Confessions of an Ex-Moralist

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

The day I became an atheist was the day I realized I had been a believer.

Up until then I had numbered myself among the “secular ethicists.” Plato’s “Euthyphro” had convinced me, as it had so many other philosophers, that religion is not needed for morality. Socrates puts the point characteristically in the form of a question: “Do the gods love something because it is pious, or is something pious because the gods love it?” To believe the latter would be to allow that any act whatever might turn out to be the “pious” or right thing to do, provided only that one of the gods (of Olympus), or the God of “Genesis” and “Job” in one of His moods, “loved” or willed it. Yet if God commanded that we kill our innocent child in cold blood, would we not resist the rightness of this act?

This would seem to be the modern, sane view of the matter. We have an intuitive sense of right and wrong that trumps even the commands of God. We have the ability to judge that God is good or bad. Therefore, even if God did not exist, we could fend for ourselves in matters of conscience. Ethics, not divine revelation, is the guide to life. That is indeed the clarion call of the “new atheists.” As the philosopher Louise Antony puts it in the introduction to a recent collection of philosophers’ essays, “Philosophers without Gods: Secular Life in a Religious World”: “Another charge routinely leveled at atheists is that we have no moral values. The essays in this volume should serve to roundly refute this. Every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong.”

But I don’t. Not any longer. Yet I once devoted my professional life to studying ethics in the spirit of Antony’s book. The task seemed squarely on our human shoulders to figure out how to act on particular occasions, and how to live in general. Yes, there were deep problems to unravel, but they were subject to rational resolution. Most of my thinking concerned the dispute between the moral doctrine known as consequentialism and so-called deontological ethics: is it the outcome of our actions that determines their moral value, or, alternatively, the quality of the act itself? For example, is a lie that leads to something good thereby permissible, perhaps even obligatory, or would it be forbidden simply in virtue of being a lie? This kind of inquiry is known as normative ethics.

Then there is another kind of motive for doing ethics, more practical in nature. So-called applied ethics seeks to find answers for the pressing moral problems of the day. Can abortion ever be justified? Capital punishment? Euthanasia? War? In my case the plight of nonhuman animals at human hands became the great preoccupation. I could think of no greater atrocity than the confinement and slaughter of untold billions of innocent creatures for sustenance that can be provided through other, more humane diets.

In my most recent published book, I defended a particular moral theory – my own version of deontological ethics – and then “applied” that theory to defend a particular moral claim: that other animals have an inherent right not to be eaten or otherwise used by humans. Oddly enough, it was as I crossed the final “t” and dotted the final “i” of that monograph, that I underwent what I call my anti-epiphany.

A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset. I thought to myself: “Ah, if that is what she means, then I could believe in that kind of God. For when I think about the universe, I am filled with awe and wonder; if that feeling is God, then I am a believer.”

But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.

And what is more, I had known this. At some level of my being there had been the awareness, but I had brushed it aside. I had therefore lived in a semi-conscious state of self-delusion – what Sartre might have called bad faith. But in my case this was also a pun, for my bad faith was precisely the belief that I lacked faith in a divinity.

In the three years since my anti-epiphany I have attempted to assess these surprising revelations and their implications for my life and work. I found myself in the thick of meta-ethics, which looks at the nature of morality, including whether there even is such a thing as right and wrong. I myself had ignored the latter issue for most of my career, since, if there was one thing I knew in this entire universe, it was that some things are morally wrong. It is wrong to toss male chicks, alive and conscious, into a meat grinder, as happens in the egg industry. It is wrong to scorn homosexuals and deny them civil rights. It is wrong to massacre people in death camps. All of these things have met with general approval in one society or another. And yet I knew in my soul, with all of my conviction, with a passion, that they were wrong, wrong, wrong. I knew this with more certainty than I knew that the earth is round.

But suddenly I knew it no more. I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong. But neither are they right; nor are they permissible. The entire set of moral attributions is out the window. Think of this analogy: A tribe of people lives on an isolated island. They have no formal governmental institutions of any kind. In particular they have no legislature. Therefore in that society it would make no sense to say that someone had done something “illegal.” But neither would anything be “legal.” The entire set of legal categories would be inapplicable. In just this way I now view moral categories.

Certainly I am not the first to have had thoughts like these, and today the philosopher Richard Garner in particular is a soul mate. Nor has there been a shortage of alternative conceptions of morality to the one I held. But the personal experiment of excluding all moral concepts and language from my thinking, feeling and actions has proved so workable and attractive, I am convinced that anyone who gives it a fair shot would likely find it to his liking.

One interesting discovery has been that there are fewer practical differences between moralism and amoralism than might have been expected. It seems to me that what could broadly be called desire has been the moving force of humanity, no matter how we might have window-dressed it with moral talk. By desire I do not mean sexual craving, or even only selfish wanting. I use the term generally to refer to whatever motivates us, which ranges from selfishness to altruism and everything in between and at right angles. Mother Theresa was acting as much from desire as was the Marquis de Sade. But the sort of desire that now concerns me most is what we would want if we were absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as moral right and wrong. I think the most likely answer is: pretty much the same as what we want now.

For instance, I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop. Has this lessened my commitment to ending it? I do not find that to be the case at all. Does this lessen my ability to bring others around to sharing my desires, and hence diminish the prospects of ending animal agriculture? On the contrary, I find myself in a far better position than before to change minds – and, what is more important, hearts. For to argue that people who use animals for food and other purposes are doing something terribly wrong is hardly the way to win them over. That is more likely to elicit their defensive resistance.

Instead I now focus on conveying information: about the state of affairs on factory farms and elsewhere, the environmental devastation that results and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered. It is also important to spread knowledge of alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet. If such efforts will not cause people to alter their eating and buying habits, support the passage of various laws and so forth, I don’t know what will.

So nothing has changed, and everything has changed. For while my desires are the same, my manner of trying to implement them has altered radically. I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly.

My outlook has therefore become more practical: I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized. This implies being an active citizen. But there is still plenty of room for the sorts of activities and engagements that characterize the life of a philosophical ethicist. For one thing, I retain my strong preference for honest dialectical dealings in a context of mutual respect. It’s just that I am no longer giving premises in moral arguments; rather, I am offering considerations to help us figure out what to do. I am not attempting to justify anything; I am trying to motivate informed and reflective choices.

In the process my own desires are likely to undergo further change as well, in the direction of greater compassion and respect, I would anticipate – and not only for the victims of the attitudes, behaviors and policies I don’t like, but also for their perpetrators. But this won’t be because a god, a supernatural law or even my conscience told me I must, I ought, I have an obligation. Instead I will be moved by my head and my heart. Morality has nothing to do with it.

[LaCroix]

Short version:

I no longer think people are immoral to eat meat, I just think they are uneducated and dumb to do so, because I think my opinion is superior to theirs.

[RazorOutlaw]

Not even! He no longer thinks there is something as objective morality, like "It's wrong to do X because of consequence Z". He thinks that desire subsumes moral discussions. We typically desire for children to be safe from harm, right? So, according to this guy, talk about the morality of harming children (whether it's good in any case or only good if the consequence is good) is pointless because we're usually hard-wired to not harm them anyway.
In the end he gives up trying to build an argument for a certain kind of morality and realizes he has to spend a lot more time influencing people (again, this seems kind of dumb but a philosopher does try to build arguments for a set of views, especially in ethics).

I don't know how much I agree with his idea that our intuition guides us, because our intuition can be dead wrong.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

I wonder if people would knee-jerk against this so readily if it used something different from the meat industry as its central example.

A better summary is that declaring things right or wrong based on how they feel is similar to religious beliefs in many ways. Just as you're not going to be able to convert a believer by simply saying how right your religious beliefs are, you aren't going to be able to convince someone who has different moral feelings by simply saying how wrong something is.

I don't know how much I agree with his idea that our intuition guides us, because our intuition can be dead wrong.

That's actually a big part of his entire point. The author intuitively feels that the meat industry is a heinous moral wrong. Obviously many people feel intuitively that this isn't the case because most Americans can eat a chicken sandwich without a crisis of consciousness. And if you simply go by what's "right" or "wrong" based on these feelings, you can't get anywhere; you'll either be talking with someone who already agrees or someone who can't be convinced by you coming from an entirely different set of feelings.

Here's the key segment:

Does this lessen my ability to bring others around to sharing my desires, and hence diminish the prospects of ending animal agriculture? On the contrary, I find myself in a far better position than before to change minds – and, what is more important, hearts. For to argue that people who use animals for food and other purposes are doing something terribly wrong is hardly the way to win them over. That is more likely to elicit their defensive resistance.

Instead I now focus on conveying information: about the state of affairs on factory farms and elsewhere, the environmental devastation that results and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered. It is also important to spread knowledge of alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet. If such efforts will not cause people to alter their eating and buying habits, support the passage of various laws and so forth, I don’t know what will.

Unlike LaCroix's strawman version, he's not saying "hurf durf meat eaters are ignorant lol". He's saying "telling them that I feel what they're doing is wrong isn't going to change their minds. Recognising this and taking another approach might bring a few people over, and thus it's better."

Edit: It's also weird seeing people who are presumably consequentialists attack this essay. If you believe it's the consequences that matter, what's more important? That something is declared wrong (or right) or that it happens less often (or more)? The author's conclusion is the latter and I'd think any consequentialist could sympathise.

[Nephtys]

I find it immoral to write with no intent what-so-ever to be concise, using amazing and ever-so-insightful terms as 'anti-epiphany' and 'meta-ethics'. And don't forget overuse of 'so-called', and such amazing metaphors as 'Dominoes continued to fall'.

[Spoonist]

I wonder if people would knee-jerk against this so readily if it used something different from the meat industry as its central example..

Probably.

Edit: It's also weird seeing people who are presumably consequentialists attack this essay. If you believe it's the consequences that matter, what's more important? That something is declared wrong (or right) or that it happens less often (or more)? The author's conclusion is the latter and I'd think any consequentialist could sympathise.

Not weird at all.

I think it boils down to what the individuals consider to be morality/moralism etc. The OP article has a very weird definition of morality. You could pretty much say all that he says about his "new" way of life by simply using a more normal scientific definition of morality instead of a philosofical one.

The way he argues is not at all similar to that of Richard Garner which he compares his new view to.

[Korto]

... and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered.

Has he ever met the other animals we share this world with? They can be just as cruel and sadistic as us, or more so, and the more intelligent they are, the more likely it is. To my knowledge, the only animals where you've got a majority of "gentle" are the domesticated, something that, as a vegan, I assume he's not too much in favour of.

I wonder what he thinks of other animals eating animals? Is it wrong, but something he's got to put up with since (a) the animals don't know better, and (b) many animals can't live on vegetation anyway? Or does he feel it's all right for "animals" to eat animals but not "people" to eat animals, like some might feel that it's wrong for whites to kill each other over religion, but it's all right for browns to kill each other over religion because they're brown.

Otherwise, I'll confess, tl;dr - eyes glazed over half way through

[mr friendly guy]

... and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered.

Has he ever met the other animals we share this world with? They can be just as cruel and sadistic as us, or more so, and the more intelligent they are, the more likely it is. To my knowledge, the only animals where you've got a majority of "gentle" are the domesticated, something that, as a vegan, I assume he's not too much in favour of.

I wonder what he thinks of other animals eating animals? Is it wrong, but something he's got to put up with since (a) the animals don't know better, and (b) many animals can't live on vegetation anyway? Or does he feel it's all right for "animals" to eat animals but not "people" to eat animals, like some might feel that it's wrong for whites to kill each other over religion, but it's all right for browns to kill each other over religion because they're brown.

Otherwise, I'll confess, tl;dr - eyes glazed over half way through

First let me preface this by saying I haven't read the article, but a simple counter argument would be that these animals aren't as intelligent as us, so they can't come up with a system of morality like we do.

[LaCroix]

My point was that he just dropped the word "morality", but still keeps the conviction that his opinion and desires are more important thatn the ones of others. He still argues that, for example, eating meat, is "wrong", for people only do it since they aren't aware of the "alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet".

So he just replaced "You should change your ways because I think it immoral" to "You should change because I think you are uninformed and do things I believe are wrong"

There is no abandonment of moral - it's just semantic nitpicking and blame shift from "moral" to "uneducated". The whole "desire" to end meat industry is just a product of his moral qualms with it. It's still the same argument of "I believe it's wrong", eg. appeal to morality.


edit - regarding the he thinks other approach is better:
"Eating meat is wrong, you should go vegan instead."
"I could teach you how to lead a life with vegan food, so you no longer have to eat meat."

Makes no difference. Both sentences state that eating meat is wrong, which is a personal opinion, but no fact. I personally feel that his new approach is even more patronizing than the pure moral one, since he assumes that I made my choice due to lack of information.

[RazorOutlaw]

I think his point is that you shouldn't take a position and then beat people over the head with the facts of it in a hope to change their minds.

So he just replaced "You should change your ways because I think it immoral" to "You should change because I think you are uninformed and do things I believe are wrong"

He just didn't change what he was saying, he changed his perspective. He became less about confrontation (however understated it is in this essay) and more about education.

Replace vegan diet with teaching evolution in schools. He switches from "confront Creationists" to "educate Creationists".

I find it immoral to write with no intent what-so-ever to be concise, using amazing and ever-so-insightful terms as 'anti-epiphany' and 'meta-ethics'. And don't forget overuse of 'so-called', and such amazing metaphors as 'Dominoes continued to fall'.

He does describe meta-ethics, at least.

I found myself in the thick of meta-ethics, which looks at the nature of morality, including whether there even is such a thing as right and wrong.

I do think his article had a little too much jargon.

[Straha]

Kind of funny to see people try to trash and/or respond to an article while self-admittedly having never read it.


As for the article itself, the author's revelation isn't in any sense new. There is almost two hundred years of ethical philosophy, starting with the works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and flowing through authors like Zygmunt Bauman, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler to name a few, that take as a starting point that there can be no truly 'objective' ethics and roll from there. Combined with the works of people like Foucault, Ranciere, Agamben, et al. who convincingly show the pitfalls that trying to have an 'objective' set of ethics necessarily entails. There is a book called "Fashionable Nihilism" out that makes the claim that Analytic philosophy almost inexorably leads to utterly detached nihilism, articles like this seem to lead credence to that claim.


tl;dr The author is out of touch with the most productive lines of thought in philosophy, and his premise that ethics are not something that can be discussed is almost objectively incorrect.

[Junghalli]

The article paralleled some of my own thoughts on the true nature of morality (that it is basically an extension of instinct, and hence of desire).

My point was that he just dropped the word "morality", but still keeps the conviction that his opinion and desires are more important thatn the ones of others. He still argues that, for example, eating meat, is "wrong", for people only do it since they aren't aware of the "alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet".

So he just replaced "You should change your ways because I think it immoral" to "You should change because I think you are uninformed and do things I believe are wrong"

There is no abandonment of moral - it's just semantic nitpicking and blame shift from "moral" to "uneducated". The whole "desire" to end meat industry is just a product of his moral qualms with it. It's still the same argument of "I believe it's wrong", eg. appeal to morality.

I didn't get that from it at all. What I got was he started taking a more humble and realistic and less prescriptive perspective on his veganism:

Before: "I believe eating meat is morally wrong and people who do it are being evil."
After: "I do not like the meat industry, I do not like what it does to animals, I wish it would stop existing, I will try to effect the world to bring that wish about by trying to bring others to my viewpoint, while keeping in mind that my viewpoint is not more 'right' than theirs in any absolute sense, so I will focus less on condemning them and more on presenting to them the same facts that led me to my own desires, in the hope they will react to it as I did."

Reading your post, I'm not sure what would have satisfied you short of him ceasing any advocacy for his own views.

[LaCroix]

My problem with him is the default position that he assumes that people do things he doesn't like because they are uneducated, and he has to teach them in order to see the truth. If the topic at hand was something science-related, where there is a possibilty to identify the wrong or right position due to facts, this can be valid.

In his example, though, he realizes that it is only his personal set of morals that make him assume his position, but he still defaults to the assumption that other people don't share his position because they don't know better, which is in no way humble.

[Straha]

Whats your brightline for adequate humility?

[Junghalli]

I did not get the sense he assumes people aren't vegan only because they "don't know any better", rather that our perspective is always shaped by our experiences and he thinks it's possible that one reason they might have a different perspective from him is they they have not had the experiences and knowledge that led him to his present perspective and, hey, might as well try to impart those if your goal is to change minds.

I don't see what's particularly arrogant about this. If I see somebody who disagrees with me I wonder what experiences they had that led them to the conclusions they do, and whether I might be able to change their minds by sharing some of my own experiences with them and visa versa. Do you think that human beings only ever disagree because their core values are different, and not because different experiences and knowledge has led them to different conclusions?

[LaCroix]

Whats your brightline for adequate humility?

I'd prefer honesty. To stay with the example, if someone tells me that he thinks eating meat/ killing animals is morally wrong, (and/or asks me why I do it), I have no problem with it, and will enjoy having a discussion about our different moral systems. I have had lots of these discussions with my circle of friends.

But if it starts with "You might not be aware that you can live just as healthy without eating meat," he starts off with an insult, trying to state that he is the expert, while I'm not knowing enough to make decisions, AND still implies I'm doing an evil thing, for he wants me to stop it. You might not feel that way, but to me, this is a worse insult than telling some that you think he does evil (=morally wrong) things. Your milage may vary.

[Straha]

I'd prefer honesty. To stay with the example, if someone tells me that he thinks eating meat/ killing animals is morally wrong, (and/or asks me why I do it), I have no problem with it, and will enjoy having a discussion about our different moral systems. I have had lots of these discussions with my circle of friends.

But if it starts with "You might not be aware that you can live just as healthy without eating meat," he starts off with an insult, trying to state that he is the expert, while I'm not knowing enough to make decisions, AND still implies I'm doing an evil thing, for he wants me to stop it. You might not feel that way, but to me, this is a worse insult than telling some that you think he does evil (=morally wrong) things. Your milage may vary.

A. Read the article. His entire premise is that he's come to the conclusion that there can be no such thing as morality or ethics. As such for him to approach another person and say that eating meat is morally wrong would be the height of dishonesty and hubris. By approaching questions of 'ethics' from the standpoint of "this is an alternative way to approach the world and here's why I approach it in this way" (a standpoint he elucidates quite clearly in the article) he hopes to create a more honest and open dialog and exchange of views that he thinks is more productive. If anything this is far more humble because he gives up the high ground of ethics and morality and concedes a priori that your point of view with regards to anything, in this case the treatment of animals, is just as valid as his own, and he hopes that by doing this he also gives up the implication that his morality/ethics is further developed than yours, which seems to answer back the totality of your criticism, and especially the criticism that he's setting himself up as an expert.

B. I think there's an interesting discussion to be had here about the way that questioning the propriety of meat-eating immediately causes a reflexive response with limited to no thought. Your immediate response to an analytic philosopher trying to wrangle with deep questions of morality and meta-ethics is to boil the entirety of his thought-process down to the sole question of the treatment of non-humans. Korto and Friendly Guy do the same damn thing, while both of them admit to not even having finished the article. As someone who deals with both questions of ethics and meat-eating this is truly fascinating (though in no way surprising) to me, and if I wanted to be psychoanalytic I think the case could be made that it bespeaks a massive guilt and disavowal process. Especially in a world wherein you could easily offer other criticisms to how he approaches the possibility of dialog and decision-making. (Hypothetical in point: How can a dialog be reached between a woman and a misogynist in the world where the woman has to a priori concede that there can be nothing ethically wrong with the misogynist's misogyny?) It strikes me as almost the ultimate example of missing the forest for the twigs, and is probably a process that should be explored at length.

[Junghalli]

You might not feel that way, but to me, this is a worse insult than telling some that you think he does evil (=morally wrong) things. Your milage may vary.

I think I kind of have the opposite feeling myself. All else being equal, I have a higher opinion of someone who's factually mistaken than someone who's just plain evil - at least the factually mistaken person has his heart in the right place.

[LaCroix]

A. Read the article. His entire premise is that he's come to the conclusion that there can be no such thing as morality or ethics. As such for him to approach another person and say that eating meat is morally wrong would be the height of dishonesty and hubris. By approaching questions of 'ethics' from the standpoint of "this is an alternative way to approach the world and here's why I approach it in this way" (a standpoint he elucidates quite clearly in the article) he hopes to create a more honest and open dialog and exchange of views that he thinks is more productive. If anything this is far more humble because he gives up the high ground of ethics and morality and concedes a priori that your point of view with regards to anything, in this case the treatment of animals, is just as valid as his own, and he hopes that by doing this he also gives up the implication that his morality/ethics is further developed than yours, which seems to answer back the totality of your criticism, and especially the criticism that he's setting himself up as an expert.

I read it, or else I wouldn't have commented on it.

To me, his whole attempt to construct of non-morality falls apart at his self-choosen example. He says he has a desire to end consuption of meat. This desire exists due to his belief of it to be morally wrong. If he approaches me in order to educate me, he does it because of his desire to end my meat consumption, for he believes it to be morally wrong.

If he believes my morality weren't less developed or equally valid, why would he try to change it, instead of leaving it be, as it isn't morally objectionable? His desire to change my ethic views stems from his opinion that they are evil.

Thusly, he is not an ex-moralist. He still acts on moral. He still believes that dissenting morals are evil. He only doesn't state it outright, anymore. I call that dishonest.

[Korto]

Kind of funny to see people try to trash and/or respond to an article while self-admittedly having never read it.

That's a fair cop, guv'nor, but honestly, so much of it reads like just so much drivel. Which may also explain the concentration on the part about the animal agriculture, which is the only bit in the article with any real meat in it.
It's also possible it's just me, and philosophy isn't my strong suit.
You psychoanalysis by the way is a massive fail. I feel no guilt about eating meat. We eat them, they (occasionally) eat us. Everyone's happy. That's not to say I'm happy with factory farming, which is a different issue and something we try to avoid.
I don't have much time for veganism. I consider vegetarians to have gone a little too far, and therefore vegans have gone completely overboard. There are many ways animals can be used in farming to make food production more efficient; poultry and pigs, goats and fish could all be used in scavenging and complementary roles and then consumed and otherwise used. This would probably be more expensive then what we do now, though.

But that's enough concentrating on what he had only put in there as an example, when the actual thrust of his article (to my reading) was that morals and ethics didn't exist, only desires. This is where I would like to have sat him down and asked him to define what he meant by morals, because to me morality is an internal set of rules and guidelines, differing from person to person, and the sum set of that morality forms (in weird and wonderful ways) the morality of the culture. If he's using a different definition (for instance, some absolute Morality), I need to know what it is. If he is using my interpretation as part of his definition, and he's saying his morality has nothing to do with why he, for example, feels a desire to stop baby roosters being thrown in a meat-grinder, then I would like to ask him where he does feel this desire comes from. He's doing it for the laughs?

PS. Yeah, Straha, I did get a bit more out of it on a second read.

[Cykeisme]

I'm not sure if I understood the latter portion (the conclusion) of the article correctly.

Is the author saying that our behaviour is based solely on our desires, and our "morals" simply stem from what we desire to do? If I read that right, he then proceeds to state that our desires are shaped by the information we have.

So he believes by "educating" people on the information that led him to his beliefs, they will have the same beliefs.

But what if an individual is completely educated of the inhumane treatment of farm cows, of the purported intelligence and sentience of these animals and the torturous experiences they have between birth and slaughter, but still enjoys a nice juicy steak too much to care?