(March 24, 2026 at 10:57 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: -and, like before, I'd just give you a picture of a broken face.  

Pyschological and physical damage are real, and scientific.  We could expand our inquiry by looking at the consequences of an so's face splitting permissive societal structure, historically.  We've been there and done it, after all.  Also real and scientific.

This too is an appeal to subjective effects of doing something I personally consider evil, yet other people don't always suffer these negative effects nor hold my constraints. Indeed some delight in them. Those prisoners didn't spring up out of the ground.

You're appealing to results while you're arguing that morality is a priori objective.

I wouldn't consider psychological and physical damage subjective effects. It's not just my opinion that assault harms body and mind, such that, if I changed my opinion, assault would not harm body and mind. Similarly, it's not just my opinion that the conditions and ends met by many livestock animals are nothing short of horrifying.

OFC I don't give a shit whether or not someone enjoys assaulting their so. That would be emotivist. Non cognitive. Their enjoyment also has no effect on the effects of assault. Likewise "but meat tastes really good" isn't a compelling excuse for mistreating livestock.

(Yesterday at 9:31 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I wouldn't consider psychological and physical damage subjective effects.  

You missed my point. What if your significant other is trying to kill you? Doesn't that change your moral equation?

I think there might be a factual difference between assault and self defense....and, as we've already discussed, this is an implicitly realist modifier that would only mean something if such facts of the matter..well...mattered. Still, there's a universe in which self defense is not good either, more like a permissible evil. We tend to determine whether or not what a person has done was done in self defense at all by whether or not they actually had to do x to prevent y, not by whether or not what they did was good (or even not bad) in and of itself.

Arguments for ethical veganism suggest to us, even if we don't share their particular conclusions, that eating meat might also be in this territory. Generously, we can assume that an ethical vegan does not believe that a person should be compelled to choose starvation over omnivory. That eating an animal to prevent your own death is the dietary version of self defense, and while not good, not as easily condemnable as electively overeating cruelty enhanced beef like veal.

This all leads me back to a wonderful counterpoint to ethical vegan arguments that I wanted to separate from any discussion about metaethics. The impoverished vegan producer of sustainable and humane meat products. Her land is marginal, as is often the case with lower economic classes. Her ability to buy off farm inputs is nonexistent. She is keenly interested in the wellbeing of the livestock under her care for both moral and economic reasons - as they are not easily replaced. Her free range chickens which are of a heritage breed are raised on open pasture and what small grains she can produce on her land by composting their waste and with whatever rain falls. She may additionally use this fertility for a small market garden producing high quality organic vegetables sold directly to consumers in her local area. She may keep a number of other livestock animals for purposes of tillage and cultivation. She could not afford distribution, and cannot produce enough product to entice an outside distributor. She sells eggs and, at around 5 years of age, ethically slaughters the spent hens and markets them as roasting chickens. They would not sell well against factory raised meat which is plumper, more tender, and lighter in flavor.

It seems as though she's evading every horn of the ethical vegan dilemma we'd been considering. Firstly, she does not actually eat meat. Secondly, the animals under her care are well treated, live full lives, and become products at end of life through humane means more because they cannot be let go to waste than because they taste good..which they don't. Finally, it would be patently absurd to see this as contributing to the ecological damage attributed to factory faarming or it's more factual and ultimate cause ff production and consumption. This is all a thought experiment, but there are people in this situation. Many people. They are often practical vegans or vegetarians even if they are not ethical vegans, as they couldn't afford to consume the products they produce. Most agricultural labor in the world and their families are malnourished or starving for these reasons listed.

I think the self-defense example points up a salient problem with equating harm with damage if damage is justified or desired, then it becomes moot from a moral standpoint. Damage is only harm if it is both unwanted and unjustified, but both counts require a value judgment. Value judgments are inherently subjective. You do not determine desirability or justification by objective facts. Therefore, the harm standard is inherently subjective.

(Yesterday at 10:10 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I think there might be a factual difference between assault and self defense....

Don't look now, but you're making the point that morality might be rooted in this or that context. Hardly objective if the same act can be acceptable and uncceptable depending on circumstance.

(Yesterday at 11:42 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(Yesterday at 10:10 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I think there might be a factual difference between assault and self defense....

Don't look now, but you're making the point that morality might be rooted in this or that context. Hardly objective if the same act can be acceptable and uncceptable depending on circumstance.

Precisely. By way of example, there’s the recent rat killing carried out by my wife. Norway rats are an invasive, destructive species and pose a significant danger to our native plants and animals. What she did was a ‘right’ action. Had she beaten the neighbour’s dog to death simply because it was looking at her funny, that would be a ‘wrong’ action.

Although clearly not on a par with the spousal abuse scenario mentioned earlier, it does seem to point out that moral actions are based not so much on some hoped-for objective standard, but on circumstance. Even those cases we in this time and place find utterly repugnant are not (and never have been) universal.

Boru

(Yesterday at 10:55 am)Angrboda Wrote: I think the self-defense example points up a salient problem with equating harm with damage if damage is justified or desired, then it becomes moot from a moral standpoint.  Damage is only harm if it is both unwanted and unjustified, but both counts require a value judgment.  Value judgments are inherently subjective.  You do not determine desirability or justification by objective facts.  Therefore, the harm standard is inherently subjective.

IDK about that, in my earlier example I offered the valid realist suggestion that harm done in self defense was still harm.  Still not good.  Still immoral.  We do employ terms and concepts like necessary evil suggesting that even if something is desired and justified (in some other sense, I'm assuming) it can still be an item of moral concern, still be harm.  At least on the face of it, a things harmfulness does not seem to be decided by it's desirableness or it's necessity.

A simple summation of the contemporary position here is that the harm standard is not itself subjective (or necessarily so) though harm consideration in practice may be and often is.  As in, there is a fact of whether or not an action causes harm, but not all moral agents will be aware of that or those facts or agree to their logical consequences if they were.  Ostensibly, a more thoughtful, consistent, and objective application of that standard might clear up muddy areas for us - which is what I suggest when we think about the ethics and alternatives to our current food production systems.

Bringing that back around to ethical veganism and livestock production.  I'm interested in how many of us here believe that the harm to animals and the harm to the environment invoked are not objectivist statements?  That it has not been or could not be quantified and demonstrated in the same way that any other fact we take to be an objective fact can be?  It's just an opinion or the viewpoint of society in this moment that our management practices harm animals and the environment? Is that where we disagree, or is it something else?

(Yesterday at 11:42 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(Yesterday at 10:10 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I think there might be a factual difference between assault and self defense....

Don't look now, but you're making the point that morality might be rooted in this or that context. Hardly objective if the same act can be acceptable and uncceptable depending on circumstance.

Descriptively speaking, these terms explicitly refer to the context in which moral statements are made, apprehended, and considered -  it's not clear why this would be a problem.   Insomuch as a moral statement is intended and constructed to make a fact statement, that the arguer believes to be a fact statement, I will consider it as an attempt at a fact statement. That seems entirely appropriate to me. Ultimately, there may be no such thing as fact (of this or any kind, let's go nuts) but on the face of things moral statements appear to invite realist consideration. Pretty quick and easy defense of moral realism right there, too, don't you think? "Jon said I should do x because y was true, but y is not true - Jons moral argument has failed". Subjectively, Jon said - is all that matters. Relativisticaly, that jons utterance is in accordance with his societal organization- is all that matters. I think facts exist, and facts matter, and this is what signifies that I am a moral realist in-practice even if moral realism is, for reasons I/we don't fully understand or can't coherently articulate, metaethically false.

Metaethically speaking you may be confusing absolutist or universalist consideration for objective consideration (and as above, moral standards and moral consideration are not interchangeable concepts).  If the specific facts of an act are the moral making facts, rather than facts about a persons opinion or the society they were raised in, then OFC different factual circumstances could produce different moral conclusions?  The conclusion could not be fully objective if it omitted such things.  In my experience, this is another effect of the history of subjective deistic deontological contamination.  We find ourselves looking for the thing a bunch of charlatans and zealots told us "objectivity" was, and finding that objectivity is not that, decide that objectivity cannot be objectivity, or does not exist.

Bringing it back to ethical veganism, because this is really on point imo, it seems to me that the ethical vegan argument I'm considering takes for granted a certain set of factual circumstances. The ones that my vegan livestock producer evades. My disagreement with the argument is not in principle but in the accuracy and specificity of the facts that argument invokes..which is as things should be, if we're considering things rationally and objectively, no? I think that there are ways to raise livestock that do not cause the harms specified as the wrong-making properties of meat consumption. I think the argument fails to account for facts, including factual circumstances, that do produce same-said wrong-making properties the arguments premise is to avoid. The conclusion ends up being wrong in fact but not in principle. There's probably some version of the argument that would succeed, but that version may not actually lead to the desired conclusion of vegan normativity.

(Probably worth noting here that my position..as a moral realist, is that most moral propositions are wrong, and wrong in fact. We're not very good at it, we haven't even tried to be good at it for most of our history.)