure and minimizes suffering is good. This criterion of goodness is quite different from the naturalness criterion and seems a possible contender. It could be that the natural state (simply the way things are or have been?) is full of suffering and that some unnatural state ought to be pursued as it might well mean the betterment of ourselves or the world in general. But then why is pleasure necessarily good and suffering necessarily not good? And then there is the question of higher and lower pleasure, or suffering that serves a higher pleasure, and so on. And if there is higher and lower pleasure, what determines the higher and the lower? Surely something other than pleasure!

And in what way is nature a source of moral guidance? How ought we to read its commandments? If something is demonstrated by nature, should we feel free to follow that example? Is what is natural for any living thing perfectly okay for us? Should we take sharks as role models? Is that a state we want to aspire to? Similarly, should we take our primitive ancestors as role models? How about even our recent ancestors? If they did a thing, does the very fact of their having done it make it good and something we ought to do as well? If not, why not? And what are we appealing to when we make our evaluations here? Nature? Something else?

Why is the naturalistic fallacy a fallacy? Basically, it isn't at all clear that X is good necessarily follows from X is natural. Something needs to fill that gap and show why the natural is always good.

Can we find counterexamples, something that is arguably natural but yet is generally considered evil? What about rape? What about war? What about pain? Suffering? Death? Cancer? Migraines? Male domination of women? Basically anything that has actually happened that is bad?

How do we decide what is natural? Historical precedence? If we have some criterion of naturalness, we should dispense with naturalness and then look at that criterion more directly. Suppose we say that what has been done for at least a thousand years is what we should consider natural, or that what we did "back when we were still animals" is what we should consider natural. Then to say that what is natural is what is good is to say that what has been done for at least a thousand years or what our animal ancestors did is what is good for us to do always. See where this is likely to go? We are headed for trouble, aren't we?

People often talk about such things as our tooth structure as evidence of what we should be eating. To show that we "evolved to eat meat" or otherwise is simply to show that at some point in the past, our species did such and such and managed to survive and propagate the species while doing this or partly by means of this practice. So would we then be wise to argue that whatever aided the survival of our ancestors is automatically okay for us?

Besides, "evolved to X" or "are made to do X" or "meant for X" all imply some kind of teleology. There is an implicit "in order to" or "so that" involved. This implies some kind of mind with intentions and aims and a plan behind these things, in which case, we might be half-consciously appealing to God as being the hidden link between goodness and naturalness, as God surely wouldn't disapprove of what he made us to do. Isn't this really the hidden idea or feeling behind the naturalness justification of meat eating or abstention? "That we have teeth shows that we are meant to/supposed to/made to eat meat." "If God gave us X, surely he can't justly condemn us for using it!" In a nature without God where the physical is causally closed, there is no "meant to" or "should" implied in our physical structure, is there? Is it clear that we always ought to do what is suggested by the structure of our bodies, which resulted presumably from selective pressures and circumstances to which we are no longer subject? If our hands originally evolved while we lived in an arboreal environment and selective pressures drove us into the trees, does that mean we should live in the trees still? Is there anything wrong with dispensing with that and using our hands for other things? If we can survive in other ways, is there any reason we shouldn't?

Is the mere fact that we can survive in a certain way justification for living that way? Does can imply ought? Or is it at least the case that can implies no ought not? If we were able to survive in a certain fashion in the past, does that mean that we should never say no to that behavior?

And if what is natural is good, is what is unnatural then evil or at least never good? That opens a pandora's box, doesn't it? Isn't that how some people argue for the condemnation of homosexuals, among other things?

Is it impossible for something unnatural to be good? If something unnatural can be good, then how we evaluate it as good must be independent of whether or not it is natural. Consider modern medicine. Should we continue to practice it? Why or why not? Is nature your only guide in considering this question?

And what does it mean for something to be natural anyway? Perhaps one could say that anything that actually happens is by definition natural. In that case, if what is natural is what is good, then everything that can and does happen is therefore good. Surely you can think of things that actually happen that you feel are bad.

Is it possible for anything unnatural to actually exist?

If everything that does happen is good, any question of goodness seems completely pointless, especially if we accept ought implies can, which would rule out any goods that don't happen. Everything you do would automatically be good, no matter your choices, no matter the consequences.

Or is it the case that humanity marks a break with nature? Can humans do things unnatural? If so, what is the source of this power? If we have any such powers, perhaps you might look there for other sources of moral guidance, since nature then isn't the only thing at work.

You could also say that while it might be natural for humans at a certain level of development or with a certain level of awareness to eat meat, it might be unnatural for humans to eat meat under other circumstances, perhaps at higher levels of development. Or it might simply be natural for certain kinds of people to reject eating meat.

It isn't clear to me at all why it would be the case that if something is natural, it is therefore necessarily good. That's why it is fallacious reasoning. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

I think the concept of nature itself is a rather problematic one to begin with. So is the concept of goodness or value. Both of these are issues that require much examination. So to say that what is natural is therefore good cries out for a whole lot of deeper examination.

Also, to accept that what is natural is therefore good implies that you accept the idea of the natural and also the idea of the good, presumably an objective good. In order to predicate the goodness of the natural, you have to accept that nature has this property of goodness. Where does it get that property? How do you know that nature is good? Aren't you then appealing to something outside of nature in order to answer the question of whether or not nature is good? I am reminded of the question in Euthyphro. Is it good because God wills it or does God will it because it it is good? Is it good because nature produces it or does nature produce it because it is good? Give that one some thought!

And isn't saying that something is good because it is natural sort of along the lines of saying that this is the way it always has been done in the past and is therefore the way it should always be done in the future? Why can't it be a good thing in some cases for traditions to be rejected and for people to change their ways? For one thing, we don't have a fixed nature, do we? Aren't we continually changing? Notice the word nature in there. If our very nature is malleable, how does this affect the consideration? Or is the way we were the way we always have to be? If we are malleable in nature, should our past nature be used as a guide for evaluating where we ought to go in the future? Is there no other possible consideration? Such a guiding principle would seem to recommend against change period. Might not new ways be better ways? Is moral progress impossible? If it is, we must look outside of descriptions of our past behavior for advice about how we ought to live.

I think all asserting a naturalistic fallacy does, is lead to moral nihilism. It could only be sustained by a supernaturalistic morality.

I hope you aren't implicitly making the argument that because asserting that the natural fallacy is a true fallacy would lead to moral nihilism, it is therefore not a fallacy. It could be that moral nihilism is the correct position! That can't be ruled out right off the bat, can it?

Also, why does it necessarily lead to moral nihilism? All we are doing when we assert that the naturalistic fallacy is a proper fallacy is denying that something's being natural necessarily establishes its being good. We haven't ruled out other ways of estimating value. To establish moral nihilism, wouldn't you need to rule out the possibility of any objective value? It isn't clear that a lack of necessary connection between the natural and the good also necessarily negates the possibility of value being in some sense real.

If what is natural is indeed what is good, why is there a necessary connection between these things? Why is nature good? Or, at least, why is it the case that what is natural cannot be bad?

I think that until someone can demonstrate a strong connection between naturalness and goodness, we can safely dispense with the idea that the naturalness criterion can be used to justify eating meat or abstaining from eating meat.