Comment by ricecake@sh.itjust.works on Animal Rights vs Pro-Life

It being the same species as me. There’s no objective reason I’m “better” than a chicken since value is a subjective measure.

Since it’s subjective though, it’s not unreasonable to say that as humans, we value humans more than chickens.
We’ll never escape the subjective nature of value judgements, but as long as we’re honest about their subjectivity we can work with it.

A moral system that requires me to pretend that when you, my child, and a chicken are trapped in a burning building that I’ll be unconcerned about who gets rescued first is a non-starter. Likewise, when it’s me, your child, and a chicken it’s a non-starter to assume you’ll have the same priorities as me.

That’s a straw man, though. That’s not what the argument is.

It’s not about whether or not other animals have the same moral value as us. It’s about whether or not they have sufficient moral value to not be killed for a moment of sensory pleasure, when other options exist.

I’m not sure I see how it’s a strawman. I haven’t misrepresented what anyone was claiming. I immediately agreed that there’s no objective measure of value that makes a human on a “different level” than a chicken.
Pretty sure the conversation that I was responding to was about if they have the same moral value.

It seems like you want to have a different conversation, which is fine, but don’t pretend the conversation you want to be having is the one that was and everyone else is a jerk for not knowing that.

Perhaps I misunderstood, so let’s back up a step.

Do you think veganism entails a “moral system that requires [you] to pretend that when [your child] and a chicken are trapped in a burning building that [you’ll] be unconcerned about who gets rescued”?

Nope, not at all. That was, in conjunction with the complementary example where the trapped people swap around, an example of worth and value of beings being subjective, and how belief that humans and chickens are of truly equal consequence is not something that is believed often, if ever.

Sometimes arguments for veganism can convey that it entails that belief though, even though it does not. This can cause disagreement where one party argues that they have more value than a chicken, and the other is arguing that a chicken “has value”. One party hears “your life and a chickens are equally important”, and the other hears “there is nothing you can do to a chicken that is morally impermissible”.

Inspired by the “fire at an IVF clinic, who do you grab, the baby or the cooler with 500 human embryos” used to demonstrate that people don’t really value an embryo as much as a baby, but I didn’t want to imply a parallel between veganism and anti-abortion, or say they were hypocritical.

Ah, my mistake, I definitely misunderstood your comment, then. I misread your comment as a criticism of veganism due to the larger context of thread.

Totally reasonable. I reread the context and I had mostly ignored the anti-vegan starter comment on account of it being such a bleh sentiment, but got snagged by the value comment.

No issues with veganism other than some academic edge cases around insect products that I think could qualify as mutually beneficial, but mainstream veganism seems to disagree.

values are subjective

Ok, so if someone else just decides your life isn’t of value, then that’s OK since your moral worth is subjective? Am I understanding your argument properly?

value judgements can’t be objectively correct. you’re allowed to arrange your values how ever you like.

I’m fairly confident you are not.

It’s not okay for someone to hurt me to me in my subjective moral opinion.

If a lion attacks a human, I don’t view it as a moral failing on the part of the lion. It’s still an affront to how we order the importance of creatures, so we’ll destroy the lion because it poses a threat to something we view as more important than it, and so much more important than it’s not worth the risk of trying other options and letting them fail, usually.

Socially, we expect humans to have a baseline of shared values necessary for society to function. Social contract and all that. If someone behaves in a fashion outside that baseline, they either share the values and chose to transgress, or they don’t share the values and have no issue with what they’re doing. In either case the people who share that baseline inevitably seek some method of protecting themselves from this person.

Acknowledging that what we value is subjective does not obligate us to value what others value, or to ignore when they act contrary to ours.
Like I said above: in a fire I’ll rescue my child before I rescue a stranger or a chicken. Likewise, I don’t expect the stranger to rescue my child before their own, but I do expect them to rescue mine before the chicken.

Some values are more subjective than others, though. Especially when it comes to matters like aesthetics. We might disagree on whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza, for example, but when it comes to our own lives having value, it’s nearly universal that our own lives have at least some value to ourselves.

The universality of those values are the basis of that social contract.

If society were to one day just decide that a certain class of people were less valuable for a superficial reaaon, let’s say because they have red hair, for example, is it not possible that that decision could be an objectively bad thing?

It’s not objective at all. We are still fully entitled to feel outrage at it, but that doesn’t make it not a subjective judgement. You can’t measure morality with a tool, and if two people disagree on a moral question there’s no impartial test or metric you can use to decide the matter.

If the earth is destroyed in a calamity, the universe will not weep for our loss. It will just be another thing in the big list of things that have happened.

A value or belief doesn’t need to be objective to be valid, and a belief being subjectively true is functionally identical to objective truth, as far as the believer goes.

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