1s/Because a/A/
Okay, I see what you’re saying. I really didn’t mean an insult by it, and I apologize.
Daniel
But I do, and you’re trying to accuse me of a fallacy I didn’t commit.
Correct. And if it is necessary, and babies and or Russians can’t do it, then they can’t possibly qualify. But a wel programed computer can do it, so it at least passes that test. Hence, the computer is more validly considered a concern than the newborn. It, at least, doesn’t fail the one necessary condition you outlined, whether or not it still passes whatever unseen tests you have.
Okay. Do this test. Go stand up in your closet for… the rest of your life. See if that hurts or not, then we can talk.
I’m not sure what “extreme” emotional pain means to you, but I don’t see any reasonable to deny that their lives are extremely painful, and that their treatment psychologically damages them in ways relevant to cow psychology. None of which is to say that cows are deep or complex animals. But for what they are, their treatment is pretty obviously traumatic and awful.
Sure, but I didn’t say that. What I said was that, by your own reasoning, you can rule out babies and Russian because they CAN’T communicate their emotions, and hence computers are more worthy of potential respect because of it.
I definately agree. And that’s why this thread wasn’t about trying to get anyone to care about cows. It was a comparison: if you think this thing is morally outrageous and yet not this, then you’re nuts. How you, who self-admittedly don’t even fall into that comparison, I have no idea.
Of course it is, and appealing to the status-quo (that’s just the way things are so I feel no reason to justify it) is not a moral argument. You didn’t answer my question: how can you possibly claim that a newborn human being has more complex emotions or anything else in the way of a moral capacity than an adult animal with higher social function?
The point was that YOU, who are the arbiter, can’t understand their attempts to communicate. If communication is key (and necessary), instead of some more direct physical evidence of particular experience, then you are setting this roadblock up for yourself.
Thank you.
Russians can communicate complex feelings very well, from what I’ve read. Babies can’t, and has I’ve already said I don’t think babies should have the same rights as an adult human.
No, it can’t. Unless you’re basing your knowledge of the current state of artificial intelligence on Marvin Minksy’s projections from 40 years ago, there ain’t no way a well-programmed computer has feelings right now. They can’t be programmed well enough to mimic banal human conversation, much less a conversation on complex emotions.
Again, I’m not arguing here that you must draw the line in one particular place (including higher animals, excluding liver flukes). I’m arguing that drawing a line such that it somehow encompasses stem cells and excludes animals is bizarre and unjustifiable.
Well, obviously they shouldn’t be allowed to drive a car. They lack any such capacity. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether infanticide is ok, given that the emotions of a newborn are not demonstrably superior, and in many respects are obviously inferior, to many adult species of animal. An adult gorilla is world’s more complex psychologically and emotionally than a newborn baby. Certainly the baby has potential that the gorilla doesn’t, but when you kill or hurt something, you are doing so in the present.
But you see, I’m not a veal calf. So it’s different.
If I was forced to stand in a closet for several years, I’d get very bored, because there would be very little intellectual stimulation. The lack of social interaction would be depressing. I’d feel a great deal of anxiety about my situation: What’s going to happen to me in the future? Will I eventually be able to go back to the life that I enjoyed outside of my closet? What does the person whose forced me into the closet plan to do to me? If I further knew that I was going to be slaughtered, I’d feel existential anxiety: I’m going to die soon, what’s going to happen to me?
Those are the sorts of thought processes that need to occur before being locked in a closet becomes a bad thing. I haven’t seen any evidence that cows experience those thoughts, and I’ve seen a great deal of evidence (made possible through our language) that humans do.
I’d say that infanticide is not OK, for reasons that don’t have anything to do any inherent notion of rights. I don’t have to be against infanticide for the same reasons that I’m for tasty veal meals.
Would you agree that potential can inherently have value? In other words, that something can be valuable because it has potential?
It can, but not to the individual with the potential if they have no capacity to recognize or have an interest in it. And when we start taking into account externalized judgements of potential, we enter into the hopelessly subjective and speculative.
Hence, a mother might well not want her child killed not simply because she loves it as it is, but because she has hopes and dreams for what it will grow into. But those are harms done to her. No one justifies protections against infanticide simply on the basis of whether or not there is a mother around to feel sad, or indeed anyone external judgements. That’s what inherent moral worth is all about: it’s inherent to the being itself.
Not really. You both have muscles which are built to function with exercise and joints that aren’t designed to be constantly motionless or constrained. The whole point of a veal calf is that it is deliberately made anemic and then prevented from every seriously using its muscles. The result is pretty nasty. But don’t ask me. Just try it yourself and see whether or not it is painful, smart guy.
If I was forced to stand in a closet for several years, I’d get very bored, because there would be very little intellectual stimulation. The lack of social interaction would be depressing. I’d feel a great deal of anxiety about my situation: What’s going to happen to me in the future? Will I eventually be able to go back to the life that I enjoyed outside of my closet? What does the person whose forced me into the closet plan to do to me? If I further knew that I was going to be slaughtered, I’d feel existential anxiety: I’m going to die soon, what’s going to happen to me?
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Again please actually carry out the experiment, did you? If you had, you’d soon find yourself in excrutiating physical pain. That’s the torture to which I refer, which alone is enough for the purposes of this discussion.
And of course cows don’t have complex psychological imaginations and fears. But they are not quite unfeeling machines either. Calves do long for socialization and contact and affection for their mothers. They do develop obsessive and self-destructive behaviors consistent with a reasonable model of psychological trauma.
Unless your moral judgements are entirely arbitrary, you should then probably give some account of why some beings are worthy of moral concern and some aren’t. I don’t much care whether or not you bring rights into it, just that it’s coherent without being completely arbitrary.
Being forced to be completely motionless is indeed physically painful, but veal calves aren’t forced to be completely motionless. They’re in crates that permit some limited movement, including the assumption of different postures.
My moral judgements aren’t arbitrary. In fact, I’ve given a great deal more reasoning and justification for my positions then you have in this thread.
The whole “But your argument has to work for babies too!” is a silly sidetrack; my argument that cows can’t experience the pain to anywhere near the degree that we do is a rebuttal of your arguments veal is wrong because it hurts cows. I don’t need to come up with a comprehensive moral system to rebutt your argument.
Furthermore: Apos, why do you think animals should have rights? Is it solely because you think they can suffer like we do?
As far as I can tell, nobody is disagreeing with you.
Except perhaps me, but only in a very narrow way.
Your argument can easily be extended from stem cells to first trimester fetuses. Now personally, I find it bizarre to rank grown cows behind 7 week fetuses.
But most people are uncomfortable with abortion on some level: when I’ve made this argument IRL, I’ve found few takers. So, no, it’s not bizarre insofar as weirdness is measured by proximity to mainstream opinion.
Metacom:
------ You want the radical change? You justify the radical change by arguing for it on its own merits.
Yeah, I’ve been waiting to collide with a) a decent anti-abortion argument and quite separately
b) a science-heavy discussion of the capacity of animals to suffer (as opposed to feel pain).
Hasn’t happened yet. This is odd, considering the passion of the anti-abortion and animal rights crowds.
Back to Apos:
Here’s an easier question. Which is worse, the factory-farmed treatment of veal calves or the factory-farmed treatment of piggies? Is there an informed treatment of this question?
Michael Pollen, in his thoughtful New York Times article on animal rights, reproduced here singled out the pig rather than the calf as an example of a mistreated animal.
Indeed, the article didn’t address veal or calves at all. I’m not sure why.
Oh. But Pollen mentions the sow twice, without going into too much detail.
They can’t turn around or stretch. They can’t exercise. That’s the whole POINT. Again, if you’re such a big expert on how nice that all is, by all means: give yourself anemia and stand in a small closet for, and we’ll make this easy, days on end. See if there’s any pain.
First of all, you’re an idiot. For like the 80th time, this thread was making the case not that veal is unequivocally wrong, but that it’s nonsense to consider stem cell research wrong AND not veal. Never did I argue that cows experience pain with the complexity of emotion and suffering that a human being does. In fact, I explicitly argued against that right from the first. So, geez, you’re a real fuckup on that count, yet again.
But second of all, sorry: you do at this point need to explain why abusing a cow is cool beans but hurting a baby is not. After all, babies don’t experience pain with the complexity and emotion of adults: they probably don’t even experience it with the complexity and emotion of cows. And even if they grow into adults that do, that still leaves terminally ill babies: is the lack of a deeper psychological future (and thus psychological damage being imparted on that future) enough to excuse hurting them? Is that really even the basis on which anyone would be against hurting a baby anyway?
The problem here is essentially inconsistency. And an inconsistency that seems bourne out of fear of confronting troubling questions rather than any serious moral objection.
Who ARE you, the fucking Memento guy? I first of all have expressed no particular interest in using or not using the concept of “rights” which is a smaller and more legalistic subset of any discussion of morality. Second of all, I’m not advocating that animals should necessarily have rights or be given moral consideration or whatever. I made an argument of comparison between various beings, and have defended the premises behind it.
Myself, I’m not sure what to do with animals. I think it’s very difficult to come up with any sort of coherent argument that holds their pain and suffering to be of no moral account. I suspect that most of our indifference towards them has much more to do with fearing that our lifestyles would be inconvienienced or just not wanting to think about it than it does any sort of serious or coherent argument as to why the suffering of animals doesn’t count (all the usual tropes, such as that their natural lives and treatment towards each other isn’t representative of deeply moral thought, are bogus and empty, given that we would never accept such arguments in any other context). But on the other hand, I’m still thinking about the issue.
But they can change postures, sit and stand, and have some other limited movement. They’re not immobile. Not being able to turn around or excercise doesn’t cause physical pain, unlike forced complete mobility. People are prohibited from excercising and have their mobility limited for extended periods of time all the time, and they do just fine. Limited movement is not the same thing as complete immobilization.
Bullshit. Your motives for creating this thread are pretty fucking transparent: you wanted an AR thread, but are too intellectually bankrupt to actually debate it head on so you started a pit thread lambasting conservatives for taking a position that appears inconsistent to you. It’s a pretty good tactic, come to think of it, given that lambasting conservatives, especially religious conservatives, instantly buys you SDMB cred.
Now you’re just picking nits in lieu of making a real argument to support your position: You are arguing that veal calves experience emotions complex enough to make veal production count as “torture,” so you basically are arguing that, in this case, they suffer as, or similiarly to, a human being.
No, I don’t. I didn’t start this thread, and I’m not making an AR argument. I’m just poking holes in yours. You say veal production is wrong because it causes cows to suffer, I say they don’t really suffer. Babies don’t figure into it at all.
Furthermore: Apos, why do you think animals should have rights? Is it solely because you think they can suffer like we do?