I assumed this was the intent of the tweet but maybe I was misreading it. In animals rights activism you hear lots of people making arguments like “if you’re fine eating meat, you should be fine with X”, where X is something they’re clearly not fine with (and while I wouldn’t class her as an animal rights activist, Julia Galef has been doing this for years with eating meat and bestiality). I don’t think it’s necessarily very persuasive but it can generate a conversation about eg why humans should matter more than animals which can in then lead people to revise some of their anthropocentric biases.
Eh comparing the intelligence of a pig to a toddler is a common
talking point in the context of animal rights. I am sure I have said
something similar. Like the top comment says, the conclusion from that
statement is the problem.
A few things, first off a 3 year old is significantly more
intelligent than a pig. The language and social expression alone is
huge. Problem solving etc.
Second if killing babies and toddlers was legal, there’d be a lot of
parents killing their kids ;-)
I lovingly say as a parent of a toddler who def I sometimes wanna
kill.
As an undergrad around 2000 I did an independent study for my
Philosophy major in “animal rights and animal liberation.” My
conservative professor overseeing this independent study made me read a
bunch of ethics papers on abortion too. They were actually quite
fascinating, and I concluded that the ethics of abortion and when life
begins are really complex and definitely do overlap with the ethics of
killing animals. But my conclusion was that this is exactly why we
shouldn’t regulate abortion, because it is somewhat arbitrary when we
decide life begins, and yet a “right to life” argument also leads to
absurd conclusions, so really we are arguing from a “potential” argument
which children have but it’s unclear whether zygotes have. Also we
shouldn’t treat animals like garbage as we do in factory farms, at the
very least. Killing animals at all is a more complicated ethical
question, but torturing them is not complex. My professor was in denial
that factory farms existed, and called them vegetarian propaganda. I
also think it is almost certainly worse to eat a hamburger than to have
an abortion, but that’s where my mind went after reading many papers on
philosophical ethics and everyone will have endless debates on these
topics forever because there is no way to make clear ethical evaluations
on complex topics involving arbitrary lines drawn. Also I eat
hamburgers, now at least. I was vegetarian/vegan for 11 years, but
ultimately found it unsustainable for health, so I eat “mostly
vegetarian” instead.
>My professor was in denial that factory farms existed, and called them vegetarian propaganda.
Wait what? Did he just not think CAFOs existed? What about all the pictures and...
How?
Found the part this person should actually be mad about
Eh comparing the intelligence of a pig to a toddler is a common talking point in the context of animal rights. I am sure I have said something similar. Like the top comment says, the conclusion from that statement is the problem.
Is this a GPT-3 tweet bot trained on Peter Singer?
A nice demonstration of how one man’s modus tollens is the other’s modus ponens.
hey my flair is relevant
A few things, first off a 3 year old is significantly more intelligent than a pig. The language and social expression alone is huge. Problem solving etc.
Second if killing babies and toddlers was legal, there’d be a lot of parents killing their kids ;-)
I lovingly say as a parent of a toddler who def I sometimes wanna kill.
“Pigs are about as mentally capable as human three year olds”
This is one of those statements I just can’t imagine someone saying to anyone else in real life.
As an undergrad around 2000 I did an independent study for my Philosophy major in “animal rights and animal liberation.” My conservative professor overseeing this independent study made me read a bunch of ethics papers on abortion too. They were actually quite fascinating, and I concluded that the ethics of abortion and when life begins are really complex and definitely do overlap with the ethics of killing animals. But my conclusion was that this is exactly why we shouldn’t regulate abortion, because it is somewhat arbitrary when we decide life begins, and yet a “right to life” argument also leads to absurd conclusions, so really we are arguing from a “potential” argument which children have but it’s unclear whether zygotes have. Also we shouldn’t treat animals like garbage as we do in factory farms, at the very least. Killing animals at all is a more complicated ethical question, but torturing them is not complex. My professor was in denial that factory farms existed, and called them vegetarian propaganda. I also think it is almost certainly worse to eat a hamburger than to have an abortion, but that’s where my mind went after reading many papers on philosophical ethics and everyone will have endless debates on these topics forever because there is no way to make clear ethical evaluations on complex topics involving arbitrary lines drawn. Also I eat hamburgers, now at least. I was vegetarian/vegan for 11 years, but ultimately found it unsustainable for health, so I eat “mostly vegetarian” instead.