Please, go on. I've not heard this criticism before.

Lol, I've not done anything but ask questions to discover if it was inherently wrong to eat meat, apparently not. I then asked whether it was inherently wrong to eat a human being, apparently it isn't. The problem is that I agree with the first but not the second.

As a human I can express my will not to be eaten (or have my organs harvested) in the event of my death. Animals don't seem to have the capacity for this particular will. But then again you can see even plants demonstrate a desire to survive/live in the way they reach deeper in search of water and stretch towards the sun. That desire to live doesn't seem to stop anyone from cutting them down in their prime and consuming them. Similarly when I watch videos of microorganisms moving around, hunting and eating under a microscope it becomes obvious that even they have a desire to survive/live but no one seems to mind consuming fermented foods and beverages. It seems to me that a desire to survive/live isn't enough to explain whether something should be eaten or not. Nonetheless I still believe it's okay for me to survive at the expense of other living things and at the same time I don't believe in cannibalism.

I imagine now that the real justification is something like: the more dissimilar from me something appears the more excusable it is for me to destroy for my benefit. As a result you get a hierarchy of value that goes something like humans>animals (mammals on top)>plants>simple organisms>molecules>... In terms of consumption I guess some people think it's okay to organize this as "humans>everything" and some people like to take it to "humans + animals > everything." I'm not so sure I'm content by that hypothesis. I think how far you decide you want to go down that ladder, what a person decides to consume, is entirely arbitrary; it's all wrong or it's all right.

I may think cannibalism is wrong but what if someone asked to be cannibalized? A man can't give their consent to be murdered. There must be something objectively wrong with the act of murdering another human so that it's not even okay if the "victim" requests to be murdered. Cannibalism is wrong, but is it OK if the dead man wills it? So does that make it different than murder somehow? I don't know if it is. I think once you eat a human, willed or not, your consumption changes from "human>everything" to "me>everything." Once you have established yourself as "me>everything" then whether a man wills to be eaten or not becomes irrelevant, just as the desire for survival/life of everything else isn't enough to save them. So, at that point, what makes eating humans different than eating other animals or a plants? It may be that murder and cannibalism aren't so different in this context. It may be as simple as "cannibalism is wrong."

I don't believe in cannibalism.

I'm not so sure.

Is cannibalism inherently wrong?

So if no one knows about it cannibalism is alright?

You introduced a new variable to the scenario to try and stretch the goalpost a little further rather than just answering the question considering the context in which it was asked. That was dishonest from my perspective. You could see that the debate was about eating meat in the context of suffering. Regardless, you've answered.

Is it a moral harm to eat a man that died of natural causes?

That's a dishonest evasion. Is it or is it not OK to eat a cow that has died of natural causes?

Who said I believed in objective morality? If there is an objective morality of the universe then the universe must have a design, right? Then there must be a designer which imbued the universe with that objective moral truth, right? This is the line one would have to argue.

I found the "so is it good because God says so or is God simply the messenger of what is good?" argument to be pretty good at discrediting the objective moral goodness of God until I heard an argument that went something like "Goodness is an essential element of the concept of God" (Craig). I'll paste a quote about this below.

Either way, you don't have to believe in objective morality to recognize that without it morality is not actually "real." It would be up to everyone to decide for themselves, even if that includes rape and murder.

"You state your fundamental question as follows: How do we know that God is good?Now at one level, as I explained in last week’s Question #294, that question is easy to answer: it is conceptually necessary that God be good. That is to say, goodness belongs to the very concept of God, just as being unmarried belongs to the concept of a bachelor. For (i) by definition God is a being worthy of worship, and only a being which is perfectly good would be worthy of worship; and (ii) as the greatest conceivable being God must be morally perfect, since it is better to be morally perfect than morally flawed."

That's from this page: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/on-the-goodness-of-god

But it's ok to eat these animals, right?

Why do you consider there to be "no morality" rather than 8 billion people with their own subjective take on morality? If my moral compass allows me to kill you then certainly I'm still moral by my own measure, you just don't like my measure. Well, I don't like yours so we're even.

I'm simply trying to illustrate what's permissible without objective morality (i.e., everything). If there is no objective morality then morality isn't a "real" thing that exists. If "murder is wrong" doesn't exist objectively somewhere out there then it doesn't actually exist at all. We avoid murdering because we don't happen to find it trendy (it has been before) or because we don't have the power to actualize our will to commit murder (people have before).

I think what you're imagining is a scenario where you and some other people get together to decide among yourselves a version of morality you can force upon the world. So long as everyone is obeying your group's subjective morality it's as though an objective morality actually exists, but what makes YOUR moral code the correct one? You decide that it's because it satisfies conditions A, B, C but you just decided that those conditions had to be satisfied. I could decide that morality needs to satisfy X, Y, Z instead and conclude an entirely different system of morality that opposes yours completely. What's wrong for you, of course may be right for me. You can get the allies behind you, I'll get the axis behind me and the result is whoever is more powerful decides which subjective moral system survives. This isn't unlike the world today (sovereigns are still in the state of nature).

What if cows were bred each year for decades so that you had a rolling supply of cows dying of natural causes? Is it ok to eat them then?

Sure but there is no objective morality so all morality is simply a matter of opinion. There's nothing real about morality, it's just that a mode of behaviour is more or less trendy within the "social group, society at large, humanity," and so on. You didn't have to explicitly state that was the case, it follows from your assertion that it must be the case. If there is no objective good then good is whatever I say it is and I can do whatever I like so long as I have the power to do so (e.g., "the state of nature"). It's actually a pretty rational take on things if you don't believe in objective morality. The Romans weren't wrong to the Romans. The Nazis weren't wrong to 9/10 Germans. Whether Alexander was great or terrible depends on where you lived. It's not a novelty.

Is it ever okay to kill an animal for food?

So everything is permitted - so long as you can get away with it I suppose. Good and evil are just a matter of what's trendy.

Sure, but don't you think you'll end up at a different conclusion depending on where you start? What ethical framework are you using for your own conclusions?

How high above are we talking? Where does objective morality come from? Are you arguing there is no objective morality?

Which ethics is that?

I would look.

Culture as in humans doing what humans do. Archaeology examines human culture, they do this by examining things like tools left behind. Culture is the thing that humans do. You get what I mean.

Hello,

Thanks for your reply. I don't know if it's a bit strange but I can enter this extremely wonderous and profound appreciation of life when considering what I think may be some really unexpected things. For example, I remember sitting around during lunchtime at work. I obviously wasn't particularly occupied at that moment so i could think about random ideas. I had my neck turned, I touched my neck and thought about how those muscles are all laid out so perfectly for my neck to work, then I considered my body and how amazing it is we are such complicated and, in my opinion, exceptionally impressive and precise machines, then I considered how the entire universe is organized in such a way that this is all happening for us/with us. It's so strange how you get there sometimes. There is considering the consequences of the idea of being the universe itself rather than separating yourself from the universe. There is considering the story of cosmogony so far.

You know, I find it interesting that you state you accept the pain of life and consider it a blessing - I agree. I once asked my father about what he would do if an asteroid was going to annihilate life on earth, would he go to a bar and drink or would he stand and watch it hit. He told me that he would choose getting drunk, he wouldn't want to see it coming. I found it pretty interesting to consider because death is a part of the experience of life as a mortal. Your death will only happen one time, would you want to fully experience the event? (I've read some pretty cool things about what happens when you die). It seems like most people would choose to look away. I think it's all a part of the story. I wonder, would you look at your death?

The Sublime

I once heard (or maybe read) that daily exposure to the sublime is important. I think the point of it is to anchor your experiences and perspective of reality in the transcendent, awe inspiring, and divine. I often forget to engage in this kind of exposure. I do amateur astronomy and astrophotography but I usually get this sense of grandness and awe while engaged in thought about the nature of reality. When I happen to achieve this emotion - it's difficult to explain apart from "awe" or maybe it's kind of what religious ecstacy is like - I'm incredibly captivated by the idea of my existence in this world.

I often feel incredibly curious about what this is all about. I also often ponder human culture and how radically it changes from one Millenia to another, though the human animal is basically the same. This high variability in human culture makes the culture I know seem a bit arbitrary and absurd. It's like humans are so distracted by engaging in culture that those initial ideas, like asking why you're even alive, seems to regularly escape our attention. The nature of death, for example, remains uninspected until it finally surprises us all later in life as if we didn't really believe we were mortal all along. Our engagement in our culture - i.e., chasing money, a career, cars, houses, lovers, food, media, etc.. - distracts us from wondering about the nature of the reality in which we're engaging in that culture. This is true, at least for me, until I touch the sublime (usually in idea) and get sucked into the more fundamental, I think, experience of reality. However, I notice this occurs at night and I've also noticed that no matter how deep my thought had been through the night the next morning I wake up "locked in" to human culture once again. Each morning I wake up distracted and ignorant and some days I'm lucky enough to remember I'm part of something grand and wonderful.

I wonder now, how many of you experience this? Does it happen to you regularly? How do you achieve this? Feel free to comment how you'd like (obviously), I'm very curious.