your pilot example misses the point. It changes the obligation in the shift from all to some.

The obligation is this:

If two pilots are present, then all pilots would be obligated to fly.

It follows that from that obligation that;

If two pilots are present, then some pilots would be obligated to fly.

You can't deny the antecedent to deny the consequent, because the obligation in both cases only holds as long the as the antecedent is affirmed (i.e., two pilots are present). If some pilots are not obligated to fly, it must be that the antecedent condition has not been satisfied, but that also holds for all pilots since that was the obligation that allowed us to say some are obligated. Some necessarily follows from all.

It's not a variation, it's an entirely new argument. But this argument is invalid because it denies the antecedent (note: this is likely a pedantic comment and possibly just an typographical oversight):

If my donation will help towards saving X, then I am obligated to donate (rearranged first premise to be in logical form)
If you don't donate, then my donation will not help towards saving X.
You don't donate
My donation will not help towards saving X
Therefore, I am not obligated to donate.

If it is moral and rational to act in your own self-interest, then why wouldn't you disintegrate the homeless man? — darthbarracuda

This is a far too simplistic view of rationality and self-interest. I have a plurality of values that I am self-interested in preserving, several of which comprise my reluctance to disintegrate obscenely fat homeless people so I have a clear path to walk. For instance, I value my personal freedom to the extent that I value not being in prison, so I might first of all make sure no police or people likely to snitch on me are around when I go about my disintegrating business. From my egoism perspective, I run a calculus of all my self-interests, short-term and long-term, and act accordingly, which may in fact involve a short-term harm (walking around the blob) if I believe it will yield a long-term personal gain (that pretty girl is watching and word is she frowns upon unnecessary disintegration). If you run your calculus and it comes out in favour of disintegrating fat people, you have probably made an error in your mental arithmetic, or you have self-destructive tendencies and will not function well in society.

I'll weigh in on this: it's wrong to lie, but we shouldn't outlaw lying.

The government need not intervene every time you are wronged. — Hanover

The government ought to intervene when the government is wronged. If adultery can be broadly construed as a wrong committed against the values of the government, then the government has an interest to protect those values as far as it is reasonable to do so (people might object that adultery is not reasonable to outlaw because the cost to enforce such a law would be onerous). At least though, if the adultery law fails at the enforcement portion and not in relation to the jurisprudence claim, the facilitation claim might be upheld nonetheless and the enforcement of that law may not be onerous.

So if we agree that I shall deliver you beef meat, and instead I deliver you horse meat, claiming that it is beef, and you take it, assuming it to be beef, I have done you no harm? If I have done you no harm, how can finding the truth harm you? Finding the truth in and by itself can certainly cause you no harm, can it?

If as a doctor I tell you that I'll give you an analgesic, and instead I give you a poison that will not only put you to sleep, but will also kill you, have I not harmed you? Afterall, you'll never know! — Agustino

If you promise me beef meat and deliver horse meat, I have a mechanism to measure the harm if and only if I become aware of the deception (e.g., the harm to my health, financial harm for unfair pricing, etc). If I am never made aware of the deception, by what measure can I possibly say you have harmed me? If I agree to a contract with you I will outline the conditions of the contract to delimit the expectation of fulfillment and I will take care to ensure that those conditions are met so that I am not at risk of being harmed. If you still manage to deceive me and I come away feeling satisfied and unharmed, how can I make a claim to an unspecified harm that I am unaware of?

In the case of the murderous doctor, I'm not a spiritual person so I would say the harm is limited in my person to when I am alive, but my death will harm my friends and family insofar as my friends and family will, hopefully, notice I'm dead even if they don't know the extent that the doctor intended the harm. The breach of the fiduciary responsibility of the doctor can only be measured if and only if information is made known of the murderous intent.

I do see a point emerging here though. Insofar as an action is illegal, the facilitation of the illegal activity and concealment of said activity ought to be illegal (i.e., it's illegal to cover-up a crime).

If we have a contract together and I break it, without you knowing it, have I harmed you? — Agustino

Presumably not if I don't know about it. Would you say you have harmed me? I wouldn't even know where to begin to quantify a harm that I am unaware of. I don't know what would be the point of a contract you can break without my knowledge.

That doesn't make it clear what the harm is and how it can still be a harm without the "victim" knowing it. Marriage vows can be open or closed by your admission, and both are permissible. We are not arguing the harm is to marriage vows such that marriage vows ought to restrict sexual activity and the harm is to the vow itself insofar as sexual activity outside marriage is harmful to marriage vows. It is the harm done to the trust of the participants in a closed marriage that have agreed to remain faithful.

What harm is that? You conceded open marriages are permissible, so I took that to mean on your account that marriage vows are not harmed per se by extramarital relationships. You seemed to indicate the harm was confined only to extramarital relationships in a closed marriage. That implies the harm is in the information and knowledge of the relationships outside marriage and not a harm in breaking the vows. For consistency, if the harm is to the vows themselves, the openness of the relationship shouldn't have any affect on the harms.

The liability of encouraging and facilitating access to illegal activity. That in itself is culpable. — Agustino

Except where the facilitation of illegal activity mitigates the jurisprudential claim, is my rebuttal. If the facilitation of the activity alleviates the harms, it removes the impetus to outlaw such activity.

Obviously the people using AM ought to be punished by virtue of i). That claim is uncontroversial by my argument. I concede that adultery ought to be illegal. The question is what legal liability does the website have in facilitating the actions of the users.

Donating is obligatory iff it will save X.
If one person doesn't donate then X cannot be saved.
Therefore if one person doesn't donate then the others are not obligated to donate. — Michael

That argument isn't even close to being valid.

Where in the argument is the conclusion contained?

hasn't offered much of an argument, if any at all, so in the interests of discussing the topic, I will supply an argument to Agustino and respond to that argument. Agustino, feel free to interject if my characterisation of your position is uncharitable.

The underlying jurisprudential claim is that i) if an action is immoral and harms the society in which it occurs, the society ought to legislate against that action. The jurisprudential claim is two-fold: immoral and harmful to the society. In the interests of this argument, I will concede both to Agustino. Sexual relationships outside a closed marriage arrangement is immoral (harms the trust of the participants in the marriage) and is harmful to society (weakens marriage rights and obligations).

But the discussion here isn't whether adultery should be illegal, it's whether websites that explicitly offer services to enable that activity should be illegal. Prima facie the illegality of the websites doesn't go through on the same jurisprudential claim (the websites are not in themselves immoral or harmful), but requires another claim as an extension to that claim, a facilitation claim. We can state the facilitation claim as ii) if tools or services facilitate illegal action as established by i), then said tools or services ought to be legislated against because of the indirect harm such tools present by virtue of the action of i). We might want to make a reasonable condition to pre-empt semantic distinctions, such as: if tools or services facilitate illegal action as established by i), and is a reasonable and foreseeable outcome, then such tools ought to be legislated against.

The facilitation claim with or without the reasonable condition is problematic especially when the tools are designed in a way to mitigate the harms established in i). The illegality of adultery is premised on the harm caused when a spouse is made aware of the infidelity, but a tool that offers to reduce that harm by protecting information alleviates the jurisprudential claim. The website isn't fool-proof (evidenced by the hack), but if such activity is bound to happen, it might be better for a society to allow and encourage it to happen in a safe and secretive forum such as the websites.

X ought be saved iff X can be saved.
X can be saved iff all Ys donate.
Therefore, all Ys ought to donate.
Therefore some Ys ought to donate. — Michael

This is the claim. It follows that if all Ys have an obligation, then some Ys have an obligation. It doesn't do to argue that the argument is invalid (it's not) or unsound (it may not be) because some Ys do not fulfill the obligation, it just means that some are immoral and need to do better to fulfill an obligation that all Ys logically have.

Your response it excellent, thorough, and probably too much to overcome. You've done a very good job of undermining the knowledge claim of gratuitous suffering, on which this particular argument hangs together. I was intrigued to construct this argument by a throw-away line in forgettable article that made precisely that claim. I have no particular interest to defend this argument beyond what I feel is intellectually honest, but I will address some comments for which I feel I can offer a response.

If gratuitous suffering is such a problem, and if it costs me very little to perform some action that would alleviate, eliminate, or reduce some gratuitous suffering, why am I not obligated to do so? — Postmodern Beatnik

A case could be made that there are obligations for action to be taken to alleviate, eliminate, or reduce some gratuitous suffering, but abilities to perform actions vary from person to person and the strongest obligation is one where no special skill or ability is required. I am disabled, so if an obligation for action falls outside my scope of ability I am not obliged to act on it (i.e., ought implies can). When I construct an argument for an obligation I want to cast the widest net possible, which means reducing the number of people falling outside the scope of ability. It's not that there may not be further obligations for people to act, but at the basic level I want to focus on the most general obligation applicable to the most/all people.

Is this the only condition on which we can inflict or risk gratuitous suffering on ourselves? — Postmodern Beatnik

I'm inclined to say yes, but the nature of this condition is very fuzzy and problematic. It leaves room for the individual to risk harming oneself with the justification that the prevention cost was unreasonable only later to decide that they were wrong about the cost or the harm. That's the nature of life. In order to know the balance of the costs, one needs experience or the appropriate moral leaders that can offer insight.

The problem is that P6 is not necessarily true depending on the subject. As far as I can tell it comes closest to being true when everyone adopts a vegan diet. There is no direct link between the person who eats the animal and the treatment of the animal. It could well be that my going vegan does not have any effect on the animals that are farmed, chances are my super market is not going to order less meat because I am no longer buying from them. — shmik

I promised to address the issue of the ambiguous subject (i.e., adopted by whom, an individual or collectively as a society) as mentioned in the parallel thread. Upon reflection, this is a much more substantial objection than I previously considered, in particular because several of my premises adopt the plural pronoun "we". The inclusion of "we" negates the ambiguity and the truth of the conclusions as entailments rely on subject consistency throughout. I am forced, as it were, to come down on one side or the other in terms of the subject.

I am inclined towards the individual obligation contingent on the conditions of the moral obligation (i.e., known, preventable, and a reasonable cost). It doesn't make much sense to me to say, "we know" because "we" is an undefined group and not necessarily a homogeneous group with shared knowledge or beliefs. Some people know, and others don't. The obligation only applies to the class of people that satisfy the conditions of the moral obligation.

, I believe, objected that the prevention condition is more robust as a collective obligation, which is true, but comes at the cost of weakening the knowledge condition and the new reasonable cost condition. For the argument to go through, the prevention condition only has to be maintained in even a weak form (although this might make the argument less persuasive as a behaviour modifying argument).

The P6 premise relies on whether gratuitous suffering caused by food production practices is preventable if and only if it is possible to adopt a vegan diet (in the individual). That is a dubious claim. Two objections come to mind: i) the individual obligation is ineffective at preventing gratuitous suffering and ii) the collective obligation is effective at preventing gratuitous suffering. If either is true, the biconditional is defeated. A charitable reading can grant that i) is false, the individual obligation can prevent gratuitous suffering, but the denial of ii) may require asserting the truth of i). If the collective obligation is ineffective at preventing gratuitous suffering, it is not clear how the individual obligation could possibly hope to be effective. On the surface this commits a division fallacy, but I'm not sure it is an error in reasoning in this case. Any thoughts? Am I missing something?

Do we invent technology, or do we discover technology, or both? — darthbarracuda

In your other thread I stated:

[T]echnology is the discovery of a method or apparatus to perform a function in a new or more efficient way (i.e., solve a problem).

We don't discover technology, we discover the object of technology. We can discover the object of technology by rearrangement (invention) or by the latency of an pre-existing object. Rearrangement has limits insofar was we cannot rearrange objects beyond the physical properties of the universe. Once rearrangement has taken place, we can supply a telos to the object according to our needs and the object becomes pregnant with teleological latency.

There is virtually no personal political executive agency inside the contemporary State. — Bitter Crank

Are you saying there's no procedure for the individual to express the individual's will, or that there's no procedure for the expression of the individual's will to have an effect on the State as a whole? In terms of the former, that seems prima facie false by virtue of voting and political demonstrations. For the latter, contemporary liberal democratic states have safeguards against the ability for an individual to have an effect on the State as a whole.

It merely claims that homosexuals should be helped to live under regimes which favor their disposition. — Agustino

While this seems like a sensible response, it ignores a potential (and potent) harm of social and psychological displacement. It shouldn't be expected that a person is asked to leave friends and family in exchange for security. The two needs (social and safety) are basic needs, and a society that fails to meet the basic needs of individuals in that society loses legitimacy (from within).

Slaveowners could do whatever they wanted to their slaves. If you think conservatives can do whatever they want to you, then I suggest you seek the help of a medical professional. — Agustino

There is room for conservative ideology to justify interference and harm on the grounds that the group being interfered with and harmed is not included in the group to which the rights apply (note: this is not exclusive to conservatism). A freedom principle does not assign inclusion to the group whereas an equality principle in theory aims to offer an inclusion criteria. A freedom principle is applied once inclusion has been granted and can be a secondary principle to the equality principle. An equality principle is not without flaws and susceptible to special pleading as well, but it offers a somewhat more tangible principle to appeal to for the mechanism of upholding rights.

An interesting case-study for this would be in cases where meeting needs becomes a challenge (e.g., after natural disasters). The hierarchy of needs might be played out in such cases as you see people begin to rebuild.

Naivety gets the better of us when we think our interests aren't in agreement with state interest, lest we become an enemy of the state and choose to fall in line or perish. We always have the right to pursue our own self-interest as stateless individuals (refugees), but such a decision, barring a benevolent intervening state, should practically be conformity or death (or at least a brutal and short life).

My interests and the rights that I need to fulfil them change depending on where I am born. — Agustino

Your interests change, but the minimal right(s) needed to pursue those interests are fundamental (i.e., the right to pursue interests so long as those interests are not harmful to the interests of others). This is where left and right ideologies collide (i.e., identifying interests that are harmful to the interests of others). For example, the unrestricted right to private property permits the excessive pursuit of capital such that few have nearly all the resources while most have little to nothing. The respective tolerance or intolerance of the political spectrum is cashed out in terms of whose interests are being upheld (i.e., personal freedom vs. inequality) but is flexible and in flux within the respective groups to the degree that each side picks and chooses how they fall on specific issues and not a general principle (e.g., dominant abortion views in political groups/parties) and each group accuses the other as intolerant.

I wouldn't call them human rights, I'd call them the rights that a particular state grants its citizens. Again, the justification for calling those rights "human" assumes that there exists a power structure capable of guaranteeing those rights to all humans. As no such structure exists, or can indeed exist (our differences are too many; + it's too dangerous since it would be too powerful), we are left solely with rights granted to us by our nation. — Agustino

Yes, rights require a mechanism to uphold said rights, which becomes particularly troublesome for stateless individuals. The mechanism doesn't have to be a global authority, but can come from within individual nations that recognize the rational basis of human rights as the advancement of the nation's own self-interest. This allows a criticism of other nations for the lack of human rights protection on the basis that the nation's policies are inconsistent with the nation's own self-interest (if you can properly identify the nation's self-interest, which is minimally assumed to be sustainability). The nation can continue to shrug off such a criticism, but pressure to adopt mechanisms to uphold human rights is consistent with tolerance insofar as the pressure is not itself a violation of a human right. Allowing a sovereign nation to treat the nation's own citizens in a way that is judged to violate human rights is a balancing act. You want them to be independent and free to make their own choices, but at the same time the outcome is foreseeable and compassion for fellow humans (philanthropy) wants to minimize the suffering of bad policy by those nations.

As for what rights I want - that is a question that presupposes that I am a member of a certain society. — Agustino

Not what rights you want, what rights would you need, minimally, to pursue your interests, even the most basic interests of food, shelter and security. People will have different wants as a product of the culture or society to which they belong, but the rights they need are not so (at all) culture dependent.

However, I do not think that the risk-averse assumption goes through. — Postmodern Beatnik

I don't think it would go through either, at least not as rigorously as I would like. There will always be the hard-line skeptics that will demand proof rather than accept a principle on an assumption. The argument relies on a risk-averse assumption of some sort, whether the strong one I claimed earlier or a weaker version introduced to account for BitterCrank and your own objections.

The trouble here is that humans have different capacities for suffering than animals. — Postmodern Beatnik

This is precisely what the risk-averse assumption aims to overcome. The assumption is that humans are not biologically special to a degree and that if the capacity for sentience is present in non-human animals, that faculty is also minimally necessary and sufficient for gratuitous suffering of a higher order. If we want to single out humans as special we need a strong claim why they are, without relying solely on introspection. The argument makes room for discovery to add or remove animals as needed, but during our state of ignorance, as it were, we can use the assumption as a guide for ethical treatment.

You're going to need at least one more clause here. — Postmodern Beatnik

I think part of your objection is covered by my reasonable cost condition not yet mentioned here.

The reasonable cost condition states:

If any gratuitous suffering is preventable, known and the cost to prevent it is reasonable, then it is wrong to allow said gratuitous suffering.

One does not have an obligation to prevent gratuitous suffering if the cost of prevention is an onerous burden on the agent (e.g., risk one's life to save another). The reasonable cost condition is vague, but as a minimum I kept it as obligations of omission rather than commission. We have obligations to prevent gratuitous suffering in a limited sense, if the prevention requires only that we abstain from actions that cause gratuitous suffering and not perform actions that alleviate or eliminate gratuitous suffering. Obviously, if we abstain from some action then we must choose another to take its place, but we have no specific obligation for the replacement action or any other further actions.

One might choose to inflict or risk gratuitous suffering on oneself (e.g., elective surgeries), if the prevention is considered to be an unreasonable cost (e.g., further harm, either psychological or physical).

So, before I go into the question of refuting Rawls, it is you who must prove that there is a group called humanity. — Agustino

That is a sensible objection. It is precisely the difficulty of making human rights claims, and furthermore, if there is a common group, what rights could possibly come from membership to that group. The geography and political power structures of where an individual lives is arbitrary and cannot inform us about inclusion into the group of humanity. If we want to identify human rights, and maybe you don't quite yet want to identify such rights, we would want to begin by stripping away all the superficial differences between disparate people throughout the world to see if there is anything common that can be the basis for rights. We're not going to have much left, if anything, as the basis for human rights.

What could motivate you to look for human rights? How about self-interest? If you have an interest in yourself, and who doesn't, what right(s) would you need to optimize your ability to get as much of the things that you want? That's the start of human rights.

So inequality is sustained by Nature herself, and has nothing to do with man. — Agustino

Nature doesn't say we live in societies and communities where we respect property rights, We decided in our own self-interest, and to escape the Hobbesian State of Nature, to submit to a magistrate. Inequality in a society is arbitrary, irrational, paranoid and destructive (i.e., unsustainable).

If technology is the discovery of a method or apparatus to perform a function in a new or more efficient way (i.e., solve a problem), then you're asking if solving problems can solve all our problems. The answer is only the problems with solutions. The hard part is knowing which problems have solutions and which do not.

The needs are vague and ill-defined so it has remarkable applicability. The hierarchy becomes a bit fuzzy especially when the fulfillment of needs intersect (e.g., the care of a mother for a child). I would guess that there is evidence that the fulfillment of these needs in the order offered by Maslow leads to greater well-being for individuals in a society (e.g., mouse-models). It probably also has some applicability in policy-making by governments.

Well it is intolerance when you assume, without prior demonstration, that "equal rights" is universally a value, and therefore you can impose it on other people. Who are you to fight to impose "equal rights" on me? Maybe I don't like this "equal rights". Am I morally wrong if I don't? If you say yes, then you need to mobilise an argument which explains both the origin of this value "equal rights" and its universality. Something that is sorely lacking at the moment. — Agustino

Rights are such that membership to a group permits protection against harm by appeal to a right, so long as there is a mechanism to uphold the right. If the group is humanity, then rights protect all members of that group (i.e., human rights). If you want to exclude a person or a demographic from protection by appeal to a human right, it is you that needs the argument as to why some humans are to be excluded. Human rights as equal rights have a pretty solid argument from John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, which argues for equal rights as a rational principle. Do you care to take a stab at refuting Rawls?

Yes, I would say you're morally wrong because inequality can only be sustained by the irrational, paranoid and destructive principle that one deserves more because of the arbitrary circumstance of one's birth.

Instead of the leftist position that others must observe rights, I much rather prefer the conservative position that others must not interfere with rights. It seems both more tolerant, and more ethical. — Agustino

I understand this distinction to be between positive rights and negative rights, wherein a person in a society claims to have positive rights that entail some action is taken by a government (e.g., a guaranteed standard of living) and negative rights entail the government refrain from acting in a way that violates a right (e.g., freedom of speech). You seem to be arguing that the political left make some positive rights claims, whereas the political right make only negative rights claims. It is not clear to me this is an accurate description of the respective positions. In particular, I can conceive of a leftist position that aims at equality through negative rights and distinguishes itself from the political right in terms of the negative rights that are claimed.

"X is immoral" they are often telling others how to behave. — Michael

That's where the presupposition comes in from my perspective. As a meta-ethical analysis, where did this idea that morality is about telling others how to behave come from? Deontology and virtue ethics would disagree with that foundation. Deontology and virtue ethics would stand as a principled (universal, non-relative) theory, that prescribes personal action specific to the character of the agent (relative). I cannot tell you what is immoral because the prescriptions of conduct are not universal and truth-apt to an observer, but I can give you truth-apt claims as a foundation for the normative theory that supply truth-apt prescriptions through introspection.

Meta-ethics is prior to normative ethics. Before we can discuss whether or not the the moral value of X is determined by duty or by consequences we have to determine what it means for X to be moral (or immoral). — Michael

I asked because your analysis seems biased towards a meta-ethical analysis that presupposes morality as consequentialist. The bolded section seems particularly troublesome absent a normative framework. A meta-ethical consideration might be something like, are actions the sorts of things that have moral worth or do we measure character? From there we can build a particular normative theory, but you jumped right to actions as the subject of moral judgement. Exemplified by this comment:

If someone tells me that some X is immoral then they are usually telling me not to do X — Michael

*edited*

Is this is a meta-ethical analysis of consequentialists theories in particular or do you think that deontology and virtue ethics are prone to the same meta-ethical problems? In particular, you seem to be imaging a moral system that allows the moral agent to say of another's actions, "you ought not do x because it is immoral", whereas I want my morality to tell me and only me, "I ought not do x because it is immoral". If I want to judge another person's actions, morality is the wrong tool for that. This is not to say I advocate relativism, realism or nihilism, just that morality is not the sort of thing that fits neatly into those distinctions. Perhaps this is covered in the non-committal word "usual", where you would consider my opinion to be an outlier and not subject to your analysis.

Moral language is deceptive because it has pragmatic use in other disciplines that make judgements of conduct (i.e., law and etiquette). If you're going to do an analysis of moral language, I would think you might want to at least acknowledge the dual-duty the language does or show how these uses are one and the same. I wouldn't rest too much on the naïve use of the words because such an analysis is susceptible to error.

P9 If it is wrong to allow gratuitous suffering caused by food production practices, and gratuitous suffering caused by food productions practices is preventable if and only if a vegan diet is adopted (by [ oneself as a member in ] the set referred to in P6), then one ought to ensure that a vegan diet is adopted by [ oneself as a member in ] the set referred to in P6. — shmik

What about this amendment (and subsequent amendments to premises and conclusions to include this amendment)? It doesn't address the soundness of P6, but it makes the individual obligation explicit and not dependent on the entire set adopting veganism. It might weaken the soundness claim of P6, but that's a topic for elsewhere.

I find this amendment addresses a rather pedantic and uncharitable reading where you seem to be looking for a "technical" out by feigning ignorance of whom the argument is referring.

This is because each individual does not necessarily play a contributory role in causing suffering. — shmik

This takes a degree of special pleading and denial about one's actions to hold as justification for eating meat. In essence, it seems to argue that because the amount of suffering caused or alleviated by an individual's actions is miniscule and negligible, the individual can carry on with the immoral behaviour.

For clarity, you are addressing the soundness of P6 on the grounds that if other people (or most people) do not also adopt a vegan diet, then the actions of an individual in adopting a vegan diet cannot be said to prevent gratuitous suffering. Moral arguments are meant to be applied by the individual but hold for the entire group of moral agents. If the argument holds, the individual has a responsibility to prevent gratuitous suffering by the individual's and only individual's actions, but the argument holds irrespective of the particular subject. This is not an obligation to adopt a vegan diet if and only if everyone else also adopts a vegan diet. The collective consequence of the argument should be a wholesale adoption of a vegan diet and the sort of effect on gratuitous suffering in general that you seem to be imagining. However, the scope of the argument is limited such that regardless of whether others adopt a vegan diet as well (even though the argument applies to them), the reader has a moral responsibility to adopt a vegan diet. I regard your rebuttal as a sort of tragedy of the commons justification, whereby an individual can excuse their own immoral behaviour so long as everyone else is also acting immorally.

In a formal assessment, the ambiguity of the subject is not a problem unless explicit reference dispels the possibility of equivocation by the reader. I would address that issue as a preface to the argument explaining the purpose of the ambiguity and cautioning the reader that the subject is ripe for equivocation but the ambiguity is indeed purposeful (which I will explain in the other thread, time permitting).

For the sake of discussion, do you have any suggestions to solve the problem you brought up, or do you think it's beyond repair?

Do you find it immoral for good reason or by appeal to emotion? Maybe you just need to align your emotions with the moral requirement. For instance, it could be that it's a no-win situation and you can assuage some guilt by justifying inaction rather than action.

There's room for some flexibility from this argument. A condition of the moral claim is epistemic (i.e., known suffering) and if there is sufficient understanding to be confident that killing an animal does not produce suffering (I.e., no CSN) than it would not fall under the obligation of this argument. If eggs and milk come from a sentient non-human animal and using eggs and milk taken from humans would constitute gratuitous suffering in humans, it constitutes gratuitous suffering in non-human animals. I used veganism because I considered it a broad obligation supported by this argument. A narrowing of the obligation requires a justification in itself, and I considered that any narrowing was arbitrary. I could be wrong, but that remains to be seen.

In terms of the environmental argument, it could be another way to come about this issue, and certainly bolster the cause, but I would worry the prevention premise (i.e., gratuitous suffering caused by global warming can be prevented if and only if it is possible to adopt a vegan diet) is defeated by a reduction proposal (i.e., if we restrict eating meat and greatly reduce food production practices using animals as food, gratuitous suffering caused by global warming can be prevented.)

I might be committed to say yes, the suffering of turning down a girl is gratuitous. I'm not sure if it follows that I ought to accept her proposal, unless the gratuitous suffering of turning down a girl is preventable if and only if I accept her proposal. In this case, the methods of rejection might mitigate or eliminate the gratuitous suffering.

Gratuitous suffering is any suffering that is not justified, whether it is unjustified by quantity (i.e., is of excessive intensity) or quality (i.e., is inflicted for no purpose or unnecessarily). Suffering that is inflicted as an unavoidable consequence of a necessary action is not gratuitous since it is not preventable. This definition alters the argument in this way:

Definition: If suffering is known and preventable, then said suffering is gratuitous (i.e., unjustified and wrong).

The antecedent condition of P1 follows from this definition.

Or, put another way, isn't DNA itself very close to the ancient idea of 'essence'? — Wayfarer

I'm not sure DNA does the job on its own because DNA is pretty flexible in terms of incorporating new molecules without significant changes. In particular, I'm thinking of DNA transmigration from something like a viral infection. It might also be worthwhile to note that DNA as an essence would likely be a reference to a wild type allele, but DNA essence is weakened in the particular by the phenotype and later epigenetic changes.