Veganism is more ethical than non-veganism because it reduces suffering and death by a massive amount. [ ... ] Now that I have provided argument and evidence, is it now the truth?
— Truth Seeker
Yes, but that "truth" does not entail that "non-veganism" is immoral or necessarily so. Imo, eating either non-industrial or vat-grown/3-d printed meats is no less ethical than a strictly plant-based diet.

How can consciousness be an illusion when I am experiencing it right now and you are experiencing it right now?
— Truth Seeker
Given that the human brain is transparent to itself (i.e. brain-blind (R.S. Bakker)), it cannot perceive how the trick is done and therefore that consciousness is an illusion (i.e. not the entity it seems to be or that one thinks it is).

Also, as Libet's experiments have shown, one is not "experiencing right now" but rather conscious perception occurs up to 550 milliseconds after a stimulus. And what one is conscious of is a simplified representation of the salient features of the perceived object; thus, "consciousness" is only a simplification of a much more complex process that one cannot be conscious of (like e.g. a blindspot that enables sight).

Consider Buddhist no-self, Democitean swirling atoms, Humean bundle theory, Churchlands' eliminativism ... Nørretranders' user-illusion, Hofstadter's strange looping, Metzinger's phenomenal self model, etc: some philosophical cum scientific 'models' of the entity-illusion of consciousness. — 180 Proof

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I’d like to engage with both parts of what you said.

On veganism:
You’re right that lab-grown or 3D-printed meat could potentially be just as ethical as a plant-based diet, since it wouldn’t involve animal suffering. That’s an exciting possibility for the future. But in the present, the overwhelming majority of non-vegan consumption comes from industrial and even small-scale animal farming, both of which involve suffering and killing that veganism avoids. So while non-veganism could be ethical in theory, in practice it mostly isn’t.

On consciousness:
I agree that our conscious experience is a simplified, delayed model of reality. Libet’s experiments and theories like Metzinger’s self-model do show how much is happening outside of our awareness. But calling consciousness an “illusion” may go too far. An illusion is still an experience — like a rainbow. The rainbow isn’t what it seems, but it’s still real as a phenomenon. Similarly, consciousness may not be what we intuitively think it is, but the fact that we have experiences at all means it isn’t unreal.

In short: veganism reduces real suffering today, and consciousness, while not what it seems, is still a real phenomenon of experience.

Attempts to answer these questions historically led to the creation of the Deontological (correct is what is prescribed) and Utilitarian (correct is the least of two evils) approaches and their combination. — Astorre

How would we know which is correct? The deontological approach contradicts the utilitarian approach.

A path is made by walking on it; ethics are made by questioning our actions. — unenlightened

An excellent point. You've put it much better than I, but that's the basic idea I was trying to get across here:

However, I want to suggest that one can have "the best," or an "infinite good" in mind as a goal without knowing such a good... That's sort of the root of Plato's notion. It is the desire for what is "truly good" not merely what "appears good" or "is said to be good by others" that allows us to transcend current beliefs and opinions, to move beyond our own finitude in a self-determining pursuit of the Good. The object is not known at the outset, it is merely desired (that's the whole idea of the "erotic ascent"). — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Metaethics" often deals with questions of moral truth, etc., but I think there is a very real question about what sort of things will be needed to "walk any path" regardless of where that path leads. That is, to my mind, the most important sort of "meta" question. A metavirtue here is one which is required for any such questioning, and to abide by what one finds, and I think these can indeed be identified. Plato's notion of the "rule of the rational part of the soul," seems to me to be an excellent candidate for instance. Even if we might want to radically rework the underlying anthropology, the habits described seem necessary for all inquirers.

I don't like any of the approaches. That's how we live.
In the deontological approach, you have to believe in something (but what about non-believers?)
In the utilitarian approach, everyone can have different values, which leads to chaos
In the existential approach, if you are a maniac and act in accordance with your aspirations, things don't work out very well either

Nihilism is also not a solution

What would you suggest for people like me?

.

I don't like any of the approaches. That's how we live.
In the deontological approach, you have to believe in something (but what about non-believers?)
In the utilitarian approach, everyone can have different values, which leads to chaos
In the existential approach, if you are a maniac and act in accordance with your aspirations, things don't work out very well either

Nihilism is also not a solution

What would you suggest for people like me? — Astorre

I can understand your frustration — every ethical system seems to run into problems:

Deontology can feel too rigid or tied to belief.
Utilitarianism can clash when values differ.
Existentialism can be misused to justify harmful actions.
Nihilism leaves us without direction at all.

That’s why I’ve found it helpful to think in terms of Compassionism, which is compassion for every sentient being. Instead of relying on rigid rules or endless calculations, the guiding question becomes: Does this choice show compassion, or does it cause harm?

Compassionism doesn’t depend on religion, and it works even when people’s values differ — because compassion is something we all understand as a sentient being. It’s not about being perfect, just about orienting ourselves toward helping rather than harming, moment by moment.

You write compassion for all sentient beings. Ok. Let's define who is sentient and who is not. Here on the forum there are many adherents of the idea that stones also have consciousness. Or again set boundaries - these are sentient, these are insensitive. Then what can this be based on? Just believe you or someone else?

then what is the limit of compassion? Sell a kidney and feed starving children with the proceeds?

You write compassion for all sentient beings. Ok. Let's define who is sentient and who is not. Here on the forum there are many adherents of the idea that stones also have consciousness. Or again set boundaries - these are sentient, these are insensitive. Then what can this be based on? Just believe you or someone else?

then what is the limit of compassion? Sell a kidney and feed starving children with the proceeds? — Astorre

Great questions. For me, sentience means the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. That usually includes humans and non-human animals, and possibly conscious aliens from other planets. Stones, as far as we know, don’t have any capacity to feel pain or pleasure, so they wouldn’t be included. The boundary isn’t arbitrary — it’s based on whether there is scientific evidence of consciousness and the ability to have painful and pleasurable experiences.

As for the limits of compassion, I see it less as an all-or-nothing demand and more as a guiding orientation: do what you reasonably can to help, and avoid causing harm where possible. Compassionism isn’t about self-destruction — it’s about balance. It includes compassion for self and compassion for others. If I act with compassion within my means, I contribute to less suffering and more well-being in the world.

Stones, as far as we know, don’t have any capacity to feel pain or pleasure, so they wouldn’t be included. — Truth Seeker

I hope the stone consciousness supporters will pass by and not look in here :lol:

Compassionism isn’t about self-destruction — it’s about balance. I — Truth Seeker

The balance offers a scale. This is Relativism again. Maybe this is an unsolvable problem.

By the way. There are systems of views (ideologies) in which what is good and what is bad is prescribed in advance, and the choice is practically prescribed to the person (for example, Chu che). You don't need to think about what is good or bad. It has already been written for you. In my opinion, most people in the world don't even think about it; they simply believe in their ideologies (including those that emphasize personal responsibility for one's choices).

Going back to the question: does a person really need to have their own choice, or is it easier to follow a pattern? (For example, if you get on a full bus and there's only one seat available, you'll sit there instead of searching for a better spot if the bus is empty)

Stones, as far as we know, don’t have any capacity to feel pain or pleasure, so they wouldn’t be included.
— Truth Seeker

I hope the stone consciousness supporters will pass by and not look in here :lol:

Compassionism isn’t about self-destruction — it’s about balance. I
— Truth Seeker

The balance offers a scale. This is Relativism again. Maybe this is an unsolvable problem.

By the way. There are systems of views (ideologies) in which what is good and what is bad is prescribed in advance, and the choice is practically prescribed to the person (for example, Chu che). You don't need to think about what is good or bad. It has already been written for you. In my opinion, most people in the world don't even think about it; they simply believe in their ideologies (including those that emphasize personal responsibility for one's choices).

Going back to the question: does a person really need to have their own choice, or is it easier to follow a pattern? (For example, if you get on a full bus and there's only one seat available, you'll sit there instead of searching for a better spot if the bus is empty) — Astorre

On balance and relativism: I think balance isn’t the same as “anything goes.” Relativism says all views are equally valid, but Compassionism does not say that. It is about reducing the suffering of all sentient beings and helping oneself and others flourish. It gives us a clear direction, even if the details vary depending on circumstances.

On your bigger question: I agree that many people just follow ready-made systems. It feels easier, like taking the only open seat on a bus. But I think there’s value in choosing consciously instead of outsourcing morality. Even if we borrow ideas from traditions or ideologies, ultimately, it’s our compassion and responsibility that give them meaning. Following a pattern blindly might be simpler, but it risks causing harm without ever asking whether it could be avoided.

So your system is valuable to you, but just an empty template to others?

So your system is valuable to you, but just an empty template to others? — Astorre

I don’t see Compassionism as just “my personal template,” but as a principle anyone could adopt because it’s grounded in something universal: the capacity to suffer and the desire to avoid harm.

Of course, people may or may not value compassion as highly as I do — but that doesn’t make it empty. It’s like honesty: not everyone practices it, but most would agree it’s better than dishonesty when building trust. Compassion works the same way — it has value beyond me because suffering and wellbeing are real for everyone who can experience them.

I would imagine that suffering and happiness were experienced before language, so there’s that.

I would think also that morality comes from our interactions with the world and other creatures, not just language. But given you wrote of relativism “is all that is left” it sounds like you’re not comfortable with it. I think we’ve had this conversation before. — Tom Storm

Yes, it is a philosophical obsession of mine, ethics. I think most philosophy is an abstraction, as is science and the pragmatic os dialy living; an abstraction in that all knowledge is categorical, as when one says light is really a spectrum of wavelengths: light, wavelengths, spectrum, etc., these are categorical ideas that subsist in hierarchies of subsumption, and they are abstracted from the whole of the givenness of the world. Derrida wrote The White Mythology, and in it he takes a very close look at Anatole France's Garden of Epicurus, near the end, in a conversation between Polyphilos and Ariste in which the claim is made that metaphysics is like a faded coin that has been tossed about in its wear and tear for years, and barely preserves the original images. This is a metaphor for the way metaphysics came into being: "at first" there was a natural language, long ago, that was clear and right in the way it spoke about the world, a primordial language----God's logos? Is there such a thing? Not as absurd as it sounds, I think, because when analysis attempts to look at language, it is essentially looking at itself, which is impossible since the metalanguage is the same as the object language, and all you will ever get is reflections of the metalanguage, or more strings of metalinguistic thinking; think of logic trying to get to the ground of what logic is. One then is stopped hard in the tracks of inquiry, suddenly, if you will, lest one simply go on reeling off more of the "same" that can never penetrate into the desideratum: the true ground-language that springs into existence with every thought. One can only stand there and observe the threshold of one's acceptance (see Fink's Sixth Meditation if you like) in the act of thinking, and the question of the ground is pushed into metaphysics. Put 'God' aside, for it is nothign but trouble, but metaphysics is there, right at the tip of one's tongue as she speaks, thinks, feels, wonders, and so on.

Anyway, off track a bit, but OTOH, not really: Derrida's idea (as best as I have gotten so far. He WANTS to be puzzling so you don't glide through reading) is to question this metaphor: the assumption is that metaphysics is born out of the wear and tear of language through the ages, a process that corrupts what was once clear and right: a borrowing of the essential meanings originally given, to construct dizzying heights abstract thought, and that process is inherently metaphorical, the making of novel meanings by contextual interchange of language. There was a time when things were much simpler, but once language moved into the extravagant mode of excessive creation, and things were moved from their grounding into where that had no business

Derrida uses this little dialogue if France's to illustrate a point: Once one inquires about the true foundation of language and tries to conceive of something that once was, one comes face to face with the very language that is supposed to be corrupted and out of which the very notion of corruption issues for itself. As I see it, it is like the evolutionary science: If our current horizon of possible conceiving at all issues from an evolved mentality, then any attempt to "look back" and draw up theories about how this mentality evolved is going to meet with its own evolved categories of thought. A kind of scientific Hegelianism: we are currently IN a modality of possiblities that is delimited, and anything that is produced therein cannot exceed its own delimitation.

Which bring me to ethics: To speak at all is to work within such a delimitation, and there is no way out of this....except through Kierkegaard (and his ilk): We actually exist, and this is existence is not simply about how our evolving language possiblities can speak what it is; rather, existence is palpable, real, hic et nunc, and its reality is striking, overwhelming, and this is where ethics finds its ground, this ahistorical real, not in the historicity of the what-can-be-said, which is where philosophy performs its eternal aporetic advance to nihilism. Philosophy is already done, but philosophers mostly just keep wheels spinning. Ethics is about, foundationally, value-in-being, and value lies outside of language, notwithstanding that I am speaking just this.

Why should I act this way and not otherwise? — Astorre

Isn't this where reward and punishment play a major role? From an early age on we are offered rewards for acting the way an agency prefers -- that agency being anything from parent to a government. And the opposite, of course: punishment of some sort from an early age on. At an early age, punishment installs guilt, a powerful guide and something to avoid by behaving 'correctly' whatever that is.

I like your statement, "What is the price of my action? Am I ready to bear it as part of myself?" This is a critical issue where we decide to deviate from the dominant rules and regs. An example is the decision of a gay boy, man, to announce that he is gay, even though this act of existential truth may bring immediate negative consequences. 75 years ago, being a communist in the United States was that sort of existential issue. (There are always these existential issues -- different times and places, different existential issues.)

Normally, traditions that build on Plato—Boethius, the Golden Age Islamic thinkers, many of the Patristics, the Scholastics, etc.—also posit a sort of "knowing by becoming" here. Praxis is essential (e.g., contemplation, ascetic labors, etc.). But within these schools it isn't "knowing the good" that comes first, but knowing what essentially precludes knowing and consistently willing the good, which is being divided against oneself and controlled by one's passions and lower appetites, rather than the rational appetite for goodness or truth as such. Hence, ethics here beings from a sort of "meta" position, from looking at what must be the case for any ethical life regardless of what goodness and justice turn out to be. Indeed, much of what Plato puts out there would seem to hold even if "good" just means "what I myself will prefer." It applies to anyone not embracing full nihilism, in that being ruled over by one's appetites and passions will only lead to good outcomes by accident (and we know from experience that it will often result in disaster). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yet all of this remains discursive, merely. Such is philosophy, and the assumption is that this is the best one can do: postulate from a position that is at a distance from reality which is philosophy's impossible desideratum. As long as this scholarly need to publish continues to dominate thinking (and really, what is a philosopher do to if not speak endlessly about what someone said vis a vis someone else?), doors are closed. And philosophy is reduced to entertainment, and in modern anaoytic thought, not even serious entertainment--for what is philosophy without a primordial metaphysics? Nothing. Even Kant, with his absolute ceiling on meaningful thought, is an attempt bring the house down on philosophy by simply drawing a line between representation and something that is not representation, not realizing, and this is an important insight for me, that to draw such a line can only be done if both sides of the line are intelligible (as the early Wittgenstein observed), and so the radically other of this both remains and yet is lost to sense making, for metaphysics will not be dismissed in a wave of spurious rigor, nor can it be reduced to nonsense (contra positivism) because the radicality of the other is IN the phenomenality of what is given.

This is just a glance at something I think intrudes dramatically upon the story of the metaphysics of the good you sketch out above. The good is a term so burdened by such thinking that one forgets Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that there was in his thinking a failure to acknowledge that one actually exists. Metaphysics can do this, that is, impose, say, some Christian idea about faith and the church and how platonism can provide a model for the world and divinity, and how thinking leads to more rationalizing, and soon, one is burning heretics and believing god to be some kind of embodiment of superlatives. I argue all of this fails to understand religion, ethics and its good and evil.

To really deal with ethics, one must, as Walt Whitman put it, have all schools in abeyance, even the schools that inform inquiry. The good and the bad of ethics stands outside of thought entirely, though philosophy brings thought to realize this. Such is the paradox of metaethics. The prima facie injunction against bludgeoning one's neighbor is grounded in an actuality not bound to the finitude of the totality onto-ethicality. It issues from, if you will, eternity. (Levinas has much to say on this).

On your bigger question: I agree that many people just follow ready-made systems. It feels easier, like taking the only open seat on a bus. But I think there’s value in choosing consciously instead of outsourcing morality. Even if we borrow ideas from traditions or ideologies, ultimately, it’s our compassion and responsibility that give them meaning. Following a pattern blindly might be simpler, but it risks causing harm without ever asking whether it could be avoided. — Truth Seeker

I don’t see Compassionism as just “my personal template,” but as a principle anyone could adopt because it’s grounded in something universal: the capacity to suffer and the desire to avoid harm.

Of course, people may or may not value compassion as highly as I do — but that doesn’t make it empty. It’s like honesty: not everyone practices it, but most would agree it’s better than dishonesty when building trust. Compassion works the same way — it has value beyond me because suffering and wellbeing are real for everyone who can experience them. — Truth Seeker

I'm sorry, but I see contradictions here.

In short: veganism reduces real suffering today, and consciousness, while not what it seems, is still a real phenomenon of experience. — Truth Seeker

Here are a couple of articles on vat-grown meat that can reduce animal suffering today:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/08/worlds-largest-lab-grown-steak-unveiled-by-israeli-firm

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/health/fda-lab-meat-cells-scn-wellness/index.html

Also, by 'illusion' I do not mean fiction or does not happen. As I wrote ...

... entity-illusion of consciousness. — 180 Proof

Thank you for the links and for the clarification.

I'm sorry, but I see contradictions here. — Astorre

Please let me know what contradictions you see.

Ethics is about, foundationally, value-in-being, and value lies outside of language, notwithstanding that I am speaking just this. — Constance

I wonder if it might be more precise to describe values as having a pre-linguistic dimension (in experience, emotion, embodied life), but that they only become social, reflective, and enduring through language. Morality then is social relations with language. Our entire discourse would vanish without language.

Whatever prelinguistic or 'transcendent' origin ethics might have, we cannot demonstrate it, nor can we access it. And, as you say, we are limited to using language. I wonder if it is safe to leave it behind, as it is difficult to see what use this frame has beyond engaging in abstract speculation or intellectual exercises. Unless you add God (which you seek to avoid) which might provide us with a putative foundation or grounding for it all and this also comes with a 'to do' list. (Not that this frame is convincing to me either.)

My question to you is this: how do we talk about ethics as a society? Setting aside the abstruse, speculative material of academia or in a forum like this, what can we say (as per the OP) that is accessible and useful at a societal level about right and wrong?