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Comment by kixiQu | Hacker News Reader

> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker.

There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd.

> A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not.

Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.

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Murdering (or being complicit in the factory farming model), and then consuming another living conscious being is on a very different moral plane than remixing intellectual work.

It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.

Deciding that "living conscious being" is the category that merits moral status is one framework of justification for veganism – the Western originated-in-the-1970s-one. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/moralstatus_1.sh... I'm not saying that it's wrong, but to act like it should be taken as the default prior without requiring laying out its context is a very narrow view.

>It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.

It's really not hard. You just have to care more for the harm to the well-being of human artists than for the harm for the well-being of farmed animals. It may surprise some people but speciesism is the default position for the vast majority of the population.

Wait. When you say well being you're aware that killing them is close to the ultimate harm we can inflict on them.

What you're saying is that you think intellectual property is more valuable, to you, than the life of other conscious non human beings.

I think for most people, this is a stretch.

It really isn't. Most people don't consider farming murder and do not care about the well-being of non-cute, non-immediately present animals at all.

Redefining words like “murder” to include killing animals for food requires some pretty impressive mental gymnastics too.

But I don’t find either one hard to imagine.

Eating animals is kind of what our species has been doing for millenia.

The mental gymnastics are required to rationalize the act of eating meat and murder being the same thing.

> There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd.

The vegan argument is that factory farms are literal lifetime torture pins. This isn't much up to debate. You can shrug and choose to eat meat anyway, but co-opting their name for your argument on ip seems incredibly shallow. Even if you believe that ip violations are worse than animal cruelty. I'm not a vegetarian at all fwiw. Not too dissimilar from trying to frame this as the holocaust of artists or any other strongly held event / movement by many others.

> Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.

If your ethical framework suggests ip violations are immoral, unless you think the execution was bad that's just silly.

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