Since this post is obviously mostly about abortion, you might as well just say so. The only moral dilemmas we currently face in the civilized world that hinge on whether or not something is a moral agent are abortion, and more rarely, whether it should be legal to euthanize humans in persistent vegetative states.
For what it’s worth, abortion was indeed the motivating example. But maia’s right, I wanted to be meta-level—I wanted to avoid people from seeing that I’m talking about tic-tac sympathisers, talking sympathetically about them no less, and assuming that I’m a dirty tic-tac sympathiser myself and have nothing to say to them on the subject of tic-tacs. (I think LW could have handled it, but I’d like to eventually have an audience larger than LW.)
Even though abortion and animal rights are the two obvious applications, the interpretation that first came to my mind when reading the post was political correctness—I mapped “tic-tacs suffer when eaten” to “women/minority groups are significantly harmed by such-and-such uses of language”. I guess because heated discussions on this topic arise more often in LW than on the other ones.
I need to stop treating you like a fascist, and start trying to convince you that tic-tacs are not sentient.
But that doesn’t apply in the case of either abortion or animal rights. Everyone already knows that these are central aspects of those issues. All arguments about them acknowledges that (but not all vilification of the opponent, intended for internal consumption).
I think that one thing I was doing without realising it , when I wrote this post, was thinking about the sort of arguments you see on reddit. (As opposed to debates in congress, for example, which I don’t get much exposure to.)
I don’t think it’s uncommon to see redditors accuse a pro-lifer of just wanting to punish people for having sex, or to exert control over women’s bodies.
I do think this is less of an issue with vegetarianism, but the vegetarianism debate seems to be less heated. I’ve seen people on facebook say that it’s okay to be vegetarian/vegan but you shouldn’t force that choice on your cats and dogs; but it came with the argument that cats and dogs can’t be healthy without meat, which makes it not a great example. (It might be wrong for humans to eat meat, but not wrong for humans to feed meat to cats and dogs.)
I did a search for PETA, expecting to find people calling them fascists in some sense, but didn’t find much. Vegetarians accusing non-vegetarians of being rakes seemed more common.
I think the poster’s intent was to invent an example so that this post would be on the meta-level, instead of being about a particular issue.
You may have interpreted it as being about a particular issue, but I don’t think that was on purpose, as evidenced by the fact that someone else interpreted it as being about a different particular issue.
Since this post is obviously mostly about abortion, you might as well just say so. The only moral dilemmas we currently face in the civilized world that hinge on whether or not something is a moral agent are abortion, and more rarely, whether it should be legal to euthanize humans in persistent vegetative states.
I thought this post was about eating animals.
Huh. I think you might be right—that really never occurred to me, and I’m not sure why.
For what it’s worth, abortion was indeed the motivating example. But maia’s right, I wanted to be meta-level—I wanted to avoid people from seeing that I’m talking about tic-tac sympathisers, talking sympathetically about them no less, and assuming that I’m a dirty tic-tac sympathiser myself and have nothing to say to them on the subject of tic-tacs. (I think LW could have handled it, but I’d like to eventually have an audience larger than LW.)
Even though abortion and animal rights are the two obvious applications, the interpretation that first came to my mind when reading the post was political correctness—I mapped “tic-tacs suffer when eaten” to “women/minority groups are significantly harmed by such-and-such uses of language”. I guess because heated discussions on this topic arise more often in LW than on the other ones.
But that doesn’t apply in the case of either abortion or animal rights. Everyone already knows that these are central aspects of those issues. All arguments about them acknowledges that (but not all vilification of the opponent, intended for internal consumption).
I think that one thing I was doing without realising it , when I wrote this post, was thinking about the sort of arguments you see on reddit. (As opposed to debates in congress, for example, which I don’t get much exposure to.)
I don’t think it’s uncommon to see redditors accuse a pro-lifer of just wanting to punish people for having sex, or to exert control over women’s bodies.
I do think this is less of an issue with vegetarianism, but the vegetarianism debate seems to be less heated. I’ve seen people on facebook say that it’s okay to be vegetarian/vegan but you shouldn’t force that choice on your cats and dogs; but it came with the argument that cats and dogs can’t be healthy without meat, which makes it not a great example. (It might be wrong for humans to eat meat, but not wrong for humans to feed meat to cats and dogs.)
I did a search for PETA, expecting to find people calling them fascists in some sense, but didn’t find much. Vegetarians accusing non-vegetarians of being rakes seemed more common.
Really? That isn’t true of nearly all arguments on the issue that I’ve seen.
I think the poster’s intent was to invent an example so that this post would be on the meta-level, instead of being about a particular issue.
You may have interpreted it as being about a particular issue, but I don’t think that was on purpose, as evidenced by the fact that someone else interpreted it as being about a different particular issue.