oshitwaddup
@oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
- Comment on I use a goat 11 months ago:
Exactly
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz/comment/2243561 I haven’t put my views in those terms before but even here I say my views are based on sentience. I give an example, and I should have been more clear that I’m not strictly looking at the issue from a utilitarian lense although I get why it would come across that way. At base I’m a sentientist, I think there are many reasonable ways to go from there
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
are your ethical views based on what most people have done historically? Or how most ethical systems view something? What is your ethical system?
what is/are the difference(s) between human and non-human animals that justifies treating humans better than non-humans?
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Neither of those are axioms I hold. The axiom “all sentient beings are morally relevant” does not specify how to go from there, and I am not convinced that any one ethical framework is “the one”. There are some things that all the ones I’m aware of converge on with a sentientist perspective, but there are weird cases as well like whether to euthanize stray animals where they don’t converge
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Why is sentience too broad? afaik all humans are sentient, otherwise we’d be philosophical zombies (or there would be p-zombies among us)
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
i think I do understand them, I’ve thought about that problem before. Can you go into more detail on what you mean by internally inconsistent? By my understanding, situations in the world can come about where values need to be weighed, or there are only bad choices available, but that doesn’t mean those values should be discarded or replaced or that they shouldn’t be shared/spread.
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
That seems to bother you. Let’s taboo the word. When I say “someone”, “anyone”, “person”, etc, I’m referring to a sentient being, a subject of experience, an experiencer, one who is experiencing. Now you can interpret what I’m saying better, do you disagree with the actual points I’m making?
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Hell even to get past solipsism you have to subjectively assume to that your mind and senses accurately reflect the world at least a little bit, otherwise gathering any accurate data or reasoning about that data productively would not be possible
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Once you go to a deep enough layer I think you’re right. But, the one subjective thing my argument rests on is that you care about your own experience. Anyone who flinches away from touching a hot stove because it hurts cares about their experience at least a little. The next step is recognizing that from an objective view, there’s no reason to think your subjective experience is any more important than anyone elses (subjectively there is).
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
I don’t claim to 100% live in an ideal way. I try to keep improving but I don’t think I’ll ever be perfect
i think in cases where consent is difficult or impossible to achieve, we should act in the best interest of the experiencer in question. But I think that example is a tough one, at first glance I think we shouldn’t sterilize them, but then when I consider what will almost certainly happen if they’re not sterilized I think it’s probably worth doing the one bad thing to prevent worse things from happening. It’s an example where I think a utilitarian approach makes the most sense, since the variables are relatively clear
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
The based on the way you are using arbitrary, I see why you think my position is arbitrary. Do you think all positions are arbitrary?
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
the experiencers should have a say in whether or not they experience it
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
ok, taboo the word arbitrary. What do you mean when you say arbitrary?
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
someone experiencing it should have a say in whether or not they experience it
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
I think that having sex with sentient beings without their consent is extremely immoral
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
I’m not saying it is objective, I’m saying it’s not arbitrary.
If my dna was isolated in a test tube and it could experience things then I would also care about what it experiences. There isn’t any evidence I’m aware of that that’s the case. Dna is the instructions and tool to build the sentient being, not the sentient being itself. So no, the same couldn’t be said of dna. Extrapolating from how much I care about what I experience, I think it’s reasonable to care about what ** experience
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
We disagree very strongly
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Really? What about bestiality?
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it’s reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Tell which thing? I wrote a lot
but, one thing we could do is divert the massive subsidies and bailouts the US gives to animal agriculture (and a lot of the subsidies to plant ag too! It leads to a tremendous waste, iirc the reason corn syrup is so common is we grow too much corn cause it’s overly subsidized. People need good food, not corn syrup) and spend that on actually feeding those people
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Are you saying everything we can talk about is arbitrary because everything we can talk about is with words and concepts?
Are you talking about meriological nihilism? (thanks alex oconnor for teaching me that term lol)
I know sentience is real based on the fact that I’m experiencing things right this moment. Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it’s reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Then present yours lol
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
I don’t. I try to get people’s goals to align and recognize that these are important issues, and I’m working to grow more of my own food and get in a position where I’m able to have more of an impact, but no I don’t have an answer for everything and I don’t need one to be able call out injustice when I see it. And like most people I’m a hypocrite in some ways, I see these massive injustices and I still buy avocados and contribute to capitalism and waste time watching tv and arguing with people online instead of using that mental energy to actually do something in the world. I’m working on being better tho
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Almost certainly we do. But, do you think if there was a culture that ran dog fights, that would be ok just because it’s part of their culture?
I would not find that ok, because all sentient beings are worth moral consideration, and culture is not a good reason to hurt sentient beings. I might not focus on it especially if that culture was already marginalized and discriminated against and there were bigger problems to solve, but I’d still have the understanding that it’s bad
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
sbs.com.au/…/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-there-s… did you read the editors note at the bottom?
independent.co.uk/…/veganism-environment-veganuar… the main thrust of the article is buy more locally grown food, grow your own food? I agree with that lol. To go a step further, community gardens are good!
theguardian.com/…/vegans-stomach-unpalatable-trut… yeah I agree eat less quinoa and asparagus. See also the footnote
Those things are failures of our food system, and problems we could and should solve. The cool thing about eating plants is it doesn’t inherently require exploiting other sentient beings, but it does still happen unfortunately. That goes for animal ag too tho, and animal agriculture inherently depends on the exploitation
www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37034619 last two paragraphs
telegraph.co.uk/…/parents-raise-children-vegans-s… the vegans in that post make good points. Obviously negligent parents are a problem, vegan or no
To maintain a nutritionally complete vegan diet for an individual year round actually requires far more use of fossil fuels and directly released carbon emissions due to limited seasonality and local accessibility than a cow produces for the same nutrient density and complexity locally
did I miss the source on this?
Here’s a source for you to read, I read the ones you linked www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w
while this doesn’t go super in depth, it’s a counterpoint to the idea that veganism (And definitely vegetarianism) is only possible with global trade. www.iamgoingvegan.com/vegan-cultures/
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
sure, there are a lot of factors that would make it difficult. If most people can’t afford to be vegan (for monetary or other cost reasons especially) that reflects a failure of our food system. Our food system hasn’t even gotten to the point of ensuring nobody goes hungry, we should be using our cropland to feed humans not other animals (look up how much of our crops go to livestock)
we should end the biggest problems first, and start with ending factory farms, but we should also remember that culture is not a good reason to hurt others
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
there are other approaches to sentientism that aren’t based on valence. I don’t feel like writing a book on the different ones, but to give an example of a rights based one that I think is strong is that every sentient being has, at the very least, a right to their body, since that’s the one thing they’re born with and that is (almost certainly) what gives rise to their sentience in the first place. And to violate another sentient beings bodily autonomy is to forfeit your own (a sort of low level social contract), which allows for self defense and defending others
but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there’s a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility. I don’t really feel like getting into the weeds of that discussion though, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the conversation anyways
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
I explained why it’s not arbitrary, then pointed to a group that does draw arbitrary distinctions. That’s not tu quoque because I’m not saying “you also”
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
Sentience is what I base my ethics on (i’m a sentientist or sentiocentrist), which has implications on diet when considering whether to exploit sentient beings to get food. I don’t think it’s arbitrary, if someone is sentient, they are a part of the moral landscape because they can experience positive and negative valence (pleasure/pain, to put it more plainly but lose some nuance). If something is not sentient, I don’t see how it can be ethically relevant except in cases where the nonsentient thing matters to a sentient being
if you’re looking for arbitrary, the anthropocentrists are that way
- Comment on Fish have heart too. 11 months ago:
the scientific consensus is that a well planned vegan diet can be healthy for all stages of human life. Plant staple foods are some of the cheapest foods around (rice, beans, grains)