Edit: This was a reply to a now-deleted comment by Richard_kennaway.
Veganism is the unusual thing, less-than-veganism (including both those who do eat meat and various forms of vegetarianism, pescetarianism, etc.) is the usual thing. Vegans are vegans on ideological grounds; as one gets further and further from veganism, the ideology becomes less and less. This is the distinction between marked and unmarked. The ordinary person who does not give this issue any attention is not practising an ideology when they have a lamb chop any more than when they have a banana.
There’s no rule that you shouldn’t have categories to describe common things. In fact, it is often common. When referring to people of average height, we might use the term “169 cm” rather than taking care to erase that height on all documents to keep them unmarked.
I think a major factor why people eat meat is because it is delicious and convenient. The deliciousness and convenience are non-ideological motivations. However, this doesn’t mean carnist ideology isn’t a factor. To some degree, it’s a direct factor; those who believe there’s nothing wrong with eating meat and that it’s their own personal choice and that it’s actually good for the animals are presumably going to feel more positive about eating animals and therefore going to do it more. But also, it affects things on an institutional level. Vegans might want to stop institutions from paying people to breed, cage, mutilate and slaughter animals, and if they could broadly succeed with this, it would presumably make animal consumption plummet; but attempts to do this is generally not met with support for opposing animal farming, but instead met with opposition. Presumably this opposition is reflective of an ideology that people should be allowed to eat meat if they want to. (This is an ideology that is plausibly motivated by self-interest considering the deliciousness/convenience, but it is an ideology nonetheless.)
I don’t know what it means for an epistemic environment to declare war on anything. Your boo words are chosen to make both of these sound like bad things. Is it your view that they are both bad, or are you indeed in favour of the former, of declaring war on humans?
I’m using Ninety-Three’s metaphorical words. I agree that they are not literally true, and perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be something like “So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that is caging, mutilating, slaughtering animals and eating their flesh for pleasure and sustenance and covers up the gruesomeness of the process, or being in an epistemic environment that uses any means they feel may be effective to expose and undermine this caging/mutilation/slaughtering/eating process, even if that includes manipulation”.
If you want to know more about why Ninety-Three used the words “declared war on me” in order to refer to manipulation to stop him from hiring people to cage, mutilate and slaughter animals so he can eat their flesh, feel free to ask him.
Torture is not the purpose of farming animals. Meat is the purpose, suffering a side-effect. No farmer is going to out of their way to torture their livestock if they think it isn’t suffering enough.
This is true.
I’m ignoring a very fringe group, maybe smaller than vegans, of people who have decided to eat almost nothing but meat. But even they are doing so for health reasons, not ideology.
I’m not sure what you mean by “not ideology”. My understanding is that they have an ideology that falsely claims that it is healthy to eat nothing but meat. In this case, health reasons and ideology are tightly linked.
Similarly, most people have a liberal ideology about eating meat which says that it’s a personal choice that anyone may choose how to make as they want. While this is liberal and thus can feel neutral in the sense of permitting many different lifestyles, it is presumably not neutral in the sense of having zero causal effect on a society’s consumption of animals.
Torture is not the purpose of farming animals. Meat is the purpose, suffering a side-effect. No farmer is going to out of their way to torture their livestock if they think it isn’t suffering enough.
This is true.
While it’s true that torture isn’t the purpose, many workers in animal agriculture/farmers do go out of their way to torture animals, beyond what is entailed in profit seeking. Whether as a form of sadism, taking out their anger, a twisted and ineffective attempt at discipline, it certainly happens.
This may be somewhat tangential, but I think it’s worth noting.
Personally I’ve listened to a farmer I know gleefully recounting stories of repeatedly hitting his cows with baseball bats, in the face and body. It’s anecdotal, but growing up in rural environments I’ve heard a lot of things like that. He also talked/joked about performing DIY surgery on their genitals without anesthesia, which technically has a profit motive, but I think it’s indicative of an attitude of indifference to causing them extreme suffering.
There’s also all sorts of reports and undercover footage of workers beating and mutilating animals, often without any purpose behind it.
It’s a bit difficult to disentangle torture for the sake of torture, from torture which is vaguely aimed at profit seeking (though torture for the sake of harming the animal does happen).
If someone wants an animal to move somewhere, or if they want to perform an excruciating procedure on the animal without it struggling too much, they may beat the animal until it does what they want it to. They may be using this as an opportunity to vent their aggression. You could say profit seeking/meat is the ultimate purpose of that. However I think there’s a lot of context in between the dichotomy of ‘torture for profit’ vs ‘torture for torture’.
These things often happen in a context where the industries have final say over whether a particular practice constitutes unlawful treatment. Where it’s illegal to record and release video footage of what goes on there. Where local law enforcement has no interest in enforcing laws when there are laws.
I think abuse for the sake of abuse is common in any environment with power imbalances, lack of oversight, and resource constraints. Nursing homes, schools, prisons, policing, hospitals, etc. All entail countless examples of people with power over others abusing others, with the main purpose being some sort of emotional catharsis.
Those are industries where humans are the victims, members of the ingroup, who have laws and norms meant to protect their interests. I think beyond all of the available evidence of ‘torture for the sake of torture’ on farms, it also makes sense to assume it does/will happen.
I guess there’s a tricky thing here because one needs to distinguish:
Indifference about their suffering
Excitement about effective means of manipulating them
from
Sadistically enjoying their suffering
Like indifference about the animal’s suffering is a core part of modern carnism, right? And insofar as you see animals as morally irrelevant agents for human manipulation, it’s logical to be excited about certain things that otherwise seem grotesque.
As an analogy: I don’t see random farmed trees as morally significant. So if there is some powerful manipulation one can do with a tree, e.g. sawing in it using a chainsaw or running into it with some big machine, I wouldn’t feel outraged about it, even if it doesn’t serve a business need. Instead I might even get excited about it, if it looks awesome enough.
So in the case of animals, if one doesn’t care for them, one might enjoy showing off one’s new and powerful techniques. This makes some of the more absolutist vegan policies make more sense to me. Like it seems like to avoid this, you’d need to forbid carnists from farming animals.
(I deleted my previous comment before I saw your reply, as having been already said earlier. But your quoting from it contains most or all of it.)
So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that is caging, mutilating, slaughtering animals
By “epistemic environment” I understand the processes of reasoning prevalent there, be they good (systematically moving towards knowledge and truth) or bad (systematically moving away). The subject matter is not the product of the epistemic environment, only the material it operates on. Hence my perplexity at the idea of an epistemic environment doing the things you attribute to it.
I’m not sure what you mean by “not ideology”. My understanding is that they have an ideology that falsely claims that it is healthy to eat nothing but meat. In this case, health reasons and ideology are tightly linked.
That is merely a belief that these people hold about what sort of diet is healthy. “Ideology” as I understand the word, means beliefs specifically about how society as a whole should be organised. These are moral beliefs. People who believe a meat-only diet is healthy do not recommend it on any other ground but health. They may believe that one morally ought to maintain one’s health, but that applies to all diets, and is a reason often given for a vegetarian diet. Veganism is an ideology, holding it wrong to make or use any animal products whatever, and right to have such things forbidden, on the grounds of animal suffering, or more generally the right of animals not to be used for human purposes. Veganism is not undertaken to improve one’s health, unless via a halo effect: it’s morally good so it must be physically beneficial too. Ensuring a complete diet is something a vegan has to take extra care over.
The subject matter is not the product of the epistemic environment, only the material it operates on. Hence my perplexity at the idea of an epistemic environment doing the things you attribute to it.
I think this constitutes a rejection of rationalism and effwctive altruism? Eliezer started rationalism because he believed that a better epistemic environment would change the subject matter to AI safety and make people focus on more fruitful aspects of AI safety. I’m not sure how effective altruism started, but I believe it is a similar reasoning about how if you think well about charity you might find good neglected causes.
Just highlighting this to see if this is the crux.
That is merely a belief that these people hold about what sort of diet is healthy. “Ideology” as I understand the word, means beliefs specifically about how society as a whole should be organised. These are moral beliefs. People who believe a meat-only diet is healthy do not recommend it on any other ground but health. They may believe that one morally ought to maintain one’s health, but that applies to all diets, and is a reason often given for a vegetarian diet. Veganism is an ideology, holding it wrong to make or use any animal products whatever, and right to have such things forbidden, on the grounds of animal suffering, or more generally the right of animals not to be used for human purposes.
“Eating nothing but meat is healthy” is merely a belief about nutrition, so I agree that this by itself is not an ideology. However I believe it is part of a wider belief system that can reasonably be considered an ideology.
In the only-eating-meat case, it’s sort of weird because anecdotally they seem to have some strange masculinist-primitivist ideology that I don’t know much about.
It’s easier to talk about mainstream carnism. Carnists seem to believe that farms should raise animals for slaughter and consumption, that it’s reasonable to shame people if they oppose carnism at social gatherings (i.e. if someone serves meat at their birthday and a vegan starts talking about how horrible that is, it’s reasonable to call the vegan mean/crazy and tell them to shut up), and some (not sure how many) even believe that the state should send the police to arrest activists who break into factory farms in order to reveal what’s going on there to others.
These very much seem like beliefs about how society should be organized to me? Like we’re covering the production and consumption of fundamental resources like food, culture views about appropriate social interactions, and laws enforced through state violence.
Veganism is not undertaken to improve one’s health, unless via a halo effect: it’s morally good so it must be physically beneficial too. Ensuring a complete diet is something a vegan has to take extra care over.
I agree that many followers of many ideologies end up with stupid, insane, biased and otherwise wrong beliefs.
I think this constitutes a rejection of rationalism and effwctive altruism?
Well, I do reject EA, or rather its intellectual foundation in Peter Singer and radical utilitarianism. But that’s a different discussion, involving the motte-and-bailey of “Wouldn’t you want to direct your efforts in the most actually effective way?” vs “Doing good isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing”.
Rationalism in general, understood as the study and practice of those ways of thought and action that reliably lead towards truth and effectiveness and not away from them, yes, that’s a good thing. Eliezer founded LessWrong (and before that, co-founded Overcoming Bias) because he was already motivated by the threat of AGI, but saw a basic education in how to think as a prerequisite for anyone to be capable of having useful ideas about AGI. The AGI threat drove his rationalism outreach, rather than rationalism leading to the study of how to safely develop AGI.
Carnists seem to believe that …
I notice that people who eat meat are generally willing to accommodate vegetarians when organising a social gathering, and perhaps also vegans but not necessarily. I would expect them to throw out any vegan who knowingly comes into a non-vegan setting and starts screaming about dead animals.
More generally, calling anyone who doesn’t care about someone’s ideology because they have better things to think about “ideological” is on the way to saying “everything is ideological, everything is political, everything is problematic, and if you’re not for us you’re against us”. And some people actually say that. I think they’re crazy, and if I see them breaking and entering, I’ll call the police on them.
Rationalism in general, understood as the study and practice of those ways of thought and action that reliably lead towards truth and effectiveness and not away from them, yes, that’s a good thing. Eliezer founded LessWrong (and before that, co-founded Overcoming Bias) because he was already motivated by the threat of AGI, but saw a basic education in how to think as a prerequisite for anyone to be capable of having useful ideas about AGI. The AGI threat drove his rationalism outreach, rather than rationalism leading to the study of how to safely develop AGI.
Maybe a way to phrase my objection/confusion is:
In this quote, it seems like you are admitting that the epistemic environment does influence subject (“thought”) and action on some “small scale”. Like for instance rationalism might make people focus on questions like instrumental convergence and human values (good epistemics) instead of the meaning of life (bad epistemics due to lacking concepts of orthogonality), and might e.g. make people focus on regulating rather than accelerating AI.
Now my thought would be that if it influences subject and action on the small scale, then presumably it also influences subject and action on the large scale. After all, there’s no obvious distinction between the scales. Conversely, I guess now I infer that you have some distinction you make between these scales?
I notice that people who eat meat are generally willing to accommodate vegetarians when organising a social gathering, and perhaps also vegans but not necessarily. I would expect them to throw out any vegan who knowingly comes into a non-vegan setting and starts screaming about dead animals.
I didn’t say anything about screaming. It could go something like this:
Amelia’s living room was a dance of warm hues with fairy lights twinkling overhead. Conversations ebbed and flowed as guests exchanged stories and laughter over drinks. The centerpiece of the food table was a roasted chicken, its golden-brown skin glistening under the ambient light.
As guests approached to fill their plates, Luna, with her striking red hair, made her way to the table. She noticed the chicken and paused, taking a deep breath.
Turning to a group that included Rob, Amelia, and a few others she didn’t know well, she said, “It always makes me a bit sad seeing roasted chickens at gatherings.” The group paused, forks midway to their plates, to listen to her. “Many of these chickens are raised in conditions where they’re tightly packed and can’t move freely. They’re bred to grow so quickly that it causes them physical pain.”
Increasing the volume of one’s speech is physically unpleasant and makes it harder for others to get a word in, though with the advantage being that it is easier to hear when there is background noise. Thus screaming would be indicative of there being something non-truthseeking (albeit not necessarily from the screamer, as they might be trying to overwhelm others who are being non-truthseeking, though in practice I expect that either both would be truthseeking or both would be non-truthseeking).
More generally, calling anyone who doesn’t care about someone’s ideology because they have better things to think about “ideological” is on the way to saying “everything is ideological, everything is political, everything is problematic, and if you’re not for us you’re against us”. And some people actually say that.
I don’t think one can avoid ideologies, or that it would be desirable to do so.
Turning to a group that included Rob, Amelia, and a few others she didn’t know well, she said, “It always makes me a bit sad seeing roasted chickens at gatherings.” The group paused, forks midway to their plates, to listen to her. “Many of these chickens are raised in conditions where they’re tightly packed and can’t move freely. They’re bred to grow so quickly that it causes them physical pain.”
One of them replies with a shrug, “So I’ve heard. I can believe it.” Another says, “You knew this wasn’t a vegan gathering when you decided to come.” A third says, “You have said this; I have heard it. Message acknowledged and understood.” A fourth says, “This is important to you; but it is not so important to me.” A fifth says “I’m blogging this.” They carry on gnawing at the chicken wings in their hands.
These are all things that I might say, if I were inclined to say anything at all.
In this quote, it seems like you are admitting that the epistemic environment does influence subject (“thought”) and action on some “small scale”. Like for instance rationalism might make people focus on questions like instrumental convergence and human values (good epistemics) instead of the meaning of life (bad epistemics due to lacking concepts of orthogonality), and might e.g. make people focus on regulating rather than accelerating AI.
By “epistemic environment” I understand the standard of rationality present there. Rationality is a tool that can be deployed towards any goal. A sound epistemic environment is no guarantee that the people in it espouse any particular morality.
I agree that morality is not solely determined by epistemics; the orthogonality thesis holds true. However people’s opinions will also be influenced by their information, due to e.g. expected utility and various other things.
Edit: This was a reply to a now-deleted comment by Richard_kennaway.
There’s no rule that you shouldn’t have categories to describe common things. In fact, it is often common. When referring to people of average height, we might use the term “169 cm” rather than taking care to erase that height on all documents to keep them unmarked.
I think a major factor why people eat meat is because it is delicious and convenient. The deliciousness and convenience are non-ideological motivations. However, this doesn’t mean carnist ideology isn’t a factor. To some degree, it’s a direct factor; those who believe there’s nothing wrong with eating meat and that it’s their own personal choice and that it’s actually good for the animals are presumably going to feel more positive about eating animals and therefore going to do it more. But also, it affects things on an institutional level. Vegans might want to stop institutions from paying people to breed, cage, mutilate and slaughter animals, and if they could broadly succeed with this, it would presumably make animal consumption plummet; but attempts to do this is generally not met with support for opposing animal farming, but instead met with opposition. Presumably this opposition is reflective of an ideology that people should be allowed to eat meat if they want to. (This is an ideology that is plausibly motivated by self-interest considering the deliciousness/convenience, but it is an ideology nonetheless.)
I’m using Ninety-Three’s metaphorical words. I agree that they are not literally true, and perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be something like “So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that is caging, mutilating, slaughtering animals and eating their flesh for pleasure and sustenance and covers up the gruesomeness of the process, or being in an epistemic environment that uses any means they feel may be effective to expose and undermine this caging/mutilation/slaughtering/eating process, even if that includes manipulation”.
If you want to know more about why Ninety-Three used the words “declared war on me” in order to refer to manipulation to stop him from hiring people to cage, mutilate and slaughter animals so he can eat their flesh, feel free to ask him.
This is true.
I’m not sure what you mean by “not ideology”. My understanding is that they have an ideology that falsely claims that it is healthy to eat nothing but meat. In this case, health reasons and ideology are tightly linked.
Similarly, most people have a liberal ideology about eating meat which says that it’s a personal choice that anyone may choose how to make as they want. While this is liberal and thus can feel neutral in the sense of permitting many different lifestyles, it is presumably not neutral in the sense of having zero causal effect on a society’s consumption of animals.
While it’s true that torture isn’t the purpose, many workers in animal agriculture/farmers do go out of their way to torture animals, beyond what is entailed in profit seeking. Whether as a form of sadism, taking out their anger, a twisted and ineffective attempt at discipline, it certainly happens.
This may be somewhat tangential, but I think it’s worth noting.
Can you expand on what you are referring to?
Personally I’ve listened to a farmer I know gleefully recounting stories of repeatedly hitting his cows with baseball bats, in the face and body. It’s anecdotal, but growing up in rural environments I’ve heard a lot of things like that. He also talked/joked about performing DIY surgery on their genitals without anesthesia, which technically has a profit motive, but I think it’s indicative of an attitude of indifference to causing them extreme suffering.
There’s also all sorts of reports and undercover footage of workers beating and mutilating animals, often without any purpose behind it.
It’s a bit difficult to disentangle torture for the sake of torture, from torture which is vaguely aimed at profit seeking (though torture for the sake of harming the animal does happen).
If someone wants an animal to move somewhere, or if they want to perform an excruciating procedure on the animal without it struggling too much, they may beat the animal until it does what they want it to. They may be using this as an opportunity to vent their aggression. You could say profit seeking/meat is the ultimate purpose of that. However I think there’s a lot of context in between the dichotomy of ‘torture for profit’ vs ‘torture for torture’.
These things often happen in a context where the industries have final say over whether a particular practice constitutes unlawful treatment. Where it’s illegal to record and release video footage of what goes on there. Where local law enforcement has no interest in enforcing laws when there are laws.
I think abuse for the sake of abuse is common in any environment with power imbalances, lack of oversight, and resource constraints. Nursing homes, schools, prisons, policing, hospitals, etc. All entail countless examples of people with power over others abusing others, with the main purpose being some sort of emotional catharsis.
Those are industries where humans are the victims, members of the ingroup, who have laws and norms meant to protect their interests. I think beyond all of the available evidence of ‘torture for the sake of torture’ on farms, it also makes sense to assume it does/will happen.
Hmm… 🤔
I guess there’s a tricky thing here because one needs to distinguish:
Indifference about their suffering
Excitement about effective means of manipulating them
from
Sadistically enjoying their suffering
Like indifference about the animal’s suffering is a core part of modern carnism, right? And insofar as you see animals as morally irrelevant agents for human manipulation, it’s logical to be excited about certain things that otherwise seem grotesque.
As an analogy: I don’t see random farmed trees as morally significant. So if there is some powerful manipulation one can do with a tree, e.g. sawing in it using a chainsaw or running into it with some big machine, I wouldn’t feel outraged about it, even if it doesn’t serve a business need. Instead I might even get excited about it, if it looks awesome enough.
So in the case of animals, if one doesn’t care for them, one might enjoy showing off one’s new and powerful techniques. This makes some of the more absolutist vegan policies make more sense to me. Like it seems like to avoid this, you’d need to forbid carnists from farming animals.
(I deleted my previous comment before I saw your reply, as having been already said earlier. But your quoting from it contains most or all of it.)
By “epistemic environment” I understand the processes of reasoning prevalent there, be they good (systematically moving towards knowledge and truth) or bad (systematically moving away). The subject matter is not the product of the epistemic environment, only the material it operates on. Hence my perplexity at the idea of an epistemic environment doing the things you attribute to it.
That is merely a belief that these people hold about what sort of diet is healthy. “Ideology” as I understand the word, means beliefs specifically about how society as a whole should be organised. These are moral beliefs. People who believe a meat-only diet is healthy do not recommend it on any other ground but health. They may believe that one morally ought to maintain one’s health, but that applies to all diets, and is a reason often given for a vegetarian diet. Veganism is an ideology, holding it wrong to make or use any animal products whatever, and right to have such things forbidden, on the grounds of animal suffering, or more generally the right of animals not to be used for human purposes. Veganism is not undertaken to improve one’s health, unless via a halo effect: it’s morally good so it must be physically beneficial too. Ensuring a complete diet is something a vegan has to take extra care over.
I think this constitutes a rejection of rationalism and effwctive altruism? Eliezer started rationalism because he believed that a better epistemic environment would change the subject matter to AI safety and make people focus on more fruitful aspects of AI safety. I’m not sure how effective altruism started, but I believe it is a similar reasoning about how if you think well about charity you might find good neglected causes.
Just highlighting this to see if this is the crux.
“Eating nothing but meat is healthy” is merely a belief about nutrition, so I agree that this by itself is not an ideology. However I believe it is part of a wider belief system that can reasonably be considered an ideology.
In the only-eating-meat case, it’s sort of weird because anecdotally they seem to have some strange masculinist-primitivist ideology that I don’t know much about.
It’s easier to talk about mainstream carnism. Carnists seem to believe that farms should raise animals for slaughter and consumption, that it’s reasonable to shame people if they oppose carnism at social gatherings (i.e. if someone serves meat at their birthday and a vegan starts talking about how horrible that is, it’s reasonable to call the vegan mean/crazy and tell them to shut up), and some (not sure how many) even believe that the state should send the police to arrest activists who break into factory farms in order to reveal what’s going on there to others.
These very much seem like beliefs about how society should be organized to me? Like we’re covering the production and consumption of fundamental resources like food, culture views about appropriate social interactions, and laws enforced through state violence.
I agree that many followers of many ideologies end up with stupid, insane, biased and otherwise wrong beliefs.
Well, I do reject EA, or rather its intellectual foundation in Peter Singer and radical utilitarianism. But that’s a different discussion, involving the motte-and-bailey of “Wouldn’t you want to direct your efforts in the most actually effective way?” vs “Doing good isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing”.
Rationalism in general, understood as the study and practice of those ways of thought and action that reliably lead towards truth and effectiveness and not away from them, yes, that’s a good thing. Eliezer founded LessWrong (and before that, co-founded Overcoming Bias) because he was already motivated by the threat of AGI, but saw a basic education in how to think as a prerequisite for anyone to be capable of having useful ideas about AGI. The AGI threat drove his rationalism outreach, rather than rationalism leading to the study of how to safely develop AGI.
I notice that people who eat meat are generally willing to accommodate vegetarians when organising a social gathering, and perhaps also vegans but not necessarily. I would expect them to throw out any vegan who knowingly comes into a non-vegan setting and starts screaming about dead animals.
More generally, calling anyone who doesn’t care about someone’s ideology because they have better things to think about “ideological” is on the way to saying “everything is ideological, everything is political, everything is problematic, and if you’re not for us you’re against us”. And some people actually say that. I think they’re crazy, and if I see them breaking and entering, I’ll call the police on them.
Maybe a way to phrase my objection/confusion is:
In this quote, it seems like you are admitting that the epistemic environment does influence subject (“thought”) and action on some “small scale”. Like for instance rationalism might make people focus on questions like instrumental convergence and human values (good epistemics) instead of the meaning of life (bad epistemics due to lacking concepts of orthogonality), and might e.g. make people focus on regulating rather than accelerating AI.
Now my thought would be that if it influences subject and action on the small scale, then presumably it also influences subject and action on the large scale. After all, there’s no obvious distinction between the scales. Conversely, I guess now I infer that you have some distinction you make between these scales?
I didn’t say anything about screaming. It could go something like this:
Increasing the volume of one’s speech is physically unpleasant and makes it harder for others to get a word in, though with the advantage being that it is easier to hear when there is background noise. Thus screaming would be indicative of there being something non-truthseeking (albeit not necessarily from the screamer, as they might be trying to overwhelm others who are being non-truthseeking, though in practice I expect that either both would be truthseeking or both would be non-truthseeking).
I don’t think one can avoid ideologies, or that it would be desirable to do so.
One of them replies with a shrug, “So I’ve heard. I can believe it.” Another says, “You knew this wasn’t a vegan gathering when you decided to come.” A third says, “You have said this; I have heard it. Message acknowledged and understood.” A fourth says, “This is important to you; but it is not so important to me.” A fifth says “I’m blogging this.” They carry on gnawing at the chicken wings in their hands.
These are all things that I might say, if I were inclined to say anything at all.
Valid responses.
By “epistemic environment” I understand the standard of rationality present there. Rationality is a tool that can be deployed towards any goal. A sound epistemic environment is no guarantee that the people in it espouse any particular morality.
I agree that morality is not solely determined by epistemics; the orthogonality thesis holds true. However people’s opinions will also be influenced by their information, due to e.g. expected utility and various other things.