> Others argue that all animal lives carry equal weight with human lives (I don't know who these people are, but they worry me).

I'd consider myself one of these. All living things are equally fair game to be eaten. Obviously some carry social and legal consequences that make it not worthwhile, but ethically, we're all organic matter. Life consumes other life to keep itself going. That's how it works. I don't know why I should be concerned about a cow but not a stalk of celery. They're equally alive.

> They're equally alive

I guess if you only care about the most primitive, baseline definition of "alive". I would think we had evolved beyond believing killing is killing no matter the circumstance. Do we not wish to distinguish ourselves from primal, purely survival-driven animals?

It seems short-sighted to deem yourself more important than celery. We're both a tiny blip, an eddy in the outflow of energy from a star where we momentarily reverse the flow of entropy in the universe.

If you're not survival-driven, you will eventually be out-competed by something that is. If we don't survive, everything else is pointless.

The activity of caring can be either actuality-based or feeling-based.

A lot of caring from the vegan community is feeling-based. What this means is that one _feels_ that one cares about living species while not _actually_ caring about them. Furthermore, when one strongly feels in this manner they tend to hold strong beliefs as well. Much like religion, this results in people fighting over their cherished feelings and beliefs.

In the end, nobody seems to _actually_ care about the animals.

Think about it.

It would all be hilarious were it not for the suffering people instigate in order to defend their beliefs.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reposted with different words (same message).

I'm curious why you openly hold what seems to me a totally sociopathic viewpoint - do you assign any moral weight to anything at all? If so, why do you not assign moral weight to the suffering of conscious beings?

Even from a completely amoral perspective where nothing is preferable to anything else, do you not see the social benefits of a community which has the socially-enforced value of "suffering is bad"?

Yes, I even explicitly mentioned social reasons in the previous comment. A society in which humans are all actively trying to eat each other obviously would not function as well as the one we have, where we generally all agree that it's not all right to eat other humans. The reason for it is not for some nebulous, indefinable moral reason about preventing suffering, but simply because one works and the other does not.

To be clear, what irritates me about your comments is not that you don't care about suffering - it's that you're taking it on yourself to tell other people not to care about things they do value. What does it matter to you?

An amoral framework has no basis whatsoever to argue that any value system is wrong. Why would a moral person care about the material reasons why society is altruistic? There's nothing you can argue at the object level that will change someone's moral values.

Where did I tell someone else what to care about?

Does it also irritate you knowing that vocal vegans take it upon themselves to tell other people to care about things they do not particularly value? If not, why not?

You seem to be confusing how something might come to exist (Darwinian explanation of altruism) with why someone might choose to adhere to a philosophy. Personally, as far as I can tell, most people I know are both intrinsically good and also extrinsically good in that they have considered nihilism and rejected it in favor of, like, having any value system and preferences about how the world should be at all.

I never said I didn't have preferences about how the world should be. They are just a little more nuanced than "this class of living things should be kept alive and feeling happy and that class of living things should not"

In general I prefer life should go on living and creating more life in a sustainable fashion, but generally that does involve some amount of suffering for some life somewhere.

This is the nihilist/materialist rhetorical trap.

If you take scientific materialism to it's extreme 'we are all just particles' ergo, none of intelligence/life/love/wisdom/creation even really exist, it's all just how we perceive randomness.

'Sociopaths' and 'Psychopaths' cannot exist in materialism after all: we're just mounds of atoms.

But once you accept the life principle, which is not so well defined but nevertheless evident to us all at least due to the fact we are conscious ... well then you can start to arrive at why we might think we are 'more important' than rocks.

Then things like 'community' etc. make sense.

But one's metaphysical view needs to have something more transcendent that e=mc2 at the root of it in order for it to work.

The OP's comments are actually reasonable in the context of materialism, and that they are a little 'shocking' to someone normally engaged in life is only evidence of the hollowness of our current rational regimes at explaining the most basic question, which is 'who/what are we'. Knowing how 'dark matter' works will be nice, but it's still secondary to understanding the nature of life itself, I think.

> Others argue that all animal lives carry equal weight with human lives (I don't know who these people are, but they worry me).

I thought as well that human lives are more important than animal lives, but the question is that when AI gets smarter than us and concious, do you want AI to have the moral value of human life having lesser importance than AI life?

IME most non vegans (including me) understand why it is a useful delineation, even if we cannot precisely quantify miral weights.