Was curious what was happening, was using libreddit and figured they were just being bogged down, but my mobile app doesn't work either. Also anyone know why the upvotes on this post are fluctuating between <10, ~20, 150, 400, etc.? Are they upvote numbers for different instances?
Nevoic
joined 1 year ago
I agree with your take on antinatalism, which is why I'm not an antinatalist. If we had the ability to stop all human births though, and not just the subset that would be born to antinatalists, then it becomes a more interesting ethical position.
My reasoning for why "what can I permit" is a better framing than "how much can I help" is essentially that we can't be morally obligated to help, because that would imply people don't have the moral right to end their own life. If someone can benefit from your help, you have an obligation to keep going even if you don't want to and would rather not exist. This I think is an adequate reductio ad absurdum. I would claim people's only obligations are to not cause suffering (which would also not be caused if you chose to stop existing). If your entire existence is net-neutral, you haven't done anything wrong. Put another way, to claim that someone who simply exists in the wilderness, who sits around and does nothing, has somehow committed an immoral act seems obviously wrong.
The reason exploitation of chickens is wrong isn't because they care about some ideal world where they're not being exploited, but some actual practical realities we have to consider. If you find an abandoned egg in the wilderness and decide to eat it, sure we can agree that's fine. But once you get into a human taking an animal into their care, things get more ethically gray. Permitting people to take care of animals and utilize their byproducts in the process presents an obvious conflict of interest. We want the chicken to produce as many eggs as possible, so we'll breed chickens who do that, and ultimately destroy their wellbeing in the process. As chickens exist today, they produce an entire order of magnitude more eggs than they did in the wild. We can't separate these interests, exploitation will always present a conflict of interest, and permitting it will allow a violation of rights and subsequent harm to take place for the benefit of the exploiter. To more surely reduce negative utility, it's a much simpler and sure approach to just reject the idea that exploiting animals is permissible.
The animal sanctuaries that act in the animal's best interest will simply feed the eggs back to the chickens so they can regain those lost nutrients. We know that the people in those sanctuaries are acting in the interest of the animals, and not looking for some ethical workaround that allows them to consume eggs. Having people who care about the animals taking care of the animals will be better than having people who are only out for what the chickens produce take care of them.
As for the ecological question, I don't advocate that we interfere in wild affairs. This goes back to my rejection of the ethical framing "how much can I help". I have an obligation to not cause harm or violate the rights of animals because there is a practicable alternative to that. I don't have an obligation to prevent other humans or non-human animals from perpetrating this harm. It's a good thing for me to try to get humans on board with being vegan, but vegans don't have an obligation to make other people vegan. It's enough to just stop the suffering you as an individual contribute.
Maybe at some point in the future we'll have the means to reduce suffering in the wild without causing ecological damage. That'd be a good thing, but the thing we're obligated to do is just not introduce more suffering. If humans were an entirely neutral species, and didn't introduce any more suffering or pleasure into the world, there'd be no moral issue with our existence.
A utilitarian and an egoist can often align on what is "just" so long as the pleasure of some action outweighs the pain it inflicts. Of course there's no actual way to measure X pleasure or Y pain, but people will make claims to how much pain/pleasure they get in some scenario and use it as justification for whatever they want.
We'd agree that the pleasure of egg consumption is small, but I know many people who will say things like "I can't give up cheese" or "I can't give up eggs". They'll go as far to say the only pleasure they get out of life is eating food, and that no amount of suffering could outweigh the raw pleasure they get in a utilitarian calculation.
Since there's no proper test we can do to say "no you're only getting 4 units of pleasure but you're inflicting 80 units of suffering for that egg", all we can go on is people's own judgement about their own pleasure, and their guesses about the pain they inflict. It's a very ad-hoc and non-principled approach, that anyone can use to justify anything so long as they say they've hit some required pleasure threshold.
This is all an argument against utilitarianism, not negative utilitarianism specifically, which does alleviate some of these issues. You'll still come up against moral issues that deontological ethics can solve but negative utilitarianism cannot (e.g why is it unethical to kill a person who has no connections and whose death will not produce any negative utility in the world). A rule utilitarian would say yes this is fine ethically, but the rule should be that killing is unethical because that'll produce the most positive utility/least negative utility. This would allow people to justify isolated murders so long as it's not setup as a rule for society that murder is okay, and that the murders produced no negative utility (e.g painless killing methods etc.).
As for more practical considerations in regards to animals, I'll allude back to my point about being unable to actually quantify pleasure/pain units. Someone right now might say that a "family farm" of chickens is ethical because the positive utility outweighs the negative utility of the chickens, unaware of the kinds of pain the chickens go through or the maceration of the baby males required to allow the females to survive in a profitable environment. But you might be able to find a more "ethical" form of exploitation that you might find okay that still produces negative utility that you just don't recognize as such.
The safe way to go about the world is to recognize the rights of these animals the same way we recognize the rights of humans. Whether you want to call them natural rights or human-constructs, it doesn't matter. These animals shouldn't be exploited for their byproducts even if we can't find any negative utility being inflicted. Life is always going to have some kind of suffering in it, so veganism usually implies an antinatalist stance for non-human animals. As a negative utilitarian yourself, you should recognize that we don't have the right to birth animals as they might experience negative utility as a result of our exploitation, even if we try our best to mitigate it.
There are a number of different branches I can go on here, but I'll just post high level thoughts to start.
The issue with trying to define these lines in a capitalist society is they'll always be blown past when any leeway is given. If you say "eggs can be harvested ethically", what you'll end up with necessarily is the egg industry we have today, where we macerate 10s of millions of baby male chicks a day because they're not profitable.
If it's done outside of a capitalist system, then you still have to contend with the idea that permitting these types of exploitation will mean that the people who want the things (eggs/wool/etc.) will do the exploitation on the grounds that they want those products, not because they want to take care of these animals and they have some byproduct you happen to use. The "caretakers" will be focused on their productive output instead of caring for them as pets. This is bad.
More abstractly, utilitarianism has some issues. Approaching morality as a simple math equation can lead to justifying atrocities much easier. When you can just say "the pleasure I get from this is more good than the pain you get is bad", then you can justify exploitation from a utilitarian perspective. If you take a step back though, it should be obvious that the idea of justifying suffering with pleasure is horrendous, yet this is the core calculus of utilitarianism.
A focus on rights and their violations leads to a moral view that doesn't allow you to use your own pleasure, or pleasure more generally, to justify inflicting harm. It's a better system for the oppressed, while utilitarianism is better for the oppressors.
wow that was fast, nice!
Using the websites as PWAs is perfect IMO. I'm using the Kiwi browser (any chromium-based Android browser should be able to do this, as well as Firefox etc.).
Go to whatever instance you're using (like lemmy.world or lemmy.one etc.), go to the drop-down for settings, and find "Install App" or "Add to Homescreen". This should install it as a PWA (there you can also choose if you want it on your home screen, in the app drawer, or both), so if you click the Lemmy icon on your home screen/app drawer, it should be a fully proper app now (no address bar, could in theory support notifications, offline usage, etc. depending on how the PWA was coded).
I also tried Jerboa, but using lemmy.world directly as a PWA has been a great experience.
There were people who voted for Nazis for "non-hateful" reasons, but it meant they didn't care enough about the anti-jewish rhetoric to vote against it.
It's the same for Republicans and trans people/Mexicans/etc. The party is full of hateful bigots, yes there are some people who are indifferent to the hatred spewed and stand with Republicans on some other basis, but indifference towards bigotry is an issue in and of itself.
Having a community explicitly ban people who support these bigoted groups (Republicans/Nazis/etc.) is not a problem. I prefer a space that allows people to share their views, I've debated self-identified fascists before, I'm fine in that environment, but I respect that some people aren't.
Just because someone doesn't want to engage with hateful communities only makes them "too sensitive to go outside" if "outside" is sympathetic to these hateful groups.