• @oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Sentience is what I base my ethics on (i’m a sentientist or sentiocentrist), which has implications on diet when considering whether to exploit and/or kill sentient beings for food. I don’t think it’s arbitrary, if someone is sentient, they are morally relevant because they can experience positive and negative valence (pleasure/pain, to put it more plainly but lose some nuance). If something is not sentient, I don’t see how it can be ethically relevant except in cases where the nonsentient thing matters to a sentient being

    if you’re looking for arbitrary, the anthropocentrists are that way

    Also I agree we can’t prove that plants aren’t sentient, that’s why I said “to the best of my knowledge”

    • @commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 year ago

      if someone is sentient, they are morally relevant because they can experience positive and negative valence

      this is a moral virtue only to utilitarians.

      • there are other approaches to sentientism that aren’t based on valence. I don’t feel like writing a book on the different ones, but to give an example of a rights based one that I think is strong is that every sentient being has, at the very least, a right to their body, since that’s the one thing they’re born with and that is (almost certainly) what gives rise to their sentience in the first place. And to violate another sentient beings bodily autonomy is to forfeit your own (a sort of low level social contract), which allows for self defense and defending others

        but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there’s a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility. I don’t really feel like getting into the weeds of that discussion though, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the conversation anyways

        • @commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          -21 year ago

          I don’t really feel like getting into the weeds of that discussion though, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the conversation anyways

          it is. your ethical position is highly relevant to any ethical argument you present.

          • @oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Then present yours lol

            Sentientism answers the question of “who/what matters?”, not “what ethical framework should be used to care about who/what matters?”. It can underly many ethical frameworks, personally I don’t care that much what ethical framework you use as long as we can agree on who’s included in the moral scope (although there are some utilitarians who I think have bad definitions of utility and/or do a bad job weighing the utility)

        • @commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          -21 year ago

          to give an example of a rights based one

          I have to admit, I skipped the rest of this sentence on I don’t foresee myself attempting to read it: I don’t believe in rights as an objective phenomenon, either.

        • @commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          -21 year ago

          but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there’s a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility.

          this is a good reason to doubt the validity of the theory: it is constructed in a way that it is not disprovable.

      • I explained why it’s not arbitrary, then pointed to a group that does draw arbitrary distinctions. That’s not tu quoque because I’m not saying “you also”

        • @commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          you’re saying it’s not arbitrary. “no, you” is still a form of tu quoque. you haven’t actually made a case that sentience isnt an arbitrary standard, and there isn’t a case to be made: sentience isn’t a natural phenomenon outside of human subjective classification. without people, there would be no concept of green or warm or sentient, and any of those attributes is an arbitrary standard to use to judge the ethics of a diet.

          • Are you saying everything we can talk about is arbitrary because everything we can talk about is with words and concepts?

            Are you talking about meriological nihilism? (thanks alex oconnor for teaching me that term lol)

            I know sentience is real based on the fact that I’m experiencing things right this moment. Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it’s reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)

              • Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it’s reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)

                • @commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  11 year ago

                  the same can be said of DNA. this is a completely arbitrary standard, and you would be better served to embrace that than pretending it’s somehow objective.

                  • @oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
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                    1 year ago

                    I’m not saying it is objective, I’m saying it’s not arbitrary.

                    If my dna was isolated in a test tube and it could experience things then I would also care about what it experiences. There isn’t any evidence I’m aware of that that’s the case. Dna is the instructions and tool to build the sentient being, not the sentient being itself. So no, the same couldn’t be said of dna. Extrapolating from how much I care about what I experience, I think it’s reasonable to care about what things that experience things experience