Why do people eat food they know isn’t good for their health? Why do people continue to buy products from companies that have proven to only sell bad products or engage in scumbag practices?
They all have the same answer.
It turns out in 1961 the American heart Association took bribery money from procter and gamble, who owned and sold “healthier Crisco” cooking oils that weren’t high in saturated fat, like beef and other cooking oils were.
The AHA then claimed and pushed that saturated fats caused heart disease.
Problem is, something like 88% of every study done in the past 60 years has found little to no link between heart disease and saturated fats.
So beef, according to most studies, isn’t bad for you. The AHA was just crooked and on the take, being paid off to sell Crisco.
Now it is calorie dense and people tend to eat too much of it, but that seems to be a lot of things. Don’t eat too much or you get fat. But apparently, you don’t have to worry about saturated fats being bad for you.
someone else online summarized the genetics part as the following:
Mandelian randomisation studies show that LDL-c is causative in atherogenic plaques 1 and metabolic ward RCTs show that SFA intakes increase LDL-c, while the decrease in SFAs lead to lower total and LDL-c 2.
But yes, almost all nutrition science is a bit inconclusive because of genetic variation.
Forgive me, because I’m struggling to understand the linked information, but as someone with atherosclerosis this is an issue close to my heart (ha!).
I just want to make sure I understand you.
Your link to the european heart journal says that the causal link between LDL and ASCVD is “unequivocal”.
I think the WHO study says (amongst a lot of other complicated stuff) that replacing SFAs with PUFAs and MUFAs is more favourable than replacing SFAs with complex carbohydrates? The strong implication being (although I couldn’t see this exactly) that higher SFA intake contributes to heart disease.
Why do people drive when they know it’s bad for the planet
Why do people buy from Amazon/Walmart when they know it’s making their country poorer?
Why do poor people vote for millionares when they know they don’t care about the poor?
Some of us work multiple part time jobs to barely make it.
I’d probably stay in the basement if I didn’t need to pay my landed lord their monthly tribute.
buy some cheap sliver of land and park a bus on it. save up and find a better sliver of land and plan from there.
Is it capitalism?
Do you think people in non-capitalist societies only eat the healthiest of foods?
Each individual is facing the following choice in life:
- sacrifice to save the planet, and fail
- or not
People want to immediately jump to “if everyone would just …”
Nobody is looking at an “everyone does X” button. People only have their “I do X” button available.
So that is literally the answer to your question. Very few people would sacrifice the civilization to eat a cheeseburger. But nobody has that choice or that power in their hands. Their choice is eat the cheeseburger or not, and the survival of civilization stays rigidly the same between those two choices.
Best response. Almost everyone alive has a net negative impact on the environment. Maybe that one Indian guy who planted a whole forest by himself gets a pass. We can try to be less negatively impactful depending on our inclinations, resources, and other interests and priorities. Some people may choose vegetarianism, some might buy an electric car or install some solar panels, some might organize politically for a new policy. Some might spend their altruism improving social conditions rather than focusing on the environment. But being ever so slightly less of a negative impact on the environment than your neighbour who has a slightly different set of priorities is hardly a reason to feel morally superior.
There’s truth to that. None of us is free of blame, and there’s always going to be a cost associated with the luxuries and comforts that many of us enjoy; but it’s not about “feeling morally superior”, it’s about doing the right thing, reducing unwarranted harm and suffering as much as you reasonably can. And changing your diet, eating more fruits and veggies and less meat, is probably one of the least obtrusive ways to do so (save for folks with rare medical conditions, or people who live in an environment without an abundance of arable land). Even if you don’t give a shit about the suffering of animals or the environment, you at least ought to care about your own well-being.
I’ve eaten meat my whole life, still do… but I’ve cut back a lot, and it really hasn’t been that difficult. Every time this conversation comes up, nothing annoys me more than the hive-mind crawling out of the woodwork to dump on vegans for daring to speak out against something that is demonstrably harmful in several ways, and then claim that vegans do it only for the purpose of moral grandstanding. Moreover, the absurd amount of appeals to nature and the lazy “bacon tasty” retorts make all of these people look like fucking dorks.
You don’t have to flagellate yourself for eating meat, you don’t even have to give up meat entirely… But don’t be a jackass about it, acknowledge the harmful reality you’re contributing to and you can either accept it for what is, cut back and reduce your contribution, or choose to lead a life that doesn’t enable it at all.
Same reason we use electricity despite not being 100% green energy and thus being even worse for the earth?
If you actually wanna guilt this question then the fuck are you doing using your coal and gas powered electricity to do it?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, because the capitalists have seen to it that you will never be permitted to make an ethical choice that would dare compete with what they expect you to choose.
Being a moralizing prick doesn’t send any message, what gets people to change is making that change easy, that’s why instead of being terminally online fuckwads, british vegangelists spread the good news by hosting free kitchens, volunteering to take people grocery shopping on their own pound, teaching vegan cooking classes, and all other sorts of actually addressing literally any of the actual concerns people have about going vegan instead of being a condescending snob about it.
How about we shift to talking about portion control and be less all or nothing?
How about we don’t engage in reasonable, healthy discussion and instead throw shit?
Not everyone has the time and resources to commit to every ‘good’ fight under the sun especially when the systemic problems are as deeply rooted in our society as they are.
Which device did you post from? Did you vet it wasn’t made with slave labor? You might need to go recycle all your devices and unfortunately that will cut you off from getting your message out to the world.
Your post does more harm to your cause than good because it just makes everyone angry at you.
Potatoes, pasta, bread, legumes, nut butters, vegetables, fruits, jelly, jam; all things that many people already eat with some regularity.
Time and resources are hardly an excuse, you don’t have to spend two hours a night preparing some 5 Michelin star meal with the most organic, non-GMO, [insert buzzword] ingredients in order to make better dietary choices, at least not in the first world where we have ample options… Shit, even just reducing your meat intake by 10% is a net harm reduction that adds up.
The slave labor thing is valid to an extent, but not entirely analogous. For better or for worse, modern society is increasingly dependent on technology; folks rely on it, in some form, to find/perform work, pay the bills, stay in contact with friends and family, survive the climate they live in, travel, etc… This isn’t typically the case with meat, it’s often just carnal desire which results in the death of something to the tune of ~80 billion (with a “B”) animals every year that didn’t really need to be slaughtered.
People absolutely should be upset about the conditions of workers being exploited anywhere in the world and advocate on their behalf where possible, but our position shouldn’t be: “Oh, some bad shit happened over here, so I guess it’s fine to allow this bad shit over here to proliferate as well”… just sayin’.
I’s often just carnal desire which results in the death of something to the tune of ~80 billion (with a “B”) animals every year that didn’t really need to be slaughtered.
I’m genuinely curious: what’s the vegans’ answer to the question of “what happens to the cattle and other livestock if everyone on the planet turned vegan tomorrow?”. It’s not like they can just be let loose…
Realistically the amount of livestock is not sustainable and they’d need to be culled in gargantuan numbers so that they don’t go from a “managed” ecological disaster to an “out of control” ecological disaster. And then you get the slaughter without the benefit of feeding billions of hungry people.
I mean the premise already feels a bit absurd, but I’ll play…
I’m not a vegan myself, and I don’t really hang out in vegan spaces that much, so my answers may differ from your typical vegan, or not… who knows. But I suppose if the general goal is to preserve life where possible, then you should absolutely try to find some place for the animals to live out their days in peace. If we can manage to stuff them all in neat little boxes on the land we have now, I doubt it’s some intractable problem. You don’t have to let 'em run free and “out of control” per se, repurpose the land of the now defunct factory farms and slaughterhouses, build a number of sanctuaries all over the place, and plop 'em there. Of course, no one can possibly know all of the variables involved, so I’m not saying this is a well thought out solution, I’m just spitballing… but we’re not exactly hurting for land, to my knowledge.
However, suppose I granted you:
Realistically the amount of livestock is not sustainable and they’d need to be culled in gargantuan numbers
Why would that necessitate this outcome?
And then you get the slaughter without the benefit of feeding billions of hungry people.
Veganism isn’t some virus that physically prevents you from eating meat, and plenty of vegans have been meat eaters at some point in their lives. If it came down to it, I imagine there would be a steady supply of folks who would opt to revert temporarily instead of letting it go to waste. Vegans may disagree with me here, but I think it’s certainly a more ethical choice if the animals are already dead, can’t let the sacrifice be for nothing.
The vegan viewpoint on animals really just boils down to eliminating unnecessary suffering and death. Many are fine with the prospect of hunting, fishing, or raising livestock for food when there aren’t other options (eg. environments with insufficient crop yields to feed everyone or infrastructure to get other food), the problem arises from the fact that those of us privileged enough to live in a land of abundance continue to needlessly slaughter. Do we need to eat? Of course. Do we need to kill things to do it? Fuck no.
All that said, I think a more realistic transition scenario would be something like the meat industry halting slaughter operations, exhausting their existing supply until either there are no animals left to kill, or there are a small enough quantity to where we can just yeet the rest onto some farms somewhere. Not that vegans would be entirely on board with that, being anti-slaughter and all, but it’s at least a reduction in harm and a more believable way for things to play out… I think.
Eating beef is expensive, though. I agree with the rest.
This rage bait question could be reworded as…
Why do people consume <anything> when we know it’s bad for the earth.
I think it’s valid that he chose the #1 food source problem to talk about first. Once we fix that, let’s discuss #2.
Because it’s a damn good source of creatine and protein. And it tastes good.
OK, but why not eat less beef and more chicken and herring?
In other words, humans are assholes
Yeah but so are preachy vegetablists
Each to their own and all that
Yup. Each one of us, for some reason or another. Welcome to the club, asshole ❤️
Then so is half of mother nature. It least we usually kill our food before we eat it. We could do something like rip out their guts and unborn calves while they’re still alive and start chowing down on them like a hyena.
Ha ha can you imagine if the vegans get into government and enact a law that says we can only eat meat if we kill it ourselves, so we all just start doing this like fuckin deranged hyenas 😂
The real question is, why should we try to not eat beef for the environment, when corporations make 90% of all pollution in the world.
Maybe focus on the 90% of the problem and not the individual people who but meat?
the beef industry wouldnt be razing down the amazon forest if no one was buying and eating it, would they?
No corporation pollutes except to produce goods or services for human consumption, or for other businesses that provide goods or services for human consumption.
Every gallon of gas burned is to power a vehicle to move you, or the goods you purchase.
Every natural gas line leads to a house, of a business that sells things to houses.
Theres no such thing as a corporation without consumers, we are where the buck is created, and where the buck stops.
Theres no such thing as a corporation without consumers, we are where the buck is created, and where the buck stops.
Absolutely correct, glad to have read your comment. People need to start realizing they play a role in what’s to come. It’s a terrible mentality to think we don’t all have our effect on the future.
There is no ethical consumption in capitalism.
Nah, you just don’t give a shit to believe you have any control over reality.
Ah, yes, the ol’ victim blame schtick. GTFO with that juvenile shit. This isn’t some timeless chicken/egg quandary, son.
The reason why the top polluters in the world are oil and gas companies is because you buy oil and gas directly to drive your car or heat your house, or you buy electricity generated by oil and gas. The metals in your vehicle? Mining companies pollution. The food on your plate? Agricultural companies polluting. Even the shirt on your back burned bunker fuel to get from Bangladesh to your house.
If you think you aren’t directly responsible for corporate pollution, you’re a fucking moron.
We use oil and gas because it’s the option that has been made most available to us. This isn’t an individual problem. As long as the alternatives are prohibitively expensive for the average person, in terms of time, money, availability, etc, then we’re going to always have the bulk of people choosing the easiest option.
We all have so much to worry about each day, trying to fit biking to my job a 45 minute drive away just isn’t feasible. The options for changing that are either we go fuckin full on anarchy, burn the system down, and start anew, or slowly, systematically. Set an easily achievable baseline the average person can work to adopt, encourage it via subsidization and education, and give it time.
You’re thinking about this wrong, you choose your lifestyle.
You simply aren’t willing to give up your lifestyle to avoid emissions. It’s clearly possible to live a less polluting lifestyle, there are billions of people polluting almost nothing compared to Western averages, their lifestyle just doesn’t have as many conveniences as yours.
There are North American people who have chosen to live ultra-simplistic lives who pollute almost nothing as well.
That’s a choice YOU make. It may not feel like you made a choice, but you do so every day by not changing your behaviors.
You’re right. At the end of the day, your lifestyle is your choice. I’m merely pointing out that there are a LOT of pressures keeping people stuck in the lifestyle they’re in. Those pressures are real, and if you want to effect change, it’s better to target them, rather than the individual.
The pressures are not real, they’re entirely social constructs.
The easiest fix is for the government to just tax carbon emissions, like Canada, and turn turn the cost way up. The market (Corporations) will change very quickly if it’s cheaper not to pollute.
Will it hurt people? Yes. Costs will go up, but pollution will go down. That’s the tradeoff.
Oh yeah I’ll just stop driving my car in this world they manufactured to be unsustainable to travel in without a car.
If you think you can do ethical consumption by eating the avocados that fund latin american cartels to mutilate and rape the children of anyone who doesn’t just sit there and take their shit instead of some beef from a cow raised by some kid doing their 4H project, you’re the moron here.
You realize there are people in North America who do not own cars, right?
I made ethical consumption choices by looking at my three largest personal (and family) pollution sources.
First is Home heating/cooling. If you rank pollution sources, this is the single largest for most north American people. Now here I got lucky, my area uses almost 100% hydro electric power, so I switched to using a heat pump from a natural gas furnace. Now I no longer directly burn fossil fuels, and my grid is almost 100% pollution free as well. If I had not lived in this area, I would have chosen to install solar panels to offset my energy use as much as possible, and possibly participated in a green energy purchase program. It costs more, but the whole point is that if this were easy, it would already be done. You need to give something up to reduce your pollution, and in this case that thing you’re giving up is some extra money.
Heat pumps are a no-brainer in this category, Smaller homes pollute less, multi-family homes with shared walls pollute less, homes with better insulation pollute less. There’s choices here for everyone. They just either cost extra money, or give up some of your lifestyle.
2nd most pollution, transportation, I bought an EV a few years ago, which while it does have pollution for production over it’s lifespan will have significantly fewer emissions than an equivalent ICE vehicle. Again, my electricity here is almost 100% green, or could be in almost every area.
I wasn’t willing to go car free because of how far I live outside of a city, and I accept the pollution that results from my choice here. When I lived in the city, I used to have a bus pass AND a car, and I’d frequently leave the car in the driveway to take the bus for many trips.
Transportation can be addressed in so many ways, moving closer to the things you need, mass transit, EVs, etc. Again, Money or Lifestyle costs.
3rd most pollution, food, I cook with significantly less meat than average, we aren’t vegetarian, but we almost never eat beef(which is a massive pollution source even compared to other meats) and our portion size for meat from pork and chicken is more for flavor than nutrition. A single pack of bacon in a lentil/vegetable stew covers 10 dinner servings, compared to a single 5 person breakfast, and I bulk out the protein with the lentils. We eat tofu 4-5 times a month, prepared in various ways, etc. Using less meat actually saves you money, alternative protein sources like beans, tofu(which is beans), and lentils are FAR cheaper. We also buy a lot of our produce from our local area(less transportation pollution) and preferably with less fertilizers (heavy pollution source)
Overall, does it cost more money or reduce your lifestyle to pollute less? Yes. That’s the choice that consumers make. You want to have no pollution AND keep your lifestyle the exact same, but it doesn’t work like that. Pollution makes things cheaper, that’s why companies do it. They wouldn’t bother if it was more expensive. Nobody is sitting in a boardroom going: “Man, this coal costs far more, but we need to fuck the environment a little harder so lets keep using it”
I think your argument works if someone is stealing the beef.
If they are buying it then that is directly funding that “90%”.
Because corporations make things based on the demand of those individual people. They don’t exist in a vacuum. And they’re not going to change because someone on the internet rants about them. Their only incentive is profit
It’s a bit of both. We started out just liking beef, for all the reasons above - easy to grow, good bioavailability, tasty, etc. From there, we built our society up, became capitalists, and started really honing in on efficiency, because more efficiency is more money. Now cows are everywhere and beef is cheap.
Right now beef is pretty much the cheapest protein option readily available, and that I actually know how to prepare. Both of those come from the supply being huge, our culture being built around meat eating, it just kinda being the way we are.
This isn’t an individual problem to solve. No amount of vegans voting with their wallet is going to redirect the monumental ship that is our culture. We need subsidization on non-meat options, more ubiquitous supply, and more practice with the style of cuisine if we ever hope to make changes that stick.
Beef would be much more expensive if not for the huge subsidies, it’s artificially cheap. Maybe we just stop doing that and see how it goes.
Right. Part of my point. We have taken great efforts to make beef cheap, and to bolster the supply. With all of this effort, it really isn’t a surprise your average person is going to choose beef.
I’d propose slowly increasing subsidies to beef alternatives, and then once those are to the same level of affordableness and you’ve got some adoption, start cutting beef subsidies. Make the transition slow and painless, more people will stick to it.
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Corporation polluter the planet, therefore we should be allowed to torture animals. You got it boy
Where I live the beef is local and cheap. I’m not able to obtain enough protein without meat, as confirmed by a doctor and a nutritionist when I tried to go vegetarian. With food costs so high it’s cheaper to buy cow than anything else, but when I have the money I opt for fish or turkey. I looked into hunting but it’s prohibitively expensive for me with permits, tags, guns, licenses, days off and transportation. I tried fishing for myself as well, but whenever I get time to do it, there are warnings about eating fish in the area. When there aren’t I never catch anything big enough to legally be allowed to keep. I’d like to get chickens if/when local government ever lifts the bylaws preventing it.
I’m not able to obtain enough protein without meat
How does that work? Isn’t egg white pure protein? Surely eating a pile of boiled eggs would give you the same amount of protein as a steak, not counting stuff like cheese and legumes.
Oh gee I didn’t try eggs or dairy in the months I felt like shit after going veggie, and neither the doctor nor nutritionist suggested that either. You solved all my dietary needs and I can give up meat now after years of trying to figure out the most sustainable diet I can manage.
Sorry, I was trying to ask a genuine question, I didn’t mean to come across in a negative way.
I’d still be very interested in the answer.
Sorry about that, it’s the internet. I’m not a doctor, but it was explained to me that proteins from different sources are not all the same and, while I can process protein from a variety of foods, I don’t do it as efficiently as with muscle proteins. The nutritionist I spoke to - who was a vegan and a vegan activist - said people like me need about 1-2 chicken breasts per week. It’s not uncommon, a lot of people who try to go veggie and can’t hack it just go back to meat without trying to figure out why they felt sick and tired. Other people have said it’s genetic based on your ancestors, but I haven’t seen a lot of evidence to support that. Other sources point to evidence you can alter the way your body processes things by following specific diet plans, but I’m not prepared to feel that shitty again to figure it out.
Thanks, hadn’t heard about that before.
I’d advise you proof read future questions then. Your initial question came across as very dismissive and condescending.
Thanks, I’ll try to be mindful of that! English isn’t my first language, so there is surely some nuance to be learned.
I and others are over here with soy, egg and gluten allergies that restrict pretty heavily what I can eat. But go off since you have it all figured out, king.
Sorry about your issues, I never meant to diminish them. I was genuinely curious about how one can become so limited in ones protein intake, but clearly worded my question poorly.
Egg and dairy allergies are among the most common food allergies, so I’d guess that something like that might be the issue?
Because it tastes great and it’s today, and not tomorrow.
What a loaded question.
Outside of the fact that a single cows life provides about 900 meals for humans, and the scraps left over make boots that last for a decade and also feed our cats and dogs. Plus, it’s delicious.
Yeah so, the amount of meals is correct. But that’s about it. I mean, I can’t say about the taste, to each their own, but one kg of cow meat needs two dozen kg of grain.
That’s about as inefficient as it gets.
As for the leather, the industry doesn’t like products that last a decade, so it isn’t actually using the leather in such a way. Industrial leather boots last a year tops.
Finally, pet food is made out of discarded cuts of meat, the uglies, etc. But also lots of cereals, and vegetables.
So we could really afford eating less meat. It isn’t good for anything. Not for us, not for the other species (certainly not for the cows, that get often half assed butchered in a hasty way because of quotas and profit), and absolutely not for the ecosystem.
But I guess the taste is all that matters.
Industrial leather boots last a year tops.
With respect, you’re buying awful boots.
If we had the same size, I could be wearing my grandfather’s steeltoes that are probably a solid 40 years old. People really underestimate how long good footwear lasts when you take care of it.
I can make hey dude’s last 9 months. If OP can’t make the cheapest leather boots last more than a year, they are using them wrong, or they should buy high end boots for whatever they’re doing.
Seriously. I bought some dirt cheap full grain leather biker boots 3 years ago; I have given them exactly 0 care, abused the snot our of them daily, and they are still holding up strong. These weren’t even boots meant for working and they still survived trudging through the various slops of all 4 minnesotan seasons for 3 years.
As long as you are buying actual leather and not “genuine leather” then whatever you buy should easily last several years even if not cared for. Well cared for leather goods can last decades.
So, OK, I’m willing to learn: please show me good brands then.
They need to resist to mud (thick mud, the kind with a ton of suction that will keep your soles when you try and move), seawater, rocks and sand, and pretty dense vegetation.
They also need to have steel toe caps, good soles (vibram or equivalent if possible) that don’t slip, and that aren’t too hard (wet stone is enough of a female dog as it is), and to go higher than my ankle.
The best brand I tried so far was caterpillar, but they lasted only 3 years. That’s a far cry from “a decade or more”.
Cows are not all fed on grain. A lot of cows are ranched on land that would not be suitable for growing grain crops.
Billions of trees every year get cut down to make space for cattle pastures, now tell me how destroying entire ecosystems that have been there for potentially thousands of years is worth some particular meat.
And billions of acres of pasture could never support trees
Inefficient?
Cows eat grains that humans can’t digest, or if they can, it takes energy to transform them to something human can eat.
we use some of the most fertile lands in the midwest that could be used to grow literally anything else to grow vast amounts of soy and corn for cows.
And in those specific cases, sure, you could do more efficiently by getting rid of the cattle.
The point I’m making is that there’s plenty of cattle raised in places that aren’t like that.
sure but a very small amount compared to what people eat. around 50% of american land is just used to grow crops for cattle. if we opted to reduce that, think of how much forest and natural land we could bring back.
Imagine how many people you could feed if we would just eat what we fed the animals!
Ah yes, good old hay … delicious!
We can’t live on hay and corn. Cows need several stomachs to do it.
Also, getting enough protein and creatine and other vitamins as a vegan is a hell of a lot of work and doesn’t taste as good.
Humans are animals, and the type of animals we are is omnivores. Not herbivores.
It’s delicious, therefore we should torture it and eat it. People are the worst.
There’s no need to “torture” cattle to get meat from them. Indeed, meat from animals that are experiencing stressful conditions tastes worse. Not to mention simply having lower productivity. A farm with happy cows is going to be more profitable than one with stressed ones, all else being equal.
Guess you didn’t get to grow up watching the discovery Channel before all their shows were about crab fishing and animal rescue. Would you rather I go rip a gazelle apart and start eating it’s insides while it keeps trying to stand up with only two front legs?
Why do vegans always think they have the moral high ground?
Probably because they do, at least in the realm of dietary choices. Choosing to slaughter billions of sentient creatures every year for food and accessorization, when the majority of us have an abundance of other options, is morally fucked… and this is coming from somebody who eats meat with some frequency.
Just because we like it, or because it’s easier, or because it’s “tradition” doesn’t mean it’s morally righteous, it just means we’re selfish assholes 💀
When people lash out at vegans it always seems to boil down to some degree of cognitive dissonance… Eat meat and revel in the immorality if you so desire, no one’s stopping you; but don’t fucking lie to yourself, and don’t get butthurt when someone holds a mirror up to your face. The loss of life, environmental impact, and the effects on our own health is enough justification to argue in favor of veganism, vegetarianism, or some other alternative that doesn’t result in needless harm.
The average human has much more of a negative effect on the environment than a cow. So, shouldn’t the question be why we tolerate so many people?
You beat me to it.
How would not tolerating look like? Let’s start with you as an example, maybe your loved ones too. And maybe look at the horrors of a one child policy in China before we start following that idea again.
Maybe start with people like you who take things on the Internet too seriously
Don’t ya just love when scumbags try to make ecofascism woke?
Go back to being a terrible dad Ra’as AlGhoul.
You’re really sensitive, huh?
Why is killing people wrong, but ok in war? Why do we still kill animals even though we know it’s wrong? Why is killing wrong in the first place? I bet you can’t find a single rational reason. That is because ethics isn’t based on reason, but instead on emotion. Given that, I don’t find it very surprising that it’s often very hypocritical.
Ethics may not be fully objective, but claiming that they’re fully based on emotion is a ridiculous thing to say. You can make ethical arguments based in reason. Pointing to the war and saying “see, ethics aren’t real” is an incredibly naïve conclusion to draw.
You can make ethical arguments based in reason.
Come on, I’d love to hear some, also the stakes are still up if you can give me a rational argument why killing is wrong.
I think it’s rather self evident, but I’ll share a logical outline which resonates with me. To be sussinct: Most sentient beings kinda like being alive. Where possible, it’s morally preferable to let them continue in that state.
It’s basically an application of the golden rule. You can get in to game theory or utilitarianism for more thorough arguments to show that killing is generally wrong, but it then still has to come back to life having value which is quite hard, if not impossible, to logically prove.
So then you need to refer back to philosophy to find arguments that life has intrinsic value. I personally prefer using Camus’ acceptance of the absurd as a basis for intrinsic value, but there are lots of other potential arguments that lead to the same conclusion.
Ultimately, though, it’s impossible to even prove that other beings simply exist (e.g. solipsism) or have experiences, but at some point we mostly all look at the evidence and accept that they do.
The issue I see with these theories is that this idea of inherent value they all arrive at is very abstract in a way. What does it even mean for something to have inherent value, and why is it wrong to destroy it?
Another problem is that we talk about destroying life without even fully understanding it in the first place. What if life (in the sense of consciousness) is indestructible?
The way I see it, people accept that life has some inherent value because our self preservation instinct tells us that we don’t want to die and empathy allows us to extend that instinct to other living beings. Both are easily explained as products of evolution, not rational or objective, but simply evolutionarily favourable. All these theories are attempts to rationally explain this feeling, but they all inevitably fail, as they’re (in my opinion) trying to prove something that simply isn’t objectively true.
Anyways, I feel like even if you accepted any individual theory that seems to confirm our current understanding of morality and stuck with it fully, you would come to conclusions which are completely conflicting with it. For example in the case of utilitarianism, you could easily come to the conclusion that not donating most of your money to charity is immoral, as that would be the course of action which would result in the largest total amount of pleasure.
I think the inverse problem is more troubling. If you accept that nothing has inherent value, then isn’t everything morally permissible? Maybe it is an emotional decision, or perhaps a leap of faith, but I find that idea so repugnant, I couldn’t believe it and continue functioning as a person.
I think in terms of consciousnes, Occam’s razor leads me to suspect that it’s tied to brain function, and when that ceases, so does it. Of course, once again, things like this are very hard to prove. I do think, though, that science and philosophy will eventually unravel it. (Incidentally, there’s actually a book by Dan Dennett I’ve been meaning to read about this topic which was suggesting we’re quite a bit closer to figuring it out than most people think.)
One of the problems with philosophy is that there’s never any smallest part, beyond perhaps Descartes’s “cogito, ergo sum”. You can reduce any argument more and more and they all start to not make sense and eventually crumble. You can pick at their semantic foundation or the thousands of years of preceding thought until they unravel, then that nice sweater is now just a bunch of fibres. If you refuse to view philosophical arguments as a whole, then there’s nothing there to view.
It’s like an actual sweater. Does it even exist in the first place? After all, it’s just a bunch of stuff arranged in a particular way, and it’s called a sweater because it has some sort of human utility and we decided to give it a name. You could go about your life and believe that sweaters don’t exist, and it’d be quite hard to prove you wrong.
Or you can accept that it’s a useful human construct, so they do. Maybe you could even go further, and believe there’s some idealised concept of sweaterness that exists in some meta-reality, which all sweaters share a property of.
I think this is essentially the realist viewpoint.
And you could be right, maybe all our current moral theories do run into contradictions, so perhaps they’re all wrong.
Heck, we’re running into similar problems in astrophysics. When we learn more about our universe, and things stop adding up. But that just means we go back to the drawing board and find a better model until they make sense.
Same for philosophy. When you reach a contradiction, you go back and come up with better ideas. It’s a process of slowly uncovering the truth.
After a few years of philosophy in university, I think it’s like software development. You can always go to a lower level but doing so won’t bring you forward in most cases. You can ask these meta questions on every single argument but there are no satisfying results. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’s fun :D
Yes, I agree it seems scary, but all it really means is that morality is not universal but specific to humans. You could say everything is inherently morally permissible in the sense that there is no higher power which will punish you for your actions, so essentially there is nothing preventing you from committing them. In short, the universe doesn’t give a shit what you do.
Still, your actions do have consequences, and you are inevitably forced to live with them (pretty much Sartre’s viewpoint). Because of this, doing things you think are wrong is often bad for you, because it causes you emotional pain in the form of guilt and regret, and also usually carries along negative social repercussions which outweigh the value of the immoral act in the first place. You could say that people are naturally compelled to act in certain ways out of completely selfish reasons. In this sense, I prefer to look at morality more as a “deal” between the members of a society to act in a certain mutually beneficial way (which is fueled by our instincts, a product of evolution), than something universal and objective.
The reason I doubt in our current understanding of consciousness is because I find its distinction between what is conscious and what isn’t quite arbitrary and problematic. At which point does an embryo become conscious, and how can something conscious be created from something unconscious? The simplest explanation I can imagine is that consciousness is present everywhere and cannot be created nor destroyed. This view (called panpsychism) is absolutely ancient, but seems to be gaining some recognition again, even among neuroscientists.
As you mentioned, “cogito, ergo sum” might be the only real objective truth that philosophy has uncovered so far. I am an optimist in that I believe surely more than one such truth must exist. If it was only discovered 400 years ago, surely there is more to be found. Maybe it is possible to collect some of these small fragments and build some larger philosophical theory from them, one that will be grounded in fact and built up using logic. I guess only time will tell.
And yes, of course some abstraction is beneficial in order to make sense of the world, even if it isn’t completely correct or objective.
It tastes good and I’m a carnivore.
