Maximizing Moral Virtue

[bennyboy]

"Information asymmetry" is a problem for vegetarians, for sure. As of right now, I'm not even sure that being vegeterian even DOES reduce animal suffering or deaths.

First of all, if you've ever been in a small farm, there are bugs crawling on everything-- probably like a billion per acre or something, depending on whether you're willing to pull out bifocals, a magnifying glass or a microscope. If their lives matter, we're instantly hooped, because over the population, that's more living things killed in vegetable food production each year than cows that have ever existed.

But even if you just take mammals and birds as mattering because "squeee," I'd like to see a count on how many mice, voles, or ground-nesting birds get mulched by industrial machinery per large livestock animal saved. It might be better just to buy a few acres of grazing land and one for vegetables and straight-up murder a cow per year and grow your own food in your family's poop. (still gonna be a lot of bugs incidentally killed, though, depending on the types of foods you grow)

That's why while I'm vegetarian, and I think it's generally more moral to BE vegetarian, I'm not as convinced as your average 17 year-old activist probably is. In fact, I'd say the morality of vegetarian only really works IF you take "squeee" as one of the bases of morality, and IF you find insects non-squeee-worthy. If you're the mosquito-non-slapping type, suicide might be the most efficient path toward reducing suffering and death in the world.

[The Grand Nudger]

I suppose it depends on where you get your produce and what you would consider death for food as opposed to, say, death from plastic - for example. You can close the environment off, even to bugs, provided you don't mind going around tickling every blossom with a little vibrator. Been there, done that, sucks. I used to joke that all these bleeding hearts were saving the tomato hornworm by slowly killing me. An acre of land managed as a loop can feed about twenty people. To put it into perspective, that's eight tons of melon. Fifteen tons of cabbage. Twenty tons of onion. These are good numbers..but not great numbers. I've seen forty tons of strawberry from a single acre under open field vertical hydro. You could probably double that if you could afford the glass to cover it. The point is, you can get alot out of an intensively managed acre and..beyond it's establishment, you probably wont have to kill too many animals. It's the off-site input that does most of the killing at present. Say you kept a dairy cow and slaughtered her yearly calf. Around four hundred pounds of beef and alot of dairy and a whopping twenty four tons of manure (enough to feed two acres of mixed veg)...for about four acres of pasture. You don't need the space..really..you just need that much feed. They're basically standing and expanding fridges - and if you compare them to a fridge the ecological calculus is completely one-sided. I'm constantly threatening The Wife about buying a cow - but I just fucking hate cattle..horses too..had entirely enough of that shit and mostly bad memories, lol.

It does give me an idea for a moral question. The hornworm question. We'll consider three options. You can poison them directly with pyrethrin. It's a neurotoxin. In effect, it sends the whole insect into a seizure that ends in paralysis. A relatively quick but gratuitously painful death. You can dust with bt. Nasty stuff - it's activated by the acid in the insects digestive tract where it drills holes through the lining so that it can colonize the whole body. Three to six days in total. You can release braconid wasps. Parasites - with the value added effect of annihilating any and every hornworm they find post emergence until they run out of hornworms and fuck right the fuck off looking for more.

Hornworms are rather gorgeous if you appreciate caterpillars - and stunning when they become sphinx moths...even if you don't like bugs. Point being, even if they make you go squeee - you're still gonna kill em. I think that probably demonstrates that while an emotional response is present - it's not determinative. Even as we've determined that we're okay with killing them, regardless of how much we may or may not appreciate them, we're not out of the weeds of moral import just yet. Do any of them stand out as particularly bad, does any order of bad present itself to you? Which of those three, in your estimation, would serve the goal of maximizing the moral virtue of a production method?

I'll throw in a kink. The end product will be twice as expensive to you as a consumer no matter which of these three we choose. This moral virtue -whatever it is and however you see it- will literally cost you. Does that change how you would put the order of moral import?

(nightsoil is how we bootstrapped our population from distributed grazer to invasive species, btw - just straight up exploded - before the haber process shitting and pissing was the only game in town - quixotically, unintuitively, if we wanted to reduce animal suffering as a consequence of agriculture we'd have to breed and keep loads more livestock than we already do - an entirely different way than we currently do - even if we didn't intend to eat them...which would be extravagantly wasteful.)

[JC1432]

is there anything such as objective moral values?

[The Grand Nudger]

Is there any such thing? Some people think so. I like turtles. Delicious - especially softshells - I absolutely will stop if I run one over. I'm accustomed to cleaning turtles - a brutal method - all you need are needle nose pliers and a bolo - the turtles are commonly uncooperative. I enjoy trapping them and flushing them out, and I tend not to feel guilty about eating them. I still knew it was wrong to eat softshell turtles growing up. They ended up getting delisted (or listed as of least concern) due, in part, to conservation efforts and regulations. They're still protected seasonally. Outside of those issues - it's fine to eat them now and every time I go back to visit there's turtle soup. So, what happened? My personal feelings, my individual tastes and preferences, my general disposition hasn't changed. The state of their population changed. Objective moral values aren't quite as complicated - or near as impressive..as alot of people have in mind when considering them. I think it's difficult to conceive of a more egregious and demonstrable harm to any creature than it's extermination as a species. If you can harm a creature - if harm is a thing - then it definitely includes that, at least.

Hilariously - midway through typing this out I had to run out onto my steamy ass driveway to beat a snake to death for my youngest son. I appreciate snakes-but I don't like them. It was a harmless snake. Ish. Longer than he is tall. Been playin snake along time. Second one this year. I didn't do a good thing, I did a bad thing to rid a barefoot kid of a specific fear. If I were maximizing moral virtue we'd have relocated into the woodlot beyond the fenceline. In fact, despite both me and my child beating the ever living shit out of that snake, we'll both be able to tell you that there were better - more moral ways- to handle that situation.

-It just wouldn't help with the fear.

[downbeatplumb]

is there anything such as objective moral values?

no.

[bennyboy]

is there anything such as objective moral values?

In a material monism, literally all moral values are objective.

[The Grand Nudger]

Wildly untrue. Is this mistaken belief part of your distaste for a material monism, by chance? In a material monism (or an immaterial monism, or a mixed dualism, or -keep multiplying substances to infinity if we like-) moral values may be noncognitive, or cognitive, or just plain wrong. Of the cognitive moral values some may be subjective, some may be relative, and others may be objective. None of these categories is predicate on what the world is made out of, or how many types of stuff there are.

When speaking of maximizing moral virtue we can be confident that a person is considering the set of objective moral values and this..even if there aren't any - if it's an empty set. That's still what they're considering - we'd just say wrongly or contrary to fact, in that instance.

I think it's fascinating...because it's difficult to say that we don't live in a world of mixed moral values regardless of what this world is made of. The subjective or relative moral value of praying to allah five times a day - in order to maximize virtue, for example..is a thing - but it's not an objective moral imperative. There's no indication that it makes people more moral, and it's insistence relies on a subject's dictation alone.

[Pat Mustard]

is there anything such as objective moral values?

Christianity says there is. I though, being a christian, you'd know this basic tenet of your religion.

[The Grand Nudger]

A misconception. Not only does christianity not say anything about objective moral values, it espouses subjective and relative moral value. People, as a rule though - just how we live and act, tend to believe that there are - and insomuch as a person might also be a christian, they mistakenly conclude that their gods subjective demands or their societies relative demands are those objective moral values, or at least concordant with them.

This, in my experience, when they communicate it, also tends to misinform the irreligious, who begin to believe that whatever happens to fall from the lips of the afflicted -is- whatever objective moral value is supposed to be, and because they don't believe in the ghost, consign the set to the same place as the fairy who's supposed to have said this or that. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say that theism doesn't just rot the theists brain. That it's detrimental to more than just the people who positively assert it. The notion of the headman - whether human or god, making the rules as they see fit..is the antithesis of objective moral value. A direct rejection of the set.

You could conceivably maximize your loyal value to the headman without moving the moral meter one iota - or even drive the moral meter into the dirt seeking out it's approval.

[h311inac311]

What does the word moral even mean?

From my understanding it refers to a collective spirit amongst men. The phrase, "Spirits were high" means that your troops have high morale, without an appeal to the soul however I guess you could just replace the word moral with emotion.

To violate morale is to violate a collective understanding of right and wrong which usually forbids hypocrisy and inflicting pain on another without a justified cause.