Something else to consider: Person X believes that gay sex, or maybe abortions, are immoral. Is it okay for him to show people pictures of those activities in order to shock them? As in the vegetarian example, the imagery adds “information”.
But I would certainly classify trying to get someone to oppose gay sex by forcing them to confront how disgusting it looks (to non-gay people) as “immoral mind-hijacking”. It doesn’t add meaningful information. Technically, you could claim that someone wasn’t aware of how disgusting it is and now that they know, that’s new information, but that’s not the type of information that’s normally relevant to rational arguments.
You could also say “well, some disgust isn’t rational, but the disgusting aspect of animal slaughter is a different kind of disgust which is rational”, but you’d be hard pressed to come up with an argument for why the two kinds of disgust are different that doesn’t amount to a direct argument for vegetarianism that could be expressed without involving disgust at all.
In the case of gay sex and abortions, the disgust is the person’s emotional response to something that isn’t the most important (to the image provider, and perhaps to the providee too) part of the action. Dicks in butts (because anti-gay people always talk about gay men, never lesbians (probably because if they did they wouldn’t get the desired response)) are less important to them than adults being able to do something they really want to do with their own bodies. Tiny bloody fetuses having been killed aren’t as important as people’s lives not being ruined by children they can’t support, or people dying in childbirth who could have been saved by abortion.
On the other hand, piglets getting their testicles ripped out without anesthetic (and similar bad things that happens to animals) are the most important thing about eating meat.
Retracted cause this doesn’t really work for the abortion example. It does for the gay sex one though. For the abortion one, I guess I won’t condemn abortion based on some universal principle of how arguments should be conducted.
I don’t think it works for the gay sex example either for the reason I gave: in order to say that using disgust is good in one example and bad in another, you need what amounts to a separate argument for vegetarianism anyway. “That’s the most important thing about eating meat” is not an undisputed fact, it’s something that is only believed by vegetarians. Non-vegetarians wouldn’t agree with it.
This turns it into circular reasoning: You should be vegetarian because of disgust. You should accept disgust as an argument for vegetarianism because what it shows is “the most important thing”. And you only believe that that’s the most important thing if you’re already vegetarian.
Most of the fence sitters it’s aiming to convince care a lot more about things besides “icky dick in butt” though.
And most of the people I’ve argued with don’t take the “animals aren’t people, I don’t care about them at all” route, so if they understood the scale of the problem, animal suffering probably would be important to them, and not a distraction from the big important issues.
Something else to consider: Person X believes that gay sex, or maybe abortions, are immoral. Is it okay for him to show people pictures of those activities in order to shock them? As in the vegetarian example, the imagery adds “information”.
But I would certainly classify trying to get someone to oppose gay sex by forcing them to confront how disgusting it looks (to non-gay people) as “immoral mind-hijacking”. It doesn’t add meaningful information. Technically, you could claim that someone wasn’t aware of how disgusting it is and now that they know, that’s new information, but that’s not the type of information that’s normally relevant to rational arguments.
You could also say “well, some disgust isn’t rational, but the disgusting aspect of animal slaughter is a different kind of disgust which is rational”, but you’d be hard pressed to come up with an argument for why the two kinds of disgust are different that doesn’t amount to a direct argument for vegetarianism that could be expressed without involving disgust at all.
In the case of gay sex and abortions, the disgust is the person’s emotional response to something that isn’t the most important (to the image provider, and perhaps to the providee too) part of the action. Dicks in butts (because anti-gay people always talk about gay men, never lesbians (probably because if they did they wouldn’t get the desired response)) are less important to them than adults being able to do something they really want to do with their own bodies. Tiny bloody fetuses having been killed aren’t as important as people’s lives not being ruined by children they can’t support, or people dying in childbirth who could have been saved by abortion.
On the other hand, piglets getting their testicles ripped out without anesthetic (and similar bad things that happens to animals) are the most important thing about eating meat.
Retracted cause this doesn’t really work for the abortion example. It does for the gay sex one though. For the abortion one, I guess I won’t condemn abortion based on some universal principle of how arguments should be conducted.
I don’t think it works for the gay sex example either for the reason I gave: in order to say that using disgust is good in one example and bad in another, you need what amounts to a separate argument for vegetarianism anyway. “That’s the most important thing about eating meat” is not an undisputed fact, it’s something that is only believed by vegetarians. Non-vegetarians wouldn’t agree with it.
This turns it into circular reasoning: You should be vegetarian because of disgust. You should accept disgust as an argument for vegetarianism because what it shows is “the most important thing”. And you only believe that that’s the most important thing if you’re already vegetarian.
Most of the fence sitters it’s aiming to convince care a lot more about things besides “icky dick in butt” though.
And most of the people I’ve argued with don’t take the “animals aren’t people, I don’t care about them at all” route, so if they understood the scale of the problem, animal suffering probably would be important to them, and not a distraction from the big important issues.