A critique of vegetarianism, veganism and animal rights

Vegetarianism, veganism and animal rights market irrationality with a quasi-religious fixation on an arbitrary deontology detached from real-life outcome.

However, even a consequentialistic sentiocentrism still faces:

 

· Hume’s Is-Ought Gap

· No metric of sentience (panpsychism/solipsism)

· Aggregation and intersubjective commensurability of conflicting interests, supererogation

· Ignorance and chaos in predicting consequences

On Religion

Problems of Theism

(an interacting God with specific properties)

 

·      Unreliability of inner feeling

Cultural/familial specificity of ‘deeply felt truths known only to the mind’ renders it unreliable. Mutual incompatibility of religions. On chance alone expect yours to be wrong.

·      Unreliability of scripture

Historical unreliability and errors of holy books. Chinese whispers.

·      Incoherence

Theodicy/ Evil God Hypothesis, Inconsistent triad, Free will – Omniscience

 

Problems of Deism

(a non-interacting, mathematician/physicist creator)

 

·      Fallacy of composition, re: ‘first cause’

·      Unfalsifiability

Eg. Russell’s Teapot

 

Religion is comforting for some people, but that doesn’t make it true.

It was humanity’s first attempt at philosophy and science, to try and understand an emotionally difficult world.

Good thinking

Some people are careful to note that critical thinking isn’t anything negative or mean and that there is no predisposition to finding flaws. This is nonsense.