moral nihilism

[Darth Wong]

The "enlightened western society" with its democracy and individual freedoms was made possible by technology. Could you have democracy before the printing press? I doubt it; democracy requires widespread public knowledge.

Just a nitpick, Athens had democracy long before it had the printing press. They didn't have universal suffrage, but that's a relatively new concept politically.

Fair enough. Of course, they were also tiny, which solved the problem of communication. All the voters could literally hang around a single (physical) forum.

[Aaron MkII]

For a good portion of canadian and american history a large number of people would have been illiterate anways right?

Word of mouth or what the preacher said would probably have been more important, till radio.

[Darth Wong]

For a good portion of canadian and american history a large number of people would have been illiterate anways right?

Word of mouth or what the preacher said would probably have been more important, till radio.

Even they had the printing press and telegraph. While not everyone could read, you could still achieve distribution of information that way, because some people in every community still could.

[Aaron MkII]

Oh right, the people who read would have told those that don't.

Duh.

[Surlethe]

The "enlightened western society" with its democracy and individual freedoms was made possible by technology. Could you have democracy before the printing press? I doubt it; democracy requires widespread public knowledge.

In fact, to combine this with your point about judging western society by the well-being of its citizens, the modern welfare state did not exist prior to the 1930s, largely because the technology which makes effective intranational coordinate and efficient bureaucratic administration did not exist (or had not been widely implemented) before the 1920s. Even the proto-welfare states of the nineteenth century spent a tiny fraction of their production on transfers -- ballpark 2-10% of GDP. It wasn't until the 1930s that governments could even coordinate 15-40% of national production toward the modern welfare state's social contract.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Because evopsych, especially internet amateur evopsych, has a history of being used to defend questionable social and cultural propositions on the basis of dodgy just-so stories?

I would argue that this is like being mad at chemistry because some people use it to make bombs. Actually, it's even less reasonable than that, because usually its applications in the way you describe are based on bad science. Like creationists attempting to "disprove" evolution, they abuse, misinterpret, and otherwise mangle any actual scientific basis underlying their arguments to the point that it is no longer fair to categorize it as a science anymore.

But, still, point taken.

[Questor]

Ziggy, the problem is that EvoPsych is often presented incorrectly, as you stated. As random Internet person, I don't know if you're spouting real EvoPsych or just something that sounds like it. While I believe AD probably knows what he's talking about because of long acquaintance, for 99% of the people on this board, that doesn't apply.

[Darth Wong]

If someone mangles evolution to claim that it supports Nazism, you don't blame evolution; you blame the guy who's mangling evolution. You also don't insist that no one mention evolution unless he has a PhD in the subject.

It's not reasonable to declare an entire class of arguments verboten just because it's often done incorrectly. If it's done incorrectly, then explain what the person did wrong. Dismissing the whole category of ideas as "mythology" is utter bullshit, and it remains so despite numerous peoples' valiant efforts to pretend otherwise.

[Akhlut]

The "enlightened western society" with its democracy and individual freedoms was made possible by technology. Could you have democracy before the printing press? I doubt it; democracy requires widespread public knowledge.

Just a nitpick, Athens had democracy long before it had the printing press. They didn't have universal suffrage, but that's a relatively new concept politically.

Fair enough. Of course, they were also tiny, which solved the problem of communication. All the voters could literally hang around a single (physical) forum.

The Haudenosaunee Confederation was a large, multi-ethnic, pre-literate nation covering an area larger than many modern European states with tens of thousands of members. It also happens to be a democracy by nearly every reckoning.

[Darth Wong]

Interesting. I've never heard of them. Do you have any viewable resources on them?

[Kuja]

Interesting. I've never heard of them. Do you have any viewable resources on them?

It's another name for the Iroquois Confederation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haudenosaunee

[Vaporous]

He means the Iroquois League. They had a hereditary central authority (I think, I haven't read anything on the subject since high school), but within the tribes them usually had elected leadership of some for or another. Most decisions had to be made by some kind of consensus, and members of defeated tribes and groups were brought into the League with full equality. I'm not sure if this fits the standard of "democracy" that you were using earlier, since I don't think there was a central elected authority, but there were certainly democratic institutions in the society as a whole.

Edit: What he said.

[Darth Wong]

OK, I didn't know about the alternate name. Mind you, the description given above exaggerates the scope of the league, which numbered perhaps ten thousand people. Yes, they "controlled" a vast area of land, but at absurdly low population density. It was basically a league of six small tribes, so it is not really an exception to the scaling rule I mentioned earlier.

[Ziggy Stardust]

It is also worth noting that the Iroquois League was not a central government until late in the 19th century. It was more properly a network of peace and trade treaties, with a council along the lines of the United Nations. The majority of decisions were made almost exclusively at the local level (tribes, or subdivisions of such). And while, yes, there were often democratic/consensus based decision making processes, this was at the community level, which is not "democracy" per se. In fact, basic family or village-level "voting" probably has existed since nomad pastoralist times. There was no central government devising or implement policy; the Council's purpose was mostly for treaties and inter-tribe agreements.

If I may quote Wikipedia, because I have had a very long day and am too tired to go to a better source,

[Tooker] does not think that the Iroquois League was a democratic culture; such a conclusion is not supported within historical literature ... [snip] ... Historic evidence suggests that chiefs of different tribes were permitted representation in the Iroquois League council, and the leadership positions were hereditary. The council did not practice representative government and had no elections. Deceased chiefs’' successors were selected by the most senior woman within the hereditary lineage in consultation with other women in the clan. Decision making occurred through lengthy discussion and decisions were unanimous, with topics discussed being introduced by a single tribe.

[Simon_Jester]

OK, I didn't know about the alternate name. Mind you, the description given above exaggerates the scope of the league, which numbered perhaps ten thousand people. Yes, they "controlled" a vast area of land, but at absurdly low population density. It was basically a league of six small tribes, so it is not really an exception to the scaling rule I mentioned earlier.

Like all First Nations/Native American societies, the population was vastly larger before European diseases. The estimates I've seen are more like a hundred thousand, which really is much too large for everyone to meet in one place, especially without huge cities and granaries to keep everyone alive during the meeting.

Anyway, older stuff. I'm sorry, but I'm having to work a lot harder than I'm used to these days, so I can't keep up with a rapidly moving thread easily.

---

Do they really? It seems to me that they usually accuse their opponents of having warped and twisted their morality away from True Morality, not of having a perfectly valid but old morality which they will now replace with a newer better version.

The words that catch my eye here are "perfectly valid." I never said anything about "perfectly valid."

The kind of movement I'm thinking about typically looks like this:

1) Core philosopher proclaims new moral system. It only resembles old systems in that it uses the same nouns, which is not enough to make it "old" or in any way "traditional."
2) If the core philosopher bothers to reference any past state of human affairs (Locke/Rosseau and the state of nature), they tend to make a lot of stuff up and mythicize the past.
3) For a while, the philosophy does not catch on. Major philosophers usually aren't actually good at starting mass movements.
4) People start expanding on the work of (1), retconning it to make it more palatable to followers, and generally trying to turn the philosophy into a mass movement. THIS is when you start seeing people appeal to "old values" as part of a new system.

Marx, for instance, uses some of the same nouns as older moral systems when he talks about distribution of labor and resources and so on. But he calls for changes in society that older systems would all disapprove of, and his whole point is that society and morality that he saw in the 1840s is unscientific, whereas he is oh-so-scientific and therefore a society based on the lines he describes would be healthier.

Marx didn't really care about feudal peasant uprisings since they didn't matter to his system- what mattered was bourgeoisie vs. aristocrats, then proles vs. bourgeoisie. But some of the people who followed him, who tried to organize Marxist uprisings in heavily agricultural countries like Russia and China, did try to make that tie-in, and invoke old values to mobilize people who'd heard of those values and cared about them.

Among themselves, they had a much more 'modern' attitude. Anything that predated Marx was pretty much worthless to them.

Obviously, there have been a lot of changes. But at no point did people openly discard old morality. They just keep thinking that their new morality is the old morality, and that people in the old days were simply being immoral. Take his example of civil rights for black people. People today don't say "we replaced the old morality of hating blacks with the new morality of liking blacks". They say "it was immoral to hate blacks".

Actually, that's kind of what I'm trying to say.

Someone projecting forward in 1900 would have assumed that the moral code of 2000 would be the product of revolutions, not gradual change. Marx was taken very very seriously by most intellectuals, and so was his doctrine that society changes through revolutions. They might well predict, as the site I linked to described, things like:

"By 2000, religion will be abolished."
"By 2000, democracy will have been replaced by rational government along technocratic lines."
"By 2000, the supremacy of Man over his environment will be absolute. Species like the horsefly will be abolished, all useless swamps and jungles will be cleared for agriculture, et cetera."

And so on.

I want to understand the 20th century. So I like to be able to explain why this didn't happen. Except in the USSR in a very twisted-up, modified, and temporary form.

Now you're introducing all sorts of issues of social progress and technological progress and progression of public awareness of issues that are interesting but not relevant to the original issue of whether people openly discard old moralities and adopt new ones.

I think it's relevant. Moral philosophy affects political philosophy and social progress. When we think it is moral for one class to dictate terms to another at gunpoint because of the divine right of kings or the needs of the revolution, that manifests itself in society. If a moral philosophy is in order, we should see evidence of this in society. If it isn't, we should see evidence of that too.

You can get a very simple moral system out of something like: "The revolution will bring paradise. Anything that happens before the revolution is irrelevant compared to what happens after. Therefore, anything that makes the revolution closer is good, including mass death. Anything that delays it is bad. All other rules are sentimentality."

That's very hard for humans to really adhere to. But there have been places where that was taught in college with a straight face. Is that an advance in moral philosophy compared to something like the works of Mills, or even earlier figures like Kant? Or, heck, Aristotle?

I hope you realize you just fell back on a utilitarian method in order to justify what constitutes a "basic" moral rule. You are determining what constitutes a good moral rule by seeing what effect it has, or which problem it solves.

So? This is sophomore philosophy stuff- the difference between rule and act utilitarianism.

If you thought I was arguing to exclude utilitarianism earlier, you must have mistaken me for a different man. You can take my willingness to use utilitarian arguments as a victory if you like.

I mean, come on, this is the large scale equivalent of safety rules like "don't play around the electric fence." Sure, sometimes the power is off and playing is awesome, but you'd be out of your mind to tell people that they should avoid the electric fence only sometimes.

Whether morality is absolute or subjective or evolved or constructed, some things are the practical equivalent of "don't go playing around the electric fence."

That's more an issue of how you present your morality to the plebs, not how you should actually conceptualize it.

I disagree with this.

When you seriously think to yourself "X is how I present morality to the plebs, and Y is how I really behave," you're... it's just such a bad idea. There's the "do as I say, not as I do" thing going on, which people will catch on to. Then they rebel against the hypocrisy of the system. There's the fact that the people with power always think they have a great excuse for breaking the rules (see Watergate and Guantanamo). If you set up a moral system that's meant to read "us enlightened people break the rules, but nobody else can," it's not going to last. The psychopaths and fanatics will pick up on this quickly, and use it, because it's a premade excuse for them to ignore play by the rules.

Arguably that kind of thing is what's so wrong with the modern US economy. We've got this moral attitude among the rich that really big entities are above the law and can do whatever they like. Because they're the job creators. They're the ones who understand money, and generate it for the rest of us. And that this will all somehow work out for the best.

But it doesn't. It just gives them an unlimited hunting license on everyone else's money. And sooner or later a system like that will have to evolve, so that the rich have to play by the rules instead of rewriting them and folding them). Or collapse into true tyranny of the rich, which is a moral disaster. Or collapse in a revolution when people get fed up. Which is going to be ugly too.

An order founded on hypocritial use of power cannot stand up forever.

It may not even last one generation- how do you propose to transition from teaching everyone the "pleb" version of morality in school to teaching the elite future overlords of your society the elite version? What happens if they respond like young aristocrats throughout history, by deciding that there really aren't any rules for a Nietzschean superman like themselves?

[Thanas]

The "enlightened western society" with its democracy and individual freedoms was made possible by technology. Could you have democracy before the printing press? I doubt it; democracy requires widespread public knowledge.

Just a nitpick, Athens had democracy long before it had the printing press. They didn't have universal suffrage, but that's a relatively new concept politically.

Fair enough. Of course, they were also tiny, which solved the problem of communication. All the voters could literally hang around a single (physical) forum.

There was also this nation called the Roman Republic which controlled most of the mediterranean countries and still worked as long as any western democracy.

[Questor]

If someone mangles evolution to claim that it supports Nazism, you don't blame evolution; you blame the guy who's mangling evolution. You also don't insist that no one mention evolution unless he has a PhD in the subject.

It's not reasonable to declare an entire class of arguments verboten just because it's often done incorrectly. If it's done incorrectly, then explain what the person did wrong. Dismissing the whole category of ideas as "mythology" is utter bullshit, and it remains so despite numerous peoples' valiant efforts to pretend otherwise.

I'm just stating I'm not going to take random internet guy's word for it. I don't know enough to evaluate EvoPsych based arguments myself, nor do I have the resources to evaluate the person making the claims, so I take the whole thing with a grain of salt. When someone who I know is qualified on that subject (like AD or Angurious) speaks, I listen.

Its the same as when I take you at your word on engineering, or I'd hope people here would take me at my word in the narrow fields where I have expertise.

The skepticism (at least in my case, and I just try and stay away from those arguments, as the don't interest me much) comes from the fact that I know my own limitations.

[Straha]

Bull fucking shit. Look at the moral status of the prisoner, or the animal. Torture isn't just allowed, it's supported as a moral good. Until falls apart at the stage where it tries to figure out who counts, and then goes to some horrifically awful places from there.

Why does it have to fall apart? The goal/'utility function' (and who it applies to) of any particular brand of consequentialism can be decided as arbitrarily as the subjects of a deontological rule. Unless you mean the specifc brand of 'social'/'human' utilitarianism being promoted by others, in which case I have no comment.

Just to get something off my chest, and not to single you out here because tons of people are doing it here, but except for the last few Kantian hold-outs there are no 'deontologists' left, and nobody who has been taken seriously in world of ethics in the past fifty years has ever advanced a deontological position. To compare your particular ethical/philosophical stance to something deontological and come off the better for it is akin to trash talking Lamarckian evolutionary theory. You're right, sure, but who cares? There are a plethora of other ethical systems out there that delve very deeply into these sorts of questions, and that have answers of varying degrees of satisfaction, but they all tend to get ignored by utility nuts who seem to think that ethical philosophy ended with Mill.

To answer the core part of your question:
Firstly, your objection seems to be that other systems do this too, therefore it's acceptable. I think that that's obviously a problematic statement. Rather than focus on what other systems do we should try to create an ethical system that is truly good, or can try to become truly good.
Second, there's a major problem with determining who counts. The philosopher Jacques Ranciere explores this question at great length in some of his books (though, being a Marxist, he too arbitrarily cuts groups out of discussion), no utilitarian system can account for the desires and wants of all beings, which means that groups will be excluded from the very beginning. Those excluded groups, because the system simply has no place for them in its axiomatic concerns, become non-beings. Legitimate targets for violence, oppression, and a whole litany of other atrocities because it would be nonsensical to claim an action against them as immoral.
Third, the minute you start applying values to beings you create the scenario where the value they hold can become zero, or even negative, and thus it becomes good to slaughter them. Michael Dillon calls this the "zero point to the holocaust", and the comparison is fitting. Once there, it becomes a moral necessity to hurt, main, or kill them. This sort of logic is why things like factory farms and slaughter houses are acceptable now, and how people have justified internment camps, forced deportation, racism, genocide, etc. in the past and present. Only by stepping away from this sort of 'moral system' can we have a proper system of ethics, and one that is not horrifically laden on social perceptions.

[Straha]

Onto Alyrium. Let's deal with your post back to front.

If you think animals are worthy of the same moral consideration as humans, I suggest you go kill yourself in moral despair right now, because every time you eat vegetables, untold numbers of insects died in the harvesting process, and if you insist on absolutely uniform ethical consideration for animals, you cannot exempt them.

You insecticidal monster.

I'm really genuinely confused why everyone and their mother seems to think that this is even an argument. Every Vegan and Animal Rights/Liberation advocate I have ever known runs into this over and over again without any rational explanation. Having read that sentence do you now think I'm going to see that all is clear, and run to Christie's and buy a Porterhouse? More importantly, is there a cheat sheet that gets passed around that I didn't get before I went veg? Is there an invisible troll who gets off on taking control of people and making them say it? Why? The only pleasure I get out of this is the way that certain people just lock up after they hear a response. I once watched a conversation where a woman could only repeat the mantra "Yes, but PETA kills animals too, and so does harvesting corn..." while someone else spent ten minutes calmly trying to explain animal rights and the deeper issues thereof to her. If she wasn't so earnest it'd have almost been comical.

Anywho.
First, it's a textbook case of a tu quoque. Even if I do kill animals wontonly and without remorse that fact doesn't really answer the point that we probably should consider them to be moral beings worthy of protection.

Second, you're right. Insects and small animals do die whenever vegetable matter is harvested. Funnily enough, however, my stance has always been that it is morally acceptable for beings to do what they must do in order to survive. This means that, for instance, the woman living in the Marshall Islands can fish if she must because it's pretty hard to get agriculture going out there, ditto for the lion eating a gazelle. Living where I do I have to eat vegetables and fruit in order to live and survive. Which means that insects do die. Such is life. However I do a number of things, like selectively shop, restrict my diet beyond simple veganism, and buying the most efficient caloric food possible, to try and reduce my impact as much as possible.

Which brings us to point three, avoiding eating meat is still vastly preferable on the simple terms of impact on insects than a carnivorous diet. The vast amount of plant matter consumed to create meat and animal products (and the mind-boggling amounts of water, and energy wasted in transportation) means that consuming meat kills orders of magnitude more insects than I do even if I were indiscriminate in how I shopped as a vegan.

You have no basis other than your own say-so upon which to argue the last assumption you always make, as you have repeatedly demonstrated every time you argue. I am not arguing that animals are not worthy of any moral consideration. They are, because of and proportionate to their cognitive traits that impart moral consideration(such as but not limited to the capacity to feel pain, I am not a strict utilitarian). There may even be species in the cosmos with a higher claim to ethical protections than us, on a one to one basis.

Lolz. And 'you have no basis other than your own say-so' that this is not the case. If you're going to strawman (and dare I say vendetta?) me over this issue, fine. Prove to me how we can measure an animal as worthy of lesser moral consideration, and indeed how we can measure beings at all. I'm all ears.

Finally,

We do not torture animals. I repeat, we do not torture animals. Not anymore anyway. If painful procedures are performed, they are done under anesthesia, barring the replication of natural occurrences like predation. If the animal's quality of life is diminished by a procedure, that procedure will either not be done, or the animal will be euthanized to end its suffering.

No.

This is a video detailing agriculture practices with animals:


This is a video shot of teenagers learning how to castrate pigs:
Linka

This is a video of a cow being dehorned:


Puppy Mills:


Chicken Factory Farm:


Dairy and meat cows:


And, yes, primates:



Every minute, of every hour, of every day animals are being mutilated, tortured, and butchered alive. Simply for being an animal. Any attempt to claim otherwise is simply wrong.

[Shadow6]

Just to get something off my chest, and not to single you out here because tons of people are doing it here, but except for the last few Kantian hold-outs there are no 'deontologists' left, and nobody who has been taken seriously in world of ethics in the past fifty years has ever advanced a deontological position. To compare your particular ethical/philosophical stance to something deontological and come off the better for it is akin to trash talking Lamarckian evolutionary theory. You're right, sure, but who cares?

Ok, sure. Simon_Jester and Junghalli have both been proposing systems that have deontological elements.

There are a plethora of other ethical systems out there that delve very deeply into these sorts of questions, and that have answers of varying degrees of satisfaction, but they all tend to get ignored by utility nuts who seem to think that ethical philosophy ended with Mill.

To answer the core part of your question:
Firstly, your objection seems to be that other systems do this too, therefore it's acceptable. I think that that's obviously a problematic statement. Rather than focus on what other systems do we should try to create an ethical system that is truly good, or can try to become truly good.

My point was a little more subtle than that - I wasn't suggesting the problem is acceptable or can be ignored, but that there is nothing inherent in utilitarian (or consequentalist in general) systems that leads to excluding groups of beings from its consideration of worth. Thus if you have some superior way to assess the moral status and worth of a being than what anyone here has suggested, I don't see why it can't be applied in the process of selecting such a utility function.

Could you expound upon how these other ethical systems ascribe moral status to beings?

Second, there's a major problem with determining who counts. The philosopher Jacques Ranciere explores this question at great length in some of his books (though, being a Marxist, he too arbitrarily cuts groups out of discussion), no utilitarian system can account for the desires and wants of all beings, which means that groups will be excluded from the very beginning. Those excluded groups, because the system simply has no place for them in its axiomatic concerns, become non-beings. Legitimate targets for violence, oppression, and a whole litany of other atrocities because it would be nonsensical to claim an action against them as immoral.

I disagree with this assertion. I personally like something along the lines of 'a being's moral value is proportional to their level of sentience/ability to feel pain/have preferences'. I'm not suggesting this is easy to determine or that it doesn't have problems - this is where the 'realistic' utilitarian actor would have to apply their limited resources in order to determine a best-guess answer. But there's no reason you can't use a different method of ascribing moral status. You could well say 'anything alive is attributed equal moral value' or 'anything with a nervous system'.

This doesn't strike me as a problem either exclusive or inherent to utilitarianism. I would presume, having read your post responding to AD, that you have some basic moral tenets along the lines of 'don't kill' and 'don't cause pain'. You presumably delineate between killing plants and killing animals (and potentially other organisms). The question is how you (not specifically you) determine the line.

Third, the minute you start applying values to beings you create the scenario where the value they hold can become zero, or even negative, and thus it becomes good to slaughter them. Michael Dillon calls this the "zero point to the holocaust", and the comparison is fitting. Once there, it becomes a moral necessity to hurt, main, or kill them. This sort of logic is why things like factory farms and slaughter houses are acceptable now, and how people have justified internment camps, forced deportation, racism, genocide, etc. in the past and present. Only by stepping away from this sort of 'moral system' can we have a proper system of ethics, and one that is not horrifically laden on social perceptions.

You seem to be positing two different problems here: 1) the utilitarian answer to some moral dilemmas is harmful to some 2) people will choose or adjust (whether insincerely or due to external manipulation) their utility functions in order to justify harm.

The first is obviously just the accepted result. Not much more I can say.

With regards to suggesting that it can and will be the case that people will abuse the selection of utility function in order to justify harm, I would refer back to my previous answer to Junghalli - I don't have a good solution. I just don't think the problems are in any way unique to utilitarian and consequentialist systems. You can't very well suggest that people will pervert a utilitarian system and then on the other hand propose your moral system (which would, as a consequence, require almost universal veganism) and expect people to adhere to it.

I'd be (sincerely) interested in how you would address this.

[Alyrium Denryle]

No.

Did you notice how I responded to you specifically making reference to animal research? I realize reading might be a problem for you. However, you do not win the argument regarding utilitarianism when I am talking about the moral status of animals in a research context, by bring up factory farming and puppy mills, something any utilitarian WILL tell you is morally wrong.

If that is to be how you argue

Having read that sentence do you now think I'm going to see that all is clear, and run to Christie's and buy a Porterhouse?

No. I am simply mocking you. You do not have a concrete defensible position. You simply Assert something is wrong without bothering to justify it. So, I see no reason to dignify your position with a serious response.

If you want to come at me with a concrete metaphysics that justifies a set of meta-ethics which in turn leads to a set of ethical positions, be my guest. As it stands however, all you have done in every argument I have ever had with you is assert an axiom ex ano without justification but your own say-so.

[Straha]

My point was a little more subtle than that - I wasn't suggesting the problem is acceptable or can be ignored, but that there is nothing inherent in utilitarian (or consequentalist in general) systems that leads to excluding groups of beings from its consideration of worth. Thus if you have some superior way to assess the moral status and worth of a being than what anyone here has suggested, I don't see why it can't be applied in the process of selecting such a utility function.

I'm not sure we disagree that much. I'm not necessarily against util/consequentialism, I just think it has to be nested inside other systems of ethics and that when confronted with a moral situation we ought default away from util. A friend of mine has jokingly accused me of being a closeted rights-utilitarian, and while I don't think there's too much veracity to that claim I will say that I'm not necessarily against rights-util, I just have deep concerns and doubts over whether the concept of a 'right' will ever be universal enough to prevent the kinds of atrocities we see every day.

There are, however, a number of things which I think make my objections an intrinsic part of any consequentialist system. There was a thread about it here where I went about this at some length. The cliffnotes version of it is this:

Any purely consequentialist/utilitarian system will always rely on certain axioms determining who counts in matters of protection and agency in its moral calculus. This leads to a number of problems.
First, it will always create hierarchies that are based on purely subjective judgments, and creates a system that defaults to excluding beings from protection if they are judged wanting or have yet to be judged. This means that any encounter with the unknown, or any encounter with beings that haven't been examined in depth, will lead to catastrophe, and once that starts it snowballs from there with no way to repair harms. Further, making the determination of things like the moral worth of others beings based on subjective values which we can't ever judge in an objective way is definitely problematic for all sorts of reasons.
Second, it creates a need to judge everything according to the system at hand. If something were to come up that was either completely alien to the system or operated in ways that were difficult to understand, the moral calculus can't handle it. Instead beings become moral non-entities, at the very least until the system 'changes'.
Third, an attempt for util/consequentialism to include everything leads either to calculative paralysis from practical standpoint as we literally cannot for our actions on all creatures/beings (known and unknown), or requires us to elide certain beings from our calculations. Which leads to subjective determinations as to who counts, again, and then leads to some more bad shit happening.

Could you expound upon how these other ethical systems ascribe moral status to beings?

There are lots.
I personally endorse a Jainist individualist ethic of approaching all beings as having intrinsic value and worth that we cannot calculate, and then seeks only to minimize and mitigate the amount that we infringe onto other beings. From the Jain's perspective assigning worth doesn't really make sense, and we should instead focus on our own actions so as to limit the amount of harm/infringement on others.
I'm also open to Emmanuel Levinas' ethical system of having an infinite obligation to 'the other', and using that as a starting point for ethics. Which is to say that Levinas himself has some problematic views, but the people who have taken his system and run with it have produced some really thought provoking stuff that I have internalized rather deeply.

Other authors who try to offer other approaches like this include, but aren't limited to, Judith Butler in Frames of War and Precarious Life, Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism, Tom Regan's concept of Subject-of-a-Life (he is, for the record, a neo-Kantian), Donna Haraway, and Matthew Calarco.

I disagree with this assertion. I personally like something along the lines of 'a being's moral value is proportional to their level of sentience/ability to feel pain/have preferences'. I'm not suggesting this is easy to determine or that it doesn't have problems - this is where the 'realistic' utilitarian actor would have to apply their limited resources in order to determine a best-guess answer. But there's no reason you can't use a different method of ascribing moral status. You could well say 'anything alive is attributed equal moral value' or 'anything with a nervous system'.

Again, I'm not sure that we disagree all that much. It's rather that a primarily consequentialist/utilitarian system is inevitably going to lead to these problems.

Take for instance your criteria: 'a being's moral value is proportional to their level of sentience/ability to feel pain/have preferences'.

How do we determine sentience, or whether (or the degree to which) creatures have preferences? As long as they remain unintelligible to us this remains an impossible goal, or one which will be informed by poorly cross-applying human attributes to them. And what is a unit of measurement for sentience? For preferences? For pain?
Finally any sort of measurement like this even leaves massive numbers of humas outside the world of moral concern. See: infants, mentally handicapped peoples, persons with certain tumors or illnesses, the elderly, etc. Not only does this lead to a world of disturbing conclusions, but also creates the possibility to kick people out of the realm of protected being with little to no trouble at all.

This doesn't strike me as a problem either exclusive or inherent to utilitarianism. I would presume, having read your post responding to AD, that you have some basic moral tenets along the lines of 'don't kill' and 'don't cause pain'. You presumably delineate between killing plants and killing animals (and potentially other organisms). The question is how you (not specifically you) determine the line.

I don't think there needs to be a line, and I'm leery of any line drawing at all and think that's where our problems really begin. Moreover, while this problem might not be exclusive to utilitarianism it's certainly deeply embedded in its logic, and I think it's impossible to have a truly utilitarian system absent these problems.

With regards to suggesting that it can and will be the case that people will abuse the selection of utility function in order to justify harm, I would refer back to my previous answer to Junghalli - I don't have a good solution. I just don't think the problems are in any way unique to utilitarian and consequentialist systems. You can't very well suggest that people will pervert a utilitarian system and then on the other hand propose your moral system (which would, as a consequence, require almost universal veganism) and expect people to adhere to it.

I'd be (sincerely) interested in how you would address this.

See above and the other thread.

And I'm not suggesting that people will pervert a utilitarian system as much as I'm saying that a utilitarian system necessarily leads to these perversions which can be avoided by adopting other systems.

[Straha]

Did you notice how I responded to you specifically making reference to animal research? I realize reading might be a problem for you. However, you do not win the argument regarding utilitarianism when I am talking about the moral status of animals in a research context, by bring up factory farming and puppy mills, something any utilitarian WILL tell you is morally wrong.

Let's backtrack this a little bit, shall we?

My initial post made a very simple claim: Utilitarian theory has lead to humanity torturing animals every day in the modern world.
You respond with the claim, and I quote: "We do not torture animals. I repeat, we do not torture animals." And then proceed to back it up by cherry-picking stories about your animal research and backing it up with the fact that you mercenary ethical committees to back you up. (Read Paul Mann's Anethics or Cary Wolfe's marvelous essay on Bioethics about that, for starters.)
When I respond with proof that, yes, we do torture animals every day you accuse me of a failure of reading comprehension?

Again, no. The question of animal research is a red herring, it ignores the widespread ubiquity of slaughtering animals every day simple because we think their flesh is better off in our mouths than on our bodies. We can have a discussion about animals in research, sure, but frankly I'm not interested in so narrow a discussion, especially because such a discussion becomes meaningless when it's detached from broader concerns and issues.

Also, Utilitarian theorists of all sorts (Cass Sunstein, Posner, and Michael Leahy all leap to mind without a second's thought) support the slaughter and torture of animals. The only ones who oppose the slaughter of animals are that cretin Peter Singer, and Paolo Cavalieri (who I am mixed on, but remain optimistic about). No other utilitarian philosopher of the past hundred years has really stood up like them, and any claim otherwise reveals deep ignorance about the state of modern Anglo-American philosophy.

No. I am simply mocking you. You do not have a concrete defensible position. You simply Assert something is wrong without bothering to justify it. So, I see no reason to dignify your position with a serious response.

I'd tell you to read any of my posts/threads on the subject, but so far you've displayed absolutely no reading comprehension whatsoever or even an ability to grasp how basic argumentation works, so I don't even really think it's worth my time. I have much better things to do than deal with amateur armchair philosophers like you.

[Darth Wong]

Any purely consequentialist/utilitarian system will always rely on certain axioms determining who counts in matters of protection and agency in its moral calculus.

Fair enough (although one could argue that this is already dealt with simply by describing the type of morality you're talking about, ie- individual morality, social morality, human morality, global morality, etc., each of which implicitly declares its included groups).

But alternative systems tend to rely on more axioms (or at least as many), not less. Any ethical system which says that you can't be cruel to animals either does so in a utilitarian way, by including them in its calculations, or in a largely deontological way, by simply declaring that it's evil to be cruel to animals.

[Straha]

But alternative systems tend to rely on more axioms (or at least as many), not less. Any ethical system which says that you can't be cruel to animals either does so in a utilitarian way, by including them in its calculations, or in a largely deontological way, by simply declaring that it's evil to be cruel to animals.

I would disagree there. Something like a Jainist system of ethics need only have two axioms:
1. "Assume all things are living creatures until proven absolutely otherwise."
2. "Do the least possible to infringe on the existence of other beings."

There are certain Levinasian scholars who distill his work down to one pseudo-axiom. Whereas any Utilitarian system needs a slew of axioms to be able to define happiness and self-interest in anything near a universal way, and that's just to set up the ground-work for the moral calculus that comes later.

Of course, even the idea of an 'axiom' as it's being discussed in this thread is obsolete in the modern post-structuralist ethical world. While I endorse certain axiomatic ideas as a matter of practicality, it needs to be understood that these come second to a larger ethical mindset that must always be inherently critical and questioning towards the validity of any axiom.


(Also, while the moral imperatives I'm describing can perhaps be loosely understood as deontological in nature, any Kantian would sneer at the comparison. Deontological thinking takes at its root the idea that reason can be used to understand/universalize all ethics, whereas the sort of ethics I'm describing takes root either outside that enlightenment tradition, or in the anti-enlightenment tradition of the late-19th and 20th century that recognizes reason as being limited and seeks to account for those limits in ethical theorizing.)