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Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberati

Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. Same goes for whether profiting from closed source software is ethical. Same goes for whether homosexuality is evil. These are all cases in which it would be possible to show, systematically, how one's views are contradictory, or really empirical questions. This appears to be a philosophical task, not a common sense one.

Goladus 15y ago
> I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. The amount of philosophy needed is not too significant. One needs to know enough logic to show that inability to find a justification doesn't mean a justification doesn't exist. So if someone is using Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation to persecute meat eaters and you want to do something about it, general skill at persuasion is more important than philosophy.
- siglesias 15y ago
  I glossed over some of the subtleties. To show that eating animals needs to be justified requires extending our ethical framework to animals beyond humans. Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, nor have compelling arguments been presented that this is unwarranted. Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.
  - Volpe 15y ago
    I think it's important to distinguish Philsophy from Critical thinking here. The practical skill Philsophy teaches is critical thinking and logical reasoning. But you don't need philosophy to learn either of those. "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...
    - Goladus 15y ago
      > "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric... Persuasive techniques can be used deceptively but that's hardly necessary. It's important to accept that people are emotional and simply proving them wrong is usually not sufficient to change their mind about something they've already decided.
  - jodrellblank 15y ago
    Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, To the contrary, almost every vegetarianism argument on the Internet has comments like "plants are living things which you slaughter for food", and they just get ignored. I suspect because if you seriously believed killing living things for food is wrong, it would be suicide, so the only conceivable answer is to reason in such a way that it comes out with the answer you want - draw your arbitrary cutoff between important-living-things and not-important-living-things somewhere above plants and bacteria while staying comfortably below humans. Then let the argument rage as if there was a real substantive difference between drawing the line above cow or below cow, or just diverting it around milk, or only around milk sourced in a particular way.
    - siglesias 15y ago
      Anybody using that argument is talking nonsense. There is no evidence that cutting a cabbage causes it pain and suffering. On the other hand, you can look at the vast similarities between our nervous systems and those of other vertebrates as well as their behavior under pain (squealing and so on) to reasonably conclude that these animals feel pain like we do.
      - Goladus 15y ago
        There is no evidence that cutting a cabbage causes it pain and suffering. We don't have as much evidence and the evidence we do have isn't as visceral or widely discussed. That doesn't mean there is no evidence.
        siglesias 15y ago
        You're distorting my position anyway. I'm not stating that it is categorically unethical to eat living things, only that any enjoyment we get out of meat over vegetables isn't worth animal suffering. In no way does a weak position that plant suffering is possible make a strong case for animal suffering inadmissable to our eating choices. That's simply absurd.
        15y ago
philwelch 15y ago
Funny, then, that I, armed with the same arguments, just had a delicious steak for dinner. I imagine many a philosopher has considered Singer's arguments and had a delicious steak nonetheless; mathematicians and scientists don't have this problem. The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justified or unjustified. You have to have some type of basis for logic, and even if you come up with some sort of foundational principle, there's nothing special about foundational principles that makes one any more or less likely to reject them than the conclusions you reach from them. The history of ethics is a history of people working out logically consistent ethical systems only to discover that they justified things like kidnapping strangers and killing them for their organs, and based on the "moral intuition" that it's wrong to kidnap strangers and kill them for their organs, the logically consistent ethical system was amended. The history of philosophy is filled with this kind of thing, but let's think about what we're doing here! What do we need ethics for if all we're going to do is change them when they end up having unintuitive results?
- impendia 15y ago
  You might read Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit if you haven't already. Not that he offers solutions per se, but he starts from a similar view of the subject.

Goladus 15y ago

> I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. The amount of philosophy needed is not too significant. One needs to know enough logic to show that inability to find a justification doesn't mean a justification doesn't exist. So if someone is using Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation to persecute meat eaters and you want to do something about it, general skill at persuasion is more important than philosophy.

siglesias 15y ago
I glossed over some of the subtleties. To show that eating animals needs to be justified requires extending our ethical framework to animals beyond humans. Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, nor have compelling arguments been presented that this is unwarranted. Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.
- Volpe 15y ago
  I think it's important to distinguish Philsophy from Critical thinking here. The practical skill Philsophy teaches is critical thinking and logical reasoning. But you don't need philosophy to learn either of those. "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...
  - Goladus 15y ago
    > "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric... Persuasive techniques can be used deceptively but that's hardly necessary. It's important to accept that people are emotional and simply proving them wrong is usually not sufficient to change their mind about something they've already decided.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, To the contrary, almost every vegetarianism argument on the Internet has comments like "plants are living things which you slaughter for food", and they just get ignored. I suspect because if you seriously believed killing living things for food is wrong, it would be suicide, so the only conceivable answer is to reason in such a way that it comes out with the answer you want - draw your arbitrary cutoff between important-living-things and not-important-living-things somewhere above plants and bacteria while staying comfortably below humans. Then let the argument rage as if there was a real substantive difference between drawing the line above cow or below cow, or just diverting it around milk, or only around milk sourced in a particular way.
  - siglesias 15y ago
    Anybody using that argument is talking nonsense. There is no evidence that cutting a cabbage causes it pain and suffering. On the other hand, you can look at the vast similarities between our nervous systems and those of other vertebrates as well as their behavior under pain (squealing and so on) to reasonably conclude that these animals feel pain like we do.
    - Goladus 15y ago
      There is no evidence that cutting a cabbage causes it pain and suffering. We don't have as much evidence and the evidence we do have isn't as visceral or widely discussed. That doesn't mean there is no evidence.
      - siglesias 15y ago
        You're distorting my position anyway. I'm not stating that it is categorically unethical to eat living things, only that any enjoyment we get out of meat over vegetables isn't worth animal suffering. In no way does a weak position that plant suffering is possible make a strong case for animal suffering inadmissable to our eating choices. That's simply absurd.
        15y ago

philwelch 15y ago

Funny, then, that I, armed with the same arguments, just had a delicious steak for dinner. I imagine many a philosopher has considered Singer's arguments and had a delicious steak nonetheless; mathematicians and scientists don't have this problem. The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justified or unjustified. You have to have some type of basis for logic, and even if you come up with some sort of foundational principle, there's nothing special about foundational principles that makes one any more or less likely to reject them than the conclusions you reach from them. The history of ethics is a history of people working out logically consistent ethical systems only to discover that they justified things like kidnapping strangers and killing them for their organs, and based on the "moral intuition" that it's wrong to kidnap strangers and kill them for their organs, the logically consistent ethical system was amended. The history of philosophy is filled with this kind of thing, but let's think about what we're doing here! What do we need ethics for if all we're going to do is change them when they end up having unintuitive results?

impendia 15y ago
You might read Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit if you haven't already. Not that he offers solutions per se, but he starts from a similar view of the subject.