These are my actual beliefs.

You lie. If I was hammering toothpicks under your fingernails, you would not believe that there's nothing wrong about it and that there's no reason to stop.

As soon as we have the capacity to inhabit another planet we have the responsibility for the continuation of life. — Lif3r

You got it all backwards! As soon as we have the capacity, we must extinguish all known life and try to minimize the chances of it arising again.

However, anything that furthers sustainable peaceful coexistence seems like a good strategy for getting to that point, so I'm with you for now.

Could it be argued that extinction isn't only not unethical, but the only way to guarantee the removal of unethical practices? — JacobPhilosophy

That's what I hold to be true, more or less. Pretty straightforward antinatalism argument.

However, you seem to approach this from an anthropocentric angle and consider only humans and human extinction, which is quite arbitrary and something I profoundly disagree with. Ethics doesn't depend on taxonomy. Of course, if you for some reason do limit yourself to antinatalism and not genocide, then for sure, the only ones you can convince through argumentation are other humans so it makes practical sense.

I don't know Bill so all I can do is guess, but for me it's easy to find questions I would myself deem unanswerable. Subjects like ethics and politics are full of them. I don't have to deeply investigate the trolley problem to find that it's unanswerable, nor do I have to study politics to understand that most political dilemmas have no correct answer. Are we living in a simulation? Unanswerable.

However, above I make no distinction between questions that are unanswerable and questions that don't have a correct answer.

I don't think "stopping the spread of harmful ideas" can really work at least in the liberal western culture. This is a culture that I think idolizes rebellion, siding with the underdog, breaking taboos and generally pushing the bounds of established social norms.

Obviously, to some degree people anywhere will likely gravitate towards ideologies that speak to them even if they're taboo or socially unacceptable, but I'd imagine that's particularly difficult to prevent in a culture that so strongly idolizes opposing the establishment.

It is simply nature. — Grievous

Of course. So, what do you think of the ethics of it?

Too prone to abuse, too irreversible when it turns out a prisoner was innocent after all, too unfair due to variability (some would have easier/worse experiments conducted on them than others).

Not all prisoners should be experimented on, just the worst. — Gitonga

Why not?

Despite living far from the US and not really having discussed BLM with many people, one problem I expect a lot of people to have is simply that they reject any rhetoric which is too dramatic, emotional and hyperbolic to their taste. You quoted the BLM website claiming that the state deliberately inflicts rampant violence on black people and/or systematically targets them for demise, and then they also call themselves liberators

As far as many people are concerned, rational discussion is already off the table at that point. I'd imagine a lot of rationalists and sceptics would fall into that camp.

Just a guess.

Of course, I agree about people generally holding a massive double standard with regards to treatment of animals, but I'll try to have something else to say as well:

In principle, it's no different.whether you breed, raise, slaughter and eat a cow or a dog. However, in our culture when you do that to a cow I can't know whether you're being actively amoral or simply ignorant (I suspect most people would fall somewhat into the latter category). But, if you do that to a dog, then, due to the cultural double standard, I know it's not ignorance but that you're instead making a much more intentional choice than a typical cow-eating layperson, even if the act itself is not worse per se.

In addition to judging you by your actions, I can also judge you by your intent. Flaunt your beef-eating and I think you're probably callous and probably ignorant; flaunt your dog-eating and I think you're definitely callous and not ignorant.

The world would therefore be entirely abstract and meaningless if there was no objective truth. — Gregory

Objectively, it is. But I wouldn't know anything about that.

Sure, animals would seem to have fewer reasons to be sad and fewer requirements to be happy. Is that reason to assume they tend to be less sad than a human, though? If you're injured and dying, then you only have one worry, but the intensity is probably completely different than having five different social problems.

Of course we can't really know what an animal's experience really is. I'd guess that on an average sunny day a healthy adult squirrel or elephant isn't particularly suffering and might actually be having a good time, so in that sense I agree. I would still definitely not rather be either of them, but arguably I don't have the kind of problems most people in the world struggle with.

They have very simple needs, so long as their stomach is full of either nuts or grass they're happy. — Gitonga

A) And just how often is that? Animals starve, freeze, bleed and drown to death all the time.

B) Some animals have simple needs, some also have social needs. Odd that you'd pick elephants as an example when they're well known to be social animals who experience sadness.

I'd rather suggest that close-minded parents, bad self esteem and unrealized dreams are fairly trivial problems compared to not eating for days and then being ripped apart by a predator. Granted, if you suffer from the aforementioned for a long time then at some point the total amount of suffering is bound to be worse than a few days of physical and emotional misery, but then again at least you still have the capacity to do something about it.

I don't have a time machine, but I suspect sexual activity hasn't always been the free-for-all it currently seems to be. — Bitter Crank

Oh, for sure. I think it wasn't long ago that some study did, if not outright prove, but at least strongly suggest that in prehistoric times only very few men produced offspring (whereas most women did). Whether that means most men died violently before even having a chance to procreate, or that only men with high enough status got access to women in those societies, or if there was some other factor in play, I don't have a clue.

Still, my understanding is that human civilization has allowed progressively more and more men to actually procreate, although there has always been a small amount of men with large amounts of offspring (Genghis Khan being the most common example).

So, I'm not saying that it's been commonplace that human males have mated with many different females, but rather that typically it would have been a good strategy even if very few have had the chance to actually do it.

Due to the pressures of natural selection, genes that enable their "gene machines" to reproduce with fated partners do not propagate through the gene pool. — Key

I'm afraid I can't tell what that means, but I'll wager a guess: genes that increase promiscuity in men don't actually end up propagating through the gene pool if too many of their partners are evolutionary dead-ends?

You seem to be approaching this from a organism-centric model of evolution which has been outdated since at least the mid-70s when Dawkins published his work known as "The Selfish Gene" and established gene-centric evolution as the dominant hypothesis. — Key

Well, I don't see how what I've said would be mutually exclusive with gene-centric evolution.

I don't follow how being limited to reproducing at one rate or another makes it "[...]more important [...] to be more selective regarding their mating partners[...]" — Key

Because reproduction is free for a male, and costly and dangerous (and in the worst case, fatal) for a female? From the point of view of spreading their genes, a male has no reason not to reproduce with every female they possibly can. A female can't do that, because pregnancy is taxing, dangerous and you can't do it as often, so you have to give more consideration to who you actually reproduce with; whether they have good genes, whether they're a good parent, and so on.

Is there a literary work done by an evolutionary biologist you can source? — Key

Not that I can name any, but I'm sure a lot of the stuff referenced for example here.

"Asymmetrical biology of reproduction"?
Please explain; to my knowledge 50% of genetic material is sourced from both parents in homo sapiens. — Key

Men can have a practically unlimited amount of children, women can carry at best one child per year. Plus, after birth, only the woman is physically needed to care for the child (breastfeeding). Therefore for men it's a more viable strategy to simply have more children, whereas for women it's more important to ensure their offspring actually survive and to be more selective regarding their mating partners as well.

A. Women account for 53/(866 + 53) = 6% of ALL Nobel Laureates.

B. Women (Marie Curie) form 1/4 = 25% of two-time Nobel Prize winners

C. Women (Marie Curie) make up 100% of Nobels won in two different fields. In other words no man has achieved a Nobel in more than one discipline.



It appears that
D. In general, men are smarter than women
E. Women are more versatile — TheMadFool

What do you mean it appears? D and E don't follow from A, B and C.

The common explanation is that there's more variability among men than there is among women. In other words, that the smartest and dumbest are more likely to be found among men. The evolutionary basis for that would be the asymmetrical biology of reproduction which made risk-taking a more favorable strategy for men than women.

I'm inclined to say that I don't understand this whole objectification thing. Sure, I can read the words about seeing another person as merely an object or denying their agency or whatnot, but I can't find any feeling or experience I might have had which would seem to match. It feels like I've never been objectified or have objectified anyone; of course, I'm sure the phenomena being referred to has occurred many times, but my point is that the common definitions and explanations of objectification all seem to be written by someone with a fundamentally different way of seeing the world and human interaction. Thus, they don't connect with me at all.

That root fact essentially being "less women will become sexually assaulted if dressed modestly and remain sober". If it is a fact and by communicating it to multiple people less women become victims of sexual assault... I ask you. Is that a service or a disservice?

There is no church state now. No moral guidelines for raising children. If people want to embrace the worst traits of humanity to get ahead they will. It is simply the world we live in. So again. Is such a statement that prevents countless sexual assaults a service or a disservice? — Outlander

It's a disservice, as you're framing it as the victim's responsibility to refrain from acceptable behaviour as a means to lessen the chance of being victimized rather than the perpetrator's responsibility to refrain from unacceptable and criminal behaviour.

Should a gay couple refrain from holding hands in public where there are known to be homophobes? Should a Muslim family refrain from practicing their religion where there are known to be Islamophobes? — Michael

But it isn't necessarily that kind of framing. Locking your car/bike/house makes you a less likely victim of theft, even though the responsibility would be entirely the thief's. Since presumably you don't find it a disservice to point out that sort of thing, how can you tell what the intended framing is when someone points out increased risk due to some other form of acceptable behavior?

As far as I can tell, this particular question of how sexual assault correlates with victim behavior tends to be one where people see only the framing they want to see. You seemed to see the framing that anyone pointing out a statistical connection between behavior and likelihood of being victimized is shifting part of the blame on victims, whereas someone else will see the framing that even obvious attempts to shift blame on victims are just genuine concern.

P.S. I see no reason to assume that skimpy clothing as such increases risk, at least where I'm from (obviously, in some other parts of the world it definitely would). Heavy intoxication clearly seems to.

If the net effect of the anaesthetic is that the (non-)experience makes no impact on post-op me whatsoever, sure. — Kenosha Kid

If the anaesthetic also made you experience time more slowly, at which point would that change your assessment that you'd be fine with it? If the surgery takes an hour and you're in terrible pain for what feels like an hour, you're fine with it. But what if your agony would feel like it lasts two hours, a week, a year? Would you still be fine with it as long as you remember none of it afterwards? If so, why does the duration matter?

I'm under the impression that it has been studied and that pain does show up on EEG and such, and if true, that would seem to place your scenario mainly in the "everything's possible" category (because we would already know if it was so), right?

It matters as much as any other pain. You won't (presumably) remember any pain once you're dead, either, yet that doesn't make your worldly suffering not matter. So no, I would definitely not use it.

Of course, it would be less bad overall than same amount of pain which you would actually remember (because in that case the memory would also haunt you afterwards; in your scenario, it wouldn't).

Most humans have empathy in that we can put ourselves in the shoes of other people and know what harm we can cause them. However a person with empathy can never put himself in the shoes of a psychopath because an empathetic will never know what it's like to be a person without empathy (psychopath). — Wheatley

I don't see how that actually follows. I feel like I can imagine what it's like to be a psychopath the same way I can imagine, well, perhaps any other experience you might have had in mind. Of course, if you mean more like casual everyday situations then sure, it's far easier to put myself in the shoes of someone with empathy than a psychopath, although in neither case I'll never know for sure if I got it right.

I'd feel bad for a psychopath being tortured, for instance, and if someone wouldn't then I'd consider them to be somewhat akin to a psychopath themselves.

What I would really, really like is to block myself from seeing the threads of a particular category entirely. Some of the active threads there are full of the kind of hateful bullying that does nothing but anger me, yet as long as they're right there one click away on the All Discussions page, I can't seem to help myself.

Improving my self control would, of course, be another option.

And actually, before pressing Post Comment I did get a browser extension to inject this on the whole site:
...which kind of works but not perfectly, so the aforementioned would still be a handy feature to have. Or if moderators' tools allow blocking a person from seeing a specific category, then perhaps they could do so on request?

If humans have an intrinsic need to categorize, then gender might have been a really simple and convenient way to categorize others (and oneself), seeing how it more or less split the population in half and was straightforwardly based on physical characteristics.

I don't see any particular need for social genders as such; social roles might be useful, but they don't need to be genders.

I would choose the one claiming to be sane, of course. There is no way to deduce the "right" answer (at best, one can arbitrarily choose a theory about what's going on and make a guess based on it), so choosing the straightforward and seemingly obvious option at least ensures I won't feel really stupid if it's the wrong choice after all.

I was pointing out an inconsistency that arises from the vegan/animal rights premiss of reducing suffering. — DingoJones

It's not an inconsistency unless one believes that beetles and cows are capable of equal amounts of suffering, or that their lives somehow matter equally much. You don't believe it, animal rights people don't believe it, so no one's being inconsistent.

So just to clarify: you personally value the lives and suffering of, say, a beetle and a cow equally (or, alternatively, that you believe a beetle and cow are equally capable of suffering)? That your ethical judgement if you see someone squash a cat with a bat is more or less the same as when you see someone squash a mosquito?

Pardon my non-philosophical response, but I don't think you can seriously expect anyone to believe that that is your actual position. Yet your whole argument seems to hinge on that.

I was comparing the suffering experienced by farm animals to the suffering of animals in the wild. Thats not a dichotomy, its a comparison. — DingoJones

You specifically said that the alternative to animals suffering on farms is the animals suffering in the wild. And it's obviously not, since those animals wouldn't exist in the wild in the first place. This is what you said:

Well it seems strange to save an animal from suffering by ensuring it will suffer. Frying pan or fire? And thats besides the fact that most animals cannot make an ethical social contract. Its protecting an animal from suffering and death by sending it off to..suffering and death. (Presumably the alternative to being a farm animal is living in the wild). — DingoJones

That's clearly saying that you think animal rights people want to take animals from farms and send them into the wild (where they would then suffer considerably). And that's an absurd claim. I'm sure you can find a teenage activist or few who genuinely want to free all the chickens into the wild, but everyone knows that's not representative at all.

Not breeding them in the first place is a fair point but doesnt address what to do with the ones that have been bred already. — DingoJones

I don't know, have you ever asked someone that directly? What did they answer?

Also, regardless of what we do with the current stock of farm animals doesnt change the fact that animals, anywhere, live harsh and short lives that end in various horrific deaths. Thats the point I was making. There is no significant ethical difference between the suffering of farm animals and the suffering of animals in general. — DingoJones

Of course there is no difference, suffering is suffering. Does someone disagree with your point? I'm aware that perhaps even most people consider it somehow worse if a human intentionally inflicts suffering than it is for that same amount of suffering to occur "naturally", but they still don't think that suffering in nature isn't bad.

It IS strange, as under your paradigm one should be out rescuing animals from the wild as well. — DingoJones

Sure, anyone who says we should only do something about human-inflicted suffering but not wild animal suffering is wrong. On that I'll happily agree. Anyway, my personal paradigm is very different than what you probably think; I'm just pointing out how you seem to have misconceptions about people advocating plant-eating.

Well isnt preventing suffering what grants the moral highground? Suffering isnt being prevented by not eating meat, in fact id say that it causes more suffering just by the sheer numbers of individual suffering (unless you want to claim those lives are less significant somehow, but again that is the exact same calculus a meat eater is making). — DingoJones

That doesn't make any sense. How does plant-eating cause more suffering than meat-eating? It causes some, obviously, but if you make an esoteric claim such that it causes more suffering or suffering to more individual creatures, then surely you have some kind of rationale for that. What is it?

Well it seems strange to save an animal from suffering by ensuring it will suffer. Frying pan or fire? And thats besides the fact that most animals cannot make an ethical social contract. Its protecting an animal from suffering and death by sending it off to..suffering and death. (Presumably the alternative to being a farm animal is living in the wild). That doesnt seem odd to you? — DingoJones

But practically no one ever suggests such a thing. The alternative to suffering of farmed animals is obviously not freeing them to starve in the wild, but not breeding them in the first place. That's a basic false dichotomy.

Take vegans and vegetarians. In order to grow the food they eat, animals still have to be slaughtered en masse. Those fields of fruits or veggies result in countless deaths and plenty of suffering from displacement and starvation. If you want to say rodents and insects dont count or count less, then you are making the exact same calculus a meat eater is making. The moral high ground held by vegans or vegetarians is an illusion. — DingoJones

Sure, production of plants results in animals dying en masse. No one seriously thinks that's not the case. How or why would that eliminate the moral high ground?

Ive always found it strange when animal rights people talk about the suffering from farms and human consumption of meat. Do they not realise the suffering that exists in the natural world? Its a non-stop horror show of pain, suffering and death. — DingoJones

Why do you find that strange? There is no actual contradiction there, after all. In my experience, most animal rights people tend to agree that nature is a horror show of pain and suffering.

I appreciate the span of your reply, but I believe you misunderstood my question. :grin:

If we humans stop breeding and go extinct, non-human suffering will continue indefinitely, until and unless life on the planet is wiped out by either a cosmic event or a new civilization. Likely, neither is going to happen in a long, long time.

If we consider how long suffering-capable life has existed, humanity is probably just one tiny step away from being able to concoct some kind of technological doomsday solution. Are you sure you want us to stop now, when a couple hundred years more might be all it takes to be able to remove all suffering on Earth permanently (or at least for some hundreds of millions of years it would take for new advanced life to evolve)?

I actually think we can come together on antinatalism.. it can be a sort of rallying cry for the living. 1) Recognize the situation of suffering we live in and 2) do something about it together by not breeding. — schopenhauer1

Assuming that, through some kind of argumentative miracle, we could convince all of humanity of negative utilitarianism and antinatalism, what would you actually want us to do? Humans stopping breeding is at best going to eliminate but a small portion of global suffering, and I wouldn't exactly be surprised if it ended up increasing it instead.

I don't think it can be. Humans don't experience absence and they don't experience non-existence. — unenlightened

Fair enough, experience was a poor choice of word. Substitute "experience" with "intuit", "view", "feel about" or something along those lines.

The asymmetry is not an argument, it's a description of how we humans experience pain and pleasure. Your purported contradiction is not a contradiction in the asymmetry, it is the asymmetry.

If utilitarianism dictates that the greatest policy of ethics is to minimise suffering, wouldn't the most ethical position be the extinction of all existence? — JacobPhilosophy

Yes. Sadly, it is tricky to actually try to apply in real life. The only currently foreseeable way to achieve extinction of life even just on our planet is through human civilization and technology that is probably at least hundreds of years away. How does one further that scenario in our lifetime?

As an antinatalist of course I won't willingly procreate, but at the same time, I realize that if I somehow got all other humans to do the same, it would actually prevent the extinction of life.

One of the major arguments for the acceptance of homosexuality is the fact that a person cannot choose to be homosexuals. — NukeyFox

I think that tends to be a counterargument to the idea that homosexuality is a choice and people can decide to stop being gay if they really want to. I'd think you'd have a hard time finding people who would say that homosexuality is okay because it's not a choice.

Regardless, whether sexual preference is something that a person can change easily enough for it to be called "choice" seems to be something for neuroscience to determine. From what I've heard and read it seems that the current scientific understanding is that there are physical differences in the brain which correlate with sexual orientation.

But just as Michael said, I don't see what there is to justify, choice or not. If there's something wrong with X, then you can ask for what justifies X despite that thing that's wrong about it. But if there's nothing wrong with it in the first place, then there's nothing to justify.

Sounds like a complete nightmare, unjust, punitive, unsafe, inhuman. — unenlightened

Indeed, punishmentless doesn't have to mean being soft, idealistic and non-interventionist.

Look at nature. Everything acts with purpose. One known purpose of life is to survive and evolve. But why would life need to do that? Why would there need to be constant improvement? If life was just some random occurrence why does it evolve? If we look at different ecosystems there are many lifeforms that play specific roles and have a specific purpose to survive in their ecosystems. All life has a purpose. — Grey

The reasons I think there is a creator based on all this is the fact that humans are so complex. I don't mean to suggest that I can't comprehend the fact that the human body and mind could be a random occurrence. But there is no reason for us to exist if life was a random occurrence. Life doesn't need to be as complex and imperfect as humans to exist. If life simply only needed to exist it would have been much more optimal to create something other than humans. — Grey

You might find it interesting to read up on some basics of evolution. It's the thing which tends to answer those kind of questions quite comprehensively.