this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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As I read your comment, you approach veganism from a nihilistic perspective, invalidating their belief system since it is driven by emotion. At the same time you seem to have missed that every ethical concept stems from similar emotional processes. I wanted to point out the contradiction you created by that, since there is and was no living "full" nihilist or amoralist (except folks like existential nihilists) who whishes to continue their existence.
In other words: There is no moral without emotion. So critisizing veganism that way you did before, is illogical.
Didn't you know that - based on our current understanding - virtually all animals besides humans lack the cognitive capacity of moral agency?
In your example, wolves are not able to contemplate their actions the way we do. They don't have the necessary self-awareness, nor the required brain structure to even have labels such as "good" or "bad" to evaluate and prospect their (possible) actions. Their behaviour is mostly driven by instinct and training or experience. They do not "think" about whether it's good or bad to kill and eat the sheep, they also don't "think" that "they" are more important than the sheep. They simply do. They are not able to perform moral reasoning. There is no moral at play here. Moral does not exist for wolves. Only beings which posess moral agency are able to do that.
We - as humans - can evaluate the actions of wolves as morally correct or incorrect, since we are beings with moral agency. But the wolves can't. They don't look at other wolves killing sheep and think "oh dude, maybe the sheep wasn't so happy about that, but it's okay, since we need to eat".
So even though your observation is in so far correct as that wolves still have a decision making process, which allows them to hunt their prey if they are hungry, this decision making process is of purely instinctual and not morally aware nature.
I don't find it curious, no. As you already said this is rooted in similarities of capacity to suffer within us humans and other animals. According to my currenty state of knowledge, a lot of research shows that insects do not feel pain. Although a definitive answer is still out in the open. If I remember it correctly, there are hints that honey bees for example can experience some sort of distress when being smoked, which is why some vegans also do not consume honey. Vegans attribute suffering as something which can (currently) only be experienced by beings with a central nervous system. And that is also nuanced in several degrees. (An example, some vegans eat oysters since those lack a central nervous system.) This is an active interpretation of the term "suffering", and that makes sense. Why should you want to prevent damage to a being, if it is not able to feel suffering? A passive interpretation of suffering would be the presence of any stimulus which drives an organism to actions which prevent the occurence of such a stimulus. Those stimuli have evolved into incents for increasing the survival chance of an organism and its species. For example, this would also mean that plants are suffering when they don't maximize their beneficial sunlight exposure, which is why they grow towards light. This is of course one of the factors which drives evolution. However, as you will hopefully agree, there are different levels of suffering. While reactive behaviour of, e.g., oysters or plants are simple and mere reflexes to the environment, more complex organisms like vertebrates are capable of more complex forms of suffering, like pain, fear, stress, etc.. Simply put, that's also where vegans draw the line.
Since you can not make sure that the involved animals do not suffer, this is not okay for vegans. Most vegans also don't understand "suffering" as an active negative stimulus but also as the lack of positive ones. (Which also holds for what I said in the previous paragraph.) An early end of life, the lack of "true" freedom, i.e., living in the wild as in times before humans domesticated them, the fact that most of the animals, which humans consume, are bred for optimized meat, milk or whatever yield, which decreases their natural lifespan are such lacking positives and also brings along a bunch of negatives like (hurtful) health issues. Those are all the manifestations of suffering that vegans aim to prevent.
I already disambiguated the term "suffering" as a stimulus before and where and why vegans draw a line. So I hope that this will be a sufficient response to your paragraphs which follow the quote from the last one I quoted here.
Yes, of course. Still, these premises all start with emotions. But it seems we agree on that.
I am not sure I completely understand you here. What do you mean by that? Which evolutionary drive's sucess rate should we want to maximize? And how is this related to the first part of the sentence?
Agreed. To dive deeper: there is no inherent need for consistent results. It's just that most people like to respect themselves and justify their actions. They don't want to see themselves in a bad way and therefore naturally strive for morally correct behaviour. If you then explore their moral belief system you often find that it has sometimes more, sometimes less inconsistencies which cause distress for them. They might re-evaluate their stance and correct their belief system, possibly condoning their past behaviour and views. Or they shut down, blocking arguments which might invalidate their position even though logically correct, aka "confirmation bias".
But I see now how you originally meant your "emotional blackmailing" part. You were mainly criticizing the meme and not veganism as a whole by saying that, correct?
I would still justify such a meme format, since such emotions can be the nudge required to re-evaluate ones values and beliefs. This is why populism works, but also why it is so dangerous. The problem, and I agree with you in that regard, might then become that people don't spend sufficient cognitive effort for thinking about this criticially enough, such that they could arrive at logically consistent conclusions. In this meme specifically I still see the incentive for that ("should ones own pleasure be evaluated with higher priority than the suffering of animals?"), it's therefore less emotionally appealing than more radical examples, which leverage as much emotion as possible and almost completely omit the rational part.
Furthermore I feel the need to put this into perspective: This meme was posted to the german vegan community (VeganDE), the title of the post translates to: "Why did you become a vegan?". It does not seem as if it would aim to appeal to the viewers of this post to change their lifestyle towards veganism, but I see it rather as a conversation starter within a vegan community. Also, from my experience, most vegans I met so far, have thouroughly thought about their choice to go vegan and did not made this choice irrationally based on emotion alone.
Have I missed it? ...as I said before, emotions are needed but only as a basis. And I believe you agreed on that.
But my point was that you need logic to have a consistent/sound human moral out of that basis.
Emotions also lead people towards murder, rape, abuse and all sort of things that are considered immoral.
Emotions are just the expression of our animal instincts. I'd argue that even the most complex feelings of love are linked to deep responses to stimuli hardwired in our genes.
Without using logic to distill morality, you'd get an animalistic set of morals as wild and clueless as our emotions often are... the same kind of morality that an animal, like the wolf, would have, because that's all it has: instint / emotion (I know you disagree with the wolf as a moral being, but I'll get to that in the next point).
Agency? based on our current understanding, humans might not even have any real "agency" themselves. That's something that scientists and philosophers have been discussing for ages without reaching any sort of agreement... many think that "free will" is just an illusion.
I feel there's a fundamental diference in the way we define "Morality". I'll try to explain my take on it, which doesn't involve "agency":
In my view, if a creature (human or not) is capable of displaying a set of priorities in how it behaves, and we can notice there are rules governing the way they conduct themselves, then that set of priorities and rules is susceptible to be understood as the moral compass that governs its behavior.
To me, morality is intrinsic to any form of complex natural behavior subjected to evolutionary pressure (whether they have cognitive capacity or not). Even if there's no "Universal" morality, there are objective moralities emergent from the way each species has been driven towards seeking some set of stimuli that might be "good" for their own survival. All that we see as "good" is only "good" because it satisfies that evolutionary drive.. not because we happen to have a "thought" about it.
As I said before, in the case of humans we can use logic to test, distill and extrapolate to obtain a higher level and better defined morality. Plus our actions usually have more complex and convoluted causations that require logic.
But if you do something "bad" without "thinking" (like you said wolfs do), that does not make the act any less "bad". At most, it just shows that your "thinking" wasn't the cause responsible for your behavior.
I wonder what's you position about "determinism". I'm not sure how would you reconcile it with your idea of morality, which seems to require the need for agency.
I don't believe in free will. But my take on morality does not require it.
It seems to me that's arbitrary. I don't see enough reason as to why the line should be drawn on vertebrates.
Equally arbitrary would be to draw it on intelligent beings who's suffering can be more complex and say anything below is so much less important, that the desires of an intelligent being to marginally improve one tiny aspect of one instant of their intelligent lives takes priority.
I know. It's kinda extreme, but it's jut as valid as any other arbitrary line. That's not a strong case for Veganism.
Of course, defining "intelligence" might be complex. But it was just an example. And it's a particularly interesting one because you already implied that "virtually all animals besides humans" lack some relatively important cognitive capacities.
Yes. Often with these memes the title is a question that is either answered by the meme, or a follow up from it. So I interpreted it as an answer (ie. the quote in the meme being given as a reason on "why did you become Vegan?").
Maybe I interpreted it wrong... but seeing that the meme was not enough of an answer for me (and on top of that, it appealed to emotion), I saw it as an opportunity to engage in some conversation which I hoped would not be unwelcome.
It seems my reply got so long that lemmy won't let me post it completely. So you'll get it in parts.
Part 1 of 2:
I just wanted to explain why I said, what I said. You questioned Veganisms from a nihilistic perspective in your original comment. And yes, at first it did not become clear what your standpoint with regard to the connection of emotion and ethics is. But since we cleared that up and agree on that we can move on.
You are again attributing moral as something which can exist without the capability of reasoning about it, i.e., purely instinctual and emotionally driven behaviour is already something which you understand as morality. This is a fundamental disagreement we seem to have with regard to the definition of moral. You observed this as well and provided your definition. I will deal with that later.
I say that moral can only be an attribute of a being which is capable of higher reasoning. If a being is not able to even have such labels as "right" or "wrong" and not able to attribute them to its actions, then it can not have moral. A wolf acts instinctively, as I have detailed before. That's why it's not a moral agent and can't act morally "good" or "bad". Those are labels we put on the wolves since we have moral agency.
The illusion of free will, yes. I am well aware of that. There have been studies which show that we already have a decision for an action before we become aware of it. It makes sense that we could predict the actions of someone before they are becoming aware of it, if we have a detailed view of their neural circuitry. We could simulate the exchange of electrochemical signals, which are again rooted in external and internal inputs, like sensory information. There is a clear cause and effect visible on a macroscopic scale. If we could create a very well controlled environment we could even make some guarantees about our predictions.
(This will now get abstract for a while, but bear with me, you'll see how this will become relevant.)
However, no environment is currently perfectly controllable. And it is not even possible in theory. Are you familiar with Laplace's demon? If not, here is a short summary: Laplace's demon is basically the idea that there could exist a being, which is able to perfectly predict the future state of each and every particle in the whole universe, as well as to determine its past. It is the ultimate culmination of determinism and also illustrates the illusion of free will. Because, if we can simulate the interaction of each and every particle in the whole universe, given the knowledge about their current state, we basically know beforehand what decisions humans will make. If we would construct a machine which resembles Laplace's demon, then this machine could even be able to predict it's own predictions, which would lead to an interesting paradox.
But, as far as I know, our current understanding of the universe does not allow Laplace's demon to exist. One of the major problems is the exchange speed of information. Einstein disullisoned us of that when he found out that there can be nothing faster than the speed of light. This includes the speed of communication. Laplace's demon can't exist, because it is not able to know the current state of particles which are lightyears away from it. It can't even perfectly know the current state of particles which are one centimeter away from it, since it only sees a shadow of it, which was casted a very brief moment before.
There are more reasons why such a demon can not exist. For the sake of not making my response excessively longer than it already is, I omit them, but I will highlight another important one:
True randomness. Given our current knowledge, true randomness exists on a quantum level. If you would like to know more about that, I refer you to Heisenberg's unvertainty principle. Even though deterministic interpretations like the de Broglie-Bohm theory exist (or the Many-Worlds-Interpretation, which I reject for now for a lack of evidence of parallel universes), those and other hidden variable theories have been deeply challenged by the findings for which three physicists were are awarded a nobel prize last year. Those basically proved that our universe is not locally real. (Here are two resources to wrap your head around it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txlCvCSefYQ )
So either it is real or local or none of them, but it can't be both, if I understood that correctly. This again underlines the existence of true randomness on a quantum scale.
If we have true randomness, our universe is not deterministic, at least not entirely, meaning it is probalistic. Even though we have a certain degree of determinism on a macroscopic scale (which under the hood is just a manifesation of a high probability in that view), those processes are influenced by quantum processes which are random in nature.
Consequently, Laplace's demon can't exist. Furthermore, the existence of true randomness, allows room for the existence of free will. Even though "free will" is the high level product of some neural circuitry, it is very difficult to perfectly predict this product as this neural circuitry in turn is again influenced by truly random processes. That doesn't mean we can make high probability predictions, but we can't do it perfectly. And that's the critical point here.
If we have free will, this supports that we have moral agency. We can evaluate whether some action is right or wrong. We can differentiate between good and bad and act to that accordingly.
Part 2 of 2:
Coming to your definition of moral agency:
Either you need to rethink your definition of moral or you are making a mistake here. (Or I am not understanding you here, which is another possibility of course.)
What is moral for you? What does it require?
I was thinking that for you and me, moral - in a nutshell - means distinguishing actions between "good" and "bad", where the exact definition of "good" and "bad" can vary as well as the ethical framework which might be built on that. I need to emphasize the "distinguish" part of the last sentence, as this involves active contemplation about possibilities entangled with an evaluation of "good" and "bad". If I don't misunderstand you here, you say that any influence which lead to a certain behaviour in an organism can already be seen as moral behaviour. But is it though? Take a plant for example. It will grow towards light. Is this moral behaviour? I say it isn't. I say it is a reflex. If the plant is not able to reason about whether it might be advantageous or not and thereby "good" or "bad" for its survival to grow towards light and if it does not have the possibility to "decide" against growing towards light, it can not have moral. The plant does not care whether it is "good" or "bad", because it can not care at all. It just does, behaving purely as a reflex. That this reflex formed at all is the result of an evolutionary process, but it does not enable the plant to make decisions, especially not moral ones.
To me, that's also a characteristic which distinguishes us humans from most animals or other forms of life. We are able to defy our nature by reasoning about it and making an active decision. That's a key component necessary for moral agency which virtually all other forms of life on our space potato lack.
There are intrinsic objectives which emerge from the way organisms evolved, plants seek light, animals seek food, and so on, but those are not "moralities", those are reflexes, instincts, beneficial and detrimental stimuli for the survival and procreation of a species. Yes, our understanding of "good" and "bad" are rooted in an understanding of such beneficial and detrimental stimuli, but to be able to actively, willingly, decide whether we want to confront ourselves or others with a (detrimental) stimuli, is something only we humans as moral agents are capable to do. A cow will feel detrimental stimuli when it is confined on small space, suffering pain from physical damages and will strive to escape from such influences, since those are detrimental stimuli of course. But it can not think about that in such a way that it could make the decision to stay. It lacks the cognitive abilities to do that. We on the other hand can do that. We can expose ourselves to detrimental stimuli willingly. We can expose others to those as well. We can label such actions as "good" or "bad". Cows can't. And wolves can't as well.
Being able to decide, given a set of different actions, is one of the major factors which constitutes a moral agent.
Even if free will was an illusion and our universe was deterministic (which I currently think isn't the case, as I detailed before), you are still able to think about your actions before you act on them. And not only think in a goal oriented manner about that, but in an ethical manner. Even if the result of such a thought process might be determined, you can still have one. And other life forms don't. So why shouldn't you have it? Isn't your deterministic stance on free will not fallable for nihilism again? Because if it is deterministic anyway, doesn't that make life and ethics meaningless again, even creating your own purpose and ethics in an amoral meaningless universe? Why do you seek a logical consistent ethical construct at all? I argue that being able to have these thoughts and contemplations, whether their results are predictable or not, you still need to have them to come to a conclusion for your action. We are able to ask such questions. We are able to get the impression of being able to make such decisions.
If someone is not able to think about their actions, they are not able to do "good" or "bad" things. But that's just another example for the same concept we are arguing about. To illustrate this, say someone suffers from a brain injury which incapacitaes their higher reasoning. Then they kill someone. Wouldn't you argue that this is something less "bad" than someone who kills someone else intentionally? I would even say, if their reasoning abilites were really completely turned off, they are "innocent". They weren't aware of what they were doing. You can find such interesting examples in criminology, or psychiatry in general, think of lobotomy for example. More common are negligent homicides. Someone does not look on the street while driving, a car crash happens, someone dies. It was "bad" that the driver did not look on the street. But it would've been way worse if they really wanted to kill someone. Intentions matter a lot, highlighting the importance of moral agency. However, if the driver in our example had a disease like narcolepsy (and wasn't aware of that prior to driving) and suddenly fell asleep which then leads to the deadly car crash, then they would be innocent again from my point of view, since they didn't kill someone willingly, nor was it rooted in negligence. It was simply an unfortunate accident.
I understand that. That's also one of the main reasons why I am not a vegan (yet), even though you find me defending veganism here a lot. The best counter argument I got so far is rooted in the fact that I am already distinguishing between different forms of life. To illustrate it with an extreme example: I would rather pick a flower than shoot a human. What would you do?
Given such an extreme and hypothetical example if you were given a choice to pick a flower or shoot a human, and you would have to decide for one of these options and don't have any other. Wouldn't you also rather pick the flower?
This has significant implications. Probably because of natural instincts, I value the life of humans much higher than the ones of plants. Therefore I have to accept that I already see a hierarchy of life forms with respect to their capacity to suffer. And I don't want to change my view of that hierachy. Vegans draw the line there, were more complex forms of suffering can begin, which are usually vertebrates. Simpler forms of life, whose capacity to suffer is reduced to mere reflexes (like the light seeking plant), can be ethically consumed. However, some vegans I've got to know so far would prefer nutrients snythesized from lifeless matter. Since that is not a realistic option right now, not consuming animal products, and plant- / non-animal-based products instead, is the best they can currently do.
I would prefer such synthesized products as well. But to be honest, I am currently still struggling whether I really want to accept that hierarchy as is and I am questioning myself whether it is "good" or "bad" that I also value the life of humans much higher than others. I need to justify somehow what forms of life I destroy in order to live myself. Veganism seems to provide the best logical construct for that, as I haven't been in contact with better alternatives yet.
I see. Yeah, I think maybe you interpreted it a bit wrong. However, any civil discussions on that topic - and I take the liberty to say that for the community here - are of course most welcome.
I also need to thank you for our discussion here. Even though we disagree on some key aspects, this motivated me to dive deeper into the topic of "true randomness" and related topics. This has yielded some life changing results for me, even though it led me to a minor existential crisis, haha. :D