Girl Burned Alive: The Quest for Morality in America

[BigBallinStalin]

Here's some lovely problems with "100% veganism within Western countries":

Suppose consumption of non-humans for nutritional and pleasurable wants is now prohibited. We live in a Metsian world. What happens to the value of all currently produced chickens, pigs, and cows? It'll drop to almost zero, so hardly anyone would want to own them--compared to the previous property rights regime. Land with animals of near-zero value becomes useless, unless the animals can be removed.

Possible solution: don't remove the animals, which must entail forcibly controlling these lands from the previous owners in order to make animal sanctuaries. It'll be forced because currently the demand for donating to animal activist centers to purchase land for sanctuaries is minimal. Government coercion is the only option if animal sanctuaries is the goal. Or, we can skip animal sanctuaries and attack this problem from a new angle:

Without removing the animals, much of the potential agricultural land would be off-limits, and unless this problem can be resolved instantly at the time of the Great Metsian Transformation, then prices on plant matter will be extremely high as demand skyrockets (too bad, poor people) [insert possible redistribution by government argument].

The animals can't be forcibly removed from the land because non-humans are now persons, deserving such rights as explained in the Metsian Constitution. Now, if the animals agree to a social contract, oh wait, that won't work because any claim for any kind of government intervention can be arbitrarily justified with the social contract ideology (goodbye soundness).

Let's instead get the animals to agree to a contract. Now, determining what a chicken thinks is best for its chicken-self will depend on conflicting arguments by humans and their (unsound) anthropomorphic interpretations of what each animals "prefers." That argument is unresolvable. Imagine Metsian Commission boards arguing about what they think the cows, chickens, and pigs most prefer. Does that sound ridiculous? (It's because 100% veganism is ridiculous and unsound).

[BigBallinStalin]

You will be tried in a Metsian court for sharing such a prejudiced video.

A jury of your fellow animals (pigs especially) will judge you. Of course, they can't really express any opinion, so we'll bring in the "Metsian Animal Experts" who are impartial and who will interpret the jury's opinions for the court.

[thegreekdog]

You will be tried in a Metsian court for sharing such a prejudiced video.

A jury of your fellow animals (pigs especially) will judge you. Of course, they can't really express any opinion, so we'll bring in the "Metsian Animal Experts" who are impartial and who will interpret the jury's opinions for the court.

I plead guilty to thinking pigs are delicions (see Vincent Vega). I plead guilty to thinking pigs are filthy animals.

[BigBallinStalin]

You will be tried in a Metsian court for sharing such a prejudiced video.

A jury of your fellow animals (pigs especially) will judge you. Of course, they can't really express any opinion, so we'll bring in the "Metsian Animal Experts" who are impartial and who will interpret the jury's opinions for the court.

I plead guilty to thinking pigs are delicions (see Vincent Vega). I plead guilty to thinking pigs are filthy animals.

The net benefits derived from all the non-human delicions of the world offset the net benefits of Metsian Socialism.

[thegreekdog]

GODDAMMIT!!! I hate misspellings!

[_sabotage_]

Which animals get how much of a vote and and will Metians cast them?

[Metsfanmax]

(1) Consent matters. Property rights matter. To avoid racially/gender-based justifications, people have property rights over themselves. In order to use a person as your property, you need their consent. Seems pretty straight-forward, so out goes the racial/gender problem. Non-humans are essentially objects which people own. Not all non-humans are owned (it depends on the relative costs of applying various kinds of property rights regime for a given set of non-humans--e.g. a commons, or fish in the bottom of the Mariana trench, etc.).

The problem with this stance is that you have argued by fiat that humans are people, and that animals are not people, but as this is actually the only real content of the argument, arguing that "people have property rights over themselves" is beside the point. I believe that non-human animals are people, and thus should have property rights over themselves. In order to disprove this argument, you need to provide (for example) a relevant difference which makes adult chimpanzees incapable of having property rights over themselves but human babies capable of having property rights over themselves.

White people in the 1850s thought that black humans were property, not people. How would you have convinced them otherwise?

The main point here is about context. That's why context matters. If you want soundness of your moral claims, then its limits must be revealed through examples which you (in hindsight) deem as irrelevant. Now that the scope of your argument has been reduced, let's delve into the limits within "Western countries."

I deem it as irrelevant only when talking to you because you live in the USA and are not poor. This is an argument to convince you that you are behaving inappropriately and inconsistently within whatever moral system you actually hold. I don't need to know the specifics of your moral situation to know that your speciesism is wrong, just as I don't know need to know it to know that racism or sexism are wrong. We can deal with the rest of the world later.

Does your 100% veganism apply to relatively poor people within Western countries

I am not arguing for 100% veganism. I am arguing that non-human animals are people. Once we agree on that, then we can start getting into the context-dependence of when it is OK to eat people. Place your argument in a different context to see how it absurd it sounds.

"Does your 100% non-racism apply only to white people in the US? Can white people in South Africa still lynch black folks?"

[Metsfanmax]

Here's some lovely problems with "100% rights for black people within Western countries":

Suppose slavery of black humans for nutritional and pleasurable wants is now prohibited. We live in a Metsian world. What happens to the value of all currently existing black slaves? It'll drop to almost zero, so hardly anyone would want to own them--compared to the previous property rights regime. Land with black humans of near-zero value becomes useless, unless the black humans can be removed.

Possible solution: send them back to Africa. It'll be forced because currently the demand for donating to abolitionist activist centers to purchase tickets for boat rides back to Africa is minimal. Government coercion is the only option if we want to move them. Or, we can skip that and attack this problem from a new angle:

Without removing the black humans, much of the potential agricultural land would be off-limits (no one wants to live on land with darkies), and unless this problem can be resolved instantly at the time of the Great Metsian Transformation, then prices on cotton will be extremely high as demand skyrockets (too bad, people who like wearing clothes) [insert possible redistribution by government argument].

The blacks can't be forcibly removed from the land because they are are now persons, deserving such rights as explained in the Metsian Constitution. Now, if the blacks agree to a social contract, oh wait, that won't work because any claim for any kind of government intervention can be arbitrarily justified with the social contract ideology (goodbye soundness).

Let's instead get the blacks to agree to a contract. Now, determining what a black man thinks is best for its black man-self will depend on conflicting arguments by white humans and their (unsound) racist interpretations of what each black man "prefers." That argument is unresolvable. (I've heard that black people have some sort of language system, but it seems remarkably un-advanced and their accents are hard to hear through. Their brains are much smaller than ours -- I don't think they really know what they want for themselves.) Imagine Metsian Commission boards arguing about what they think the old slaves most prefer. Does that sound ridiculous? (It's because rejecting racism is ridiculous and unsound).

The sad part is that this really is not too different from what actual white people were actually saying in 1857.

[thegreekdog]

Here's some lovely problems with "100% rights for black people within Western countries":

Suppose slavery of black humans for nutritional and pleasurable wants is now prohibited. We live in a Metsian world. What happens to the value of all currently existing black slaves? It'll drop to almost zero, so hardly anyone would want to own them--compared to the previous property rights regime. Land with black humans of near-zero value becomes useless, unless the black humans can be removed.

Possible solution: send them back to Africa. It'll be forced because currently the demand for donating to abolitionist activist centers to purchase tickets for boat rides back to Africa is minimal. Government coercion is the only option if we want to move them. Or, we can skip that and attack this problem from a new angle:

Without removing the black humans, much of the potential agricultural land would be off-limits (no one wants to live on land with darkies), and unless this problem can be resolved instantly at the time of the Great Metsian Transformation, then prices on cotton will be extremely high as demand skyrockets (too bad, people who like wearing clothes) [insert possible redistribution by government argument].

The blacks can't be forcibly removed from the land because they are are now persons, deserving such rights as explained in the Metsian Constitution. Now, if the blacks agree to a social contract, oh wait, that won't work because any claim for any kind of government intervention can be arbitrarily justified with the social contract ideology (goodbye soundness).

Let's instead get the blacks to agree to a contract. Now, determining what a black man thinks is best for its black man-self will depend on conflicting arguments by white humans and their (unsound) racist interpretations of what each black man "prefers." That argument is unresolvable. (I've heard that black people have some sort of language system, but it seems remarkably un-advanced and their accents are hard to hear through. Their brains are much smaller than ours -- I don't think they really know what they want for themselves.) Imagine Metsian Commission boards arguing about what they think the old slaves most prefer. Does that sound ridiculous? (It's because rejecting racism is ridiculous and unsound).

The sad part is that this really is not too different from what actual white people were actually saying in 1857.

Post of the Year 2014 (are we still doing that?)

[BigBallinStalin]

(1) Consent matters. Property rights matter. To avoid racially/gender-based justifications, people have property rights over themselves. In order to use a person as your property, you need their consent. Seems pretty straight-forward, so out goes the racial/gender problem. Non-humans are essentially objects which people own. Not all non-humans are owned (it depends on the relative costs of applying various kinds of property rights regime for a given set of non-humans--e.g. a commons, or fish in the bottom of the Mariana trench, etc.).

The problem with this stance is that you have argued by fiat that humans are people, and that animals are not people, but as this is actually the only real content of the argument, arguing that "people have property rights over themselves" is beside the point. I believe that non-human animals are people, and thus should have property rights over themselves. In order to disprove this argument, you need to provide (for example) a relevant difference which makes adult chimpanzees incapable of having property rights over themselves but human babies capable of having property rights over themselves.

Well, in order to communicate in a manner distinct from non-humans, we have to use words which have particular meanings. Again, the term "person" or "people" is arbitrarily determined but has emerged through the conscious actions of humans. Its common sense meaning is "humans." Through the use of human language over millennia, we developed a distinction between "person" and "non-persons." You don't like it, so you wish to convert the meaning of "people" (as in "humans") into "all living things which aren't plant matter, bacteria, viruses, etc." Just highlightin' the role of preferences in this argument. Again, this "game of semantics" cannot resolve the issue:

Whatever qualms you have against my arbitrary, yet commonly accepted, definition of "persons/people/whatever," I can use them to set standards against your arbitrary definition of "people." For example, I believe that all, non-human yet living entities are people, and thus should have property rights over themselves. In order to disprove this argument, you need to provide (for example) a relevant difference which makes adult chimpanzees/bacteria/plant matter incapable of having property rights over themselves but human babies capable of having property rights over themselves.*

*Parents have de facto ownership rights over their kids. That bundle of property rights marginally shifts more toward the kid as the kid ages.

To what degree are all non-humans similar to all/nearly all humans? There's two major differences, of which I'll give examples. There's still the role of consent and communication (e.g. preference revelation), which you neglected. There's also the persistent failure of the vegan crowd to control for their anthropomorphic personification of non-humans (they do this much more arbitrarily than commonly accepted norms of the human language). You're using human terms and applying them arbitrarily to non-humans. I can't argue against that--except to say how arbitrary the foundation of your argument is.


Here's an analogy. There's a distinction between voluntary and involuntary agreement. Voluntary agreement is X. Involuntary agreement is Y. Then comes a Metsian who claims that there's no difference between the two. If you don't want to play the rules of the human language game, then there's no way we can resolve this matter.

White people in the 1850s thought that black humans were property, not people. How would you have convinced them otherwise?

Were there not black men who were free? It's not like that white crowd would call a freed black man property of another human. Even before the slave trade during white colonialism, there was enslavement among all sorts of tribes across the world. Before that, it was more efficient to destroy people (e.g. human sacrifices). After some time, captured humans became more valuable as slaves instead of dead bodies. Why?

The production possibility frontier expanded due to changes in technology. The marginal productivity of humans increased, so keeping them alive was more valuable than killing them all. Over time, people began to realize that the old form (slavery) was less productive than granting people freedom over themselves. This transformation is partly explained by evolving moral arguments but its also explained by the realization of greater gains from trade. Being free results in good incentives to be more productive. Hiring people instead of enslaving them tends to be less costly. Self-interest becomes gradually more aligned with social interest as property rights over humans becomes more respected.

Again, the benefits, costs, and constraints played a role in this evolution of the concept of "human" and "freedom." What's my goal? Maximize human welfare. What are the best means? Allow property rights of humans over themselves. If you agree with the goal, then the recognition of the humanity of all humans, regardless of skin color, national origin, etc., follows.

[BigBallinStalin]

The sad part is that this really is not too different from what actual white people were actually saying in 1857.

Well, I've easily exposed the ridiculousness of your analogy--given my axiom of maximizing human welfare through recognition of property rights for humans over themselves.

Currently, my reductio ad absurdum holds, and the many problems (i.e. incoherence) of positing that animals have equal human rights is still being neglected by you. If you don't care about the consequences of your moral position--as stated in the original post, then your moral position is absurd.

[Metsfanmax]

Whatever qualms you have against my arbitrary, yet commonly accepted, definition of "persons/people/whatever," I can use them to set standards against your arbitrary definition of "people." For example, I believe that all, non-human yet living entities are people, and thus should have property rights over themselves. In order to disprove this argument, you need to provide (for example) a relevant difference which makes adult chimpanzees/bacteria/plant matter incapable of having property rights over themselves but human babies capable of having property rights over themselves.

"Person," ethically or legally, does not mean "human." It is a distinct word for a reason, because it expresses a different concept. (For example, corporations are persons from the perspective of being able to have legal rights.) That is why this is no mere "game of semantics." Personhood, as generally understood, is understood as an entity which we consider to be a self and which is capable of having rights accorded to it. This is not a definition I made it up; it is the commonly accepted definition of a person from the socoiological or moral perspective.

Personhood is the status of being a person. ... According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.

The group of beings that are considered people has generally grown throughout cultural time. It started off including only male humans, then expanded to include female humans, racial minorities, etc. in most countries. So while in common parlance person is often used interchangeably with human, it has a distinct usage in morality and that is the term I am using.

So this is all important because the set of beings that we define as "persons" are really just those capable of having rights. (We can use that longer terminology if you want to avoid the person/human debate, but "person" is more succinct.) Now, you're accusing me of a game of semantics because my group of "persons" includes non-human animals and yours does not, and you believe there is no way to resolve this. However, the argument I am making is that if we are to have a group that we are defining as beings capable of having rights, there has to be some set of meaningful qualities that these beings have, which sets them apart uniquely as persons. My contention is that there is no way to construct a set that includes all humans but excludes non-human animals, without explicitly relying on some arbitrary category boundary like "species" or "race" or "gender" which we can hopefully agree is not a morally relevant characteristic in itself. That is why I don't need to know what your specific set is; it is sufficient to point out that if you try to set it up in this way, you will fail, because any quality you choose will be present in some non-human animals to a greater extent than some human animals. If you do not believe me, define your personhood category and we will discuss it.

To what degree are all non-humans similar to all/nearly all humans? There's still the role of consent and communication (e.g. preference revelation), which you neglected.

I did not neglect this, you neglected my response to it. As I observed, the ability to consent or communicate in spoken language is not a prerequisite for the ability to have legal rights. Human babies are recipients of some baseline legal rights protections, including the right not to be killed, despite not being able to consent or communicate in a way more meaningful to us than a cow, chicken or pig.

(Edit: I see now that you included a response to the issue of children. Even if parents have de facto ownership of their kids, that does not mean that children are incapable of having certain rights. In our society children always have the right not to be imprisoned (at least by people other than their parents) or to be killed, regardless of their age. Even though the bundle of rights and responsibilities increases over time, they always have some and are always capable of having some. A child's parents cannot legally or ethically murder the child.)

There's also the persistent failure of the vegan crowd to control for their anthropomorphic personification of non-humans

This is not a serious failing of the "vegan crowd." The implication of your statement is that it is possible to empathize with and understand the experiences of other humans, but not with non-humans. But how do you know, when you are conversing with someone, what they are really feeling? You have never been them, or been able to feel their feelings. They could be lying to you; they could be a sociopath who interprets stimuli completely differently from you. The only way you can really be confident that they are likely to be capable of feeling similar things to you (and thus as deserving of moral respect as you do) is your trust that because they are biologically similar to you, they likely experience the world in roughly the same way. If we go this route, we have no choice but to respect the sentience of non-humans. From the perspective of evolution and neurobiology, we have discovered no reason to believe that non-human animals respond to stimuli like pain and pleasure in fundamentally different ways than we do. Most parts of the human brain map onto the brains of other mammals. This has to be so, evolutionarily speaking; what makes us different from other species such as chimpanzees is merely the size and complexity of a certain part of our brain, there is nothing fundamentally unique about the human brain from a biological point of view. As an example of the difficulty of the speciesist position, imagine if we discovered a relict population of Neanderthals on a remote desert island. How would these people fit into our current legal hierachy? Would they be considered persons? That there is not a continuum of extant beings in the mammals is an accident of history, not a statement about morality.

Were there not black men who were free? It's not like that white crowd would call a freed black man property of another human.

True, but some black men were property, and whether or not a black man was free was often dependent on accidents outside their control like their birthplace or whether they spent time in a free state. And that particular bit was fairly unique to the US, you would not have had such a chance at being free in the older societies.

Even before the slave trade during white colonialism, there was enslavement among all sorts of tribes across the world. Before that, it was more efficient to destroy people (e.g. human sacrifices). After some time, captured humans became more valuable as slaves instead of dead bodies. Why? The production possibility frontier expanded due to changes in technology. The marginal productivity of humans increased, so keeping them alive was more valuable than killing them all. Over time, people began to realize that the old form (slavery) was less productive than granting people freedom over themselves. This transformation is partly explained by evolving moral arguments but its also explained by the realization of greater gains from trade. Being free results in good incentives to be more productive. Hiring people instead of enslaving them tends to be less costly. Self-interest becomes gradually more aligned with social interest as property rights over humans becomes more respected.

Again, the benefits, costs, and constraints played a role in this evolution of the concept of "human" and "freedom."

So we can agree that if you were alive in 1857, you would not have fought for abolitionism of slavery because you thought white people should be able to decide for themselves whether the costs of allowing black humans to be free were justified?

Well, I've easily exposed the ridiculousness of your analogy--given my axiom of maximizing human welfare through recognition of property rights for humans over themselves.

Your analogy is useless in the current discussion because it starts from the assumption that human welfare is worth maximizing. We are currently debating what organisms belong in the group of beings whose welfare should be maximized, and if I am victorious in convincing you that some non-humans should be considered moral persons if humans are too, then it becomes important to maximize the welfare of the group of humans + some non-humans. If on the other hand you are victorious and win the point that non-human animals are not persons and therefore their interests are not worth considering in welfare maximization, then your point will be valid -- we can do whatever want to non-human animals, because it is only the interests of humans that matter. So I am not debating you on that point; under your category it is correct, but it is the category we are debating.

Currently, my reductio ad absurdum holds, and the many problems (i.e. incoherence) of positing that animals have equal human rights

I did not argue for animals having equal rights to humans, so your argument is nothing more than a straw man. The current debate is whether animals are even capable of having legal rights. It is only once we have agreed upon that, that we can start discussing which specific legal rights animals should have.

[mrswdk]

Your sidestepping of the question is kind of pointless because you could just use the same logic to say that we can never have a concrete discussion on morals for humans -- killing every human leads to different consequences. Does that mean there is not a single situation in which you would be prepared to argue that the act is wrong?

One person's killing of most other people will have an overall cost to society. It removes people from the labor force, causes distress among their relatives and further conflict. Permitting killing would put valuable members of society at greater risk - talented individuals could be killed by people who are competing with them. Allowing wanton killing would create a level of danger that many would be unwilling to tolerate, leading to a huge decline in immigration and large increase in emigration. Your country would be decimated.

Killing your own infant? Debatable. It would depend how much consent you have from the rest of your family. In China there are reasons relating to a traditional preference for boys and the One Child Policy that make a prohibition on infanticide a good idea (I can explain further if you like). In other countries, I don't know. It depends.

Killing someone else's pet piglet? That would cause the person distress and cause social conflict. The net effect of this is (I imagine) negative, and so it is illegal to kill someone else's piglet against their wishes. But raising your own piglet for food? Overall benefit. So this is legal.

Comparing the freeing of the slaves to the 'freeing' of animals is a non-starter. Show me a chicken or a pig whose descendants could one day graduate from college and become a productive part of the labor force.

I reject your attempts to equate what I am saying to a moral stance, but whatever. That's beside the point. What's important is that killing a pig and killing a human have very different effects and thus are treated differently by the law.

[BigBallinStalin]

The main point here is about context. That's why context matters. If you want soundness of your moral claims, then its limits must be revealed through examples which you (in hindsight) deem as irrelevant. Now that the scope of your argument has been reduced, let's delve into the limits within "Western countries."

I deem it as irrelevant only when talking to you because you live in the USA and are not poor. This is an argument to convince you that you are behaving inappropriately and inconsistently within whatever moral system you actually hold. I don't need to know the specifics of your moral situation to know that your speciesism is wrong, just as I don't know need to know it to know that racism or sexism are wrong. We can deal with the rest of the world later.

I am not arguing for 100% veganism. I am arguing that non-human animals are people. Once we agree on that, then we can start getting into the context-dependence of when it is OK to eat people. Place your argument in a different context to see how it absurd it sounds.

"Does your 100% non-racism apply only to white people in the US? Can white people in South Africa still lynch black folks?"

I've already explained why your analogy of equating "specieism" with "racism and sexism" is false.

I've already went over the essential arbitrariness of the semantics game. You keep running in circles, and I've kept trying to show why you're running in circles.

Now, we've run into some additional problems:

Why did I ask this question: At what budget constraint--e.g. income--does 100% veganism* become the only legitimate lifestyle? Apparently, it's not affordable for sub-Saharan countries, but as soon as someone enters the US, they become relatively wealthy enough to afford a 100% vegan lifestyle. So, by implication, you're clearly making an argument about budget constraints, but you don't want to talk about budget constraints. It's incoherent, and it's a Phatscotty dodge.

The budget constraint matters. In other words, when does 100% veganism become a luxury good? If adopted by people below that income, then 100% veganism becomes harmful. This scenario can apply to people below a certain income within the US.

(Oddly, if the well-to-do are the efficient producers of animals, and if your system prevents their ownership over more efficient means of production, then the poor have to rely on inefficient means to feed themselves. Again, another unintended consequence, greater poverty, is caused by the implications of your moral stance).

*100% veganism is the outcome of your moral definition of "people." It doesn't matter if you did not intend on supporting 100% veganism--for whatever unknown amount of humans--because that definition results in a particular societal order (100% veganism). If you want to burn resources on another game of semantics, then I'll call it "Metsianism."

[BigBallinStalin]

Why do I keep trying to place this argument about semantics, budget constraints, and false allegations of racism beyond you and me?

I care about humans beyond my small circle of relations, so arguments about outcomes between you and me won't cut it. I'm a humanist, Mets, but I'm also an economist. Good intentions matter, but unlike the humanist vision, good intentions are insufficient for defending an acceptable moral vision because outcomes also matter. You can't arbitrarily confine my criticism to only semantics because my moral axiom involves consequences and alternatives (i.e. relative benefits and costs). For me, it's moral consequentialism FTW.


Using false analogies in no way answers questions about the means and ends of your moral vision. Instead, as a political economist, I'm going to challenge the practicality and coherence of all moral visions. I did this by accepting your definition about "people" and have show several examples of the impracticality and incoherence of 100% veganism (i.e. the fragile, unsustainable societal order which emerges from your moral definitions).

Why is 100% veganism complete rubbish? Because it fails to address these fundamental questions (which you consistently overlook):

These cases that involve "people" (however defined) depend on consent. Are non-humans capable of giving consent? If so, then how do humans control for their own anthropomorphic personification of animals?

Here's the answer: Humans can't control for their own anthropomorphic personification of animals. I've already explained this in my post about outcomes. This problem is already evident in the fundamental arbitrariness of your moral definition. In short, varying groups will make up shit in order to push their own agendas onto other people. Your moral vision posits a societal order ripe with opportunism (corruption, self-interest unaligned with social interest, etc.).

In other words, even after accepting that animals are people, your moral vision of a new order is incoherent and impractical. It's garbage. You're done, and you've got nothing to play but your semantics game.

[Metsfanmax]

I've already explained why your analogy of equating "specieism" with "racism and sexism" is false.

The extent to which you actually did this was merely to question the extent to which humans and non-humans share sentience; you never actually proved the analogy false. When I gave you a biological and evolutionary description for why equating speciesism with racism is perfectly justified, the burden fell on you to respond to that.

I've already went over the essential arbitrariness of the semantics game.

I have pointed out that no matter how arbitrary your definition is, it is nevertheless internally inconsistent. This isn't a case of me preferring one definition over you; it is that your own definition is wrong. You have consistently failed to respond to this. If you like, we can cut right to the chase: please explain what beings are in the group of beings whose welfare is worth maximizing, and what morally relevant characteristics they have that you chose the boundaries of that group on. In other words, you say things like

I care about humans beyond my small circle of relations

...but why do you care about humans beyond your small circle of relations? Do you even know?

Why did I ask this question: At what budget constraint--e.g. income--does 100% veganism* become the only legitimate lifestyle?

Most likely because you misunderstood the current argument. The current argument is not about 100% veganism, and turning it into one is strawmanning my position. I am presently arguing that non-human animals (some of them, anyway) ought to be capable of holding legal rights and considered moral persons. Whether or not that leads to 100% veganism depends on how rights are actually accorded to those non-human animals and is beyond the scope of the present issue, though it is an interesting discussion. The farthest I will go is to point out that your argument would condone those people in 1857 who said that we should allow slavery in some instances because poor white people depend on the labor of black people. (You'll just retreat to the argument that all humans deserve to have their welfare maximized, but in that time period there were a whole lot of people who thought that it was only white humans whose welfare deserved to be maximized, and I suspect that you may have been one of them had you been alive at that time.)

*100% veganism is the outcome of your moral definition of "people."

Veganism is the stance that it is wrong to consume animal products. If my moral definition of "people" were accepted, veganism would become an obsolete term because it would be understood that animals cannot be turned into products.

[BigBallinStalin]

Whatever qualms you have against my arbitrary, yet commonly accepted, definition of "persons/people/whatever," I can use them to set standards against your arbitrary definition of "people." For example, I believe that all, non-human yet living entities are people, and thus should have property rights over themselves. In order to disprove this argument, you need to provide (for example) a relevant difference which makes adult chimpanzees/bacteria/plant matter incapable of having property rights over themselves but human babies capable of having property rights over themselves.

"Person," ethically or legally, does not mean "human." It is a distinct word for a reason, because it expresses a different concept. (For example, corporations are persons from the perspective of being able to have legal rights.) That is why this is no mere "game of semantics." Personhood, as generally understood, is understood as an entity which we consider to be a self and which is capable of having rights accorded to it. This is not a definition I made it up; it is the commonly accepted definition of a person from the socoiological or moral perspective.

Personhood is the status of being a person. ... According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.

The group of beings that are considered people has generally grown throughout cultural time. It started off including only male humans, then expanded to include female humans, racial minorities, etc. in most countries. So while in common parlance person is often used interchangeably with human, it has a distinct usage in morality and that is the term I am using.

So this is all important because the set of beings that we define as "persons" are really just those capable of having rights. (We can use that longer terminology if you want to avoid the person/human debate, but "person" is more succinct.) Now, you're accusing me of a game of semantics because my group of "persons" includes non-human animals and yours does not, and you believe there is no way to resolve this. However, the argument I am making is that if we are to have a group that we are defining as beings capable of having rights, there has to be some set of meaningful qualities that these beings have, which sets them apart uniquely as persons. My contention is that there is no way to construct a set that includes all humans but excludes non-human animals, without explicitly relying on some arbitrary category boundary like "species" or "race" or "gender" which we can hopefully agree is not a morally relevant characteristic in itself. That is why I don't need to know what your specific set is; it is sufficient to point out that if you try to set it up in this way, you will fail, because any quality you choose will be present in some non-human animals to a greater extent than some human animals. If you do not believe me, define your personhood category and we will discuss it.

To what degree are all non-humans similar to all/nearly all humans? There's still the role of consent and communication (e.g. preference revelation), which you neglected.

I did not neglect this, you neglected my response to it. As I observed, the ability to consent or communicate in spoken language is not a prerequisite for the ability to have legal rights. Human babies are recipients of some baseline legal rights protections, including the right not to be killed, despite not being able to consent or communicate in a way more meaningful to us than a cow, chicken or pig.

(Edit: I see now that you included a response to the issue of children. Even if parents have de facto ownership of their kids, that does not mean that children are incapable of having certain rights. In our society children always have the right not to be imprisoned (at least by people other than their parents) or to be killed, regardless of their age. Even though the bundle of rights and responsibilities increases over time, they always have some and are always capable of having some. A child's parents cannot legally or ethically murder the child.)

None of this resolves the fundamental arbitrariness of "personhood" status. Keep running in circles, Mets. Throw up a criticism against my definition of personhood, and I'll throw up the same criticism against your definition of personhood. You'll balk at the point where you'd have to accept plant matter as people. Why? It's just as arbitrary as my reasons for delineating humans as persons.

There's also the persistent failure of the vegan crowd to control for their anthropomorphic personification of non-humans

This is not a serious failing of the "vegan crowd." The implication of your statement is that it is possible to empathize with and understand the experiences of other humans, but not with non-humans. But how do you know, when you are conversing with someone, what they are really feeling? You have never been them, or been able to feel their feelings. They could be lying to you; they could be a sociopath who interprets stimuli completely differently from you. The only way you can really be confident that they are likely to be capable of feeling similar things to you (and thus as deserving of moral respect as you do) is your trust that because they are biologically similar to you, they likely experience the world in roughly the same way. If we go this route, we have no choice but to respect the sentience of non-humans. From the perspective of evolution and neurobiology, we have discovered no reason to believe that non-human animals respond to stimuli like pain and pleasure in fundamentally different ways than we do. Most parts of the human brain map onto the brains of other mammals. This has to be so, evolutionarily speaking; what makes us different from other species such as chimpanzees is merely the size and complexity of a certain part of our brain, there is nothing fundamentally unique about the human brain from a biological point of view. As an example of the difficulty of the speciesist position, imagine if we discovered a relict population of Neanderthals on a remote desert island. How would these people fit into our current legal hierachy? Would they be considered persons? That there is not a continuum of extant beings in the mammals is an accident of history, not a statement about morality.

Dude, it's not just empathy. Think harder. Think about revealed preference. Think about the role of communication. Think about the role of consent: the difference between agreement, acquiescence, and coercion. Think about the outcomes.

Were there not black men who were free? It's not like that white crowd would call a freed black man property of another human.

True, but some black men were property, and whether or not a black man was free was often dependent on accidents outside their control like their birthplace or whether they spent time in a free state. And that particular bit was fairly unique to the US, you would not have had such a chance at being free in the older societies.

Just showing that your initial question is not 100% true for all white people. I'm glad you agreed. Before you interject, you should've read the following paragraph which went into detail, but ya didn't. This paragraph-by-paragraph back-and-worth is wasting resources.

Even before the slave trade during white colonialism, there was enslavement among all sorts of tribes across the world. Before that, it was more efficient to destroy people (e.g. human sacrifices). After some time, captured humans became more valuable as slaves instead of dead bodies. Why? The production possibility frontier expanded due to changes in technology. The marginal productivity of humans increased, so keeping them alive was more valuable than killing them all. Over time, people began to realize that the old form (slavery) was less productive than granting people freedom over themselves. This transformation is partly explained by evolving moral arguments but its also explained by the realization of greater gains from trade. Being free results in good incentives to be more productive. Hiring people instead of enslaving them tends to be less costly. Self-interest becomes gradually more aligned with social interest as property rights over humans becomes more respected.

Again, the benefits, costs, and constraints played a role in this evolution of the concept of "human" and "freedom."

So we can agree that if you were alive in 1857, you would not have fought for abolitionism of slavery because you thought white people should be able to decide for themselves whether the costs of allowing black humans to be free were justified?

Insert moral argument about maximizing human welfare. Those people were wrong to enslave them because.... the costs of doing so were externalized--thanks to the coercive capacity of the state.

But it's not just 100% Kaldor-Hicks efficiency for me. I'm still going to bend to morally good reasons--e.g. all humans have property rights over themselves. (Again, I will sidestep your insistence on arguing that "people" = "not just humans" for reasons continuously explained).

Well, I've easily exposed the ridiculousness of your analogy--given my axiom of maximizing human welfare through recognition of property rights for humans over themselves.

Your analogy is useless in the current discussion because it starts from the assumption that human welfare is worth maximizing. We are currently debating what organisms belong in the group of beings whose welfare should be maximized, and if I am victorious in convincing you that some non-humans should be considered moral persons if humans are too, then it becomes important to maximize the welfare of the group of humans + some non-humans. If on the other hand you are victorious and win the point that non-human animals are not persons and therefore their interests are not worth considering in welfare maximization, then your point will be valid -- we can do whatever want to non-human animals, because it is only the interests of humans that matter. So I am not debating you on that point; under your category it is correct, but it is the category we are debating.

Okay, Mets. We're back at the arbitrariness game. We still need certain axioms from which moral premises and conclusions must flow. You say, "axiom = 'living things that I arbitrarily define as people'. I say, "axiom = humans." The chosen axiom is arbitrary--i.e. based on preference but supplied with reason (e.g. humans and their property mean more to me than the implications of your moral vision).

This is why a discussion of outcomes is needed. That entails a story about coherence and practicality--a point you totally missed about (not my analogy), but rather a post about the unintended consequences of Metsianism.

Currently, my reductio ad absurdum holds, and the many problems (i.e. incoherence) of positing that animals have equal human rights

I did not argue for animals having equal rights to humans, so your argument is nothing more than a straw man. The current debate is whether animals are even capable of having legal rights. It is only once we have agreed upon that, that we can start discussing which specific legal rights animals should have.

Okay, dude. So, giving them property rights and a role in politics turned out to be impractical and incoherent. I'm just limiting the scope of your argument, bit by bit.

Are animals capable of having legal rights? Well, we discussed animal cruelty laws, so--to some degree--yes. But that still dodges the issue of the proper bundle of property rights over animals--even their lives, as my 'outcomes post' explained and which you ignored with your prejudiced analogy and continual nose-dives into the Preference-based Foundation of all Moral Claims. Now, [insert scope of legal rights], then I'll [insert anthropomorphic problem (Note: that's not a problem about only empathy)] + [means-ends analysis].


So... we've scaled down Metsianism from property rights to animals to unknown legal rights to animals. Questions about budget constraints, thus effects on human welfare are unknown but still neglected. Relative benefits and costs of killing more insects due to a greater supply of plant matter is still neglected. blah blah blah, Metsianism is looking increasingly ridiculous.

[Metsfanmax]

I care about humans beyond my small circle of relations, so arguments about outcomes between you and me won't cut it. I'm a humanist, Mets, but I'm also an economist. Good intentions matter, but unlike the humanist vision, good intentions are insufficient for defending an acceptable moral vision because outcomes also matter. You can't arbitrarily confine my criticism to only semantics because my moral axiom involves consequences and alternatives (i.e. relative benefits and costs). For me, it's moral consequentialism FTW.

I'm a moral consequentialist as well. Your current argument is meaningless because if we accept that animals are people, that means we need to care about their interests. Their interests matter. As a result, talking merely about some negative effects such a change would have on humans is an incomplete description of social welfare. There are currently 10 billion farm animals being killed every year in the US alone for food. That is more animals than there are existing humans. Unless you think that my world will lead to the complete extinction of all species of mammals, there is virtually no reasonable scenario in which the harm that will flow to some humans is enough to justify maintaining the currently existing Holocaust happening every single day.

That being said, I admit that part of the reason it's hard to take your argument seriously is that white racists in the 1850s were making the exact same arguments you are presently making. Freeing the slaves will lead to a total breakdown of social order, they said. Well, those dire predictions did not really pan out. We found a way to coexist. There are still some lingering effects from that time, but things are a lot better now than they were then. Your pessimism that we cannot find a way to resolve some of these thorny moral issues is really rather stunning. There's a lot of smart people out there. We'll find a way, as we did in the past.

[BigBallinStalin]

[Game][/Game]

I've already explained why your analogy of equating "specieism" with "racism and sexism" is false.

The extent to which you actually did this was merely to question the extent to which humans and non-humans share sentience; you never actually proved the analogy false. When I gave you a biological and evolutionary description for why equating speciesism with racism is perfectly justified, the burden fell on you to respond to that.

What you did was say, "your axiom about maximizing human welfare is wrong." [insert arbitrariness on moral axioms again].

I easily countered your specieism = racism bit by continuously insisting that humans are humans. A simple point which distracts you because then you lapse back into the Arbitrary Semantics Game. Note the catch-22. Maybe that helps explain why this issue about semantics is unresolvable--as I've already stated from the beginning.

I've already went over the essential arbitrariness of the semantics game.

I have pointed out that no matter how arbitrary your definition is, it is nevertheless internally inconsistent. This isn't a case of me preferring one definition over you; it is that your own definition is wrong. You have consistently failed to respond to this. If you like, we can cut right to the chase: please explain what beings are in the group of beings whose welfare is worth maximizing, and what morally relevant characteristics they have that you chose the boundaries of that group on. In other words, you say things like

All definitions of personhood are arbitrary. How many times do I have to keep repeating this?

(1) Given my definition of personhood, it applies to all humans.
(2) Given a racist definition of personhood, it applies to a particular subsection of humans.
(3) Given a Metsian definition of personhood, it applies to an arbitrary range of living beings.
(4) Given a Uber-Metsian definition of personhood, it applies to all living beings.


(1) is 'wrong' because Mets thinks (3) is correct. (2) is 'wrong' because I think (1) is correct and because Mets thinks (3) is correct. (3) is 'wrong' because Uber-Metsians think that (4) is correct. (4) is 'wrong' because everyone thinks either (1), (2), or (3) is correct.

In case you've forgotten, I'm (1), which isn't the same as (2). Whatever inconsistency/arbitrariness you highlight about (1) with comparisons to (2), I can keep saying that (3) is internally inconsistent with comparisons to (4).

I care about humans beyond my small circle of relations

...but why do you care about humans beyond your small circle of relations? Do you even know?

Why? [Insert the Human Axiom]. Why do I give a shit about studying political economy? [Insert the Human Axiom]. Why do I care about addressing the incoherence and impracticality of ridiculous moral visions? [Insert the Human Axiom + Moral Consequentialism].

Mets: "but but but"

Me: [Insert Arbitrariness Problem].

Round in circles we go.

Why did I ask this question: At what budget constraint--e.g. income--does 100% veganism* become the only legitimate lifestyle?

Most likely because you misunderstood the current argument. The current argument is not about 100% veganism, and turning it into one is strawmanning my position. I am presently arguing that non-human animals (some of them, anyway) ought to be capable of holding legal rights and considered moral persons. Whether or not that leads to 100% veganism depends on how rights are actually accorded to those non-human animals and is beyond the scope of the present issue, though it is an interesting discussion. The farthest I will go is to point out that your argument would condone those people in 1857 who said that we should allow slavery in some instances because poor white people depend on the labor of black people. (You'll just retreat to the argument that all humans deserve to have their welfare maximized, but in that time period there were a whole lot of people who thought that it was only white humans whose welfare deserved to be maximized, and I suspect that you may have been one of them had you been alive at that time.)

*100% veganism is the outcome of your moral definition of "people."

Veganism is the stance that it is wrong to consume animal products. If my moral definition of "people" were accepted, veganism would become an obsolete term because it would be understood that animals cannot be turned into products.

Okay. As I said within that post, I'll call it "Metsianism." Apparently, Metsianism has scaled back its claims about property rights on animals and has no idea what the optimal budget constraint is. None. No idea. Doesn't even get the implications of that. Now, Mets: [dodge certain implications], then [insert scope of legal rights], then I'll [insert anthropomorphic problem (Note: that's not a problem about only empathy)] + [means-ends analysis].

[macbone]

My son asks me if monsters are real, and I tell them, yes, they are. They're us.

You have now created a paranoid misanthrope.

Don't get me wrong, DaGip. We humans have great capacity for good as well, and as individuals, we can do much to help those around us. The greatest of us can affect chance on a global scale. The more evolved the lifeform, the greater its capacity for good and evil. Sure, Plasmodium is incredibly dangerous, but we at least know how to inoculate against malaria. It's far harder to stop someone like Hitler or Stalin, or monsters like the people who threw that homeless woman into a dumpster and set it on fire.

[Metsfanmax]

None of this resolves the fundamental arbitrariness of "personhood" status. Keep running in circles, Mets. Throw up a criticism against my definition of personhood, and I'll throw up the same criticism against your definition of personhood. You'll balk at the point where you'd have to accept plant matter as people. Why? It's just as arbitrary as my reasons for delineating humans as persons.

Ok, this clears some things up for me. I thought you were working off something more well thought out than just "persons = humans because BBS said so." Now I see that you are not. Fair enough. I thought we working off the same framework, but now that I see we are not. Some discussion is in order, but before we get there, let's try something out. Suppose person X says "persons = male humans only because person X said so." Would you respond to person X to convince them that their definition of personhood is problematic, and if so, what arguments would you use? Or, would you concede that at the end of the day, we all just have our own reasons for who ethically matters, and we should respect that no matter how narrow or expansive it is? Would you attempt to stop that person from raping or killing women? Why is your "we can all have our own definitions of who matters" framework anything other than complete anarchy? Do you have any particular reason to believe that your conception of who matters is worth defending? If not, then it is easy to demonstrate on your own grounds why this idea of arbitrary personhood axioms fails. In order for there to be a meaningful society where things like property rights for humans are protected, there needs to be some sort of legal agency whose job it is to protect those property rights in cases of conflicts. That legal agency can only function if its authority is respected by all involved parties. Now, if my definition of personhood is "everyone but BBS" (and again you cannot disprove me since you have no arguments for why your version of "everyone including BBS" should be preferred), then I do not even agree to the legitimacy of that agency to restrict my actions in relation to you. You are mere property, or not even that in my world. Such a society would clearly break down immediately. The only way the legal agreements can be enforced is if all parties involved agree to the authority of the agency that enforces the legal agreements. You can only get to that state if you can convince other people that you are, in fact, a person and your property rights should be protected. But none of us give a shit, because your argument was "I'm a person because I said so," and we don't think you're a person, so we don't care about your arguments.

1) Given my definition of personhood, it applies to all humans.
(2) Given a racist definition of personhood, it applies to a particular subsection of humans.
(3) Given a Metsian definition of personhood, it applies to an arbitrary range of living beings.
(4) Given a Uber-Metsian definition of personhood, it applies to all living beings.

(1) is 'wrong' because Mets thinks (3) is correct. (2) is 'wrong' because I think (1) is correct and because Mets thinks (3) is correct. (3) is 'wrong' because Uber-Metsians think that (4) is correct. (4) is 'wrong' because everyone thinks either (1), (2), or (3) is correct.

In order for you to think that (1) is correct, you presumably have a reason that you think (1) is correct. If you don't have some reasons for it, it is not something which can be considered correct or incorrect, you may as well have thrown a dart at a dartboard. I bring this all up because apparently unlike you, I can actually provide some reasons why my definition of personhood is correct, with respect to more fundamental axioms. That is, my definition of personhood is not an arbitrarily defined axiom as you keep implying, but instead follows from other axioms about morality. (You might respond that it is those more fundamental axioms that are arbitrary, but that is a very different argument and either way lays to waste the false equivalence you are constructing between our perspectives.)

Or, said even more simply,

...but why do you care about humans beyond your small circle of relations? Do you even know?

Why? [Insert the Human Axiom].

You mean, you care about humans because humans are worth caring about? That's not an answer, it's a tautology.

[BigBallinStalin]

. I bring this all up because apparently unlike you, I can actually provide some reasons why my definition of personhood is correct

.

Okay. Go ahead.


Then I'll use your post as an example of what I've been repeating 20 times. We've made no headway any other way, so let's see what happens.

[BigBallinStalin]

I care about humans beyond my small circle of relations, so arguments about outcomes between you and me won't cut it. I'm a humanist, Mets, but I'm also an economist. Good intentions matter, but unlike the humanist vision, good intentions are insufficient for defending an acceptable moral vision because outcomes also matter. You can't arbitrarily confine my criticism to only semantics because my moral axiom involves consequences and alternatives (i.e. relative benefits and costs). For me, it's moral consequentialism FTW.

I'm a moral consequentialist as well. Your current argument is meaningless because if we accept that animals are people, that means we need to care about their interests. Their interests matter. As a result, talking merely about some negative effects such a change would have on humans is an incomplete description of social welfare. There are currently 10 billion farm animals being killed every year in the US alone for food. That is more animals than there are existing humans. Unless you think that my world will lead to the complete extinction of all species of mammals, there is virtually no reasonable scenario in which the harm that will flow to some humans is enough to justify maintaining the currently existing Holocaust happening every single day

That being said, I admit that part of the reason it's hard to take your argument seriously is that white racists in the 1850s were making the exact same arguments you are presently making. Freeing the slaves will lead to a total breakdown of social order, they said. Well, those dire predictions did not really pan out. We found a way to coexist. There are still some lingering effects from that time, but things are a lot better now than they were then. Your pessimism that we cannot find a way to resolve some of these thorny moral issues is really rather stunning. There's a lot of smart people out there. We'll find a way, as we did in the past.

Yes. "Social welfare" depends on those axioms and the arbitrary semantic game. Good job with the appeal to Nazism. That definitely indicates that your position is so unemotionally correct.


I'm not sure how many times I have to keep saying that human lives are equally valuable. That goes against the whole racist analogy you keep bringing up to satisfy yourself.

I could be like you and ignore my fundamental axiom while selecting a subsection of my premises and "analogously" argue that my position is "logically indistinct" from a racist argument about personhood. For example, whenever you use your reasons for your favored arbitrary class of living beings, I can simply call it "specieism" because it ignored bacteria and plants. Then I can find comfort in saying how similar your argument is to 1850s white racism.

But I don't do that because that would be sloppy thinking.

[Metsfanmax]

. I bring this all up because apparently unlike you, I can actually provide some reasons why my definition of personhood is correct

Okay. Go ahead.

if we are going to have a discussion about morality, we must first agree about what it even means for an action to be judged under the lens of morality. That is, what is the definition of a moral action, as opposed to an immoral action or an amoral action? In order to do this, we must understand what value(s) we wish to uphold. For example, if our value is happiness, then roughly speaking, a moral action (as consequentialists would agree, at least) is one that increases net happiness; an immoral action is one that decreases net happiness; and an amoral action is one which doesn't affect the net happiness of society (i.e. rocks cannot be happy or sad, so kicking a rock is an amoral action). Now, your argument is that instead of valuing happiness in general, we should only value human happiness. You contend that my choice of valuing non-human animal happiness is just as arbitrary as your choice of human happiness.

How can we resolve such an impasse? We can do so if we ask why it is that we value happiness. If we think about it, we can immediately see the reason we value our own happiness: it makes us feel good; it increases our total utility. Selfishly wanting to maximize our own utility is the true fundamental axiom -- the part that we cannot get past. We simply accept that we value our own utilty for its own sake -- we have no choice, it is fundamentally how we think. We all have an incentive to live in a world where others do not infringe upon our own happiness, because that decreases our utility, and we want to maximize our own utility. If we want to maximize our utility and prevent others from harming our utility, how do we do so? It is simple: we live by the categorical imperative, the golden rule: we do not take actions that would harm the utility of others, because we would not want those others to harm our own utility. The reason why this is essentially a unique choice of moral systems is that there is no other way for us to reliably construct a system in which our own utility is consistently maximized.** If our moral compass is instead "rape and pillage whatever we like," we risk getting raped and pillaged in return, and we do not like that. As a result, in this moral system, we respect the preferences of others. (We do so fundamentally because we want our own preferences to be respected, of course, but once we have settled on what our moral system is, the reason for it becomes less prominent.) You believe that everyone is obligated to respect the preferences of anyone else who has preferences, because that is the only way to actually have a consistent system. As a result, the preferences of any being that has preferences should be respected. Since basically all sentient beings have a preference not to feel pain*, we should not unduly inflict pain on them unless we would be OK with having a comparable amount of pain inflicted upon us. That is a direct consequence of the categorical imperative, and this is why arbitrary category determinations such as "race" and "gender" and "species" can never be respected in a self-consistent ethical system that respects preferences, because all of these being have preferences, and each of those preferences is about as important to those individuals as your preferences are to you.*** Thus, you see, I am not merely rejecting one category and substituting a different one. I am arguing for a fundamentally different conception of morality: what we value is pleasure and pain felt by beings that can feel pleasure and pain, and the extent to which a being deserves moral consideration depends on the extent to which it feels pleasure and pain. It follows simply from that, that personhood could not ever be restricted as arbitrary a category as "humans" or "male humans" because these are not the only beings that feel pleasure and pain.

*Now, we can certainly argue this point if you want. But if we do then it's important to understand that this debate only occurs once we have accepted the premise that preferences matter, and then this becomes an empirical debate about which beings in particular have preferences. I assure you that you would lose such a debate when it comes to animals such as chimpanzees and gorillas. I would almost certainly be correct regarding common domesticated land animals and birds. Insects are a huge grey area. Bacteria, grasses, etc. are essentially certainly not sentient, and thus do not have preferences.

**I want to emphasize that I am distinguishing this from hedonism. This argument is a guide for us to get to a true universalizable moral system, and is not meant to argue that we should pretend as though we respect the preferences of others simply because that generally maximizes our own utility. I am saying that we really should respect the preferences of others, and the reason we should do that is because we know from our own experience that we want our preferences to be respected, and we assume they do too.

***Typically at this point a rule-based ethics person might argue for something like the "utility monster." I do not believe that particular example plays a fatal role for preference utilitarianism, but I bring this up because I recognize that preference utilitarianism**** is not a perfect ethical system. We do not have a perfect ethical system yet. Nevertheless, I wanted to explain my beliefs to show you that it's part of a self-consistent moral system that demands that we respect the preferences of non-human animals. You may disagree with the moral system itself but your original argument was that your definition of personhood is as arbitrary mine and this all demonstrates that mine is definitely less arbitrary than yours.

****Preference utilitarianism is also not strictly speaking necessary for this exercise. We can go with good old-fashioned utilitarianism where we maximize pleasure. The flaw in your perspective comes from the fact that it is pleasure we are trying to maximize. Therefore if a being is capable of feeling pleasure, that should be included in our moral calculation. The response that it is really human pleasure alone we are trying to maximize then immediately demands an explanation for why the pleasure of some beings does not count, because the reason we wanted to maximize pleasure again comes from the categorical imperative -- we respect the pleasure of others because we want our own pleasure to be respected. In this framework, selecting human pleasure as the unit of utility is as arbitrary as selecting white human pleasure or anything else, because the only starting point we had was that you like pleasure and you wanted it to be maximized, and the existence of that pleasure is not unique to you.

[/]

I agree with the basis that desire is the fundamental function that shapes law. However, for argument's sake, if I wrote all the world's laws and social acceptabilities, it would be illegal for others to kill, and completely legal and welcome for myself to kill others. That is because I, like most others, am perfectly confident in my own capacity to enforce my own moral judgment.

Are you really that confident? I think a lot about morals but don't feel perfectly confident to be able to assess the morality of all situations. Not only is there the problem that you'll only have imperfect information about the conflict, but also there's just subjectivity in some cases that cannot be resolved by perfect decision-making. Having society work its morals out through a set process prevents that one person who thinks they understand everything from destroying everyone else. I believe fervently that killing animals for food is almost always wrong, but I am not so confident to say that it is wrong in every single circumstance, or that I would be capable of doing so (just as I could not make the same assessment for killing humans). If I were king of the world, I'd have a committee to at least check my reasoning.

Why would I ever need to doubt myself? If by your logic, we are pretty much just animals exhibiting natural biological motives, thus absolute might would mean absolute right. Thinking any further than achieving your whims as an omnipotent super-despot would imply that you believe a greater moral good exists, which contradicts the stance that morality is just a means of cooperation, peace making, and self-benefit.
I would personally probably feel like killing only a select few, people heinous or dangerous enough to inspire automatic disgust... But let's not get into that, since I don't have such powers, I'm instead trying to do the peace and love thing. The point is, besides masochists and a few philosophical extremists, most people don't want to be punished, threatened, or restricted for their actions, so why would someone voluntarily impose a limit on themselves if they could otherwise avoid it without consequence? It's currently legal for me to do all sorts of stupid crap, that doesn't mean I desire to do so, yet all the same I wouldn't want it to be illegal for me just so I can double up on punishment.

Just to play devil's advocate since I believe in animals welfare (though not to the degree nor for the same reasons as Mets), how is a human in any way harmed by killing animals, and how are they benefited by not killing them? As far as I know, chickens aren't a threat as an enemy, nor a prize as an ally.

Humans are harmed in many ways by their love affair with animal food. It is a huge waste of water, taking over ten thousand gallons of water to make a one-pound hamburger compared to about one hundred gallons for a pound of corn. It is a huge waste of energy -- up to 90% of the energy used to make food provided to an animal is burned in keeping the animal alive (i.e. metabolic processes), food we could have just eaten directly. It results in significant pollution of groundwater. And it is a huge emitter of greenhouse gases, being responsible for at least 15% (and likely significantly more) of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is about the same contribution as all transportation combined. It is no exaggeration to say that animal agriculture is an ecological disaster.

Very well, but then what about animal cruelty that provides a net gain for humans?
By viciously infecting, dissecting, and grinding up a whole bunch of monkeys, we eventually got the polio vaccine, saving virtually all modern human societies from polio outbreaks. Surely this would be unacceptable to any morality based on a species' sentience or intelligence, yet it was was in humans' best interest, and besides the side effects of the vaccines, had no lasting repercussions for humans. Why should or why shouldn't this be seen as a moral act to humans?
How about the countless lab rats that die every day to further science and medicine?