changing his behavior might be more difficult than changing his position away from the carpet. In any way, my behavior towards the baby is different when a carpet is present: I can move the baby away, or the carpet. And when instead of a baby we have an older child, I can try to directly change its behavior.

if everyone fails at survival, then how come there still is biodiversity? Look at the ring finger principle: it is about the conservation of biodiversity. So with survival I meant that biodiversity does not get lost. Or you can say: it is survival of a population instead of an individual.
Yes, the chimp has his own path in life, and yes we should respect his path. But we should do it consistently! We should respect everyone's path, without arbitrary exceptions. You forgot someone: the hunted colobus monkey. Why did you not say that this monkey has his own path in life? Why is the chimp allowed to kill the monkey? With hunting and killing the monkey, the lifepath of the monkey is very drastically changed, you agree? But with preventing the chimp from hunting the monkey, the lifepath of the chimp is changed only a little bit.
You are saying you have some superior path that justifies making the chimps path much more superior than the monkey's path.

Again, if you interfered in the babies behavior blindly, by force, you did nothing good.[/quote]
my sister has a baby, and she puts the baby in a chair at the table so that he cannot throw up on the carpet. My sister used force to lift the baby up and put him in the chair. I don't know what you mean with interfering blindly. But are you suggesting that this interference did nothing good?

 good idea :-)
we can go as far as a teacher or policeman go when they see a child attacking another child. Perhaps in the kindergarten they are interested in this shock collar that zaps a child when the brain part associated with agression lights up. And yes, let's arm the other children. Cool :-)

yes, everyone would 'enforce' that baby in the sense that everyone will interfere in such a way that the baby does not throw up on the carpet. We enforce our values on the natural behavior of the baby.

in the case of the chimp we were talking about killing someone for food that was not necessary for survival. If it was necessary for survival, to avoid death, then we have to use the ring finger which says that the animal is allowed to eat whatever is necessary for survival. Then we have the situation of the lion eating the zebra.

that sounds obvious. But it is not merely about convincing someone. We did not convince the baby not to throw up on the carpet. Yet, we interfered in its behavior with the goal that the baby doesn't throw up on the carpet.

but you evaded the question. You could not choose to remove the enforcer. In the case of the chimp, there is always enforcement: either the chimp enforces the monkey to sacrifice himself, or either I enforce the chimp to stop hunting the monkey. Removing the chimp means that the problem does not even pose itself. Removing me would not remove the enforcement of the monkey.

Hitler condoned the rape of jews in concentration camps (although there were antimiscegenation laws, so you had to kill the jewish girl afterwards)

probably not; it is too close to slavery

both can be derived from the moral hand. There are strong analogies between using someone's muscle tissue against his will and using someone's vagina against her will, between thinking that someone else (a pig) has less moral status and thinking that someone else (a woman) has less moral status, between antispeciesist veganism and antisexist feminism

dammit, tough one... How many seconds do I have left?






[/quote]

well, why should the chimp be allowed to enforce his values on others, on his victims, his prey? By killing a colobus monkey, a chimpanzee enforces his values in a very brutal, lethal way. Why should that be permissible? Why should the interests of the chimp count more than the interests of the monkey? When I protect the monkey by preventing that chimpanzee from hunting, I do not kill the chimp, so my enforcement is much less violent than what the chimp intended to do. What would you prefer: being enforced not to kill someone else, or being enforced to sacrifice yourself?

they are amoral

yes, they act with conscious intention. No instinct. (although they don't ethically reflect on their actions, whereas I do)
But with or without conscious intention is not relevant here, unless it is related to "being above nature", but I don't see how.

what do you mean with being above nature? That you interfere in nature? But the chimpanzee also intervened in nature by eating some food, so in that sense the chimpanzee was above nature as well. The chimpanzee wanted to stop someone else from living, I wanted to stop the chimpanzee from killing.
You know that we should be above nature when it comes to ethics, because in nature some ugly unethical things happen. So we should not listen to nature and not condone the ugly things. Being above nature in the ethical sense is good. But first of all you should clarify what you really mean with being above nature.
Yes, humans and animals are equal, and yes humans have the right to stop chimpanzees from eating meat. Where is the contradiction? Chimpanzees also have the right to stop humans from eating meat, so there is our equality.
What do you mean with that natural state and being in contradiction to a natural state?
I don't understand your whole question. What makes whom different making what allowable?

my ethical system says that it is not permissible for chimpanzees to eat meat, because they can survive without meat.

sorry for the quotes; I hope this is better...
(and I hope you can give counterarguments point by point insetad of merely saying that I'm lacking logic.

That is the ring finger of the moral hand. Briefly put: you and I and all primates don't need meat in order to survive. So if all beings who do not need meat stop eating meat, those populations would no go extinct and biodiversity would not decrease. But a lion needs meat. So if a lion is not allowed to hunt and eat, then no animal is (apply the thumb principle of rule universalism to the ring finger principle), and then all obligate carnivores would die from starvation and then biodiversity decreases a lot. Now we can democratically decide how much moral value biodiversity should have. I want to give it a lot of value, and therefore my ethic says that predation by obligate carnivores is permissible. 

yeah, and that's why I rape women, because Hitler did not rape women. And I eat dogs and humans, because Hitler didn't.

of course there will always remain void gaps, because not all fossils of all our dead ancestors remained conserved. But evolution can predict something: that new fossil discoveries make the gaps smaller. And indeed that is what we see happening again and again. And we see the fossils in different layers in the ground corresponding with different eras in the past. And that all makes sense. The genesis flood will predict another patern of fossil deposits, and we don't see that pattern.
So yes: if (yes, of course "if") evolution is true, we expect to see X, Y and Z. If genesis is true, we expect to see A, B and C. Now, we see none of A, B nor C, but we already see X and Z. Then it is irrational to believe in genesis and not in evolution by claiming that there is a gap, that we didn't see Y yet.

we can deduce that those fossils are intermediate species (or relatives of intermediates), by first dating how old those fossils are. Then we put all the fossils next to each other, the oldest ones left, the newest ones right. Then we look at structural differences between the fossils, the shapes of the bones. And then we see some changes when we move from left to right. And those changes make sense from the point of evolution. For example we see an old fossil of an animal with arms, a newer fossil of an animal with featherlike things at his arms, a newer fossil of an animal with winglike arms, and still a newer fossil of an animal with full blown wings. And of course now there are three gaps in the fossil record. And then we find another fossil of an animal that lived between the second and third and looked a bit like the second and a bit like the third in the row. So it is an intermediate, but now there are four gaps. But the gaps are getting smaller.

here we can see a clear distinction between current science and religion. Like evolution, god is a hypothesis. But it in contrast to evolution, god is not a fruitful hypothesis. After all those millenia, christians still don't know anything about how god did it, what he is like. Whereas evolutionary biologists are moving ahead at fast speed, gaining new insights every time. I have the impression that christians are not even investigating their god hypothesis. The god hypothesis is not fruitful.

well, we have mathematics to determine whether they are plausible, in the sense of whether they are consistent and whether they predict things that corresponds with empirical data. You see scientists thinking about how the universe began, constructing and testing models. Why are christians so incapable of doing that? Why don't they construct a clear model of god and then test it against empirical data?

well, scientists (physicists) are moving ahead at great speed and understand more and more about the big bang. Whereas christians remain stuck with those basic questions.

how do you even know that an entity like that even exists?
Scientists are able to discover things (particles, dark matter,...) that are not visible...

why can't the bible exist?
If the bible can't exist, then neither can the bhagavat gita.

I guess no-one who makes something thinks about the mistakes and pplans for the failures. But the failure and mistake of eve eating from the forbidden fruit is not automatically corrected. All this suffering after the fall is not a good correction for a single person eating from a fruit. A correction would be to induce vomitting in Eve.

very strange question...

oh, sure :-)
God is sooo good, that he is allowed to be sooo narcissistic...

and then someone ate from a fruit, and god turned 180° and decided to make the world far worse than perfect. And with far worse I mean: far worse. Why would he change his mind like that? Why would he suddenly allow so much unnecessary suffering?


this doesn't make any sense to me. Giving someone an opportunity for A without giving him at the same time the opportunity for non-A? You are free to choose A but not free to choose anything else but A?

well he clearly did, with his floods and plagues and genocides and infanticides...

 I think god has to know what he wants. He can't have the cake and eat it too. Either he wants to be sure that he will be worshipped by his creatures, or he wants his creatures to be free.
But are people made for worshipping god? How egocentric and narcissistic is this god? If I would be a creator and I want to be worshipped, I can create people who worship me. But why would I make these people sentient, with their own preferences, likes and dislikes, if all I'm going to do is destroy these people (against their preferences) once they no longer worship me? Why didn't god make insentient robots that worshipped him?

and that innocent child that died from a horrible disease did not even get one chance...

well, according to your descriptions and to what I read in the bible...

ok, on the engineering part, god can be clever, but reading the bible, on the psychological-moral part he is really crazy. He is jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. (quote from Dawkins)

well I can't understand the jesus part either. God sends himself as his son to earth to be tortured for the things that someone else did wrong in order to forgive some other people? It doesn't make any sense... Perhaps god watched too many episodes of Monty Python's flying circus: "and now for something completely different"

but jesus is still not helping all those innocent victims now. Where is he waiting for? He does not even want to say when he will come to help. He still does not give us any evidence that he will come and compensate for all the unnecessary suffering. That's not good. Look at how a medic does it in the hospital. Suppose we have a patient, and a doctor can heal him instantly. But the doctor does not heal him. Instead, he goes away, does not even tell when he will be back, that he will heal the patient. And he remains absent for a long long time without giving the patient any sign of hope... That's not a good doctor.

 
but why all the unnecessary suffering? It is like a thief. Suppose we have a thief who already has enough money. Still he steals money from you. So you are stolen and poor. You won't hear anything from the thief, but then, some 50 years later, the thief comes back and gives you back your money and much much more. Ok, what the thief did in the end, giving that fortune, was very good. But that still doesn't justify him stealing your money. The thief did not need your money. Compare this thief with a second person: someone who did not steal from you, but still gave you the fortune. I think this second person did something better.

for babies we have some evidence that they drink milk. I've seen them doing it. For plants there is no evidence that they have a will. Having a will requires having a consciousness, and it is generally scientifically excepted that consciousness is generated by brains.


yes, it is up to science to answer questions like who has a will. But let's not run ahead of science.

for scientific progress we don't have to empty our minds. We only have to listen to the evidence and think consistently. A scientists is able to chance his beliefs, based on evidence.

there is no evidence that plants have a will (because plants lack a central nervous system...)

indeed, interpretations, as is always the case when looking at evidence. But in the case of evolution it is an extremely coherent interpretation.

but there are plenty of fossils of intermediate species. With the fossils that are discovered, we can rather clearly see how species evolved. We can see how our ancestors looked like. Some 60 million years ago, our great great... grandfather looked like some kind of squirrel. http://news.discovery.com/animals/zoo-animals/first-human-ancestor-squirrel-121018.htm

but then who created god? If he created our universe, he must be a very complex being...
And what about spontaneous emergence of complexity, such as we see in evolution?

some models about the origing of the universe did not have a beginning and hence were not caused (e.g. Hawking Hartle no-boundary state http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartle%E2%80%93Hawking_state)

and what is the cause of that? What caused god? What caused god to make a causal universe?

soul and spirit are like the life force (elan vital) unscientific terms. But scientists are gaining knowledge on how consciousness works.

so?

so god is not that smart? Even I am smart enough to know that planting a tree with delicious fruits in the middle of the garden of eden, guarded by a seducing talking snake, is asking for problems.

being extremely narcissistic is not my idea of being good...
It sounds silly: "oh, let's make toys that can adore me and see how great I am"


no, God turned. First he created a vegan world, so he was against unecessary suffering. And after someone ate from a forbidden fruit, everyone is allowed to kill and eat someone else and cause unnecessary harm?

then why didn't he create a free world in the first place? A world where everyone is free to kill and eat someone else?


so God killed everyone who did not worship him? That is what an extremely bad dictator does.

he's crazy, this god... Absolutely crazy. Gone mad beyond imagination.

it is easy to explain if we assume god is absolutely crazy...

but it was god who said we are not allowed to eat blood. He says it quite often, so it must be important to him: http://biblehub.com/genesis/9-4.htm

but there are a lot of believers who became victims of war, genocide, earthquakes, disease, bad luck,... So god does not always help the believers. In fact, he quite often does not help. It seems he acts a bit arbitrarily.

of course, but you understand the analogy, I hope...

why do you assume it lowers the position of humans instead of increasing the position of animals? You seem to have a moral gravity bias https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/the-moral-gravity-bias/
Humans and animals are equivalent as long as we can't find a morally relevant difference.

being against the slaughet of cow but tolerant toward the slaughter of humans? That would still be arbitrary discrimination, a kind of speciesism, against the claim that humans and animals are morally equivalent.

no, as long as the analogy makes sense, we are allowed to make that analogy. It has nothing to do with obsessive behavior, it has to do with moral consistency and analogical reasoning. That is very important in ethics.

but you should not lower the moral status of humans, that would be immoral. You know that I want to uplift the moral status of non-human animals and that I am against lowering the position of humans, so you don't have to make such straw man fallacies.

 no thet are not. In fact, one of the early warning signs of being a psychopath is animal abuse as a child.

because the majority suffers from a moral illusion called speciesism. There was a time when the majority of whites suffered from a similar kind of moral illusion called racism. Those racists believed that the black-white distinction was not arbitrary.

no, you know that is not true. You know that mentally disabled humans are humans, right? And some of those humans are not able to join this discussion, right? So far you haven't heard from those humans. But they still have basic rights such as the right not to be used as merely a means, right?


it is rather based on the premisse that we should not arbitrarily harm someone.

I respect the basic right of plants not to be used against their will as a means to my ends. I respect their basic right not to be killed against their will. That is because plants do not have a will. No matter what I do, I respect their rights because those rights are trivial for plants. So, the basic right not to be used against your will as merely a means should be given to everyone and everything in the universe, including elektrons, planets, cars, laptops, trees, pigs,... without any arbitrary exceptions. You cannot accuse me of making arbitrary exceptions.

that is clearly not what the nutritional scientists meant with "can be". You don't have to scoure the globe etc. Eating vegan is perfectly feasible.

I don't know where you live, but I bet for you it is as realistic as it is for me. So let's consider our duties, without hiding ourselves behind "the majority of humans".

yes, Hitler was antihuman, because he placed some humans (jews) lower than some animals. So let us suppose that Hitler was like me a real animal rights activist, against all kinds of violence towards animals, against killing them, against vivisection, etc... Let us, for the sake of the argument, suppose this is true. Then, what would happen if Hilter believed that humans are equal to animals? Use your logical reasoning skills. Yes, there would be no holocaust, no war, no racism, no cruel experiments on humans. So that would be good. The problem with Hilter would than be that he did not believe that humans are equal to animals. If only he believed that...
So Hitler was clearly inconsistent: he was against vivisection of animals but pro using some humans (disabled, jews,...) against their will in cruel experiments.

anyone who disagrees is a speciesist. And yes, that is "as if" s/he is racist or sexist. Because both speciesism and racism and sexism are kinds of immoral, arbitrary discriminations that cause harm.

uhm... are you suggesting that my attitute against rape is the result of indoctrination by neo-feminists? But you are also strongly against rape, aren't you?

I am male.
And I don't see the harm I bring down upon females when I communicate my anti-rape attitude


that is similar to what I meant with anti androcentrism: against men.


you do not ahve evidence that I am malnourished, but I do have evidence that you violate someone's basic right by using someone's body against his/her will (by eating his/her muscle tissue). And that is comparable to what a rapist does: using someone's body (vagina) against her will.

As long as you can't give a morally relevant difference between humans and non-humans, we cannot arbitrarily exclude nonhumans from the moral community. The starting assumption is that everyone and everything is morally equal, until there is evidence of moral inequality, i.e. until there is evidence of a morally relevent difference. So please tell me what that difference is.

well, there are no mentally disabled humans engaging in this discussion here today because they are unable. Therefore mentally disabled humans cannot be equivalent to mentally abled humans? Therefore we can use their bodies against their will as means to our ends, for experiments or meat? Do you give basic rights to mentally disabled humans? I hope you do. But then, what is the difference with non-human animals?

necause if you believe eating those humans is immoral whereas eating non-human animals is permissible, and if you are not able to point at a morally relevant difference, then you are guilty of discrimination. And if you are allowed to choose your victims arbitrarily, then so am I and so is everyone. And you cannot want that. If you are allowed to be speciesist, then a rapist is allowed to be sexist.

again, if you don't believe they are equivalent, you have to give a reason, a criterion, a morally relevant difference. Merely making a claim is not sufficient.

authority fallacy?

perhaps this will convince you
https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/the-health-benefits-of-vegan-diets/
http://www.greatveganathletes.com/

well at least veganism is not counter to facts, reality and our originally held strongest moral beliefs.

 but no-one told me to use the rape analogy. I used it because it is a valid analogy. Rape is bad because of X (this is a moral judgment you already agree with), eating meat also satisfies X (this is a true fact, whether or not you believe it) and there eating meat is bad. That is a matter of consistency
(X= harm, rights violations, use of body against the will,...)

shaming against all men? As if all males are potential rapists? Trauma based control? What are you talking about? It seems you're making things up. Yo do know that I don't believe that all males are potential rapists.
And almost all feminists are not gynocentric, they don't believe women are more important than men.


or like asking the question "what is your obsession with rape?" The assumed premisse is that the person being asked is obsessed with rape.

it is rather a matter of consistency.

that's like the rapist who responds to the judge: "No one is attempting to push you to rape someone"

yes. And if I look at your basic moral intuitions and judgments, you have to come to the same conclusion. You think rape and slavery are very bad, and the very reason why they are bad, according to you, is the same reason why eating meat is bad. Rape is very bad because someone's body (someone's vagina) belongs to that individual and not to you, so you should not use someone's body in a way that she strongly dislikes. The same can be said about someone's muscle tissue.

yes. or a woman, in the case of rape.

yes

in this context: yes

vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for all humans: http://www.eatright.org/About/Content.aspx?id=8357


it rather might have demonstrated that hitler did not do 100% bad things.
You refer to antihuman, but reference to humans is morally arbitrary. You and I are as much primate and as much mammal as we are human. So when you speak about antihuman, you could as well use antimammal or anti dry nosed primate. And if you are white, you could have said antiwhite.

what do you mean with that? My fascination with rape? Gynocentric brainwashing?



then how did you use the word antihuman?
Of course the rapist would not argue against a male centric viewpoint. I was comparing it with your claim. A meat eater says that anti meat talk is anti human. Well, than a rapist says that anti rape talk is anti male. You see the analogy? It is an analogy between two fallacious argumants.

that it is bad. But that is not an obsession. So what do you mean with an obsession, and why do you believe i'm obsessed with rape?


yes. If you disagree, than give me a morally relevant difference betwene those humans and non-human animals. But you can't give that, because from the 1000+ people i spoke with (including philosophers, slaughterhouse workers, anti-animal rights people,...) no-one could give a relevant difference.

no-one, because that is immoral.

you can hide behind words like "personal choice" or "lifestyle", but you do know that abstaining from harming (eating, raping,...) someone is not merely a matter of personal choice.

conformity bias does not mean there is an intentional, conscious or overt pressure from the group. Cfr the experiment of Asch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments The group members did not overtly or consciously pressure the subject to give the wrong answer.

including "malnourished"? That's a factual claim, and you don't even know me. You do not know what I eat and what kinds of physical activities I do. So where is your evidence that I'm malnourished?

Belgium
But why do you use the word brainwahsing? Give me some evidence that this is brainwashed. And first give a definition, what you mean with brainwashing.

yes, and some sources claim he wasn't vegetarian http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/hitler.html
I guess we will never know the truth. Luckily, the truth doesn't matter here.

yes, the nazi's had (for those days) very progressive animal and environmental protection laws. Not really consistent with what they did to jews. But at least we learn again that not everything is black or white. Even the nazi's did some good things or abstained from doing some bad things.

seriously now: when refering to Hitler's diet, what argument did you really try to make? Can you explain the logic of your argument, and the point you wanted to make? It seems you wanted to make an argument against vegetarianism, but that would be strange, because it would be an obvious fallacy. So what were your intentions? 

do you know how group pressure works? I was refering to groupthink or conformity bias (http://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/conformity-bias), as was demonstrated in the experiments of social psychologist Solomon Asch and others

well, ethical vegans are at the moral high ground. Meat eaters are really pushing their lifestyle way too far on others, when they even kill and eat others just for taste. Not harming someone, not subjecting someone in slavery, not raping someone, not killing and eating someone are not mere lifestyle choices. And yes, the rapist responds that I should not push my anti-rape lifestyle on him. But it is he who pushes his pro rape lifestyle on his female victims.


and what is wrong with the given argument that you should not use someone else against his will as merely a means, that your body belongs to you and no-one else, and that counts equally for everyone, without any arbitrary exceptions? What about the argument that lifetime well-being is what matters and that livestock farming decreases someone's lifetime well-being? What would you prefer: not being able anymore to eat someone else, or being killed and eaten by someone else? You prefer the former, so that indicates the importance of the interests at stake.
You do agree that we are not allowed to choose our victims arbitrarily, that someone else's muscle tissue belongs to that individual and that we cannot claim his or her muscle tissue, and that we should no do something that someone else seriously dislikes.

it is, because a meat based diet harms others, and morality is about not harming others.

 
but the act of eating plants is better than the act of eating someone's muscle tissue. You do agree with that, I hope.

he was not even a vegetarian. And I have a different notion of environmentalism.
But suppose he was a vegan: do you have any idea how irrelevant that would be? It's like the rapist who responds to the anti-rape activist by saying that Hitler did not rape anyone.
Why do you give such highly irrelevant (and even incorrect, as Hitler was not vegan) statements?

 like the rapists who says that all this anti-rape talk is anti-androcentrism (anti-male)
It is not new agey spiritual bullshit, because you agree with my starting points. You agree that discrimination is wrong, that mentally disabled humans have an intrinsic right not to be used against their will as merely a means for food,...
Here is another argulentation scheme for veganism
http://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/argumentation-scheme-veganism-2/
If you disagree with the moral conclusion that we should eat vegan, then you should be able to point at an assumption in the argument that you reject.

 that sounds like an ad hominem. You lose credibility if you give fallacies in a discussion.