I write on this often. See:

The Moral Argument (part 1)
Why Trust the Conscience?
The Wrong Test for Ethical Theories

Am I the only person who has had issues with the file on an iPod? It may be that the info is densely packed and my mind has wandered, but every time I’ve tried to rewind 30 seconds to hear a point again it seems to take me to a whole other discussion/timeline/etc.  Very strange (I suspect my iPod is borked because it has too much stuff on it).

Anyway…

I’d like to discuss the possiblity of us having evolved a moral sense, but I want to see if there’s a post more current to have that discussion in.  The question I have is that you and Alonzo both say something along the lines of “we have no reason to believe we’ve developed a moral ‘6th sense’”, but while I agree that our moral “sense” would be highly fallible, it seems to me very likely that we would have in fact evolved a moral sense.  I’ll detail the hows/whys from an evolutionary perspective in a bit (possibly on this thread if I can’t find a better post to reply to).

Btw, a quick internet search debunked my question on whether the planet can support it. Short answer: It can, because a vegan diet requires less energy than what most of us now eat. A vegan diet results in longer life and lower risks for cancer, heart disease, and other diseases. Setting aside the question of whether “animal farming” results in a net gain for the animal and looking at the simpler case of hunting, I still can’t see how this is any different from rape (a case that A.F. has already worked out). By my calculus, we should all be vegans. Please, show me where I’m wrong.

It could be that 100,000 years ago, when survival was less certain, hunting animals for food may very well have been a reasonable thing to do. 

Fast forward to the present. Survival is much less of a problem (at least it is for some of us), and we know that meat isn’t necessary for a healthy diet. But just because a few have gone vegan with no ill effects, it doesn’t mean the whole planet can, and in order for this to be a moral imperative, isn’t that exactly what we would need?

Desire utilitarianism is a theory that accounts for moral language (aka what we SHOULD do, what we are permitted to do, etc.) and (unlike other theories) refers only to things that really exist as described. Also, it is a theory of how we SHOULD do moral reasoning, I guess – only because it is the only theory that accounts for our moral language and also makes true claims about things that exist.

I don’t know the answer to your hunting question. Your hunting question requires a moral expert in that area. A lot of data has to be gathered, and a lot of hard thinking about the issue has to be done. Desire utilitarianism is not a theory that gives easy answers in many cases, because that is not how the world really is. In many cases, morality is a daunting research tactic. We need desire utilitarian researchers to answer many of our moral questions.

If the former, I (as I am not a proponent of desire utilitarianism) would like to hear your response to tinyfrog’s question about hunting, and the difference between hunting humans and non-human animals.

If the latter, do you think that desire utilitarianism suggests that hunting is immoral, since it violates the desires of the hunted animal? And also, do you think that the morality of an action depends on the capacity of the recipient’s capacity to have desires? Is it okay to “torture”  a tree (by, say, cutting all of its leaves), since the tree has no cognition (and therefore no desires)?

I have to admit that hearing him talk, it was hard to get a sense of the ‘mathematical certainty’ of his his system. There were times when he just seems to favor one explanation over another, and went about formulating a justification for it. It almost seemed like talking to a mathematician talking about numbers, but he was not letting you see his calculations. He would talk about this number being added to that number and getting a third number, and that it all works out correctly. But, the mathematician was always talking in vague terms, and you couldn’t help but wonder if it was as solid as he says. Maybe “mathematician” is bad in this context, since we all believe math works. Maybe “astrologer” would be a better example. It also reminded me a little of “evolutionary psychology” explanations – where someone finds a way to connect evolution with any particular human behavior. (There may be a hundred possible explanations of any particular behavior, and a hundred more we hadn’t even thought of, but the evolutionary psychologist acts like his explanations are the right ones.)

The human desires bacon.
The pig desires to stay alive, to get plenty of food, and to be healthy.

In this arrangement, the human fulfills several of the pig’s desires by caring for it and providing food and health care, in exchange for the pig fulfilling the human’s desire for bacon.

Both actually fulfill their desires more fully as a result of the arrangement, even though the pig ends up in the human’s belly.

In a rape scenario, the desire fulfillment is strictly one-way–the rapist fulfilling his own desires at the expence of the victim’s desires. That seems to me to be an important difference.

How is this scenario different from rape?

Chuck: What does desire utilitarianism say about killing the pig you had for 10 years?

I don’t know. This is all a research question. We haven’t collected the data necessary to know what the relevant moral desires are and their consequences. If you want to become a moral expert in this area, please do! :)

I like the analogy he makes between animals and humans who are more or less powerless to make their desires known. However, I am less convinced that our treatment of animals somehow makes them better off. Let’s say a pig lives 5 years in the wild and 10 if kept as a pet. (I have no idea what the real life expectancies are, for now let’s just assume.) What does desire utilitarianism say about killing the pig you had for 10 years? The pigs desire live is just the same as it was before. I don’t see how your decision to extend its life factors in at all.