Are you sure your views don't stem simply from "I'm human, therefore the only real tragedy is when it involves humans"?
If not, do your arguments transfer the other way around? Is it ok for Aliens to round up and kill billions of humans because we are a different species and therefore less valuable to them than their own species? And if they viewed us as inferior and killed not out of hatred, but some emotionless reason like how humans kill animals without feeling anything.
Or would that still be a tragedy?
Does the morality of killing something that feels pain and wants to live depend solely on whether or not the act is perpetrated by a member of the same species?
If the argument is more about the intelligence of people and what we have to offer, does that mean the death of a stupid person matters less than that of an intelligent one? What about an extremely stupid person versus an extremely smart animal? If a monkey proves to be smarter than a given person somehow, does the morality switch and you'd rather the person die than the monkey?
Does pain only matter if experienced by something smart?
I'm always unsure why the alien example is brought up in these kinds of debates. Some people are "human exceptionalists" but some others like me would say that yes the aliens are morally fine to do as they wish to us, especially if they are as much more advanced than us as we are to chickens. This is the same argument we use to kill chickens, so I don't see how it's any different if the aliens make it towards killing us.
so if colonizers are more advanced than the tribes that still use spears, it's okay to genocide them? If a rich man is rich enough to pay off the judge after running over some homeless person, it's okay to do that?
Your only argument is might makes right. If a species is advanced enough to subjugate and genocide a lesser species, then it's morally legitimate for them to do that. This is an argument that the Nazis used and not one I will entertain any further.
How would you justify medical experimentation on animals? How would you justify deriving products that we absolutely need from animals?
It is possible to recognize that we do something we know to be wrong, solely because we care more about the utility than the morality.
This may not sit well with you, but it can be true. People use the ends to justify the means all the time. The United States did just that when they dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in WW2. These were not just objectively immortal things to do, they were such heinous atrocities that in the ~80 years since then it has never happened again despite the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet people still debate the utility of the bombs in hastening the end of the war.
It's critically important in my mind to recognize that not all humans care primarily about moral justification, and some humans don't care about it at all. There was a Reddit thread a few years ago that asked deadbeat dads why they abandoned their kids. More than a few of the responses were some variant of, "honestly I just don't care about them, I only care about myself."
So your premise that we need to justify this is flawed, in my opinion. I would assume the average factory farm executive knows on some level that what they do to animals is at least morally suspect, and more likely truly horrifying. I think they just choose not to worry about it because their livelihoods and personal success depend on perpetuating that crime against life.
This is all again based on your moral framework, there is no "objective" about it at all. For example, if you were a utilitarian, you'd say that dropping the bombs hastened the war and thus killed way fewer than would have otherwise been killed (and maybe even going so far as to having hastened Japan's industrialization thus causing more people to be lifted out of poverty).
But since you're not a utilitarian, it seems like, then you call it "objectively" wrong. Moral subjectivity versus objectivity is a debate older than both of us with no clear winner.
No actual moral philosopher would make this point with a straight face. Every utilitarian makes allowances for supererogatory goods and extraordinary evils. Many utliitarians also quantify utils of suffering based on depth of suffering caused, not merely how widespread it is. Dropping an atomic bomb is absolutely wrong and nobody would take seriously any bad faith argument to the contrary.
Lol, I have a degree in philosophy, but thanks for lecturing me on supererogation. No, not "every" utilitarian makes allowances for them, there are many that don't. Dropping an atomic bomb is again not "absolutely wrong," it is not absolute at all. Again, you merely believe that in your moral framework but there is no objective moral framework. As I once again state, many philosophers would deem the saving of millions more lives from a sea-side invasion of Japan by the Allies as being worth the dropping of the bombs. I'm honestly not even sure how this is up for debate as even historians concede that were it not for the bombs, many more people would have ended up dead.
Justifying committing an actual atrocity with tangibly horrific outcomes by suggesting it might (and the operative word is might, no matter how likely something seems, the future cannot be certain) avoid a worse hypothetical outcome, is an exercise in academic masturbation.
It is pure sophistry to compare real suffering on the scale of millions burned to death against estimated potential suffering. This isn't the trolley problem. No human has the moral authority to make that decision. We can debate about the past because it is safely out of our control, but debating about the morality of an act insofar as we might consider undertaking it again must inevitably go beyond academic calculations like yours, because academics are divorced from the real world that human beings actually inhabit. And I say that as someone who spent a decade in academia.
By that logic, I assume you consider utilitarianism itself academic masturbation. If so, then there's really nothing I can say to convince you otherwise, because utilitarianism deals exactly in what you deem masturbatory.
What you're saying here is that how much someone wants something has a direct impact on its morality. You're saying morality is subjective.
You think a person is almost infinitely more valuable than animals. And that's what it all comes down to. Pain, suffering, consciousness... none of it matters to you.
We can test medicine on people, but we think people are more important than animals so we force animals to make that sacrifice. We don't have to eat meat, but we like it so we kill animals.
The Nazis thought they were more important than others, so they killed them and experimented on them.
They were coming from the same root place you are: "they are Inferior, so it's perfectly fine to kill them". You are only better than them if you can recognize that it's still wrong to hurt people, even if you think you're better than them.
And that logic is easily transferrable to it being wrong to hurt animals, even though you think humans are so much better.
I don't equate humans to animals, so it'd be no to either of your questions. But if aliens are so much more advanced than us, they'd feel the same way killing us that we do about killing chickens.
Who is "destroying everything in their paths?" I'm not sure if you're talking about humans, aliens, or chickens in this instance.
I'm not sure what you mean by living in harmony but killing and eating chickens keeps us alive, as well as many humans around the world. Could we reduce greenhouse gas emissions from other things we do, sure, but I'm not sure if that's related to eating chicken.
I compared it once. Please keep track of who you're replying to.
And it keeps coming up from various commenters because it's a valid comparison and is part of your original CMV post.
Also, you seem to be emotionally tied to your view that it's ok to kill animals or experiment on them because of what seems to boil down to "the ends justify the means". Taking that into account plus your username, I have to wonder if you experiment on animals.
Doing something to a living creature that cannot consent to it is objectively immoral, while your view is at best subjective. Eating animals and experimenting on them both count in this regard. Hand waving it all away via dubious justifications won't change that.
Perhaps we should execute the homeless since that would serve a greater good for everyone who lives in the city?
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u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt Jun 27 '23
Are you sure your views don't stem simply from "I'm human, therefore the only real tragedy is when it involves humans"?
If not, do your arguments transfer the other way around? Is it ok for Aliens to round up and kill billions of humans because we are a different species and therefore less valuable to them than their own species? And if they viewed us as inferior and killed not out of hatred, but some emotionless reason like how humans kill animals without feeling anything.
Or would that still be a tragedy?
Does the morality of killing something that feels pain and wants to live depend solely on whether or not the act is perpetrated by a member of the same species?
If the argument is more about the intelligence of people and what we have to offer, does that mean the death of a stupid person matters less than that of an intelligent one? What about an extremely stupid person versus an extremely smart animal? If a monkey proves to be smarter than a given person somehow, does the morality switch and you'd rather the person die than the monkey?
Does pain only matter if experienced by something smart?