this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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You can make a purely rational environmental argument with reducing CO2 emissions.
A pure appeal to emotion is showing slaughterhouse footage or other animal suffering.
A utilitarian philosophical argument about reducing suffering is also logical, not emotional.
A emotional spiritual appeal can be made with karmic debt accumulated or similar.
I don't give a flying fuck about CO2. I care that you are murdering an animal and ending its life for no reason. Animals have rights including the right to live without your torturing them and mudering them. Everything else is out of scope for veganism. It is an ethical position advocating for the rights of animals, not a utilitarian calculation.
Please do this without resorting to an emotional motivation such as "People enjoy being alive and not suffering" or whatever.
That’s not an emotional argument. The drive to survive is universal for all living beings.
What do to mean when you say "emotional argument"? I understand it as something like "an argument which rests on an appeal to an emotional experience" or similar.
For example a mathematical proof is not an emotional argument, as a being without any emotions would be able to verify it as true.
However "people don't want to die, so you shouldn't kill them" is an emotional argument as it fundamentally rests on the counterfactual "a person assumed to have qualia observing a universe in which they had been killed might experience negative valence". Which only makes sense if the notion of another being you assume to have qualia being sad in a way which is impossible in reality upsets you.
Of course that's emotional.
Reducing suffering is based on the idea that I don't like suffering, therefore I don't want others to suffer. That's emotional.
There are whole schools of philosophy around suffering, its necessity, and its reduction. Utilitarianism is one of that. Philosophy is based on logic, not straight emotions.
If you say, “I don’t like suffering” to someone with a “no pain, no gain” shirt, your argument is weaker.
Yeah, sorry, but that's straight untrue.
As I wrote before, every time you're doing a value judgement, you're arguing based on emotions.
Saying shredding two animals causes more suffering than shredding no animals is a rational, provable statement. But whether suffering is bad or not, is a value judgement and thus not rational.
And both of these statements are value judgement, you're doing a category error here.
This is nonsense. you should study philosophy and stop reading "rationalist" blogs.