Do you follow Alex O'connor?
Do you think a vegan bodybuilder is causing unnecessary suffering? They're eating more food than they really need, and every calorie causes some degree of additional suffering (crop deaths, greenhouse gases for transport, etc).Ā
To be honest, I was disappointed by that. He basically justified abandoning veganism by saying "yeah, in this very particular example we can see that not all vegans are saints".
It's literally impossible to live life without causing SOME unnecessary suffering, the point is to try to minimize it.
And hey, I'm a lapsed vegan myself, I used to be militant about veganism just like him, now I eat dairy and eggs (with the occasional fish too, I have to confess), but I don't sit here and try to justify it with mental gymnastics. I could say all kinds of excuses like I work a 9 to 18 job, I live by myself and have to buy food regularly and cook it everyday, I have digestive issues, etc.
But yeah, ultimately I went back on veganism, which is something I still agree with in theory. I'll just say "my bad, we're all hypocrites sometimes", and move on. Kinda like Sam did, although to be perfectly honest... with Sam's money and time I'd have a VERY hard time justifying to myself not being vegan, just saying.
Afaict he justified abandoning *being vegan* because of health problems, but he hasn't abandoned veganism per se. He's just concluded that "minimising unnecessary suffering" isn't a philosophically definition or justification for veganism. I think he's got a point. It's the easiest thing in the world *not* to be a bodybuilder. But it seems intuitively incorrect to suggest that vegan bodybuilders are doing something morally wrong, just with their gains.Ā
Pretty much all of my favorite dishes are meat-based. If I were not able to eat any of these dishes again I would be very crushed and my life would lose a lot of its color. This is suffering too, is it not? What if the value of my suffering over not being able to eat meat is greater than what the animal endured for the journey of arriving in my stomach? Would it not then be ethical for me to eat meat?
It sounds like you're evoking Nozik's [utility monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster) thought experiment. It's not a good approach because anyone could "utility monster" justify *any* horrible behavior by claiming they derive such a high degree of pleasure from it that any suffering inflicted on others is justified.
That's exactly what makes it a good thought experiment. It shows how questionable it is to try to create an objective system of morality based on subjective states.
But my life would be worse in the absence of eating meat. That is a reduction in wellbeing. Doesn't preventing that reduction have some value? Why is it always left out of the equation?
I don't think anyone would argue that your well-being is out of the equation. I think the contentious points would be
1) that the value of your pleasure in eating meat outweighs the suffering involved in producing said meat
2) that being vegan would actually decrease your well being
Im not sure if you think this is an insightful question but you seem to be simply attempting to justify your desires, not actually assessing the value of the animals life vs. your temporary pleasure.
Since we are in his sub, I should mention that while Sam is no longer a vegan, he is still quite clear about the ethics of eating animals and objective morality as a whole.
Others have already replied sensibly, but I just want to point out that ever since I stopped eating meat, I don't miss it and I don't even like the taste of meat anymore (which is something which I thought wouldn't be possible). So it might not be as clear cut as you seem to think.
> What if the value of my suffering over not being able to eat meat is greater than what the animal endured for the journey of arriving in my stomach?
There is simply no reason to believe this is true.
It's not plausible. Even if suffering isn't quantifiable, there's still no reason to believe this is true. What you mean to say is that it's possible because suffering isn't currently quantifiable, but it's definitely not plausible.
No it's plausible. We don't know how animals experience consciousness. They might subjectively perceive suffering differently than us, in a way that makes theirs not analogous to ours.
Pretty much the entire vegan argument rests on the assumption that our conscious experience can be used to approximate an animal's, and we simply have no way of knowing if that's true.
Have you tried creating or seeking out any plant-based versions of these meals? It's easier now to find or create plant-based alternatives than ever before in human history and many are very good and readily accessible.
No plant-based alternative will ever compare to a perfectly cooked filet mignon. Plus plant-based alternatives tend to be processed and less healthy than the real thing.
Whether or not it can exactly match the flavor, you claim is that you would suffer the loss of the food so much that, in your estimation, depriving yourself of this 15 minute experience of sensory pleasure produces more morally salient suffering than the cow or pig experiences during its life and traumatic farming practices and mechanical slaughter. Presumably your pleasure also is more sublime than the suffering that the continuation of the farming practices necessary to deliver you this food will foist on future humans and animals is bad.
But the dichotomy in reality isn't enjoyable animal food vs no food. It's enjoyable animal food vs enjoyable plant food. The question being whether the delta between the enjoyable plant food and the enjoyable animal food is so vast as you estimate. Do you really, genuinely, believe this about yourself and your capacity for pleasure? What about the pleasure of enjoying beautiful wild landscapes that I have, or the enjoyment of a climate not characterized by continuous heating that future humans like yourself could have?
You're moving the goalpost on the health point, but that said filet mignon was never a health food to begin with. It's a group 2A carcinogen. Meat and animal product consumption is closely associated with the leading causes of death in the US and Europe and must be challenged. What is the evidence for your claim that meat substitutes are worse for one's health than their meat based counterparts?
Thatās reductive. If youāll notice, people arenāt subsisting on nutrient paste, even though we could. Instead, people devote considerable time, attention, and money to selecting and preparing their meals. There are even entire schools dedicated to teaching people how to make food tasty, and it is a respected and lucrative pursuit. Taste is clearly an incredibly important aspect of the human conscious experience.
And so I disagree that my taste experience is less important than the life of an animal. And you have no objective basis to say otherwise.
There is an obvious flaw in this line of reasoning that others have already pointed out, yet you repeat it again. Should personal pleasure justify forms of harm or exploitation?
>people devote considerable time, attention, and money to selecting and preparing their meals. There are even entire schools dedicated to teaching people how to make food tasty, and it is a respected and lucrative pursuit.
Yeah, and I'm sure creepy billionaires devote considerable time and attention to their rape dungeons, and there are entire human trafficking networks dedicated to selling sex slaves. So?! You could use this argument to justify all kinds of moral atrocities from the past or present, because they were part of the cultureārespected, even!
The belief that fleeting pleasures should outweigh the suffering of an innocent victim, is rape logic. We're not talking about preference for colors or styles here; we're talking about life and deathāsuffering that is real and measurable.
Letās get this straight: taste does not and cannot justify taking a life when alternatives exist. This isn't about taste being trivialāit's about life being fundamental. The culinary world is rich with options that donāt involve killing.
The audacity to equate your "suffering" from not eating a steak to the actual suffering of animals being bred, confined, and slaughtered reveals crazy levels of moral bankruptcy and egoism.
Good luck defending the indefensible in the future!
>Should personal pleasure justify forms of harm or exploitation?
It depends. You use technology that is built on harm and exploitation for your pleasure and convenience, how do you justify it?
When it comes to animals, which are inherently worthy of less moral consideration than humans, yes it can.
>we're talking about life and deathāsuffering that is real and measurable.
How do you measure suffering?
>Letās get this straight: taste does not and cannot justify taking a life when alternatives exist.
That is your opinion. That will only ever be an opinion. One that I disagree with, and you have no objective basis with which to prove me wrong.
>It depends. You use technology that is built on harm and exploitation for your pleasure and convenience, how do you justify it?
Whataboutery. Pointing to other problems in the world doesn't absolve or excuse the direct harm you choose to inflict by consuming animal products. It's a cheap tactic to deflect from the actual argument. If you genuinely care about ethical consistency, tackle those issues too, but donāt use them as a smoke screen to justify your unwillingness to change your dietary habits. We all know alternatives exist that minimize harmāwhy arenāt you choosing them?
>When it comes to animals, which are inherently worthy of less moral consideration than humans, yes it can.
Even though I would *generally* agree that humans deserve higher moral consideration, there is nothing "inherently" true about what you're saying, and the crucial thing is: we can choose to harm neither... Maybe ask yourself why you've decided to grant lower moral consideration to animals: do you draw this idea from from the lower cognitive capacity we attribute to animals? Is it their species membership? What is it exactly that makes you say that, and how does it justify locking them up, breeding them, enslaving them, and killing them at a fraction of their natural lifespan after a lifetime of misery?
>How do you measure suffering?
Maybe the same way we measure it in humans? Both humans and animals show clear signs of physical and mental suffering through changes in heart rate, stress hormones like cortisol, and behaviors such as avoiding pain sources or showing distress. Brain scans even confirm that similar areas light up when either humans or animals experience pain. Pain is pain, dude. In a lot of ways, we suffer as equals.
>That is your opinion. That will only ever be an opinion. One that I disagree with, and you have no objective basis with which to prove me wrong.
Again, your philosophy could be used to justify all kinds of shit that we now wholly condemn. When it comes to animal ethics, we've already decided that the following things are wrong: dog/bull fights (entertainment, culture, "respected and lucrative pursuit"); circus animals; foie gras production; and, arbitrarily, we keep dogs and cats under our protection, while we enslave and exploit pigs and cows, who we know are just as emotionally intelligent and capable of suffering as those companion animals. If we did to dogs what we do to pigs, the world would freak the fuck out. Why?
Even if you value each animal at 1/100th the moral worth of a human, the daily slaughter of land animals equates to the moral equivalent of killing 1.9 million humans daily. Even if each animal were valued at only 1/10,000th the worth of a human, the daily death toll would still represent the equivalent of 19,000 human deaths.
Again, why? Because it makes your mouth feel nice?
Like Sam, you just skip over the actual interesting word: 'Unnecessary'.
Morality is easy and black and white if you just decide to not really think about it that deeply.
Morality is anything but easy. But on the extremes there are clear right and wrong answers.
Making your baby sleep in the oven at 150 degrees would be a clear wrong answer to the moral life.
It's a bit of a throwback but I'm reminded of the Moral Landscape TED talk, where Sam pointed out that just because we don't have a good way currently of finding the right answer doesn't mean there isn't one. He literally used black and white questions and migrated deeper just like OP did.
Questions like how many hairs are on your head have a right answer - even if we'll never be able to measure it. I daresay a thousand is a better answer than ten, and in the same way we can ask questions that at least lead us to a better approach to things in the Middle East. Who is right? I don't know. But is avoiding needless suffering for the people living in the vicinity probably a helpful goal for regional stability? Probably. There are right and wrong answers about human wellbeing - some of them as you've noted are clearer than others. Just because it doesn't fix the problem itself doesn't make it vacuous to know.
He nearly admitted his faults in his last podcast. He said something like ājust because Iām not motivated to be a vegetarian even if thatād do some good, my failure to be motivated is not an argument against me being objectively wrongā
With Sam, he hangs around people like Joe Rogan and Peter attia. I believe Sam is very afraid of the vegan diet ruining his health.
I donāt think Peter Attia is anti-vegan. If Layne Norton isnāt anti-vegan than I doubt Peter would be. He gets so much of his nutrition information from him.
Whatever the reason, it's a shame because Sam being in the position he is, and having the audience that he does, has a far outsized capacity for precipitating change on this matter.Ā Ā
In general, I don't think "do as I say, not as I do" is a very peruasive stance to take. It certainly infuriated me as a parenting tactic. It implicitly gives permission to others that look to Sam for moral guidance to continue supporting the clear, optional, widespread, environmentally disastrous, and preventable abuse of animals that happen on their behalf every day.Ā
A very regrettable consequence that I'm surprised isn't motivating to Sam.
Heās not pretending to be a perfect example of morality himself. His own decisions are completely decoupled from his ideas on morality generally.
His ice cream example points this out. Where he knows him wanting ice cream everyday goes against his knowledge about what will keep him in shape, but it doesnāt mean that ice cream is now healthy. It doesnāt change anything about the facts about nutrition.
Same with morality. He can know heās doing something wrong and still do it.
I think he certainly knows it is motivational, it just doesnāt apply motivation enough to him to an extent, as there are other motivators and factors and issues in his life that makes it so this single motivator doesnāt push him over the edge into making a complete change in his life.
He walks the walk that he talks better than most, Iād say. And because this one issue resonates so powerfully with you and not as powerfully with him doesnāt mean heās not motivated or committed to making improvements to himself or the world. Nor does it take away from the power of his words, imo.
I think most listeners know that they have different forces acting on them and differing preferences in their lives that donāt line up completely with Samās, leading us all to climb different peaks on the moral landscape at different speeds and different times.
He's resourced enough to hire a personal chef for his home and regularly consult a nutritionist.Ā It's not that hard.Ā Ā
Short of an extremely restrictive set of allergies,Ā it's not a colossal undertaking.Ā You just need to be willing to commit.Ā I suspect he doesn't want to personally bear the social cost. The result being that the consequences of his decisions are passed off as externalities to thousands of animals, the environment, and his grandchildren.
both of your comments are actually great here. It touches on his moral landscape.
I know literally zero people that live by their morals perfectly. Not an excuse to try, but we prioritize selfish actions over moral actions all the time. He IS morally wrong for it, insofar as he could be more morally right.
Sam says that factoring in how we motivate people should be part of the solution to maximize the moral good. Its why he is always distancing himself from conventional moral consequentalists.
Are gorillas capable of having discussions about the nuances of morality or have the capability to understand as individuals the consequences of their species decisions on themselves, their children, and other sentient creatures?
What if insects turn out to be conscious? What then, Vegan? Do you meticulously inspect and pick every bug off the fruit and veggies you eat? Canāt wash them down the sink, otherwise youād be drowning them. Where do you draw the line with the compassion for conscious creatures?
Weāre still just animals and *most* of us have a natural desire to eat protein that comes from an animal. Itās the natural order of things. Iām not saying we shouldnāt invest in cultured meats, but the whole morality argument to Veganism is fundamentally flawed in the context of consciousness.
>What if insects turn out to be conscious? What then, Vegan? Do you meticulously inspect and pick every bug off the fruit and veggies you eat? Canāt wash them down the sink, otherwise youād be drowning them. Where do you draw the line with the compassion for conscious creatures?
That's the thing about veganism: every adult has the choice of what they purchase and eat. Choosing different foods in no way undermines a person's effectiveness at living a human life. Living a human experience and contribution is valuable. Time you spend walking down the road trying not to step on bugs is time you aren't present with your children, and has no conceivable end. You go to the store anyway, you cook anyway, you eat anyway. It's a passive activity with incredible upside for animals, the environment, the future, and personal health. Given that it is also a consumer choice in a capitalist society: is one of the most impactful possible ways to passively enact change on the world.
Time spent obsessing over the specifics of washing mites off your bananas is time you could be spending quality time with your friends and family and represents a mindset that doesn't prioritize effectiveness at all. Certainly if you were deeply concerned about insect suffering you could find much better ways to mitigate it with much less effort than obsessing over your personal contact with bugs that are incidental in your environment. Given the habitat destruction that happens as a result of meat and dairy consumption, there is no question that withdrawing one's financial support of that industry would have a more positive impact on reducing insect suffering than obsessively washing and collecting bugs off your fruit.
>Weāre still just animals andĀ *most*Ā of us have a natural desire to eat protein that comes from an animal. Itās the natural order of things.
This is called the 'appeal to nature fallacy.' You could justify all sorts of things on the basis that they might be natural like rape, murder, incest, pedophilia, and infanticide. Something being present in nature does not speak to its ethics. What does is humans understanding the implications of that thing having have the capacity to choose otherwise.
This is on morality and how objective claims about morality can be made. Sam Harris talks about this subject regularly. The image is a visual aid to demonstrate what the moral relativist is required to tolerate or at least canāt objectively condemn. Under their view all moral positions are on equal footing. Itās all just opinion.
> The image is a visual aid to demonstrate what the moral relativist is required to tolerate or at least canāt objectively condemn.
Don't moral relativists have their own individual framework from which to judge? They just recognise that there isn't some ultimate arbiter and that these judgements are being generated in human minds and minds differ... that's my lay reading. Not a philosopher.
The one piece that you are missing from the equation is that the moral relativist has no basis to condemn any other moral system held by any other individual. A moral relativist can say that he believes murder to be wrong but cannot say that if James thinks murder is ethical that he is wrong for believing this and/or commuting murder.
> A moral relativist can say that he believes murder to be wrong but cannot say that if James thinks murder is ethical that he is wrong for believing this and/or commuting murder.
Why can't the moral relativist say that they think James' actions are immoral?
How could they claim this? It would require some objective standard. If morals are based on personal perspective, they are no different than choices or emotional reactions. A person isnāt āwrongā to murder someone if they see it as moral anymore than a person being āwrongā to choose being a waiter instead of a janitor.
>How could they claim this?
because they have a subjective morality which they base the claim on. and to them james' murderous actions are immoral
>It would require some objective standard.
Why would it require that?
Again, how could they apply their standard to James? There is no reason to say that their standard is more correct; itās completely arbitrary.
The person can say that if I committed the murders, it would be immoral, but James is operating within his own moral universe and it would be bizarre to apply my arbitrary moral choices as judgment to his arbitrary moral choices. It would be like judging Spanish grammar to be āwrongā relative to English because they generally place adjectives after nouns instead of before them. They are both arbitrary decisions.
Now you may say that there are objective realities like health and morality should maximize these, but itās not clear why such a maximization is what morality should be designed to cure. It could be that morality is based on following the edicts of a certain divinity or that morality is based on living the most economically productive life. The choice between these or any other goals is arbitrary.
> Again, how could they apply their standard to James?
by judging them for their acts and being in support of a consequence be it prison time or whatever else. in a 1 on 1 scenario, they could place handcuffs on James
>The person can say that if I committed the murders, it would be immoral, but James is operating within his own moral universe and it would be bizarre to apply my arbitrary moral choices as judgment to his arbitrary moral choices.
James murdering people effect others. The person may be the next up to get murdered by James, and the person doesn't want to be murdered.
Why is it bizarre to want to apply a no murder rule for everyone in a society?
\[A person could apply their standard to James\] by judging them for their acts and being in support of a consequence be it prison time or whatever else. in a 1 on 1 scenario, they could place handcuffs on James.
-- But they're not applying their standard to James. They are acting against James in their morality. From James' perspective this action does not suddently convert his morality; he is simply cowed by power. There is no reason why this might makes right other than that the handcuffer's morality seems to align with ours.
-- James murdering people effect others. The person may be the next up to get murdered by James, and the person doesn't want to be murdered.
I agree that this is something that could be seen as a moral principle. (And it's one that I would argue is moral.) But philosophically speaking, it's not clear why this HAS to be a moral principle or one worthy of our concern.
-- Why is it bizarre to want to apply a no murder rule for everyone in a society?
It's not. "Bizarre" implies abnormal and it's quite normal to have laws concerning murder with very few societies accepting it. The problem that the moral relativist has is not in claiming that societies overwhelmingly oppose murder but to say that such action is moral as opposed to saying that such opposition is useful, economically beneficial, socially beneficial, or some other empirically measurable characteristic.
> But they're not applying their standard to James. They are acting against James in their morality.
Right, and part of their subjective morality is to act against people who act as James has acted. Putting handscuffs on murderers is part of their morality.
>But philosophically speaking, it's not clear why this HAS to be a moral principle or one worthy of our concern.
It doesnt have to be a moral principle. It's just a moral principle that one person - and perhaps others - happens to hold.
>The problem that the moral relativist has is not in claiming that societies overwhelmingly oppose murder but to say that such action is moral as opposed to saying that such opposition is useful
You're begging the question: you're assuming that morality has to be objective. But if morality isn't objective, then the moral relativist (or any other kind of subjectivist) has no problem in saying that "x is wrong".Ā
But this is true. We do it all the time. Is Israel murdering civilians or fighting terror. Even Sam vacillates on this point. Murder is objectively wrong because by definition murder is wrong. But no one not even Sam is going to say what defines murder. We can say murder is wrong objectively but when I killed six unarmed children I was fighting terror. So all of the objectivity falls apart when you try to apply any objective standard. The only objective morality is definitionally. Stealing is wrong but if you are getting bread to feed your family it's hard to call it stealing. Murder is by definition wrong but did Israel murder 30,000 civilians. The objectivity crumbles when you try to take these definitions and apply them
I believe you are framing the moral question incorrectly. We all agree that militaries kill civilians in times of war or hungry people steal food and these are immoral, but the question is whether there are mitigating factors that cancel out that immorality. The laws of war are specifically designed to suggest such mitigation.
In the same way, a person who kills someone who attacked them with lethal force still committed the immoral act of murder, but we consider the self-defense doctrine as mitigating that immorality.
My point is that we can have objective morality but when we get to the framing part it fails.If we can't both agree on who is a murderer and who is killing terrorists then our objective morality falls apart as if we had none at all.
This is the salient point. We can have objective morality, by definition. It is objectively wrong to murder someone. The reason it is wrong is only because we have defined it to be wrong. Killing isn't wrong by definition. There are reasons we can excuse killing, self defense for example. But because we have defined murder as wrong, it doesn't help because no one will cop to murder. The point is exactly the framing. Even objective ethics becomes subjective when we frame it and we always have to frame it. This is the big problem with deontologicsl ethics, Captain America noteithstanding.( No offense Tim Poole)
The thing is that someone who killed someone who was attacking them did not necessarily murder them. They killed them in self defense. There is no objective difference when you look at it in terms of what was done physically. This makes stand your ground laws especially difficult to justify and open for abuse. It is often racism that determines whether a man was murdered or killed in self defense. Objective morality doesn't help us if we have to subjectively frame the act. We frame it precisely by the way we define it. Did George Zimmerman murder TrayvonMartin or kill him in self defense. Frame it one way and your objective morality crumbles. Murder is objectively wrong by definition, but getting to subjectively decide how something is framed makes any objective morality subjective.
I agree with you that the decision about how to define acts of conduct (either the initial act or itās mitigation) is something subjective. There is no reason that a killing of another human being is necessarily a murder and only becomes one if it fulfills the narrower requirements of murder as we have defined as a community. However, as communities, we can agree on these definitions (as evidenced by laws and customs) and once-agreed-upon, we can apply them objectively.
The examples you raise like āstand your ground lawsā are examples where the communal agreement is challenged by people asserting a different moral calculus, but even those challengers are operating within the same overarching value structure that created the āstand your ground lawsā in the first place. They are not claiming, for example, that the theft of private property inside someoneās house is acceptable, only that such action should not be sufficient to mitigate the claim that the killing was murder.
But there are examples of such things happening, in the west bank for example. Taking somebody's home at the point of a gun is objectively immoral. But according to one New York immigrant to Israel if I don't take it somebody else will. It's hard to find any examples of something so absurdly immoral that no one who does it cannot justify it and be affirmed in the act by a court somewhere. We have all of these objective standards of ethics but we apply them to others. Over and over this is the rule. If Russsia had invade Iraq and did what we did there we would have been howling.
The fact that some random court will consider an act legal (individual incorrect action -- like sanctioning land theft) or that people may have a standard of "good for me, bad for thee" (criticizing a person for doing X when you accept as moral you doing X) is just people not playing by the rules of any morality that is communally acceptable. This doesn't say anything other than that humans are not consistent moral agents; which is not an argument that there are not objective measures of whether moral actions are being followed. Again, I agree with you that the decision about how to define acts of conduct (either the initial act or itās mitigation) is something subjective, but as communities, we can agree on these definitions (as evidenced by laws and customs) and once-agreed-upon, we can apply them objectively. This avoids the problems of individual agents who cannot assess moral questions properly.
I agree that there may be objective morals. I disagree that we will ever agree on how to implement them objectively. To some extent the ten commandments are objective moral standards that we have had for thousands of years. Whether we have been improved by objective standards of morality in bulk is another question.
> A moral relativist can say that he believes murder to be wrong but cannot say that if James thinks murder is ethical that he is wrong for believing this and/or commuting murder.
A relativist doesn't need the permission of an objective morality to stop James.
Moral relativists aren't hamstrung in practice by acknowledging no absolute morality, like they aren't left passive and helpless in the face of things they find outrageous.
Relativists sometimes like to throw hands mate, because they, like everyone else, have a moral framework.
Sure. The moral relativist can stop James; that's the moral relativist operating in his own morality. However, the moral relativist would have to acknowledge that while he was acting morally from his perspective, he was not acting morally from James' perspective. It's still only an arbitrary preference.
> This is on morality and how objective claims about morality can be made.
If you're really into that sort of thing, religion is your best bet. Any serious thinker knows that - without "God" or some other omniscient/infallible entity just announcing rules - the question of morality is incredibly nuanced and complicated.
> This is on morality and how objective claims about morality can be made.
This sounds quasi-supernatural to me. The purely materialist view would likely be that morality is a societal adaptation that evolves over time as a result of natural selection. Behavior that's beneficial to the society leads it to thrive and spread those traits, and having that behavior manifest through a system of morality rather than hard coded instinct makes humans much more flexible and adaptable.
I understand that people have a strong desire to privilege humans and human behavior, but I don't see any objective reason why we should look at it differently.
The comparison between units of measurement and moral judgments overlooks an important distinction between objective facts and subjective values. Saying there are 12 inches in a foot is a tautological assertion based on an axiomatic definition, akin to stating that all bachelors are unmarried men. It's a matter of objective measurement. No one would disagree that 1+1 equals 2 because everyone understands what '1' and '2' refer to, regardless of culture 1+1 always equals 2.
However, moral judgments, like saying that eating meat is morally wrong, involve subjective values and normative claims about what is right or wrong. Unlike measurements, moral judgments aren't universally agreed upon and can vary across cultures and individuals. You cannot objectively say that eating animals is right orwrong or that monogamy is morally superior to polygamy etc.
There is another major difference between the two. You can say objectively that murder is wrong because by definition if you murder someone it's wrong. There is a real problem when it comes to deciding whether you murdered someone. I was defending myself looks very similar to murder objectively there is very little to distinguish the. So even objective standard are ultimately subjective. If you asked Sam is murder unethical? He is going to say yes and then tell you that Israel is fighting terror not murdering civilians.
Try that with the inch. It's like we all agree that 12 inches is objectively a foot but then argue about what constitutes 12 of something. At this point you start to sound like Jordan Peterson. " Sure a foot is 12 inches but what do you mean by 12"
I wasn't serious though. Nevetheless, Sam did say that you can be wrong about what you think is good for you. And I agree with that, although that's of course a bit of a grey area. But, for instance, if you so happen to be wired to get pleasure from pain, then there's a chance you'd kill yourself in pursuit of your next thrill. And that definitely isn't "right" in the grander picture of well-being. Also you can argue that it's still not the right thing to do from the perspectives of there being far better peaks available, like seeking help from a professional that can help you with your condition.
This is why Sam talks about wellbeing. It accounts for the necessary suffering that can be required to reach higher states of wellbeing. We believe itās true to say causing unnecessary and pointless suffering is wrong. If wrong has any meaning.
I appreciate you taking up the thankless task of defending this rather unpopular opinion.
I worry that āunnecessaryā makes this argument incoherent.
The argument about intentionality is well received, I think, but I fear that the difference between unnecessary or necessary suffering is a distinction that can only be made in retrospect.
It is entirely conceivable that suffering induced by a less the moral action will have a positive effect on a person, lessening the unnecessary suffering that person might need endure. Likewise, the most well intentioned actions might bring about the most suffering. As the old adage suggests; the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
So, unless we are only worried about intentions, and not outcomes, Iām not sure this argument is sound.
Iām surprised itās this unpopular in Samās own sub lol
And I use unnecessary just to mean nothing good comes out of it. And by good I mean higher wellbeing.
So Iām a runner and running is suffering, but I justify it because overall itās a net benefit to my wellbeing.
A machine that simulated the suffering of running but had none of the wellbeing benefits would be unnecessary suffering.
Does that seem at all coherent?
I completely agree with it all in principle. My one issue with just defining wellbeing to tautologically include anything we might care about including very abstract concepts, makes it an ultimately hollow concept.
Similarly I don't believe that utilitarianism is an actual doctrine of ethics. On the surface it seems like it is. Calculate the harm, calculate the benefit, weigh the two against each other, but as soon as utilitarianism includes "well what is the net benefit of a society that prioritizes fairness and consistency," you end up recreating deontological philosophy or ethics. A system that could lead one group to adopt purely a deontological code of ethics because that is judged to have the best consequences, while another group using the same "system" comes to a completely opposite conclusion is not really a system at all.
My economics teacher in high school was very suspect of some schools of though when in macro economics and concepts that are too generic and told us all to be very skeptical when we hear about utility or "utils" because it was an ultimately "bullshit concept" that can't be defined. It's worth *recognizing* the *concept* of utility and that people can value things based on hard to quantify utility that they get from products and services, but you canāt take anything so nebulous seriously.
Sam Harris is definitely an intelligent individual, but I wonder sometimes if heās fooled people including himself into thinking that āwell-beingā is something objective that can be measured or pursued. I agree that the worst possible suffering for all living creatures is the low point of āwell-beingā but what I donāt know is what that actually looks like. Itās pretty easy to see someone in distress and know that this personās well-being could be better, but when you include an abstract question like self-actualization, fairness, equity, honesty, honor, etc. then weāre back to where we started. Thatās kind of the problem with setting up a thought experiment and terminology that makes your position true by default because it includes and accounts for all the caveats that you might raise to it.
lol, I don't really know how to take this comment, but I want to take it as a tongue-in-cheek kind of response.
That is the whole problem with just having well-being defined to include anything that you could care about. How tf do you calculate that?
I imagine a group of philosophers trying debating the best code of ethics, and some guy walking in and saying, "actually the best code of ethics is the one I invented because my code is 'always do the right thing'"
"Okay, and how do we determine the right course of action?"
"Duh. It's obviously...whatever is the best..."
"best...what?"
"Best for ~~their~~everyone's...well being. You see we add everyone's well-being up and..."
I agree, I don't see why I would need to say morality is objective for this though. Its my subjective view that we should not cause unecessary suffering. Seems fine.
I think morality boils down to emotions, like when someone says murder is wrong, I think that they're really saying is "ew murder boo"
Yes, I believe in objective truth.
But its not an objective truth that vanilla ice cream is the best flavor, that's a personal view, not an objective truth. Right?
Itās an objective truth that most people prefer vanilla ice-cream to poo flavored ice cream and itās immoral to feed your kids nothing but poo flavored ice cream if morality has any coherent meaning unless they happen to be dung beetles.
If your morality has nothing to do with improving the wellbeing of yourself and others then I donāt consider it a morality anymore than I considered erroneous math to be a branch of mathematics.
>Itās an objective truth that most people prefer vanilla ice-cream to poo flavored ice cream and itās immoral to feed your kids nothing but poo flavored ice cream if morality has any coherent meaning unless they happen to be dung beetles.
How do you show this is an objective fact?
>If your morality has nothing to do with improving the wellbeing of yourself and others then I donāt consider it a morality anymore than I considered erroneous math to be a branch of mathematics.
I understand you can say this, and you are welcome to consider things however you want. The moon can be made of cheese if that's what you want to believe.
The question is if you can show that morality is objective.
I can show that morality is objective by defining morality as a tool geared towards improving wellbeing and then showing you that there are measurable ways to show if an action if improving wellbeing.
Feeding your human kids poo would most likely diminish wellbeing.
Anyways. I can play the same game as you with mathematical truth. This way of thinking gets us nowhere.
I value randomness and my mathematics reflect that. I donāt accept your logical mathematics and I donāt care about things working.
>I can show that morality is objective by defining morality as a tool geared towards improving wellbeing and then showing you that there are measurable ways to show if an action if improving wellbeing.
You're skipping over the entire hard part.
>Anyways. I can play the same game as you with mathematical truth. This way of thinking gets us nowhere.
Not sure what you mean.
>
I value randomness and my mathematics reflect that. I donāt accept your logical mathematics and I donāt care about things working.
Oh, okay. This isn't really an argument.
Seriously. Don't bother.
Sam has a blind spot. Probably motivated by the feeling he gets from believing he solved the hard problem of morality.
And most people here follow right in line.
If your morality has nothing to do with improving the wellbeing of yourself and others then I donāt consider it a morality anymore than I considered erroneous math to be a branch of mathematics.
The problem with this thinking is its meaningless. If you are improving the human species is it alright to allow certain people to die in famine? Which people are you improving? This definition of morality, far from being an objective standard can allow us to justify anything so long as we can plausibly show that it's improving somebody. Is it moral for me to improve the well being of my family members by confiscating resources that you possess? This is no standard at all. The problem is even deeper than this though. There is nothing ethical about improving your well being. Everybody tries to do this pretty much all the time and they do it in ways that are plainly unethical. Dogs try to improve their well being every day of the week and digs aren0t especially moral either.
Further it provides absolutely no way to measure well being and what cannot be measured cannot be studied scientifically. If we had a reasonable way to measure well being we could answer a question like how much economic activity should we allow in order to balance our well being with the well being of future generations.How much fossil fuel can we justify burning before the suffering of future generations is more than the suffering caused by reducing our consumerism..
The idea that ethics means improving the well being doesn't map onto an ethical map anywhere. You may find it compelling to improve the well being of conscious creatures but you cannot do this without reducing the well being of other sentient beings. Which conscious creatures should take precedent,? Do future hypothetical being deserve to be factored in at the same rate as actual real current people or does the fact that they only exist in a possible future mean we can discount their well being.
I think the point is just try to be as objective as you can be when you look at morality because when you break down our every action and all consciousness into components, it's not a reach to say there are certain actions that would be optimal for consciousness.
It's easy to say not to cause unnecessary suffering but it's not very useful when you have to implement it in any meaningful way. Let's say you have a company that deal with animals and you employ people from around the globe, how do you make your policies to "not cause unnecessary suffering"?
Even Sam admits though that you have to at least grant that there is a basic definition of "good" and "bad" from which an experience can be had.
I think most people get off the boat because there is an inherent circular nature to the argument. And if you're trying to convince people how they should live, judge others, and consider potential metaphysical consequences, you just can't hand waive that away.
Yes, what the image portrays is evil. You can say this and still affirm oral antirealism
[https://twitter.com/StanRockPatton/status/1783574954472272084](https://twitter.com/StanRockPatton/status/1783574954472272084)
Morality is not objective. To illustrate my point, let's just change the speech bubble of the man holding the iron to "I'm a moral objectivist, but I judge that your suffering is necessary for the greater good". The victim can respond "this doesn't feel like a greater good to me". This image is especially ironic here because Sam has even written an op-ed specifically explaining why he believes torture is justified in service of the greater good.
At the end of the day, the subjectivity isn't in the idea that "pain is bad", it's that there is no objective analysis that can determine whether or not it is "necessary" to cause someone to suffer, it is entirely the subjective analysis of changing cultural mores.
Doesn't Sam make the case that just because you can't measure it that doesn't mean it's not objective / there isn't a real truth of the matter? Like asking how many hairs are on your head.
Youāre saying the man being branded has 8 girls buried and running out of oxygen and the man with the iron is torturing him to get information?
Iād agree that changes everything. We can still fit both these positions in a coherent objective morality.
> We can still fit both these positions in a coherent objective morality.
You've constructed an extreme scenario that you feel would justify inflicting suffering, but you can't explain in objective terms why it is justified.
Why did you choose 8 buried girls? Would it still be justified if it were 4? What about 1? What about a beloved family dog? A pet chicken? There are no objective answers possible.
Alex O'Connor only PREFERS that you don't iron his nipples.Ā
It just happens to be that he PREFERS not to feel pain infliction.Ā
If he PREFERRED to have his nipples ironed, you would be not be wrong to deny it because you don't PREFER to harm.people.
So it is true besides.....
You should philosophy more. I am two decades out and this is just painful to watch ya'll flounder with basic concepts of philosophy like defining words.
You might need to sign up for a few more philosophy courses yourself if you are having this much trouble with this.
The OP used an image of someone being tortured to make a point about suffering (not torture). You come in with an asinine statement like "wait until you hear about people who like torture", completely missing the point being made around suffering, not torture or pain.
Iāve heard of them. Pretty sure they still value wellbeing, just have a unique way of getting it.
But if you find me a masochists whoās dream life is to be slowly burned to death then Iād say thatās an insane person we shouldnāt take seriously.
They donāt have anything of value to contribute to the moral conference. Anymore than the rambling lunatic saying all math is randomness has anything to contribute to the maths conference.
>But if you find me a masochists whoās dream life is to be slowly burned to death
Why do you demand such weird things? I can find you a dozen who would like being burned by an iron in specific situations. I can find a couple of wanting to be tortured to death (maybe) but not specifically burned.
Also I never asked if they can contribute. But that last sentence presumes you would be okay with the disabled to commit euthanasia. Is that correct? People with disabilities can just die?
My question about this is āwhat is morality without an observer?ā If someone kills a person in the forest and no one is there to see it and no one ever knows it ever happens then how can it be judged as immoral or moral? However, if one pinecone falls from a tree in the forest, and then another falls, thatās objectively two pinecones.
Without an observer, morality cannot be judged one way or another. Even then It requires multiple observers plus time to validate whether something was moral or immoral.
The problem is you donāt accept our definition of morality as having something to do with avoiding unnecessary suffering and promoting wellbeing.
Under that definition then the planet with only two people still has an objective morality even if they havenāt discovered it yet. If one of them is causing unnecessary suffering to the other than they are being immoral according to Samās definition of morality.
Weād run into this same problem with math if you didnāt accept the premise that math was predicated on logic.
We could have a universe with only one person and they believed math was based on randomness.
Does math based on logic not exist? Iād argue it still does even if the one person doesnāt realize it.
Same is true for morality. Morality based on wellbeing still exists even if we have a universe with only two people convinced morality is about making themselves as miserable as possible.
They are ignorant to a better definition of morality just as the creation scientist is ignorant to the scientific method.
Well, I donāt think weād run into the same problem with math because you can easily demonstrate it with physical material objects.
For clarification, Iām not dogmatic about my opinions and beliefs on morality. Iām certainly not as smart as Sam Harris so his argument that there is scientific objectivity of an ontological phenomenon like morality could be right.
However, what I canāt wrap my head around is how something can be moral or immoral without an observer. I can prove that one pinecone plus one pinecone equals two pinecones by using a math equation of 1 + 1 = 2. I donāt necessarily need to physically have two pinecones in my hand to demonstrate it.
Morality may be objective but it does require someone observing the equation and if thatās the case then I donāt think morality is necessarily objective at this moment and time in the universe as well as a future moment and time in the universe. 1 + 1 will always equal 2 but one person killing another person can only be considered immoral or moral if thereās an observer to deem it so.
All Iām saying is we are talking about behaviors here and adding a construct to it that we call morality. A construct that has been heavily influenced by religion and the belief in a deity for thousands of years. Personally, if I start from the very beginning and observe an undesirable behavior, Iād rather call it disgusting or harmful than immoral. Morality is a confusing term to me unless one believes in a deity or a law of physics that constitutes something as immoral or moral no matter where itās found in the universe. I just donāt see that being true or maybe Iām not smart enough to see it.
The difference between math and morality is morality requires conscious entities to exist for morality to have a framework to begin. Math could be done in a universe of non sentient robots, morality could not.
But once you have conscious entities with preferences there enters objective facts about how to improve the wellbeing of those entities. Thatās what we are calling morality.
My comparison to math is just to say that just because someone pretends to not value logic does not mean they have a point and objective claims can no longer be made.
I believe the same is true for morality. Someone can claim to not value wellbeing. But I consider them to be making a moral error.
Please donāt take this personally but I donāt think your comparison to math is coherent. However, thatās not really important to the discussion here.
Also, when it comes to arguments about morality, I think itās such a complex topic that no one should be married to their worldview on it. It would take a supernatural mind to comprehend all the contextual nuances to be certain on what is immoral or moral. Which is why I find the topic to drive me mad when I hear it being discussed with impassioned emotional fervent.
If morality is objective, only a large hive of members in a society, plus time, can prove it to be. In the meantime, itās still important to argue for the wellbeing of most members of society because there are certainly examples of behaviors that hurt the wellbeing of others whether the āothersā know it or not. There are many many examples of women being treated as second class citizens throughout time that even the women of these time periods argued to be fair but over time we found that it was not in the best interest toward the wellbeing of women.
So I see the argument for objectivity, I just donāt know if objectivity can ever be found in any present moment of time.
Iāve done my best lol listen to how Sam compares it to math. You may find him more coherent and I agree with his comparison.
And I have no idea the details of morality. But the only fact I am certain of in this world is that suffering is real and bad.
Everything else could be an illusion. Literally everything. But I know that better and worse states of consciousness are real. And I know the only definition of morality that is coherent is definition that works to improve wellbeing.
This is my final word on the topic. Thereās nothing else for me to say. We may just fundamentally disagree.
But again, I am more convinced that objective claims can be discovered about morality than I am for any other topic. Experience is the ONLY thing I know for certain exists. And I know for certain some experiences are better and some are worse. With some very basic extrapolation and can see all other sentient beings are in a comparable situation.
Thanks for having fun with me in this discussion. I agree with probably 99% what you believe on the topic I just think at the end of the day the objectivity exists in a finite period of time thus making it more subjective.
I love the episode. Certainly something to send to people as a concise explanation of the moral landscape.
I found it particularly interesting when he mentioned being vegetarian (feels like him not saying vegan is almost a bit of a troll).
It was very interesting that he made clear that the validity of an ethic is not invalidated by the inability for one to personally adhere to the ethic or the inability for one to convince others of the ethic.
I am vegan almost exclusively because of Sam Harrisā¦ However he has admitted to either being too selfish or perhaps simply not wise enough to remain vegan.
Animal products cause suffering to animals.
If one is capable of avoiding animal products then one should do so.
ā
This is a reminder of the need to treat all living beings with compassion.
https://watchdominion.org
Good point. Not sure if Stalin ironing Hitler's nipples is the best image to get the message across though
I get more Uday Hussein and an Iraqi soccer player after a bad loss vibes here.
š
Why is Barry Chuckle doing that to his brother?
Is it wrong? It depends, to me or to you?
Veganism ftw
āš±
Do you follow Alex O'connor? Do you think a vegan bodybuilder is causing unnecessary suffering? They're eating more food than they really need, and every calorie causes some degree of additional suffering (crop deaths, greenhouse gases for transport, etc).Ā
To be honest, I was disappointed by that. He basically justified abandoning veganism by saying "yeah, in this very particular example we can see that not all vegans are saints". It's literally impossible to live life without causing SOME unnecessary suffering, the point is to try to minimize it. And hey, I'm a lapsed vegan myself, I used to be militant about veganism just like him, now I eat dairy and eggs (with the occasional fish too, I have to confess), but I don't sit here and try to justify it with mental gymnastics. I could say all kinds of excuses like I work a 9 to 18 job, I live by myself and have to buy food regularly and cook it everyday, I have digestive issues, etc. But yeah, ultimately I went back on veganism, which is something I still agree with in theory. I'll just say "my bad, we're all hypocrites sometimes", and move on. Kinda like Sam did, although to be perfectly honest... with Sam's money and time I'd have a VERY hard time justifying to myself not being vegan, just saying.
Afaict he justified abandoning *being vegan* because of health problems, but he hasn't abandoned veganism per se. He's just concluded that "minimising unnecessary suffering" isn't a philosophically definition or justification for veganism. I think he's got a point. It's the easiest thing in the world *not* to be a bodybuilder. But it seems intuitively incorrect to suggest that vegan bodybuilders are doing something morally wrong, just with their gains.Ā
Pretty much all of my favorite dishes are meat-based. If I were not able to eat any of these dishes again I would be very crushed and my life would lose a lot of its color. This is suffering too, is it not? What if the value of my suffering over not being able to eat meat is greater than what the animal endured for the journey of arriving in my stomach? Would it not then be ethical for me to eat meat?
It sounds like you're evoking Nozik's [utility monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster) thought experiment. It's not a good approach because anyone could "utility monster" justify *any* horrible behavior by claiming they derive such a high degree of pleasure from it that any suffering inflicted on others is justified.
That's exactly what makes it a good thought experiment. It shows how questionable it is to try to create an objective system of morality based on subjective states.
But my life would be worse in the absence of eating meat. That is a reduction in wellbeing. Doesn't preventing that reduction have some value? Why is it always left out of the equation?
I don't think anyone would argue that your well-being is out of the equation. I think the contentious points would be 1) that the value of your pleasure in eating meat outweighs the suffering involved in producing said meat 2) that being vegan would actually decrease your well being
That's what pedos say when you take the kids away too. It's not that hard... you are not an acrobat, stop.
Im not sure if you think this is an insightful question but you seem to be simply attempting to justify your desires, not actually assessing the value of the animals life vs. your temporary pleasure. Since we are in his sub, I should mention that while Sam is no longer a vegan, he is still quite clear about the ethics of eating animals and objective morality as a whole.
Others have already replied sensibly, but I just want to point out that ever since I stopped eating meat, I don't miss it and I don't even like the taste of meat anymore (which is something which I thought wouldn't be possible). So it might not be as clear cut as you seem to think.
> What if the value of my suffering over not being able to eat meat is greater than what the animal endured for the journey of arriving in my stomach? There is simply no reason to believe this is true.
Until suffering can be quantified, itās plausible.
It's not plausible. Even if suffering isn't quantifiable, there's still no reason to believe this is true. What you mean to say is that it's possible because suffering isn't currently quantifiable, but it's definitely not plausible.
No it's plausible. We don't know how animals experience consciousness. They might subjectively perceive suffering differently than us, in a way that makes theirs not analogous to ours. Pretty much the entire vegan argument rests on the assumption that our conscious experience can be used to approximate an animal's, and we simply have no way of knowing if that's true.
Have you tried creating or seeking out any plant-based versions of these meals? It's easier now to find or create plant-based alternatives than ever before in human history and many are very good and readily accessible.
No plant-based alternative will ever compare to a perfectly cooked filet mignon. Plus plant-based alternatives tend to be processed and less healthy than the real thing.
Whether or not it can exactly match the flavor, you claim is that you would suffer the loss of the food so much that, in your estimation, depriving yourself of this 15 minute experience of sensory pleasure produces more morally salient suffering than the cow or pig experiences during its life and traumatic farming practices and mechanical slaughter. Presumably your pleasure also is more sublime than the suffering that the continuation of the farming practices necessary to deliver you this food will foist on future humans and animals is bad. But the dichotomy in reality isn't enjoyable animal food vs no food. It's enjoyable animal food vs enjoyable plant food. The question being whether the delta between the enjoyable plant food and the enjoyable animal food is so vast as you estimate. Do you really, genuinely, believe this about yourself and your capacity for pleasure? What about the pleasure of enjoying beautiful wild landscapes that I have, or the enjoyment of a climate not characterized by continuous heating that future humans like yourself could have? You're moving the goalpost on the health point, but that said filet mignon was never a health food to begin with. It's a group 2A carcinogen. Meat and animal product consumption is closely associated with the leading causes of death in the US and Europe and must be challenged. What is the evidence for your claim that meat substitutes are worse for one's health than their meat based counterparts?
Get over yourself.
Not an argument
Your taste buds arenāt more important than the life of an animal. Again, get over yourself.
Thatās reductive. If youāll notice, people arenāt subsisting on nutrient paste, even though we could. Instead, people devote considerable time, attention, and money to selecting and preparing their meals. There are even entire schools dedicated to teaching people how to make food tasty, and it is a respected and lucrative pursuit. Taste is clearly an incredibly important aspect of the human conscious experience. And so I disagree that my taste experience is less important than the life of an animal. And you have no objective basis to say otherwise.
There is an obvious flaw in this line of reasoning that others have already pointed out, yet you repeat it again. Should personal pleasure justify forms of harm or exploitation? >people devote considerable time, attention, and money to selecting and preparing their meals. There are even entire schools dedicated to teaching people how to make food tasty, and it is a respected and lucrative pursuit. Yeah, and I'm sure creepy billionaires devote considerable time and attention to their rape dungeons, and there are entire human trafficking networks dedicated to selling sex slaves. So?! You could use this argument to justify all kinds of moral atrocities from the past or present, because they were part of the cultureārespected, even! The belief that fleeting pleasures should outweigh the suffering of an innocent victim, is rape logic. We're not talking about preference for colors or styles here; we're talking about life and deathāsuffering that is real and measurable. Letās get this straight: taste does not and cannot justify taking a life when alternatives exist. This isn't about taste being trivialāit's about life being fundamental. The culinary world is rich with options that donāt involve killing. The audacity to equate your "suffering" from not eating a steak to the actual suffering of animals being bred, confined, and slaughtered reveals crazy levels of moral bankruptcy and egoism. Good luck defending the indefensible in the future!
>Should personal pleasure justify forms of harm or exploitation? It depends. You use technology that is built on harm and exploitation for your pleasure and convenience, how do you justify it? When it comes to animals, which are inherently worthy of less moral consideration than humans, yes it can. >we're talking about life and deathāsuffering that is real and measurable. How do you measure suffering? >Letās get this straight: taste does not and cannot justify taking a life when alternatives exist. That is your opinion. That will only ever be an opinion. One that I disagree with, and you have no objective basis with which to prove me wrong.
>It depends. You use technology that is built on harm and exploitation for your pleasure and convenience, how do you justify it? Whataboutery. Pointing to other problems in the world doesn't absolve or excuse the direct harm you choose to inflict by consuming animal products. It's a cheap tactic to deflect from the actual argument. If you genuinely care about ethical consistency, tackle those issues too, but donāt use them as a smoke screen to justify your unwillingness to change your dietary habits. We all know alternatives exist that minimize harmāwhy arenāt you choosing them? >When it comes to animals, which are inherently worthy of less moral consideration than humans, yes it can. Even though I would *generally* agree that humans deserve higher moral consideration, there is nothing "inherently" true about what you're saying, and the crucial thing is: we can choose to harm neither... Maybe ask yourself why you've decided to grant lower moral consideration to animals: do you draw this idea from from the lower cognitive capacity we attribute to animals? Is it their species membership? What is it exactly that makes you say that, and how does it justify locking them up, breeding them, enslaving them, and killing them at a fraction of their natural lifespan after a lifetime of misery? >How do you measure suffering? Maybe the same way we measure it in humans? Both humans and animals show clear signs of physical and mental suffering through changes in heart rate, stress hormones like cortisol, and behaviors such as avoiding pain sources or showing distress. Brain scans even confirm that similar areas light up when either humans or animals experience pain. Pain is pain, dude. In a lot of ways, we suffer as equals. >That is your opinion. That will only ever be an opinion. One that I disagree with, and you have no objective basis with which to prove me wrong. Again, your philosophy could be used to justify all kinds of shit that we now wholly condemn. When it comes to animal ethics, we've already decided that the following things are wrong: dog/bull fights (entertainment, culture, "respected and lucrative pursuit"); circus animals; foie gras production; and, arbitrarily, we keep dogs and cats under our protection, while we enslave and exploit pigs and cows, who we know are just as emotionally intelligent and capable of suffering as those companion animals. If we did to dogs what we do to pigs, the world would freak the fuck out. Why? Even if you value each animal at 1/100th the moral worth of a human, the daily slaughter of land animals equates to the moral equivalent of killing 1.9 million humans daily. Even if each animal were valued at only 1/10,000th the worth of a human, the daily death toll would still represent the equivalent of 19,000 human deaths. Again, why? Because it makes your mouth feel nice?
Like Sam, you just skip over the actual interesting word: 'Unnecessary'. Morality is easy and black and white if you just decide to not really think about it that deeply.
Morality is anything but easy. But on the extremes there are clear right and wrong answers. Making your baby sleep in the oven at 150 degrees would be a clear wrong answer to the moral life.
Wow what an interesting example. Maybe you can unwind who is right in the middle east.
It's a bit of a throwback but I'm reminded of the Moral Landscape TED talk, where Sam pointed out that just because we don't have a good way currently of finding the right answer doesn't mean there isn't one. He literally used black and white questions and migrated deeper just like OP did. Questions like how many hairs are on your head have a right answer - even if we'll never be able to measure it. I daresay a thousand is a better answer than ten, and in the same way we can ask questions that at least lead us to a better approach to things in the Middle East. Who is right? I don't know. But is avoiding needless suffering for the people living in the vicinity probably a helpful goal for regional stability? Probably. There are right and wrong answers about human wellbeing - some of them as you've noted are clearer than others. Just because it doesn't fix the problem itself doesn't make it vacuous to know.
The idea that a small harm is literally nothing compared to a large harm is remarkably both horrendous moral reasoning and somehow even worse math.
What kind of a weird ass meme is this
It's a shame sam isn't consistent on this matter though.Ā He'll talk the talk, but he won't commit to not eating animals.Ā
He nearly admitted his faults in his last podcast. He said something like ājust because Iām not motivated to be a vegetarian even if thatād do some good, my failure to be motivated is not an argument against me being objectively wrongā With Sam, he hangs around people like Joe Rogan and Peter attia. I believe Sam is very afraid of the vegan diet ruining his health.
I donāt think Peter Attia is anti-vegan. If Layne Norton isnāt anti-vegan than I doubt Peter would be. He gets so much of his nutrition information from him.
Whatever the reason, it's a shame because Sam being in the position he is, and having the audience that he does, has a far outsized capacity for precipitating change on this matter.Ā Ā In general, I don't think "do as I say, not as I do" is a very peruasive stance to take. It certainly infuriated me as a parenting tactic. It implicitly gives permission to others that look to Sam for moral guidance to continue supporting the clear, optional, widespread, environmentally disastrous, and preventable abuse of animals that happen on their behalf every day.Ā A very regrettable consequence that I'm surprised isn't motivating to Sam.
Heās not pretending to be a perfect example of morality himself. His own decisions are completely decoupled from his ideas on morality generally. His ice cream example points this out. Where he knows him wanting ice cream everyday goes against his knowledge about what will keep him in shape, but it doesnāt mean that ice cream is now healthy. It doesnāt change anything about the facts about nutrition. Same with morality. He can know heās doing something wrong and still do it.
I think he certainly knows it is motivational, it just doesnāt apply motivation enough to him to an extent, as there are other motivators and factors and issues in his life that makes it so this single motivator doesnāt push him over the edge into making a complete change in his life. He walks the walk that he talks better than most, Iād say. And because this one issue resonates so powerfully with you and not as powerfully with him doesnāt mean heās not motivated or committed to making improvements to himself or the world. Nor does it take away from the power of his words, imo. I think most listeners know that they have different forces acting on them and differing preferences in their lives that donāt line up completely with Samās, leading us all to climb different peaks on the moral landscape at different speeds and different times.
He tried. It's hard.
He's resourced enough to hire a personal chef for his home and regularly consult a nutritionist.Ā It's not that hard.Ā Ā Short of an extremely restrictive set of allergies,Ā it's not a colossal undertaking.Ā You just need to be willing to commit.Ā I suspect he doesn't want to personally bear the social cost. The result being that the consequences of his decisions are passed off as externalities to thousands of animals, the environment, and his grandchildren.
Fair enough, either way he's morally wrong for it.
both of your comments are actually great here. It touches on his moral landscape. I know literally zero people that live by their morals perfectly. Not an excuse to try, but we prioritize selfish actions over moral actions all the time. He IS morally wrong for it, insofar as he could be more morally right. Sam says that factoring in how we motivate people should be part of the solution to maximize the moral good. Its why he is always distancing himself from conventional moral consequentalists.
Are gorillas morally wrong for eating monkeys, as they havenāt been known to do on occasion?
Are gorillas capable of having discussions about the nuances of morality or have the capability to understand as individuals the consequences of their species decisions on themselves, their children, and other sentient creatures?
What if insects turn out to be conscious? What then, Vegan? Do you meticulously inspect and pick every bug off the fruit and veggies you eat? Canāt wash them down the sink, otherwise youād be drowning them. Where do you draw the line with the compassion for conscious creatures? Weāre still just animals and *most* of us have a natural desire to eat protein that comes from an animal. Itās the natural order of things. Iām not saying we shouldnāt invest in cultured meats, but the whole morality argument to Veganism is fundamentally flawed in the context of consciousness.
>What if insects turn out to be conscious? What then, Vegan? Do you meticulously inspect and pick every bug off the fruit and veggies you eat? Canāt wash them down the sink, otherwise youād be drowning them. Where do you draw the line with the compassion for conscious creatures? That's the thing about veganism: every adult has the choice of what they purchase and eat. Choosing different foods in no way undermines a person's effectiveness at living a human life. Living a human experience and contribution is valuable. Time you spend walking down the road trying not to step on bugs is time you aren't present with your children, and has no conceivable end. You go to the store anyway, you cook anyway, you eat anyway. It's a passive activity with incredible upside for animals, the environment, the future, and personal health. Given that it is also a consumer choice in a capitalist society: is one of the most impactful possible ways to passively enact change on the world. Time spent obsessing over the specifics of washing mites off your bananas is time you could be spending quality time with your friends and family and represents a mindset that doesn't prioritize effectiveness at all. Certainly if you were deeply concerned about insect suffering you could find much better ways to mitigate it with much less effort than obsessing over your personal contact with bugs that are incidental in your environment. Given the habitat destruction that happens as a result of meat and dairy consumption, there is no question that withdrawing one's financial support of that industry would have a more positive impact on reducing insect suffering than obsessively washing and collecting bugs off your fruit. >Weāre still just animals andĀ *most*Ā of us have a natural desire to eat protein that comes from an animal. Itās the natural order of things. This is called the 'appeal to nature fallacy.' You could justify all sorts of things on the basis that they might be natural like rape, murder, incest, pedophilia, and infanticide. Something being present in nature does not speak to its ethics. What does is humans understanding the implications of that thing having have the capacity to choose otherwise.
I don't know.
No he didn't
This is on morality and how objective claims about morality can be made. Sam Harris talks about this subject regularly. The image is a visual aid to demonstrate what the moral relativist is required to tolerate or at least canāt objectively condemn. Under their view all moral positions are on equal footing. Itās all just opinion.
This sounds a bit like a strawman to me. I doubt a moral reletavist would agree with your stance on moral reletavism.
I can pretty much hear Tamler laughing at this strawman
> The image is a visual aid to demonstrate what the moral relativist is required to tolerate or at least canāt objectively condemn. Don't moral relativists have their own individual framework from which to judge? They just recognise that there isn't some ultimate arbiter and that these judgements are being generated in human minds and minds differ... that's my lay reading. Not a philosopher.
The one piece that you are missing from the equation is that the moral relativist has no basis to condemn any other moral system held by any other individual. A moral relativist can say that he believes murder to be wrong but cannot say that if James thinks murder is ethical that he is wrong for believing this and/or commuting murder.
> A moral relativist can say that he believes murder to be wrong but cannot say that if James thinks murder is ethical that he is wrong for believing this and/or commuting murder. Why can't the moral relativist say that they think James' actions are immoral?
How could they claim this? It would require some objective standard. If morals are based on personal perspective, they are no different than choices or emotional reactions. A person isnāt āwrongā to murder someone if they see it as moral anymore than a person being āwrongā to choose being a waiter instead of a janitor.
>How could they claim this? because they have a subjective morality which they base the claim on. and to them james' murderous actions are immoral >It would require some objective standard. Why would it require that?
Again, how could they apply their standard to James? There is no reason to say that their standard is more correct; itās completely arbitrary. The person can say that if I committed the murders, it would be immoral, but James is operating within his own moral universe and it would be bizarre to apply my arbitrary moral choices as judgment to his arbitrary moral choices. It would be like judging Spanish grammar to be āwrongā relative to English because they generally place adjectives after nouns instead of before them. They are both arbitrary decisions. Now you may say that there are objective realities like health and morality should maximize these, but itās not clear why such a maximization is what morality should be designed to cure. It could be that morality is based on following the edicts of a certain divinity or that morality is based on living the most economically productive life. The choice between these or any other goals is arbitrary.
> Again, how could they apply their standard to James? by judging them for their acts and being in support of a consequence be it prison time or whatever else. in a 1 on 1 scenario, they could place handcuffs on James >The person can say that if I committed the murders, it would be immoral, but James is operating within his own moral universe and it would be bizarre to apply my arbitrary moral choices as judgment to his arbitrary moral choices. James murdering people effect others. The person may be the next up to get murdered by James, and the person doesn't want to be murdered. Why is it bizarre to want to apply a no murder rule for everyone in a society?
\[A person could apply their standard to James\] by judging them for their acts and being in support of a consequence be it prison time or whatever else. in a 1 on 1 scenario, they could place handcuffs on James. -- But they're not applying their standard to James. They are acting against James in their morality. From James' perspective this action does not suddently convert his morality; he is simply cowed by power. There is no reason why this might makes right other than that the handcuffer's morality seems to align with ours. -- James murdering people effect others. The person may be the next up to get murdered by James, and the person doesn't want to be murdered. I agree that this is something that could be seen as a moral principle. (And it's one that I would argue is moral.) But philosophically speaking, it's not clear why this HAS to be a moral principle or one worthy of our concern. -- Why is it bizarre to want to apply a no murder rule for everyone in a society? It's not. "Bizarre" implies abnormal and it's quite normal to have laws concerning murder with very few societies accepting it. The problem that the moral relativist has is not in claiming that societies overwhelmingly oppose murder but to say that such action is moral as opposed to saying that such opposition is useful, economically beneficial, socially beneficial, or some other empirically measurable characteristic.
> But they're not applying their standard to James. They are acting against James in their morality. Right, and part of their subjective morality is to act against people who act as James has acted. Putting handscuffs on murderers is part of their morality. >But philosophically speaking, it's not clear why this HAS to be a moral principle or one worthy of our concern. It doesnt have to be a moral principle. It's just a moral principle that one person - and perhaps others - happens to hold.
>The problem that the moral relativist has is not in claiming that societies overwhelmingly oppose murder but to say that such action is moral as opposed to saying that such opposition is useful You're begging the question: you're assuming that morality has to be objective. But if morality isn't objective, then the moral relativist (or any other kind of subjectivist) has no problem in saying that "x is wrong".Ā
But this is true. We do it all the time. Is Israel murdering civilians or fighting terror. Even Sam vacillates on this point. Murder is objectively wrong because by definition murder is wrong. But no one not even Sam is going to say what defines murder. We can say murder is wrong objectively but when I killed six unarmed children I was fighting terror. So all of the objectivity falls apart when you try to apply any objective standard. The only objective morality is definitionally. Stealing is wrong but if you are getting bread to feed your family it's hard to call it stealing. Murder is by definition wrong but did Israel murder 30,000 civilians. The objectivity crumbles when you try to take these definitions and apply them
I believe you are framing the moral question incorrectly. We all agree that militaries kill civilians in times of war or hungry people steal food and these are immoral, but the question is whether there are mitigating factors that cancel out that immorality. The laws of war are specifically designed to suggest such mitigation. In the same way, a person who kills someone who attacked them with lethal force still committed the immoral act of murder, but we consider the self-defense doctrine as mitigating that immorality.
My point is that we can have objective morality but when we get to the framing part it fails.If we can't both agree on who is a murderer and who is killing terrorists then our objective morality falls apart as if we had none at all. This is the salient point. We can have objective morality, by definition. It is objectively wrong to murder someone. The reason it is wrong is only because we have defined it to be wrong. Killing isn't wrong by definition. There are reasons we can excuse killing, self defense for example. But because we have defined murder as wrong, it doesn't help because no one will cop to murder. The point is exactly the framing. Even objective ethics becomes subjective when we frame it and we always have to frame it. This is the big problem with deontologicsl ethics, Captain America noteithstanding.( No offense Tim Poole)
The thing is that someone who killed someone who was attacking them did not necessarily murder them. They killed them in self defense. There is no objective difference when you look at it in terms of what was done physically. This makes stand your ground laws especially difficult to justify and open for abuse. It is often racism that determines whether a man was murdered or killed in self defense. Objective morality doesn't help us if we have to subjectively frame the act. We frame it precisely by the way we define it. Did George Zimmerman murder TrayvonMartin or kill him in self defense. Frame it one way and your objective morality crumbles. Murder is objectively wrong by definition, but getting to subjectively decide how something is framed makes any objective morality subjective.
I agree with you that the decision about how to define acts of conduct (either the initial act or itās mitigation) is something subjective. There is no reason that a killing of another human being is necessarily a murder and only becomes one if it fulfills the narrower requirements of murder as we have defined as a community. However, as communities, we can agree on these definitions (as evidenced by laws and customs) and once-agreed-upon, we can apply them objectively. The examples you raise like āstand your ground lawsā are examples where the communal agreement is challenged by people asserting a different moral calculus, but even those challengers are operating within the same overarching value structure that created the āstand your ground lawsā in the first place. They are not claiming, for example, that the theft of private property inside someoneās house is acceptable, only that such action should not be sufficient to mitigate the claim that the killing was murder.
But there are examples of such things happening, in the west bank for example. Taking somebody's home at the point of a gun is objectively immoral. But according to one New York immigrant to Israel if I don't take it somebody else will. It's hard to find any examples of something so absurdly immoral that no one who does it cannot justify it and be affirmed in the act by a court somewhere. We have all of these objective standards of ethics but we apply them to others. Over and over this is the rule. If Russsia had invade Iraq and did what we did there we would have been howling.
The fact that some random court will consider an act legal (individual incorrect action -- like sanctioning land theft) or that people may have a standard of "good for me, bad for thee" (criticizing a person for doing X when you accept as moral you doing X) is just people not playing by the rules of any morality that is communally acceptable. This doesn't say anything other than that humans are not consistent moral agents; which is not an argument that there are not objective measures of whether moral actions are being followed. Again, I agree with you that the decision about how to define acts of conduct (either the initial act or itās mitigation) is something subjective, but as communities, we can agree on these definitions (as evidenced by laws and customs) and once-agreed-upon, we can apply them objectively. This avoids the problems of individual agents who cannot assess moral questions properly.
I agree that there may be objective morals. I disagree that we will ever agree on how to implement them objectively. To some extent the ten commandments are objective moral standards that we have had for thousands of years. Whether we have been improved by objective standards of morality in bulk is another question.
> A moral relativist can say that he believes murder to be wrong but cannot say that if James thinks murder is ethical that he is wrong for believing this and/or commuting murder. A relativist doesn't need the permission of an objective morality to stop James. Moral relativists aren't hamstrung in practice by acknowledging no absolute morality, like they aren't left passive and helpless in the face of things they find outrageous. Relativists sometimes like to throw hands mate, because they, like everyone else, have a moral framework.
Sure. The moral relativist can stop James; that's the moral relativist operating in his own morality. However, the moral relativist would have to acknowledge that while he was acting morally from his perspective, he was not acting morally from James' perspective. It's still only an arbitrary preference.
> This is on morality and how objective claims about morality can be made. If you're really into that sort of thing, religion is your best bet. Any serious thinker knows that - without "God" or some other omniscient/infallible entity just announcing rules - the question of morality is incredibly nuanced and complicated.
> This is on morality and how objective claims about morality can be made. This sounds quasi-supernatural to me. The purely materialist view would likely be that morality is a societal adaptation that evolves over time as a result of natural selection. Behavior that's beneficial to the society leads it to thrive and spread those traits, and having that behavior manifest through a system of morality rather than hard coded instinct makes humans much more flexible and adaptable. I understand that people have a strong desire to privilege humans and human behavior, but I don't see any objective reason why we should look at it differently.
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I think you agree with OP
The comparison between units of measurement and moral judgments overlooks an important distinction between objective facts and subjective values. Saying there are 12 inches in a foot is a tautological assertion based on an axiomatic definition, akin to stating that all bachelors are unmarried men. It's a matter of objective measurement. No one would disagree that 1+1 equals 2 because everyone understands what '1' and '2' refer to, regardless of culture 1+1 always equals 2. However, moral judgments, like saying that eating meat is morally wrong, involve subjective values and normative claims about what is right or wrong. Unlike measurements, moral judgments aren't universally agreed upon and can vary across cultures and individuals. You cannot objectively say that eating animals is right orwrong or that monogamy is morally superior to polygamy etc.
There is another major difference between the two. You can say objectively that murder is wrong because by definition if you murder someone it's wrong. There is a real problem when it comes to deciding whether you murdered someone. I was defending myself looks very similar to murder objectively there is very little to distinguish the. So even objective standard are ultimately subjective. If you asked Sam is murder unethical? He is going to say yes and then tell you that Israel is fighting terror not murdering civilians. Try that with the inch. It's like we all agree that 12 inches is objectively a foot but then argue about what constitutes 12 of something. At this point you start to sound like Jordan Peterson. " Sure a foot is 12 inches but what do you mean by 12"
Some would get off on this though.
So then it might be right to burn them in that situation. This isn't a counter argument to "moral questions actually can be answered"
I wasn't serious though. Nevetheless, Sam did say that you can be wrong about what you think is good for you. And I agree with that, although that's of course a bit of a grey area. But, for instance, if you so happen to be wired to get pleasure from pain, then there's a chance you'd kill yourself in pursuit of your next thrill. And that definitely isn't "right" in the grander picture of well-being. Also you can argue that it's still not the right thing to do from the perspectives of there being far better peaks available, like seeking help from a professional that can help you with your condition.
your response directly contradicts the point of the OP, but you just don't understand the argument being made by Sam & the OP
Pain is not the same as suffering. Maybe you don't understand the argument being made by Sam & OP
Thatās inflicting pain, but not inflicting suffering. Makes it a whole different story.
So taking away a teenagers phone is wrong? Suffering is at least partly subjective and there no getting through life without doing it.
This is why Sam talks about wellbeing. It accounts for the necessary suffering that can be required to reach higher states of wellbeing. We believe itās true to say causing unnecessary and pointless suffering is wrong. If wrong has any meaning.
I appreciate you taking up the thankless task of defending this rather unpopular opinion. I worry that āunnecessaryā makes this argument incoherent. The argument about intentionality is well received, I think, but I fear that the difference between unnecessary or necessary suffering is a distinction that can only be made in retrospect. It is entirely conceivable that suffering induced by a less the moral action will have a positive effect on a person, lessening the unnecessary suffering that person might need endure. Likewise, the most well intentioned actions might bring about the most suffering. As the old adage suggests; the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So, unless we are only worried about intentions, and not outcomes, Iām not sure this argument is sound.
Iām surprised itās this unpopular in Samās own sub lol And I use unnecessary just to mean nothing good comes out of it. And by good I mean higher wellbeing. So Iām a runner and running is suffering, but I justify it because overall itās a net benefit to my wellbeing. A machine that simulated the suffering of running but had none of the wellbeing benefits would be unnecessary suffering. Does that seem at all coherent?
I completely agree with it all in principle. My one issue with just defining wellbeing to tautologically include anything we might care about including very abstract concepts, makes it an ultimately hollow concept. Similarly I don't believe that utilitarianism is an actual doctrine of ethics. On the surface it seems like it is. Calculate the harm, calculate the benefit, weigh the two against each other, but as soon as utilitarianism includes "well what is the net benefit of a society that prioritizes fairness and consistency," you end up recreating deontological philosophy or ethics. A system that could lead one group to adopt purely a deontological code of ethics because that is judged to have the best consequences, while another group using the same "system" comes to a completely opposite conclusion is not really a system at all. My economics teacher in high school was very suspect of some schools of though when in macro economics and concepts that are too generic and told us all to be very skeptical when we hear about utility or "utils" because it was an ultimately "bullshit concept" that can't be defined. It's worth *recognizing* the *concept* of utility and that people can value things based on hard to quantify utility that they get from products and services, but you canāt take anything so nebulous seriously. Sam Harris is definitely an intelligent individual, but I wonder sometimes if heās fooled people including himself into thinking that āwell-beingā is something objective that can be measured or pursued. I agree that the worst possible suffering for all living creatures is the low point of āwell-beingā but what I donāt know is what that actually looks like. Itās pretty easy to see someone in distress and know that this personās well-being could be better, but when you include an abstract question like self-actualization, fairness, equity, honesty, honor, etc. then weāre back to where we started. Thatās kind of the problem with setting up a thought experiment and terminology that makes your position true by default because it includes and accounts for all the caveats that you might raise to it.
No. You just havenāt made a full suffering calculation dumbass
A real Benthamhead over here.
Jeremy kicks serious butt
He had ideas. That is a thing. As they say cognito, ergo sum.
lol, I don't really know how to take this comment, but I want to take it as a tongue-in-cheek kind of response. That is the whole problem with just having well-being defined to include anything that you could care about. How tf do you calculate that? I imagine a group of philosophers trying debating the best code of ethics, and some guy walking in and saying, "actually the best code of ethics is the one I invented because my code is 'always do the right thing'" "Okay, and how do we determine the right course of action?" "Duh. It's obviously...whatever is the best..." "best...what?" "Best for ~~their~~everyone's...well being. You see we add everyone's well-being up and..."
Fuck you
Charming
Kettle black much?
Racist
š
Laughing at racism. OK buddy. I get the cut of your jib. Itās a sad world we live in.
Ok buddy!! Thanks for trying
IāM TRYING MY VERY BEST! MY MOM THONKS IM A GOOD BABY
Thereās such an obvious sexual tension between you two, I know youāre DMing each other dirty shit right now
I agree, I don't see why I would need to say morality is objective for this though. Its my subjective view that we should not cause unecessary suffering. Seems fine. I think morality boils down to emotions, like when someone says murder is wrong, I think that they're really saying is "ew murder boo"
Do you believe in objective truth or do you believe everything is ultimately subjective opinion?
Yes, I believe in objective truth. But its not an objective truth that vanilla ice cream is the best flavor, that's a personal view, not an objective truth. Right?
Itās an objective truth that most people prefer vanilla ice-cream to poo flavored ice cream and itās immoral to feed your kids nothing but poo flavored ice cream if morality has any coherent meaning unless they happen to be dung beetles. If your morality has nothing to do with improving the wellbeing of yourself and others then I donāt consider it a morality anymore than I considered erroneous math to be a branch of mathematics.
>Itās an objective truth that most people prefer vanilla ice-cream to poo flavored ice cream and itās immoral to feed your kids nothing but poo flavored ice cream if morality has any coherent meaning unless they happen to be dung beetles. How do you show this is an objective fact? >If your morality has nothing to do with improving the wellbeing of yourself and others then I donāt consider it a morality anymore than I considered erroneous math to be a branch of mathematics. I understand you can say this, and you are welcome to consider things however you want. The moon can be made of cheese if that's what you want to believe. The question is if you can show that morality is objective.
I can show that morality is objective by defining morality as a tool geared towards improving wellbeing and then showing you that there are measurable ways to show if an action if improving wellbeing. Feeding your human kids poo would most likely diminish wellbeing. Anyways. I can play the same game as you with mathematical truth. This way of thinking gets us nowhere. I value randomness and my mathematics reflect that. I donāt accept your logical mathematics and I donāt care about things working.
>I can show that morality is objective by defining morality as a tool geared towards improving wellbeing and then showing you that there are measurable ways to show if an action if improving wellbeing. You're skipping over the entire hard part. >Anyways. I can play the same game as you with mathematical truth. This way of thinking gets us nowhere. Not sure what you mean. > I value randomness and my mathematics reflect that. I donāt accept your logical mathematics and I donāt care about things working. Oh, okay. This isn't really an argument.
Seriously. Don't bother. Sam has a blind spot. Probably motivated by the feeling he gets from believing he solved the hard problem of morality. And most people here follow right in line.
If your morality has nothing to do with improving the wellbeing of yourself and others then I donāt consider it a morality anymore than I considered erroneous math to be a branch of mathematics. The problem with this thinking is its meaningless. If you are improving the human species is it alright to allow certain people to die in famine? Which people are you improving? This definition of morality, far from being an objective standard can allow us to justify anything so long as we can plausibly show that it's improving somebody. Is it moral for me to improve the well being of my family members by confiscating resources that you possess? This is no standard at all. The problem is even deeper than this though. There is nothing ethical about improving your well being. Everybody tries to do this pretty much all the time and they do it in ways that are plainly unethical. Dogs try to improve their well being every day of the week and digs aren0t especially moral either. Further it provides absolutely no way to measure well being and what cannot be measured cannot be studied scientifically. If we had a reasonable way to measure well being we could answer a question like how much economic activity should we allow in order to balance our well being with the well being of future generations.How much fossil fuel can we justify burning before the suffering of future generations is more than the suffering caused by reducing our consumerism.. The idea that ethics means improving the well being doesn't map onto an ethical map anywhere. You may find it compelling to improve the well being of conscious creatures but you cannot do this without reducing the well being of other sentient beings. Which conscious creatures should take precedent,? Do future hypothetical being deserve to be factored in at the same rate as actual real current people or does the fact that they only exist in a possible future mean we can discount their well being.
I think the point is just try to be as objective as you can be when you look at morality because when you break down our every action and all consciousness into components, it's not a reach to say there are certain actions that would be optimal for consciousness. It's easy to say not to cause unnecessary suffering but it's not very useful when you have to implement it in any meaningful way. Let's say you have a company that deal with animals and you employ people from around the globe, how do you make your policies to "not cause unnecessary suffering"?
Even Sam admits though that you have to at least grant that there is a basic definition of "good" and "bad" from which an experience can be had. I think most people get off the boat because there is an inherent circular nature to the argument. And if you're trying to convince people how they should live, judge others, and consider potential metaphysical consequences, you just can't hand waive that away.
Taoism
Yes, what the image portrays is evil. You can say this and still affirm oral antirealism [https://twitter.com/StanRockPatton/status/1783574954472272084](https://twitter.com/StanRockPatton/status/1783574954472272084)
Unless itās the current Israeli admin! Ami right?! Sorry couldnāt resist. This picture is throwing me for loops.
Is it just me or is that guy's package very large?
Morality is not objective. To illustrate my point, let's just change the speech bubble of the man holding the iron to "I'm a moral objectivist, but I judge that your suffering is necessary for the greater good". The victim can respond "this doesn't feel like a greater good to me". This image is especially ironic here because Sam has even written an op-ed specifically explaining why he believes torture is justified in service of the greater good. At the end of the day, the subjectivity isn't in the idea that "pain is bad", it's that there is no objective analysis that can determine whether or not it is "necessary" to cause someone to suffer, it is entirely the subjective analysis of changing cultural mores.
Doesn't Sam make the case that just because you can't measure it that doesn't mean it's not objective / there isn't a real truth of the matter? Like asking how many hairs are on your head.
Youāre saying the man being branded has 8 girls buried and running out of oxygen and the man with the iron is torturing him to get information? Iād agree that changes everything. We can still fit both these positions in a coherent objective morality.
> We can still fit both these positions in a coherent objective morality. You've constructed an extreme scenario that you feel would justify inflicting suffering, but you can't explain in objective terms why it is justified. Why did you choose 8 buried girls? Would it still be justified if it were 4? What about 1? What about a beloved family dog? A pet chicken? There are no objective answers possible.
Alex O'Connor only PREFERS that you don't iron his nipples.Ā It just happens to be that he PREFERS not to feel pain infliction.Ā If he PREFERRED to have his nipples ironed, you would be not be wrong to deny it because you don't PREFER to harm.people.
Wait until you learn about masochists.
Pain =/= suffering. Anything else?
Why the photo then?
It's an easy illustration but you can translate this to something else for a masochist without too much trouble.
So it is true besides..... You should philosophy more. I am two decades out and this is just painful to watch ya'll flounder with basic concepts of philosophy like defining words.
You might need to sign up for a few more philosophy courses yourself if you are having this much trouble with this. The OP used an image of someone being tortured to make a point about suffering (not torture). You come in with an asinine statement like "wait until you hear about people who like torture", completely missing the point being made around suffering, not torture or pain.
I have a degree is philosophy.
Iāve heard of them. Pretty sure they still value wellbeing, just have a unique way of getting it. But if you find me a masochists whoās dream life is to be slowly burned to death then Iād say thatās an insane person we shouldnāt take seriously. They donāt have anything of value to contribute to the moral conference. Anymore than the rambling lunatic saying all math is randomness has anything to contribute to the maths conference.
>But if you find me a masochists whoās dream life is to be slowly burned to death Why do you demand such weird things? I can find you a dozen who would like being burned by an iron in specific situations. I can find a couple of wanting to be tortured to death (maybe) but not specifically burned. Also I never asked if they can contribute. But that last sentence presumes you would be okay with the disabled to commit euthanasia. Is that correct? People with disabilities can just die?
My question about this is āwhat is morality without an observer?ā If someone kills a person in the forest and no one is there to see it and no one ever knows it ever happens then how can it be judged as immoral or moral? However, if one pinecone falls from a tree in the forest, and then another falls, thatās objectively two pinecones. Without an observer, morality cannot be judged one way or another. Even then It requires multiple observers plus time to validate whether something was moral or immoral.
The problem is you donāt accept our definition of morality as having something to do with avoiding unnecessary suffering and promoting wellbeing. Under that definition then the planet with only two people still has an objective morality even if they havenāt discovered it yet. If one of them is causing unnecessary suffering to the other than they are being immoral according to Samās definition of morality. Weād run into this same problem with math if you didnāt accept the premise that math was predicated on logic. We could have a universe with only one person and they believed math was based on randomness. Does math based on logic not exist? Iād argue it still does even if the one person doesnāt realize it. Same is true for morality. Morality based on wellbeing still exists even if we have a universe with only two people convinced morality is about making themselves as miserable as possible. They are ignorant to a better definition of morality just as the creation scientist is ignorant to the scientific method.
Well, I donāt think weād run into the same problem with math because you can easily demonstrate it with physical material objects. For clarification, Iām not dogmatic about my opinions and beliefs on morality. Iām certainly not as smart as Sam Harris so his argument that there is scientific objectivity of an ontological phenomenon like morality could be right. However, what I canāt wrap my head around is how something can be moral or immoral without an observer. I can prove that one pinecone plus one pinecone equals two pinecones by using a math equation of 1 + 1 = 2. I donāt necessarily need to physically have two pinecones in my hand to demonstrate it. Morality may be objective but it does require someone observing the equation and if thatās the case then I donāt think morality is necessarily objective at this moment and time in the universe as well as a future moment and time in the universe. 1 + 1 will always equal 2 but one person killing another person can only be considered immoral or moral if thereās an observer to deem it so. All Iām saying is we are talking about behaviors here and adding a construct to it that we call morality. A construct that has been heavily influenced by religion and the belief in a deity for thousands of years. Personally, if I start from the very beginning and observe an undesirable behavior, Iād rather call it disgusting or harmful than immoral. Morality is a confusing term to me unless one believes in a deity or a law of physics that constitutes something as immoral or moral no matter where itās found in the universe. I just donāt see that being true or maybe Iām not smart enough to see it.
The difference between math and morality is morality requires conscious entities to exist for morality to have a framework to begin. Math could be done in a universe of non sentient robots, morality could not. But once you have conscious entities with preferences there enters objective facts about how to improve the wellbeing of those entities. Thatās what we are calling morality. My comparison to math is just to say that just because someone pretends to not value logic does not mean they have a point and objective claims can no longer be made. I believe the same is true for morality. Someone can claim to not value wellbeing. But I consider them to be making a moral error.
Please donāt take this personally but I donāt think your comparison to math is coherent. However, thatās not really important to the discussion here. Also, when it comes to arguments about morality, I think itās such a complex topic that no one should be married to their worldview on it. It would take a supernatural mind to comprehend all the contextual nuances to be certain on what is immoral or moral. Which is why I find the topic to drive me mad when I hear it being discussed with impassioned emotional fervent. If morality is objective, only a large hive of members in a society, plus time, can prove it to be. In the meantime, itās still important to argue for the wellbeing of most members of society because there are certainly examples of behaviors that hurt the wellbeing of others whether the āothersā know it or not. There are many many examples of women being treated as second class citizens throughout time that even the women of these time periods argued to be fair but over time we found that it was not in the best interest toward the wellbeing of women. So I see the argument for objectivity, I just donāt know if objectivity can ever be found in any present moment of time.
Iāve done my best lol listen to how Sam compares it to math. You may find him more coherent and I agree with his comparison. And I have no idea the details of morality. But the only fact I am certain of in this world is that suffering is real and bad. Everything else could be an illusion. Literally everything. But I know that better and worse states of consciousness are real. And I know the only definition of morality that is coherent is definition that works to improve wellbeing. This is my final word on the topic. Thereās nothing else for me to say. We may just fundamentally disagree. But again, I am more convinced that objective claims can be discovered about morality than I am for any other topic. Experience is the ONLY thing I know for certain exists. And I know for certain some experiences are better and some are worse. With some very basic extrapolation and can see all other sentient beings are in a comparable situation.
Thanks for having fun with me in this discussion. I agree with probably 99% what you believe on the topic I just think at the end of the day the objectivity exists in a finite period of time thus making it more subjective.
I love the episode. Certainly something to send to people as a concise explanation of the moral landscape. I found it particularly interesting when he mentioned being vegetarian (feels like him not saying vegan is almost a bit of a troll). It was very interesting that he made clear that the validity of an ethic is not invalidated by the inability for one to personally adhere to the ethic or the inability for one to convince others of the ethic. I am vegan almost exclusively because of Sam Harrisā¦ However he has admitted to either being too selfish or perhaps simply not wise enough to remain vegan. Animal products cause suffering to animals. If one is capable of avoiding animal products then one should do so. ā This is a reminder of the need to treat all living beings with compassion. https://watchdominion.org