Re: Animal pain, suffering, and death: why does it matter?
I agree with your post here and your follow-up post as well. I just don't understand why it needed to bring utilitarian ethics in to this argument. Additionally, once you do bring them into play, resolving your reasoned position of “my life is valuable to me”, with the altruistic ethic of utilitarian ethics “my life is valuable and subjugated to society”. Utilitarian ethics adds nothing to your argument and is the greatest logical jump in your post.
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When attempting to make moral decisions the first questino I ask myself is what do I value? What scenarios are preferable to me over other scenarios? The answer is simply that I value my own happiness and well beeing, I value good food, I like playing basketball and poker, I care deeply for family members, etc... I can then reseaonably assume that every other human beeing has certain preferences and values and care about things in a way that I do. Therefore I consider the morally good option to be the one that gives the most people the most happiness (basic utilitarianism). Ending a life is thus bad in that it eliminated all future positive expereiences a particular individual can have (which is especially worrisome if you don't buy into an afterlife).
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Therefore I consider the morally good option to be the one that gives me what I value, while not taking away what others reasonably are shown to value (basic individualism and objectivism, rejection of hedonism and altruism). Ending a life is thus bad in that it eliminated all future positive experiences a particular individual can have (which is especially worrisome if you don't buy into an afterlife).
Your follow up post was especially insightful in that it explains that ethics will only be as correct as our reason, and knowledge is correct. It is only when we say that mankind is not able to reason or understand does ethics live outside of mans domain.
I would say that it is also important to distinguish between values and desires. As to interchange the two will lead to incorrect ethics.
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