It’s one thing to prioritize saving children from a burning building but not mice, and another to justify one’s decision to do so based on the neural complexity of children compared to mice. I don’t think killing a mouse is the moral equivalent of killing a child, but that’s me making a value judgment. I don’t need to cite a scientific (objective) criterion for this, such as how many neurons a child has, or whether or not it is conscious or has an ego (if such a thing is even scientific).
Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here (although I don’t feel you’re arguing in bad faith, for the record - I can see how my comments may be taken that way). I don’t believe species ought to be treated equally but rather that we ought to give all species consideration.
It’s curious that this view is considered so extreme by so many, while the treatment we inflict on living beings, which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than the way we treat the billions of mammals currently trapped in the dystopian hell of factory farming.
>It’s one thing to prioritize saving children from a burning building but not mice, and another to justify one’s decision to do so based on the neural complexity of children compared to mice. I don’t think killing a mouse is the moral equivalent of killing a child, but that’s me making a value judgment. I don’t need to cite a scientific (objective) criterion for this, such as how many neurons a child has, or whether or not it is conscious or has an ego (if such a thing is even scientific).
I mean, you certainly can go ahead and declare that that is how it works. Declaring that Its Not About Neurons is most definitely a statement you can make. That's step 1. Steps 2, 3, 4 etc are making arguments in support of that statement, explaining what the alternative basis for making moral judgments is based on, explaining why it's a better system, explaining how its meaningfully different and not just a restatement of what I said but with different words, etc.
You haven't done any of those things though. So this boils down to saying "no! it's not that! It's something else!" If we were using Graham's Argument Hierarchy[0], this would amount to DH3, which is Contradiction. It's one step better than DH2 (responding to tone), but it's one step worse than DH4 which is making a counterargument, which involves stating something else (contradiction) plus a layer of reasoning and/or evidence of some kind. In fact I would say this is barely even a contradiction, because contradiction means stating an alternative and I'm not even sure what the alternative is that you're stating.
>Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here
That was basically being put forward as a definition of speciesm that I was responding to, so I'm not sure how that's a straw man. If you can elaborate on what it means to value species differently but not have it count as speciesm, but not to it based on appealing to any biological information about species, but with something that is still a "moral judgment" differentiating species, I'm all ears. Let me remind you that you were using "deserve to suffer" as your idea of good faith characterization of the view you disagreed with, which is B-movie scifi villian, which to me qualifies it as a straw man.
>which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
>As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than...
These are also beside the point. So the long and short of it is there's not really anything responsive here that I can respond to.
Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here (although I don’t feel you’re arguing in bad faith, for the record - I can see how my comments may be taken that way). I don’t believe species ought to be treated equally but rather that we ought to give all species consideration.
It’s curious that this view is considered so extreme by so many, while the treatment we inflict on living beings, which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than the way we treat the billions of mammals currently trapped in the dystopian hell of factory farming.