Re: let's not be silly...

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

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This is back to the main argument...

It is true that the points I raised in earlier emails about detecting the 
inner life of others apply to other humans just as to animals. However 
this does not help the vegetarian philosophy cause.

I think it was Nick who said that eventually the philosophical has to 
become the practical. Well, that really depends on what you are trying to 
do. If you have already decided that animals are worth saving, and that 
you need to argue somehow to justify this, then yes it does. But if you 
are simply enquiring after truth, then no, philosophy does not have to 
compromise on its strict requirements that premises are necessary and 
sufficient for their conclusions, and that arguments are valid and sound.

This is where the point I tried to start my first email on this subject 
with comes in. Vegetarianism argues for a change in the default behaviour 
of many people. Most people eat meat. There are almost no people whose 
default behaviour is to eat humans. In contrast with vegetarianism, nobody 
is proposing a change in people-eating behaviour.

To change the default behaviour of someone using philosophy you need to 
have a fully justified case (at least in analytic philosophy). Otherwise 
you are a rhetorician and a polemicist. Which is fine if your avowed 
intent is to save animals from being eaten, but not if you are after 
secure knowledge and truth. I am not using assumptions about the inner 
states of other humans as a premise in an argument to stop people eating 
humans. If I were, I would fail because it is insecure. Vegetarians *are* 
using assumptions about the inner states of animals as a premise in the 
philosophical justification they offer for not eating meat. And they are 
entitled to do so. You might find it plausible, or likely, or the simplest 
explanation, or intuitive or whatever. But it can be all these things and 
still *false*. So any justification resting on it is philosophically 
insecure. If your concern is simply philosophical, this case must fail to 
convince.

If philosophy represents rationality, it is therefore irrational to change 
your behaviour on the basis of the vegetarian case, as you know you are 
either i) doing so for emotional rather than rational reasons, or ii) 
doing so in response to an identifiably fallacious argument. Neither of 
which is rational behaviour. This is your right, of course.

Tag! You're it.

Rab.


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