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>Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the poten

>Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the potential social and legal consequences attendant thereto? I'm asking for factual reasoning, not emotional justification. There's a major difference between what I believe is correct and what is objectively logical, or beneficial to humanity.

ceras 4y ago
Caring about anything is inherently emotional. Take human suffering. There's no logical reason to care about it. You can't take someone with sociopathic tendencies and logic them into caring about humans - it simply doesn't make sense. Either that empathetic circuitry exists in someone's brain or it doesn't, which manifests as emotions when it does exist. I think you're starting from a flawed premise that logic is a motivating force. Logic is a slave to the passions, not the other way around. Logic is a tool we use to manage our emotional state more effectively by helping us choose actions that we believe are more likely yield net positive emotional states. Logic just computes results; it has no innate motivation of any kind, it takes motivations and emotions as inputs. Take this for example: > beneficial to humanity. You're implying a preference for humanity, which has some emotional foundation. Maybe you care about humans as a whole for some abstract emotional reason; or maybe it's purely self-interest since you're a human (so what benefits humans hopefully benefits you, even if you don't care about other humans) which is also an emotional reason. There's no objective, inarguable truth that you should care about humanity. The root of your confusion on animal rights stems here. Ultimately, animal rights is about taking the empathy that most humans innately have to at least a limited extent, and expanding that to apply to more entities. If you experience no empathy in general in life, it makes no sense. If you experience some empathy, it makes some sense. If you experience a lot of empathy, it makes a lot of sense.
GPerson 4y ago
Perhaps you could explain why animals being sentient creatures only counts as emotional justification? It’s a profound fact that human beings evolved from non-human animals. It would be very strange to me if none of them are sentient. I believe killing humans is wrong precisely because they are sentient. Therefore killing animals is also wrong.
ss108 4y ago
> objectively logical, or beneficial to humanity. Well those are two separate things. Anyways, the gist of the "logical" argument (which is a myopic way of looking at things to say the least) goes something along the lines of "at least x subset of animals has cognitive and emotional capacity analogous to mentally handicapped humans and/or human children, and thus should be given rights coextensive with such humans". Obviously, there's more meat to it than that, but that's basically what it is. There's no "logic" to it either way, really; opponents of that argument counter with arguments that often boil down to "no the children and mentally handicapped should get more rights because they are humans". This is largely about value judgments and morality, not "logic". A lot of political, philosophical, and legal things require reference to subjective factors and assumptions, and, unsurprisingly, a lot of people on Hacker News discount that realm of these conversations. I think it's a matter of competence; I've noticed when I talk to some engineers about these sorts of assumptions, they get confused and would rather discount that realm as inferior to "logic" than grapple with the stuff or learn how to become conversant in it (some engineers certainly already are). Obviously, there are lots of issues where a an almost purely pragmatic, logical approach may be more than sufficient, but even drawing that kind of line involves making a kind of value judgment.

ceras 4y ago

Caring about anything is inherently emotional. Take human suffering. There's no logical reason to care about it. You can't take someone with sociopathic tendencies and logic them into caring about humans - it simply doesn't make sense. Either that empathetic circuitry exists in someone's brain or it doesn't, which manifests as emotions when it does exist. I think you're starting from a flawed premise that logic is a motivating force. Logic is a slave to the passions, not the other way around. Logic is a tool we use to manage our emotional state more effectively by helping us choose actions that we believe are more likely yield net positive emotional states. Logic just computes results; it has no innate motivation of any kind, it takes motivations and emotions as inputs. Take this for example: > beneficial to humanity. You're implying a preference for humanity, which has some emotional foundation. Maybe you care about humans as a whole for some abstract emotional reason; or maybe it's purely self-interest since you're a human (so what benefits humans hopefully benefits you, even if you don't care about other humans) which is also an emotional reason. There's no objective, inarguable truth that you should care about humanity. The root of your confusion on animal rights stems here. Ultimately, animal rights is about taking the empathy that most humans innately have to at least a limited extent, and expanding that to apply to more entities. If you experience no empathy in general in life, it makes no sense. If you experience some empathy, it makes some sense. If you experience a lot of empathy, it makes a lot of sense.

GPerson 4y ago

Perhaps you could explain why animals being sentient creatures only counts as emotional justification? It’s a profound fact that human beings evolved from non-human animals. It would be very strange to me if none of them are sentient. I believe killing humans is wrong precisely because they are sentient. Therefore killing animals is also wrong.

ss108 4y ago

> objectively logical, or beneficial to humanity. Well those are two separate things. Anyways, the gist of the "logical" argument (which is a myopic way of looking at things to say the least) goes something along the lines of "at least x subset of animals has cognitive and emotional capacity analogous to mentally handicapped humans and/or human children, and thus should be given rights coextensive with such humans". Obviously, there's more meat to it than that, but that's basically what it is. There's no "logic" to it either way, really; opponents of that argument counter with arguments that often boil down to "no the children and mentally handicapped should get more rights because they are humans". This is largely about value judgments and morality, not "logic". A lot of political, philosophical, and legal things require reference to subjective factors and assumptions, and, unsurprisingly, a lot of people on Hacker News discount that realm of these conversations. I think it's a matter of competence; I've noticed when I talk to some engineers about these sorts of assumptions, they get confused and would rather discount that realm as inferior to "logic" than grapple with the stuff or learn how to become conversant in it (some engineers certainly already are). Obviously, there are lots of issues where a an almost purely pragmatic, logical approach may be more than sufficient, but even drawing that kind of line involves making a kind of value judgment.