The principle of harm is a principle applicable to nature. And what is meant of nature is not what is possible. What is meant of nature is "the principle of being that draws into reason what makes a thing intelligible as member of a kind". So we see this is not about what can be done to a thing, but rather what is rational in use to a kind within its system. The powers of every kind should be limited to the intelligible order for the act to be in of itself rational. And the rationality is what determines the morality.
You're asking about the overall societal attitude, yes?
Well, truth is, they are both just fine by society. And they are also both horrid and depraved.
Because the difference maker... is money. Money as a motivation greenlights just about anything to the late stage capitalist. Here is the american kennel club's advice on jacking off male dogs:
Some vet pages about making female cats cum to "control their estrus cycle". Which is something you can just go have a vet do to her, and breeders often do it on their own.
You're a vegan, did you forget how factory farms make more cows? A whole lot of fisting, and they don't exactly take dissent either.
And of course you can buy animal semen as well. Granted, that's much more hassle than a burger.
Now let's flip around to the opposite end. What if I were to do all the torture and murder of a factory farm worker, but without any of the material gain – just for my own personal pleasure? Society wouldn't like that very much actually! I'd be called a sicko! I need to get paid to make it okay.
Well, actually, it doesn't always have to be money. It just absolutely definitely super cannot be pleasure, whether the human's or the animal's. Because THAT'S disgusting.
If you wanna follow me on a tangential topic, I'd be curious how you justify your foregone conclusion of bestiality involving harm/rape that seems to underly the entirety of your post, by the way.
Sex is an emotional & psychological act, not just a physical one. Sharing such an extreme level of intimacy with a creature that cannot comprehend or consent is a sign of an utterly debased person.
While it may be different on the side of the animal (the victim) on the human's side it is quite similar to someone who would rape a child.
They are either completely uncaring about the impact on the creature they are "connecting" with or are so deluded they've convinced themselves it "consented." Either way, this is a sociopathic sensation addict of the worst sort, a junkie who will do pretty much anything to satisfy their craving.
Why is the person who kills others and inflicts profound suffering on them not similarly debased? Though I'd agree that the average person who engages in bestiality is morally worse--just that the act is not itself worse.
Yeah that feels right – is probably what you thought after you completely pulled this one out of your ass without so much as 5 minutes of research.
"A sociopathic sensation addict of the worst sort, a junkie who will do pretty much anything to satisfy their craving."
Ooo, goosebumps. It may not be all that original so far, but keep working on it and you have a functional comicbook villain.
I'll give you another example of a deluded person, maybe it'll inspire you!
How about someone who's so absorbed in their disgust-based morality that they've convinced themselves an entire sexual minority consists of inhuman monsters.
Bestiality is wrong because of the consequences it has on humans, not the consequences it has on the other animals. Most of human morality is entangled with adaptive evolutionary mechanisms related to the well-being and survival of... humans. This is not weird, new or hard.
This is a true descriptive claim, but that doesn't justify the controversial normative claim that we ought to arbitrarily favor humans. That, as a normative claim, is indefensible.
I'm not sure it is as indefensible as you think, but sure. Personally I am in favor of including animals in our circle of concerns, but I think that has to be argued for. We are not incorporeal gods making choices in the name of the universe and all its beings — we are human beings, living in specific contexts, bound by our survival environment, and it is natural to hold ourselves up at the highest echelon of moral concern.
My prefered rationalization for placing humans at the top of our moral concern is the recognition that we, as humans, are utility monsters. I think that gives us a starting point that anchors our moral intuitions and gives us space to consider, for example, human rights as a very important thing indeed. But other rationalizations for human's moral supremacy do exist, and can be very persuasive.
Most people agree that it's wrong to cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. Humans are not utility monsters we don't have orders of magnitude more valenced experiences than non-humans.
Do we not? I mean, it's not like other animals make films and poems and tragedies that are a little worse than ours— they don't make them at all. It is arguable that we are leaps and bounds above any other species of animal in terms of moral depth and breadth and richness. I really don't think other animals can compare at all. At the very least, it is arguable that they can't compare. We might very well be the universe's utility monsters.
"Imagine that a person committed bestial acts while sleepwalking, such that they never found out about it and it didn’t affect their character. However, while they were carrying out the bestial acts, the animal was screaming in pain, as it was being sexually assaulted. Surely that would still be bad. Thus, the wrongness of bestiality doesn’t stem from its negative impacts on the person carrying out the bestial acts — a lot of it comes from the harm to the animal."
In this case, the badness of the act doesn't come from bestiality (ie the fact that a human had sex with an animal), it comes from the animal's suffering and feeling of pain. In this scenario, no additional immorality is introduced by the fact that it was a human having sex. Otherwise, you'd have to accept bestiality if it were neutral or pleasurable to animals.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying. If you say the badness of bestiality comes mostly from the fact that it harms humans, then you'd have to say that in the sleepwalking case where no human is harmed, it's morally equivalent to eating meat.
As an aside, I don't think sleepwalkers are 100% blameless. They might be 99%, but I don't actually believe humans capable of complex neuro-motor activities such as engaging in painful sex with animals are 100% unawake or unconscious, and even if they are to some definition, I still don't think they're blameless (they could strap themselves to their beds if they run such risk, or they could take drugs to sleep more soundly, or whatever). If you are talking about an automata or machine mechanically fucking an animal — that's bad for all kinds of reason, but it's not bestiality.
Some of the badness of bestiality might come from direct harm to individuals (such as risk of disease, which the sleepwalker still suffers), but a lot of it probably comes from our judgment of other humans, social trust, upholding of social norms, etc. I know for a fact I wouldn't trust a human capable of sleepwalking into bestiality; I would want protection and distance from such human, and I would in fact consider him or her to be 'bad' in important ways.
In short, I think you take a very narrow view of "harm to humans". A specific act might be harmless — the sleepwalking example is already a stretch in that regard — but the normative claim might still hold for second-order effects, specially given a very long time-horizon, taking immaterial goods such as culture, social cohesion and trust (and many others) into account.
Since there are many human-affecting harms related to bestiality that make it different from meat-eating, I don't think they're morally equivalent.
This seems to be a flawed analysis. You assume a scenario in which case bestiality is beneficial for humans due to it being hedonistically pleasurable for the person committing the act. However, bestiality is inherently bad for a society given the terrible health implications for a society which commits bestiality. This is an extension of the moral argument against incest.
You're treating the morality of an act as though it exists within a vacuum when it is not so. For example, in your response to Jessie, you state that you "find the idea of masturbating while looking at pictures of corpses gross, but it's not immoral." The distinction here is that while the act itself is not inherently immoral, it does indeed point to a broader increased likelihood of immorality.
Bestiality is not more immoral than eating animals *in a vacuum*, but a society which engages in bestiality would absolutely be more morally and medically unstable than the one in which we exist now.
I believe your analysis is flawed due to the dismissal of the reasons for sociological dogmas. Chesterton's fence and all that.
Strongly disagree here. There's a VAST difference between "someone eating meat *might* have caused this single virus and "having sex with a horse will very likely kill you and/or give you X disease". You're vastly miscalculating the relative harm caused to humans by each.
Depending on the premise here, I think there is a flaw in the analysis. If you are asking the reader why bestiality is objectively immoral and eating meat is not, no objections here. Objectively speaking, it does seem like there really is no moral difference (though I suspect we would fall on different sides of this debate). However, if you are asking how people in general believe there is a moral difference, this post goes astray. In my opinion, you had it right at the very beginning: people think bestiality is gross and eating meat is not. The key difference here though from your blobfish example is that there is a human element. Because a human is involved in an act that also seems gross, that may make it immoral to the casual viewer. However, as you would point out, there are plenty of gross things humans do that are not seen as immoral; a key difference may be that it is a human plus another living organism which may enhance the grossness. The other difference may be social acceptance or social momentum: this is not a widely held or practiced phenomenon and people continue to avoid practicing it. Combine this with the fact that it seems gross and a human is involved with another living thing in the practice, we now have a formula that would seem to match this and other cases. Incest is the classic case: if a brother and sister decide to have safe sex, this is seen as immoral because it is gross (for various historical and biological reasons), involves a human being with another human being, and it is not a widely performed practice. Another is organ markets: taking organs out of other people and putting them in other people is gross, the surgery involves several human beings (donor, recipient, doctor), and paying for organs is not openly (or at least legally) practiced. This formula may not be completely robust, but I think it at least gets closer to answering your question and getting to the bottom of this "popular morality" puzzle.
Generally, we want our morality to be coherent and not just based on disgust. If a person's moral views are based entirely on disgust then presumably they wouldn't endorse them upon reflection. This is so even if moral realism is false. Lots of things are gross without being bad. I find the idea of obese people having sex to be gross, but it's not immoral. I also find the idea of masturbating while looking at pictures of corpses gross, but it's not immoral. Ultimately, I'm looking for a moral explanation of the difference, not a sociological one.
If I speak
The principle of harm is a principle applicable to nature. And what is meant of nature is not what is possible. What is meant of nature is "the principle of being that draws into reason what makes a thing intelligible as member of a kind". So we see this is not about what can be done to a thing, but rather what is rational in use to a kind within its system. The powers of every kind should be limited to the intelligible order for the act to be in of itself rational. And the rationality is what determines the morality.
I'm not following.
My answer is not what you expect.
Nope, not even after reading my username.
You're asking about the overall societal attitude, yes?
Well, truth is, they are both just fine by society. And they are also both horrid and depraved.
Because the difference maker... is money. Money as a motivation greenlights just about anything to the late stage capitalist. Here is the american kennel club's advice on jacking off male dogs:
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/dog-breeding/what-to-expect-when-you-collect/.
Some vet pages about making female cats cum to "control their estrus cycle". Which is something you can just go have a vet do to her, and breeders often do it on their own.
https://veteriankey.com/feline-reproduction/
http://therio.vetmed.lsu.edu/controlling_the_female_estrous.htm
You're a vegan, did you forget how factory farms make more cows? A whole lot of fisting, and they don't exactly take dissent either.
And of course you can buy animal semen as well. Granted, that's much more hassle than a burger.
Now let's flip around to the opposite end. What if I were to do all the torture and murder of a factory farm worker, but without any of the material gain – just for my own personal pleasure? Society wouldn't like that very much actually! I'd be called a sicko! I need to get paid to make it okay.
Well, actually, it doesn't always have to be money. It just absolutely definitely super cannot be pleasure, whether the human's or the animal's. Because THAT'S disgusting.
If you wanna follow me on a tangential topic, I'd be curious how you justify your foregone conclusion of bestiality involving harm/rape that seems to underly the entirety of your post, by the way.
Sex is an emotional & psychological act, not just a physical one. Sharing such an extreme level of intimacy with a creature that cannot comprehend or consent is a sign of an utterly debased person.
While it may be different on the side of the animal (the victim) on the human's side it is quite similar to someone who would rape a child.
They are either completely uncaring about the impact on the creature they are "connecting" with or are so deluded they've convinced themselves it "consented." Either way, this is a sociopathic sensation addict of the worst sort, a junkie who will do pretty much anything to satisfy their craving.
Why is the person who kills others and inflicts profound suffering on them not similarly debased? Though I'd agree that the average person who engages in bestiality is morally worse--just that the act is not itself worse.
Yeah that feels right – is probably what you thought after you completely pulled this one out of your ass without so much as 5 minutes of research.
"A sociopathic sensation addict of the worst sort, a junkie who will do pretty much anything to satisfy their craving."
Ooo, goosebumps. It may not be all that original so far, but keep working on it and you have a functional comicbook villain.
I'll give you another example of a deluded person, maybe it'll inspire you!
How about someone who's so absorbed in their disgust-based morality that they've convinced themselves an entire sexual minority consists of inhuman monsters.
Now that's a silly kind of deluded!
Bestiality is wrong because of the consequences it has on humans, not the consequences it has on the other animals. Most of human morality is entangled with adaptive evolutionary mechanisms related to the well-being and survival of... humans. This is not weird, new or hard.
This is a true descriptive claim, but that doesn't justify the controversial normative claim that we ought to arbitrarily favor humans. That, as a normative claim, is indefensible.
I'm not sure it is as indefensible as you think, but sure. Personally I am in favor of including animals in our circle of concerns, but I think that has to be argued for. We are not incorporeal gods making choices in the name of the universe and all its beings — we are human beings, living in specific contexts, bound by our survival environment, and it is natural to hold ourselves up at the highest echelon of moral concern.
My prefered rationalization for placing humans at the top of our moral concern is the recognition that we, as humans, are utility monsters. I think that gives us a starting point that anchors our moral intuitions and gives us space to consider, for example, human rights as a very important thing indeed. But other rationalizations for human's moral supremacy do exist, and can be very persuasive.
Most people agree that it's wrong to cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. Humans are not utility monsters we don't have orders of magnitude more valenced experiences than non-humans.
Do we not? I mean, it's not like other animals make films and poems and tragedies that are a little worse than ours— they don't make them at all. It is arguable that we are leaps and bounds above any other species of animal in terms of moral depth and breadth and richness. I really don't think other animals can compare at all. At the very least, it is arguable that they can't compare. We might very well be the universe's utility monsters.
About the sleepwalking counter to this:
"Imagine that a person committed bestial acts while sleepwalking, such that they never found out about it and it didn’t affect their character. However, while they were carrying out the bestial acts, the animal was screaming in pain, as it was being sexually assaulted. Surely that would still be bad. Thus, the wrongness of bestiality doesn’t stem from its negative impacts on the person carrying out the bestial acts — a lot of it comes from the harm to the animal."
In this case, the badness of the act doesn't come from bestiality (ie the fact that a human had sex with an animal), it comes from the animal's suffering and feeling of pain. In this scenario, no additional immorality is introduced by the fact that it was a human having sex. Otherwise, you'd have to accept bestiality if it were neutral or pleasurable to animals.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying. If you say the badness of bestiality comes mostly from the fact that it harms humans, then you'd have to say that in the sleepwalking case where no human is harmed, it's morally equivalent to eating meat.
As an aside, I don't think sleepwalkers are 100% blameless. They might be 99%, but I don't actually believe humans capable of complex neuro-motor activities such as engaging in painful sex with animals are 100% unawake or unconscious, and even if they are to some definition, I still don't think they're blameless (they could strap themselves to their beds if they run such risk, or they could take drugs to sleep more soundly, or whatever). If you are talking about an automata or machine mechanically fucking an animal — that's bad for all kinds of reason, but it's not bestiality.
Some of the badness of bestiality might come from direct harm to individuals (such as risk of disease, which the sleepwalker still suffers), but a lot of it probably comes from our judgment of other humans, social trust, upholding of social norms, etc. I know for a fact I wouldn't trust a human capable of sleepwalking into bestiality; I would want protection and distance from such human, and I would in fact consider him or her to be 'bad' in important ways.
In short, I think you take a very narrow view of "harm to humans". A specific act might be harmless — the sleepwalking example is already a stretch in that regard — but the normative claim might still hold for second-order effects, specially given a very long time-horizon, taking immaterial goods such as culture, social cohesion and trust (and many others) into account.
Since there are many human-affecting harms related to bestiality that make it different from meat-eating, I don't think they're morally equivalent.
This seems to be a flawed analysis. You assume a scenario in which case bestiality is beneficial for humans due to it being hedonistically pleasurable for the person committing the act. However, bestiality is inherently bad for a society given the terrible health implications for a society which commits bestiality. This is an extension of the moral argument against incest.
You're treating the morality of an act as though it exists within a vacuum when it is not so. For example, in your response to Jessie, you state that you "find the idea of masturbating while looking at pictures of corpses gross, but it's not immoral." The distinction here is that while the act itself is not inherently immoral, it does indeed point to a broader increased likelihood of immorality.
Bestiality is not more immoral than eating animals *in a vacuum*, but a society which engages in bestiality would absolutely be more morally and medically unstable than the one in which we exist now.
I believe your analysis is flawed due to the dismissal of the reasons for sociological dogmas. Chesterton's fence and all that.
Strongly disagree here. There's a VAST difference between "someone eating meat *might* have caused this single virus and "having sex with a horse will very likely kill you and/or give you X disease". You're vastly miscalculating the relative harm caused to humans by each.
Way to not engage with the substance of the argument! Have a good one :)
Depending on the premise here, I think there is a flaw in the analysis. If you are asking the reader why bestiality is objectively immoral and eating meat is not, no objections here. Objectively speaking, it does seem like there really is no moral difference (though I suspect we would fall on different sides of this debate). However, if you are asking how people in general believe there is a moral difference, this post goes astray. In my opinion, you had it right at the very beginning: people think bestiality is gross and eating meat is not. The key difference here though from your blobfish example is that there is a human element. Because a human is involved in an act that also seems gross, that may make it immoral to the casual viewer. However, as you would point out, there are plenty of gross things humans do that are not seen as immoral; a key difference may be that it is a human plus another living organism which may enhance the grossness. The other difference may be social acceptance or social momentum: this is not a widely held or practiced phenomenon and people continue to avoid practicing it. Combine this with the fact that it seems gross and a human is involved with another living thing in the practice, we now have a formula that would seem to match this and other cases. Incest is the classic case: if a brother and sister decide to have safe sex, this is seen as immoral because it is gross (for various historical and biological reasons), involves a human being with another human being, and it is not a widely performed practice. Another is organ markets: taking organs out of other people and putting them in other people is gross, the surgery involves several human beings (donor, recipient, doctor), and paying for organs is not openly (or at least legally) practiced. This formula may not be completely robust, but I think it at least gets closer to answering your question and getting to the bottom of this "popular morality" puzzle.
Generally, we want our morality to be coherent and not just based on disgust. If a person's moral views are based entirely on disgust then presumably they wouldn't endorse them upon reflection. This is so even if moral realism is false. Lots of things are gross without being bad. I find the idea of obese people having sex to be gross, but it's not immoral. I also find the idea of masturbating while looking at pictures of corpses gross, but it's not immoral. Ultimately, I'm looking for a moral explanation of the difference, not a sociological one.
Thanks for the reply and explanation. I think you're on the right track then based on that premise. Good to point out these conundrums.