Ferk

Even if they were the ones paying me $1 a year for having an account, I doubt I'd be using it.

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

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).

Didn’t you know that - based on our current understanding - virtually all animals besides humans lack the cognitive capacity of moral agency?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You call me nihilist while arguing that I'm likely not really nihilistic. I feel that's a very fuzzy box you are trying to put me in :P ...but you are free to call it whatever you want so long as it's kept respectful.

The Universe doesn't have morals. But humans do. And evolution has ingrained a particular set of morals in our brains.

However, in those morals the benefit (you could say "thriving") of our species is the main theme, and it could not be other way since they emerge from natural selection.

This can be in conflict with the survival of other species too. And I do believe that all creatures with instinct are also moral beings... it's not that wolves are behaving immorally when they hunt sheep, they are behaving in the most morally correct manner that emerges from their natural selection. Their appetite is more important for the wolf than the sheep's suffering.

This seems logical if the only premise is environmental protection and preservation. It’s obvious that this is not the only premise which plays a role here.

Yes, my point was to show that the topic is not that simple. My first line was: "it depends on you morals"

"Suffering" and "empathy" taken as universal would not work, you'd need to draw the line at some point. So it becomes a question on where you draw the line. You can look into the eyes of a worm, speak to it and treat it like a child that has the same feelings a human would, and you'll be sad when it dies. But I don't see how our ability to project empathy towards an animal that has eyes justifies drawing the line there.

Don't you find it curious that most people only seem to care about an animal when it's relatively close in mechanism / behavior to a human? ...most people don't have second thoughts when it comes to killing a cockroach, for example. Is the desire to not have insects in the house more important than the insect's suffering? I suspect the meme wouldn't cause such an impact if it used that.

You may find that Veganism is an ethical framework, which has the strongest logical consistency (at least to my knowledge) if you start with the premises “I want to be alive” and “suffering is bad”.

If those 2 premises were enough to start with, then it would follow that it's ok to eat meat (or use animal products) as long as we could be absolutelly sure the animals involved did not "suffer" (and as long as it did not put our own lives in danger, which is, imho, a better point towards going plant-based ...but I won't derail into that).

Then it becomes a matter of accuratelly determining what constitutes "suffering". Does experiencing suffering require "pain" and a nervous system exactly like ours? Or is it possible that the only reason we experience "pain" through our nervous system is because the way we are programmed makes this the most efficient way for a mechanism of reward-punishment to emerge that is evolutionarily benefitial to our survival?

If other creatures have a different emergent mechanism to signal in their biology what's hurtful to their survival and morally wrong for them, having a different manifestation of what (I'd argue) could also be categorized as "suffering", shouldn't they be included? are we just only caring for the nervous response because that's one thing we can relate to? are we unfairly discriminating based on how similar is their biology to ours? why?

it is impossible to create moral through reason alone, which is equivalent to saying that logic has no moral. You need to start somewhere and accept it as given.

This is true, but only as the very first initial premise. You NEED logic to isolate what those premises should be (and to be able to extrapolate from those premises) if you actually want to maximize the success rate of the primal evolutionary drive that pushes our human morals.

I'd argue most crimes and acts considered immoral are driven by emotion too. You need logic if you want to form a coherent human moral that can be extrapolated to a higher abstract level. Because using emotion as a basis alone, without logical reasoning, would lead to contradictory and inconsistent results, the morals would be changing based on the circumstances in a way that is not logically sound.

This means that if you manipulate certain circumstances, you can manipulate the moral compass of someone who is driven by emotion and does not use logic. That form of manipulation is what I referred to as "emotional blackmailing".

Why is the meme asking us to "look in the eye" to the animal? why is it asking us to "tell" it to the animal as if it could understand the words of whichever language we speak?

Because it's trying to manipulate you into projecting your empathy towards it.

Personally, while I appreciate when people add a "snippet of explanation", I do prefer that to be in the comments. Not as the main text of the submission.

Making it part of the submission can feel like editorializing. If I want to read the artice, I read the article, if I want to read opinions / interpretations of the article, I read the comments.

Using the "text snippet" for opinions or interpretations can cause bias... and it also might encourage people to repost the same content multiple times just so they can post with a different bias.

I think the comment section is a more organized and suitable place for that. It also allows people to use their votes to decide whether the opinion/explanation deserves the upvote, separatelly from whether the link itself deserves promotion.

Veganism is a compromise, nothing more, nothing less.

Sure, compromises that "depend on where you place your morals".

The meme here is trying to superficially tackle a topic that's complex, projecting to the animal by "talking" to it with the intent of triggering empathy and causing a natural emotional reaction.

I do wonder, though, why do you think it’s reasonable to put importance on humanity or its future at all? Might as well just put importance on oneself, no?

Exactly.

I do believe that the only reason we give importance to "humanity" is because it happens to be what's interesting for our own importance on "oneselves" as individuals.

Do you think that's unreasonable?

I do genuinely love other people, and I do so for egotistic reasons. Because they mean a lot TO ME. My family and friends are a huge part of MY world, of what I am. They can give me strength when I need it. A strong group makes ME strong, so I wanna give them strength when they need it too. Making them happy ends up making ME happy. And that applies (to a lesser/more abstract extent) to the community around me. It's in MY interest to have the most welcoming and charitable society. So I try to be charitable to help make it a charitable society since that is what's of interest to ME.

We have evolved as "pack" animals like that for a reason. If someone tells me they are freely acting in detriment to their own interest/satisfaction, then I would not trust that person... either they are lying to me or they are lying to themselves and they actually get some form of personal satisfaction/benefit from those actions.

If people did not deeply place importance on themselves first, then that would lead to sacrificing themselves for a perceived notion they have of what might be of interest to others... that's essentially what hardcore Christians preach (even if they don't practice it): to endure suffering for the sake of others. Imho, if everyone did that, then everyone would have to endure suffering... and because it's impossible to really be 100% sure of what others really need (we are not mind readers) not only is it inefficient to base your life in what you think others need, but it might even be counterproductive, it might even lead to a never ending cycle of guilt. And even the Christians had to think of a reward in the "afterlife" in order to sound convincing at all... just so that they can actually try and convince their own animal brains that the sacrifice isn't against their own benefit...

I fail to see “the vegan argument” in your comment, whatever this is.

I'm not sure what you mean here.
If you are asking me: "when do you think veganism makes a good case?" then I would say: when it makes the point that if we don't switch our diet we would end up destroying ourselves, since our current diet does not seem to be sustainable long term for our environment.

Doom did have networking, using IPX. You had to start the game with a parameter from the DOS commandline. Like Quake, the maps had special player spawn points & items for deathmatch too. The term "deathmatch" was coined by the Doom game mode.

However, there was no frame interpolation in the original Doom, instead, there might be a latency in the inputs. The game state only advances when all players have sent an update for that "tic" (1/35 of a second), so the game might be laggy for everyone if the connection from one of the players is slow.

But multiplayer back then was mostly for LAN parties. At least in my area. I didn't even have an internet connection at that time, personally. In fact, even during the Quake age, I was only able to play on LAN... and I still liked coop better.

Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.

Yes, what I meant is that cheating becomes irrelevant in coop, not that it doesn't exist.

If a game has an economy that makes some players richer than others (like say.. in many MMOs), and you actually care a lot about being rich in that universe, then it'd starts being more of a competitive thing and less about coop... a game can be competitive and be PvE.

Even singleplayer games can be competitive if you make it about beating your friend's "score" or speed.. almost anything is susceptible to speedrunning.

I guess the question on coop vs competitive is more about what are the goals of the players. If people play games to have a fun time, or if it's because they want to have some way to prove themselves they are good at something :P

Yes.. honestly, imho, any game that's competitive should either embrace "cheating" and design its gameplay to be as transparent as chess (ie.. make it ok to be tool-assisted) or be designed around controlled environments that forbid using tools like that.

Anyone who doesn't want to surrender to a controlled environment (whether it's in the form of some kernel-level control or VPN / Stadia-like platform) should just look for coop games.

It's sad that FPS have evolved towards the competitive landscape... to me, the best experience in the original classic Doom was coop mode. Yet Doom Eternal, at most, only supports some wacky asymmetric team deathmatch.

If depends on where you place your morals.
Human morals are antropocentric. The only reason we see "life" as something good is because we are descendants of people who saw "life" as someting good, it's in our genes, our instinct of survival. Our ancestors would have killed themselves without that instinctive attachment to life, so we wouldn't have been born in the first place. It's selection bias... natural selection.

The Earth, and the Universe in general, does not care about life (human or otherwise), or about suffering, or about apetite. The planets will continue to be there long after we are extinct. We (including the animals around us) and our feelings have zero "importance" in reality. There's no real importance scale but the one we make.

Humans categorize things in "importance" based on how they serve the human race. Even something like global warming, is important in so far as it puts humanity lives at risk, no other reason. It's not about "saving Earth" or the animals, it's about saving ourselves. We are the "important" ones, in our own view. If you don't agree with this then... why not advocate for a safe way to end ourselves without suffering? wouldn't the Earth be "better" without humanity? if the goal was really about minimizing suffering, that might be a good approach wouldn't it?

Note that I'm NOT advocating for suicide... but trying to show the argument is not that good.
I can understand vegans that do it for the future of the Earth (and humanity) and to fight our own autodestructive behavior. And I totally support that, I think it makes complete sense and it's what got me interested in this as well. But I don't understand those who first and foremost put the focus on the animal suffering. I feel that's more of an appeal to empathy (another evolutionary trait) and it's driven by emotion/instincts rather than logic/reason. The argument being made this way is more of an emotional blackmailing trying to make our reptile brain feel bad, not about giving an actual logical argument.

Me neither? That's why I was hoping they might have added some markdown extension.

I have done it in the past with mardown-it-wikilinks npm package, for example.

Also, I'd argue the wikilinks (internal links) using [[any term here]] from Wikipedia, that optionally allow automatically inferring the link, is much more comfortable (and less error-prone) for the usecase of a wiki system, than the [text required](/link_here_also_required_even_when_redundant) from markdown.

I was hoping they might have added some markdown extension to do something similar, but it seems not.

"Danger Zone", the Battle Royal mode from CS:GO is completelly gone now too.
They didn't even bother to mention it being taken away....

Sure, it might not have been the best battle royal game, but as someone who was never a fan of the terrorist vs counter terrorist theme, and who actually enjoyed Danger Zone once in a while, it saddens me.

In the past, English had "thou" for 2nd person singular and "you" was exclusive to the 2nd person plural.

I don't see why that can't happen with "they" vs "he/she" too.

Though it's a bit sad that it would likely result in a more ambiguous language that could potentially lead to misunderstandings. Unless we start to use constructs like "they all" for adding specificity, in a similar way as how "you all" (or y'all) is sometimes used.