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Comment by maipen | Hacker News Reader

Because we humans are more important than them.

I don’t understand the issue.

We should try to minimize the pain and suffering of these test subjects, in a few decades I am sure we will have better alternatives…

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> Because we humans are more important than them.

This seems to be self evident to you. Can you explain why this is true?

Can you explain why it's not? Are you seriously proposing that if you were in a trolley problem choosing between saving the life of a random human you know nothing about and a random mouse you know nothing about, you would have difficulty making the decision?

Why not? Because without animals you wouldn't be here today.

We're only here today because animals have given us the resources to survive. From cavemen hunting for meat to bees, insects pollinating plants.

The only resource we can provide is limited breast milk, sperm and meat. But human meat is deemed socially unacceptable, sperm only exists within biological males and the biological women has a limited timespan in their life where only if the conditions are right they lactate. So no, we have no importance.

Without any feasible resources that the homo sapien race can provide, of which could provide cultivation, that in return makes humans unimportant. QED

> Humans are not important, we are a fault to this world.

No other plant or animal is important either. Nature doesn't give a shit about any of us. The ability to actually care about abstract concepts like the suffering of others is a rare trait in the animal kingdom. Humans have it. Maybe some primates and cetaceans have it. Otherwise animals are quite content to rip each other apart in the most cruel ways possible for food. I assure you, a lion does not lose any sleep over the suffering of the gazelle.

This alone makes humans a little special, no?

I removed that statement but:

> Humans are not important, we are a fault to this world.

> This alone makes human a little special, no?

No, not really. We build militant armies only to send them off to fight so we can cause brutality to the same race for all but nothing other than evil and greed.

At least animals are mauling in for survival. You could say power too but at least they eat the remains.

Not my cat, little bastard tortures mice and leaves me a grisly present of submission.

You and several others in this thread are disturbingly nihilistic misanthropes. You should not be allowed to vote nor breed, though what self respecting person would ever couple with you in the first place.

ANTS go to global war. Murdering a significant amount of your rivals over territory is a completely normal animal thing. The fact that we are very good at it and invented explosives to do it "better" is just another feather in our cap that we have made ourselves "different". Hell, dolphins murder porpoises and launch them 50 ft into the air for shits and giggles and rape other dolphins when they are bored.

Philosophy is an invention of humans. Laws are an invention of humans. ETHICS are an invention of humans. Nature thinks our laughable attempts at "being ethical" are adorable. Nature is perfectly happy for us to brutally torture each other.

It's weird how the unironic use of “QED” in internet debates almost guarantees it's being applied to the most undeserving and undemonstrated of arguments.

Asking for an explanation is not a contradiction.

If the trolley problem involved 1 human and like 50 cats I'd probably save the cats.

Not to say animals are more important than humans but I imagine for most people it'd depend on the scale. Same reason most people are uncomfortable with the suffering of millions of animals for the sake of cosmetics.

There is actually no completely objective way in which it’s possible to determine the relative importance or sacredness of an individual’s life between one species and another.

There is no particularly good objective reason for me to value my neighbours life more than a fish.

However I choose to be an unabashed specieist and value any individual human life above any individual other life.

Well the inconvenient thing is that objectively we aren't more important than other species. What you're actually doing is just overriding that objective fact with a subjective one.

Important for what?

Exactly.

Well so objectively no life is worth protecting or what do you want to say?

Edit: or do you see cross-species minimization of pain as an objective objective (ha)? Or maximization of pleasure?

There is no "objective" answer to ethics.

But yes, if we want to base it on empathy, it would mean XY... so many philosophical arguments have been made about this. But it stands there is no "objective" ethics, at least to my knowledge.

Without even involving animals, there's not even a definite way how to answer the trolley problem without violating my subjective ethical values.

Human life as an ulterior value seems to be the best bet for explaining rational ethics.

Go ahead and objectively prove humans are less important than other species.

That's not what I said.

Surely you should have no trouble proving a "objective fact"

It's plainly axiomatic. Humans do this because it is valuable to treat other humans as if their pain, injury, or death is important. The other humans extend reciprocity. We will, for instance, chase your murderer down, because if the situation is reversed, we're pretty sure you'll chase our murderer down. We get a deterrent effect for practically nothing... that's a bargain.

Mice do not extend reciprocity. They will not chase your murderer down, or avoid injury to you.

If you're searching for more than that, you've turned it into a religion. This is a practical matter.

It's unlikely that you have developmental issues that makes this impossible for you to understand intuitively. I suspect that you were miseducated.

Because I enjoy eating the flesh of slaughtered animals. Whenever I do so I feel nothing but absolute pleasure of the taste of cooked flesh. I feel zero guilt. And so does the majority of the human race.

If I were to do the same to a human that would be a big problem.

Why is it like this? I don't know but that's just the way it is. Don't try to rationalize it, it's not supposed to be rational. Our evolutionary quirks and moral instincts are the product of biological evolution not rational thought.

It's not rational, but it is self evident, to everyone. Including you. Your appeal is more of a request to ask for the rationality behind it and hoping that when people see how irrational it is they will side with you.

People aren't rational. There beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.

For example: how do you justify the slaughter and killing of all the plants that cows rip through without a second thought? Are plants less important then animals? It's mind blowing how many plants are literally executed every time those cows chew.

This what I do is a service to justice. I eat the flesh of slaughtered cows to punish plant killers. I balance the scales of justice every time I devour a steak.

This same logic justifies cannibalism of all vegetarians too but I'm unwilling to eat vegans. You'll have to get back to me on that. It takes time to fully rationalize all my instinctual behaviors.

It seems like this is mostly written to offend vegans, of which I am not, so I don't find most of it interesting honestly.

Only thing I have to say is

> People aren't rational. ~~There~~ Their beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.

A huge pet peeve of mine is when people tell me what I believe. Believe what you want, but I absolutely anchor my beliefs in my rational understanding. Sometimes I don't have a rational understanding, and no belief on the matter (not having an opinion is actually possible). That's why I asked.

Does a beetle scream when you step on it?

Does a human scream when you shoot it in the face?

I can name lots of animals that scream when you step on them. Is this related to the thread?

> Because we humans are more important than them.

The profoundly unaware speciesism and selfishness in this comment is exactly why there is so much suffering and pain in this world.

I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. There's a faulty premise or something. You might as well say "the greed of universal constants is so high and that's exactly why there are so many chlorine atoms in the ocean".

I'm minimally interested in reducing the level of human pain that exists in the world. I'm absolutely uninterested in reducing the level of non-human pain in the world unless there are practical benefits for that effort.

I don't even know what "suffering" means. Is "suffering" pain, just a synonym? If so, why say "suffering and pain"? Is it some sort of fallacy to try to add emotional weight to your statement? Is suffering distinct from pain? Can you measure suffering? Detect it with some instrument? Do you even have a definition for suffering?

"Suffering" is as mystical and meaningless as when the religious talk about souls. When people use that word, I suspect very strongly that they're incapable of consistently remaining rational.

having an in group bias is pretty universal among social animals. do you really expect people to value another species over their own?

What an insane person you are. Animals are far more cruel than Humans could ever hope to be. The mere fact that we care about this fact at all is evidence of our superiority. The human capacity for suffering, love, creativity, etc far outstrip anything in the animal kingdom and its not close.

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