For example, if as you say empathy is the starting point, and if it's immoral to experiment on things with which you empathise, then if you empathise with humans but not with non-human animals then it's immoral to experiment on humans but not immoral to experiment on non-human animals." — Michael

When I say empathy is a starting point, I mean that empathy gives us an initial motivation to help another person. We need no extra justification to help someone if we feel empathetic to them.

Yet this is surely not the only motivation for ethics. We can see how rights are applied to humans that are explicitly non-rational, like toddlers, or the mentally disabled. We can see how non-human animals are sentient. We can notice how our empathy is inherently tribe-like. And we can piece these together to come to the conclusion that our application of rights is completely arbitrary - thus motivating us to create a new schema, one that includes non-human animals in its domain.

So it would go like this:

1.) The ability to suffer is a prime candidate for ethical priority (plausible)
2.) Non-human animals can suffer (highly likely)
3.) Non-human animals therefore have ethical priority (from 1 and 2)

Like I said before, we need not care for non-human animals to realize that they deserve to be treated equally.

And I appealed to the other forms of -isms like sexism and racism to show how any arbitrary exclusion of non-human animals from the domain of ethics can equally be applied to the exclusion of females or blacks from the domain of politics or society in general. Thus this is an ad absurdum argument which is meant to show the inconsistency and arbitrary-ness of speciesism.

You've avoided any real response so I'll only repeat that pessimism is a cliche - the latest reincarnation of romanticism - and not an interesting philosophical analysis. It finds only what it already presumes. — apokrisis

:-}

In any rate, pessimism is an argument for pessimism, so it's not too surprising to myself that there exist people who are discontent with the system. The whole picture takes this phenomenon into account and doesn't pretend like it's some alien from a different universe.

Yes, of course.

Has anyone actually disagreed with this position in this thread? There's big piles of seemingly dissenting words but they all seem to be about metaethics. — zookeeper

For some reason these debates tend to devolve into metaethics. I'm still waiting for a decent argument against the OP that doesn't reek of subjugation and question-begging naturalistic fallacy bullshit.

I enjoyed True Detective (the first one at least) at the level of well-acted murder porn. But let's not pretend it had any philosophical merit. Or even artistic merit. It was a soap with glossy pretensions. — apokrisis

Oh sure, I agree, it was cliche. But it talked about relevant pessimistic themes that people ordinarily would not look into.

Humans are warming a whole planet. That's quite impressive historically speaking. — apokrisis

Ooooo, a whole planet.....in a universe of countless planets...such majesty...

Being proud of our entropic production is akin to a toddler being proud of a little LEGO tower he made in ten minutes.

It takes a gallon of petrol to produce a modern cheeseburger. A gallon of petrol represents the geologically-reduced remnants of 98 tons of ancient planktonic biomass dug out of a deep hole. — apokrisis

That is just an example of how utterly wasteful action tends to be. How the output never matches the input.

So to the degree that irony exists, it is evidence of the value we all place on a capacity to exert social control. Laughter is the clever way we now draw sharp boundaries so as to define a group identity - even when that laughter is aimed at the very fact that this is the kind of social trick we are always pulling, as in a very fine comedy like the Life of Brian. — apokrisis

It's also a way of relieving tension when things get a bit too difficult to handle. Just look at the Greek tragedies followed by comedies.

For something so accidental, life managed to happen rather easily. It appeared pretty much immediately once the biophysics allowed the semiotic phase transition involved. So from a biological perspective, it is about as "accidental" as steam condensing to water once the temperature has sufficiently cooled. — apokrisis

And from a metaphysical perspective, life and the universe in general is absurd and accidental. Given the timeline of the universe, life is but an irrelevant blip.

If we are going to talk about purpose, then it doesn't seem a problem to me that that is only meaningful in an ultimately thermodynamic sense. I'm all about the naturalism. — apokrisis

Unfortunately this equivocates natural telos with psychological affirmation of importance.

As for comfort, who ordered that? Thermodynamics justifies talk about balance or equilibrium. And you need two to tango. So if there is satisfaction, there must be unease. If there is comfort, there must be striving. It's yin and yang. Your monotonic notions have no value in nature. — apokrisis

Yup, basically scientific taoism. You would have liked Nietzsche, he put emphasis on the "healthy" life as a way of "calming us down" after the storm of disillusionment and nihilism. I don't think he succeeded but whatever.

So should I be a vegan because I believe animals have souls and in the truth of reincarnation? — apokrisis

Uhh, no.

Cannibalism was practiced until a few hundred years ago. And with a similar theistic logic. You ate the dead so as to make something of them also something of yourself. — apokrisis

Okay.

So let's stop pretending that there is a fixed morality at work here. Rationality is not enough as a guide to what is right. You also need an accurate empirical picture from which to draw those rational conclusions. — apokrisis

Right, but again I'm not a moral realist, so I'm not under any illusions that there is a "fixed" morality here. Only realizations about our state and the relations we have with others.

And this is what I've been saying you lack. You just make up the facts to fit the particular cultural prejudices which are symptomatic of your cultural miillieu. You have picked up various ideas that are fashionable for the moment and sticking to them like glue. — apokrisis

What facts do I make up? Animal suffering? That is fact!

You claim that pessimism is a reaction to modernism, yet pessimism was around long before modern society emerged. The Wisdom of Silenus would have been the True Detective of ancient Greece. Modern society is just the crumbling structure of civilization, foreseen by Nietzsche and co. Man's history is an ironic fight against nihilism.

That is what life produces in copious amounts: irony, the comedic aspect of tragedy. You can talk of entropy production but life adds such insignificant amount of entropy to the overall state of the universe that this makes it rather unimportant. Irony can only exist when there are conscious beings, and in fact it is produced quite liberally. Where there is sentient life, there is irony.

Life is an accident, it's a thing that just "happened". We shouldn't expect it to be purpose-filled and comfortable.

To talk about the virtues of veganism or antinatalism is just pointless displacement activity. It is to accept the disconnect between the social and individual sphere which modern civilisation is using to do its thing. It is to exist in a world that is actually eating ever greater quantities of meat and breeding with exponential zest, and simply want to do "the opposite" without actually dealing with the core mythology that makes that society what it is. — apokrisis

No. It is an understanding of what constitutes organic life, and a rejection of this as much as we can while continuing to live. It is the realization that life is a family of suffering, and the subsequent denial of cannibalism. Veganism was practiced thousands of years ago - every problem that modern society has in which pessimism and veganism responds to, was in existence millennia ago. Modern society just tends to have a way of amplifying them.

The fact is that entropification is natural. — apokrisis

But not moral.

I think you misread what I was trying to say. I'm saying that you tend to use the appeal to majority as a way to substantiate your point- because it must be "true" in its historical development of the group to be considered appealing. However, even if this is the case, I doubt many want to hear that they are solely existing to keep institutions alive simply because that is what the institution wants. Whether its true or not, the lack of autonomy that implies is as unappealing to most individuals as the fact that by preventing the creation of another person, they are preventing the harm that would be experienced by that person. Both may be true (and so I am even granting you the point for argument's sake), but both are unpopular. Thus, as I said, your point could make sense but it does so in a way that does not pass your own test which again, is an appeal to the majority. — schopenhauer1

In any case, apo's appeal to the majority doesn't even make sense because it fails to account for other majority views that contradict his own.

A cursory glance at culture reveals a deep sense of cynicism about life. You have Shakespeare alluding to this in many of his plays. You have Monty Python's Life of Brian mocking organized religion and pointing out the flaws of life while the actors are being crucified, as well as shows like Rick and Morty or True Detective that are heavily based off existentialist literature. You have everyday comedians making money off of social criticism. You have organized religion all over the place - various ways of venerating the "perfect hero". Everyone of us has gone through, or is currently going through, the developmental years between childhood and full-fledged adulthood - and everyone of us can attest to the teenage disillusionment with the world and the subsequent need to repress this and "move on" to "more important things", and the aforementioned cultural items are popular and memorable ways of releasing this tension. None of these things would have existed had they not acted as some kind of relatable catharsis for the audience. The reason they are popular is because they speak a bit of refreshing truth in a sea of madness.

Another cursory glance at history reveals a deep fear of death, from the massive Pyramids at Giza to the ancient Chinese Terracotta Army, to the rise of fascism in 20th century Europe and the decay of the western world into decadence and materialism. It also shows how many great civilizations rose and fell because of a single relationship or a megalomaniac leader. The historical artifacts can be beautiful - but the motivation behind these artifacts is usually anything but impressive.

So when we look at the Big Picture™, civilization looks almost like a 90s-00s strategy game - build your empire, gather resources, advance to the next age, build unique structures, harness the power of nature, and lead your little society to greatness! The civilization functions like a well-oiled machine. Everyone is doing their part, everyone follows "natural law", everyone gets married at age 25, has three children, a dog, and a white picket fence. The future is bright - soon we'll be level 50 platinum! - and nothing can stand in our way, and certainly not those pesky pessimists and antinatalists...

But this is just not reality, or at least not the Full Picture. Individual lives tend to look almost like an MMO - you start out interested with the surroundings, gameplay, and story. But pretty soon you start to get bored. It's just the same thing over and over again, grinding mobs, grinding crafting, grinding character traits...and you've devoted so much time to this character that you don't want to leave and lose it all. Sometimes there's updates that keep you entertained for a few hours; then it's back to the grind. The infinite grind, with no real end goal, just some arbitrary achievement and a stupid little costume or stronghold decoration. Wooooo! Sometimes you distinguish yourself from the rest of the grinding herd by owning a guild, or selling enhancements, or pwning everyone else in multiplayer. Yet this status is only a status when compared to other players. What use is a platinum membership if there's no-one there to worship you? Then there's server crashes and accidental character deletions - oops! All that work, down the drain...

At the metaphysical level, uniqueness is rare - thanks to universals, we have the same goddamn shit everywhere we go. There's only so much you can build with a limited set of LEGOs.

Civilization may prosper but only at the expense of those supporting it.

Animals have been taking care of themselves for billions of years before humans came around and not one ever charged sexism, racism, or specieism against another. — Harry Hindu

Because they weren't capable of doing so. But now humans have entered the stage, and I'm arguing that it's time we put down the mirror of narcissism and start acting more productive and responsible.

In any case it is clear that non-human animals have not been taking care of one another. Look at predation, social rejection from disease/disability, and r-selection.

I agree completely.

Jeez, if the Enlightenment and its Romantic reaction are that unfamiliar to you, where could I even start.... — apokrisis

Oh, they're "familiar", just not in the way you're using them.

It's like a jigsaw that you have to put together through the various criticisms. — schopenhauer1

Yes, which is why I asked him to make a thread on this that would resolve any uncertainty once and for all. It may not be his intention but it certainly feels like he dodges all our attacks by presenting new clouded information that we had no access to before. He's speaking Chinese and getting mad that everyone else doesn't speak Chinese, nor accepts that Chinese is the one true language of the world.

Semiotics is somehow trumpeted as a continuation of the Enlightenment (with the assumption that the Enlightenment is a purposeful movement rather than a collection of varying ideas). Anyways, its at least trumpeted as part of the empirical, and thus Scientific Image (though semiotics itself does not seem empirical as much as a speculative interpretation of the scientific findings.. but I that is another issue). — schopenhauer1

It's also trumpeted that ancient philosophers, with no scientific background nor methodology, somehow are part of this historic pragmatic movement and are vindicated by modern science. If science is the best guide to truth here, then you can't be appealing to philosophers who weren't scientific!

So he claims entropy, being the basis of universal teleology (and in the background of the semiotic process I guess) is a big deal, and that at the self-conscious social level that we humans experience, we can actually slow down or speed up entropy, at least as it pertains to our little organizational part of the universe. — schopenhauer1

Indeed, we have practically no influence on the overall entropic heat death.

nyways, Romanticism puts the individual experience on a pedestal (which is a base characterization and not a comprehensive understanding of most of what these Romantic proponents are saying).. and thus are limited in their narrow, merely phenomenological interpretations of personalized experience.. He also claims that the Romantics do not take into account group dynamics and how the group shapes the human. — schopenhauer1

Additionally some of these so-called "romantic" philosophers weren't even interested in pursuing what apo's metaphysics supposedly does. It's a category error to expect them to align with physics when this just wasn't their intention - see Heidegger and his "tool analysis" - consistent with physics, but not attempting to answer what physics tries to.

It is just assumed that because it is the group, it somehow is self-evident that it should continue and the individual should know his place in continuing it. — schopenhauer1

Indeed.

Point being I think you should make a thread (I meant thread not post) on this because talk of enlightenment vs romanticism, absolutism vs relativity, etc is not exactly obvious or well-accepted in the general community.

Part of the reason everyone has so much difficulty discussing stuff with you is because you present a historical narrative of philosophy as fact, and then go on to rip on one half of this binary debate while promoting the other half, when nobody really understands the justification you have for seeing history in this way, nor why the romantic notions are just automatic dead-ends. In fact, as far as I can tell, there's no good reason to see history in this binary fashion anyway! You just assert that this is the way it is and glaze over the important details that would otherwise potentially help us understand what the hell you are even talking about. It may make sense to you, but for everyone else who doesn't understand it looks like a biased fiction.

Explain to us all what Romanticism entails, what Enlightened thinking entails, so that we can stop beating around the bush every time you use these terms. I don't understand what the essential characteristics of Romantic or Enlightened thinking even is to grasp when something is Romantic or Enlightened according to your binary view. And every time I think I get something you're saying you end up denying it. Just put it all out in the open once and for all.

In any case, I disagree with a lot of what you said in the last reply, so if you make a specific thread on this I'll post there so we don't keep derailing all these threads unnecessarily. Keep the threads on topic, not hijacked by some meta-level question. I would enjoy actually reading a thread started by you instead of just posts where you try debunking everyone else.

You mean exasperation. — apokrisis

Then it's mutual.

No, I'm describing the cop out. But you are never going to address this confused dualism of yours no matter how often I point back to its familiar cultural basis.

It's been amusing as always. — apokrisis

Because I see no problem with it. Maybe you should actually make a post on this instead of having a assert it every single time.

In regards to you on Freud, more ad hominems. His work is still being studied, with plenty of professional work being generated based on his theories. — Cavacava

Freud's theories are more often rejected than accepted, but he legacy spawned a quite respectable psychodynamic field that is systematically misinterpreted and compared to Freudian psychoanalysis.

He did lie many times, but so do a lot of people. I'm not a big fan of Freud in general because of this. Everything he says I take with a grain of salt.

The theories of Jung, Rank, and Becker, on the other hand... 8-)

I think it is a form of brain washing. The symptoms are treated but not their causes. — Cavacava

And this is where psychodynamic theory excels more than most other psychological perspectives.

There's no point replying to nonsense like this. It is just a sign of desperation on your part. — apokrisis

How psychoanalytic of you... :-}

Calling people desperate, it seems to me, is a sign of desperation.

And the choice becomes rational to the degree it is both possible and has some agreed goal. — apokrisis

Right. The goal is what we're arguing out.

Is the goal to make DC blissfully happy? Is the goal to remove the very possibility of psychic suffering? You might very well say so. I don't feel particularly moved to agree. — apokrisis

And I wonder why this is so.

You keep talking about this "we". I realise you mean the many like yourself brought up on a steady cultural diet of vague romantic notions. — apokrisis

You keep using this word "romantic" as a cop-out.

It is rational to give the benefit of the doubt when faced with uncertainty. But there is far less uncertainty about things like grades of sentience than you pretend. — apokrisis

With stakes as high as they are, uncertainty is practically unacceptable.

So what we have here is only your weakly informed "intuitions" (ie: prejudices) against readily available scientific knowledge. — apokrisis

As if your scientism isn't a prejudice itself.

You said we have freedom. So why are you opposed to going against the entropic goal of the universe? Essentially you're advocating a scientific taoism - just be one with nature and it'll all be cool.

Why doesn't it surprise me that you not only abstract the object but even its properties? Your approach is Platonic and dualistic in classic romantic unbounded fashion. — apokrisis

How can you abstract an object without abstracting its properties?

No, I am not abstracting anything apart from recognizing suffering as a distinct mental phenomenon of negative value.

Empirical studies can only give you non-valued information. You can then use that to figure out how to be more likely to achieve your subjective aims. But the empirical stuff isn't going to tell you what you should do without you already having subjective goals. — Terrapin Station

Bingo.

But I would then step back from the phenomenological justification to inquire about the natural basis. Why would humans have evolved (both biologically and culturally) to feel this way? And that is where we can see that it makes sense thermodynamically. Life exists as negentropy, or little pockets of organisation, so as to assist the Cosmos in its general entropic flow. — apokrisis

ou just want to start with "how it feels to me". I am interested in the hypothesis that "how it feels" is always going to be naturally rational. And the hypothesis is holding up pretty good. — apokrisis

Yet a scientific ethics does not necessarily satisfy what we perceive to be moral.

Tell a person whom you're helping that you're helping them because they can go on and make more entropy, and not because they're a person who is valuable because they can suffer, and they might just shake you off and tell you to buzz off.

We don't "assist" the universe in its entropic flow. WE ARE the universe, at least part of it. A better term to be used is "forced" by the universe. i.e. instrumentalized as me and schop1 and others have repetitively said. The universe has an agenda - thermodyanamic equilibrium - and it uses us as means to this end.

From the universe's dormant perspective, the ends justify the means. Yet surely these ends do not match with what we want - and surely what we want is more important than what any anthropomorphized universe "wants".

There is no ethics in the void.

As I say, many might be puzzled by climate denial, rampant consumerism, neo-liberalism, gated communities, McDonalds. These seem unnatural and unethical behaviours - according to PC romantic notions that are widespread.

Yet a shift in the entropic basis of the species now can make those behaviours "ethical" and natural. If we endorse the desires of fossil fuels, the things we might object to are in fact morally right.

And if we still feel they are wrong (which I tend to) then we have to dig into just why. And that is where the alternative of a slow burn sustainable entropification can be considered. We can now argue objectively why this is a better moral paradigm. — apokrisis

No, no, no. This is where you intuitively find this behavior wrong, and then justify them as wrong by appealing to science in an ad hoc manner.

These behaviors are not wrong because of some entropic principle. They're wrong because we find them wrong, and then apparently some of us try to ignore this and shoehorn science in.

So my approach to ethical systems presumes nothing except that the Cosmos is rational. Nature has an over-arching self-organising logic. And that then presents us with the choice of either living within that logic or acting counter to it. And in fact, we can't act counter to it in any fundamental sense. But that still gives us a range of choices about the level of "harmony" we opt for. — apokrisis

Query: what if the universe was malignant to us? What if, no matter what we did, we could never manage to escape its malevolent grasp? Would it still be "good"?

Hardly.

Science has the advantage it is an open-ended process of learning. So we can get as close to the truth of things as we feel it matters. The answers one might have given 300 years ago would be much less informed than the ones we can give today. — apokrisis

You claim that goodness is not some abstract principle yet are claiming there is also a truth to ethical claims that resides in the external world. Pick one.

As I have argued, I would always seek to begin with the fewest presumptions about what might be the case. — apokrisis

And yet it is intuitive that we should give non-human animals the benefit of the doubt despite this being a presumption. It's not necessarily rational, it is ethical.

Nature lies there waiting to be discovered. Morality grows out of nature and so it would be questionable to hold to any ethical systems that go against nature. That would be - by definition - irrational and unsustainable (from a personal phenomenological point of view). — apokrisis

Because of the inherent harm to welfare it is to go against the cosmos' agenda...?

Once again, welfare is the identifier of the moral. If the universe went against our wishes, we would not find it moral. A tornado is not moral. It is destructive, albeit amoral. So why call entropy moral?

But that cuts both ways. We can't just cherry-pick the findings that support our preconceptions while not listening to the others that question them. — apokrisis

And we can't just ignore the possibility that we might be wrong in our prescription, or that we'll never know something. Don't play dice when we're ignorant.

Your "out there" is my immanent nature. And your phenomenological "in here" is my hearing you assert transcendent dualism. You treat the mind as if it could exist without a body, without a world. — apokrisis

No. Yet a body without a mind (specifically a rational and capable self) has no sense of morality.

However the evidence that only humans have articulate speech, and thus only humans can evolve culturally encoded habits of "self-conscious introspective awareness", is just as scientific. — apokrisis

Yet is the theory that articulate speech corresponds to ethical importance scientific? Nope.

You are trying to talk about "sentience" as some generic property - a mind stuff abstracted from the world. This, as I say, is a Romantic hang-over - a dualistic belief in the mental as causally something apart from the world. — apokrisis

No, I'm talking about the ability to suffer, however that manifests. Sentience is just a placeholder.

What the ^&$# is humanitarian about letting animals starve to death? You're making no sense at all! — Barry Etheridge

Way to misrepresent my position. Animal starvation is a prime example of what we ought to NOT allow. The only way to cut down on this, and other sorts of suffering, is by making compromises. Animals don't need to starve to lower the population anyway.

Now I'm laughing even harder now. Your solution to all the other species committing "specieism" is to commit genocide against them. Do you even think about what you type before you type it? — Harry Hindu

No, it's not genocide. It's humanitarianism. Animals cannot take care or advocate for themselves in the way humans can. They live more on instinct than rationality - yet they can suffer all the same. All non-agents are free of responsibility - ethically innocent.

Good job I don't say that then. — apokrisis

You literally just said that our morality should be based on scientific discoveries. Doesn't get any more naturalistic than this.

But why? Why should we entropify? Why should we breed and sustain a manageable population and energy output?

The answer to this is that we should do so, not because that is what the universe does, but because doing so presumably will make us happy, comfortable, etc.

Thus the actual point of ethical importance is agential well-being. If you want to argue that the best way of doing this is by following the march of entropy, then fine. But that's just scientifically-informed utilitarianism.

But again, how we focus on welfare is more of a practical and applied ethical issue than a purely normative ethical issue. For you need to have normative ethics before you can even start applying them. Without defining your normative ethical priorities, you end up prescribing action without reason.

Getting back to what I did say, why should I treat any notion of the good as something transcendentally abstracted from existence? — apokrisis

Well, in my opinion (which I've said before), you shouldn't. Goodness is such a queer property that it would be quite difficult to actually find goodness "out there". Hence why I'm an anti-realist: our mental states define and encompass all that is moral. None of this changes anything substantial.

After looking in the mirror? References please. — apokrisis

https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/mirror_test.htm

http://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-have-passed-the-mirror-test/

Ants, admittedly, are probably more of a fluke than anything. But the fact that they scratched off the paint means that, potentially, they are able to recognize what is "normal" in their colonies, and recognize that there are "others" - the recognition of the "other" requires a separation between the other and the self.

Denying this possibility is speciesism, or the disregard of others' rights just because you doubt they have sentience (since it's neither proven nor disproven that they have sentience). It is an unethical leap of faith.

So it IS justified that they suffer for our benefit? We should shut them in horrible little cages, give them a disease and also drugs, just to see what happens? Or even just give them enough of the drug to discover for a start what is the lethal dose?

This seems confusingly at odds with what you have been saying. — apokrisis

Benefit, in this case, is defined as the minimization of harm - harm that is more significant than the harm being applied to the lab rats. The doing/allowing harm distinction does not apply very well in consequentialist ethics.

It is hardly inconsistent that I would weigh up the trade-offs of curing cancer in the same way as anything else. But it is inconsistent that you seem to think inflicting suffering in the name of cancer research is OK for some reason that does not apply to the other cases you cite. — apokrisis

Because we don't need a burger to survive. We don't need to go to the circus to have fun. All of these are examples of exploitation without reason.

If you had the choice between synthetic meat and natural meat - why would you choose the natural meat? The difference between them is that an animal suffered/was killed for your enjoyment.

My position is that nature constitutes existence. Science is our best inquiry into the character of that existence. Morality should be based on a proper understand of nature as morality is about our actions in the world. — apokrisis

You got the last part right, but you got the first part wrong partly. Science can help inform our decisions. But to say that what science discovers is what is moral is the naturalistic fallacy.

For every naturalistic claim you present, we can always ask "but is it really moral?" because it does not satisfy the open-ended question.

OMG. Here we go again! You must be punking me. Congrats. — apokrisis

??? It's known that ants have sometimes reacted in such a way as to warrant the consideration of them having at least a rudimentary sense of self, when they scrape off the paint on their heads. The same applies to birds, dolphins, etc.

Given that neuroscience is in such a baby state right now, we really ought to not be surprised if it actually turns out that different animals can have different ways of experiencing the world, or can attain self-hood in different manners.

At this point you're just ignoring evidence. There is a much higher need for rigorous evidence to show that we ought to not treat something ethically, while if there's any doubt in our mind that they might be sentient, we have an ethical imperative to treat them equally, or at least with basic respect.

But my point is that doing so is a complicated ethical business. And right at the beginning I highlighted at least two key issues - human cognition and social proximity - that you left out in your simplistic OP. — apokrisis

Because these don't matter to morality. They may matter to the pragmatic application of morality but this changes nothing about the theoretical aspects of morality.

In fact I care a lot about animal suffering and ecology generally. The difference is that I don't have to invent the facts that would support a simple-minded absolutism. I've studied the science and that informs my ethical position. — apokrisis

It's not absolutism. If lab rats are being used to cure cancer, and this is only way to do it, then I'll support the effort. After all, I am a consequentialist. Conseqentialists tend to be rule-breakers and non-conformists, although the ends justify the means.

It's when we start talking about hunting animals for fun, eating the flesh of a dead animal for enjoyment, and ignoring the plight of predation and the infirm of the animal world, that I start to have problems with your and others' worldview. It's inconsistent.

Lab rats can suffer, but they aren't to be seen as ethically important, despite you yourself saying you don't have the stomach to deal with them in the lab?

It's not clear how science should be the ultimate guide to morality. Given that we can see that lab rats behave as though they suffer, that pigeons behave as though they can learn, and that ants behave as though they can recognize themselves in the mirror, shouldn't we give them the benefit of the doubt? Shouldn't we believe them to be sentient and thus ethically important before dismissing their lives? Don't you think an sentient shouldn't have to pass some test in order to qualify for ethical treatment?

Not having the stomach to dissect animals isn't the issue here: the issue is dissecting the animals in the first place when there's no good reason to.

You however argue in terms of absolutes. And when the evidence is not there, you invent it - like these forlorn suicidal penguins deciding to die by trekking inlands rather than just stepping off the beach into the waiting jaws of the local orca pack. — apokrisis

That's like saying a suicidal person should've just shot themselves instead of CO2 poisoning themselves. Animals can feel fear too.

Anthropomorphic nonsense. And dangerous for the reasons I've outlined. — apokrisis

No, it's not anthropomorphic nonsense. These penguins are acting in what we perceive to be distinctly human. We should view them as capable of sentience (until proven wrong), just as we don't throw out SETI transmissions as just pulsating stars, despite the likelihood of them being just pulsating stars. In the case of animals, there is no defined and systematic definition of sentience, and the scale is tipped towards sentience anyway.

Furthermore I fail to see how this is dangerous. Identifying and empathizing with another animal? How horrible! I should obviously be focused on my species...cause my species is da best. :-}

Science certainly promotes popular notions about reality being a mechanism. But scientists - especially if they biologists - know that the reality is in fact organic. So bodies are not simply machines, but complexly/semiotically machines, and thus not really machines at all. — apokrisis

To quote Voltaire, then, if animals cannot feel or have no sentience - then why are their bodies structured and their behaviors so as if they do feel and have sentience?

I'm seeking to limit theorising to what is rational. Your OP claimed to want rational thinking. I have shown how your views are actually informed by the irrationalism, the dualism, the transcendence, the absolutism, that are all the hallmarks of Romanticism. — apokrisis

No, you claim that my views are irrational. They are not. They are informed by science, informed by ethical theory.

Put yourself in the shoes of a lab mouse. Do you really think it would be alright for the scientists to experiment on you just because they think you're not actually "there"?

What could possibly be so important as to warrant the ignoring of the suffering of other beings?

If you spend all your time worrying about the pain lions inflict on zebra, you are never going to contribute in useful fashion to the real moral consequences of collective human behaviour for both lions and zebra. — apokrisis

I'm not spending all my time worrying about it - I'm doing something about it by contributing to Effective Altruism programs (the most significant and effective means to help others currently under the Sun). What you see as complaining is me attempting to convince others.

Do you think there is a problem or not in regards to animal suffering? How am I wasting time by pointing out what I see to be problems? Essentially your position comes down to "I don't quite agree with what OP is saying, therefore he is wasting is time." Nonsense.

You lost me there. How can the justification not be basic? — apokrisis

Because I'm not a deontologist. Intentions don't matter to me. As long as the best possible state of affairs acquires, justification doesn't matter. The best possible state of affairs is going to be the best because of right reasons. though. It's the same reasoning behind a political party - lots of different viewpoints, but somehow they all come together to support a single candidate. Each person believes the candidate to be the best, despite having differing reasons, and these differing reasons don't concern them so long as the candidate is elected.

Species are made of individual organisms that have a family resemblance to each other. They are fluid and ever-changing, yes, but we can organize them so for pragmatic reasons.

The question then becomes; Is it necessary for individuals to be capable of conceiving of themselves as 'person' for them to qualify as a person? — John

Personhood brings so much to the table. To be a person would seem to mean you should have bodily autonomy, the ability to participate in politics, pursue your dreams, etc.

But personhood is not necessary for an organism to suffer. So the ability to conceive of oneself as a person is not identical to ethical importance.

Eliminating predation? What by euthanasing all predators? Teaching spiders to be vegan? What are you even talking about? — apokrisis

I'm talking about radical restructuring of the ecosystems of the world in the same way first world countries restructure the political and economic structures of developing nations.

As I've explained before, as has been affirmed elsewhere (see the Foundational Research Institute), constraining the amount of foliage results in less herbivores and even less predators. Decrease the amount of foliage so that the herbivore population is manageable and the carnivore population is eliminated.

But this is merely pragmatic issues, not on the level of theoretical normative ethics.

Occam's razor says it is rational to seek the least complicated explanation of natural phenomena. I happened to be in Antarctica with penguin researchers a few years ago. And in fact a little group of penguins waddled right past the base heading in the wrong direction. They didn't look unhappy, just determined. The researchers said they get lost like that all the time as they seek out new living space. We headed them off and pointed them back where they came. But the researchers said most likely they would resume their trek after we had gone. — apokrisis

No, it's recorded that penguins remove themselves from their society and die in the middle of nowhere. They are tracked and found to die miles away from the ocean. There is video evidence of penguins looking back at their clan as if they are looking back in forlorn. They know exactly what they're doing.

In the wake of uncertainty, we should opt for the most inclusive position - that of assuming animals can suffer, and not jumping to conclusions that inevitably marginalize potential sufferers.

Or the rational answer.

The conflict here is between the Enlightenment and the Romantic point of view. — apokrisis

Absolutely not. It was the Enlightenment after all that produced the Cartesian view of animals as simply "machines" that has persisted for centuries.

I'm not sure why you keep trying to reduce my arguments to the binary Enlightenment/Romantic view.

Sure, we could all eat powered seaweed and the planet might then support 20 billion people. But rather than one dimensional thinking like this, it would be more moral to recognise the huge complexity of the ecological disaster we are so busy manufacturing. — apokrisis

Straw man.

So there is no point discussing morality in an abstracted absolutist fashion - especially in terms of what we would all hope for, but already believe could never be achieved.

We have real problems in the world which we need to solve. Your romanticism becomes Nero fiddling while Rome burns in that context. Veganism or anti-natalism is dangerously distracting - immoral behaviour - to the degree it degrades contemporary moral debate. — apokrisis

No, it's not, because there's a difference between normative ethics and practical applied ethics. I am under no delusion that veganism will be adopted worldwide. This does not change the truth of my claims, though.

You're operating under the assumption that what we can fix is all we ought to fix. This limits the content of our theories.

In exaggerating the agency of the sentient individual, you are playing right into the hands of fossil fuel's desire for entropification. Removing social and cultural constraints on biologically-wired desires is exactly why rampant entropification is winning despite our own human long term interests. — apokrisis

Maybe it's time to realize that entropy will always dominate our future interests. Hence why I said that the universe can sometimes seem almost sinister.

Who was talking about "good" in some abstract absolutist sense?

Again you betray your Romantic ontology in worrying about what might "inhere" in material reality as if it might exist "elsewhere" in Platonically ideal fashion. If you understood Naturalism, you would see this couldn't even be the issue. — apokrisis

No, I really don't, stop telling me what my views are.

You point to the indifference of Nature - even its sinister character - as a way to sustain the standard mind/body dualism of Romanticism. You have to "other" the world in a way that justifies your absolute privileging of the self - the individual and his mind, his soul, his inalienable being. — apokrisis

And you seem content with diminishing this perceived rift between the self and the rest of the world as if it's not important at all, thus shifting the focus of ethics from people as they perceive themselves as people to some abstract universal concept of entropy. We are part of the world, yes, but we also seem apart of the world as well. There is a larger picture at play, thermodynamic entropification, that we don't easily identify with. This is the "other" in which I speak, not in an ontological manner but a phenomenological manner.

In removing all moral determination from "the world" - and society and culture are the principle target there - the Romantic reserves all moral determination for "the self". So it suddenly becomes all right if you are a vegan or anti-natalist "like me". You don't actually need a reason. You get an automatic high five as a kindred spirit. Morality becomes reduced to a personal preference - the preferences the Romantic knows to be true because of the certitude of his feelings about these things. — apokrisis

Well, I mean I am a consequentialist. I would prefer if you were vegetarian and antinatalist for good reasons, but what matters ultimately is how your actions are affected by your views regardless of their justification.

Now, my rejecting postmodernism as nonsense is primarily due to the fact that they reject those rules, which in turn enables me to reject it. Once you say that words no longer correspond to reality, that they construct reality, or that nothing is outside the text, etc then we cannot but talk past each other. — Thorongil

As soon as someone leaves the realm of the intelligible then they deserve to be ignored. Post-modernism has, by and far, left this realm.

I don't see why it's inconsistent. Am I inconsistent if I eat a burger but not a hot dog? So why am I inconsistent if I help one person but not another? — Michael

In the case of burgers and hot dogs, no, you are not being consistent, but that's acceptable. You like burgers more than hot dogs.

But apply this reasoning to helping people. You would have to say that you like people of your own species more than people of different species, i.e. other people of different species don't matter.

This, I think, produces a feeling that adequately satisfies the open-ended question and shows how it is inconsistent to believe the latter but not the former, because the latter is a distinctively moral claim. I need not tell you that speciesism is immoral for you to come to your conclusion that speciesism is immoral.

Where has this "should" come from? You were just talking about what we actually do. — Michael

Switch "wouldn't" to "shouldn't". Or vice versa.

rarely, if ever, admonish them for immoral behaviour, or for eating meat. — tom

One of the points of abolishing speciesism is becoming an active role in the ecosystem - i.e. intervening and eliminating predation, helping diseased animals, etc.

Again, I am the first to say animals are aware. But it is a plugged into the moment or extrospective awareness. Humans have grammatical speech and so a new level of abstract symbolic thought. — apokrisis

Non-human animals are not capable of higher level thought process at the tier of humans, so they cannot be seriously expected to be moral agents. They can't even vote.

Yet they can suffer, and that's what matters. Many non-human animals have intellectual abilities on par or superior to babies, toddlers, and the mentally infirm. Yet these animals are often not seen as morally important.

Nonsense. Animals don't contemplate suicide because they are not equipped for that kind of (socially constructed) kind of thinking about the fact of their own existence. — apokrisis

This is not correct. Many animals are capable of experiencing depression. Look at dogs who lose their owners, they mope about and are unable to be cheered up. Or a mother sheep who loses her offspring.

Penguins actually have been recorded to kill themselves. If they cannot find a mate, they walk into the ice desert of Antarctica and die.

So to mitigate the suffering of non-human animals because they lack socially constructed propositional language is, as I see it, dogmatic and narrow-minded.

You got it. And from there, your extended family, your neighbours, your town, your nation. Or however else your social existence is in fact hierarchically organised in terms of co-dependent interactions.

It is not a bad thing. It would be irrational not to be most interested in those with whom there is the most common interests. Its normal social organisation. — apokrisis

Right, but there's a difference between rational egoism and ethical altruism. Shelly spends an entire book debunking the notion that rational egoistic constraints can be rationally (in the non-egoistic way) applied to ethics. They're arbitrary.

Our abilities and our biases do not constrain morality. Morality need not be possible to attain for it to be so.

That's my point. The loss of social cohesion is one of modern society's moral problems. Once people start caring more about highly abstracted wrongs than the wrongs they can see right under their nose, then things get out of kilter. — apokrisis

How so? Singer actually argues that if we adopted vegetarianism or something like this, we could solve a lot of the world's hunger problems.

But in any case, how does extending one's care for another being outside of one's neighborhood make the whole thing topple? I mean, there's an entire movement, Effective Altruism, dedicated to figuring out how people can still enjoy their lives while doing the most they can.

I take the naturalistic view and so "it is all one cosmos". But then there is also a clear structure - an emergent hierarchical organisation, a self-balancing complexity - that is also part of this naturalness. And it would thus be only natural for that ontology to inform any moral reasoning.

We know what is natural. The debate then is whether to remain consistent with that or to strike off in a different direction because it is "reasonable" ... then supplying a good reason for deviating from nature. — apokrisis

Yes, and I am advocating a moral non-naturalism. Nature is not inherently good, in fact many times it comes across as entirely indifferent or perhaps even sinister.

So yes, it is all "one cosmos" - yet we are also part of the cosmos, and we can feel, we can suffer. So any emergent, local phenomenon like morality is still going to be under the "one cosmos", but in a specific location. Applying holistic habits of thermodynamics to acute problems in morality obscures the identity of morality.

What 'rules of the Universe' are you referring to? Scientific law? And 'being moral' requires deliberation, to the extent one 'obeys instinctual programming' then you're no different to animals, and there's no morality involved. Indeed the fact tha we can reflect on and amend our course of action, is one of the fundamental ways we differ from animals. — Wayfarer

For the record, I'm not advocating evolutionary ethics.

Disgust is an emotion, as is empathy. So how is it a rational argument? — Michael

We need certain basic intuitions to get discussion off the ground. In terms of ethics, one of these intuitions is empathy. From there we can create rough logical syllogisms. In fact we don't even have to call anything (im)moral to get a point across. We can show how inconsistent our behavior is: for example, we would help a child who is drowning in a lake, so why wouldn't we help the child in Africa who is dying from malaria? We would help our dog if it was injured, so why wouldn't we help the rodent in the Amazonian jungle who is injured? We wouldn't experiment on humans, so why should we be allowed to experiment on animals?

Common-sense morality is filled with contradictions and arbitrary constraints, like I said.

I don't agree that empirical research can actually demonstrate this.

I don't have a problem assuming that some non-human animals have consciousness. I definitely assume that. — Terrapin Station

Correct.

Of course, I'm a subjectivist/an individual-oriented relativist on ethics anyway. I don't have any ethical problem with keeping animals as pets, keeping them in zoos, having them perform in circuses, using them for meat, etc. — Terrapin Station

I wonder how you can be alright with this if you assume non-human animals have consciousness without lacking empathy or suffering cognitive dissonance.

The fact is that even if you eradicated speciesm from humans you have only made a small dent in specieism as a whole. How are you going to change the minds of all those other animals and if you don't think it is necessary to do so, then you really aren't against specieism - just as Black Lives Matter isn't about all black lives - only about black lives ended by cops. — Harry Hindu

This is a pragmatic argument that does not affect the legitimacy of the OP.

In any case, we would presumably change the minds of predators by eliminating them from the population and restructuring ecosystems so predators cannot exist en masse. A good way of doing this would be to limit the amount of foliage available for herbivores to eat. Thus the population of herbivores would decrease, and the population of carnivores would follow.

It's interesting how most of us, including the participants in this thread, drift from saying 'non-human animals' to mistakenly saying 'animals' - by which we mean all animal life but humans. We are like them; oh, but we aren't. — mcdoodle

Singer points this out in his book Animal Liberation and argues that the use of "animals" instead of "non-human animals" is merely for pragmatic efficiency, not to demean them in any way.

There seems almost an injustice. The suicide act itself was trying to be some sort of romantic gesture of rebellion against life's pain. The fact that this ability to control one's fate was taken away, even if the same result occurred, seems to make a difference. — schopenhauer1

Excellent thought experiment, I agree.

But only humans have articulate speech and so a capacity to master the habits of thought that we would associate with being self-conscious. For instance, we can fear our death. We can even fear the death of those animals particularly dear to us. So in reality there is a discontinuity there that would make a difference. — apokrisis

There is not. You are asserting that propositional mental content is required for self-consciousness, or any sort of experience at all for that matter, when this is quite a big issue and actually has a lot going against it. Furthermore, humans are not the only ones with language - look at birds, dolphins, whales, primates, etc. They may not be as refined or poetic (capable of metaphors) as ours, but they act as a complex signalling device that offers the hypothesis that they realize who they are and that others like them exist.

In any case, it is clear from the behavior of animals that many, if not most, fear death, which is why suicide is almost unheard of outside of human civilization. It is clear that animals react to painful stimuli in similar ways that we do. It is clear they nurture their young and care about the pack. And until we have good evidence that animals aren't conscious in some sense (evidence is leaning the other way), it would be wise to act as if they do have consciousness.

And then there is also a proximity argument. You may not like it, but it seems quite rational to be most concerned with everything that is closest to us. If a plane crashes in a foreign land, it is natural to care most about any tourists from our home country. And this is because it is only sensible to care the most about what we most directly can affect (or be affected by). It is irrational to just have a free-floating abstract empathy, regardless of differences in proximity. — apokrisis

I disagree. Hume pointed out how proximity matters in empathy, but he failed to recognize economic proximity. The super rich ignore the super poor right outside their doorstep. It's only natural to care for one's family - but tell that to Marx and see how he reacts.

Bottom line here is that appeals to proximity or emotional support groups (like nationalism) is tribalism, a worn-out doctrine that can and should be replaced by a cosmopolitanism.

So your starting point is a presumption of a world without gradations. And yet gradations exist. Any rational ethics would take account of the fact we are actually people embedded in a complex world, not souls living in moral Platonia. — apokrisis

I'm not really sure what you're saying here, but from what I can tell you are associating comfort with morality. So long as we follow the rules of the universe and obey our instinctual programming, we're being moral. Moral conventionalism, i.e. common-sense morality, rife with contradictions and arbitrary constraints on action.

Excellent.

Wrong. — apokrisis

Please explain.

genocide — apokrisis

False.

You are forgetting that it is the preferences of others that you are judging. — apokrisis

Quite the opposite, I realize that nobody wants to die, nobody wants to suffer, nobody wants to lead a tedious life, all structural parts of life.

So modern society exists primarily for mass entertainment.

Are you for real? — apokrisis

Well, what other purpose is there for society other than to help people survive and the sedate them from their fears? Hints of instrumentalism can be seen here...

Let's not be ridiculous. — apokrisis

Bring an argument, then, cause you're not an authority.

What level of natural selection do you want to talk about then? Merely the cultural? Not the social or the ecological? — apokrisis

The ones that put people as ethical priority, as any ethical theory should.

Is there a reason you skipped my actual point? Pain can only exist in counterfactuality to its phenomenological "other" - pleasure. So if the existence of pain is your big ethical concern, then that is the counterfactual that is actually relevant. — apokrisis

I doubt this. Surely we can feel pain without feeling pleasure. Surely we don't need black to see white. We just see white.

Yet you state that the red plate, along with your sibling, is literally are non-existent. — apokrisis

Because it is.

So yes, this kind of logical talk is very familiar. It works well for reasoning about states of affairs. It is very pragmatic.

But it is all at sea when it comes to addressing deep metaphysical questions. — apokrisis

I thought you were all about pragmatism.

Well, it would seem to remove what is in your eyes a major constraint on their existing. What would they say if you indeed allowed them to exist having created such living conditions? Thank-you? — apokrisis

THIS WAS MY POINT, APO. We should focus on what IS/COULD BE the case FOR an individual. A bad psychological state doesn't need a redemptive opposite for it to be bad. We don't need a good state of affairs to act ethically.

It's actually pretty rare for people to wish they have never been born even in this imperfect world. So it seem presumptuous of you to talk for the unborn billions. — apokrisis

Right, cause the majority can't at all be wrong, or because the majority wins by sheer might. huh

That would be more convincing if you just hadn't begun by presuming the opposite - that society is a bunch of people who for some reason wandered off their desert islands, with their abundant food supplies, to go live collectively and dependently in the name of a little light entertainment and big city distraction. — apokrisis

What? What is more realistic is that society developed initially to support our needs to survive, but later began to develop as a means of keeping ourselves entertained. Civilization is OP in comparison to what nature throws at us generally. Yet we have the brainpower and time left over...what to do, as we twiddle our fingers?

What, indeed? Perhaps we'll argue on an internet forum!

But anthropology has no trouble explaining the phenomenology. It is obvious that modern folk live such insulated lives that they develop a magnified fear of the real world. Every papercut becomes the Holocaust because life has lost its normal calibration.

If you grow up dressed in silk, even the manufacturer's tag may seem like an unbearable annoyance.

So this kind of complaining about the unendurability of life is simply a symptom of something you need to fix. It has none of the grandeur of a fundamental philosophical problem or even a Shakespearian tragedy. It is just simply a practical issue - how can we design modern society better in a way that might be more natural to what makes the human animal most content? — apokrisis

Anthropology also can help explain as to why humans have to make culture to begin with. Done unbiased it shows how humans have developed civilization as a hodgepodge method of postponing/procrastinating death.

No amount of social institutions are going to fix the structural aspects of the human condition, only make them more or less bearable.

You have to make up your mind whether the world exists then. If it does, then there may be something beyond your person-al phenomenology. :-} — apokrisis

Oh, it exists sure, but we're not focused on the World, are we? We're focused on the inhabitants of the World! The basic focus of ethics! People! Not the relations they have to the environment or how they are part of the great cosmic plan of entropification.

And?

Unless you are going beyond phenomenology to claim ontic idealism or dualism, there is no reason to treat pain as some disembodied quality whose existence can be weighed in Platonic fashion. — apokrisis

And neither did I claim so. You're making this impossibly difficult. Pain exists where people exist. If people do not exist, then pain does not exist. If we identity pleasure as the only good, then the lack of pain is actually not a good thing at all, rather, it's merely comparative betterness in an impersonal sense. Non-existence cannot be good or bad for anyone. I'm not sure why this is so difficult.

How many different abuses of logic can you conjure up just to maintain an argument that doesn't work? — apokrisis

Oh, my god, you're hilarious. Insulting, but hilarious.

You agree - even going so far as to say the specific context is you and me agreeing verbally about the absence of some currently experienced particular. — apokrisis

We're not just talking about things that already exist, we're talking about potential existants. Just because the lack of pain would be good for us, doesn't mean the lack of pain would be good for potential, unborn people. Because we already exist, and they do not. This is not that hard.

And yet of no evolved creature could this scenario ring less true. Humans are socially and even culturally-constructed beings. We are only complete as functional members of functioning groups. So you are basing an argument on an utter fantasy. — apokrisis

And you're trying to reduce transparent phenomenological experiences to a foreign anthropological structure. As if recognizing the sustaining force of our existence doesn't make it less (or perhaps more?) absurd.

But if you recognize that, you can simply realize this interpretation of non-existence as a future non-painful state of affairs which you appear to be doing in this post. — schopenhauer1

A non-painful state of affairs is a bit incoherent in my opinion, as a state of affairs can't feel pain. Instead I would call it a state of affairs that has no individuals who are experiencing pain. Otherwise it seems like we're fantasizing about an impossibility.

To those caught up- perhaps instrumentality makes no sense at all.. Many people might feel it eventually in angst, but do not reflect on it enough to make sense of it and thus is a subtle feeling of discomfort behind the scenes and not seen as something that drives every decision and forces us to move forward. — schopenhauer1

Most people I think never go beyond the initial perturbation.

I'm talking about the logic we would apply to anything. And you already agree we are talking about "possible worlds" don't you? — apokrisis

Different scenarios require us to use different techniques.

Again, your dualism in this regard is only possible if you reject the holism of natural philosophy.

So yes. You continually claim this kind of atomistic freedom. It appears to validate your logic. I'm just pointing out its deep flaws. It is the reason why you just accept that there is the world, and there is the self. — apokrisis

Because phenomenologically that is the case, and that is where ethics resides.

I dunno. Suppressing the potential for tortured lives by addressing their contextual causes seems a lot more logical to me. Doing something about that is what would be actually logical wouldn't you say? — apokrisis

But again this is not personal value here. Suppressing the potential for tortured lives only benefits those who exist. And then we have the non-identity problem, and the related issue of lives that are inherently shitty - i.e. if they weren't shitty, they wouldn't be the same life.

But red china plates can and do exist. So there is both the general possibility and the literal actuality. — apokrisis

Well, sure, but we're talking about an individual china plate, just as we are talking about the advantages a potential, single person can have in non-existence. Does non-existence benefit anyone? I answer in the negative.

Everything else is gibberish, sorry.

Is it an objective fact that all we ever experience is the subjective?

So you can't talk about the possibility of you having a sibling in any plausible fashion unless it is in fact plausible that such a sibling might exist. And you say such a sibling doesn't exist - but how can you be so sure? Did you check in the basement where your parents have had him locked up all these years?

So sure, modal logic is good for reasoning as often the world is atomistically disjoint to a high degree of approximation. It is close enough to a collection of independent events fixed by a history for us to just argue in that fashion. You could have had a brother. But you don't.

I'm just pointing out that this is not a secure basis for the kind of grandly general argument you want to mount here. — apokrisis

I don't see how this is necessarily of cosmic importance. After all, if we're talking holism here, a little change doesn't alter the overall structure of the universe. Whether or not I exist does not change much cosmically. I've said this before, the ethics I work with is not necessarily of cosmic importance, rather, it's of person-al importance.

When I talk of possible people, then, I'm taking a person-oriented stance that focuses on advantages and disadvantages related to experience. So non-existence initially seems like it might be advantageous to the tortured child - yet clearly if this child does not exist, then there are no advantages to be found.

It is of course entirely rational. Bad and good encode a counterfactuality that makes it possible for there to be definitely something. Things can be one way because it is a real possibility they could be the other way.

I realise you find this problematic because it means life being bad means life can be good. But tough. You just have an illogical approach to this issue. — apokrisis

Well, sorry, you've just ignored the whole point of my post. Counterfactual reasoning in regards to non-existence only applies to the environment, not to the non-existent thing. The difference between the two possible worlds is measured by the causal importance of the subject thing in question. But personal values can only be derived from existing. Therefore, counterfactual reasoning in regards to personal values is rationally impossible. All other attempts to do so are merely fictions, i.e. a over-liberal use of everyday counterfactual reasoning (existing vs existing) to a quite different situation (existing vs not-existing).

If a red chinaplate does not exist, what color is it? It's an inane and irrational question: the plate isn't even able to even have a color to begin with in virtue of it not existing.

The whole purpose here was to show how we can still do ethics without the need for a counterfactual correlate, and in fact is preferable anyway since it focuses on the needs of a person instead of a dream future.

By literal non-existence I meant an absence of something. I can imagine having another sibling. This sibling is absent, non-existent. A pure possibility, whatever that manifests as.

What I'm not arguing for is holistic non-existence as a whole. Only what it means to be non-existent at the level of identity.

Alternatively, we can say that non-existence is characterized as the differences between possible worlds. But this places the focus of ethics on states of affairs, when I was distinctly trying to maintain a person-oriented ethics, i.e. something is good/bad for a person.

Was this from my response to your other post earlier regarding goals? — schopenhauer1

No.

I remember explaining a while back the difference between a totally ideal world in the preference satisfaction sense, and a totally united world in the Schopenhaurian sense, and I think these two ideas might help with your question..

Preference satisfaction ideal world: In an ideal world all preferences would be satisfied at a particular instant of time for the exact outcome one would want at that particular time (even the preference for an unknown amount of pain/misadventure that might enhance one's overall satisfaction). All dials would be adjusted accordingly. The idea of one's life needing to be a tragi-comedy would not even have to be entertained as one is just "satisfied" enough not to default to this coping aesthetic.

Schopenhauerian ideal world All would be stasis and not flux. There is no want or need as one would be completely unified with everything else. Thus a unitary existence where everything is everything is almost equivalent to everything is nothing. It is absolute completeness in the metaphysical sense. Nothing is lacking. — schopenhauer1

In regards to the preference satisfaction ideal world, this aligns with what I see to be the morality of childbirth - for childbirth to be moral, we must fulfill a certain standard for this child. If we cannot fulfill this standard, then we ought not have the child. Of course, this standard is debatable, and in my opinion cannot be fulfilled in this world. But others might disagree and believe the standard can be met. But that is a different topic.

In regards to the Schopenhauerean ideal world, I find this to be merely equivocating value. Just as certain Buddhist strains of thought make nirvana out to be a peaceful bliss in non-existence, the Schopenhauerean ideal world is one without flux or change. But this additionally means no thinking can occur, because nobody exists to think, since thinking is a process and therefore a kind of change. Thus Schopenhauer's ideal world as you describe it can be seen as the ultimate negation of life, and furthermore falls into the trap of reifying value where there is none - i.e. "grass-is-always-greener" thinking, or a need to anchor oneself in another reality. In this case, though, the other reality is unconceivable.

Schopenhauer may have been a pessimist, but if his ideal world is as you describe then he's still anchoring on to the idea of a redemptive staticity. While a full-going pessimist, in my view, negates any redemption. There's bad and not-bad. Never any good in our case. Equivocating not-bad as good reeks of desperation.

See if there's any openings around you for philosophy teachers, maybe in grade school or a community college. You might have to have education credentials, though.

Given the human propensity to ask "why" questions, existence seems to becomes irrevocably absurd.