A suffering-minimizing ideology. Given that animals are capable of suffering, and suffering is bad, it would be morally good to save an animal from being mauled to death.
This is what I meant by coherent. Maybe a very short* sighted hedonism could arrive at this conclusion, but if we prevented all carnivores from mauling all prey animals, can we say for certain it would not lead to a geater suffering? What happens to an ecosystem with no predators?
I think the idea is that you don’t really have a true ecosystem at that point. The idea basically contemplates turning the entire biosphere into something more like a managed garden than a wild space. Which is one of the reasons I brought up being nowhere near the technology required among other things, because to give the idea more than idle speculation, you’d essentially have to be able to artificially run the whole planet’s life support system without requiring a functional ecology to do it for you.
Hmm, if I stop one wolf from mauling one deer that’s less suffering for sure.
If we have to extend it to all such cases, it leads to interesting questions. How would we manage animal populations? How would we feed predators? Can these two goals be reached without suffering?
While the suffering is in some sense “natural”, it’s not clearly necessary. There was a time when some humans thought society couldn’t function without slaves, or with worker’s rights, or with women voting. But if we keep our minds open to ways of reducing suffering, we can find ways to make the world better.
Whether we have in mind a comprehensive and certain remedy, is independent of whether a problem exists though. If someone objects generally to suffering and/or death in a way that goes beyond only what’s directly in front of them, to be intellectually honest with themselves they would have to contend with the scale of brutality of the natural world and our existence.
“We must change everything to not work this way” seems like a very straightforwardly coherent conclusion. What end result would actually be ideal, and the issues of getting there, could be considered separately.
You artificially manage it, I guess? The whole world like some zoo.
Anyways, it seems like a pretty natural and normal thought to not want others to be murdered. Actually being able to do anything to prevent that without introducing all kinds of other ethical problems (in addition the technological and resource impracticalness of such), but if you don’t think, it makes sense.
An ideology that establishes its own rules based on some sort of guiding principles and attempts to follow them are not self-defeating or incompatible with existence when pragmatically applied. When I say pragmatically applied, I mean I don’t consider magical hypotheticals, like a bunch of hedonists on a boat demanding to torture me, trolly cars, or quantum hotels, as a meaningful critisism to real world applications. Philosophically based veganism, without agreeing with it, is a well developed and coherent ideology, as an example. If a person walked veganism out beyond just a diet, it demands major changes to how one live their lives and doesn’t even require magically managed global ecosystems or animal prisons.
Thanks for answering, I broadly agree. But what about consistency?
A vegan might argue that eating meat is bad because it causes animal suffering. They would be morally required to save an animal from the butcher’s blade if given the chance (assuming they didn’t have to cause more suffering to do that).
But an animal doesn’t know the difference between being killed by a butcher and being killed by a predator. So is the vegan not also morally required to save an animal from a predator? If not, how is that consistent with the basis of their veganism? It sounds like an arbitrary distinction to me, hardly an element of a coherent ideology.
Of course, once extended from the single animal to all animals, there are nuances to consider. If the whole world went vegan this instant, that would have enormous ramifications on the meat industry, and what would we do with all those animals? It might not be moral to instantly turn the world vegan and just free all industrial animals due to the chaos that would ensue. But surely it would be moral to explore what processes could turn the world vegan in a less destructive way.
What coherent ideology is concerned with the general idea of animal death?
A suffering-minimizing ideology. Given that animals are capable of suffering, and suffering is bad, it would be morally good to save an animal from being mauled to death.
This is what I meant by coherent. Maybe a very short* sighted hedonism could arrive at this conclusion, but if we prevented all carnivores from mauling all prey animals, can we say for certain it would not lead to a geater suffering? What happens to an ecosystem with no predators?
I think the idea is that you don’t really have a true ecosystem at that point. The idea basically contemplates turning the entire biosphere into something more like a managed garden than a wild space. Which is one of the reasons I brought up being nowhere near the technology required among other things, because to give the idea more than idle speculation, you’d essentially have to be able to artificially run the whole planet’s life support system without requiring a functional ecology to do it for you.
Hmm, if I stop one wolf from mauling one deer that’s less suffering for sure.
If we have to extend it to all such cases, it leads to interesting questions. How would we manage animal populations? How would we feed predators? Can these two goals be reached without suffering?
While the suffering is in some sense “natural”, it’s not clearly necessary. There was a time when some humans thought society couldn’t function without slaves, or with worker’s rights, or with women voting. But if we keep our minds open to ways of reducing suffering, we can find ways to make the world better.
Whether we have in mind a comprehensive and certain remedy, is independent of whether a problem exists though. If someone objects generally to suffering and/or death in a way that goes beyond only what’s directly in front of them, to be intellectually honest with themselves they would have to contend with the scale of brutality of the natural world and our existence.
“We must change everything to not work this way” seems like a very straightforwardly coherent conclusion. What end result would actually be ideal, and the issues of getting there, could be considered separately.
You artificially manage it, I guess? The whole world like some zoo.
Anyways, it seems like a pretty natural and normal thought to not want others to be murdered. Actually being able to do anything to prevent that without introducing all kinds of other ethical problems (in addition the technological and resource impracticalness of such), but if you don’t think, it makes sense.
What is your idea of a coherent ideology?
An ideology that establishes its own rules based on some sort of guiding principles and attempts to follow them are not self-defeating or incompatible with existence when pragmatically applied. When I say pragmatically applied, I mean I don’t consider magical hypotheticals, like a bunch of hedonists on a boat demanding to torture me, trolly cars, or quantum hotels, as a meaningful critisism to real world applications. Philosophically based veganism, without agreeing with it, is a well developed and coherent ideology, as an example. If a person walked veganism out beyond just a diet, it demands major changes to how one live their lives and doesn’t even require magically managed global ecosystems or animal prisons.
Thanks for answering, I broadly agree. But what about consistency?
A vegan might argue that eating meat is bad because it causes animal suffering. They would be morally required to save an animal from the butcher’s blade if given the chance (assuming they didn’t have to cause more suffering to do that).
But an animal doesn’t know the difference between being killed by a butcher and being killed by a predator. So is the vegan not also morally required to save an animal from a predator? If not, how is that consistent with the basis of their veganism? It sounds like an arbitrary distinction to me, hardly an element of a coherent ideology.
Of course, once extended from the single animal to all animals, there are nuances to consider. If the whole world went vegan this instant, that would have enormous ramifications on the meat industry, and what would we do with all those animals? It might not be moral to instantly turn the world vegan and just free all industrial animals due to the chaos that would ensue. But surely it would be moral to explore what processes could turn the world vegan in a less destructive way.