davidpearce comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - LessWrong

28 Post author: Lukas_Gloor 28 July 2013 06:24PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 31 July 2013 03:21:51PM 7 points [-]

the same can be said of race: I may subjectively prefer white people.

Yes. That's perfectly fine. In fact, if you examine the revealed preferences (e.g. who people prefer to have as their neighbours or who do they prefer to marry) you will see that most people in reality do prefer others of their own race.

And, of course, the same can be said of sex, too. Unless you are an evenhanded bi, you're most certainly guilty of preferring some specific sex (or maybe gender, it varies).

You might bite the bullet here and say that yes, in fact, racism, sexism etc. is morally acceptable

"Morally acceptable" is a judgement, it is conditional on which morality you're using as your standard. Different moralities will produce different moral acceptability for the same actions.

Perhaps you wanted to say "socially acceptable"? In particular, "socially acceptable in contemporary US"? That, of course, is a very different thing.

I think most people would agree that these __isms are wrong, and so speciesism must also be wrong.

Sigh. This is a rationality forum, no? And you're using emotionally charged guilt-by-association arguments? (it's actually designed guilt-by-association since the word "speciesism" was explicitly coined to resemble "racism", etc.).

Warning: HERE BE MIND-KILLERS!

Comment author: davidpearce 31 July 2013 08:22:28PM 2 points [-]

Lumifer, should the charge of "mind-killers" be levelled at anti-speciesists or meat-eaters? (If you were being ironic, apologies for being so literal-minded.)

Comment author: NotInventedHere 31 July 2013 08:31:22PM 4 points [-]

I'm fairly sure it's for the examples referencing the politically charged issues of racism and sexism.

Comment author: wedrifid 02 August 2013 03:02:00AM 0 points [-]

Lumifer, should the charge of "mind-killers" be levelled at anti-speciesists or meat-eaters?

It can be levelled at most people who use employ either of those terms.

Comment author: Lumifer 31 July 2013 08:32:10PM -2 points [-]

Neither. It just looks like it would be a useful sign in front of animal-rights discussions.

I see people having strong emotional priors and marshaling arguments in favour of predefined conclusions. Not that different from politics, really, except maybe there's less tribal identity involved.