Would you kill a puppy for $1000000?

[Asa]

lol ok

I'll try harder to convey that. I'm pretty deadpan.

 

[Pin]

There's plenty of things I wouldn't do for money that go without saying.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

There's plenty of things I wouldn't do for money that go without saying.

Five minutes earlier

Pin's internal dialogue: Oh, crap, people are going to start PMing me with offers to do immoral shit for money, aren't they? I better make a statement...

 

[Pin]

Five minutes earlier

Pin's internal dialogue: Oh, crap, people are going to start PMing me with offers to do immoral shit for money, aren't they? I better make a statement...

Spoiler: You mind-reader.

 

[Pin]

Spoiler: In vein of this thread.

 

[Fidicen]

Pin's internal dialogue: Oh, crap, people are going to start PMing me with offers to do immoral shit for money, aren't they? I better make a statement...

He's probably received dozens of offers from INFJ billionaires who have too many puppies and are too moral to kill them. And because Pin Administration doesn't have a bureau of puppy disposal, he's drowning in both money and puppies at the moment and has to put an end to this madness.

Sadly, this is one of the reasons we have countries, so that we can feel morally incorruptible while the faceless entity called "administration" or "government" does the dirty work.

 

[Ren]

It's not immoral to kill puppies. Puppies are not special compared to other animals in the way that humans are.

Categorical imperative = Busted

If we look at this from the standpoint of virtue-ethics it wouldn't even be immoral to habitually hunt puppies for sport. A person of good character still remains one.

As much as people may disagree with your position, I do think that it's pretty consistent.

Leaving virtue ethics aside for one moment: what is it about humans that makes them "special" compared to other animals, and which is such as not to be seen in puppies? What is your criterion of distinction here?

 

[Ren]

It is immoral to kill a puppy for no other purpose than to win a million dollars in a sick game.

It is not necessarily as immoral to kill a head of cattle to feed a few hundred people.

The problem with the categorical imperative is that you already have a set of morals which guide what you're going to select as the universal law. In this case you choose to interpret a single act of killing as if it means that thereafter murder is justified. So it's cherry picking combined with the slippery slope argument.

Another way to see it would be, for example, that it's a universal law that each time one could get a million dollars for killing a puppy, one should do it. There's no need to say that the universal law is about killing but about puppies. Or it could be about mammals, or about exactly a million dollars. Or about causing some harm to get some benefit. One must always decide what the word "universal" means, and other people are going to disagree with you. You're simply choosing a level of abstraction that's convenient to your already existing moral position, in this case indignation over thinking about a puppy being killed. There's no pure rationality when it comes to morals.

It is not the person committing the act who's submitting to a principle by which murder is always justified. It is actually you who are suggesting imposing such a principle on everyone on the basis of Kant's imperative. Is that not tyranny? I think people should be free to change their minds and adjust their opinions according to the situation. If you claim that a person killing a puppy submits in principle to having their mother killed, it just means that you are unwilling to see any differences in those two situations on the basis of your desire to have a universal rule, and that is much more worrying than someone killing a puppy for a million. You may call that desire for a universal rule logic, but I don't

I would agree with Fidicen here... I think there are implicit value judgements (i.e. presupposed ethical commitments) in your statements of categorical imperatives. What is a "sick" game? If you use the argument that it's a sick game in your justification of the imperative, you're effectively saying: "It's sick and shouldn't be done because it's sick" — so it's a circular argument, in a way.

I do think the categorical imperative is a useful tool, but it is remarkably difficult to state it in such a way as not to presuppose (or presuppose only very few) implicit ethical axioms when stating it. Which is a rather good thing, as 'universal moral laws' better be not too numerous anyway.

 

[charlatan]

FWIW, I wouldn't.

I guess to add footnotes to make it slightly less boring an answer, I don't think a culture that eats what we consider cute is any worse than one which just eats the 'standard' animal cuisines.

On things like not eating meat, well I don't personally, but I'm more enthused about a future where we actually hit the problem at a high-level and address the industry than about people giving meat up in the present day.
A high level solution might be something like being able to create meat in a lab that is a replica, and genuinely tastes as good, and is not deficient in any way.

I don't have very utilitarian intuitions -- it seems to me if I were to care about morality at all, I'd most likely end up viewing living things as ends in themselves, and so I'm not sure a world with 1 person in misery and a million happy people actuallly moves me much more than one with 1 misery 1 happy. To put it differently, imagine we're at 1-1 -- it seems to me the million happy world is just one where we kept hte 1 misery the same and made a hell of a lot more creatures without addressing the one intrinsically valuable life's misery.
OTOH, if we had 2 happy, or at least 1 neutral 1 happy, that probably would strike me as improvement (let's use 'happy' generically for a morally positive outcome rather than worry about whether happiness is a morally positive outcome).

Sometimes, I am tempted to consider the conundrum: even if that's the case, perhaps the fact that each life is valuable makes it more self-consistent to try to save the ones we can, even if it isn't 'making the world a better place' in some sense.
Still, that tends to lead to an insoluble dilemma: the same concern for each life being equally/intrinsically valuable in itself seems to lead to it being impossible to decide whom to save. The arguments for rolling the dice no longer strike me as ones that follow quite as obviously from the intrinsic value point of view.

Basically, I think if I'm not going to adopt an intrinsic life point of view, why not just forget about morality and strive for other things like intellectual clarity?

Usually I favor the relatively uncontroversially better (to the extent there is such a thing) worlds, and don't comment much on the more gruesome pragmatic choices, as I'm not sure I'm ever truly convinced by any one of them.

 

[Pin]

As much as people may disagree with your position, I do think that it's pretty consistent.

Leaving virtue ethics aside for one moment: what is it about humans that makes them "special" compared to other animals, and which is such as not to be seen in puppies? What is your criterion of distinction here?

All of the things that make our species beautifully unique: the location of our larynx enabling our linguistic range, our preference for bipedal locomotion, our superior ability to reason, our ability to generate so many distinctive arts and cultures.

We are so special.

 

[charlatan]

Oh and the only 'universal moral intuition' I have ever found that there may be good arguments for on rational grounds (vs on the basis of something like affection-- i.e. a more emotional love for living things) is the problematic nature of suffering.
I do think that's one case where it may be bad by definition, vs almost anything else seems relative.

 

[Ren]

All of the things that make our species unique: the location of our larynx, our preference for bipedal locomotion, our superior ability to reason, our ability to generate so many distinctive arts and cultures.

I think there is a causal mechanism missing here. You are listing traits that are specific to the human species, sure, but without explaining why these traits make us specially exempt from the non-immorality of killing living beings. Let me hazard a guess: morality requires self-consciousness, and since other species lack self-consciousness, they lack a moral sense; and lacking a moral sense, they cannot be considered to lie within the realm of morality at all. Hence, the killing of a non-human being is not immoral, nor moral, but amoral. When we kill them, we just do that, for our own reasons; and there is no morality to be spoken of in such cases.

What do you think?

 

[Pin]

I think there is a causal mechanism missing here. You are listing traits that are specific to the human species, sure, but without explaining why these traits make us specially exempt from the non-immorality of killing living beings. Let me hazard a guess: morality requires self-consciousness, and since other species lack self-consciousness, they lack a moral sense; and lacking a moral sense, they cannot be considered to lie within the realm of morality at all. Hence, the killing of a non-human being is not immoral, nor moral, but amoral. When we kill them, we just do that, for our own reasons; and there is no morality to be spoken of in such cases.

What do you think?

I do suspect your argument argument is right. My only issue with it is that it isn't empirical enough. I can't 'point' at self-consciousness or verify that other animals aren't self-conscious or lack morality.

Ya know, a posteriori.

 

[Ren]

I do suspect your argument argument is right. My only issue with it is that it isn't empirical enough. I can't 'point' at self-consciousness or verify that other animals aren't self-conscious or lack morality.

Ya know, a posteriori.

Indeed, and this lack of empirical verifiability could be one way to justify universal animal rights.

Another option would simply be to say: "the strong ought to dominate the weak, as is natural." This is more or less the stance that Nietzsche took, with remarkable (if sometimes spine-chilling) consistency. Because in such a case, you would also have to condone or at least show indifference towards the killing of people with disability (endorsed by Nietzsche, who called disabled people "vegetative cowards"), etc.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

Indeed, and this lack of empirical verifiability could be one way to justify universal animal rights.

Another option would simply be to say: "the strong ought to dominate the weak, as is natural." This is more or less the stance that Nietzsche took, with remarkable (if sometimes spine-chilling) consistency. Because in such a case, you would also have to condone or at least show indifference towards the killing of people with disability (endorsed by Nietzsche, who called disabled people "vegetative cowards"), etc.

Maybe Pin is a 'blond beast' after all?

 

[BeautifulSuffering]

The sooner we all blend together into one look, the sooner everyone can shut the fuck up about this nonsense so we can get back to ridding the world of puppies in order to maximize profits.

That is exactly what the Kalergi Plan is about. Creating a one race, one religion, one goverment New World Order. But ofcourse the simple minded who are way too comfortable in society call it conspiracy theories.

 

[Wyote]

That is exactly what the Kalergi Plan is about. Creating a one race, one religion, one goverment New World Order. But ofcourse the simple minded who are way too comfortable in society call it conspiracy theories.

Of course! God damn simpletons. They're everywhere.

 

[BeautifulSuffering]

Lol.

It's one thing to oppose immigration-policy, another to parrot neo-nazi talking points.

Why did you parrot a white-supremacist conspiracy theory like a neo-nazi?

Don;t bother calling me a neo-nazi. Your lover Hitler was a fraud anyway and worked hand-in-hand with the same Ashkenazi families that are now in control of the world central banks, media such as hollywood etc. Everything we know and have been teached is a lie sadly.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

Everything we know and have been teached is a lie sadly.

I'm not sure you have been 'teached' to be honest.

I don't know why it's acceptable to casually dismiss the knowledge of a whole discipline like that. This is why the whole David Irving thing was so infuriating; because the actual evidence is so abundant and obvious, meaning that it's hard not to assume that the ignorance is wilful.

 

[Fidicen]

I think there is a causal mechanism missing here. You are listing traits that are specific to the human species, sure, but without explaining why these traits make us specially exempt from the non-immorality of killing living beings

This discussion looks like you set up a trap with the initial question, forcing Pin to commit the naturalistic fallacy, i.e. to list properties of human beings as if we could deduce self-evident morals from those properties. But Pin didn't pin down any moral rule, so he didn't actually step into the trap, just very close to it. The causal mechanism you speak of is the spring of the trap. Once you say such a mechanism exists, the view can be refuted on the grounds that we have no compelling reason to say that morals should be decided by natural properties.

Let me hazard a guess: morality requires self-consciousness, and since other species lack self-consciousness, they lack a moral sense; and lacking a moral sense, they cannot be considered to lie within the realm of morality at all. Hence, the killing of a non-human being is not immoral, nor moral, but amoral.

You make an unexplained logical leap here. Saying that morality requires self-consciousness, it's not at all evident what you mean by morality. By saying it is connected to self-consciousness you imply that morality is a property of a certain kind of being and limited to that. We may consider that sentence being correct now although of course we don't know about the moral feelings of other creatures. However, in this case what you mean by morality is merely an understanding of right or wrong. It does not follow that creatures that have no such sense are outside morality. When we talk about morality we're always talking about human values and that includes not only other human beings but the entire world (whether to pollute the planet etc), which affects our well-being and views in complex ways. So there are two meanings of the word morality you're using: one as a moral sense and another one as a mental phenomenon that has an effect on things. Even if you take the moral sense away from creatures, it's still possible to say that some things are immoral, defining harmful effects etc.