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That's trivially solved with shared culture. Simply by both being human, we share a level of shared experience that would make me uncomfortable eating you. To a

That's trivially solved with shared culture. Simply by both being human, we share a level of shared experience that would make me uncomfortable eating you. To a lesser extent, we have a shared experience with our domesticated pets, which is why we find it repugnant to eat them, but unlike with Grandma it's okay to give them the Old Yeller' treatment when need be. Most edge cases you could come up with are covered by "it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare."

hombre_fatal 3y ago
You're putting forth multiple traits, btw, but I don't think it's as trivial as you think it is. One trait seems to be "shared culture" whatever that means. What about humans with cultures we don't share? What about humans with downright alien cultures we can hardly understand nor agree with? What does "shared experience" with a dog mean? What about brain-dead humans that we don't share an experience with? Another trait seems to be "being a human". What about Santa's elves or any hypothetical sentient being that's not a human? Does any alien race that discovers us have the ethical justification to farm us? > it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare. Would it be okay to farm or enslave humans if we simply didn't have that taboo? Or in a hypothetical world where it wasn't taboo: would it be okay then? These aren't edge cases btw, these are reductios that test for position's consistency and dispel the sort of "I'll know it when I see it" hand-waving we like to do. Any coherent position has a coherent answer to hypotheticals. There is a trivial answer that does nip it easily in the bud: we agree to value sentience thus we stop farming sentient beings whether they're human, cows, or Santa's elves. Finally, I was just offering a potential response to your question. HN is a poor place for this kind of discussion, but I hope you at least see that there is conversational meat on the bone, pun not intended.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  The less "like us" they are, they more justified we are in killing them. "Like us" is tied around shared culture and experience. If you asked me to choose between saving the life of an elf and the life of a human being, I'd choose the human damn near every time (barring cases where the human deserves death regardless of the dilemma). "Shared experience" in this case is a basic history of doing stuff together, or in a sympathetically similar way. Dogs have been shaped to serve side-by-side with humans as companions, sharing in our experiences. So eating them is wrong. There are no humans that are less like us than than the animals we eat. Brain-dead humans are an example of just following taboo: We don't kill and eat other humans, because of the whole "we are more alike than we are different" thing, and incidentally extend the same courtesy to things that take complex explanations for not being us. If we ran into other conscious, sapient species, we'd probably be hesitant about killing them due to the shared experience of sentience making them a lot more like us than a cow. But on the other hand, killing an alien would be a hell of a lot more permissible than killing a human. And I apply the same kind of logic to people. My friends and family are significantly more valuable than random strangers. In a trolley scenario with one of my friends on one track and 3 strangers on another, I'd save my friend, every time, and I wouldn't trust anybody who would answer otherwise.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

You're putting forth multiple traits, btw, but I don't think it's as trivial as you think it is. One trait seems to be "shared culture" whatever that means. What about humans with cultures we don't share? What about humans with downright alien cultures we can hardly understand nor agree with? What does "shared experience" with a dog mean? What about brain-dead humans that we don't share an experience with? Another trait seems to be "being a human". What about Santa's elves or any hypothetical sentient being that's not a human? Does any alien race that discovers us have the ethical justification to farm us? > it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare. Would it be okay to farm or enslave humans if we simply didn't have that taboo? Or in a hypothetical world where it wasn't taboo: would it be okay then? These aren't edge cases btw, these are reductios that test for position's consistency and dispel the sort of "I'll know it when I see it" hand-waving we like to do. Any coherent position has a coherent answer to hypotheticals. There is a trivial answer that does nip it easily in the bud: we agree to value sentience thus we stop farming sentient beings whether they're human, cows, or Santa's elves. Finally, I was just offering a potential response to your question. HN is a poor place for this kind of discussion, but I hope you at least see that there is conversational meat on the bone, pun not intended.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
The less "like us" they are, they more justified we are in killing them. "Like us" is tied around shared culture and experience. If you asked me to choose between saving the life of an elf and the life of a human being, I'd choose the human damn near every time (barring cases where the human deserves death regardless of the dilemma). "Shared experience" in this case is a basic history of doing stuff together, or in a sympathetically similar way. Dogs have been shaped to serve side-by-side with humans as companions, sharing in our experiences. So eating them is wrong. There are no humans that are less like us than than the animals we eat. Brain-dead humans are an example of just following taboo: We don't kill and eat other humans, because of the whole "we are more alike than we are different" thing, and incidentally extend the same courtesy to things that take complex explanations for not being us. If we ran into other conscious, sapient species, we'd probably be hesitant about killing them due to the shared experience of sentience making them a lot more like us than a cow. But on the other hand, killing an alien would be a hell of a lot more permissible than killing a human. And I apply the same kind of logic to people. My friends and family are significantly more valuable than random strangers. In a trolley scenario with one of my friends on one track and 3 strangers on another, I'd save my friend, every time, and I wouldn't trust anybody who would answer otherwise.