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Comment by susijdjdjxa | Hacker News Reader

Our moral intuitions are almost entirely determined by the society we live in. 30 years ago, 30% of people in the US supported gay marriage, and now it’s over 60%. Do you believe the number of good people doubled during that time?

I’m gay, and to me the animal farming industry is obviously more wrong than banning same-sex marriage. Yet almost everyone in both of the political tribes eats meat.

My values fall in line with the left in most areas, so I generally associate and agree with left-wingers. This means I get exposed to a lot of left-wing perspectives and media, so to me, it appears that the Republicans are constantly being evil. But then again, everyone on both sides is eating meat, so how different can they possibly be?

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Yes, GP's argument seems to rest on the assumption that people who reach the right conclusion do so for the right reasons. But opposing discrimination against gay people didn't become more obviously right over the course of a few decades; it gained social momentum until it was the path of least resistance for the majority.

Hopefully a similar thing will happen with respect to our treatment of animals: as humane alternatives become easier and more appealing, there will be less incentive to avoid thinking about the suffering inflicted, and this will kick-start the social process whereby factory farming eventually becomes obviously indefensible to most people.

Really, my argument was that people who reach the wrong conclusion for the wrong reasons, and stick to them, are suspect. We're all guilty of that at times, of course, but it's rare to have it quite so prominently and comprehensively refuted. And it makes it hard for me to believe that anything I say will make a difference on a topic that isn't obvious.

I hope you're right about animals. It's a case where I know I'm being inconsistent. But at least I'm aware of it and trying to do better, rather than twist the rationale why my existing behavior (and misbehavior) must be correct.

I don't need people to do the right things for the right reasons. But I need them to be open to reasons.

If you feel like it shouldn't be this hard, it's because there's a massive force pushing against you. Our situation isn't an accident; the status quo actively seeks to maintain itself, and incentives become structured in such a way as to reinforce it. You can't change people's minds without changing the structures that have forced them into that configuration.

As human beings, we're predisposed to think socially; when we see an issue, we look for the individual person who is the proximal cause of that issue. We have a much harder time seeing when the issue was caused by a broader system. That's why we're constantly frustrated and thwarted by issues where it seems the problem will never go away: we dealt with the person who was at fault, why has the issue reappeared? It must be hopeless, there must be nothing to do but accept that every bad person will be replaced with another bad person. But why aren't we asking what mechanism it is that keeps replacing these "bad" people with new ones? We're stricken with learned helplessness because we can't see the structure of the system or realize the fact that we have the ability to manipulate and change it, because the problem doesn't lie in any one person but in the shape of society itself.

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