Retra

You seem to be satisfied to do the same.

I at least explained what the problem was with the argument. "I don't think so" is not any kind of improvement there.

Extinction does not drive evolution, reproduction does, and if a species' food goes extinct, they reproduce less, not more.

Secondly, these animals aren't abandoning their niches, they're losing them due to human activities. There is no room for another species to adapt to it, because there is nothing there to adapt to anymore.

The problem with urban insurgencies is the people who don't carry firearms, not the ones that do. If you can identify the combatants, it is much easier to kill them.

That's a self-defeating argument. Your objection to the concept of ownership would apply to just about every concept, including your own morality, which leaves your thoughts about what _should_ be a little out of place. That is, unless you think there's something very special about ownership in the grand scheme that is not true of other abstractions...

I have the opposite problem: I don't know what anxiety is. Supposedly it's an emotion people have (and it's certainly possible I feel it too,) but I have no way to identify my feelings as anxiety because nobody has ever expressed the meaning of that term in a way the conforms to any feeling I have ever had.

The fact that I like cake is not a conscious decision. My decision is whether I will eat it or not. You don't actually have to be with the people you're attracted to. (We all get old and ugly eventually anyway.)

What understanding? If you can't do anything with it, what do you understand?

You called it a key. I said it is not unless it has a useful purpose.

So you're fine with a key that doesn't open anything? How will you know it is a key at all then?

We try to understand countless things without have a use case in mind at the time of study.

You're making a pretty clear reference to mathematics & science here, but in those disciplines we study things with well-defined structures. We don't study flighty nonsense because it's not ever going to be useful. You shouldn't invoke this phrase to excuse a lack of precision and clarity.

You are probably going to spend more energy than that just lugging around solar panels.

Under any practical consideration, free will is nothing more than an emotion; it offers you no capabilities, only a propensity to respond to things in a certain way. Without a useful definition of free will that offers something different to this, you won't have a key to anything.

Lots of people will question this stuff, but they definitely won't bring up their objections. People are incentivized to collect their paychecks and do what they're told, not to point out the absurd thinking of the managers and executives above them. Nobody is thinking they'll save their company those millions and get an recognition/reward for it. Even the professional risk assessors got ignored.

So you're not really protesting unless you light yourself on fire? You understand that if everybody who protested the "big stuff" did so by doing extremely risky things, you're going to end up with nobody left with the will to protest?

Sure, if you assume the only purpose of fingers is for counting.

They're considered separate fields because they focus on different problems which are amenable to different techniques, leaving their expert practitioners with very different knowledge bases. You're right that it is a cultural distinction, but that doesn't mean it isn't an important or practical one.

I don't think you've honestly tried to understand what I'm saying, and I don't think your attitude reflects the maturity I expect of someone seriously attempting to discuss ethics.

I am not saying that. I'm saying that considering the government to act only violently is a gross mischaracterization of reality such that even if you define things such that it is technically true, it is not a useful position to take.

My government has never forced me to do anything with a threat of violence -- I have been threatened with different manners of obvious inconvenience, but if that is no more acceptable to you than an actual threat of violence, then I'm afraid that is an unproductive, reductive, and uncompromising opinion.

I don't understand these distinctions. North Korea doesn't control its population with only boots on the ground, it controls it by controlling the border (with ships), the political arena (with nukes), and by controlling infrastructure like roads, food distribution, media (with tanks, artillery, and manpower.) The US government doesn't need to control every person to control the population, it just needs to control its strategic assets, and it can do that with drones, bombs, tanks, etc just fine. If you can't get food because your crops are defoliated and your roads are barricaded, you're not resisting for very long.

Anyway, the argument here is as much about the government controlling the people as it is about the people controlling the government. If the US government turned against its own people militarily, the only way you could recover is if you could regain control of the military and turn it back against the government or if you could somehow get a more powerful military to overthrow it. A revolution from within can only succeed if it controls the actual military.

There is no position from the perspective of beings that don't exist, let alone a neutral one. It's always the beings that exist that make decisions, and it's always their perspective that counts.

Really, it doesn't matter if an animal that doesn't exist would 'prefer' to exist in suffering, because that's a purely counter-factual fantasy to begin with. All that matters is whether we should prefer such an animal to exist. Anyone who prefers they wouldn't based on vague moral arguments has to reconcile that with the fact that killing those animals for food is right in line with correcting the 'error' of their birth.

A better way to make the argument is to appeal to things we do actually care about in an ethically consistent manner: how inefficient and wasteful it is to raise animals for food. If you have something that is more efficient, tastes better, and is healthier, then it becomes harder to justify that waste, regardless of anyone's moral position on suffering. Anything else is just an reasonless appeal to emotion.

They all say wikipedia.org next to them.

Federal tyrants have access to nuclear weapons, missiles, aircraft carriers, tanks, drones, satellites, etc. How do you expect to fend off tyranny with asymmetric military capabilities? At best it would put you in a perpetual state of guerilla warfare, which isn't any less of a tyranny.

I'm going to quote a previous comment of mine here, because I think your rhetoric is shallow:

Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc.

But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.

My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer.

I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).

If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.

If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.

So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?

What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.

This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different

The argument that humans have any sort of ethical duty at all assumes that humans and animals are fundamentally different. Animals don't have any ethical duty to prevent their food from suffering.

EDIT: Furthermore, human suffering is categorically different from animal suffering because human suffering can be inter-generational and have very long-term consequences. Animals don't transfer their suffering and their morality between generations, and that fact does make human suffering much worse than animal suffering, because human suffering can lead to arbitrarily catastrophic consequences. A tiger biting a human can lead directly to the complete extinction of the tiger. The emotional content of the suffering my be similar, but the consequences are not.

From an outside perspective, that waste is probably the most interesting and valuable part of the moon now. And this idea of 'purity' is rather absurd, given the size of the moon. Almost nothing in the universe is so pure that you can't find contaminants on the order of ~1 part per mole. Do you complain when someone leaves a gold atom on a sugar cube?

Shared morality makes right, but might makes right wherever a conflict of moralities cannot be resolved by shared ideals.

Not per se, but that would allow for any inefficiencies to be moved around, which is not contrary to what I'm arguing. It's quite a bold claim to say that people will think faster or more efficiently in general, but not as bold to say they will think faster or more efficiently about some things. You might be able to make a language more efficient for technical communication while making it less efficient for poetic communication, but I don't believe you can make a language more efficient at everything people need to communicate.

The guarantee is not a need, it is an opportunity that your potential effective employees are looking for. If you deny them that opportunity, they will look elsewhere and be highly effective for someone else.

It's easy to give vague advice though, and the more vague it is the less actionable it tends to be. These "huge leaps" can be seen as a counterpoint to that, where people are trying to do something, and anything less extreme won't really feel like something -- it won't feel like a life-changing event.

It's not just people's heads that need protection. Roads, traffic lights, cars, power lines, windows... people can die in lots of ways other than having a drone fall directly on their head.