(I’m pretty cynical about the morality of most humans due to factory farming. Evidently, almost everyone is happy to subsidize the torture of non-human animals, as long as 1) they don’t have to *see * the torture, and 2) they don’t face social censor for doing so. This is suggestive that many conventional moral norms that most people would be horrified to violate, are mainly the result of social punishment pressures, rather than resulting from care or fairness desires.)
Why do you dismiss the obvious hypothesis that “almost everyone” basically just doesn’t really think that factory farming is morally bad in any substantive way? You use the word “torture”, but I expect that most people simply wouldn’t agree that factory farming is morally equivalent to torturing a person. This seems to fully explain what we observe w.r.t. how people behave toward factory farming, without putting any pressure whatsoever on the view that conventional moral norms are mostly the result of people’s moral intuitions / conscience / etc. (We may still judge this view to false for other reasons, of course.)
Why do you dismiss the obvious hypothesis that “almost everyone” basically just doesn’t really think that factory farming is morally bad in any substantive way?
I confirm that I do dismiss this hypothesis on the basis of various pieces of evidence, from answers on surveys to the results of the Milligram experiment (though most people’s views about who counts as a moral patient definitely not a crux for my overall model here), but I would prefer not to get into it.
Why do you dismiss the obvious hypothesis that “almost everyone” basically just doesn’t really think that factory farming is morally bad in any substantive way? You use the word “torture”, but I expect that most people simply wouldn’t agree that factory farming is morally equivalent to torturing a person. This seems to fully explain what we observe w.r.t. how people behave toward factory farming, without putting any pressure whatsoever on the view that conventional moral norms are mostly the result of people’s moral intuitions / conscience / etc. (We may still judge this view to false for other reasons, of course.)
I confirm that I do dismiss this hypothesis on the basis of various pieces of evidence, from answers on surveys to the results of the Milligram experiment (though most people’s views about who counts as a moral patient definitely not a crux for my overall model here), but I would prefer not to get into it.