On the one hand, I’m happy to see fellow vegans all stand up against animal abuse, even though what was done to this wolf wasn’t anywhere near the level of horror carnists inflict on factory farmed animals.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I can get on the bandwagon of inflicting double the suffering these animals experience to the non-vegans that cause it (either by doing it themselves, or paying someone else to do it for them because of their delicate sensibilities).

Firstly because I don’t think a sentient being can experience that much suffering without literally dying to shock (these creatures have their limbs ripped off, skin tore off, sit in their own shit and piss day in and day out, etc.) so doubling that and doing it to non-vegans would essentially just be the same as mass-killing non-vegans.

Secondly, I’m not sure that retributive justice is even the path. Like yes, make abuse and paying for others to abuse on your behalf illegal, no doubt. But a lot of carnists would stop if it was illegal. Only the ones that subvert the system and go to the black market to continue their abuse would have to be jailed to force them to stop abuse.

Once they’re not a threat anymore, what’s the value of inflicting more harm?

Well, I can agree with one thing in this post readily. Retribution is not justice, ever. Past that, man, there’s a lot I don’t even want to engage with here.

Retribution is not justice.

People generally aren’t comfortable engaging with content that makes them confront cognitive dissonance. It’s an extremely effective defense mechanism, and it’s how systems of oppression can be maintained for so long by seemingly rational and well-intentioned people.

Now maybe it’s not that, maybe you’ve engaged with so much vegan content and vegans are so irrational that it gets exhausting having to re-explain to them every time why they’re such massive fucking idiots. I get that, honestly, that’s how religion is for me now. After years and years of engaging with religious fanatics, it just got exhausting, and I don’t really seek that out anymore.

If it’s the latter though, and you’re just exhausted explaining your superior rational/moral position to idiot vegans, I ask you to please humor me and give me a shot.

Also I don’t know how interested in discussion you are, or if you’re just looking to do the standard anti-vegan bitching routine, but on the off chance that you actually want to engage with something, I’ll post this thought here.

I get why you think what I said was an ad hom, but that’s actually only the case if moral subjectivism is true (a view held by a minority of philosophy PhD majors). Not to say that that’s undeniable evidence in favor of objective morality, it’s obviously not, just saying the people who spend the better part of 8 years studying this type of thing don’t come to the uniform conclusion that morality is subjective. I have good rationale for an objective morality I can go into assuming you’re familiar with epistemology.

Just using objective morality as the operating assumption, calling something you do evil is not an ad hom, it’s an observational fact. The fact that you saw it as an ad hom signals to me that you’re not only a moral relativist, but specifically an expressivist (you view moral statements as merely expressions of emotional/personal preference), which is honestly a pretty minority view in the grand scheme of philosophers.

Yeah as soon as you said moral subjectivism is a “minor” belief, you’ve lost all credibility. There is absolutely no such thing as objective morality. Morality is entirely a human concept, and it’s 100% cultural. If you want to argue that there IS an objective morality, then I’d posit it’s outside of human ability TO know it, if you want to bring epistemology into it.

Good and evil don’t exist. Morality is a framework that we can view the world through, but again, it’s

Objective truths require objective evidence. Certain things we can take as morally objective, to an extent, because they’re almost universally not acceptable by human standards. Two key words there, “human” and “almost”. Morality is a human standard to judge things by. Nature has no such thing as morality, things simply do. Mosquitoes and ticks are not evil, they simply exist even though just about every human believes them to be a pest.

Nice. A subtle ad hom. Yes, English is my first language. I just woke up. If you want to nit-pick specific phraseology when it’s quite clear that I simply missed the order of a couple of words, then fine. That makes you the asshole lol. I’ve never met or read anything from any serious philosophers, today or in the past, that claims there can be moral objectivism without some extra-human knowledge.

Asking if English is your first language isn’t an ad hom, if you spoke this well as a non-native speaker that’d be more impressive than misunderstanding it as a native speaker, but neither is wrong or whatever, you just misunderstood me and used it as the basis for claiming I lost all credibility, which was annoying, but not a huge deal as long as it’s cleared up now.

Objective truths require objective evidence

So I’ll start my thesis here, hopefully it’s not too abstract for you to follow when you’ve never engaged in this type of material before by your own admission.

Objective evidence exists only within the framework of certain axioms. When you take some simple evidence, let’s say an apple falling, how do you know it fell? You take it as an axiom that your senses are accurate in describing some material set of conditions that exist in an objective reality. Even the concept of an objective reality that is shared with other beings is an axiom we take. You could just as easily be in a simulation alone, with no other conscious beings around you. Reality could be constructed as you view it.

This could be true even without a simulation theory. You could be the sole conscious being in existence, and all of reality is a hallucination that you just believe has to have consistent objective truths, so that’s how it appears to you.

The point is, it’s not truly knowable what the true state of reality is without taking axioms (engaging in assumptions). Once you assume there’s a real, shared, persistent objective reality, and that your senses accurately depict this objective reality in an ontologically consistent way, then you can start building what we call objective truths.

Moral truths function literally identically to this. Without axioms, in both the descriptive and normative realm, nothing is knowable. Functionally that doesn’t work though, people take axioms unconsciously, and we can’t not take them. If this isn’t your first exposure to the idea of axioms, you’ll understand it’s generally regarded as better (or often even required) to only take axioms that are “self-evident”. That is to say, you don’t take an axiom that all matter in the universe is held up by invisible flying unicorns, but you would take the axiom that you exist in some ontologically consistent and shared space.

If you’re in a conversation with someone, and for some reason they take a different axiom than you (e.g some people take the axiom that God exists, which is honestly far too complex to be reasonable), then you can’t functionally communicate about the nature of your (supposedly) shared universe. So to have the conversation, the religious person has to drop the axiom to be able to discuss whether or not you’re able to arrive at the existence of God by building off other axioms that all humans share (hint: you’re not).

Normative discussions work this way too. Essentially all humans take it as an axiom that suffering is bad (there are exceptions in both the descriptive and normative case, e.g schizophrenia or sociopathy, where generally accepted axioms about the true nature of things are misaligned).

You can use logic and reason to build off descriptive and normative axioms, and some people do this incorrectly because they’re being irrational. Just because people disagree on these things doesn’t mean we throw out the idea of objective truth (descriptive or normative), it just means some people are going about understanding the true nature of reality wrong. Flat earthers and Islamic fundamentalists stoning gay people are both wrong in the same kind of way, they’re not using logic to build off proper axioms to try to find the true state of reality.