Fsh diet V plant based diet?

[Tom L.]

I don't think you know what the word means.
No offense, but really, look it up.

Thought experiments are a way of demonstrating how philosophies work, like it or not.

You wrote, above: "My point was that sometimes utilitarianism is the right way, sometimes deontology. No one system of moral philosophy is always the best path.
It's not always right to look for the best outcome OR to always do what is normally the right action."

From vocabulary.com: Masochistic means getting pleasure, satisfaction, or gratification from pain, suffering, or humiliation. In simple terms, it is enjoying things that are typically uncomfortable, painful, or difficult.

And that is what I thought it meant. What does a thought experiment like this one accomplish? Who wants to be in a situation where there are no truly good options? If there are really no good options, what's the point of thinking about them?

More specifically: WHY is a "....train... heading toward a junction...currently it is heading toward 5 people on the track who cannot get out of the way"? If the 5 people chose to be in a dangerous situation, why does anyone else have to pay for that by dying in their place? Why isn't the engineer hitting the train brakes? Presumably this takes place in a populated area if almost half-a-dozen people are milling around on a railway, and both you and an obese person are standing nearby, so why is the train barreling through the area, unable to stop in time to avoid running people over?

I thought @allindogecoin 's countering dilemma of eating chocolate vs. sex tourism was valid: one could simply refuse to exploit people by either purchasing products produced by unethical labor conditions or by child prostitution. But you said you had no idea what they were talking about.

 

[Lou]

And that is what I thought it meant. What does a thought experiment like this one accomplish? Who wants to be in a situation where there are no truly good options? If there are really no good options, what's the point of thinking about them?

I think you are missing the point of a thought experiment

"A thought experiment is an imagined scenario used to explore complex, ethical, or physical problems that are often impossible to test in reality, acting as a "laboratory of the mind" to test intuition, arguments, or theories. Famous examples include Einstein’s light beam, Schrödinger’s cat, and the trolley problem"

-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 

[g0rph]

You wrote, above: "My point was that sometimes utilitarianism is the right way, sometimes deontology. No one system of moral philosophy is always the best path.
It's not always right to look for the best outcome OR to always do what is normally the right action."

From vocabulary.com: Masochistic means getting pleasure, satisfaction, or gratification from pain, suffering, or humiliation. In simple terms, it is enjoying things that are typically uncomfortable, painful, or difficult.

And that is what I thought it meant. What does a thought experiment like this one accomplish? Who wants to be in a situation where there are no truly good options? If there are really no good options, what's the point of thinking about them?

More specifically: WHY is a "....train... heading toward a junction...currently it is heading toward 5 people on the track who cannot get out of the way"? If the 5 people chose to be in a dangerous situation, why does anyone else have to pay for that by dying in their place? Why isn't the engineer hitting the train brakes? Presumably this takes place in a populated area if almost half-a-dozen people are milling around on a railway, and both you and an obese person are standing nearby, so why is the train barreling through the area, unable to stop in time to avoid running people over?

I thought @allindogecoin 's countering dilemma of eating chocolate vs. sex tourism was valid: one could simply refuse to exploit people by either purchasing products produced by unethical labor conditions or by child prostitution. But you said you had no idea what they were talking about.

Thought experiments are a way of looking at quandaries with clear options to test how people think and react, alone or en masse.
They are a part of philosophy and there is nothing "masochistic" about them.
It's this kind of thing that we will need to implement rules for eventual wide-spread roll-out of driverless cars....
i.e. If the car is heading toward a group of x people, and the only way of avoiding them will likely kill the passenger what should it do? etc.



And I personally thought the chocolate v sex tourism thing was to put it bluntly, a rambling incoherent mess, with made-up stats, and ridiculous alternatives "growing plants in the backyard to save rats and fish".

 

[allindogecoin]

And I personally thought the chocolate v sex tourism thing was to put it bluntly, a rambling incoherent mess, with made-up stats, and ridiculous alternatives "growing plants in the backyard to save rats and fish".

I apologise for spreading so much negativity in this thread. That was not my intention. What I was attempting to do was try to point out that non-factory fish vs vegan food eg edamame is a contrived comparison. We could have compared any two foods. Both of these options cause harm and the assumption is that it is best to opt for the "lesser of two evils." But often when comparing two options, we need to consider whether there really are only two options. So saying "it is okay to eat non-factory fish rather than tofu because tofu production harms rodents who are trapped in harvestors" is like saying "it is okay to harm a child via sex tourism because buying chocolate harms many children." It is like the trolley example where killing one person is justified because doing so saves five people, but perhaps there is an option where no one is killed. Of course, maybe a third option is not available in certain circumstances, but I am trying to point out that just because two options are presented and compared with each other, that is just how the ethical issue is framed, and when comparing two options, any two options can be presented. Non-factory fish doesn't have anything to do with agricultural vegan food such as soybeans in the same way chocolate doesn't have anything to do with sex tourism.

I am also aware that growing plants in the backyard is quite time consuming. It reflects how the systems and environment in an area affect moral choices, so eg if precision fermentation based food were more widely available, that could potentially become an option rather than non-factory fish vs farmed edamame.

 

[Graeme M]

I read back over this thread and I'm interested to see how my own stance has changed over time. The OP raised a challenging issue, but the way I see things now it seems relatively easy to respond.

The main reason vegans don't use animal-sourced commodities is because they want to keep animals free (ie we reject treating animals as chattel property) and prevent their unfair use. Mostly, we withdraw demand from animal-using systems.

Fish on farms are not free, so vegans won't buy farmed fish. Commercially caught fish ARE free, but is it fair to support that? In other words, can we do differently? The answer is yes, we don't need to eat fish.

What about self-caught fish? Well, the same question can be asked - do we need to do that? If yes, then it's acceptable within vegan principles to do that. For most of us though, the answer will be that we don't need to do it.

The OP asked about whether it is less harmful to eat fish or eat plant-sourced foods. Well, for all commercial production, we don't need to raise the problem of harm because that's not our motivation.

For free-living fish we catch ourselves, we *might* justify doing so if the scale of harm from buying plant-sourced food far outweighs the harm from catching fish.

Ignoring invertebrates, it's hard to see how that might carry through. As I've noted before the scale of wild animal deaths to grow crops is quite small, relatively speaking. One vegan's food might demand between five and 15 wild animal deaths per year. Given one wouldn't be eating just fish, I think even the harm equation rapidly favours the plants.

Catching/hunting very large animals *might* swing the balance, so I'm going to say it could be better to do that, but again I still think it's doubtful.

The vegan solution seems secure, so long as we ignore insects. If insects matter that much, we might as well all give up eating plants now and eat nothing but free-range beef. I don't think they do. Veganism cannot make the world perfect and insects individually matter very little. That doesn't mean we shouldn't support farmers finding better pest control methods, but I don't think the fact insects are killed to grow crops should factor into our moral calculations.