>>5164765
Similarly, if you want to avoid atrocity, sneeringly dismissing any counterintuitive moral conclusion that goes against the entrenched practices of your society won’t do. If you’d done that in the past, you’d have dismissed the abolitionists who claimed slavery was evil, the feminists who claimed women were entitled to the same basic rights as men, and those bleeding hearts who suggested it was a violation of human dignity to slaughter and rape innocent enemy non-combatants.

If you don’t want to do evil things, then you have to seriously entertain the possibility that your society might be doing evil things. And note: seriously entertaining the possibility does not merely consist in thinking, every once in a while, “it may be that our society does evil things.” It also does not consist in declaring that the political issue of the day that you care about most is so important that those who disagree with you are like the Nazis. The worst atrocities have generally been mostly ignored; whether slavery should be abolished was not the main political agenda item for almost any time in history. Probably the #1 item on the political agenda isn’t going to be the most consequential moral issue.

Being serious about not participating in atrocities involves thinking very hard about particular sources of potential atrocity, where the interests of large classes of beings are written off.

>>5164766
For example, think to yourself: is it very bad that most people (likely including you) don’t give money to effective charities, even when doing so could spare innocent children from death? https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-just-took-the-giving-what-we Or alternatively: is the fact that we annually torture a population of animals more than the number of people who have ever lived so we can eat them, causing more suffering in a few years than all the suffering in human history so far, a serious moral issue? https://benthams.substack.com/p/factory-farming-is-not-just-bad-its Or alternatively: is the fact that we kill lots of fetuses before they’ve exited the womb a big deal?

I am telling you to consider these questions, not where to come down on them. For my view, I think early stage abortions are permissible. But if they’re not, then society may be doing something utterly grotesque to the most vulnerable. You should try to think hard about each particular source of potential atrocity, rather than sneering at it or dismissing it. This is why even though I’m not pro-life, at least not for early-stage abortions, I have the utmost respect for many of those who are—and the utmost disappointment in those who treat it as an issue to be dismissively shrugged off.

This is one of the things that saddened me so much about the recent AI consciousness discourse. People seemed extremely eager to near-instantaneously dismiss the possibility that AI was conscious. Rather than thinking through the question, considering arguments on both sides, and consulting our leading theories about AI consciousness, they rushed immediately for some excuse to write the whole thing off.

>>5164768
Failing to attribute consciousness to conscious beings has been a common error. Throughout the 70s and into the 80s, it was thought that infants weren’t conscious. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Pain-and-its-effects-in-the-human-neonate-and-Anand-Hickey/6c4a0cd45c9e7190f522bd6afdd68dbd762ad8dd Anesthesia wasn’t given when surgeries were carried out on infants. If you, upon hearing some suggestion that a group currently treated as insentient might be sentient, had reacted with dismissive sneering, then you would have been on the wrong side of many disputes of the past. You’d have been on the side that unnecessarily tortured infants.

>>5164769
Of course, this is not to say that we should attribute consciousness to every being imaginable. I don’t think rocks are conscious—nor even that plants, mussels, and oysters are. But it is a reason to think seriously about the question. You should try to approach it with a kind of open-mindedness that isn’t just about rationalizing your pre-existing beliefs; a kind which, if applied to past disputes, would have gotten the right answer. You should err on the side of caution, on including more beings in your moral circle, rather than fewer.

More generally, we should be very wary about arguments for writing off the interests of certain groups. Past societies reserved their worst atrocities for members of the outgroup. The outgroup could include slaves, foreigners, or members of other ethnic groups. A constricted moral circle is the cause of most historical injustice.

Upon noticing that past societies have wrongly failed to attribute moral importance to morally important beings, we should suspect that our society is doing the same. Then, upon noticing, say, the giant torture farms that operate at the heart of America and cause more suffering in a few years than all the suffering in human history—that cause billions of beings more pain than you’ll ever know for the sake of tastier food—we should suspect that we are similarly blind to the cries of mattering beings.

>>5164770
Of course, we have our excuses as they had theirs. Read those defending slavery and you’ll find arguments for the practice. That you can think of a defense of a practice isn’t much assurance against the possibility of it being an atrocity, when every atrocity ever carried out has had its share of defenders. In general, noting the poor historical track record of those who wholly wrote off the interests of large classes of beings, you should be wary about ignoring lots of sentient beings’ interests.

You should strive to have compassion for all the parties involved, when considering a practice of potential great moral import. You should try to think about what it’s like to be those creatures that society neglects. When thinking about factory farming, say, imagine being a mother pig trapped for most of your life in a tiny crate too small to turn around in, with open, festering wounds, feces piled up around you, your baby stolen from you, your tail sliced off with no painkiller, and an upcoming trip across vast distances to a hellish gas chamber. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9N4TTmKcuI4

>>5164771
Hear them as they scream and imagine what it’s like to be the one screaming. When you hear them screaming, does it seem humane? Does it seem like anything other than a crime? If you see them as they are, rather than as ignorable meat factories, does the gassing of these defenseless, innocent creatures seem like anything other than a grotesque crime—one very much like the crimes of the past? My friend Mouthy Infidel put it well:

>I was trying to stare into my dog’s soul the other night (as one does) and was just hit with this wave of revelation about the degree of willful ignorance that it requires to deny the sentience, intelligence, personality, emotional depth, and so on of non human animals. The mass torture and abuse that we inflict on these creatures for the sake of trivial entertainment, gustatory pleasure and the like is truly unfathomable. No organized human society can claim to possess a modicum of moral decency while we continue to behave in this way.

>>5164772
If you want to avoid atrocity, you’ll have to approach the potential atrocities of today with the kind of open-mindedness that allows you to figure out when society is in the wrong. Punting to popular judgment, coming up with some shallow excuse to continue doing whatever you wanted to do, and summarily writing off the interests of those outside of our society’s moral circle nearly guarantees tolerating the atrocities of one’s society.

Those who recognized the evils of slavery often did so because they saw that an enslaved person is someone, just like a non-enslaved person. They saw the victims of these practices as they are. If we see clearly, in the same way, we will have to cease those culpable omissions that cause children to die, and we will have to shut down the gas chambers. Peer into a gas chamber, see its victim as someone, and it isn’t hard to see what justice demands.

What about the millions of baby boys circumcised every year?

Nice wall of text bro.

Too bad I'm not going to read it.

>>5164787
retard

>>5164788
Keep conversing with chatgpt. It's the only one that wants to listen to your blog post drivel.

I ain't reading all of that. But I did see the word "nazi" in there, so I'll just assume it talks about how based they were for their animal welfare laws.

Ethics based on abstracts such as "sentience" "consciousness" and "suffering" are wholly invalid without a spiritual belief such as undying souls, reincarnation, a judging god, or a complex soul-cycle involving vibrational levels/karma and other such made up bullshit.

Therefore I am 0% surprised OP is in fact a hindu indian man from the Ask Yourself discord. His entire "philosophy" is a sad attempt at transplanting india's inferior, invalid, and demonic pagan beliefs to the realm of reason.

In past debates, he has defended his belief that it would be morally correct to murder a human man to save 1000 cattle from becoming food, fantasized about torturing disabled white children to death to spare monkeys, and compared farming a lower species to raping women. All revealing his hindu nature.

Under valid ethics (both atheistic and yahwist) man looks after his own or is made in gods image and therefore his prosperity takes precedence over animals, which have no innate value other than their indirect effects on moral hygiene
If 10000000000000000 chickens have to suffer for the majority of the human population to fully develop, so be it. Meat restrictions disproportionately impact people the poorer and less educated they are.

Rich people should use their ample free time and resources to set an example by acquiring meat produced through cleaner and more humane methods instead of demonstrating an unsustainable form of dietary self-flagellation. No matter how rich you are, even with a dietician on standby and so much free time you can eat for a living, if you're vegan and your wife is vegan your children will be stunted, and if they remain vegan they will be stunted further. The effects on the lower class are so dramatic that it would produce a population with an average IQ of 70-80 and an average height of less than 5'7". We need to at least eat a decent amount of fish.

>>5164796
jeet op will just feed this post into chatgpt

calling it now

Hello is this the animal and nature board?

I would ask the mods to ban this dude for spamming his substack crap about ethics every few days but given the fact that the animal abuse report option was removed I think they just don't give a fuck anymore.
>>5164785
Circumcision is one of the most heinous normalized evils in this age. The suffering factory farming does is not intentional but a side effect of maximizing efficiency in order to feed billions. The goal of circumcision is the act itself: in other words genital mutilation and the effects of said mutilation are the intended goal. Every time you bring this up, people act like you're weird for caring about penis skin, but the only rebuttals they can make is "they don't remember it" (a lie), "it doesn't impact function" (a lie), or "it lowers STD rates" (a truth that ignores the fact that no one is circumcised with the goal of reducing STD rates, and that other preventative measures are much more effective).

>>5164796
Your strawman rants are more annoying than OP. At least his are somewhat grounded in reality lol

>>5164908
Here's reality for you:
It doesn't matter how many hours of pain a chicke endured if it was the only way your brain would grow to its full size.

There is a reason you are not a malnourished 75 IQ jeet and it is factory farmed meat.

>>5164913
>It doesn't matter how many hours of pain a chicke endured if it was the only way your brain would grow to its full size.
>There is a reason you are not a malnourished 75 IQ jeet and it is factory farmed meat.
Do you have evidence?

>>5164917
be a babby, before you're even born, in the body of a woman who doesnt eat enough meat, and then grow up like that, and tell me how you turn out
>you'll end up an overgrown toddler like greta thunberg if you're lucky
believe it or not, since humans have eaten meat for well over 2 million years, its because we need it

>>5164941
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v90Q4civ_ts

She has been vegan since conception and her parents were vegan for years before she was conceived. Your “evidence” is not convincing.

No veganism does not require thousands of dollars a year in supplements either. Do not make this claim without naming each supplement / nutrient and providing a study showing vegans are deficient in each of them and that this leads to significant worse health outcomes

>>5164944
this woman is visibly dysgenic with a small cranium and a job that does not require high intellect or strength

god only knows how much better she would be if properly fe
also hes right veganisn is satanic
man > animals

>>5164946
satan isn't real and even if he was he'd be morally superior to yahweh

>>5164946
Physiognomy is a pseudoscience and you don’t have calipers on her. She played sports and went to college

Remember when the ancient indians claimed the brahmin were not hurt by refusing meat and that killing was wrong period?

Remember how the creative phase of their civilization ended and lower castes became subhuman because not everyone could follow a strict diet that conflicted with not being a rich fuck?

Guess who conquered the world? Jews. Who eat BEEF.

I love schizo threads cause they're my anchor to sanity. Go right back to >>>/x/ with your retardedness!

>>5164948
self report
>im moral
>how?
>im good
>why?
>i made a rule where i am and will insult you if you dont hold to it
>*kills you* according to my rules this was a mercy
The fate of the antichristian pseud

>>5164949
>listen this rich woman is at 85% capacity and isnt held to high standards because she is a rich woman now starve yourself! starve everyone!
countries that eat insufficient meat are worse
simple as

>>5164952
I’m moral because I’m internally consistent and embody virtues like compassion

>>5164952
there's no self report because i'm categorically saying your fairy tales don't hold power over me and therefore you need a different framework
>dude this is EXACTLY what a satanist would say
misses the mark and again, is a non-sequitur for me
the burden is on you to prove anything in the bible is real
>>*kills you* according to my rules this was a mercy
why did we go straight to killing in your hypothetical?

>>5164956
>im moral because i obey my made up rules and care about dumb animals more than people
No you arent

>>5164955
Correlation =/= causation

Countries that eat less meat are poorer because meat is more expensive than grains. Poorer countries are worse because they are poor

>>5164957
Your made up rules are inferior to faith

Muslims will kill you and your relatives descendants will practice halal slaughter. The fate of all leftists.

>>5164961
Islam is obviously false and full of contradictions so the only people willing to sacrifice everything to advance Islam are the people stupid enough to fall for it

>>5164959
>dude if we were all rich we would only be a little worse off and dumb farm animals would be saved!
i am shooting a grass fed cow in the forehead tomorrow because its life is worthless and its death is valuable
humans are worth more than animals
the slightest improvement made to human well being
a remedied heme deficiency alone
is worth more than a million cattle
and god is greater than atheist morality where you say you embody a virtue but cant explain why its good because your life is worthless and meaning is an illusion
deal with it

>>5164962
And yet they are replacing you and your nonsense philosophy

No meaning no purpose no good no evil… but at least you cant be called a hypocrite in formal debate

>>5164963
Theists have no monopoly on objective morality. Even many theists and Christians will admit atheists can have objective morality.

>>5164964
meaning can be reducing suffering and maximizing goods like pleasure and relationships. This gives purpose meaning and good and evil

>>5164968
>meaning can be *arbitrary shit i made up because i think it sounds good*
child

>>5164966
atheists can only be evidence based darwinians otherwise you make shit up and expect people to admire it because you exploit associations with pre existing faiths and social conditioning
child

you are weak
God is strong

>>5164964
>>5164963
>>5164961
1 If there is no God, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2 But objective moral values and duties do exist.

I accept premise 2, but I don’t think that premise 1 is remotely plausible. Lots of people seem to think there’s some special feature of atheism that entails moral nihilism. But I don’t know what that would be. The atheist who accepts modal, mathematical, and logical truths will accept that there are some non-natural facts with some foundation. Whatever explanation there is for those facts, there is also for the moral facts. Some facts are not just facts about the physical world.

This is the view I hold. It’s a broadly non-naturalist picture of normativity. But if one is a moral naturalist, then they also have a perfectly good solution—they think the moral facts are a species of natural fact. If so, then the mystery of how there can be good while theism is false isn’t any more difficult than the mystery of how there can be trees. If moral facts are just a species of physical fact, then it’s not hard to see how they can be deduced from various other physical facts.

Premise 1 also is just super implausible. Suppose you found out that God didn’t exist. Would that really make torture no longer wrong? It doesn’t seem so.

>>5164968
>universal good is what i enjoy! universal bad is the opposite of that!
Aliens would eat you for displaying such inferiority

We prey on liberal south american nature hikers so often we think you’d get a clue already

>>5164969
You’re just asserting it’s made up. It can be discovered instead

It seems its stance independently wrong to torture pigs for taste pleasure therefore I believe it’s stance independently wrong to torture pigs for taste pleasure because i don’t have any good reason to believe it isn’t stance independently wrong to torture pigs for taste pleasure.

>>5164970
Thanks chatGPT but no one cares

Without god you are darwinian, an egoist, or suicidal and nothing other than those. Not good not evil. Just godless. Right and wrong become goal dependent. Your life becomes arbitrary. Relativism becomes the ruler of earth. Lucifer recoils - whoever stumbles upon gods law wins regardless.

>>5164970
So for this reason, I reject premise 1. In fact, proving premise 1 would seem to require a fairly extraordinary task—going through, in detail, all the naturalistic proposals for grounding normativity and showing that none succeed. No one has, to the best of my knowledge, undertaken this momentous task. Apologists like Frank Turek forego this, preferring to shout platitudes about moist robots (okay, here I’m just talking about Frank Turek).

But I think the most fundamental problem with the argument is that God doesn’t provide a satisfactory grounding for morality. If there is a God, then God requires morality, not the other way around. This is for four basic reasons.

First, moral features seem to be intrinsic to a situation. If we ask why pain is bad, the reason seems to reside in the qualitative feature of pain, rather than in any external source. The badness of torturing children resides in what it does to the children, not in anyone else’s judgment about child torture. Yet theism locates the badness of pain in some external source—with that source being God. If you think that all you need for torture to be wrong or helping others to be right is the torture or the help, then it can’t be grounded in some external source like God.

You might worry that this same feature avails moral platonism. Doesn’t moral platonism also posit that some external feature—the platonic moral facts—determines the wrongness of various acts. However, as Richard Y Chappell has convincingly argued, the platonic moral facts are not what make acts wrong. Rather, they serve to summarize the intrinsic features of the act that make it wrong. The abstract objects are facts about which particular things have intrinsically bad features, rather than what makes acts wrong themselves. If this is right, then atheistic moral realism has an advantage in explaining the moral facts: it locates them in the features of an act itself.

>>5164974
Second, theism has no explanatory advantage. All moral views will have to posit some moral facts that are just brute, with no further explanation. The theist will have to posit the goodness of God as explanatorily brute. If the theist posits that God is good and you should follow his commands, with no deeper explanation, then that has no advantage over positing that, for example, pleasure is good and pain is bad. Thus, as Jeff Lowder has said, this involves explaining the existence of moral facts by brutely positing at least one moral fact.

>>5164961
>Your made up rules are inferior to faith
faith has no binding power on the faithless. empiricism won. christians know this, which is why a literal reading of the pentateuch is something only 80 IQ southern baptists and incels on 4chan do, because our materialistic, evidence first paradigm won. no adam and eve in eden. no exodus. noah's ark didn't happen.
furthermore in historic christianity you could only eat meat on certain days, there was no meat eating before the fall of humanity, there would be no meat eating after the new creation, and christians had to give up animal products for lent
i mean shit, you know there were sects of heterodox who used to castrate themselves and go vegan before that became condemned? origen did it. insert tranny joke here.
fwiw i think muslims are a far greater threat than neutered christianity, but they are getting one shotted by materialism and scientific realism all the same. the internet was the worst thing to happen to islam.

>>5164972
Its right to torture pigs to turn low grade food and agricultural waste into highly nutritious meat while producing fertilizer for domestic agriculture, improving the nutrition of the masses overall.

But god said no pigs
So we’re eating cows and other kosher animals such as cud chewing two toed vegans

>>5164973
You’re just asserting that without providing arguments or evidence for it. Philipapers survey shows most philosophers including most atheist philosophers are moral realists

>>5164975
>>5164974
AI slop

>>5164977
>faith has no binding power
Yet you are being replaced by muslims and catholics
>empiricism won
Meat eating populations have better nutrition across all social classes at the cost of occasional (and optional) lifespan penalties when the upper class passes their productive years.
Meat eating populations kill or convert vegetarian populations over and over again
> furthermore in historic christianity you could only eat meat on certain days, there was no meat eating before the fall of humanity, there would be no meat eating after the new creation, and christians had to give up animal products for lent
Thats why christians are slaves to jews and being converted by muslims sweatie

>>5164975
Third, theism is subject to a version of the Euthyphro’s dilemma. Suppose that God commands some act. Did God have a reason to command it? If so, then morality can be located in external reasons. If not, then it’s objectionably arbitrary.

Theists usually reply by claiming that this is a false dichotomy: it’s good because it corresponds to God’s good nature. Yet suppose that opposing torture is part of God’s nature. Is there a reason for that? If so, then there’s a moral reason outside of God. If not then it’s objectionably arbitrary.

What explanation can the theist who accepts the moral argument give for God having the features he does? Theists who reject the moral argument can explain why God is loving: because it’s good. Yet if God is the good by definition, if all his properties necessarily will be good properties, then the goodness of certain properties can’t explain why God has them. Explanation only goes one way—it can’t be that God is loving because he’s good and love is good because God is loving.

If the good is just whatever God’s nature happens to be, then it seems objectionably arbitrary. Furthermore, it can’t explain why God is loving, psychophysically harmonious, or why he cares about others, because the good is whatever God’s character happens to be. Theism only has explanatory power if we start with a conception of what’s good, and then argue that God explains why there is so much good stuff.

Finally, this view struggles to explain why, even if God is loving, he has those properties necessarily. I think that if God exists, he must be loving because that’s required for goodness. However, defenders of the moral argument can’t go that route, because they think that goodness is grounded in God. Thus, it seems that God’s love on such a view would be incidental properties, like which particular possible worlds of equal value he chooses to create.

>>5164979
>most useless eaters are-
Gonna die soon.

>>5164980
70% of American Catholics don’t believe in transubstation of the Eucharist
>>5164981
But only rejection of the moral argument enables one to explain why God is good

>>5164981
AI slop

>>5164983
Christian theology is nonsense. They just coincidentally act like muslims/jews and succeed more the more they do.
>a jewish messiah is our god we wrote a book saying so
>our god died!
>that means sin isnt wrong anymore!
lol

praise be to allah

>>5164978
Most people disagree with you as shown by studies and ballot initiatives of people voting for bigger cages for pigs so you do have good reason to think your intuition is wrong since most people don’t share your intuition of it being moral to torture pigs.

>>5164985
Who cares what kaffir vote for to feel good about themselves? The reality is in their actions. They will all be muslim soon.

Allah ackbar!

>>5164980
>Yet you are being replaced by muslims and catholics
their tfr rates don't sustain themselves over generations - again, our paradigm won and has defanged religion. deal with it.
>Meat eating populations have better nutrition across all social classes
until you factor in heart disease and obesity.
>Thats why christians are slaves to jews and being converted by muslims sweatie
which side are you on, lmao.

>>5164985
Soon, kaffir, your “moral” people will turn on their ally israel, because when they won a war against hamas, they killed people, and killing is wrong to you. Then you will accept 5 million palestinian refugees and we shall revert the whole of your nation to islam! No more pig farms for you, vegan. Good! Instead we will farm cows! ALLAHU ACKBAR! Your false moral corrects itself in the end! That is why we call it reverting alhamdulilah

>>5164990
Heart disease and obesity are sicknesses of americans satanic corn syrup diet. The french paradox is no paradox, it is the will of allah!

The age of islam comes. All atheist societies are celebrating their own extinction. We are celebrating the opportunity. At least you will see pig farming end. And halal beef begin! Already europes youth are over 50% muslim. When america votes for the blue ones and accepts palestinian refugees, your nation too shall revert. ALLAHU ACKBAR!

Weak vegans can only fire interceptor missiles and say at least they are not dying and neither are animals. Strong beef fed muslims will fire shaheds at their entire country. Then we shall turn american national parks into ranches and the burger that glorifies allah shall become the national dish of earth. The american space program shall revert even the aliens to islam. Allahu ackbar!