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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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The simplest answer is the material conditions of having one's direct material interests conflict with other people's rights and survival. It's a sort of cognitive dissonance resolution thing, that when someone is benefitting from hurting someone else they'll start trying to rationalize it: it's their "right" to take this for themselves, it's the "natural order" of the world that they should receive and others must suffer for it, the ones who are suffering are wicked and deserve to be hurt, and so on. Give that sort of mindset generations to fester and stew and you get it formalized into all sorts of violent reactionary ideologies. This is true whether one's talking about bourgeoisie, landlords, privileged ethnic groups, men in a patriarchal society, or settlers.
The specific arrangement of settler colonialism is also effectively a trap: the settlers' entire way of life and continued comfort depends on the brutal order of extraction and theft continuing, because their homes are on stolen land (and sometimes are literally homes that were directly stolen as-is), because their jobs are on stolen land, because all their wealth is tied up in systems that rely on the settler state. This means that an end to the settler project and a redress of its crimes means they lose everything and are destitute in a reactionary system that unpersons anyone who lacks land and wealth, that they would become refugees and find themselves at the mercy of other predatory capitalists eager to exploit and destroy them for profit. Considering that engaging in a genocidal settler colonialist project in the first place means starting from a position of already having a genocidal supremacist ideology, you can see how it only gets worse with time as the material conditions make it entrenched and more costly for its perpetrators to stop.
Edit: fuck this is reminding me of a "textbook" on military strategy I read when I was in highschool and was the sort of insufferable nerd who'd read stuff like that, which apart from having galaxy brain takes like "partisan resistance movements are a bad strategy because 'they are not militarily useful' and further 'corrode social morality' leading to restless populations later" also literally talked about and praised settler colonialism as a method of conquest for rather similar reasons to those I'm condemning it with here, that the settlers necessarily must be in conflict with the natives and so would "be more loyal" to the core that they both rely on and have cultural ties to than a subjugated native population would be. I looked around to see if I still had it so I could look at its brainworms through the lens of marxist analysis I have now, but its not on my bookshelves so I think it must be one of the ones that got ruined or lost while I was moving. I'm just struck by the memory of how it was basically taking a correct material analysis of some things and then applying the most ass backwards moral valuations to it to the point that now I'm wondering if it wasn't written by some trot turned neocon or something.
Well said. I think principles are really well-formed when they apply to a ton of different topics, even outside of the original scope of what the person writing intended. You listed a good number of cases where these kinds of material conflicts manifest, but there was one big one left out that a lot of leftists omit, veganism.
Even leftists, who are this aware about the cognitive dissonance humans fall victim to rationalize harm, still fall into these patterns. "What I choose to eat is my right", "it's natural that we kill and eat animals", "nature is cruel", "(non-pet) animals don't deserve moral consideration because they're lesser".
It's interesting because a lot of times these leftists aren't landlords, they aren't bourgeois business owners, they aren't benefactors of the patriarchy or imperialism. So their lack of material interests in perpetuating these systems allows them to critically analyze it. Then when it comes to a system of oppression they do benefit from, their critical analysis ends at "mmm bacon is so fucking tasty".
And they get angry and insulted - "How dare you compare me to an animal!" - because carnists cannot imagine viewing animals as anything other than disposable inferiors.
totally off topic for the threat, but i'm pro animal liberation and on board with a lot of vegan arguments. i don't really see why i should be held to a different moral standard wrt meat eating than a cat or wolf tho. there are cases where cats eating meat is criminal, but not always. in some cases you need the hunt to balance the birth rates of prey animals. i also don't think nature is entirely cruel when it comes to predator-prey relationships. i would much rather be put out of my misery than live in a decaying shell.
Male lions kill cubs so they can impregnate their mothers, but this is - to put it lightly - frowned upon in human society. If you put humans on the same moral standard as other animals, you quickly end up in absurd and horrifying places.
that's not meat eating..
He was answering your question, which was "why should I be treated differently than non-human animals with regards to morality".
He gave a concrete example, but I'll speak to the general principle. Non-human animals aren't civilized moral agents, they lack the capacity to rationally consider the harm they're causing, and by extension they have no moral obligations. "Ought implies can". Without the ability to act morally, they can't be obligated to be moral.
Humans are different. We have the capacity to act rationally and morally. Since we have the ability to consider the harm we're causing and stopping, we are obligated to. That's why you're different than non-human animals.
this argument does however does undermine the previous argument that humans are just another animal and therefore should treat other animals as our equals
Very young children and severely mentally disabled people don't have the same moral capacity as a typical adult but that doesn't make it okay to treat them as objects.
they also are people and not just animals though
I'd encourage you to read chamomile's post on this subject:
I feel that is an unfair comparison to make I have always upheld an extremely consistent definition of personhood and have never excluded from that definition any human life
I don't however see how you could possibly compare the life of an animal to the life of a human. I love dogs but for example if a human you hate is at risk of dying and a dog you love is at the same risk it would be monsterous to not prioritise the human
I don't consider the comparison unfair, but that may be because I've been on the wrong side of it.
I'm autistic. I struggle a lot with things that allistic people can typically do very easily or even effortlessly - things many would consider fundamental to being human, like socialization and romantic relationships. Over the course of my life, countless people have said and done things to me that make it clear that they view me as less than human. I've seen them say and do things to other autistic people because they make it clear they view them as less than human. This immediately gives me very good reason to be critical of the thought process that says "They're not human, so we get to be cruel to them."
Except I don't think that's what's actually going on. One of the unexpected benefits of learning communist theory has been being able to better frame my own experiences, and the experiences of other autistic people, through the lens of historical materialism. If you look at the reasons bullies give for being cruel to autistic people, they never hold up. "They should just try harder at being normal!" - yeah, that doesn't work for us and never did. It's like saying we should just try harder to see ultraviolet. Our brains and bodies aren't wired for that. "Their behaviors are unhealthy and we need to bully them into stopping them!" - except, of course, bullying doesn't accomplish the stated goal, it just makes us more miserable and withdrawn.
And that's where historical materialism comes in. Of course these reasons don't stand up to close scrutiny. They weren't arrived at out of a good-faith effort to do the best possible thing. The excuses that bullies of autistic people give are just there to give a veneer of legitimacy to what they're doing. They weren't dispassionately looking at autistic issues and deciding that the best way to handle things was to be shitty to autistic people. They wanted to be shitty to autistic people, so they needed to come up with a reason to justify to others (and perhaps even more critically, themselves) why that was an okay thing to do.
Similarly, it's not "I've reasoned that animals are inferior, so it's okay for me to eat them." It's "I want it to be okay for me to eat animals, so I need to come up with a reason they're inferior to me." I was a carnist for close to 3 decades and I can say firsthand that this is what was going on in my mind.
Your hypothetical about a human and a dog at risk of death isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand and not something I care to argue one way or the other because, generally speaking, the decision of whether or not to eat meat isn't a matter of choosing one life or another. It's a matter of choosing to end an animal's life for your taste pleasure vs. eating something else. If you have even a sliver of moral consideration for animals, that shouldn't be a difficult choice at all.
I think it's probably more difficult than you realize to make a moral case for intervening to keep predator/prey populations in balance
you should look into the relationship between deer and wolves in the inter-mountain west in north america. in particular the case studies of the removal and later re-introduction of wolves to yellowstone. there's some interesting work being done tracking degenerative conditions among deer populations that may be tied to the removal of predator animals from the region. hunting is popular in the region, so its not like humans are doing the job properly either.
its interesting to think about and it upsets dogmatic vegans so win-win. this view leads me towards eating mostly vegetarian, so its not like i'm diametrically opposed to veganism or super into meat eating. it just doesn't seem coherent to me to draw this special distinction between humans and animals. a solid philosophical system in my opinion should be able to address all inter-species relationships in some way, otherwise it cannot grapple with concepts like homeostasis effectively.