a moral intuition i have: to avoid culturally/conformistly-motivated cognition, it’s useful to ask:
if we were starting over, new to the world but with all the technology we have now, would we recreate this practice?
example: we start and out and there’s us, and these innocent fluffy creatures that can’t talk to us, but they can be our friends. we’re just learning about them for the first time. would we, at some point, spontaneously choose to kill them and eat their bodies, despite us having plant-based foods, supplements, vegan-assuming nutrition guides, etc? to me, the answer seems obviously not. the idea would not even cross our minds.
(i encourage picking other topics and seeing how this applies)
I’ve most often read/heard this argument in relation to alcohol and marijuana. Something along the lines of “if we had never had this thing and we discovered it today, would we make it legal/illegal?”
I think of it in vaguely the same category as the veil of ignorance and other simple thought experiments that encourage us to step outside of our own individualized preferences.
a moral intuition i have: to avoid culturally/conformistly-motivated cognition, it’s useful to ask:
if we were starting over, new to the world but with all the technology we have now, would we recreate this practice?
example: we start and out and there’s us, and these innocent fluffy creatures that can’t talk to us, but they can be our friends. we’re just learning about them for the first time. would we, at some point, spontaneously choose to kill them and eat their bodies, despite us having plant-based foods, supplements, vegan-assuming nutrition guides, etc? to me, the answer seems obviously not. the idea would not even cross our minds.
(i encourage picking other topics and seeing how this applies)
I’ve most often read/heard this argument in relation to alcohol and marijuana. Something along the lines of “if we had never had this thing and we discovered it today, would we make it legal/illegal?”
I think of it in vaguely the same category as the veil of ignorance and other simple thought experiments that encourage us to step outside of our own individualized preferences.
Sounds like the reversal test