Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

It’s not posturing, you keep reading into my messages some kind of emotional sentiment because you’re an expressivist, but I’m not. When I make a claim about someone doing something evil, it’s exactly the same kind of claim as saying they’re walking or running. It’s not an expression of my emotional preferences, it’s a logical deduction based on simple axioms we all take.

I’m just not willing to say that anyone who doesn’t share my specific views is morally bankrupt as you seem to be.

No, you reach for different language. You call them “insane”. You’ve done this in thread when describing immoral acts (e.g torturing the wolf), but you nor I know if they’re descriptively insane. We aren’t their psychiatrist. You just have to reach for some language, and your understanding of moral philosophy doesn’t allow you to reach to moral language, even though that’s what you’re actually doing; making a logical deduction based on normative axioms, in other words an objective moral judgement that may be right or wrong.

I’m just going to ignore the pissing part of your comment because for like the fourth time you misunderstood what I was saying, but I can’t really be bothered to correct you repeatedly on simple reading comprehension problems you have. Feel free to read the comments back if you want.

As for the latter part you’ve literally never addressed any part of my major thesis here, about the basis for descriptive and normative truths. Are you an epistemological nihilist? Do you understand the purpose of axioms in forming coherent worldviews? How and why do you differentiate between descriptive and normative axioms? Because one makes you feel better?

No, you misread or misunderstood some of what I was writing. Veganism is not an approach to reduce consumption as far as you feel like, it’s an approach to reduce consumption as far as possible. Those are two very different things. Do you honestly not understand the difference?

Typically vegan items are SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive,

Common talking point, actually false. 5 years ago it was kind of true if you were talking purely about substitutes (e.g replacing beef with beyond meat), but that is no longer true, and beyond meat is vastly more expensive than rice and beans. Like orders of magnitude more expensive. The cheapest food on the planet, by a metric fuckload, is vegan food. Even with the government providing billions of dollars of subsidies for animal flesh.

The entire economic angle is not an actual sticking point for non-vegans, it’s not why you choose to partake in consuming tortured animals. This one actually frustrates me a bit, because there are people who actually do have economic problems, and they generally complain about the price of meat, eggs, and milk. They don’t complain about the price of lettuce, beans, or rice.

Ideally, we’d all live off the land, eating sustainable food sources. If you eat meat, it’s something you killed and prepared yourself.

Inflicting suffering for pleasure is not ideal. I don’t understand what axioms you’re taking that justify taste pleasure over the life of sentient animals.

That’s an easy dig, but in reality there are a lot of people who believe irrational things are objectively true (God, flat earth, moon landing being staged, etc.). Not all these people have mental disorders.

I feel like your answer is more of a deflection than an honest answer. The point I was making was that you do believe somethings are objectively true, and that some people are actually objectively wrong.

Which is contradictory to your statement “I don’t think that you CAN arrive at a concrete truth”. As far as I can tell, you do believe in objective truth.

Sure, I’d have a nuanced view as an abolitionist, just like I have a nuanced view of veganism.

The only way to truly eliminate all forms of animal suffering you contribute to is to end your own life, but nobody has a moral obligation to commit suicide (this is actually an axiom, sentient beings have a right to life). So what you’re actually obligated to do is not participate in suffering in ways that are possible/practicable. Like people need to drive to work to survive, tires have animal products in them and we currently have no alternative to move 15 miles in 30 minutes that doesn’t use some animal product.

The areas vegans operate in are the areas where there exist actual alternatives. Food, clothing, hygiene, etc.

It’s not actually just universally immoral to have bread with milk in it. If you’re starving in the middle of the desert, and someone hands you a glass of milk and some cheese, you don’t have an obligation to starve yourself (again, because you have a right to life).

What you are obligated to do is when you’re in the store and staring at 2 different brands of bread and one of them has baby cow juice and the other one doesn’t, you take the one that doesn’t. Not as a form of harm reduction, but because it’s not permissible in that context to demand that sort of suffering from a cow just for convenience or taste (a lot of people aren’t familiar with how cows even work, there are people who genuinely believe dairy cows exist for example, as in cows that just always produce milk from the point of adulthood).

You can’t be obligated to do something you’re incapable of doing (this is why it’s not immoral for lions to eat meat, they lack the capacity to act as moral agents). You are however obligated to not demand or inflict suffering.

Obligations or rights sometimes conflict. You have a right to life, but you also have an obligation to not inflict suffering. This is where morality gets harder and we can actually have interesting discussions about how to behave.

What’s deeply uninteresting though is when obligations or rights don’t conflict. Someone wants bacon because it’s tasty, but it requires the inflicting of massive amounts of suffering. This isn’t a complicated calculus, there’s one obligation (don’t inflict suffering), you have the ability to change it, and it doesn’t conflict with your own right to life. Vegans live and exist healthily (all major medical associations in America and Europe have consistently found that veganism is healthy at all stages of life, pregnant, baby, elderly, normal adult, whatever).

And no, we don’t need to go into the political philosophy of different forms of governance (e.g dictatorship), that would be an entirely different discussion.

I’ll probably keep replying as long as I have something to say, I’m not offended whichever way you decide to go on it lmao

If I lived in the 1850s, I would not have been able to settle for half measures for slavery. There were people who advocated for reform in slavery, e.g make it illegal to physically assault your slaves (similar to wage slaves), those people were in the minority but they existed.

If I was talking to a slave owner, and he started talking about half measures, how he treats his slaves with dignity, works them 10 hours a day and lets them have 5-6 hours to themselves everyday, how he never physically abuses them and let’s the slave families stay together, and how he advocates for reform in slavery to make physical abuse illegal, I would still say what he’s doing is a moral abomination, and say that he has a moral obligation to free his slaves. I’d still be an staunch abolitionist.

I thought this was the main thread.

You don’t functionally hold that the earth is round as an objectively true thing? What’s your perspective on flat earthers? They’re arriving at a different conclusion with the same information and that’s somehow valid?

I won’t be offended if you don’t reply to this, partially because we both want to focus on the other thread, but mostly because this is an argument of semantics, which is just us trying to align on the way we use words, and not actually a discussion about something important like what’s right or wrong to do.

You’re entirely ignoring the connotation of the word sacrifice. The connotation of sacrifice is so powerful, it’s mentioned in some definitions, e.g:

“A sacrifice is a loss or something you give up, usually for the sake of a better cause”

I wouldn’t call not raping a slave a sacrifice, even though (to use your words) “you don’t participate the same way, you don’t get to enjoy the same [biological pleasures], one[s] you may have loved initially. People will be asking you why you aren’t [satisfying your primal desires]. People will be making snide remarks. All of this is friction you do not have to go through, ergo it is a sacrifice”. Yet, in common English, it’d be ridiculous to say someone who stops raping their slaves is sacrificing something, because it heavily implies that they’re giving something up for the sake of some grand cause, when really all they’re doing is not engaging in morally reprehensible behavior. It’s not virtuous to not inflict suffering, it’s a moral obligation.

It may be something you say at a technical level given some definition you find, but if you’re actually out with your friends, and someone mentions “oh did you know [some slave owner] stopped raping his slaves because he found religion?” you wouldn’t unironically say “damn what a sacrifice”.

Isn’t the entire point of debate to change the views of someone else on some unknowable?

Think about conversing with someone who has a mental disorder, where their version of reality literally doesn’t align with yours. If they don’t want to help themselves, there’s essentially nothing you can do short of force-feeding them medication to get them to align and actually have a coherent conversation with them.

People who don’t have mental disorders have some shared framework to operate under. You’ll both believe that the other is conscious, that you both have sensory experiences that depict the (functionally) same reality, etc. These are unproveable axioms you take at baseline to have a conversation with someone else, always.

What happens first for me may happen third for someone else from a different spacetime perspective

Only to someone outside of your lightcone. If this was the case to someone within your lightcone, then you’d run into all sorts of paradoxes. Functionally our universe has consistent ordering. Either way an interesting sidebar but irrelevant to the broader discussion.

Morality entirely exists within axioms, and they’re mostly formed by where you were raised

Morality (normative reality) is entirely based on axioms, but it doesn’t exist entirely within them. This is also true for descriptive reality. Nothing is truly knowable (epistemological nihilism is valid), but functionally we believe in objective truth (both descriptive and normative) because we take axioms that are so obvious and self-evident that they might as well be undeniable facts.

Morality has no objective truths. Morality entirely exists within axioms & I can agree that flat earthers and people who use religion to defend stoning innocents are both guilty of a similar kind of thought … ‘crime’

These are contradictions given the definition of morality I’m operating under (a system of normative truths). It seems your definition might be essentially a set of practices a culture or individual engages in, and in that case it’s just tautologically subjective, but that’s a deeply uninteresting point (like the point that a triangle has 3 sides).

Interestingly, that second statement you made signals to me that we might agree more than we think. So instead of using the word “morality”, I’m going to start using the phrase “normative reality” to describe the set of truths that exist in the normative realm. Do you agree that arriving at truth in the descriptive realm and normative realm is epistemologically identical?

Agreed on the first part, one thread sounds fine.

I just want to say I was a meat eater for my entire life too up until being a vegan. I wasn’t raised vegan, my family wasn’t vegan, nobody around me was vegan. I still don’t hold that it was a sacrifice. Even if you lived in a society where everyone raped (sounds far fetched but this was allowable 150 years ago to your “property”), it’s not a sacrifice to forego those urges and not engage in what’s been normalized. It’s the bare minimum moral requirement.

I asked it for good reason, the structure of the sentence doesn’t lend itself to the misinterpretation you had. You would’ve had to completely restructure the sentence to arrive at “moral subjectivism is a minor view” because in that exact sentence I mentioned in the context it was a minority view, amongst PhD graduates. You would’ve had to not connect the first and second part of the sentence to arrive at a misunderstanding that was severe enough that you literally said I lost all credibility.

This makes much more sense if you come from another language where subject/object placement is different.

I made a simple rebuttal to that view

My guy, I didn’t even express my view yet when you made that comment. This really comes across as bad faith, because I even expressly said I was going to express my view (future tense). Sometimes it’s okay to actually have a discussion and not try to dismantle the other person’s view before they even had a chance to express it

In both of these scenarios, if you believe that morality is objective, then both people are in the wrong

That’s a crude reduction. If you have conflicting wrongs (e.g a human dies or a rabbit dies), then you choose the one that is less wrong, because you have no other option. This isn’t a moral question, it’s a functional one with a very basic moral consideration (is a human worth more than a rabbit). It should be obvious to you by the very existence of people who abstain from animal products that modern western society is not the kind of place where we’re constantly choosing between the life of a pig and a life of a human.

I’ll give you moral objectivism if you also give up that morality is relative

This should stay in the confines of the other thread, because like I said I didn’t even express my view before you made this comment or the other one. I gave you a chance to express your view, and once you have a chance to understand and internalize mine, then you can try reframing this in that thread, though I think you’ll understand why this doesn’t make sense after you read my other comment.

let people live their lives as long as they’re not doing something completely insane like this person did.

Exactly, and to be more specific, what you mean by “completely insane” is “morally unjust” and I entirely agree. Let people live their lives as long as what they’re doing isn’t morally unjustified.

You can make sacrifices it takes to not eat meat

Veganism isn’t activism. It’s not a sacrifice. Or I’ll put it another way, it’s only a sacrifice in the way that not raping is a sacrifice. I have a biological urge to eat and have sex, and I want to engage in these acts in a consensual way. Some people might view consent here as unnecessary, and that you should just follow your biological urges and take what you want so long as nature allows it. As I understand it, that’s a disgusting and incorrect way to go about the world.

Asking if English is your first language isn’t an ad hom, if you spoke this well as a non-native speaker that’d be more impressive than misunderstanding it as a native speaker, but neither is wrong or whatever, you just misunderstood me and used it as the basis for claiming I lost all credibility, which was annoying, but not a huge deal as long as it’s cleared up now.

Objective truths require objective evidence

So I’ll start my thesis here, hopefully it’s not too abstract for you to follow when you’ve never engaged in this type of material before by your own admission.

Objective evidence exists only within the framework of certain axioms. When you take some simple evidence, let’s say an apple falling, how do you know it fell? You take it as an axiom that your senses are accurate in describing some material set of conditions that exist in an objective reality. Even the concept of an objective reality that is shared with other beings is an axiom we take. You could just as easily be in a simulation alone, with no other conscious beings around you. Reality could be constructed as you view it.

This could be true even without a simulation theory. You could be the sole conscious being in existence, and all of reality is a hallucination that you just believe has to have consistent objective truths, so that’s how it appears to you.

The point is, it’s not truly knowable what the true state of reality is without taking axioms (engaging in assumptions). Once you assume there’s a real, shared, persistent objective reality, and that your senses accurately depict this objective reality in an ontologically consistent way, then you can start building what we call objective truths. (If you want to do your own reading in this realm, this position is called epistemological nihilism).

Moral truths function literally identically to this. Without axioms, in both the descriptive and normative realm, nothing is knowable. Functionally that doesn’t work though, people take axioms unconsciously, and we can’t not take them. If this isn’t your first exposure to the idea of axioms, you’ll understand it’s generally regarded as better (or often even required) to only take axioms that are “self-evident”. That is to say, you don’t take an axiom that all matter in the universe is held up by invisible flying unicorns, but you would take the axiom that you exist in some ontologically consistent and shared space.

If you’re in a conversation with someone, and for some reason they take a different axiom than you (e.g some people take the axiom that God exists, which is honestly far too complex to be reasonable), then you can’t functionally communicate about the nature of your (supposedly) shared universe. So to have the conversation, the religious person has to drop the axiom to be able to discuss whether or not you’re able to arrive at the existence of God by building off other axioms that all humans share (hint: you’re not).

Normative discussions work this way too. Essentially all humans take it as an axiom that suffering is bad (there are exceptions in both the descriptive and normative case, e.g schizophrenia or sociopathy, where generally accepted axioms about the true nature of things are misaligned).

You can use logic and reason to build off descriptive and normative axioms, and some people do this incorrectly because they’re being irrational. Just because people disagree on these things doesn’t mean we throw out the idea of objective truth (descriptive or normative), it just means some people are going about understanding the true nature of reality wrong. Flat earthers and Islamic fundamentalists stoning gay people are both wrong in the same kind of way, they’re not using logic to build off proper axioms to try to find the truth.

You’re not a cultural/moral relativist. In the other comment thread I’ll explain the philosophy behind objective morality slowly by helping you build a framework for understanding how we arrive at any piece of knowledge.

In this thread I’ll take a different approach, which is to say functionally nobody is actually a moral relativist. A moral relativist would believe that in Islamic countries, it’s fine that they stone gay people to death because that’s a cultural norm they arrived at. They would believe that raping slaves in the 1840s in America was fine because that was a cultural norm they arrived at.

Nobody actually believes these things in our society, they just use the abstract concept of subjective morality to justify whatever current atrocity they fancy indulging in. For past atrocities that no longer interest you, there’s no moral subjectivism.

People obviously have preferences and tendencies, but sometimes those preferences are wrong. Raping slaves, stoning gays, etc. are not sometimes right based on some subjective collective framework for understanding interactions. Again, I’ll explain the actual philosophy behind this in the other thread, but in this comment I’m just pointing out how nobody actually functionally thinks this way in our society.

It’s similar to how in our society we understand the earth is round, but in past societies they understood it to be flat. The interesting thing is those other societies were wrong, even though they had a different understanding. Personal or even collective understanding is not always the basis for true knowledge. Probably getting too philosophical for what I intended for this comment though, since the other one will get into this more.

Do you believe in descriptive, objective truth? Like let’s say gravity, do you believe gravity to be an objective fact? Or that the world is round? Is that fact a subjective one or an objective one?

Also fwiw I’m an atheist, always have been. The vast majority of (modern) moral realists within philosophy are atheist too.

When you said moral subjectivism is a minor belief you lost all credibility

Is English not your first language? If not you speak it very well for a non-native speaker. I didn’t say moral subjectivism is a minor belief, I said it’s a belief held in the minority (more specifically when you take polls of philosophy PhD majors, they on average believe in objective, secular, moral truths). It’s an incredibly non-minor belief, it’s the foundation for how you understand morality.

I’d posit it’s outside a human’s ability to know it

This is on the right track believe it or not, but this principle is more generally true than you might be aware of. We’ll get to this.

Also I don’t know how interested in discussion you are, or if you’re just looking to do the standard anti-vegan bitching routine, but on the off chance that you actually want to engage with something, I’ll post this thought here.

I get why you think what I said was an ad hom, but that’s actually only the case if moral subjectivism is true (a view held by a minority of philosophy PhD majors). Not to say that that’s undeniable evidence in favor of objective morality, it’s obviously not, just saying the people who spend the better part of 8 years studying this type of thing don’t come to the uniform conclusion that morality is subjective. I have good rationale for an objective morality I can go into assuming you’re familiar with epistemology.

In the mean time, using objective morality as the operating assumption, calling something you do evil is not an ad hom, it’s an observational fact. The fact that you saw it as an ad hom signals to me that you’re not only a moral relativist, but specifically an expressivist (you view moral statements as merely expressions of emotional/personal preference), which is honestly a pretty minority view in the grand scheme of philosophers.

People don’t hate vegans in real life, people bitch online when they’re confronted with uncomfortable facts, but in reality people think you’re virtuous and good (when really this is a misunderstanding of veganism, but whatever).

You’re just as hard-line as me, so is essentially every western person. You’re just hard-line about things you (correctly) understand are immoral. You would never compromise on rape, slavery, genocide, a half a dozen other things because you correctly understand engaging in those actions is a moral abomination. You’d likely include abusing dogs in that too ironically, but not abusing pigs.

People arrive at different conclusions, but people are often wrong. It’s wrong to pay for abuse and torture of cats, dogs, pigs, horses, humans, etc.

You’ll understand that it’s wrong to pay for dog meat. You’ll understand that gassing dogs is wrong, or that holding them in cages so small that their legs atrophy and they can’t walk is wrong. You’ll understand that dragging them up by their legs and slitting their throats while they bleed out for minutes is wrong.

That’s because you were normalized In a society that doesn’t objectify dogs. Your inability to generalize that principle to other more intelligent animals (like pigs) is just a human failing; your inability to universally apply reason when it should be applied.

Nobody forced you to comment or engage, that’s on you. If you’re going to continue funding abuse and torture, without taking time to reflect on whether it’s permissible or not morally, more power to you man. I know people normalize evil things, this isn’t news to me.

Dude, I’m sorry for you honestly. It must be exhausting to force yourself to engage with people online and then get mad and frustrated at them and yourself for arguing.

I engage online because I find value in it, engaging with other views is how I learn. I wasn’t born a vegan socialist, I was born a meat-eating capitalist, and lived that way through my childhood into early adulthood. I found value in engaging online in different ways with different views to assess the true state of the world and grow as a person.

You on the other hand seem miserable and agitated. You don’t seem to be gaining anything from this, so I genuinely don’t understand why you’re doing this. You should talk to a therapist if you don’t already, it’s helpful in a ton of ways ime.

I ask genuine questions, you call me a pissbaby (because you misunderstood me lol) before I say anything to you that could be construed as negative , then you call me whiney and flip out that I told you you could fuck off as an alternative to reading what I said earlier. You’re projecting a lot of negativity outwards and then get incredibly frustrated when anyone says anything remotely negative towards you, like you’re entitled to just be as negative as you want but anyone who reciprocates that negativity is morally failing. It’s wild, and like I said earlier, must be exhausting. This can’t possibly be healthy for you.