I think both things can be true. I do think that "right" should be an exclusively legal term describing a range of actions a human can in principle perform and that the State tries to guarantee all its citizens should be able to perform. In that sense, animals do not have the right to life and not suffer, because no state on Earth has outlawed killing flies. So unless this guy lives on another planet that is empiriclally wrong but it is not logically incoherent.

@@tafazzi-on-discord Oh, I hear you. But the issue is that he assumes a right which is NOT legal. Notice that he is fighting against that thing which is allowed by law (the eating of animals), and so Alex's definition of right would seem to be opposed to a legal grounding.

Atheist is always deluded with their own mind.

@@unapologeticapologetics6953 One can say that the absence of a right is morally wrong and can fight to get it working. Or to be very unwieldy one could say that if something is a moral right, it is worth it to try and make it an actual right, a moral right being a right that "ought be there". I still have trouble following this guy, his exposition of his position is too unprecise for me.

@@tafazzi-on-discord I agree! But the issue is that Alex assumes no objective moral values, and as such, he has no logical and authoritative reason to argue for the reforms that he desires. You are correct, but you are not describing Alex's position. You are describing a different one.

Exactly, and his attempt at a reductio ad absurdum by saying he used to be star dust doesn't work, because while it may be the case that the matter that makes up his body is "star dust", it's not the case that Alex used to literally be a star or something, whereas we were all literally zygotes.

@@jasonwolfe2991 Very well observed. Such is the recourse and conclusions based upon untenable premises which are ultimately rooted in pride.

No “human” ,born or otherwise, has a right to someone else’s bodily resources against their continued consent.

@Tercio Novohispano Yes, I can't believe he keeps bringing up a deer falling down in the woods and getting a boo-boo as a knockdown argument against God.

@Tercio Novohispano How is an emotivist by definition irrational? An emotivist believes people make moral judgments based on how it makes them feel. I might have discovered that I am an emotivist.

@@josephpostma1787 Emotivism, at least discussed here, is deeper than a description of how and why people make their moral choices, as you’ve put it. What emotivists hold is that any and all moral statement and judgements are fundamentally descriptions of emotional states. A person saying “you ought not murder” is, at rock bottom, just expressing disapproval, merely saying “I don’t like murder”. Under your description, emotivists can still hold to the sorts of categorical imperatives that Trent holds to, but this is clearly not the case. Emotivists do not believe in categorical imperatives.

@@Zosso-1618 If you take out the "fundamentally", I suspect that emotivism is generally the case, and when it is not the case, your emotions often come to agree with the earlier ethical proposition. What is meant by "categorical imperatives"?

@@josephpostma1787 Yeah if you take out fundamentally, you stop dealing with actual emotivism lmao

Yup. He is more interested in what amounts to trivial brain teasers than any real deep thought. Despite his oversized brain and education. I find him to be one of the least interesting people in these debates.

What if killing non-human animals is not necessary for human survival?

@@jacobfrancis8310 Human survival is far too low a bar there. We are meant to steward the earth, but that doesn't mean to coddle all the animals at the expense of humans. Those animals would otherwise not exist / be eaten soon within nature if I didn't eat them. If it makes people happier than the alternative and has the same or lower overall cost (eg a direct and total benefit) then eating animals is fully justified because humans and animals are not on the same moral plane. One example is those fake meat burgers - they're horrible for you, and they tend to be more expensive. Ditto for almond milk vs cow milk, etc.

I agree that there's no contradiction, though for example, if I state "I find no issue with punching people who have names beginning with J, but I find it wrong to punch people who have names beginning with E" there's no contradiction, yes, but it's inconsistent. You need a reason to separate the two claims so that one is okay and one is not. Alex most likely believes there is not enough of a substantial difference between humans and animals; from this one could infer that if killing one is wrong, to be consistent, killing both should be wrong. That's probably why he argues that it would be inconsistent to believe otherwise. Just because there's no contradiction does not mean something is consistent, at least in the way that he is using the word. If the only misunderstanding was the use of the word consistent then this should clear it up hopefully

@@68m8rz I hear you, but Alex cannot call that position "internally inconsistent." In the same way that it isn't at all inconsistent to say "I am fine with punching people whose names starts with J, but will not punch people whose names start with E." This actually is not an inconsistent belief at all. It is just, by itself, UNSUBSTANTIATED.

Begging the question and apolegetics, name a better duo

It seems that Alex thinks something like animals that can suffer should not suffer if possible including humans. I do not think that Alex believes that unborn animals can suffer, so, unborn human animals also cannot suffer.

You glorify a god who actually kills children

Amen!

I think many people eat meat for taste. Not everyone, but many people do. I do believe many go vegan and have health problems. I do aware that. But, if even we eat meat for healthy life. It doesnt justify the meat we eat came from industrial farming. However, industrial meat can be justify in some cases. If i lived in poor country,and cheap industrial meat is only meat that i can afford. Then, it is justify for you to eat industrial meat. I myself is vegetarian. Sometime i eat cake that contain milk. Reason i eat that because it taste good and i cant resist it. So if someone call me wronf, i admit it. It wrong base in my moral standard but i did it anyway, because it is really hard to become strict vegan.

That's extremely interesting because I remember Jordan Peterson saying that going from Vegetarianism to a carnivorous diet, actually was how he not only lost weight, but prior health issues disappeared as well

@@robinrobyn1714 But JP also ended up in and out of hospitals for years after switching to an all beef diet. It may be due to coming off meds, but I do believe eating only beef contributed to his decline in health.

for me its not the taste of meat. To me a veggie pizza has more flavor. Its I literally feel more nourished from eating meat, and veggies dont do well with my IBD. FOr me, if we get lab grown meat that is real animal meat without the suffering, that is the most desirable moral state.

@@vela-6 he didnt eat nly beef, just beef and green vegetables

A parasitic clump of cells with no brain activity is not a human nor has special rights over a woman’s bodily autonomy.

@@2l84me8 Thanks very much for your reply. I have some questions for you. Ok, so would it be correct to infer that humans beget parasites? Also, would someone in a coma or with 100% Alzheimer's disease lose his status as a human? Thirdly, would a prisoner of war or a stow-away on a ship, who would be dependent for sustenance on his captors, be considered a parasite?

@@MM22272 A zygote or fetus is functionally no different from a parasite in that regard. It doesn’t have special rights to violate someone else’s bodily autonomy even if it were biologically independent. Your questions regarding comatose states and cannibalism aren’t relevant to this discussion nor do they apply.

@@2l84me8 Is a zygote or fetus human such with its own DNA and blood type? To commit a violation (as you characterise human gestation) requires moral conscience and free will. Since at that stage of human development these faculties are not operational, how could a human zygote or fetus violate his mother? Try re-reading my previous comment. You won't find any comments regarding cannibalism. Evidently you somehow assumed that. On the other hand, only if you are able, try again to answer the questions.

@@MM22272 Why are you asserting that a parasitic relationship requires free will or morals? That’s completely irrelevant to this topic. You mentioned something regarding captors and sustenance, so I assumed you were making an analogy to cannibalism.

Why is it ok to kill lettuce and not a piglet?

@@tafazzi-on-discord cause Lettuce can feel pain, fear, emotions and even cry while piglets just stood still and do nothing

@@TrideepNagg I was asking this guy. You cannot logically be pro life and at the same time argue that the basis for whether to kill something is if they feel pain. Also who cares if piglets feel pain? Pain is like sight, it's just a sense. There is absolutely no good reason to consider it of ultimate moral significance. I try to find the weak spot of any ideology, even if they are correctly prolifers they need to provide reasons for their position on the lives of animals.

@@tafazzi-on-discord Are you Catholic? If so realize that if you cause someone who was doing good to renounce that good and sin, that is scandal and you are liable to under pain of sin corresponding in severity to the offense caused.

@@tafazzi-on-discord Why would you ask me this question? I already said that from my worldview nothing is objectively good or evil. If you wanna know my opinion I think that is a shame that we live in a world where a living creature has to kill another one to survive and if we can do something to minimize the suffering in the world then we should do it.

Yes. In the meantime he can bless his own equipment is which he has control over

Amen

You literally are ok with Aborting kids but think killing animals is a worse ethical issue. Ya. your insane. Atheists don't have morals, just hedonistic preferences.

Vegan pro-lifer here, just letting you know that we do exist and are not as rare as you might imagine!

@@laurameszaros9547 I'm glad your more consistent then Alex and I definitely have sympathies for the vegan argument, but my anecdotal guess is that 5% of vegans are pro life.

I heared people say things like "I am (vegetarian) but I don't want to outlaw hunting or farming, I also would not want to ban abortion even though I wouldn't do it myself" The pro life position is stronger than "abortion is wrong", we stand for statal intervention to prevent that from happening.

@@Wolfschanzeful Unfortunately I think you are probably right on that one. However I will say that it was only after I became vegan that I grew towards the pro-life position. Only after I became vegan did I start to consider the little thing that can't speak for itself in the human as well as the animal context.

@@laurameszaros9547 very interesting. Kinda shows that you were also once part of the vegan pro "choice" crowd too. I'm really glad that veganism was the catalyst for you. Maybe that's a good learning opportunity for all of us pro lifers: since veganism is a growing trend, use that to our advantage when we promote pro life positions. Maybe more will come to pro life in the same way as you!

Yeah great job RCC.. flip flop doctrines. Mary worship (sickening) or... Hiperdulia excuse me.. purgatory definitely exists, praying to saints clearly scriptural... Holy water, hail Marys, yes.. I should definitely listen to their interpretation.. a church with more blood on its hands than Heinrich Himmler. O and the inspired books of the Bible were already known before they apparently compiled them if youre going to use that lame arguemnt. O please protect us Mary, Queen of Heaven.. how sick. Not to mention Cardinals with their hundred thousand dollar outfits while people eat dirt cookies.. and their gay bars . I'll pass..o and Jesus doesn't turn into a wafer shaped like the sun.. he was figuritively speaking 100x in His ministry but the time he said to EAT HIM.. THATS when He was being literal. Give me a break..

@@anonymous.1303 Word salad diarrhea

It's morally acceptable to kill an animal for the benefit of a human. It is morally unacceptable to cause an animal to suffer unduly. If your work is benefiting a human by killing an animal, do not make it suffer unduly.

@@461weavile Isn’t unduly suffering dependent on a kind of subjective view?

@@lt3746 yes. We're not robots. Not everything is as simple as find where the line intersects the axis.

Must be hard for him to see lobster in Maine Lobster Festival.

@Tercio Novohispano Lol, you're everywhere in this comment section ☠️

Your argument might be more convincing if the apostle Paul had not exhorted slaves to obey their masters. You say we are all capable of seeing objective moral truths even if they happen not to be currently in vogue, but Paul's perspective generally was to encourage kindness to slaves whilst being all but silent on the question of the institution itself, which is not challenged, let alone condemned, anywhere in the Bible. Since the Bible is believed by most Christians to be the unerring word of the divine, it is surely remarkably remiss of God not to have pronounced forthrightly and clearly against this evil. Strange that we have all had to wait for secularly minded folks during the last two centuries to confront it, rather than being able to rely on incontrovertible scriptural evidences from the outset. Strange that UN human rights declarations take more advanced positions on this subject than do the holy books of either the Jews, Christians or Muslims.

@@laurameszaros9547 hey why do you think Paul exorted slaves to obey their masters like for example because he thought is was moral or because he did not condone it ect ect and if so what evidence do you have to support your conclusion. For example I and many others belive it was because he was trying to protect the slaves from the consequences of rebellion. Also keep in mind just because God or the Bible condones some behavior or regulates laws it does not mean it was because it wasn’t bad for example when they asked Jesus if divorced was not good why did Moses allow it to wich he replied because of the men hardness of heart.

@@laurameszaros9547 the slavery question is a lot more complicated than people realize. The Bible and the Catholic Church oppose chattel slavery, which is the ownership of a person. But it's not intrinsically evil to own someone's labor, provided you're still respecting their dignity as a human being. Consider the conflict between Russia and Ukraine right now. Russia attacked without provocation and has caused an incredible amount of destruction in Ukraine. If the Ukraine army captures Russian soldiers, it's not evil to force these Russians to help rebuild the infrastructure that they destroyed. The Ukrainians must treat them humanely though, and only force them to work to an extent that serves justice.

@@alfredomaldonado6614 Yes, there is definitely a discrepancy between Moses and Jesus on the subject of divorce. But as for Paul "..trying to protect slaves from the consequences of rebellion.." I find that pretty unconvincing, as you should also, if you were honest about it. Are Christians protected from the consequences of rebellion against the Romans or the traditions of the Pharisees when they attest to belief in Christ as the Messiah? Hardly. Even setting Paul aside however, nowhere does the Bible challenge or condemn the institution of slavery itself. That is pretty telling, wouldn't you say? Somewhere, somehow, God could easily have found the opportunity to make clear his opposition to the evil phenomenon of slavery by inspiring at least one of the authors of the Bible to declare as much, but nowhere in the scriptures can such a prohibition be found. I'm almost amused by the ways in which Christians try to wriggle out of dealing with this failure on God's part. They want so much to believe in their story that they are prepared to excuse God virtually anything.

@@laurameszaros9547 Here are some videos that could challenge your views and where I came up with my conclusions 1. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/it2XYLt7ybuYYmg.html 2. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/b5l6l8191qi1oXk.html 3. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/eqp8idudl8nJo30.html 4. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mrh0gtWS1dXNnn0.html

This was intriguing when Alex brought it up, Im liking this comment, hoping it gets seen

there is a lecture on the "thomistic institute" channel about it, it's called Did Christ Die For Neanderthals.

@@tafazzi-on-discord Thanks, I'll check it out.

"If you believe in literal genesis, would you equate Adam to the dirt that shaped him?" You can't equate things that have different qualities even if they have the same source. Evolution explains how the different qualities came about, there is no problem here. And tell me, how did T. Rex manage to get on top of the food chain before humans existed? Easy: the top of the food chain is the spot for the praying animal that has no natural predators in its enviroment. It is something GUARANTEED to exist in any enviroment where predation exists.

Nat Hentoff and Christopher Hitchens had the answer when it came to the right to life. Both were secularists, if not atheists.

@@AJKPenguin Christopher Hitchens was a mouth-piece for the soviets, hardly a poster boy for ethics. All the suffering of the central and eastern Europeans was worth it in his eyes, just so long as 'superstition' was destroyed and his people ruled.

I can't answer as an atheist, but I am a pro-life Catholic vegan. Did you mean valuable where you said viable? I don't think insects are less valuable (we need the honeybees!) than larger animals, but I am less concerned about killing them. I am more concerned about larger animals, because they have nervous systems that allow them to feel pain more acutely. I eat a plant based diet so that I'm not participating in the factory farm industry which causes enormous animal suffering. I believe I'm healthier living this way, as well, so it's win-win. The line between farm animals and insects is admittedly arbitrary, and if a yellow jacket comes in my house, I will kill it. My husband has to go to work, and he kills bugs and sometimes small animals on road. We don't sweat it. But it's quite easy to choose to have beans in my burrito rather than beef, and I sleep better at night that I've done what I can to minimize my role in animal suffering.

I'm an atheist but not a vegan or vegetarian. I can't answer for others, but I may have at least some sense of how non-believers would view your questions. At the very least I can explain how I feel about them. "I’d love to know how atheists draw the line on what animal death is acceptable/unacceptable? How do you quantify that in any objective way?" I cannot draw that line. I've an impression that it has something to do with an animal's ability to suffer but I couldn't quantify that or measure it effectively so as to delineate between acceptable and unacceptable. I care about people suffering. I find that I care about animals suffering too. What I care about in this regard doesn't seem to be any more easily objectively divided by (somewhat arbitrary) species distinctions than it does by intelligence. "I just think the atheist has no answer for this that will make coherent sense." It's certainly a difficult thing to make sense of ... but don't find the alternative to be any more coherent. Objectively measuring/establishing the (sacred?) value of a human life seems just as much of a challenge.

I would imagine that the birds, at any rate, disagree with that claim. I have read that the New Caledonian crow is, after homo sapiens, the most intelligent species on planet Earth. Remember Hitchcock's haunting movie "The Birds"?

Yes the church teaches that being cruel to an animal is a sin.

@@tafazzi-on-discord that’s wonderful where did you find that info 🙏🏼☺️🕊✝️🙏🏼

@@roseg1333 You can look up "catechism of the catholic church" and read from article 2416 to 2418

@@tafazzi-on-discord ok thank you very much 🙏🏼

Completely agree!!

It is not an illogical problem like "how to make a square a circle", it raises the question of whether zygotes that genetically are guaranteed to grow up as heavily mentally impaired are humans. I found it a useful question, it made it seem like another huge problem for atheistic moral objectivism, which is always a good thing since most people are moral objectivists yet some hold to the idea of atheism, provably incoherently.

Unless he ultimately is mistaken and merely believes he is one but could change or finds the pattern matches something else ultimately.

And why show this be the starting point? And what are these are these objective moral truths and why?

@@maxmaximus2608 This is the starting point because this is where things are currently. As for why because according to natural law theory the natural law is present within each of us whether we approve of it or realize it or not. Looking at it like an engineer, information theorist esp a cryptographer, or a hacker, that is still operative even when suppressed or rejected and can be demonstrated with enough work in a way that is undeniable tp the person, since even if unseen or broken and defaced it is objectively expected to be present. As for what they are exactly, something akin to either the Noahtide Laws or the Ten Commandments but as generalized governing directives for proper moral behavior. In short, because God wrote His Law into the hearts of humankind. In my experience this way works pretty well. Now this is abstracted somewhat, but as we do not have direct access to this, we need to use essentially rebounded signals to map onto what is below and use an interpretive layer to make more concrete sense of it. Now how to go about it will change wildly from person to person, both on the doing and recieving ends, and varies through time and is highly situational. It is not like electronics or other such systems except that there are information structures, so this is at best analogous, but we don`t have to have a perfect understandin to attempt a given categorically-oriented method. Ultimately though, we come to the realization that we can not fix the most important parts that are broken, because the source of the problem is much broader and deeper than an obscured understanding of natural law. Both within ourselves and within the greater system we are in, we have fallen out of our intended place, and we can not put ourselves back there without help. So even if we could perfectly map it all internally, we can not fix what is truly broken because it is squarely beyond our reach or in any way we could reach for. This is because we have fallen out of line with what our Creator intended us to be. If it is an existential decoupling like this, it can seem invisible but ever-present. If God is the self-subsistent ground of all that is as St.Thomas Aquinas says, a relational break with Him in us will be as a modal existential break in what we are vs what we are meant to be. We`ve lost the access rights to the source and everything is serverside. So only the One in charge can restore that. He is also fixing all the damage that occured downstream. We neef to accept it though, He won`t force it on us, He respects the volition He gave us. But we do best, when we follow the intended design and eventually, the network will be rebooted and anyone unauthorized and refusing cooperation, will be cut off.

@@LostArchivist Thanks for the long response: - starting point because this is where things are currently: this is meaningless, I'm not sure "where" you are, I'm certainly not there. - natural law is present within each of us: this is hollow church-speak as well. There is no reason in my opinion to believe in anything which is postulated under "natural law". As far as I can tell, this is an invention of the Catholic Church, nothing more. When was natural law applied to solve a scientific question? - the Ten Commandments but as generalized governing directives for proper moral behavior: hundreds of different christian sects point to the Bible/these commandments and come up with hundreds of different moral frameworks. Even if I'd agree that there are objective moral truths, it has no utility as we have no good path to agree on what this framework is. - because God wrote His Law into the hearts of humankind: Again, this is an assertion without any evidence and is just blank, bla... If this is correct then your god instructed me to defend a romans right to choose. - Now how to go about it will change wildly from person to person: I thought you defend the concept of objective moral truths but here it sounds as you make the case for morals being subjective. But perhaps you see it similar to what I did describe earlier: Objective morality exists, but we can't know it... - I have a hard time to understand what you mean in the last paragraph. I don't sign up for the "broken nature" of humans or original sin and you seem to say that goodness is unobtainable. I don't know... but thanks for sharing your thoughts.

​@@maxmaximus2608 This opening statement has nothing to do with you or your opinions anyway. I was speaking about Cosmicskeptic and Trent Horn, if Cosmicskeptic is an emotivist so we must begin with him (or anyone else) where he is , this is not meaningless, it is a fact of dealing with other human beings. You provided no evidence to the contrary for your counters however either and simply stated your own assertions as a counter, you have also misread my post and assumed much based on a generic theistic stance. Natural Law predates the Catholic Church however and conceptually draws from various ancient philosophical and legal systems, particularly the thoughts of the Ancient Greeks and the Church integrated the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions with the Old and New Testaments and those of their contemporaries. The Scholastics later synthesized this into a systematic framework that St.Thomas Aquinas utilized along with the then newly recovered works of the Ancient Greeks and those of the Muslim scholars of his day to formulate the Thomistic School that survives to his day. So while there are many frameworks, they are not all standing on equal footing, this is not even to get into using Biblical and historical analysis to compare them. For the latter parts of my post, think like someone who is reverse engineering something and it may make more sense. And our individual subjective apparent experience and understanding of the Natural Law is not necessarily identical to the Natural law and it is this and not the Natural Law itself that I was citing when I said there was wild variance between people. This is especially expected if we are in fact various degrees of broken. Then after that is mostly computer analogy. Either way, I was not proposing a proof of anything but a potential frame for persuasion and introspection and perhaps a rough sketch for a means to investigate for the existence of something like the Natural Law if one wished to attempt to go about it. Basically, there are certain hallmarks that would be expected from any given system if it exists, and as we humans are able clearly to communicate and have a general idea for what each other means and experiences, there must be a consistent common human mental dynamic. Taking that, we can use Information Theory and Complexity Theory to determine some properties we would expect if a common moral law existed within human beings as a whole. How to do that is above my ken, but it should be theoretically possible, unless I missed or misunderstood anything.

I'd answer that question with: it's fine either if you intervene or if you don't. You are not legally nor morally required to stop a parent beating their child. You would however be required to aim towards reducing the instances of these events, maybe by telling the parent it is wrong to beat their kid, or as God did it, by giving a moral compass to all men, and later prophets and Scripture.

@@tafazzi-on-discord Thanks for the reply! Though your answer is rather different than mine but in some ways can be similar. Personally I’d rather say that to who’s authority can we say that the greater good is not us? In other words, I believe if we are put in such position, God may be using us to bring the greater good. I don’t want to restrict God’s will to just be him intervening, rather Id liked it when we say God gives us a choice by allowing such a situation to occur in front of us, whether we intervene or not. I believe God will use us sometimes and not. In the end it’s in God’s hand. Just my opinion though, I don’t know of any objection to my way of thinking since I’m not so rational, maybe you could show some holes? Nonetheless I appreciate your comment!

Amen. I used to be vegan too, and I couldn't agree more.

Paul told slaves to obey their masters. I wouldn't regard him as a reliable source.

@@laurameszaros9547 You continue to spam every comment, nobody cares about your petty temper tantrum. Get over yourself, atheist.

@@laurameszaros9547 he is a reliable source. If you are in a country where slavery is legal, that does not make you allowed to break the law by disobaying your owner. Breaking the law is only permissable when the law is compelling you to sin.

I mean, veganism is rational if you believe in utilitarian ethics. You may believe in the inherent value of human life, but why? Aren’t there many other animals that are also conscious and thinking, but their lives are destroyed for the sake of a good meal? Sure, you might not feel like animal lives are as important as human lives? But so what? Many people don’t feel as if the lives of human fetuses are important enough to inconvenience themselves with birthing them, so they just kill them and move on, you wouldn’t assert that these people were right for aborting their children based on their feelings, so what rational grounds do we have to value human lives over animal lives? Well, Christians can rely on sacred scripture, which heavily implies the sacrosanctity of human life, and which condemns acts of murder and cruelty. They can also rely on sacred tradition and the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church, and because all of this is *infallible* it means that it is guaranteed to be true, even if the precise way it is true isn’t revealed. But Alex O’Connor can’t ground a belief in the inherent value of human life rationally, nor can he ground the justification to kill animals rationally, to him, the term “human” merely designates an animal within the homo genus, a particularly intelligent species, but there’s no reason to arbitrarily believe it is more valuable than any other species. Therefore, people who reject the infallible decrees of Christianity don’t have any rational reason to believe in the inherent value of human life. Therefore, to justify the value of human life, they must look elsewhere. Perhaps it is the sapience of human life that makes it valuable, the fact that humans are creative, intelligent, able to form civilizations, languages, communities, abstractions, etcetera, that makes their lives more valuable, under this view, human fetuses cannot be valuable if they don’t have a functioning mind or brain, because they’re not sapient, they might still defend the lives of third-trimester fetuses or newborn infants, on the basis that they have sapience, it’s just not very developed, and may use the example of babies learning languages from humans around them as a demonstration of the low-intelligence sapience of infants. But maybe our killing of animals is not justified, the ending of a conscious being’s life should be a pretty big deal, but we do it for the sake of flavor, we wouldn’t kill a severely mentally disabled person for the sake of getting his allowance, even if said person’s mental disability was severe enough to put his iq in the 40s, so why should we kill animals on the basis of their lack of intelligence or sapience, especially for something as unimportant as taste. You wouldn’t kill your own pet for the sake of food (unless maybe you had to), and indeed, pet owners tend to feel sad when their pets pass away, but that implies some kind of values that the pets had, unless of course, the pets’ lives only mattered inasmuch as they impacted the owner’s life, or only mattered because the owner loved the pets, but why is ownership, which to Alex O’Connor, is a mere human concept that has no basis in the real world, but exists as a concept in our minds, why is this ownership important in determining the value of a pet’s life? What if the owner killed their own pet maliciously? Won’t most people hate that person as if they had ended a human life? And if that’s the case, why is it different for farm animals?

@Tercio Novohispano I disagree, I think he’s a rational person, if by that you mean someone who feels and expresses an interest in knowing the truth via rationality, both motivated by curiosity and, ironically, a moral sense that one should not deliberately believe in falsehoods and should instead try to be intellectually honest. He makes rational errors, he’s often presumptuous, like when he read Numbers 31:18, which says: “but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” and immediately presumed that this was a command to keep the virgin women as sex slaves for the Israelites, when in reality, that doesn’t have to be the interpretation of the passage, he later said that he interpreted the passage that way, because (and I’m paraphrasing here, not a direct quote) “I don’t know what else a bunch of ancient Israelite men would want to do with virgin women aside from keep them as sex slaves”, now even if it, by his worldview, may seem likely that they were sex slaves, which is a point I would contest, I still think that without having certainty, it would be reckless to offer this interpretation as anything more than just a mere hypothesis, but Alex O’Connor declares it as if it were the only plausible meaning of the text. But aside from that among other rational errors, he does have a passion for knowing the truth, and seems like someone who is willing to change their mind as long as they’re sufficiently convinced of something. That being said, I think emotivism is a moral belief that ultimately originates in a desire to preserve morals, as every person, regardless if they wish to deny it or not, has moral convictions that they feel are objective and universally binding, while simultaneously not having the ability to believe in virtue ethics (the idea that concepts like justice, mercy, prudence, respect, etcetera, are real and are morally binding) because you simply cannot justify virtue ethics rationally, try to prove (without any infallible religious document) that we have a moral obligation to respect other people, you simply can’t, so he must resort to a more rationally justifiable moral belief system, and in this case, emotivism won out.

@Tercio Novohispano I am quite sure emotivists observe that people, including themselves, make moral judgments based on emotions.

Because they typically don't taste as good.

how is that ironic? Humans are farmers they naturally nurture life forms they intend to eat.

If you're not consistent with your morals, then you're a hypocrite meaning that you only choose to be good or bad when it benefit you or when you're discriminating against one and not the other. It's simply is never a good look to be inconsistent.

Sure keep believing in your imaginary friend in the sky

@@TrideepNagg Atheism is illogical; it assumes the laws of physics broke themselves to create themselves. If anything, you support an imaginary concept.

@@TrideepNagg if this is about who's got the wilder imagination, the atheist takes the cake. Of course, the real question is, does the atheist still have that cake anymore once he's gone and eaten it?

“The worst part was his hypocrisy”

>The person who wants to die has the right to suicide false

@@tafazzi-on-discord i didn’t say it is right. the point is no matter how much someone wants to die, you can not ask a christian to do it. just like you can’t ask a priest to marry same sex. They have that right from a worldly view, it’s just not Christian.

@@JT.Pilgrim I say that a "right" is an action that the State guarantees no other citizen will stop you from doing. Presently there is no right to suicide: if you walk in someone hanging themselves as a citizen you are allowed to save that person's life. If you meant a "moral" right, that depends who you ask. Most constitutions in the world do not recognize such right, meaning it is just something that is not there.

@@tafazzi-on-discord regardless of any government “laws” there are no specific forces at play to stop someone from acting in any manner they choose. That right is free will. It’s inalienable. Man creates laws, some are based in moral truth according to their religion or absence of it. St. Paul said everything is permissible, but not all things are beneficial. From a moral standpoint one has to choose what is their constitution. Now that’s the real question.

Your heart is actually in a omnivorous body

Evolution being real does not allow you to redefine morality from the ground up. If I see a cow I'd hesitate before killing it more than if I saw a deer only because that cow is probably owned by someone and I would not want to break someone's possession.

Factory farming sucks

Atheist is always deluded with their own mind

use a readable translation

So no lettuce?

Can I kill my bully