>Ethics is not something dictated by a number of ppl sharing a belief.
Unless you believe ethics is given from some sort of higher authority, ethics is dictated by the number of people sharing a belief.
Unless you believe ethics is given from some sort of higher authority, ethics is dictated by the number of people sharing a belief.
My personal belief is that we have a responsibility for all species on our planet (as the most intelligent, evolved, smart, etc of them). Even if everyone believes except 1 person that does not make their argument less or our argument more valid. Purely from an ethical perspective.
Let's at least be honest about our moral/ethical frameworks. They are useful for social cohesiveness, peace and order. But they're still just made up.
I don't have time for a complete response, but as an expert in this field (ethics) I feel compelled to let you know that nearly every professional philosopher (particularly in ethics) disagrees with this position.
Ethics is not simply whatever the majority says it is. You're not going to get anyone in ethics (including those who think ethics are in some sense "made up") to sign off on that.
>You're not going to get anyone in ethics
Isn't this exactly an argument supporting collective position ?
So you are (at least partially) defining ethics by the consensus of people (in your case professional philosophers).
Even in pure mathematics, which is considered to be among the most rigorous of fields, a whole lot depends on consensus about axioms and consensus about what is a valid proof.
Yes, I agree there are logical principles for determining ethical actions given a set of ethical axioms, but however, the ethical axioms themselves, and indeed the logical principles, are determined by consensus.
I am not. I'm saying that people on HN make some very hasty assumptions about ethics (e.g. the claim made in the parent comment) that ethicists broadly agree are deeply misguided. I'm hoping to encourage a little more caution. Ethics are not defined by what professional philosophers agree on, but professional philosophers are in a good position to point out when lay comments are making simple mistakes in their reasoning. This is such a case.
Of course that becomes wrong if many humans embrace the idea that minimizing suffering for animals is a good thing. At that point you would also be increasing the humans' "moral/ethical pleasure" in a kind of self fulfilling way. But there's no reason for this to happen except human hubris.
You're mistaking ethics as a branch of philosophy for norms dictated by society.
But empirically speaking, almost all people would agree at a high-level that minimizing suffering is an agreeable axiom.
Yes, they would, but there is a weighting based on the perceived status of the animal. Otherwise we would feel compelled to destroy all carnivores, since a single carnivore can kill many, many prey throughout its lifetime. We agree that the utility a lion gets from eating a dozen zebras is greater than the suffering of those zebras. Also, note that predators, do not just kill strictly what they need for food(biggest example is housecats, though other examples include wolves killing elk https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/160325-wolf-...).
Similarly, humans have a weighting function. Many people think that the utility/pleasure that a human gets from eating octopuses is greater than the suffering of those octopuses.