I don't know that it does, really. We include certain groups of humans that that doesn't apply to - namely very young children and the mentally deficient - largely because they tend to matter very greatly to one or more people to whom it does apply.

I mean, only homo sapiens would be capable of formulating your question, or of providing an answer to it, which is the answer in and of itself

> To base morality off of arbitrary species labels is simply not intellectually supportable.

Why not? It makes more sense than pretending we base them on mental capacity, when, say, an adult crow can be significantly smarter than a month old human. We have moral obligations to humans because we are human, and because other humans can reciprocate. Other animals are not human, and cannot reciprocate, so we owe them nothing.

No, intolerance is a refusal to tolerate something. It is not the same as disapproving of something. For instance, my vegetarian boyfriend disapproves of people eating meat, but he tolerates people who do, including me. If he refused to keep anyone in his life who ate meat, that would make him personally intolerant of meat-eaters. If he argued in favor of commiting violence against meat-eaters to try to rid the world of such vermin, that would make him politically intolerant of meat-eaters. It is that last sort of intolerance that Popper claims we shouldn't tolerate, and even then he adds a bunch of caveats limiting when it would be acceptable to suppress such speech.

> in this case, having a discriminatory ideology isn't an immutable trait.

Except it sort of is. At least, you can't just change your political beliefs, or any belief really, through an act of will. Beliefs may change on their own, of course, but inasmuch as they can't be changed by your choice, they probably qualify as "immutable" in the way you seem to be trying to get at.

I mean, part of it is surely about how you (one) want to be, right? You can be a dick to those who are a dick to you, but then those people will just feel justified in their dickishness, and you will have developed the habit of behaving badly yourself.

So no freedom of speech for those who try to cancel the speech of others?

>This may have been the most important question raised in the discussion: is it only "speciesism" that leads us to value complex life more than "less complex" life, or is there actually a rational basis from which to ask the question of which animals' lives are more important?

I mean, "important" is a value judgement, and so the question becomes "important to whom and for what". Animals are super important to me, for instance, because they provide me with a lot of different food products. I suppose the term "specieism" is an attempt to try to draw parallels with the notion of "racism", and to transfer the current moral outrage over the latter to the former, but if you ignore the emotional elements, the parallel isn't particularly helpful.

What you are doing is called "straw-manning" your opponents. This is a time-honored tradition in politics, but what is different now is that it used to be done cynically, as a way to fool others. But you seem to be sincere, meaning you have basically deluded yourself.

But I vehemently disagree with the notion of "structural violence". It's an attempt to harness our emotional reactions to violence and to apply our tendency to desire to restrict it to things that absolutely are not violence. It's similar to what progressives have done with the term "racism", which they started applying to a lot things that weren't, in fact, racism, in the hopes of using the emotion associated with the term to win support for their positions. And instead basically succeeded only in discrediting the term.

I mean, none of the examples you gave are violent, under any reasonable definition of the term. That's just not what the word means. "Harm" works, as long as you realize that "harm" is a much more subjective word, and that attempts to address "harm" are usually trade offs. For instance, anti-discrimination laws in hiring are deliberate infringements of an employer's right to freedom of association, justified on the grounds of the social harm they ostensibly prevent.

Based on the quotation from the article, it seems clear that what was meant originally was that what we should not tolerate is violence, that is, intolerance in the original sense of not tolerating something, to the point of trying to physically remove it from society.

So it is less that we need a narrower definition of the paradox of tolerance, and more that we need a narrower definition of intolerance. Not liking something, or someone, is not intolerance, for instance. Believing that certain behaviors are sinful or immoral, likewise not intolerance. Nor is merely expressing such beliefs, however annoying, upsetting, or offensive they may be to those who hear them.

That is, tolerance is different from acceptance, just as acceptance is different from celebration. And nowadays, when most people invoke the paradox of tolerance, the problem is what they are being intolerant of is not in fact intolerance, but merely non-acceptance of their views.

>Professional philosophers devote long books to this debate.

Which may be why philosophy lacks the cachet of the hard sciences. The willingness to debate something clearly foolish is itself foolish, as is using an appeal to authority in a debate, especially when you engage in the fallacy so vaguely.

>The post seems to presume that morality is subjective.

Because it is, like all matters of personal preference.

>If morality is objective, a reviewer could censor false normative statements as well.

But they aren't, which is why the problem arises.

>While epistemically knowing whether certain moral statements are true or false may be difficult, it is not always difficult. I don't see why censoring, for example, "cannibalism is good" should be a tough call.

Because that is your particular opinion, but it is not objectively true. It's a value judgement, and like all value judgments it really depends on your goals and personal desires. You can argue that cannibalism is bad because it risks spreading prion diseases, for instance, but that will only be convincing to people below a certain threshold of risk tolerance.

The Nordic model was what I had in mind, yes.

>In more properly functioning democracies inequality isn't so egregious.

I mean, most democracies have fairly high levels of inequality, and to the extent you seem to mean "free society" by "democracy" rather than "tyranny of the majority", economic inequality seems baked in - people are not equal, so any system that leaves people with a fair amount of economic freedom is going to end up reflecting that.

> I notice almost all criticisms of democracy are explained by a lack of actual democracy, which is encouraging as a democracy enthusiast.

Or you are no true scotsmanning it.

>Based on how I use means vs. ends for instance, I would say that economic development, higher literacy, better health outcomes, and robust human rights protections are inherently good.

Nothing is inherently good. Those things are all things that tend to be good for modern urbanized centers. To the extent that "economic development" has meant shifting from primary and secondary economic activities to tertiary ones, it has been deveststing to many rural areas and small towns. Literacy is of course very important in a knowledge-based economy, which is good, if you happen to be in a position to thrive in such an economy. "Better health outcomes" sounds like it might be one of those things you could get universal agreement on, but after watching a parent die of Alzheimer's at 80, you might wonder if helping them avoid a heart attack at 75 was really such a good idea. And of course, by "robust human rights protections" I assume you include a variety of policies opposed by solid majorities of those living outside major metropolitan areas.

>One’s religious, artistic, or personal values can’t have any political authority over others who don’t share those values. What has political authority is reason, more specifically, those principles which can’t be reasonably rejected. Those are our moral principles, which any legitimate political and legal institution needs to be based on.

This just sounds like you lack self-awareness of your own biases. Because all moral principles are at base personal preferences. Politics is always about whose values get to be imposed on everyone and justified as "reasonable". Religion only fell out of favor as a good source of such values because society changed to quickly to keep up, and so it lost too many adherents to make its influence stick.

>You're missing the inherent virtue of democracy: it provides the maximum dispersion of power throughout a population, which matters because in a free society everyone should have an equal voice, virtually by definition.

Is this its main virtue, though? Or is it just that it gives people desperate for change a non-violent means of pursuing it, and people hungry for power a non-violent way of seeking it? Because I don't think high levels of social power equality is particularly characteristic of most democracies. Elon Musk has a wee bit more power than, say, your average janitor, despite living in a democracy.

I mean, we would have used the simpler model because it would be more useful, but if in the fullness of time space telescopes had allowed us to see that the geocentric model was correct, we would have still called it true. That is, you have cherry picked an example where Occam's Razor correctly pointed us to the truth, but that doesn't prove much.

Occam's Razor says only that simpler explanations are to be preferred to more complex ones, because complexity often arises from people using motivated reasoning to plug holes in their pet theory rather than admitting that it is probably wrong. But it's not some law of nature that the simplest explanation is always right. We say the planets revolve around the sun because they do, and Occam's Razor pointed towards that, but special relativity is more complex than Newtonian physics, creationism is simpler than evolution, etc.

>Isn't this essentially the Trolly problem, If a trolly was going to kill a thousand people then Geralt wouldn't pull the switch to kill one person instead.

No. That is being forced to choose between bad outcomes, not two moral evils. Choosing between two evils would be, say, choosing between supporting a trolley conductor who wanted to run over one specific person he hated and one that wanted to run through a crowd to rack up a high kill count. The correct choice would be to support neither, since both are evil people.

It seems a lot of these dilemmas are only dilemmas if you believe one person can be morally responsible for another person's actions. In the case of "Jim", for example, if he kills the one person, he will be morally responsible for that person's death. But if he refuses, he will not be morally responsible for the death of the twenty - the executioner will. Nothing about Jim's refusal forces the executioner to kill, and the executioner is still free to choose not to execute anyone.

>Now tell me... where, in this web of firing neurons is the "choice" exactly?

No idea! Nevertheless I am aware of having choices. I still don't see why your inability to explain why should cause me to doubt the reality of my experience.

>This is the opposite of an argument from ignorance. I'm not saying "I have no idea how free will could work", I'm saying that based on everything we know about how the brain works, and how physics works, the illusion of choice does not translate to actual choice.

Yes, physics can't explain it, any more than it can explain life or consciousness, because those things are all emergent properties of complex systems, not direct consequences of simple actions.

Money isn't wealth - it's just a symbol for it, so you don't have to barter item for item. Wealth is what the money stands for - which is basically anything people are willing to trade you for.