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RE: Vegan Dishonesty
Conflating species differences with racism is intellectually dishonest. The fact that authoritarians use bad arguments to justify their totalitarianism does not justify using even worse arguments to support your position.
How so? What does that even mean that i'm being "intellectually dishonest"? Ad hominems aren't very convincing.
cognitive dissonance.
I was very specific. You take two different concepts and try to connect them without showing there is a connection between them. Human "races" are no more different species than a Siamese cat and a Russian Blue cat are different species. In contrast, cats and dogs are in fact different species. To place the first distinction on the same level as the second is intellectually dishonest.
It is not an ad hominem to criticise the argument someone makes. An adhom is criticism of the individual instead of the argument, or criticizing the argument because of he individual. if I had said, "you're wrong because you're a wussy vegan," that would have been an adhom, and intellectual dishonesty on my part.
An assertion of cognitive dissonance when confronted with a distinction is lazy argumentation, too. I am saying the use of a bad distinction or comparison is a bad argument. You still bear the burden of proof to show that non-human life of any kind warrants identical moral consideration as human life. I am sympathetic to this position, but I am unconvinced. In nature, we see that all species treat their own kind by different rules than they treat other species. My position is that humanity is unique due to the capacity for higher-level reason, whether it is exercised or not. Your job is to show that this requires treating other species differently. If you feel a certain way, that is one thing. As I said, I personally am uncomfortable with the idea of killing and eating cephalopods, cetatceans, and primates. However, I acknowledged up front that this was my feeling rather than a rigorously-tested rational position.
How is it "intellectual dishonest"? What is so dishonest about it? I consider them both to be collectivist type thinking —racism and speciesism, I'm not lying about it; I'm an individualist, I don't base morality by different groups of people. I never placed the first distinction on the same level, I just stated that anybody is capable of making distinctions between groups, humans are a type of animal and all animals are individuals. Separating humans and animals is a spook, there is no ontological process that determines that a human is not an animal, but rather something distinctively different.
By saying I'm being intellectually dishonest. This is a judgment of my thinking and ideas that you are presupposing.
Sure point taken, but it's just like your one sentence statement that my argument is worse than authoritarians. That's all you said to what I said in my previous response, until now, so I didn't think it was worth putting effort into a further argument.
I don't bear any burden of proof. The burden is on anyone who thinks humans have any authority over other animals without any given rules of conduct governing this presumption.
Non-human life warrants identical moral consideration as human life in my view because there is uncertainty regarding where one draws the line between when morality should apply to a certain being versus another. Regardless of what is observed in nature by other animals, there are some humans that treat other animals with the same rules as they would to their fellow humans. Why must morality a priori be confined to only within a species? And if you say that certain species like cephalopods, cetatceans, and primates deserve moral consideration, this begs the question as to why only certain species may receive moral consideration based on their cognitive ability. I agree that humanity is unique due to the higher-level reason and what not, though basing morality on cognitive capacity is rather subjective as people will have different views on whether a certain being is cognitively worthy enough, and it's inconsistent when you consider that all beings are individuals; the law of equal freedom, golden rule, non-aggression, and ahimsa doesn't discriminate based on collective groupings.