TotalBrownout [none/use name]
No one is accusing vegans of holding a prejudice surrounding the issue… For example, vegans do believe that it’s OK to eat plants because they do not have sentience, so even though plants do have an interest in survival, vegans don’t respect that interest. They kill the plant and eat it. They have a moral intuition that tells them that this is OK, and it would be ridiculous to accuse them of being prejudiced against non-sentient life and impossible to substantiate. The person who is accusing another of being prejudiced bears the burden of proof… vegans have a responsibility to prove that “speciesism” is a prejudice analogous to racism or sexism… but they never support this accusation properly. “Real” prejudices are when you hold a view on the basis of evidence that you wouldn’t otherwise consider adequate… it is exactly this that we see when racists and sexists try to defend their views.
Typically, racists and sexists defend their positions by way of appeal to various empirical claims about supposed differences in intelligence, or rationality, or moral character between men and women, or whites and nonwhites. And it isn’t merely that these empirical beliefs are false. Rather, the crucial point is that the racist or sexist accepts these beliefs despite the fact that the evidence for them falls far short of meeting the standards that they themselves would normally insist upon when it comes to evaluating this sort of empirical claim. They stick to their beliefs despite the evidence, despite what they themselves would otherwise recognize to be the force of the evidence; this is what marks their views as mere prejudice.
Similarly, then, if one were to defend speciesism with an appeal to false empirical beliefs (claiming, say, that even severely cognitively impaired humans have greater intelligence than any animal), and if one held these beliefs even in the face of evidence to the contrary that one would normally recognize as decisive, then that too would be a form of prejudice. But if one’s speciesism is based instead on a direct appeal to moral intuition and if one is then prepared to give presumptive weight to moral intuitions in other matters as well, then that is not prejudice. The view in question may or may not be correct; but it is not a mere prejudice and it is harmful to label it as such.
deserving of consideration is factually subjective.
Ethics is a social science and not subjective, unless you don’t believe in the science of ethics… that level of relativism is a nihilist edgelord take, imo.
As far as your chicken nugget example goes, the way animals are treated currently within the context of agribusiness is not morally justifiable and unethical by any reasonable standard… you’ll have no argument from me there.
I’ll give you a different example: Most vegans benefit from medicine every day that was tested on animals (everything from asprin to the COVID-19 vaccine) and fall back on the clause that vegans only abstain from exploiting animals as much as is possible/practical. Yet they also believe that it’s unethical when someone who is differently-abled makes use of a service animal… this is ableism. This is what prejudice looks like. This is what this thread is about… NOT ALL VEGANS ARE COMRADES.
IMO, the crux of this particular struggle session is the proposition that “speciesism” is a prejudice analogous to racism, sexism, etc. and is thus not morally defensible. The ethical underpinning for this assertion is the “equal consideration of like interests.” Vegans believe that the interests of humans are exactly alike the interests of non-human animals. If you believe that the interests of humans are not identical to the interests of non-human animals, that humans posses a quality that non-human animals do not (personhood), you are not a vegan. If you believe that human animals deserve “special consideration” owing solely to the fact that they are human persons, you may believe that it’s OK for someone who is differently-abled to use a service animal. This does not violate the ethical principle of “equal consideration of like interests” because you believe that the interests of humans and non-human animals are not entirely alike. In this scenario, you (based off of your own moral intuition about personhood) could rightfully view a vegan opposed to the use of service animals as ableist. In a similar way, you would see no ethical dilemma presented by the scenario of choosing to save a human versus a non-human animal from a burning building… the human person is given special consideration. The standard vegan viewpoint to the above scenarios is that any belief in personhood is speciesism, a mere prejudice, and is not morally defensible. They simply deny what the “speciesist” insists upon, which is not an argument. I believe that they are acting from their own moral intuition, which they have a right to, but the problem with this line of thinking for me is that it presupposes a prejudice. Prejudice has to be revealed/approached as a diagnosis of exclusion.
I’ve never seen anything from Thom Yorke that indicates he’s a Zionist… This looks like random shit-talk from a nobody.
So, basically just a protection racket at this point…
Looks like a self-portrait