Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth?
crt0o@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.
YaBoyMax@programming.dev 5 months ago
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.
crt0o@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I think it’s rather self evident. Most sentient beings kinda like being alive. It’s basically an application of the golden rule. You can get in to game theory or utilitarianism to show that killing is wrong, but it then still has to come back to life having value which is quite hard, if not impossible, to prove. So then you need to refer back to philosophy to find arguments that life has intrinsic value. I persknally prefer Camus’ approach, but there are lots of other potential arguments for intrinsic value.
Ultimately, it’s impossible even to prove that other beings have experiences, but at some point we mostly all look at the evidence and accept that they do.
crt0o@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.