“Suffering is good for the soul” only makes sense if (1) souls exist, and (2) suffering actually improves them. Both claims lack evidence. What we do know is that suffering destroys countless lives - human and other sentient species - including those who never learn, grow, or recover from it. If an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being needs agony to teach virtue, it’s a design failure, not moral wisdom. A competent creator could achieve moral growth through joy, empathy, or insight - not torture.

“Imperfection is better than perfection” is self-contradictory unless you redefine “better.” Better than what? If something is better, that means it surpasses another state, implying a standard of perfection that it moves closer to. You can’t coherently claim imperfection is superior to perfection without hollowing out the meaning of both terms.

“Knowledge creates the unknown” is a poetic statement, but epistemologically false. Knowledge reduces the unknown; ignorance is what creates it. Expanding understanding reveals new questions, yes - but that’s a deepening of knowledge, not a return to ignorance.

So all three claims rely on romantic inversions of meaning rather than reasoned argument. They sound mystical, but once unpacked, they offer no coherent defence of suffering or imperfection.

You’ve correctly pointed out that “no being can be unlimited.” But that admission doesn’t solve the problem - it changes the subject. The argument was never about a limited superbeing, but about the logical incoherence of the traditional theistic claim that God is simultaneously omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.

If you concede that omnipotence and omniscience are impossible, then you’re agreeing that the classical God concept is self-contradictory. That’s not a solution to the problem of evil - it’s the abandonment of classical theism. You’re left with a finite, naturalistic being operating within the limits of reality - powerful perhaps, but not divine in any ultimate sense.

Saying “we don’t know if a world without suffering is possible” also doesn’t rescue the theistic claim. Theists don’t usually portray God as uncertain about metaphysical possibilities; they claim that God created all metaphysical possibilities. If suffering is built into reality’s fabric, then God either designed it that way (which contradicts perfect goodness) or lacked the power to design differently (which contradicts omnipotence).

Regarding your point that omnipotence itself is impossible: if so, then every theology that attributes omnipotence to God collapses into incoherence. The “lesson” here isn’t to adjust definitions but to recognize that the very concept of an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing deity fails under logical and moral analysis.

So yes - I agree that redefining God with “realistic terms” avoids contradiction. But what you’re describing then is not the God of classical monotheism; it’s a finite being within a constrained universe. In that case, the argument doesn’t refute my point - it confirms it.

Thank you for the link to your other post. I read it and I totally agree.

I totally agree.

Redefining the terms might seem to remove the contradiction, but it really just hides it behind vaguer language. If “omniscient” now means “knows what can possibly be known,” the obvious question is: who decides what counts as “possible”? If suffering is deemed “unknowable” or “unpreventable,” that’s not solving the problem - it’s admitting that the being isn’t truly all-knowing or all-powerful. It turns the classical God into a very capable but ultimately limited entity.

Likewise, “as powerful as a being can possibly be” is circular. Possible given what? If a world without suffering is logically possible, then failing to create such a world shows a lack of either power, knowledge, or will. If it’s not possible, then reality itself imposes limits on this being, meaning omnipotence was never real to begin with.

And morally, the issue doesn’t go away. Even if this being is “as good as possible,” if it foresaw preventable suffering and chose to allow it, then by any coherent moral standard, it’s not maximally good. If goodness allows needless agony, the word loses meaning.

So, redefining the terms doesn’t eliminate the contradiction - it just concedes that the traditional “all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good” God can’t exist without being reinterpreted as a finite or morally compromised one.

My point is that when we are responsible for the species and the ecology, we have to make decisions that you seem not to think that don't have to be made. Veganism as a choice of an individual surely doesn't have to answer to these issues, but others have to do it.

I agree that humans have responsibilities toward species and ecosystems - but responsibility does not mean perpetual exploitation. It means stewardship guided by compassion, sustainability, and reduction of harm. Ending industrial breeding doesn’t mean abandoning animals; it means stopping the practice of creating billions of dependents for slaughter while maintaining ecological management through non-lethal and science-based methods.

Ecological management already exists without animal agriculture - through habitat restoration, rewilding, and fertility control programs. These are evidence-based tools used in conservation biology to prevent both overpopulation and collapse.

You're not making sense. How can you even say that you are treating animals equally when you are hell bent on eradicating all livestock and farm animals? That's billions of animals. That "they would die of old age" isn't as humane as you think it is... like genocide...

That analogy collapses immediately. Genocide is the intentional destruction of existing sentient beings who wish to live. Ending breeding is the prevention of future suffering through non-creation of victims. There is no killing, coercion, or hatred involved - only a refusal to keep breeding sentient beings for exploitation.

To be precise: veganism seeks non-existence of forced reproduction, not extermination of living animals. The animals alive today would continue to exist, cared for until natural death. What stops is the endless pipeline of artificial insemination, confinement, and slaughter.

Well, they are killed in the end. So what's different? You think every cow or chicken that has ever lived has been treated cruelly? And because of this they, as animals, shouldn't exist?

The difference is moral agency. Killing sentient beings for unnecessary reasons when we have alternatives is harm we choose. A lion killing a gazelle acts from survival necessity; humans killing cows for taste and tradition do not.

The issue is not whether every individual animal has been mistreated, but that their entire existence is designed around premature death and deprivation of freedom. Creating beings solely to kill them is incompatible with the claim that their lives “matter equally.”

If we truly value them equally, we stop breeding them into systems that guarantee suffering and death. That’s the moral consistency veganism seeks.

So your argument would be simply to "let nature take care of the reindeer"... In just a few years, reindeers would be a huge problem... famine... fragile tundra... rabbits in Australia...

You’ve built a strawman version of the position. “Let nature take care of it” does not mean “abandon all ecological management.” Vegan ethics does not entail passivity - it calls for active, non-exploitative stewardship.

In the case of reindeer, population control through non-lethal immunocontraception, controlled rewilding, and habitat management can maintain balance without slaughter. Such programs are already used worldwide - for example, in managing wild horse and deer populations humanely.

Moreover, invoking the rabbit invasion in Australia is misleading. Rabbits were an invasive species in a non-native ecosystem with no natural predators. Reindeer in Nordic regions are native herbivores that have co-evolved with their environment; their numbers can be ethically stabilized without turning them into products.

The deeper point: ecological complexity requires thoughtful transition, not resignation to the status quo of killing. Saying “the only way to keep balance is to slaughter” is an admission of moral imagination failure. We can do better - and we must.

The simplistic ideology of do not harm animals and let them be isn't going to work here...

It’s not simplistic - it’s principled. “Do not harm unnecessarily” is the foundation of every serious moral system, from medicine to law. The fact that transitioning to non-violence requires planning doesn’t invalidate the principle; it simply means the transition must be intelligent, phased, and context-sensitive.

Veganism is not a naive “hands-off” ideology; it’s an ethical framework that prioritizes minimizing preventable harm while adapting human systems - agriculture, conservation, and culture - to reflect that goal.

Thank you very much for sharing your position. It's always interesting to learn how others view reality.

"So your answer is to end them. With a "gradual, compassionate transition". You want these breeds to be erased, but are "compassionate" about it."

No - not “erased,” but retired. Compassionate transition means no longer breeding animals into dependence, suffering, and slaughter. The individuals alive today would be cared for in sanctuaries. What ends is the cycle of artificial breeding for exploitation, not the existence of animals themselves.

If we stop forcing billions of animals into existence only to kill them young, that is not hostility - it’s the cessation of harm. A being who never suffers or dies because we never bred them into bondage isn’t a victim; it’s a harm prevented.

"In this view you seem to put a lower value on animals that have been bred by humans than to other wildlife. Why the hostility and the categorical inequality between sentient animals? Or how about reindeer?"

There’s no hostility toward any sentient being - only opposition to exploitation. I already said in my previous post: all sentient beings matter equally. The ethical distinction isn’t between “wild” and “domesticated,” but between free existence and forced breeding for human exploitation.

Reindeer who roam freely in tundra ecosystems and maintain natural behaviors are not comparable to cows or chickens bred into total dependency, mutilation, and slaughter. The moral issue arises when we breed sentient beings solely as resources to be exploited. If reindeer were no longer bred for consumption but allowed to live and die naturally, that would align perfectly with veganism and ecological balance.

"Five years out of 20 years isn't a small fraction. And do note that not all live up to 20 years in the wild, just as not all humans reach 75 years."

A lifespan cut short by deliberate violence at the hands of humans is fundamentally different from a natural lifespan limited by disease or predation. Factory-farmed cows typically live 4–6 years; their natural lifespan averages 18–25. Chickens are killed at 6 weeks, not 6–10 years. Pigs at 6 months, not 15–20 years. The ethical objection isn’t numerical - it’s that we prematurely and deliberately end sentient lives for unnecessary reasons, when alternatives exist. It's not just the issue of reduced lifespan - the quality of life the farm animals have is horrific. You can search for videos online if you want to see the appalling conditions the chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows, etc. are kept in.

"I don’t share this view of humans being different from everything else as I think we are part of the biosphere and just a dominant species among others and what we do is similar to other species that mold their environment."

We are part of the biosphere, and precisely because of that, our moral awareness gives us greater responsibility, not exemption. Wolves don’t have slaughterhouses, nor do tigers selectively breed prey species for maximal suffering and yield. Ethical agency differentiates might from right.

Saying “we’re just another species” is true biologically but not morally. Other animals act from instinct; humans act with foresight, reflection, and the capacity to choose compassion over cruelty. Recognizing our participation in nature should lead us to minimize unnecessary harm, not rationalize it.

I thought I did answer your question. My answer is to put them in sanctuaries such as this one: https://www.farmanimalrescuesanctuary.co.uk All sentient beings matter equally.

You’re raising a fair logistical question, but it’s built on a mistaken premise. Veganism isn’t about retroactively erasing all domesticated animals - it’s about ending the breeding, exploitation, and killing of sentient beings for profit or palate.

Holsteins and Ayrshires, like dogs or cats, were selectively bred by humans to serve human ends. That doesn’t mean their dependence makes their exploitation ethically acceptable. Dependence isn’t consent. We created that dependence through artificial selection; we can end it responsibly through gradual, compassionate transition.

Sanctuaries are not meant to house all existing livestock. If the demand for dairy and meat declines, so does forced breeding. Populations shrink naturally over time, as fewer animals are brought into existence for human use. That’s not “mass extinction” - it’s the end of an industrial breeding cycle that exists only because humans perpetuate it.

And yes, the lives of most livestock are filled with suffering - separation from their young, physical mutilations, confinement, and slaughter at a fraction of their natural lifespan. The fact that humans created these conditions doesn’t make them justified. If beings are bred into existence primarily to be used and killed, their suffering outweighs the value of their artificially imposed existence.

Vegan ethics doesn’t deny that these animals have value; it insists that their value isn’t dependent on their usefulness to us. The goal is not zero cows - it’s zero exploitation.

In nature, cows can live around twenty to twenty-five years, but in farming, beef cows are typically killed between one and three years old, and dairy cows between four and six, once their milk yield declines. Veal calves are slaughtered at only four to six months old. Pigs can live fifteen to twenty years, yet “meat pigs” are killed at five to six months, and breeding sows after just three to five years when their fertility drops. Sheep and lambs have natural lifespans of ten to twelve years, but most lambs are slaughtered between four and twelve months, while adult sheep used for wool or breeding are killed around six to eight years. Chickens naturally live eight to ten years, but broiler chickens are slaughtered at only five to seven weeks, and egg-laying hens are killed after about twelve to eighteen months when their egg production declines. Male chicks, considered useless for egg production, are usually killed on the day they hatch. Turkeys can live around ten years, yet most are killed between four and six months. Goats can live fifteen to eighteen years, but dairy goats are killed after about four to six years, and meat goats - often called “kids” - between three and twelve months. Buffalo and oxen can live around twenty to twenty-five years, but they are usually slaughtered between three and six years old.

In every case, these animals die long before reaching even a small fraction of their natural lifespan. Veganism questions whether shortening and exploiting sentient lives for taste, tradition, or convenience can ever be morally justified. The issue is not the number of animals alive, but whether beings capable of suffering should exist only to be used and killed.

Only about 1% of the 8.25 billion humans currently alive are vegan even though the word vegan was coined 81 years ago. 80 billion sentient land organisms and 1 to 3 trillion sentient aquatic organisms are killed by non-vegans per year. Despite this, I don't think people should be forced to go vegan. I think conversion to veganism should be voluntary.

There are sanctuaries for animals where rescued animals live out their natural lives. Holstein and Ayshire cows could be moved to such sanctuaries.

If all people gradually become vegan, farmers won't breed animals for slaughter or milk or egg, etc. I think gradual change is easier to manage.

Thank you for explaining what you mean. Veganism is based on scientific evidence, reason and empathy. Evidence shows that other organisms are sentient, e.g. cows, dogs, cats, fish, octopuses, elephants, lions, meerkats, zebras, horses, monkeys, chimps, chickens, whales, dolphins, goats, ducks, lambs, turkeys, lobsters, etc. They all respond to pain, the way we respond to pain. They have sophisticated nervous systems. I empathise with the pain and distress of all sentient beings.

Why vegetarian isn't enough
The suffering caused by the dairy and egg industry is possibly less well publicised than the plight of factory farmed animals. The production of dairy products necessitates the death of countless male calves that are of no use to the dairy farmer, as well as the premature death of cows slaughtered when their milk production decreases. Similarly, in egg production, even 'ethical' or 'free range' eggs involve the killing of the 'unnecessary' male chicks when just a day old.

That's why I am a vegan.

Humans evolved as omnivores, but we are not obligate omnivores. There are many vegetarians and vegans among humans. I am a vegan. Who are you calling a hypocrite? Here are some resources if you want to learn more: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan
https://veganuary.com
https://www.carnismdebunked.com

Thank you very much for answering my question. It's always fascinating to learn how others see reality.

Compliment works. Thank you.

Beautifully put - that’s a wonderfully clear way to mark the difference.

Yes, in science, our language aims for mind-to-world fit: we adjust our beliefs to mirror what is. In ethics, the movement reverses - world-to-mind fit - we attempt to bring what is into alignment with what ought to be. But what’s fascinating is that this reversal isn’t arbitrary; it rests on a prior recognition that “what is” includes beings capable of suffering and flourishing. The “ought” is already latent in the “is,” waiting to be actualized through choice.

In my view, this makes ethics not the negation of science but its completion. Science describes relations of fact; ethics transforms those relations through care. When I say “it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering,” I’m not merely proposing a new state of affairs - I’m acknowledging a tension between the real and the realizable. Ethical language, in that sense, is a kind of creative realism: speech that doesn’t just reflect reality but helps it remember what it can become.

So perhaps the two directions of fit meet halfway: science refines our understanding of interdependence, and ethics tells us how to live that interdependence responsibly. Both, in their own registers, are ways of aligning ourselves with reality - one by describing its order, the other by deepening its compassion.

Yes - exactly. I agree that the problem lies less in ethics than in what we mean by realism. If we imagine moral facts as entities “lying about the place,” independent of all minds and cultures, then moral realism quickly collapses into absurdity. But if we reduce ethics to mere convention or preference, we lose the very distinction between right and wrong that moral language is meant to express. The challenge is to articulate a realism that isn’t naively objectivist yet isn’t dissolved into subjectivism.

My own position sits closer to what some call experiential realism or intersubjective realism. Moral truths aren’t things but relations that hold across conscious beings. When I say “it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering,” I’m not pointing to a property out in the world; I’m describing a stable pattern in the space of coexistence - a regularity in the way awareness relates to awareness. In that sense, moral statements can be true or false because they correspond to the real dynamics of sentient life, not to floating moral particles.

This is why I keep returning to compassion. It isn’t a “fact” waiting to be measured, nor a mere sentiment; it’s the experiential disclosure of what sustains the relational field in which meaning, language, and value are even possible. If that field weren’t real, nothing else we call real - not science, not logic, not dialogue - could function, because all depend on trust, recognition, and shared intelligibility.

So yes, I accept your distinction: realism about ethics needs rethinking. But rather than abandoning the word, I’d redefine it. Moral realism, for me, means this: that value is as intrinsic to the fabric of relation as curvature is to space-time. We don’t find moral “facts” lying about; we find ourselves already entangled in moral space.

Excellent points, and I’m grateful for them - they go to the heart of what it means to speak of ethics as a real structure rather than a sentiment.

You’re right that harm, conflict, or even cruelty can enlarge the field of meaning in certain ways. Tragedy, trauma, and loss often deepen awareness and generate profound transformations of self and culture. But I would distinguish between enlarging meaning and affirming value. Violence may broaden the narrative field, but it does so through negation - by showing what breaks when relation collapses. Compassion, by contrast, reveals what holds the field together. Both are revelatory; one is diagnostic, the other sustaining.

To your question: “Why privilege one over the other?” - because only compassion can make coexistence coherent. Fear, domination, and cruelty can organize relations, yes, but only parasitically; they depend on the very trust and vulnerability they exploit. To be loved or feared are not symmetrical options, because fear corrodes the dialogical reciprocity on which understanding depends. In that sense, compassion isn’t just “nicer” - it’s structurally necessary for communication itself to remain possible.

You’re also right that care can wound - that good intentions may be felt as intrusion. For me this is not a counterexample but part of the texture of compassion. Genuine care includes respect for autonomy and an awareness of its own fallibility. It isn’t perpetual agreement but sustained responsiveness: the effort to repair when our help harms, to keep the conversation open. The ethical relation is asymptotic rather than static - it’s the ongoing calibration of good within complexity.

As for the gravity analogy, I take your point. Moral life is not predictable in the way physical law is; what I mean is that the consequences of ignoring compassion are as consistent as the consequences of ignoring gravity. We may not fall at a calculable rate, but civilizations and relationships collapse all the same. Over time, indifference erodes meaning as reliably as gravity pulls objects down.

So yes - behaviour is less predictable than matter, but the pattern of what sustains or destroys meaning is remarkably invariant. We might say compassion is to coexistence what gravity is to structure: the invisible coherence that keeps the whole from flying apart.

That’s beautifully put - I think our intuitions are indeed convergent. If relation is substance, then the universe is not a collection of things interacting but an interaction that gives rise to things. In that sense, Spinoza’s natura naturans and Rovelli’s relational ontology are saying the same thing: being is event, structure is process, substance is relation-in-motion.

Where I would add a small inflection is here: if relation is substance, then the quality of relation - its affective tone - matters metaphysically. The moment we feel compassion, we’re not adding sentiment to a neutral network; we’re glimpsing the network’s self-recognition. The ethical isn’t an overlay upon the physical - it’s the physical come to consciousness of its own interdependence.

So perhaps ecstatic naturalism describes the ontology, and compassion names its pathos: nature not only is relation but feels itself through sentient beings. When we care, the cosmos cares through us.

Thank you - that’s an insightful connection, and I’m glad you mentioned Buber. You’re right: the conception of compassion I’m working with probably leans closer to Buber’s I-Thou than to Levinas’s infinite Other. Levinas emphasizes transcendence and asymmetry - an ethical height that forever exceeds comprehension. Buber, by contrast, stresses reciprocity and presence: the moment when two beings meet in mutual openness, each confirming the other’s reality.

I see compassion as the living current that flows between these poles. It begins as Levinasian exposure - an encounter with the Other’s vulnerability that unsettles me - but it deepens, Buber-like, into a dialogical relation where both exist through the relation itself. Compassion is not self-sacrifice or self-assertion but the space between, the field of recognition that allows “I” and “Thou” to co-arise.

As for the naturalistic aspect, yes - I mean that quite literally. Compassion is not a supernatural virtue but a biological and phenomenological constant: an evolved mode of attunement that makes coexistence possible. Our neural and hormonal architectures, our mirror systems and attachment circuits, are the physiological correlates of what Buber calls the “dialogical principle.” The ethical, in this sense, is the felt continuity of life with life.

So perhaps my position could be described as dialogical naturalism: compassion as the empirical face of a metaphysical truth - the truth that relation precedes substance. Whether we speak the language of Levinas, Buber, or biology, the insight is the same: to exist is already to be with.

Science only works with what we can detect with instruments. Its conclusions are limited to that. It is mute about the basis of existence and key philosophical questions. — Punshhh

Beautifully said - and I completely agree. Science excels at mapping what happens and how it happens, but not why anything matters. Instruments can register particles, forces, and correlations, but not value, significance, or moral responsibility. Those arise in the first-person field of experience that science must presuppose but cannot exhaust.

For me, that’s exactly where philosophy begins - not in competition with science but as its horizon of intelligibility. Science describes the measurable; philosophy interprets the meaning of measurement. When I speak of Compassionism as a metaphysical condition, I’m not proposing an alternative physics but pointing to the fact that inquiry itself presupposes care: the desire to know, to reduce error, to communicate truth, are all ethical acts. Even science rests on a covenant of trust and cooperation - the minimal compassion of minds working together in a shared world.

So yes, science is mute about the basis of existence, but its very success depends on that silent ground: the lived, ethical, and relational world that gives data its sense. In that light, compassion isn’t opposed to reason - it’s the precondition of reason’s continuity. Without care for truth, evidence, or one another, even science would collapse into noise.

How does Vegan fit in? Vegan is…scientific? — DingoJones

Veganism is based on evidence, reason and empathy. Evidence shows that other organisms are sentient, e.g. cows, dogs, cats, fish, octopuses, elephants, lions, meerkats, zebras, horses, monkeys, chimps, chickens, whales, dolphins, goats, ducks, lambs, turkeys, lobsters, etc. They all respond to pain, the way we respond to pain. They have sophisticated nervous systems. I empathise with the pain and distress of all sentient beings. That's why I am a vegan. Non-vegans cause suffering and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms and 1 to 3 trillion sentient aquatic organisms per year. Veganism is also better for the environment and for human health. Here is more information about reasons to go vegan: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan

I understand the appeal of the aesthetic-emotive stance very well. There’s a kind of honesty in admitting that our first contact with value is felt, not deduced. What you describe as intuition is, I think, the raw material of any genuine ethics: the moment when reality moves us before we have a theory about why.

As for your question - whether I’m a moral realist - the answer depends on what kind of realism we mean. I’m not a metaphysical realist in the sense that “goodness” or “compassion” exist as freestanding entities somewhere in the universe. But I’m also not a pure subjectivist. My position is what might be called phenomenological or relational realism: values are not “out there” independent of minds, yet they are not arbitrary projections either. They arise in the space between beings, as the disclosure of what sustains or destroys relation.

In that sense, compassion isn’t an invented rule but an encountered reality - the felt structure of coexistence itself. When I harm another, I don’t merely break a social convention; I diminish the field of meaning that connects us. The “realness” of ethics lies in that experiential invariance: wherever sentient beings coexist, the possibilities of care and harm appear as objectively distinct modalities of relation.

So yes, I would say I’m a moral realist of a weak, experiential sort: ethics is not a cosmic property but a condition of intelligibility. We discover it the way we discover gravity - by noticing what happens when we ignore it.

Your aesthetic approach, far from being opposed to this, may actually be its most authentic expression. Feeling and intuition are the first phenomenology; reason arrives later to articulate what we already know.

Yes - beautifully put. Compassion does indeed presuppose chaos in the sense that it awakens in response to vulnerability, loss, pain, disease, injury, harm or disorder. Without a fracture, there would be no need for mending. In that way, compassion and chaos form a polarity rather than an opposition: compassion arises because there is chaos, yet it points beyond it.

But I’d add a nuance. While compassion depends on suffering to manifest, it doesn’t depend on it to exist in principle. Even in a perfectly harmonious world - if such a thing could be - the relational openness that makes compassion possible would still be the same ontological structure, only without wounds to heal. What we call “chaos” is the circumstance that reveals compassion, not the ground that creates it.

The yin-yang metaphor is apt if we take it dynamically: each side generates and limits the other. Chaos exposes finitude; compassion answers it. The two are rhythmically entangled, but not equal in aim. Chaos describes what is; compassion describes what can restore relation. In that sense, compassion is not the mirror of chaos but its transformation - the movement through which Being reclaims coherence from fragmentation.

I love your questions. Thank you for asking them. These are exactly the questions that matter, and you raise them with admirable clarity.

You’re right that “compassion is the more natural relational core” cannot be demonstrated in the same way one demonstrates an empirical law. It isn’t an evidential claim about frequency or dominance, but a phenomenological and pragmatic one about coherence. When we look at the range of human possibilities - cruelty, indifference, care - which mode most fully realizes the structure of relation itself? Only compassion recognizes the other as subject rather than instrument. Violence treats the other as object, thereby erasing relation. That erasure may succeed in practice, but conceptually it’s parasitic: to negate relation, it must first presuppose it.

As for “better,” I don’t mean “better” by inherited theology but by existential intelligibility. Compassion is better not because a God commands it, but because it sustains the very conditions under which meaning, community, and dialogue can exist. I am not a Christian. Please see: https://www.evilbible.com and https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com if you want to know why I am not a Christian. The moment we decide that conquest is equally valid, we undermine the shared world that makes any valuation - including the valuation of conquest - possible. Compassion, in that sense, is self-validating: it preserves the possibility of coexistence that all discourse presupposes. I am a vegan because of my compassion for all sentient beings. To say “better” at all implies that flourishing, not annihilation, carries weight. If we reject that, then we don’t just abandon compassion; we forfeit the basis for any normative distinction whatsoever. The nihilist and the sadist can live consistently only if they cease to ask why anything matters.

So I see Compassionism not as an ungrounded belief but as the minimal metaphysical condition for an intelligible world: if meaning is possible, some form of care must already be operative. The Ouroboros image you mention captures this beautifully - yes, suffering and healing seem entwined, but the loop only closes through response, not indifference. Without compassion, the circle breaks into chaos.

That’s a crucial question, and I agree that the record of our species reveals both tendencies in abundance: tenderness and atrocity, rescue and massacre. The human condition seems bifurcated between empathy and domination.

My claim that the movement of concern discloses Being’s relational core isn’t an empirical generalization about what humans always do; it’s a phenomenological statement about what moral experience means when it occurs. The fact that many ignore or suppress this responsiveness doesn’t make it less primordial - it only shows that consciousness can close itself against its own depth. The possibility of cruelty presupposes the capacity for empathy, just as lying presupposes language. One can negate compassion only because one already stands within the sphere where the other’s vulnerability matters.

Culturally and biologically, both impulses - aggression and care - have evolutionary roots. But phenomenologically, only care reveals relation as relation: the recognition that the other’s being concerns mine. Violence objectifies and thereby conceals that relation; compassion exposes it. In that sense, cruelty is not another “core” but a rupture, a refusal of disclosure. It flattens the encounter back into ontology without ethics.

So when I say compassion is the more natural relational core, I don’t mean it is the statistically dominant behaviour, but that it reveals the more fundamental truth of coexistence. Empathy is what allows coexistence to appear as such; conquest denies that appearance. The ethical call is fragile, easily drowned by fear, ideology, or tribal conditioning - but its fragility is part of its meaning: Being’s openness is not enforced, only offered.

In this light, Compassionism isn’t the claim that humans are compassionate, but that compassion names the deepest possibility of what it means to be. The conqueror and the caregiver are both human, but only the latter manifests what humanity is capable of when it fully hears its own ontological vocation.

These are excellent questions - thank you for asking them.

Yes, I do intend the scope of the ethical call to include non-human animals, and indeed all sentient life. Levinas himself remained primarily anthropocentric - his face of the Other presupposes language and mutual address - but if we take the “face” not literally but as the phenomenon of vulnerability, then any being capable of suffering already presents that summons. The cry of a wounded animal, even without words, calls us to responsibility in precisely the sense Levinas describes: it demands a response before reflection or ontology. In that sense, ethics extends wherever suffering discloses itself. I am a vegan because I care about all sentient beings.

As for how ethics can “arise” in this way: I don’t mean that ethics emerges as a factual property within Being, but that in the event of encounter - when another’s vulnerability impinges on me - Being shows one of its fundamental modes: relational exposure. Ontology tells us what is; ethics tells us how being is with being. The claim that ethics is the “deepest disclosure” of Being is not empirical but phenomenological: it describes what experience reveals when we attend to its affective depth. We discover that to exist is already to be implicated in others’ existence. Ethics, then, is not an optional layer placed on top of ontology but the felt recognition that Being is never solitary substance but shared finitude.

To put it less abstractly: when we encounter pain - human or non-human - we do not first deduce an ethical rule; we are already moved. That movement of concern is the disclosure of Being’s relational core. Demonstration, in the logical sense, is replaced here by revelation through encounter: what Levinas calls the “saying” prior to the “said.” The ethical moment is not inferred from what-is but given with what-is; it’s how Being manifests its own openness.

You are most welcome.

Thank you very much for your excellent question. Levinas’s meontological move in Totality and Infinity is precisely what I had in mind when I spoke of the ethical and the ontological as “two inflections of the same opening.” For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy because it arises not within Being but before it - me ontos, beyond-Being. The face of the Other interrupts ontology’s self-enclosure; it calls me from a height I did not posit, demanding responsibility prior to any theoretical stance. In that sense, Levinas radicalizes Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness): I am not only thrown into Being but summoned beyond it.

Where I diverge slightly is in emphasis. Levinas’s meontology can sound like a complete rupture - an absolute outside to Being. I read it, rather, as the self-transcendence of Being itself, its capacity to exceed its own totalization through the ethical relation. In other words, the ethical call is not alien to ontology but its deepest disclosure: Being showing itself as vulnerable and relational. The “firstness” of ethics is not chronological or hierarchical but modal: the primordial tone of existence as care, exposure, and obligation.

If we hold these together - Heidegger’s ontological disclosure and Levinas’s ethical interruption - we glimpse a fuller picture: ontology opens the space for encounter; ethics keeps that space from closing into self-sufficiency. They are indeed two inflections of one openness - the event of meaning itself oscillating between comprehension and compassion.

That’s the sense in which I see Compassionism (my own evolving framework) as both ontological and ethical: Being is never a neutral substrate; it is always already an appeal to alleviate suffering. The “beyond-Being” that Levinas names as meontology is, for me, the pulse of compassion within Being - the refusal of indifference that makes the universe intelligible at all.

Thank you, Constance - your reply is characteristically rich and generous. I’ll try to clarify what I meant by “ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre,” and then engage the larger point about metaphysics, language, and sublation.

By that phrase, I didn’t mean to credit Hitchens with inventing phenomenology before Husserl, but to suggest that - without a phenomenological vocabulary - he was already doing something akin to ethical phenomenology: describing the pathic structure of moral experience as it shows itself. His critique of the “God-concept” exposes how the affective dynamics of guilt, obedience, and awe shape lived consciousness. In that sense, he was tracing the phenomenology of moral emotions, not their ontology. Of course, he stayed at the ontic level, as you rightly note - within a naturalistic frame - but even there he revealed how language and power constitute the moral field. I saw in that an unthematized phenomenological insight: the “givenness” of moral experience before metaphysics.

I completely agree that this doesn’t yet cross into Heidegger’s ontological project, where Being itself is what gives the horizon of moral and cognitive sense. But perhaps that’s where Hitchens’s critique is instructive by contrast: his limitation to the ontic makes visible the need for a deeper account of why such moral structures appear at all. In other words, his lack of ontology points us back toward ontology.

Your reflections on metaphysics as the inner life of physics resonate strongly with me. The modern impulse to banish metaphysics misunderstands that physics already presupposes a metaphysical grammar: measurement, causality, time, identity. What Hegel calls sublation - the overcoming that preserves - captures precisely the movement I see in philosophy today: a self-surpassing language that still carries its inheritance. The physicist who speaks of “fields,” “vacua,” or “information” is already enmeshed in a metaphoric web that opens onto Being, whether acknowledged or not. In that sense, I share your view that metaphysics isn’t something beyond the empirical but the intelligible depth of the empirical itself.

And yes, Derrida’s trace completes that thought: every act of meaning both posits and defers, revealing an openness that no closure can finally master. The very question, as you beautifully put it, is freedom - not the possession of answers, but the trembling of language at the edge of its own horizon. Philosophy lives in that interval where language interrogates itself.

So perhaps where we converge is here: the ethical and the ontological are not two regions but two inflections of the same opening. The cry of the suffering child and the concept of Being are both ways the real addresses itself to us. Hitchens hears the cry and answers in moral outrage; Heidegger hears the silence of Being and answers in thought. Both responses, in their different registers, attest to the same fact: existence calls, and we must respond - whether with compassion, with questioning, or with both.

Thank you, Constance - your response beautifully captures the Heideggerian intuition that any ethical relation presupposes a being who can be related. I agree that empathy or responsibility cannot arise in a vacuum; the one who responds must first be capable of self-holding - of sustaining their own openness to Being. In that sense, the haltung De Gennaro discusses is indeed prior in the analytic order, even if, as you note, not necessarily in the historical or evolutionary one.

Where I was pressing the “ought” as equiprimordial with Being, I didn’t mean that ethics could float free of ontology. Rather, I wanted to resist the tendency - especially in some readings of Heidegger - to treat the moral call as a secondary derivative of Dasein’s self-understanding. The cry of the wounded child doesn’t wait for us to complete an ontological analysis before it claims us. The affective disclosure of suffering and the ontological disclosure of being are simultaneous moments of one event - what Levinas might call the face of the Other breaking through ontology.

So perhaps the priority I meant was phenomenological, not logical: in lived experience, the ethical summons arrives first, even if conceptually we can only make sense of it against the backdrop of selfhood and worldhood. The “holding” of oneself in Being and the “being claimed” by another’s vulnerability may be two aspects of the same existential structure - the self as simultaneously sustaining and exposed.

Your point about the crucible of Dasein as the “only actuality there is” resonates deeply. Yet what strikes me is that this actuality - this singular locus of disclosure - is always already permeated by others. Even our most solitary “holding” is linguistically and affectively mediated. In that sense, the first cry of the artist or the infant is both self-affirming and world-summoning. It is a reaching outward that presupposes no prior metaphysics of self or society, only the raw openness of existence calling to itself through others.

Perhaps ethics, then, begins not after ontology but as its trembling edge - where Being feels its own finitude and vulnerability through us.

Thank you for your detailed reply. I think we’re largely aligned, though we diverge on a few interpretive nuances.

On factorization, I accept your refinement: decoherence doesn’t magically bifurcate the universal state into sealed compartments but rather entangles subsystems such that coherence between them becomes practically lost. When I said “continuously factorizes the total state,” I meant this relational entanglement structure - the effective tensor-product decomposition that yields dynamically autonomous components relative to the measurement context. So yes, the split is local and conditional, not global. I like your phrasing that “only the systems that have measured the decohered state become entangled with it.” That’s a good corrective to the loose Everettian imagery.

I share your relational preference over full-blown realism. My “ontologically generative” phrasing was intended in that same spirit: the ontology is not a collection of separate universes but a web of ever-evolving relational configurations. The structure of relations changes - new entanglement correlations come into being - even though the global amplitude distribution remains one evolving unity. So perhaps “structurally generative” would be the better expression.

Regarding “observer” versus “interaction,” I agree completely. I used “observer” phenomenologically, but “interaction” avoids the mentalistic overtones. I’m wary of language that suggests intent or consciousness as a special causal category; it risks re-smuggling the old metaphysical privilege that quantum theory works so hard to dissolve.

On free will, I think we converge on compatibilism but may use slightly different vocabularies. I take your point that “one’s own nature” could itself be construed as a second metaphysical causal chain, but I meant it more modestly: the organism’s integrated causal structure - its neural and psychological architecture - as distinct from an external intruder like the rabies virus. The point is not that one becomes “independent” of causality, but that causal efficacy remains internal to the system’s evaluative dynamics. That’s why the rabies example marks the boundary between responsibility and compulsion. Dualists, as you say, would complicate that further, perhaps imagining the pathogen interfering with both the physical and the mental “tracks,” but I see that as multiplying mysteries rather than explaining anything.

Your description of sleep paralysis is fascinating - it’s a vivid phenomenological example of partial causal decoupling: consciousness active, motor output suppressed. From a naturalistic angle, it actually illustrates how finely tuned the causal layers of agency are: when one channel is interrupted, agency becomes experiential but not performative. It’s a transient epiphenomenal pocket, not a metaphysical clue, but I can see why it feels uncanny.

As for your final point - that human choice doesn’t depend on branching - I fully agree. The experiential grammar of choice would be the same in any interpretation, whether Everettian, Bohmian, or GRW. My comparison between branching and agency was metaphorical: both involve local differentiation within a globally deterministic process. The analogy isn’t meant to make agency depend on branching, only to highlight the structural parallel between emergent autonomy in physics and in psychology.

In that sense, I see compatibilist freedom and relational quantum ontology as reflections of the same deeper pattern: causal closure at the global level, emergent quasi-autonomy at the local. In my GENE Causal Self Model, those quasi-autonomous patterns are constituted by the interaction of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - a biological analogue to decoherence’s relational structure. Both describe complex systems that remain causally determined yet exhibit self-organizing agency through internal feedback loops. Determinism and autonomy, far from being opposites, are two perspectives on the same relational process.

I totally agree.

Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed reply. I appreciate your clarifications - especially on terminology.

When I said the universal state vector differentiates, I didn’t mean that it “splits” or collapses in any literal sense. I agree that the universal wave function evolves unitarily. What I meant is that decoherence continuously factorizes the total state into dynamically autonomous subspaces. The evolution is singular, but its structure becomes increasingly partitioned as interference terms vanish. In that descriptive sense, decoherence is ontologically generative - it produces new relational structure within the universal state, even if not new “worlds” as discrete entities.

You’re right that Everett himself didn’t speak of sharply defined “branches,” and I share your caution about reifying them. Still, decoherence does create stable quasi-classical sectors whose internal histories no longer interfere. Calling them “branches” is shorthand for these dynamically independent histories. So when I said that “an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state,” I meant that every quantum fluctuation alters the total wave function’s structure, even if those alterations remain forever unamplified from our classical perspective.

I also agree that quantum mechanics is not observer-dependent in the Wigner sense - nothing special happens because a conscious agent looks. My use of “observer” was relational, not Cartesian: any subsystem that records or correlates information functions as an “observer” relative to another. Within that relational framework, phenomenological perspectives arise naturally from entanglement structure, not metaphysical privilege.

Regarding freedom and responsibility: yes, phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total evolution is deterministic, each branch still contains agents whose deliberative architectures causally mediate outcomes within that branch. That structure grounds a compatibilist sense of agency: one can be determined and yet meaningfully responsible insofar as choices flow from one’s own evaluative processes. Libertarian freedom, by contrast, would require causal independence from one’s own nature - an incoherent notion. In your rabies analogy, the external pathogen literally overrides the person’s cognitive structure, which is why we no longer ascribe responsibility. The contrast actually illustrates compatibilism rather than libertarianism.

Stepping back, the parallel between branching and agency seems telling: both involve emergent autonomy within an underlying deterministic totality. The global state’s evolution may be seamless, yet locally it yields distinct, causally closed structures - worlds in one case, deliberating agents in the other. In both, the differentiation is real enough to sustain the lived grammar of choice, even if metaphysical freedom never enters the picture.

In my own framework - the GENE Causal Self Model - I interpret such autonomy through the interplay of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences. Each agent’s decisions are determined by the evolving configuration of these factors, yet within that causal web, reflective self-organization still emerges. Much like decoherent branches of the wave function, selves are dynamically distinct yet law-governed substructures of a single evolving whole.

Thank you for such a rich and thoughtful elaboration. I deeply respect the metaphysical continuity you describe - from Husserl through Heidegger to Henry - and your insistence that all talk of “reality” already presupposes consciousness or Dasein as its horizon. I don’t reject that lineage; I simply ask a different kind of question within it.

Where you pursue the whatness of Being, I’m drawn to the ought that emerges within Being: the affective and ethical textures through which existence discloses itself. When a child is burned or a slave is whipped, what matters first is not that Being manifests itself in suffering, but that suffering calls us to respond. This “call” is not derivative of ontology; it is equiprimordial with it.

That’s why I invoked Hitchens - not as a metaphysician, but as an ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre. His critique may lack ontological precision, but it exposes the pathic structure of moral life: how conceptual fictions (like “God” or “sin”) can channel either empathy or cruelty. The moment consciousness awakens to that relation, philosophy is already in motion.

So when you ask, “What is ethics?”, I would answer: ethics is the self-manifestation of Being as concern for the Other. It is not an add-on to ontology, nor a sociological derivative, but the dimension in which Being feels its own vulnerability. Perhaps that’s where our projects intersect - your ontological monism and my existential compassionism are two ways of naming the same intimacy between consciousness and value.

Thank you for the thoughtful clarification. I think our main divergence lies in how we treat ontic status within the Everett framework.

You’re right that Everett dispenses with counterfactual definiteness: only the total wave function is “real,” while definite outcomes are branch-relative. However, if every decoherence event differentiates the universal state vector, then by definition, each “unmeasured” quantum fluctuation still contributes to the branching structure of the multiverse. The fact that we only observe a subset of classical branches doesn’t mean the rest lack existence; it only means they are decohered beyond causal contact with us.

So when I say “an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state,” I mean that decoherence is ontologically generative - the universe’s global wave function encodes every microscopic difference, even those never amplified to our classical level. From that global perspective, nothing “fails to happen”; it merely fails to be observable within our branch.

As for responsibility, I agree that phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total state-space evolves deterministically, subjective deliberation and outcome differentiation are still structurally real within each branch - enough to preserve the experiential grammar of choice, if not libertarian freedom.

I am right. You are wrong. Because I say so.

Infallable! — I like sushi

If infallibility is self-declared, then I, too, am infallible - and I say you’re wrong. Now what?

Thank you for the thoughtful engagement - I think we’re converging on several points while framing them differently.

On Claim A, I accept that Norton’s Dome demonstrates classical indeterminism under non-Lipschitz conditions, though it’s a purely mathematical curiosity. In any physically realizable system governed by continuous differentiable dynamics, each decoherence event still alters the global quantum state. Even if that alteration remains thermodynamically undetectable within a local Lyapunov horizon, it nevertheless yields a distinct universal configuration in principle. My claim concerns this ontological divergence, not its empirical detectability.

On Claim B, you’re right that the assertion depends on whether one accepts counterfactual definiteness. I was speaking from an Everett-style, decoherence-based ontology where every event contributes to a definite branch of the universal wave function. Under that framework, an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state of the universe. The difference need not be observable to be real.

For Claim C, I’d refine “always matters” as follows: every quantum perturbation modifies the total wave function, but only some of those perturbations are amplified within our causal region into new classical structures. Others disperse or remain dynamically isolated, but they still shape the global state. “Trapped” and “amplified” are perspectival distinctions within one continuous evolution.

On determinism and responsibility, I think we share the pragmatic view. Determinism doesn’t abolish agency; it merely redefines it as a complex causal process rather than an uncaused power. Responsibility survives as a social and ethical convention that regulates behaviour within the deterministic flow. To borrow my own GENE model language, deliberation and choice are emergent computations of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - not exemptions from causality but expressions of it.

So when I speak of “choice” or “agency,” I mean the real-time process of deliberation that precedes action, not a metaphysical ability to have done otherwise. The phenomenology of choice remains intact, even if the universe’s total state never could have evolved differently.

Your points about the historicity of thought and the phenomenological horizon are well taken. Yes, any talk of “God,” “the world,” or “the self” emerges from within language and culture, not from an Archimedean point outside them. But I think that is precisely why Hitchens’s critique retains philosophical force. His focus on moral consequences is not “idle talk”; it is an inquiry into how concepts shape lived reality.

You call God a fiction born of thrownness into finitude. Very well, but fictions that shape moral life still have measurable effects. Whether “God” is a phenomenological boundary-concept or an anthropomorphic myth, the question remains: What does belief in this fiction do to sentient beings? Does it cultivate compassion, or sanctify domination? That is not a superficial question; it is an existential one.

You say philosophy should proceed like a scientist suspending cultural assumptions. Yet even the phenomenological reduction cannot suspend the ethical field in which human beings suffer and act. “Value-in-being,” as you put it, is not discovered in neutral contemplation but in encounter - the face of the Other, to borrow from Levinas, not the mineral horizon of a geologist.

When Hitchens challenges doctrines that justify eternal punishment or servitude, he is performing a kind of moral reduction: bracketing divine authority to see what remains of goodness once the threats are removed. That is philosophy doing its most basic work - clarifying the conditions of value and responsibility.

So yes, we can follow Husserl into the indeterminacy of consciousness, or Heidegger into the openness of Being; but we must also follow the child burned at the stake, or the slave whipped in God’s name, into the concreteness of suffering. Otherwise, “pathos” becomes an aesthetic posture rather than an ethical response.

If the “greatness” woven into existence means anything, perhaps it is precisely this - that consciousness is capable of compassion even without metaphysical guarantees. That, too, is philosophy, and it is not nihilism.

I agree that philosophy must go deeper than empirical refutations or moral outrage - but Hitchens’s value lies precisely in the moral dimension that many technical philosophers neglect. He exposes how certain conceptions of God license cruelty and submission, and that critique operates at the level of moral phenomenology, not mere empiricism. When he asks “What kind of being would demand eternal praise under threat of hell?”, he isn’t just being cynical - he’s inviting us to examine the psychological and ethical structure of the “God-concept” itself.

You ask what is “natural” versus “supernatural.” I’d say that distinction loses meaning if “God” cannot be coherently defined or empirically differentiated from nature. Once the supernatural ceases to have observable consequences, we’re left only with human moral experience - which is precisely where Hitchens situates his inquiry: in compassion, honesty, and the freedom to question.

If “God” is a moral concept, then its worth must be judged by the moral outcomes it inspires. A concept that sanctifies fear, tribalism, or subservience fails on its own moral grounds. The greatness you mention may indeed be woven into the fabric of human existence - but perhaps what we call “God” is simply our evolving attempt to articulate that greatness in moral and existential terms. When the old metaphors harden into dogma, philosophy reopens the question.

So I’d say: philosophy doesn’t replace Hitchens’s critique - it completes it.

Thank you for sharing your observations. Given how self-contradictory the Bible is, I am not surprised that Christians can't agree about what is right and what is wrong.