i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.
If the pig isn’t a person, then it doesn’t matter what you do with the lever and people with that conclusion might pull the lever because the beans will make less of a mess, because the pig will create a more expensive accident, or they might have an empathy response that finds gratuitous suffering distasteful and pull the lever but go home and eat some venison.
Anyone who thinks the pig is a person is puling the lever unless the pig wronged them in some way personally.
I have deliberately not defined any of these terms because they are not rigorously defined by the social norms.
A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.
i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.
You think “we” do that? I don’t. I make it a point to carefully consider who should be given my empathy or condemnation based on material reality.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is to be honest. Yeah, unfortunately there are plenty of people who base their sphere of empathy not on a materialist examination of the world but on societal norms, and that’s the problem here (along many of the problems we rightly rail about as leftists). It’s what I mean when I talk about arbitrary lines differentiating the human animal from all others to justify the way some humans treat all others.
Are you equating pets to children’s toys? Hopefully you’re just pointing out how ridiculous that is? One of those things is a lifeform that has the capacity to experience their existence, the other is an inanimate object no different than a rock. These things are not comparable. Same thing with a machine. There is a material difference between an animal (homo sapien or pig) and a machine, just as there is between a human and an LLM. That some people might be so ignorant as to think an LLM and a human being deserve equal consideration and empathy is not a valid or coherant argument that sentient beings who happen not to be human are ok to torture and kill.
You can call it person-hood if you like, but that just obsfucates things because people tend to think of “person” as “human” and what we’re talking about here is the capacity to suffer and to experience, which is not exclusive to humanity. It’s just another example of using the bias that’s already built in to language as a means to prove a point through circular reasoning, something we should be familiar with and wary of as leftists.
A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.
How is that less circle-jerking? Why is this version “circle-jerking” at all? The difference in either version is a lever to choose between something that can experience and suffer and something that can’t.
Are you equating pets to children’s toys? Hopefully you’re just pointing out how ridiculous that is? One of those things is a lifeform that has the capacity to experience their existence, the other is an inanimate object no different than a rock. These things are not comparable. Same thing with a machine. There is a material difference between an animal (homo sapien or pig) and a machine, just as there is between a human and an LLM. That some people might be so ignorant as to think an LLM and a human being deserve equal consideration and empathy is not a valid or coherant argument that sentient beings who happen not to be human are ok to torture and kill.
i have seen people become very attached to a stuffed toy or a motorcycle or the characters on a TV show etc. these things are personified and elevated to the level of a human person. In that way they are actually very similar to how these people feel about their pet versus how they feel about some mixture of several cows they eat in a burger.
i’m not making excuses for the ingroup and the outgroup framework not being formed using marxist philosophy, just describing how non-vegans seem to operate without running into cognitive dissonance.
I agree, non-vegans (or certainly at least anti-vegans, even in this thread) can only operate by avoiding facing their cognitive dissonance through child-like abstractions. But a puerile affection for a stuffed animal has zilch to do with the material basis behind veganism and the very real suffering on an unimaginable scale that carnists subject sentient life to for profit and treats.
