Paris: Animal rights activists seize puppy from homeless man

[Antonio the Sixth]

I paraphrased and critiqued your arguments in detail and you declined to respond.  If that's not "losing" a debate, I don't know what is.  By your rationale, you "win" a debate by sticking your fingers in your ears and humming loudly.

Your "critiques" are irrelevant, because they are based on fundamental moral principles different from mine. That's what you don't understand. In discussions on morality, there are no objective facts that everyone can agree on, and which can form the basis for a resolution of the disagreement. If I'm arguing with a social Darwinist, I can bring him data and prove to him that inequalities have increased dramatically in the western world over the past decades, but I will never convince him that that's a bad thing. All I could say is "I think your moral principles are f**ked up" and leave it there. You seem to think that your arguments were factual when (aside from some number-crunching that didn't affect the substance of my argument) they weren't.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Ok, first off, I said "needless", not " unnecessary ". I'm not a native speaker, so I might be wrong, but I think there is a slight nuance between the two (with need being a broader concept than nececessity). Second, there is no absolute definition of what constitutes a "need". Maybe you assumed I meant a vital need, but I never actually said that. That's much too strict a condition, and if followed, it would considerably hinder human development. To me, "needless" simply means that animal suffering should be avoided whenever it doesn't serve a legitimate purpose to human beings. To me a legitimate purpose does not include increased profit (at leat not beyond a certain level necessary for workers in the industry to live a comfortable life). It does, however, include having access to a category of food that has proven crucial to human development and is a fundamental source of daily happiness for billions of people. Again, the fact that meat tastes good is not a trivial argument to me.

If your misunderstanding stemmed from a semantic mistake I made, I am ready to admit it and apologize for it (though that doesn't excuse your smug and self-righteous posturing). If you still have something to add after that, it probably means you can't comprehend different moral perspectives.

[Antonio the Sixth]

...right, see here's where I'm confused: at what point did this become a discussion debate row about the morality of meat eating? The French eat a lot of weird stuff but not dogs.

I wouldn't be opposed to trying dog meat. Hell, I never understood the whole freakout about horsemeat a couple years ago. De gustibus et coloribus...

[Antonio the Sixth]

How is that any different from what I paraphrased?

The fact that you constantly have to paraphrase my argument is a sign that either I'm not explaining myself clearly enough, or your comprehension skills are poor. I assumed the former and thus tried to clarify my argument. That does not seem to have worked. Draw your own conclusions.

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I know what I said, and I'll kindly ask you not to accuse me of lying. Otherwise, this argument ends right now. I'm already wasting enough of my time engaging in a discussion I find tedious and uninteresting (while you seem to enjoy it way too much). Once and for all, that post was a tongue in cheek, as is generally the case when a post is accompanied by a smirking emoji.

Whether or not meat is crucial to modern human development (something neither you nor I really knows enough to make a judment on) does not change the substance of my argument.

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Yes if the cost of not doing so is unreasonably high and the morality of said action is, as I have already stated it it, conditional on the existence of a valid reason.

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Because I'm not instructing the corporation to mistreat their animals. It's not like I can force them to make sure they don't mistreat them. The product is out there and I have no influence on how it is produced. My only choice is whether to buy it or not. As I said, given the limited set of choices, the animal's suffering is preferable to giving up on meat (or spending hours figuring out what meat to eat).

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First of all, as someone who values human suffering infinitely more than animal suffering, I find your comparison deeply offensive. I'd rather see a single sweatshop worker gain better working conditions than end all animal abuse worldwide.

But the false equivalence that you draw, it still fails at proving your case. I don't jump at people whom I see wearing Nike shoes, you know. In fact, chances are I probably own products that were made in sweatshops, because, again, I don't have the time to figure out where everything I buy comes from. Sweatshops, just like intensive farms, should be eliminated through through the legislative process.

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Probably not, especially since it's obviously impossible to ascribe a quantitative value to these things. As long as the purpose is legitimate (as eating meat is to me) and I have ability to change the methods of meat production myself, I am not doing anything wrong.

It's interesting that you would bring up social darwinism.  When I read arguments to the effect of 'it's natural to eat meat because we evolved to do it', that doesn't sound much different to other remarks that you would no doubt find insensitive.

Oh great, here comes the third musketeer. Good thing I never made that argument, then.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Since you were so kind as to teach me the difference between equivalence and analogy (not that it made your argument any stronger, since the difference between the two cases was relevant to my point: human suffering is not morally equivalent to animal suffering and what might be acceptable in the former case might not be in the latter), I'll return the favor and try to explain you the difference between paraphrasing and strawmanning.

This:

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is a strawman. A strawman is a dishonest paraphrasing of your opponent's argument, which deliberately distorts it so as to make it less solid or more extreme. We are always tempted to do it - sometimes inadvertently - because it allows us to set the terms of the argument, which makes it very easy to "win" it. This is why paraphrasing your opponent's argument - provided that it's already written in simple, intelligible English - is a bad idea if you're concerned about the honesty of your argument.

Why is this a strawman? Because you take a very specific statement:

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...and turn it into a much broader, and thus more easily criticizable one:

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...making me say something that I never so much as hinted was my argument. Not every purpose that has a "utility" for human beings is legitimate. Some clearly aren't, such as entertainment (I oppose cockfighting and corridas). Others, such as clothing, are more ambiguous (articles that serve merely an aesthetic purpose, such as fur, are not worth it, but some clothes serves a valid practical purpose that can't be easily supplemented). I have already explained why I believe meat consumption is a valid justification, and you had no basis to construe such specific statement into a much broader one that amounts to "anything goes".

The rest of your rambling is irrelevant since it all rests on this strawman.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Jesus, you have waaaay too much time on your hands. I unfortunately have no such luxury. I've neglected my homework to keep arguing with you, and that means right now I have to work for a good chunk of the night and completely screw up my sleep schedule. No, I don't blame you for this - only my own misguided sense of pride that makes me refuse to let some pretentious asshole on the internet repeatedly misconstrue my views and get away with it (quite pathetic, I know). Misguided pride can only go so far, though.

I'm done with this crap. You can tell yourself you've "won" the argument if you're so inclined. I'm sure this is a critical victory in the fight for animal rights that will further boost your ego.

[Antonio the Sixth]

That's not true, and you know it. Some people spout bullsh*t at high speed and others spend time carefully weighing an argument before coming to their conclusions. And truth is generally more complex than a lie. If you really can think and write very fast, that's good for you, but maybe you should use such a gift in a more productive way. Still, from your average response time, I doubt you dedicated less than 1-2 hours per day to this discussion. The "painstakingly" bit in your second paragraph also contradicts your claim.

Surprisingly enough, I find myself capable of living very well without your respect (which you never displayed to begin with).

[Antonio the Sixth]

You don't get to tell me how I could have made the debate shorter, when your entire arguing strategy has been to pick apart separate bits of my argument and pontificate over them at great lengths, while completely losing focus of the core. That might be a legitimate method for deconstructing complex problems, but in this circumstance it only served to obfuscate and waste my time. If the questions you just posted were all you were interested in, you should have posted them outright instead of coming up with one wall of text after another.

Anyway, if you're ready to get straight to the point and won't go on another tangent in the next post, I can answer that pretty simply. Whether a purpose is legitimate depends on its degree of utility to human beings. It's not a rule of thumb, and there might be legitimate disagreement as to where to draw the line - you are more than welcome to draw the line beneath meat-eating if you are so inclined. I personally draw it far beyond, somewhere between "comfort" and "luxury". No, I can't pinpoint precisely where, and I don't care about figuring it out because it makes no difference from a practical standpoint. The point is that animal suffering should be minimized as long as nothing too important is lost for humans.

The only way I could have any (minimal) impact on animal suffering is, either by not eating meat at all, or by devoting an unreasonable amount of my time and energy to figuring out which meat to eat. In both cases, I consider the utility I gain from not doing these things to be sufficiently high to warrant adding a marginal amount of animal suffering. Again, you are perfectly free to disagree.

Now that I have provided a clear answer to your questions, I presume this discussion is over? Or you will again pick apart 3 or 4 sentences and make a sanctimonious rant over each of them?

(1-2 hours is about right, btw.  better than watching TV.)

See, that's the issue: you're enjoying this, and I'm not.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I thought this was over...

It would be, if I had the good judgment not to care about my useless "internet honor".

[Antonio the Sixth]

So, essentially, this endless bickering that wasted hours of my time (but provided for your entertainment, apparently) boils down to me using the wrong word. Something for which, by the way, I preemptively apologized a dozen posts ago. If you replace "unnecessary" with "which does not procure sufficient utility for human beings", do you finally understand my point and accept that we just see things differently?

As for your analogy and "moral insulation" as you call it, I have actually explained it several times. My position as a customer toward a corporation that sells meat to, say, millions of people every day is extremely asymmetrical in terms of agency. The corporation (actually the corporations, since the original producer isn't the same as the seller and there might be several intermediate steps) decides everything about how meat is produced, from A to Z. My array of choice, instead, is limited to buying or not buying their product. The cost of not buying their product means either swearing off meat or spending an unreasonable amount of time figuring out which meat I could buy. This is not the same as the cost a farming corporation would face if it afforded better living conditions to its animals. Corporations could still do that, make a substantial profit, and provide their workers with decent wages - in fact, some do. Thus, from a customer's perspective, provided these very limited options, indirectly causing (a proportionally slight amount of) additional animal suffering is justified by the utility it provides (the ability of eating meat). It is not justified for corporations, as maximizing profits isn't a legitimate justification in my view.

All I said here was already in my previous post, though probably in a less developed form (because I did not assume such development was needed). Obviously, since I have a life, I'm not going to spend an hour like you did to come up with a fancy-looking numbered list, complete with links, of where in my posts you can find those arguments. As I said, you're having fun while I'm just wasting my time and energy.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Your sheer verbosity is what's obfuscating. In many cases you could have stated your questions/arguments clearly and concisely and instead chose to go on into a long-winded rant which included some relevant bits mixed with some irrelevant ones, some (maybe not deliberate) misconstructions, and a good deal of pointless affected outrage. You clearly like hearing yourself talk (or in these case, seeing yourself type, I guess), but, if brevity and clarity was your concern, you probably could have made the same points with about 67% less characters.

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Because, in my argument, the morality of animal suffering is based on the utility that it procures, ie the disutility that avoiding it causes. Since this disutility is higher for the customer than it is for the corporation, it makes perfect sense that the corporation's actions might be immoral while the customer's aren't.

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No, that is not what I said. I said that the disutility for the customer is big enough to warrant the suffering, while the disutility for the corporation isn't. If the disutility for the customer were smaller, the action would be immoral even if the corporation's disutility were still smaller than the customer's. I already illustrated this with the example of fur.

This point should also debunk your bookie metaphor, if you connect the dots.

[Antonio the Sixth]

OK, now you're just being disingenuous. I just said that the problem was, not the complexity of your arguments, but rather the fact that they were buried in the middle of long-winded rants which served no purpose beyond reaffirming how horrible you think I am. Everything was comprehensible, it was just hard to tell your core argument apart from the useless fluff. Obviously I could have done a better job at it, given unlimited time and will, but we've already covered this issue. If you wanted simple answers, you should have gone straight to the point.

Actually, upon reexamination, I didn't misuse any word. It might have been better to avoid the word "necessary", but that's only because it's an inherently ambiguous concept, and its colloquial use (ie, something of vital importance) is different from its true meaning (ie something that's required in order to achieve a specific goal) which is what I had in mind. Maybe I should have specified the range of legitimate goals from the start, but since, as I eventually explained, this range eventually boils down to a judgment call of where to draw the line, I didn't think it was really worth discussing.

In "#3" (do you have an archive of those? nothing would surprise me at this point) my point was more about efficacy than about morality. That was before you made it clear that your argument was exclusively grounded on moral considerations. I believed, and I still do, that fundamental social change comes from public, rather than private, action. Therefore, when you feel something is wrong with the way society works and seek to fix it, you should take issue with the legislator, not with random people. This is what I meant when I said that responsibility falls on the former and not the latter. I was talking about practical, not moral responsibility. Of course you can still hold people accountable morally when their actions contribute to a social injustice (and acceptable alternatives to those actions are available). Again, this misunderstanding could have been cleared up a lot earlier if your posts didn't include so much caricaturing and rhetorical outrage.

I really can't help you if, after all this, you still can't figure out why your metaphor doesn't apply.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Fair point (although I don't think you mean "disingenuous"...?).  I was wrongly interpreting "verbosity" to mean overly complicated language, not too much of it, which is not what that word means.  I don't understand how making it clear that I thought something was immoral "obfuscated" my argument, though?

See, you can make semantic mistakes too! And you don't even have the excuse of not being a native speaker.

Anyway, I just explained that your rants were obfuscating because they made it more difficult to isolate your core argument from all the other pointless things you were padding your posts with, and replying to the former precisely.

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Again, common vs correct (but, as I admitted, not fully specified) definition. You can't be so hung up on using precise language and then blame me for not using a term in its common (but incorrect) understanding.

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Fair enough, my mistake. In Latin languages, "vital" is the adjective associated with life, and "a matter of vital importance" essentially means a life-or-death issue. Apparently this is not the case in English.

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That simply means I misunderstood your argument and went on to argue on a practical standpoint instead of on a moral one. Whether that misunderstanding is to blame on you or me, I do not know and am not interested in finding out. Now that this misunderstanding is cleared up, this issue is irrelevant.


Your analogy fails if you disregard the above argument on relative disutility of customer versus corporation (which, as I have clarified several times by now, is irrelevant to a discussion entirely focused on morality), and go back to my actual moral framework of an actor's individual moral position, considering that I apply a much, much higher standard to justifying human suffering than I do animal suffering, and that "getting your money back" certainly doesn't pass that standard. You could deduce all this from what I have said in my previous posts.

In addition, even if we disregard the categorical imperative against unnecessary (as in, not justified by a legitimate purpose) suffering entirely, a human being would still be protected against lawless violence by the rights awarded to him as a member of the social contract. Animals, as I said in my very first post on this issue, do not have rights.

[Antonio the Sixth]

This is getting ridiculous. The core point of the argument has long been resolved, and now you're just going over all of my previous posts looking for inconsistencies. This has stopped to be an argument on the morality of eating meat and instead has devolved into an argument about the arguments that I previously made on the morality of eating meat. I already found the former to be extremely uninteresting, so you can imagine how many f**ks I give about the latter.

Was I inconsistent at some point or another? Probably. It happens in long-drawn debates, especially when the interlocutor makes no efforts to be straightforward and instead constantly goes into long-winded tangents that divert from the core of the issue. As I said, I had a limited amount of time to dedicate to this discussion, and lacked the motivation to go out of my way to take your key arguments apart from the fluff. In these circumstances, it's easy for a simple misunderstanding to snowball into a logical dead end.

Besides, the way you have framed this debate is inherently asymmetrical, since you are asking me to justify my actions and moral perspective, so it's obvious that this would make me more vulnerable to making a mistake along the way. That's basically the equivalent of a police interrogation where the cop doesn't care about ascertaining the truth, but instead just keeps going and going until the other person says what the cop wants to hear. I wonder how easy you would find it if the tables were turned.

So yeah, if what you wanted to prove is that, at some point in the discussion, I said something which doesn't correspond to my actual beliefs, congratulations, you win! It doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day, those beliefs remain the same as before.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Whatever. This argument is going nowhere and it's high time I start focusing my energy on something productive. Feel free to proclaim yourself the winner of this debate, if that makes you feel better. Most of the forum already thinks so anyway. Vox populi vox dei, I guess. I'm obviously still open to discussing my moral perspective on animal suffering with people who are interested in a genuine exchange of ideas rather than in gotchas. But I'm done with you.