In your own example, luck didn't replace justification as it did in Socrates's example, but merely put you in a position to justify your belief (by allowing you to be taught). That's not what philosophers are talking about when they talk about luck in epistemology. — jamalrob

As much as I respect the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and the academic philosophy establishment, I must say that what academic philosophers refer to Epistemic luck isn’t really luck at all. It’s just a lack of justification. This thread is about luck in general so if Epistemic luck isn’t a topic that is actually about luck then it seems like it wouldn’t be relevant to the discussion at hand. It’s worth noting that an unjustified true belief that is achieved though effort is just as incompatible with knowing as an unjustified true belief achieved through sheer luck. For example, suppose that a man wanted to find out if his wife is cheating on him and he decided to search through the trash cans for used condoms every day for a month. Eventually, he found a used condom and this made him believe that his wife was cheating on him. Turns out he was right about his wife cheating but that used condom actually belonged to his teenage son who was sneaking girls over his house. This is a Gattier case and yet I don’t think it’s fair to say that the man was right about his wife cheating by sheer luck. He did put a lot of effort in discovering the truth after all and he would have never discovered the truth without searching through trash cans.

But I think Hume’s point was far more general than you’re making it out to be. Taken in the context of Hume’s overall philosophy, it amounts to a sceptical position vis a vis moral realism of any kind, I think. I don’t recall that Hume devoted much or any attention to the basis for arriving at ‘ought’ decisions - as distinct from Kant, of course, who devoted considerable attention to just this question. — Wayfarer

Well, Hume was probably sort of a moral anti-realist but I don’t think the is/ought gap had anything to do with that. He was mostly skeptical of our ability to reason about emotionally sensitive topic where he thought that our passions would likely take the driver’s seat. For example, Hume probably thought that we can reason pretty well about an emotionally sterile philosophy questions like the question regarding whether a hot dog is a type of sandwich. Very few people care who is right about this topic and so we don’t have to worry to much about emotional bias dominating people’s opinion on this topic. On the other hand, questions related to morality, politics, and the philosophy of religion are questions that Hume thinks are answered by our emotional inclinations rather than with our reasoning. So, he would likely think that almost no one bases their opinion on a topic like abortion on reason but they just believe what they want to believe.

Though, I don’t think even this argument implies that moral realism is false as it is possible that almost all people are incapable of reasoning about morality beyond defending a viewpoint they initially accepted because it emotionally touched them and yet this wouldn’t necessarily logically entail that there aren’t correct answers to moral questions. To use an analogy, 99% of the time people’s views on whether or not there is an afterlife are the views that they also happen to wish to be true but it seems quite obvious that there either is an afterlife or there isn’t an afterlife. It seems like you can’t really be a relativist about questions concerning the existence of the afterlife. It may be argued that just as we don’t know if there is an afterlife and we predicate our opinion on the topic from our emotional inclinations, we may also not be able to deduce in an unbiased manner the correct moral opinions to hold but we can reasonably believe that some moral opinions must be correct.

It’s also possible that Hume did think that the is/ought gap implied moral anti-realism but he might simply misunderstand the implications of his own arguments. Though, it’s also worth noting that meta-ethical questions weren’t really a thing in Hume’s day and so it might be kinda strange to assume he even thought about meta-ethics. He probably just had a more down to Earth approach to ethics unlike a philosopher like Kant who thought it was better to lay forward some grandiose foundation to morality.

I think many people misinterpret what Hume was trying to say with the is/ought gap that he laid out. Hume was merely pointing out that you can’t argue for an ought claim with only premises that contain is claims. Suppose, that I wanted to argue that you ought not rape people. Here is a common informal kind of argument that people use that is logically invalid:

P1: Rape causes suffering
C: Therefore, you ought not to rape people

The argument above doesn’t follow the rules of formal logic. This is because the single premise in the argument doesn’t entail the conclusion. Rather, the argument would have to go like this:

P1: If rape causes suffering then you ought not rape.
P2: Rape causes suffering.
C: Therefore, you ought not rape.

This argument is a valid argument because the truthfulness of premises would necessarily entail that the
conclusion is true. The point that Hume was trying to make is that you can’t argue for an “ought” claim without having a premise with the word “ought” in it. P1 of the argument is needed to make this argument against rape valid. It also happens to be the more controversial premise of the argument and these sorts of premises are the center of most ethical discussions. Contrary to popular beliefs, the is/ought gap doesn’t imply that morality is arbitrary or that moral realism is false. It’s just pointing out a mistake that many people make when they make informal arguments for some ought claim. Really, the logical principle behind the is/ought gap applies to every kind of specific claim. For example, I can’t even argue for a simple claim like the claim that snow is white without having at least one premise that has the conclusion of the argument nested inside of it. Here’s an invalid argument for that claim:

P1: snow appears white.
C: Therefore, snow is white

Here’s a valid argument for this claim that is also more plausible:

P1: If snow appears to be white, then it most likely is white.
P2: Snow appears to be white.
C: Therefore, snow most likely is white.

Notice how “snow most likely is white” is the conclusion of the argument and it is also nested inside P1 after the word “then” and notice how that’s necessarily to make the premises entail the conclusion. That’s the only kind of thing that Hume really expressed with his is/ought gap(except he just limited this principle specifically to ought claims for some reason). It’s not really as sexy of a gap as most people make it out to be. I honestly don’t understand why philosophers who understand the true limitations of Hume’s gap are so interested in this gap. I think it’s just a trend of philosophers fanboying over everything that Hume says. Some people have argued that this modest observation about logic is important to study for some reason but it just seems like something we always understood since the days of Aristotle and the origins of the basic rules of formal logic.

Umm.... Gattier problems do not seem to suggest that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. For example, I believe that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and I believe this only because I was lucky enough to be taught that in school. If Jupiter really is the biggest planet in our solar system then I had known that by sheer luck. Yet, this really isn’t a Gattier case so you can know something by sheer luck it seems and it wouldn’t create a Gattier problem of any sort.

I'm saying Existence is necessarily at least as real as you and me. So if Existence is necessarily Omnipresent (which It is because it exists everywhere, including in dreams), then something Omnipresent is necessarily at least as real as you and me. — Philosopher19

Well, existence is an abstract concept so I don’t understand how it could exist like us if we are concrete entities. If existence doesn’t exist in a spatiotemporal sense then I don’t see how it even makes sense to even refer to it as being omnipresent.

Our universe is just a part of Existence. Wouldn't it be better if the whole of Existence was perfect rather than just part of it. If only a part of Existence is perfect whilst the rest of it is imperfect, then Existence is not perfect because it can be/exist better. — Philosopher19

How can the universe be part of existence if existence doesn’t exist in space and time? I can understand that we can say that the universe has a relationship with the abstract concept of existence because it exists and it contains things that exist. But, I don’t see how a concrete entity like the universe can be part of an abstract concept like existence. Are you saying that existence is some kind of a concrete entity?

Perfection is perfectly satisfied when unrepentant evil suffers. If this was not the case, then there would be nothing evil about being evil. If I committed evil and Existence was such that I did not suffer a loss of goodness as a result of this (so I did not get a headache, or go to prison, or Hell...depending on how extreme my evil was), then there was nothing evil about me being evil. If evil people wen to heaven and good people went to hell, then that's case of it literally being evil to be good and being good to be evil. That is semantically inconsistent with the semantic of Perfection, Existence, good, and evil. — Philosopher19

I think we can reasonably define being evil as simply harming others for no moral acceptable reason. We can also propose an alternative definition for evil as behaving in such a way as to elicit moral disgust. These definitions of evil do not imply that evil people deserve to be punished and thus I do not understand why evil people going unpunished necessitates imperfection in any way. On another note, there are plenty of consequentialist philosophers who believe that punishing evil people is only justified if it creates a deterrent against evil or if it prevents vigilante justice from the victims of an evil person’s actions. Additionally, many free will skeptics believe that some people are evil and yet we are not justified for punishing them because they didn’t choose to be evil. I don’t see why those alternative viewpoints are inferior to your viewpoint on this topic to be honest.

It's only evil/bad for x to be evil/bad because it leads him to a loss of goodness consequentially (despite it not immediately seeming that way). If it did not lead to this, then one cannot say that it's evil/bad for x to be evil/bad. It's only bad/evil for x to be bad/evil when it's actually bad for him to be this way (as in it's against his best interest). — Philosopher19

So, if someone can completely get away with rape then rape wouldn’t be evil in any way whatsoever? Doesn’t this just imply that we only have reason to act in our ultimate self-interest and wouldn’t this defeat the whole purpose of morality to begin with?

5) Perfection = that which no greater than can be conceived of. There is nothing better than a perfect existence. If existence is imperfect, then perfection (a perfect existence) is hypothetically impossible. — Philosopher19

Are you saying that there has to be an actual perfect existence that has existed or will exist at some point in time or does there only have to be a perfect existence that could theoretically exist but one that will never actually exist? In addition, wouldn’t a perfect universe be better than a perfect existence? I’m not understanding why you think that there’s nothing better than a perfect existence.

Existence is perfect is the same as saying God exists. This is because a perfect existence logically entails that everyone gets what they truly deserve (it would be imperfect otherwise). — Philosopher19

I don’t think that a perfect existence logically entails that everyone gets what they deserve because I don’t think anybody deserves anything or fails to deserve anything. When we say that someone deserves something, I think we are simply predicating this assertion on our feelings. I don’t see how there is any intellectual content to the claim that someone deserves something else. For example, if someone says that some Billy Bob deserves to be treated better by society then I think that’s about as intellectually meaningless as saying that ice cream deserves to be eaten. Given this, I think a better account of a perfect existence is that it is one that contains zero suffering and an infinite amount of pleasure. That hypothetical perfect existence could exist by some other force that is not God like karma or some crazy black hole in the universe that will make anyone that it sucks in have that perfect existence. Speaking of which, even if you’re not convinced by my initial claim that deserved-ness is predicated purely on emotion, why couldn’t there be a magical black hole that upon sucking one particular person inside gives that person a perfect existence where they get what they deserve? Why does it have to be a god specifically?

A platitude in epistemology is that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. — Don Wade

I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sort of view being articulated before. On the top of my head, I think I can come up with many examples of someone coming to believe the truth by sheer luck. For example, I believe that Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system only because I was lucky enough to be taught that in school. If Jupiter really is the biggest planet in our solar system then it seems like I knew that and I knew that by sheer luck. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to see how anyone can know anything at all because there doesn’t seem to be any beliefs that one can acquire through effort.

If two people act in the same way but the consequences of one of their actions are worse due to luck, should we morally assess them in the same way? — Don Wade

I don’t think it’s a good idea to assess 2 actions with different consequences in the exact same way. This is because it’s really hard to discern if a particular consequence only comes about from good or bad luck. For example, suppose you have 2 drunk drivers and one managed to drive home without incident while the other one kills someone. We can never truly know if their acts of drunk driving were actually the same in terms of the risk that they had of killing someone. This is because there is a variety of factors that effect that sort of thing besides the fact that they were drunk like the competence of the driver for example. If the first drunk driver is the better driver and he has a habit of driving slower and more carefully and he has a better alcohol tolerance then the fact that he drove home without incident isn’t merely a matter of luck. I would go as far as to say his drunk driving wasn’t as reckless and irresponsible as that of the less competent and less alcohol tolerant driver. So, it’s just hard to know if it’s really just luck or if one person had more reason to not drink and drive.

Is the inequality of a person unjust when it is caused by bad luck? — Don Wade

I think that the concepts of justness and unjustness are predicated on our emotions rather than anything that is intellectual in nature. It seems to me like asking a question about whether or not something is just or unjust is about as intellectually trivial as asking a question about whether or not a particular food is tasty or not. It just seems like these sorts of things are as subjective as anything could possibly be and I find a hard time treating this as an intellectual topic that a philosopher could address properly. I suppose you could argue that it’s useful for a society to call some things just and unjust. Regarding that consideration, you could just do a psychological study about whether or not people find something just or unjust and just base legal disputes regarding justness on that(assuming that there aren’t additional consequentialist considerations worth considering in a given legal dispute as well.)

Parents don't 'create you' like they directly create a tool with a purpose. They only make it possible by having sex. For the rest they don't have any agency over how you will turn out, that is largely predefined by evolution. — ChatteringMonkey

I think parents could create you like a tool with a purpose if they could alter your genes with technology which will likely be a real possibility in the future.

Furthermore the purpose they have in mind wouldn't be objective to begin with, it's just an idea they have. — ChatteringMonkey

Wouldn’t the purpose that a hypothetical God would have for creating the universe also just be an idea that he has?

God not only creates us, but the whole universe with a purpose. — ChatteringMonkey

I don’t think many theists care that God creates the whole universe for a purpose. For example, suppose that the universe wasn’t created by God but God only created the human race for a purpose. Wouldn’t most theists derive just as much meaning from that? Why couldn’t this also be used to ground morality? Why does it have to be the whole universe that must be created for a purpose?

That's what would make things objective, the fact that the outside world is not inherently meaningless, but part of the grand plan. — ChatteringMonkey

What exactly counts as “the outside world” though? Couldn’t the phrase “the outside world” refer to just the planet Earth or the galaxy or maybe even something larger than the universe like a multiverse. It’s not clear to me why the demarcation of moral significance should be at the level of the universe and not some other level of analysis.

God not only creates us, but the whole universe with a purpose. That's what would make things objective, the fact that the outside world is not inherently meaningless, but part of the grand plan. Being moral is not only a matter of upholding a convention we created, without the rest of the universe caring if we are moral or not, God is watching you and there will be a judgment day and you will go to hell or heaven... it presumably has material consequences outside of man-made ways we invent to enforce morality. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes but what objective normative reason do I have to care about God’s judgement day and to care about going to Heaven or Hell? Doesn’t this require me to have objective normative reasons to increase the amount of pleasure that I experience and reduce the amount of suffering that I experience? If so, do I really need God to exist to have those kinds of objective normative reasons? If I don’t need God to exist to have objective reasons to avoid eternal torment then wouldn’t this imply that some limited form of ethical egoism could be objectively true without there being God that created the universe with a purpose? In addition, I must add that the punishments that are involved in Hell wouldn’t seem to give me any selfless reason to obey God’s morality. So, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to reject ethical egoism if God exists.

People can and do have different ideas about what you ought to do. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes and people have different ideas regarding just about everything. Scientists studying observable phenomena also sometimes can’t settle their disagreements. In addition, there are plenty of ought claims that have pretty much never been disputed. For example, almost no one in history has disputed the claim that one ought to cause themselves to experience suffering for no apparent reason. In contrast, scientists often strongly disagree on topics involving what causes certain illnesses or whether or not aliens exist and so on.

Oughtness is not something that can directly be observed in the world, which is what description means it seems to me. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, the human mind cannot be directly observed in the world either but aren’t claims about human psychology also descriptive?

And I'd say we don't think water freezes because of intergalactic wizards, not because it wouldn't make sense for them to have those motivations, but because we have never seen intergalactic wizards and so have no reason to assume they exist. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes but those intergalactic wizards in my theory are supposed to be good at hiding from humans or else those humans might find out about how they have been freezing water all this time. In addition, you have stated earlier that whether or not we believe in God is merely a matter of faith. If I have never seen God then wouldn’t I have as much reason to reject his existence as I would the existence of intergalactic wizards whose existence is also inaccessible to our empirical methods?

For you to sensibly infer something from the thought experiment, you already have to assume the wizards are a certain kind of being with certain kinds of motivations... you bring your knowledge of sentient beings motivations to the thought experiment. We don't know what kind of beings they are or what motivations they would have, unless we assume it and bring the knowledge we have of sentient beings to it. And I'd say we don't think water freezes because of intergalactic wizards, not because it wouldn't make sense for them to have those motivations, but because we have never seen intergalactic wizards and so have no reason to assume they exist. — ChatteringMonkey

Well yes, there’s some assumptions made in my theory that I cannot defend but this is true of all theories and beliefs that one can hold. Even a very simple belief like the belief that your bed exists requires you to make some assumptions. It requires you to assume that your senses can give you accurate information about the existence of everyday objects. You have to assume that your perception of your bed tells you something about it’s objective existence and that you are not just hallucinating when you think that you see and feel your bed. So, I don’t see how we can escape having assumptions in our theories.

Even if financial investments are uncertain, we do have some data and so there is something we can use to begin sensibly assigning probabilities. — ChatteringMonkey

But, couldn’t you also say that we have data in the form of our personal experiences of pleasure and suffering that inform us about normative matters and wouldn’t this allow us to assign probabilities to at least some normative claims? How exactly should we define data here?

Subjective or objective is a matter of perspective. We would call the same thing subjective from a first person perspective and objective from a third person perspective. It's a bit of a flawed distinction. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, but couldn’t we say that there are objective facts about subjective experiences such that they can at least occasionally inform us regarding what is the objectively correct course of action to take? For example, suppose that you have to escape your home country and you either have to move to Denmark or to North Korea. Let’s say that you reasonably believe that you would have more pleasure and less suffering if you chose to live in Denmark then if you lived in North Korea and you agree with me that those are the only welfare considerations that you need to take into account. Given this, wouldn’t deciding to live in Denmark be the objectively correct decision to make here given your circumstances?

But again, what we are really after is whether there is one and the same morality for everybody, like there is that wall for everybody. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, I don’t think very many people care about normative reasons in general being universal for everybody. For example, I’m perfectly cool with the idea that it might be more rational for me to make certain decisions in life that might be irrational for you to make. For example, I think it would be pretty rational for me to refuse chemotherapy treatment if I get cancer under almost any circumstance. This is because I’ve received data from my everyday experiences of life that behoove me to make a hypothesis that the suffering involved in chemotherapy will feel so objectively bad that I’m better off depriving myself of future pleasure and allowing myself to die. You might be receiving different data from your everyday experiences and you might have an equally reasonable hypothesis that the suffering caused by chemotherapy will be worth it for you. Both of us could have chosen the objectively correct decision option given our circumstances even if we chose the opposite decision options. What I think matters in this discussion regarding realism about ought claims is that there are sometimes objectively right and wrong decisions that we can make in our life. It doesn’t really have to be the same for everyone. I agree with you that people typically care about “morality” being somewhat universal and I also agree with you that moral realism is false. But, you also said that you think that normative realism is false and this is where I disagree with you.

I don't agree suffering directly and unambiguously flows from hedonic reactions or pain, there definitely seem to be a mental and belief components to it. Pain and suffering are not the same, nor directly reducible to/derivable from each other it seems to me. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, I agree with you about the difference between pain and suffering. There is indeed a mental component to suffering but I don’t see how this implies that my understanding that suffering is an unambiguously and undeniably bad experience is flawed in any way. If you are mentally provoked to experience a feeling that just obviously feels bad to you, wouldn’t it make sense to call that feeling unambiguously and undeniably bad? Wouldn’t it also just makes sense to say that this feeling is bad objectively or bad in some important or “real” manner?

That is also why we don't particularly care about mild pain from sports or think that kind of damage to muscles is bad. In fact, it is precisely because your muscles get damaged that they get stronger. If we were to say that sport is good overall, but that particular part is objectively bad, we would want to avoid that particular part because it is bad... but we can't because it is that supposedly objectively bad part that makes it good. — ChatteringMonkey

Ok, I was wrong to assume that the pain in sports would always cause you to suffer. You could make the case that sports do not always have a bad aspect to them as they don’t always cause you to suffer even if they cause pain. Though, I don’t think that the personal suffering that I get from exercising is matter of me having a negative opinion about the pain of exercising. Rather, I think that the stimuli involved in exercising provokes me to suffer even if it doesn’t always make others suffer. It might even be possible to condition my mind in a such a way that I no longer suffer while exercising and this might even change the objective truth status of the claim that it would be good for me exercise. I don’t think that normative realism implies that the rationality of various decision options cannot change with changing circumstances surrounding the provocation of suffering by a particular stimuli. You can also have objective normative reasons perhaps to condition yourself towards having certain reactions towards stimuli as well. For example, I could have objectively normative reasons to try to train my mind to not react negatively to exercise.

God having created the universe with a purpose is the reason we would have moral realism in the first place. Wouldn't Gods idea just be what is objectively correct then? — ChatteringMonkey

As I have stated earlier, I’m not sure why a universe created with a purpose could change the truth status of something abstract like the truth status of moral realism. The way I see it is if creating something really big like the universe with a purpose can make moral realism true then why couldn’t creating something small with a purpose like another human being wouldn’t make moral realism true at all. Even if creating a human being isn’t as grandiose, you would think that it could make moral realism true if creating the universe with a purpose would, only that morality just wouldn’t matter as much as it would if God created the universe with a purpose. Though, I tend to think that a parent creating a child with a purpose creates zero meaning and it doesn’t make moral realism true at all. If a parent creating a child with a purpose creates zero meaning, then God creating the universe with a purpose would also give us zero meaning. This is because God creating the universe is just a much larger scale version of a parent creating a child. I don’t think it matters how much larger the scale of these sorts of acts are. Mathematically speaking, a larger number multiplied by zero is still zero. So, it’s not clear to me how you could create meaning and make moral realism true with any amount of power.

then? To what other objective standard would we be evaluating Gods idea of morality then? — ChatteringMonkey

Well, if moral realism is false then we couldn’t evaluate God’s morality objectively. It’s possible that a smart God would recognize that his morality is only subjective but he may still care about it as it may just be something he likes to dictate for fun.

I don't quite understand how it can make sense to say that normative statements are another type of descriptive statements, considering that distinction presumably was made precisely to separate those different kinds of statements. Wouldn't that then just collapse the whole distinction, and we'd left with just 'statements'... if normative statements are another type of descriptive statements then there would be no need for the distinction, right? I mean, sure, I'm open to the idea that there is some fundamental problem with the distinction from the start, but I'm not sure where that would lead us. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, my whole point is that the descriptive/normative distinction just seems arbitrary. The so-called “descriptive statements” in that distinction just refer to statements that describe everything besides things related to value and oughtness. Why should you only single out descriptions regarding value and oughtness from the definition of a descriptive statement? That would be like if I decided to make a distinction between descriptive statements and psychological statements where descriptive statements describe everything except things related to the human mind and psychological statements describe the human mind. I don’t understand how a claim can be non-descriptive. All claims seem to be describing something. I think it would make more sense to have sub-categories of descriptive claims rather than trying to claim that some claims are not descriptive.

Yeah I think all those efforts are misguided, my maybe too simple take on it is that concerning God you either have faith or you don't.... because it's outside of the realm of empirical verification. And I think empirical verification is the only way to knowledge. Logic on its own cannot yield new knowledge, you need some data to test your theories to. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, it seems to me like the implication of your viewpoint here is that knowledge is impossible. This is because everything is outside the realm of empirical verification. Even if you test your theories, you cannot verify that those theories are true. For example, suppose that I have a theory that water will freeze at -20 degrees Celsius. I test this theory by putting water at -20 degrees Celsius and I notice that it appears to have frozen. By doing this experiment, I have only provided additional evidence to my theory that water will freeze at -20 degrees Celsius. I haven’t verified that my theory is true. This is because there are plenty of alternative explanations for why the water appeared to have been frozen after I put it under -20 degrees Celsius temperature. For example, there could be a secret intergalactic society of wizards that are actually the ones responsible for freezing all the water in the universe that will be seen by humans once it reaches 0 degrees Celsius. In reality, water stored in much colder temperatures like -20 degrees Celsius will still remain a liquid without the interference of this wizard society. Sometimes, the wizards will decide to keep some water stored at 20 degrees Celsius unfrozen if they know that it won’t be seen by humans for sure.

You can never empirically verify that this alternative theory about the wizards that I have proposed is false and thus you can never empirically verify that water freezes at -20 degrees Celsius. If you reject the wizard theory because you believe that the wizard theory is just ridiculous, then you aren’t using empirical evidence to determine that the wizard theory is wrong. Rather, you are simply relying on your intuition. You might make some interesting non-empirical arguments against the wizard theory though. You might argue that it would strange for someone to have a motivation to elicit a false belief onto humans about the freezing of water. Why would the wizards want to do such a thing exactly? It seems like it’s more likely that water just freezes on its own because of that. The argument above is not an empirical argument though but it doesn’t strike me that this argument should just be dismissed for being non-empirical.

Take the fine tuning argument for instance. We have no access to another set of universes to compare our universe to, and so we just don't know what a typical universe would look like or what the likelihood of certain parameters being a certain value would be. It all seems purely speculative if you lack any data. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, but some forms of speculation are better than others. For example, all financial investment is predicated on speculation. Nonetheless, some people are better investors than others because they are better at speculating about the future. Of course, it’s hard to know for sure which forms of speculation happen to be best but we can make educated guesses about that.

Even the most apparently evident and basic principles, like say "harm to myself is bad", already implies some value judgement. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, I wouldn’t say that “harm to myself is bad” is the most evident normative principle. Rather, I would say that the most evident normative claim is the claim about the existence of hedonic reactions. These hedonic reactions are typically provoked by stimuli from the outside world and they feel unambiguously and undeniably good or bad. Hedonic reactions that feel unambiguously and undeniably good are what we usually call pleasure while hedonic reactions that are the opposite of that are what we usually call suffering. If suffering can be said to exist objectively then reactions to stimuli from the outside world that feel unambiguously and undeniably bad can be said exist objectively. Otherwise, it’s not clear what we are talking about when we speak of suffering. How else would you define suffering? It’s seems to me that the existence of suffering itself implies the existence of objective value judgements about the way that you might be feeling at times. If you are suffering then you are compelled to make a value judgement that the stimuli that caused the suffering contains a bad aspect to it. Though, this doesn’t mean that the stimuli is bad overall as that stimuli may cause pleasure in the future or the prevention or alleviation of future suffering. This is why you can think that playing sports is usually good overall. Nonetheless, if playing a sport cause some suffering then it’s pretty intuitive to think that the sport in question has some bad aspect to it as well. As an analogy, you can think about a dress that is mostly green but contains a red outline as well. We would normally just say that this is a green dress because that’s the primary color of the dress but technically the dress also has some red in it. Similarly, we would normally say that playing sports is good because we think it’s mostly good but it does have some objectively bad aspects to it nonetheless.

God is different in that he, having attributes like ominipotence and omniscience, has a lot more agency over his creation... and probably more important, he is on an entirely different level compared to human beings. It's easier to accept something from a being infinitely more powerful than you than from a being that is equally flawed as you. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, I don’t think that God’s power would be relevant here as being powerful has nothing to do with holding the objectively correct moral opinions. I also don’t think that omniscience is possible as I don’t see how God could know for sure that he really knows everything or what it would actually mean for God to know that he knows everything for sure. Nonetheless, God can be pretty smart and knowledgeable. The fact that God may be much smarter than us does seem to matter as that would make it more likely that he holds the correct moral opinions. Though, he wouldn’t really be responsible for making moral realism true through his power then. Rather, he would just happen to have a very well-educated belief that moral realism is true and moral realism would actually be grounded in something abstract. One might think that God could use his omnipotence to make moral realism true but I think that would be as absurd as God being able to create a stone so big that he cannot lift it. Presumably, God’s omnipotence is still bound by logic and he cannot do what is logically impossible. Given that moral realism is an abstract theory, it’s not clear how having more power could alter its truth status. It seems to me that moral realism is either necessarily true or necessarily false and it cannot be contingent on the existence of God just like a simple mathematical claim like “2+2=5” cannot have its truth status altered with omnipotence.

The idea that harming people is bad is not an understanding or something we 'discover', but a valuation is the problem. There is no basis for the ought in the descriptive. — ChatteringMonkey

Do we really need to discover something for it to be a kind of understanding? It seems like we have plenty of things that we understand that no one has discovered per se. For example, I can have an understanding of various philosophical theories and philosophical movements even if these things were constructed rather than discovered. I can also have an understanding of characteristics and motives of fictional characters. I can also have an understanding of how to read sheet music and so on.

Also, why not think that ought statements are just another type of descriptive statements? Are they not describing something like the nature of oughtness? If it just seems weird to think that harming people is bad can be descriptive then it’s worth pointing out that there are a lot of weird types of descriptive statements that do not seem to predicated on anything obviously concrete. For example, in music theory, you will likely be taught that the key of C Major doesn’t have any sharp or flat notes. This seems to be a descriptive statement but it’s obviously predicated on a purely abstract understanding. If that statement about music theory can be descriptive then it’s not clear why normative statements can’t just be considered as another type of a descriptive statement.

And people do disagree about this, not necessarily that harming people is bad by itself, but more whether that should be the only criterium for morality.... I don't see how you could objectively settle such a disagreement. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes and religious people also disagree about what God thinks is morally right and wrong as well. 2 Christians might disagree about whether or not the Christian God condemns suicide or abortion. 2 Muslims might disagree about whether or not the Muslim God condemns women driving or walking the streets without their husbands and so on. Unless God could come from the sky and settle all the moral disagreements among religious people, it seems like they have the same problem when it comes to settling moral disagreements in any meaningful way.

The epistemic difference is that God is per definition outside of the universe and so unprovable and unverifiable. There is nothing that can even in principle shed light on it, so it's a matter of believing in him or not... faith. For other things we typically would expect some kind of evidence because they are within the empirical realm. — ChatteringMonkey

If there’s nothing that can shed light about the existence of God then why are there so many arguments made by theists in favor of God’s existence like The Kalam Cosmological Argument and The Fine Tuning argument? Those arguments seem to provide evidence for God’s existence even if they don’t prove it outright. I would still call that shedding a light on the issue of God’s existence. It seems to me like a lot of theists believe in God because they think it’s the most plausible worldview. At least that would be the most charitable way of thinking about theism. I also have come up with some arguments against the existence of a God that is eternal, omnipresent, and omniscient as I think those aforementioned features seem to be logically impossible.

And you should care because God is awesome and powerful, and you go to hell suffering for all eternity if you don't.. — ChatteringMonkey

Regarding the issue of hell, that would only give me prudential reasons to obey God but it wouldn’t entail that moral realism is true because God exists. I do think that I have normative reasons to improve my own welfare but I wouldn’t go as far as calling myself a moral realist because I’m not convinced that I have reason to avoid harming others if there’s no conceivable way that harming others would make me worse off. I don’t think I would consider my ethical egoism as a moral theory per se. I think only prudential normative reasons seems to exist objectively. Though, realistically I do think that being a kind person and having a good moral reputation is beneficial to you like 99% of the time.

Because theism allows for a purposeful being having created the universe. And if you have that, you have meaning from the start, fused into the descriptive, because a purposeful being presumably creates something with a purpose. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, let me ask you another question. Why does the whole universe have to be created for a particular purpose in order for us to have meaning from the start? After all, if one’s biological parents have created them for a particular purpose such as the purpose of making the aforementioned parents happier, then why wouldn’t this kind of purpose give the same sort of meaning as the meaning that would be granted by a purpose that started from the beginning of the universe? How is a meaning-granting purpose that occurs on a cosmological level more important than a purpose that might occur at a more local level like the level of the purpose that your parents had for creating you? Of course, just as one might reasonably reject the purpose that one’s parents had for creating them, couldn’t one reasonably reject the purpose that a divine entity had for them? Does a belief in a divine entity actually strongly imply that you should just go along with any purpose that they might have for you regardless of how arbitrary that purpose might seem to be?

An objective, a 'true' morality can directly flow from what 'is'. And that is the important part for moral realism, not the label or idea, but the fact that it can be derived from the descriptive, that it can be true (and the same for everybody). — ChatteringMonkey

Couldn’t you have descriptive statements about abstract concepts as well though. For example, I think one could reasonably argue that “it is” the case that suffering is harms people and “it is” the case that we have moral reasons to avoid causing harm to people unless it would prevent more harm or provide enough benefit to justify the harm. It’s still not clear to me why morality has to be grounded in something that is concrete when it seems like the abstract can be just as factual and just as descriptive and “real” as concrete phenomena.

The problem for the atheist moral realist is that we came to be by non-teleological processes, physical mechanical processes and evolution. — ChatteringMonkey

On a macro level, that may be the case but your parents might have had very clear teleological reasons for deciding to conceive you nonetheless. For example, they might have wanted to conceive you in order to have an heir to an antique shop that they worked hard to establish. Nonetheless, the fact that one might have been conceived for the purpose of becoming a future antique shop owner does not imply that one has any reason to actually take over one’s family’s antique business once they pass away much less have a moral obligation to do so. So, why does one have more moral reason to follow a purpose given to them by a divine entity than a purpose given to them by their biological parents if your biological parents are also responsible for your creation and they also may have teleological reasons for creating you.

If no meaning can be found in the universe itself, we are the ones that bring it into the world, that create it. — ChatteringMonkey

That seems to be the key assumption made by most existentialist philosophers and I tend to disagree with that assumption. One could also believe that meaning is derived from a certain kind of abstract understanding like the understanding that suffering harms people and the understanding that harming people is bad. One could also believe that meaning is derived from the intentions that their parents had for conceiving them. This view is pretty unpopular in Western cultures but it has a decent acceptance in Asian Neo-Confucian cultures like China, Japan, and Korea. Ancestor worship is still a pretty big thing in many cultures and many people say that they derive meaning from that as well even though their ancestor worship does not require them to believe that their ancestors were actually supernatural in any way or were responsible for creating the universe.

Grounding it in some abstract concept just pushes the problem one step further, there's no way of verifying or proving whether we should accept that abstract principle as a basis for morality. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, it’s impossible to verify and prove anything even well established scientific theories cannot be proven. It’s also impossible to prove that we can ground morality in a god or a spiritual force(even if such entities exist.). I can always just question why I should care what some god thinks or why I should care about what purpose the universe has or why I should regard the purpose that the universe has for my species as more important than the purpose I have created for myself. So, I don’t understand how this shows that morality predicated on abstract principles is less plausible.

Well, maybe I was too quick to limit this discussion to just the argument that I had originally intended to discuss. Let me ask you some questions about your views on this topic....

It can be reasonably argued that religion's essence lies in material foundation from whence it springs, which is the moral dimension of existence. It is questions like, why are we born to suffer and die? and, what is the nature of the ethical good and bad? as opposed to contingent good and bad, as in, "My what a good couch" where in the goodness can be discussed, issues from context. — Constance

Are you implying that one cannot talk about questions like the question of why are we born to suffer and die if we don’t hold theistic views? That’s my best guess as to what this passage that you wrote would be implying so I’d like to know if I’m understanding your point correctly here.

Ethical good and bad (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. He is right on this) turns to metaethical good and bad: the badness and goodness that issues directly from the pains and joys of Being. — Constance

You seem to be implying that morality stems from pleasure and pain. Doesn’t this assume a hedonic view of morality? Should we just exclude talking about non-hedonic foundations for morality?

This latter, W says, cannot be discussed, metavalue cannot be discussed, for the rub lies in the nature of language and logic's delimitations. But this is the source of a defensible moral realism and it is, as well, the authentic basis of religion. — Constance

What are you referring to when you speak of metavalue? Are you talking about the debate surrounding value realism and value anti-realism? It’s seems like plenty of philosophers have discussed that sort of metavalue in the numerous philosophy journals that I have read on this topic. I don’t see how that requires theism or how that is even remotely related to theism

Or the other way around, depending on which of the premises moves you most. Those who reject moral realism, especially former theists, sometimes associate it with theism, thereby acknowledging P1. — SophistiCat

Well, the anti-realist version of this argument seems much more sturdy to me. It goes something like this:

P1: Moral realism is false if theism is false.

P2: Theism is false.

C: Therefore, moral realism is false

In this argument, P1 does not imply that the conclusion of the argument is more likely to be true than P2. This means that the reasons that an atheistic moral realist has for rejecting theism doesn’t require them to believe that moral anti-realism is true ahead of time. This means that if they are convinced by P1, then they have a pretty good reason to reject their moral realism. In contrast, P1 of the moral argument implies that you must accept the conclusion of the argument before you can accept P2. This means that the reasons that an atheistic moral realist has to accept moral realism are only sound if they appeal to the truthfulness of theism ahead of time. Thus, it’s not clear why any atheistic moral realist would have more reason to reject their atheism than the reasons they would have to reject their moral realism if they accepted P1 of the moral argument. It seems like they would much more rational to abandon their moral realism given P1 of the moral argument

That's what I think a lot of atheist do to some extend, i.e. P1 is false because there is some other nebulous non-specified reason why moral realism is true. And that probably works ok until you actively try to find that reason, and find out that it isn't that easy. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, let me ask you a question. Why do theist always seem to think that the existence of a god or a supernatural force gives them reason to think that moral realism is true? I personally don’t understand how grounding morality in a concrete entity is necessarily more intuitive than grounding morality in some abstract concept. I actually believe that some forms of theism are pretty plausible but I’m not a moral realist so I just don’t understand how theistic moral realism is any more plausible than atheistic moral realism.

It think it would be harder to knowingly hold contradicting beliefs, because generally we dislike cognitive dissonance. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, I don’t think one should necessarily think of this as holding contradictory beliefs but rather as temporarily suspending judgement and pretending to believe something for an instrumental benefit. For example, when there’s music playing inside of a movie, you don’t think about where the music is coming from or how the music is made. You just let the music move you as you watch the movie scene. Similarly, maybe people can just stop thinking about where morality comes from or how morality came about and just enjoy moral pursuits simply because it gives psychological satisfaction like the movie soundtrack does.

The argument that you are presenting is not the moral argument that I am referring to. Of course, you might choose to refer to your argument as the moral argument as well but my thread is discussing the particular argument that is frequently made for theism and I wasn’t trying to suggest that all arguments for theism fail.

Because it's not merely about defending an abstract philosophical position, it is their whole way of relating to the world that is at stake here. One shouldn't underestimate the importance moral convictions play in the human psyche, in the words of Nietzsche : — ChatteringMonkey

Well, the atheist could simply pretend that moral realism is true to make themselves feel better. I pretend to believe something that I don’t actually believe all the time to make myself feel better and this doesn’t really require me to actually be deluded. For example, I sometimes pretend that I was sexually intimate with a particular woman even if I actually wasn’t ever sexually intimate with that particular woman. I also sometimes pretend that I have singing skills that I don’t actually have. I think it’s instrumentally rational to make yourself believe some things for a temporary period of time to make yourself feel better and it doesn’t actually require you to sacrifice your epistemic rationality. On another note, the atheist could also just believe for emotional reasons that P1 of the moral argument is false and so there’s no reason to prefer accepting P2 and the conclusion of the argument for emotional reasons over accepting P2 and then rejecting P1 of the argument and thus also rejecting the conclusion of the argument.

This is an assumption, not a proof. In fact, I've argued elsewhere that this is actually impossible. Any time you start with an unproven statement, it is open to these kinds of attacks. I don't think the cosmological argument is any better. — Philosophim

Well, you can’t prove that any philosophical claim is true. The best you can do is provide additional evidence for that claim. The reasons for supporting any philosophical conclusion require some assumptions on the deepest level of analysis and those assumptions are usually just defended with raw intuition. Hence why there is so much disagreement in philosophy.

Deductive arguments, especially simple ones, are all subject to this seeming challenge: if you had good reasons to accept all the premises, then you should have accepted the conclusion at the same time. — SophistiCat

Well, it’s possible for one to simply fail to see the connection between the premises and how they necessarily lead to the conclusion. Sometimes, seeing that connection may just give them reason to reject one of the premises of the argument but sometimes someone may reasonably just accept the conclusion. The problem with the moral argument is that seeing the connection between P1 and P2 implies that P2 can only be defended by reasons that assume C. Thus, it seems no reasonable philosopher could just accept C after acknowledging the connection between the premises. I don’t think that’s necessarily true for other arguments.

Conversely, if you had good reasons to reject the conclusion, you must have had good reasons to reject at least some of the premises (or if you didn't, then you will surely find them when your more certain commitments are threatened). — SophistiCat

Not necessarily, there are plenty of atheists that might have some arguments against theism but they don’t have any arguments or reasons for rejecting P1 or P2 of any given theistic argument. For example, I don’t have an argument for any of the premises of the Kalam Cosmological argument but I’m just not necessarily convinced the premises of the argument are true either and I have arguments against the existence of specific kinds of gods like the Judeo-Christian god. Of course, it’s unlikely that I would become a theist if accepted the Kalam argument but it would make think that theism is more plausible. The conflict between the reasons supporting P1 and having secular reasons for supporting P2 is what I think makes the moral argument inferior to the other arguments for theism. Other arguments for theism might not be immediately persuasive because an atheist might have other reasons for being an atheist but they can at the very least make the atheist view theism as a more plausible viewpoint. I don’t see how the moral argument can make a reasonable atheist see theism as any more plausible than it was before.

On the other hand, if you had good reasons to both accept P2 and reject C, that can only mean that you have good reasons to reject P1. — SophistiCat

I would disagree, if you just reject P1 because you disagree with the conclusion of the argument then I think you would just be begging the question that the conclusion is wrong. If a particular philosopher doesn’t have good reasons to accept P1 and doesn’t have an argument against P1 then the argument should still give that philosopher slightly more confidence that C is true but he obviously wouldn’t have to think that C being true is more probable than C being false. This is because he isn’t entirely convinced by P1 yet.

The three propositions in a syllogism are like communicating vessels: if you apply pressure to one, it is immediately transmitted to the other two. — SophistiCat

But do all syllogism have this problem to an equal extent? My whole point is that the moral argument is especially vulnerable to these conflicts and thus it should be regarded as inferior to other theistic argument.

I would say that it’s a fair critique that theists who use the moral argument think that morality has to grounded in something concrete rather than a set of abstract principles. Though, that concrete entity could be anything supernatural rather than something that necessarily has intelligence like a god. I can understand that many atheists find that way of thinking about morality counterintuitive and I find it counterintuitive as well. Nonetheless, I don’t really have an argument to give to a theist of why it makes more sense to ground morality within a set of abstract moral principles rather than a concrete entity like a god or a spiritual force.

It may be more reasonable to reject moral realism, but I don't think it's about reason for most people. They feel like and assume moral realism must be true.... and so presumably if they already hold that belief, they are susceptible to P1. — ChatteringMonkey

I agree that the argument can be persuasive to some people. But, my point is that no atheist would be persuaded by this argument for the right reasons. Atheists should realize that if they have no good reason to accept moral realism then they shouldn’t be too devoted to defending this position as they can only justify believing that moral realism is slightly more likely to be true on raw intuition alone.

There is something about this argument that makes it especially vulnerable to this attack. If you try attacking other popular arguments like this, then you will probably have no luck. Here is an example of a popular theist argument that doesn’t have this weakness:

The Kalam Cosmological Argument:

P1: Everything that isn’t infinite must have a cause

P2: The Universe isn’t infinite

C: Therefore, the universe must have a cause

Let’s say someone accepts P2 because they reject the existence of actual infinities and they point to various thought experiments to illuminate their intuitions. P1 does not conflict with the reasons that they have for accepting P2 and neither premise of the argument implies that the other premise is less likely to be true than the conclusion that the argument is trying to provide evidence for. In contrast, P1 in the moral argument implies that the conclusion of the argument is more likely to be true than P2 of the argument. This kinda just brings up the question about what the whole point of the argument is supposed to be if one premise of the argument just handicaps the reasons your intended audience had for accepting the other premise of the argument.

Given that the moral argument for god completely depends on god as an authority on morals which, as it turns out above, is untenable, we have no choice but to reject premise P1. — TheMadFool

I don’t know if I would say that the moral argument even depends on God existing. You could imagine a godless form of theism that believes that there are supernatural forces that make moral realism true and that without these supernatural forces we would have no reason to think that murder is wrong. Of course, many theists might also argue that if God commanded people to murder then murder would be right and they just don’t see this as an arbitrary form of morality like the way that atheists typically do. Theists might think it’s more arbitrary to base morality of an abstract concept with seemingly no authority like the concept of maximizing happiness for sentient creatures.

I remember from reading positive psychology years ago, that extra wealth only becomes meaningless to happiness after a certain point. You need enough for a comfortable life, and so would the animals. — Down The Rabbit Hole

According to the reading that I have done on positive psychology, relative poverty correlates with unhappiness but absolute poverty does not. This is why there are plenty of poor countries living on $5 a day whose people are happier on average than people in wealthy western countries living on $80 a day. Despite this, poor people in any given country are always less happy than rich people in that country. The thing that makes them unhappy is the presence of people much wealthier than them. Animals are never jealous of humans in the same way that humans can be jealous of other humans that they know personally that are wealthier than them. Thus, there’s no reason to think that factory farm animals are necessarily suffering more than the average human due to their discomfort.

Some meat might be healthier than others, but it all has saturated fat and cholesterol which contribute to heart disease - the biggest killer in the USA. A vegan diet is supposed to be healthier, and I don't see how it is any more time consuming. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I would say that the healthiest vegan diet are healthier than the healthiest omnivore diets but it’s easier to have a diet that is healthier than the average western diet if you are an omnivore. This is because most people mostly eat unhealthy food most of the time regardless if they are vegan or omnivores. Vegans will typically indulge in potato chips, soda, white bread, pasta, and rice which are all pretty unhealthy. Meat eaters can avoid eating the above foods and reward themselves with a nice steak which is a really delicious food like the unhealthy foods that vegans often eat but it’s probably somewhat healthier than every one of the foods that I mentioned above that vegans eat. It’s kinda just something that I speculate but it seems plausible to me to think that being a healthy meat eater is easier for most people.

The animals' confusion and panic can't be much better? A human can get mental strength from fighting back or contemplating escape. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I think you are referring to hope when you speak of mental strength but correct me if I’m wrong. It’s true that humans can have hope that one day they can escape their adversity and they may also hope for lots of good things to come once a bad period of their life is over. Nonetheless, I think animals have an advantage because they don’t seem to even need hope. They don’t experience the kind of despair that humans experience from their circumstances. When the animals are not experiencing physical pain or discomfort, they are probably not suffering. Humans in bad circumstances might suffer even when their adversity isn’t even physically hurting them.

I'm sure you agree that animals don't need to suffer as much as humans would in their position for their suffering to be wrong. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I agree that animal suffering is almost as bad as human suffering and their suffering should matter more than say the pleasure of humans. I would happily press a magic button that would prevent all humans from enjoying the taste of meat if such a button existed. This would probably lead to a reduction of suffering in the world and humans would probably have just as much pleasure as they would simply find other ways to enjoy themselves.
Though, fewer animals will be born to experience pleasure as well but I don’t think the pleasure justifies the suffering.

I’m not willing to abstain from eating factory farmed meat myself though. This is because it would lead to social stigma for me and it would interfere with my goals of saving money for my own pain management in the future. The problem is that people who don’t eat factory farmed meat can’t be “in the closet” about it unless they live alone. You have to actually reject some meals that your family has made you out of the kindness of their heart. You have to put up with your family constantly trying to convince you to eat their meat and you might have some really bad experiences during the holidays. I would actually experience more conflict with my family if I refused to eat factory farmed meat than if I told them I was gay. To put this in a thought experiment, suppose that it was the case that animals will suffer greatly for some strange reason if gay people don’t come out to their entire family. If you have a very religious and conservative family that also greatly supports you financially, then would it be wise to sacrifice your relationship with them by coming out to help sentient beings that you never even met. I happen to think that it would be better to keep your mouth shut. Unfortunately, keeping your mouth shut is rarely an option for those with dietary restrictions because unlike sex, eating is typically a communal activity.

There is no guarantee this pittance would have any impact on innovation, where buying free range would undeniably give the animals a better quality of life. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I would disagree that buying free range is guaranteed to give these animals better quality of life. The first point to consider is that quality of life is often determined by internal factors rather than external ones. A chicken living in a factory farm that is genetically predisposed to be happy is going to have a higher quality of life than a free range chicken that is genetically predisposed to be depressed. In addition, a single individual not buying factory farmed meat doesn’t guarantee that the production of such meat will be reduced because meat production is pretty insensitive to demand.

Then, there is also a possibility that the company that is selling the free range meat is lying about their farming practices or are not fully aware of policy violations in their own company. A company can illegally label their meat as free range even if it’s usually factory farmed. They probably will rarely get investigated and they may pass inspections because they might have some farms that are actually free range but other farms might be doing the same thing other farms are doing. In addition, employees frequently break the rules and policies of a particular company in the real world. They may abuse those free range animals for fun just like the factory farm employees might do and they might simply be too lazy to let the animals go outside because they want to play on their phone. The employers will often just turn a blind eye to all this because it saves them money to hire bad employees and not fire anyone as long as they are getting the product out. They also probably don’t want to hire expensive managers and HR people to deal with those employees. So, free range farming is probably not much better than factory farming in reality. It’s also worth noting that free range usually just means the animals get like 1 foot of space to walk around in and they not laying on top of the other animals covered in feces. Is that a huge improvement? I don’t think that it is.

In any event, vegan food is even cheaper, then you would have even more money to donate to the ethical meat charities, and you've caused no cruelty in the process. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I’m pretty sure it’s more expensive as it usually doesn’t fill you up as much. It’s definitely more expensive to buy free range meat for those that don’t want to go the full vegan route. In addition, the stigma caused by being vegan can lead to less support from your family and less money to donate to charity. Even if your family accepts your veganism, then it’s still more expensive to have separate meals from your family if your family is not on board with your dietary restrictions. Plus, eating healthy is easier if you also don’t abstain from healthy meat products. Being healthy would lower your medical expenses and increase your lifespan and this would allow you to donate more money in the long run. Donating lots of money to charity also requires you to be a busy person and it’s hard to find the time to be a vegan if you are busy making money.

When thinking about the ethics of factory farming, there are several considerations that I have in mind:

1. Animals probably don’t have the same capacity to suffer as human beings do mainly because they can’t reflect on their suffering and they probably can’t be traumatized by their suffering the way that humans can be.

2. The suffering of an animal is probably just as important as the suffering of human assuming equal suffering. Outside the fact that most humans are probably capable of greater suffering than animals, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think human suffering is more important to address.

3. Depending on your definition of the word “ethical”, it might be rational or good to refrain from being ethical. Some philosophers do not define ethical behavior as necessarily rational or good while others require that a behavior is rational or good in order to be ethical.

4. I think that it is more rational and more good for someone to focus much more on their own hedonic welfare above the hedonic welfare of others all things being equal. This is due to the fact that we are the ones that have to endure our own suffering and we get to enjoy our own pleasure. So, I think it’s probably more rational to be an egoist if you also happen to be a hedonist or subscribe to another experiential account of welfare.

5. If I happen to be wrong about egoism, then it still seems that factory farming is best eliminated through investment in technology that can produce cultured meat at a more inexpensive rate. Instead of spending extra money on free range meat, it is better to donate the extra money you would have spent to charities that are trying to produce inexpensive ways to make ethical meat.

6. On a final note, I think it is plausible to believe that even the suffering of disadvantaged people in poor countries is not much worse than the suffering of privileged people in wealthy countries. This is partly because of the role that hedonic adaptation plays on suffering. Hedonic adaptation is a phenomena where one adjusts to adversity after continuous exposure to that adversity and that adversity no longer causes as much suffering. If people adjust to adversity in this manner, then preventing the beginning of adversity is more important than preventing the continuation of adversity. Though, it could be argued that we can make poor people experience a period of greater happiness if we prevent the continuation of their adversity. This period of greater happiness will be somewhat valuable even if it is only temporary and will be followed by hedonic adaptation. But, this consideration wouldn’t apply to factory farm animals because a lack of factory farming would only cause these animals to not get born in the first place and other animals in more ethical farms will be born instead. Due to hedonic adaptation, these other animals might suffer almost just as much as the factory farm animals.

Yep, that’s kinda where I was going with this question. Though, I figured this question would open up a larger discussion about the conditions under which self-defense is justified. I think you probably remember one of my past threads where I argued that murder doesn’t seem to be as bad as torture or rape so you can imagine that I also think that killing someone to avoid getting yourself tortured is more justifiable than killing someone to avoid getting yourself killed.

I think middlemen exist because they typically provide a useful service to the buyers and sellers of a product. Think of Uber for example. Before Uber, someone could advertise themselves as a driver on Craigslist or maybe get some customers on Facebook. Similarly, you might be able to find someone to give you a ride online. But, Uber was successful in making this easy and convenient by making sure that there was enough drivers and enough customers. They did this through advertisement and by educating people on the demand for this sort of thing. Before Uber, most people that wanted to freelance by driving people around simply either couldn’t find enough people on free platforms or didn’t bother to try finding people on free platforms. The same goes for people that wanted to find people to drive them around.

Basically, there was a coordination problem because not enough people were creative enough to use the free platforms for taxi services. The middleman insures that everyone does know that they can use their platform for this sort of thing and thus it actually creates demand for something just by giving people great ideas about how to solve their transportation problems or their employment problems. Another thing that Uber does is offer a great software interface and features that free alternatives do not have. It has geolocation so you can see who’s nearby, it has reviews and ratings of drivers and customers, it allows you to report bad drivers and bad customers and so on. It would be much riskier to try to be a freelancer or try to get a freelance service from someone on Craigslist and that’s a big reason why middlemen exist as well. Middlemen can isolate the bad actors and make sure that all service providers and customers are good and honest people which is just something that someone needs to do but unfortunately nobody is just going to volunteer their time to do it for free.

The measures used will usually also have to be in the same ballpark as the threat, so no responding to theft with deadly force. — Echarmion

So, suppose that someone responds with lethal force towards another because it was the only way to avoid experiencing extreme physical pain. Would you say that this constitutes strict proportionality?

Responsibility is kind of an odd concept to use here, I think, because responsibility is usually to someone. Responsibilities occur in relations, they define obligations and duties (or the lack thereof, as with the common use of "responsible adult") between people. But what would responsibility for pregnancy entail? — Echarmion

Well, the pregnancy could be said to entail the responsibility to the human fetus inside the mother that the pro-lifers would classify as a person.

not. A person, male or female, who is not under the influence of debilitating substances, who is not physically forced or coerced, and is aware of the fact that sexual relations produces kids, is literally what defines a legal adult, de facto of course. — Outlander

Yes, and driving a car can result in people dying as well and every legal adult understands this as well. This doesn’t entail that everyone should always be responsible for killing someone while driving their car so why should someone always be held responsible for a pregnancy simply because they chose to have sex?

Defense against children, mentally ill or otherwise disabled persons can be classed under self-defense, but the rules that apply are usually different. Strict proportionality will apply, with perhaps duties to avoid conflict as far as possible. None of that seems to be of much help to shed light on the abortion discussion though. — Echarmion

Can you explain to me the concept of strict proportionality? Does it mean that you cannot harm someone in self-defense more than he will likely harm you if you didn’t take the self-defense measure?

However, killing in self-defense is only permissible when there's a threat to life and that seems to be missing from your list of undesirable consequences for the mother. By the way, to my knowledge, current practice allows the termination of pregnancies when there's a risk to the mother's life. Thank you again for opening up a new front in this pitched battle between pro-lifers and pro-choicers. Excellent! — TheMadFool

Thank you for your compliments! I just want to point out that pregnancy always can pose a risk to a woman’s life and the doctors may just be ignorant of a particular woman’s risk. Because of this, I think it’s safe to say that women always risk their life when they decide to continue a pregnancy. Additionally, I think the view that self-defense is only justified to preserve human life is a strange one to most people. It seems that if someone tries to torture you or tries permanently damage to your body by trying to tattoo a penis on your forehead, you would be justified in killing that person if it’s the only thing that can prevent them from harming you in a serious manner. Most self-defense laws would allow self-defense if you face “severe harm” without it and you had no other means to avoid that harm and “severe harm” is rarely defined so it could include the torturous pain of pregnancy and the bodily damage that it causes. So, unless your typical self-defense laws are unjustified, it seems like abortion should be protected under common self-defense laws.

Sleepwalking is non intentional. Normal pregnancy outside of .. "coerced measures" is. So. No. lol — Outlander

I don’t think that it’s appropriate to say that normal pregnancy is intentional if it hasn’t been planned. That’s like saying that if I accidentally hit someone with my car that I did so intentionally just because I chose to drive a car that day. You might say that I should be liable for running the person over if I was driving the car in an unsafe manner but it seems unfair to punish someone who was driving their car safely and then had a random suicidal person jump suddenly in front of their car. Similarly, it seems unfair to punish someone for an abortion if they were practicing reasonably safe sex.

I think that Incels want to get laid because it gives them a higher social status and that has nothing to do with pleasure. Speaking from experience, I think almost every guy can derive more pleasure from masturbating with sex toys used competently or by putting women’s dirty panties in their mouth or by using another advanced masturbation technique. In addition, I don’t think a real philosophical hedonist would care if the person they do sexual things is an escort or a girl doing it for free. In fact, they may prefer an escort because escorts try to please their clients while a girl doing it for free is probably just trying to please herself.

It seems sanctions against murder are required for the establishment of civilization. The law is an attempt to apply sanctions from the outside, while morality is an attempt to apply sanctions within each person. — Hippyhead

I agree, I’m not trying to say that murder isn’t bad at all. I’m arguing that it isn’t as bad as most people think. I think murderers should get like a 5 year prison sentence or be sentenced to death.

Well, I don’t think that we should assume that economic prosperity is purely defined by productivity. Rather, I think makes sense to think of it in terms of productivity relative to the desired consumption of consumer goods and services. For example, suppose you have a society full of financial minimalists who don’t work very often but also have little desire for consumer goods. I think it’s fair to say that this society would be just as prosperous as a society of hardworking people who have a high level of desire for consumer goods even if they might have a lower level of employment or lower work hours. Murder reduces the productivity of a society but it offsets this negative effect by reducing the consumption of that society as well. In contrast, the trauma caused by rape tends to make its victims less productive at work since it’s hard to have your shit together at work if you are dealing with trauma and it also increases the resource consumption of the victim because they now have to pay for therapists to deal with their trauma and that therapist could be helping us build more computers if rape didn’t exist.

Society is just a group of individuals in aggregate, I don't understand what you mean by "society is a collective mechanism". — Judaka

Well, society could be thought of as a collective mechanism if we consider society as something that could flourish or crumble. If society is just individuals in aggregate then it’s hard to understand what do people mean when they speak of fears of society crumbling. After all, individuals have always operated in aggregate and will always continue to do so. So, under your definition of society, it would be incoherent to speak of societal decay or collapse(unless almost everyone dies). Society can only be restructured or transformed under your definition. But, some philosophers might say that society is defined more by its laws and its institutions rather than the individuals living inside of it. Under this view, speaking of societal collapse is coherent because the death of all our institutions would entail the death of our society and any new society that may come after will no longer be the same society. In addition, you could have a group of individuals living close to each other without laws and institutions. This environment could be considered too chaotic to be called a society.

I can offer you a short explanation for each statement if you’d like.

Regarding the issue of viewing morality as a social mechanism for benefiting society. I find that strange mainly because I view society as a collective mechanism for benefiting ourselves or benefiting humans or maybe sentient creatures as whole. I think most of us only care that society exists because we benefit from living in a society. Some people would extend this interest to our families or the human race as a whole or maybe as far back as sentient life as a whole. But, it would seem strange for morality to be used as a mechanism for benefiting society because society is only good because of the benefits it provides to people. If you imagine a society that benefits no one, everyone would want this society to crumble.

Regarding the issue of moral obligations. It’s hard for me to understand how there could be moral obligations if you
are physically able to violate those obligations and sometimes get away with it unscathed

Fair enough, but I tend to think that the notion of obligation is pretty incoherent. Also, I have a hard time understanding why we should base morality on the benefit of society rather than the benefit of sentient life as a whole.

What if this madman that has kidnapper you and stranger has done this countless of times before and he always kept his word? Wouldn’t it be rational to believe that he would do what he said he would do given his history of doing what he said he would?

Well, I think this question kinda goes beyond morality and more in the territory of general decision making. It is about to what extent should one focus their energy on morality rather than focus our energy in making our own life better. Let me ask you a similar question, should you be doing everything that you can to make sure that children in Africa don’t have to experience severe suffering or early death? The case in the OP seems to be analogous to this real life dilemma of us being able to prevent major tragedies in Africa with minor effort and the overwhelming choice most of us make to focus on our own life rather than helping the needy strangers on the other side of the world.