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Comment by projektir | Hacker News Reader

> The idea that we should have moral compunctions about biological reality seems absurd to me

Why? We seem to have plenty of moral compunctions about lots of other biological realities. Otherwise, why do anything at all?

As humans, we have so far not acted in a manner that implies we're completely OK with biological realities. We keep trying to change them. Hopefully, it will continue this way.

Most people agree that they do not want to suffer. That's what makes it evil. It's not a difficult concept.

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> Why? We seem to have plenty of moral compunctions about lots of other biological realities.

Do we, in practice? Can you go into more detail?

> Most people agree that they do not want to suffer. That's what makes it evil. It's not a difficult concept.

Did we ask the animals too? Maybe the pig consensus is different.

If most people agree they do not want to pay taxes, do taxes become evil?

There is no objective reason to consider 'most people agree on x' as some kind of objective moral imperative. There is no moral quality to caring what people want. I don't think this is a very sound basis for an objective morality.

EDIT: What I'm trying to get at is basically this. You're saying that eating meat (at least meat that necessitates the killing of animals) is morally wrong. You're saying this because you want to persuade me and the rest of your audience that eating meat is morally wrong. But you are not a moral authority; I consult my conscience, which feels entirely guilt-free about the subject, and my appetite, which feels a positive obligation to eat meat. You're simply trying to exploit a "hack" in my social animal brain, which is that if you tell me that something is wrong, you are telling me that other members of the human herd will judge me unfavorably and perhaps ostracize me or otherwise punish me.

Some people, but not very many, will be swayed by your attempted brain-exploit. But I, again, observe that my conscious feels guilt-free, which is a very strong sign that the people I am surrounded by do not, in fact, disapprove of my eating meat, and also that the vast majority of people I know actually eat meat. So somewhere in my hindbrain, I realize that you are (from my perspective) lying to me, and it will make me instinctively resentful of you, because you have marked yourself as a member of The Other.

So your 'moral' argument is, objectively, amoral; and for your purposes, actually counterproductive, useful only when a person is surrounded overwhelmingly by vegans and vegetarians, who will be able to enforce a shared social norm. You could, instead, if you want to try an intellectual tack, try to show how my personal interests are served by becoming a vegetarian, but you will have to discover some interests and values that strongly outweigh my predilection for eating meat.

Or what you could do is abandon your moral arguments, temporarily, until a day when you're worried about punishing the wayward vegans rather than converting the meat-eaters. You want to make vegans cool, the social elite. You want to get into the media and fill as many TV shows and movies and podcasts and YouTube personalities with cool vegans. You want to make people want to be like you. While you're at it, make animals more important, anthropomorphize them as much as possible, try to generate as much empathy for animals as possible - to some degree, this is already being done. And then in a few decades, if you keep it up, most people will be vegetarians and you can then start talking about how killing animals for food is evil, and you can probably even pass a law to that effect. That'd be a way to get some moral feeling behind it.

> Do we, in practice? Can you go into more detail?

Treating diseases, reducing violence, caring about the rights of the disenfranchised, sitting here on HN talking about how we treat animals.

> There is no objective reason to consider 'most people agree on x' as some kind of objective moral imperative.

I didn't say "most people agree" to imply that something is "objectively" true because most people agree with it. I said it because the definition of suffering as evil is fairly common sense, because it's an experience that anything conscious shares (given a developed enough nervous system), and nothing conscious wants, tautologically due to the definition of the word.

Morality is derived from subjective wants and non-wants, there's literally nothing else to derive it from.

> You're saying that eating meat (at least meat that necessitates the killing of animals) is morally wrong. You're saying this because you want to persuade me and the rest of your audience that eating meat is morally wrong.

I'm not a vegetarian and I'm not trying to convince you in particular of anything. My beliefs on eating meat and moral wrongs are more complex than that and my conclusions are far more negative.

> Treating diseases, reducing violence, caring about the rights of the disenfranchised, sitting here on HN talking about how we treat animals.

Diseases are not regarded as a moral problem; violence considering morally acceptable in pursuit of the right socially-approved causes, the 'rights of the disenfranchised' have nothing to do with the intersection of morality and biological reality, and the same for HN.

> I didn't say "most people agree" to imply that something is "objectively" true because most people agree with it. I said it because the definition of suffering as evil is fairly common sense, because it's an experience that anything conscious shares (given a developed enough nervous system), and nothing conscious wants, tautologically due to the definition of the word.

It isn't tautologically true at all. Anyone can look around and see plenty of people that want to suffer. There are different reasons; some, to punish themselves, some, in pursuit of some other interest, some, for the sake of their religion, and so on and so forth. In fact, I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive who was not inflicting on themselves some amount of suffering for some reason.

Diseases are very much a moral problem relative to biology. We're keeping the "weak" a live, prolonging life, disturbing the natural order of things. In our society, we consider it pretty immoral to leave someone to die of a curable disease, and we work to cure more. Clearly we're more interested in keeping those around alive and happy than having them die so the next generation will become "stronger". That's very contrary to evolution's preference for everyone just being disposable fodder to make better and better organisms.

If violence needs the right socially-approved causes, that is further evidence that we really don't like it at the end of the day.

Rights of the disenfranchised has nothing to do with it? It's related the same way diseases are - the disenfranchised should be mistreated and thrown out according to evolution. We seem to continually decide otherwise.

Discussions on HN relate to what people are considering and thinking. In a properly naturalistic society, nobody would ever worry about the feelings of animals, we would think this entire discussion is silly.

> It isn't tautologically true at all. Anyone can look around and see plenty of people that want to suffer.

Your examples and arguments here are so shallow I'm skeptical that you're actually arguing in good faith.

Surely there's a difference between someone undergoing a painful medical treatment that they believe will help them in the long run vs someone being tortured for another's enjoyment? And for the case of one undergoing painful medical treatment, is it really _wanting_ to suffer if they'd much rather have a non-painful version of the same treatment? Or is it more that they weren't really given a choice?

You're confusing 'biological reality' with naturalism. I am not advocating naturalism, nor am I claiming that one or the other is moral. I am claiming that amorality is reality, and our 'morality' is whatever the fashionable social norms of the day consist of.

For example:

> We're keeping the "weak" a live, prolonging life, disturbing the natural order of things. In our society, we consider it pretty immoral to leave someone to die of a curable disease, and we work to cure more. Clearly we're more interested in keeping those around alive and happy than having them die so the next generation will become "stronger". That's very contrary to evolution's preference for everyone just being disposable fodder to make better and better organisms.

Keeping their own alive, even the weaker members, is something many social animals do. The 'naturalism' position might be that we should engage in some kind of eugenics. The biological reality is that evolution doesn't care how strong individual members of the herd are. There's nothing "anti-evolution" about protecting the weak.

> Rights of the disenfranchised has nothing to do with it? It's related the same way diseases are - the disenfranchised should be mistreated and thrown out according to evolution. We seem to continually decide otherwise.

This is, again, nothing to do with 'biological reality' but with the straw-man of naturalism. And it couldn't be any other way. Everything we do is 'according to evolution', ergo the disenfranchised being accorded rights is 'according to evolution,' not somehow contra to it. We are animals, not gods.

> Surely there's a difference between someone undergoing a painful medical treatment that they believe will help them in the long run vs someone being tortured for another's enjoyment?

Maybe, but we have moved the goalposts from 'suffering is evil' to 'suffering for another's enjoyment is evil.' And yet there are people who allow themselves to be subjected to physical pain gladly for the enjoyment of others, and in older times, even tortured and killed.

You haven't exactly defined what you mean by "biological reality". I don't really see how what you're proposing is any different from naturalism. Resignation to intentions of nature, i.e., statements like these:

> I am claiming that amorality is reality

Is exactly what I consider naturalism. That's what nature wants you to think. Why is that statement even significant? Morality, as I've stated earlier, is derived from a subjective experience. It starts existing the moment someone has experiences they like and don't like. It's a simple place to begin, everyone shares it, everyone agrees on the good or the bad side of it. The only difference is that there are people who are OK with the bad happening, and those who are not. But both groups are aware of the bad.

I will say there is a big difference between a civilization where the bad is OK and one where it is not. I also know which one I'd prefer to live in. Which one pretty much everyone will prefer to live in. That's not a coincidence. Those who would prefer to live in the other civilization are also those who always expect to be on top. That seems quite a condition. Again, not a coincidence.

"fashionable social norms" are an approximation, that doesn't mean the thing they're trying to approximate doesn't exist. Just like physics don't cease to exist because our conclusions about it are not always correct.

> And it couldn't be any other way. Everything we do is 'according to evolution', ergo the disenfranchised being accorded rights is 'according to evolution,' not somehow contra to it. We are animals, not gods.

Are meteors hitting dinosaurs according to evolution, too? "Everything we do is according to evolution" is a rather tautological, unfalsifiable belief. At some point, we need to start distinguishing what evolution intended and what we do. The aforementioned fashionable social norms to me don't sound like evolution had it all figured out already. Caring for the weak and our own is a thing social animals do? To a very, very limited point... we didn't do that at all for quite a few members of society for a very long time. It seems to have taken us a lot of civilized development to even start thinking about such things. Natural fear of the other is still fighting us at every turn. Desire to eat meat is fighting us in this very topic. No, I don't think evolution has anything to do with this, unless it's evolution of thought itself. There are clearly forces in opposition to each other here.

If we are not gods, someone else is.

> Maybe, but we have moved the goalposts from 'suffering is evil' to 'suffering for another's enjoyment is evil.'

I haven't moved such goalposts, I made an example, and you should stop projecting your own conclusions when they were not at all present in the post you're responding to. The purpose of the example wasn't at all to say that suffering for another's enjoyment is evil (consensual BDSM is a thing), but to say that someone suffering due to things they didn't choose is very different from suffering due to things they chose. The difference here is obvious and I'm not going to explain it again.

> You haven't exactly defined what you mean by "biological reality".

> Resignation to intentions of nature, i.e., statements like these: ["]I am claiming that amorality is morality["] [i]s exactly what I consider naturalism.

I think we have an is-ought problem here.

I am describing what is. Biological reality is 'what is'. I am not describing what ought to be. What I am saying is that yes, morality is subjective, and people (inclusively, taking all peoples throughout history) very strongly disagree on what is moral and immoral.

> everyone agrees on the good or the bad side of it.

That's the thing. They don't, not even close.

> "fashionable social norms" are an approximation, that doesn't mean the thing they're trying to approximate doesn't exist. Just like physics don't cease to exist because our conclusions about it are not always correct.

Are you suggesting moral realism? That is, are you saying that there are, in fact, some kind of moral truths we can discover? How? Through experiment? Archaeology? Reason? I am guessing the latter; if I can be allowed to speculate as to your thought process, you seem to hold something like the Golden Rule as an axiom of moral truths. That is, murder is wrong because, as I do not want to be murdered, it would be wrong for me to murder someone.

But what I'm saying is there is no justification for that axiom (though I personally might prefer it). It's arbitrary. We can construct an elegant system of ethics upon it, but it would be founded in the sand. And thus we discover why, again, throughout human history, there were countless cultures who would have regarded it as the most silly nonsense they'd ever heard.

> I will say there is a big difference between a civilization where the bad is OK and one where it is not. I also know which one I'd prefer to live in. Which one pretty much everyone will prefer to live in.

Most people will prefer to live in the civilization most like their own. Naturally, you and I would most prefer to live in a modern Western society where everyone agrees with us on most points of right and wrong.

> Caring for the weak and our own is a thing social animals do? To a very, very limited point...

I think you would be surprised by animal behavior. They will risk their lives for others. A good example is elephants, who have been known to do everything they can for the injured, even if it's just wait in the same place for them to die, hold 'funerals', and even seek vengeance on those who hurt their fellow.

> At some point, we need to start distinguishing what evolution intended and what we do.

Evolution does not intend anything at all.

> we didn't do that at all for quite a few members of society for a very long time.

Plenty of other cultures did for long periods of history.

Its pretty moronic to assume that a feeling every animal with a nervous system avoids, is somehow not proven to be a deplorable state to put sentient life into. You can play coy semantics but its quite apparent that even primitive mammals avoid pain.

You can go ahead and spout off arguments about us being biological primal carnivores but that isn't very persuasive considering that the defining aspect of intellect has always been a higher sense of understanding of good and evil, and manipulating the environment to support the greater good.

And thus, inflicting pain on beings like us, for extra entropy on taste bud receptors, seems rather low class and savage. Its one thing to kill. Its an entirely different thing to buy products from a supermarket that come from a pipeline of some of the worst acts against a conscious entity one could imagine themselves waking up in. What separates you from those animals today? Merely luck. When it is luck that decides the outcome of rather uneven circumstances, people rally against it. Intelligence presupposes that consciousness is not a choice, so is punishing someone because they sprouted into the wrong mammal type something that should be deemed okay?

Do onto others as one would want done onto self. We are experiencers first, animals second, and humans third, lets not deny the absolute tragedy that is the conscious experience of millions of livestock. Death is not the enemy of moral virtue but cruel and unusual life surely is.

I agree with everything you've written except, I think, this last sentence:

>Death is not the enemy of moral virtue but cruel and unusual life surely is.

Are you saying that it's ok to kill animals for food as long as they are not made to suffer in the process?

If so, I'd argue that depriving them of subjective experience - which is what death entails - is also morally wrong.

That is a stronger opinion. I agree with you but I am offering a logical framework that will agree with more people.

> You can go ahead and spout off arguments about us being biological primal carnivores but that isn't very persuasive considering that the defining aspect of intellect has always been a higher sense of understanding of good and evil,

OK. Sounds great. Tell me more about this 'higher understanding of good and evil.' What is good? What is evil? Why? Where do they come from?

We don't have any 'higher understanding of good and evil', we simply have language and (most likely) a higher capacity for abstract thought which allow us to argue about our social instincts, which are not objective truths.

There's a reason why, for all of human history, 'morality' has differed wildly among cultures. The only real constant is some level of in-group altruism, because that is a biological necessity for social animals. The rest is all gravy. Some humans thought human sacrifice was good, and a moral obligation. Others, torture. Others, slavery. Others, rape. Others, pacifism.

There is no rationale, there is no higher truth, there is no higher power, that you could appeal to to convince the most enlightened and rational Aztec that human sacrifice was evil. That's because it doesn't exist.

That's why your whole moral argument is entirely unpersuasive to people who eat meat. You're like an Aztec come to tell us that we need to be committing human sacrifice; it's all nonsense without the cultural context and socialization and inoculation. You, based on a moral belief you did not come to through reason, are trying to convince people secure in their own moral beliefs that they are commiting evil. A simple check-in with their conscience confirms that you are wrong.

So you need something other than a moral argument.

No argument is going to work on someone who thinks its okay to torture animals for human enjoyment. Just like no description of smell is going to enlighten someone who lacks a nose.

The only thing that might change your mind is watching videos of the conditions that these animals are in, solely for hedonistic pleasure, extra information/nueron firing in the form of taste. Imagine yourself in their body -- a punishment from birth to death because of bad luck on the end of some humans' excessive want for neuropathic pleasure. Any way you shape it, excess is always going to be morally dubious. When one has no choice, some things like self defense make sense. But there are plenty of choices in our modern age. A vegetarian diet with good farm fresh eggs, cheese, and milk, is plenty enjoyable and easy to do healthy. And a grass-fed free-range steak is not the worst thing to have once in a while. It can be argued that death is not a terrible thing, since we all experience it. Rather, torture is. So eating sustainable and cruelty-free meat, is sound.

You seem to be bent on excusing torture and pain because no bullet-proof definition or argument can sway you. I don't know what to say, except that you are clearly in denial and lying to us and yourself.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil. We've asked you repeatedly not to do this. Please don't do it again.

How is calling an opinion moronic uncivil?

I'm going to ask again, aside from the word "moronic" which I called an opinion, not a person. What exactly is uncivil? I gave a cogent argument about the issue at hand. If you have issue with a single word as a moderator, it would fit to specifically point that out, rather than call my entire post uncivil. This is clearly a decisive issue with strong opinions.

"Moronic" is a textbook example of calling names in the way the HN guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's bad anywhere, and the worst kind of thing to lead with.

"You can go ahead and spout off" and "You can play coy semantics" come across as personal jabs. Such phrases are a kind of elbowing. You may feel that you didn't mean them personally, but the person who gets the elbow typically doesn't agree. This is the path to degraded discourse, so please don't do it here.

Okay, thanks for the explanations. I will do my best to avoid these things in the future. Cheers.

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