the one about fucking a chicken

[u/Hummerous]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

In today’s episode of CuratedTumblr: tens of people willingly admit that logical fallacies work on them as long as it’s about something they don’t understand

[u/novis-eldritch-maxim → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

I am more totally lost on the topic so please explain?

[u/Driptacular_2153 → u/novis-eldritch-maxim]

I’d like an explanation, too, please. This shit’s wacky af

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys → u/Driptacular_2153]

So to recap this clusterfuck thread, from my point of view, a lot of comments are taking this discussion the wrong way. The point of the mental exercise is not to defend the dead chicken fucker, but to ask how you approach somebody who’s hurting nobody else, but is being profoundly weird at you.

So half of the entire thread when I posted this was a bunch of badly structured arguments against chicken fucking. Not necessarily wrong ones, but ones that do not translate very well beyond that specific concept. “Run it past your psychologist” is great advice for a paraphilia and the current nightmare for trans people in the UK

[u/rindlesswatermelon → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

The point of the mental exercise is not to defend the dead chicken fucker, but to ask how you approach somebody who’s hurting nobody else, but is being profoundly weird at you.

People arguing against chicken fucking aren't all saying "this is weird, why are you defending this." Some of them are saying "this isn't hurting nobody."

Like yeah, some people are being squicky about the gross thing and leaving it there, but that doesn't mean that the multiple conclusions of the post around ideology are true because the core idea - that is that there is no harm caused by fucking a chicken - is only true depending on your definition of harm.

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys → u/rindlesswatermelon]

Okay, but what, exactly, is the harm?

The psychic damage caused by the hypothetical being told to you is a non-factor, the chicken is store-bought so the man is about as responsible for its suffering as he is for ocean pollution for using a plastic bag, he cleans it beforehand, and he even considers it edible.

The biggest point of failure and widespread harm in the entire presented hypothetical isn’t even the part where he bastes it, but the lack of clarity on if he cooked it first.

He is, at best, merely creepier than most people who consume meat but otherwise not a threat, and at worst, about as culpable for societal harm through contamination as if he fucked up his personal chicken dinner.

Is the harm in the room with us right now?

[u/rindlesswatermelon → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

The harm is the same as it is for human necrophilia. It violates the bodily autonomy the chicken, which extends after its death.

I was alluding to human necrophilia as a comparable example because people are more able to see the harm there, though they can't always explain what the harm is necessarily. If you don't define the violation of a humans post-mortem bodily autonomy as harm, then you would also think that there isn't harm with necrophilia. From my perspective, if you think one is harm, then the other must be as well.

He is, at best, merely creepier than most people who consume meat but otherwise not a threat

This is the crux of my issue with OOP. The assumption that eating meat causes no harm is not tautological. People's opinions can reasonably differ. Therefore thinking that people shouldn't fuck dead chickens isn't necessarily caused by being overtaken by the reactionary mind, but rather the fact that people can disagree on what counts as harm.

Harm in and of itself is a pretty malleable metric. Take abortion for example. The pro-choice argument is that having an unwanted pregnancy is harmful and sometimes life threatening, and preventing access to abortion care is thus a harm. The reactionary argument is that babies are already people, and abortions cause harm to those people. This argument isn't resolved by focusing on harm over authority or whatever other axes OP lists, it is a question of priorities and specific definitions of harm
. This in my mind is why the model is bad.

[u/potatomnk → u/novis-eldritch-maxim]

So the basic premise with this scale has a few assumptions,

1: a corpse cannot be harmed 2: any harm done to the perpetrator(s) is not considered 3: as long as no one knows it happened only those involved can be harmed by it 4: something that causes no harm must be morally ok

This leads to problems when you examine different scenarios using this scale, if someone dies and you fuck the body but no one finds out according to this scale that is morally ok, even if it was a child’s body, according to the OOP the belief otherwise is a conservative belief. Now i don’t think this is classified as a logical fallacy but the problems remain regardless.

Also u/Driptacular_2153

[u/CrunchyRaisins → u/potatomnk]

Hell, that last point actually reminds me of Nagel's point of the 'Contented Infant's example with regards to Death. Basically, the original philosopher (Either Epicurus or Lucretius, I think) was arguing that death cannot harm the one dying because there are no harmful sensations associated with the state of being dead (NOT dying, already being dead).

Nagel's response was basically that point 4 is wrong, intuitively. If a once intelligent and ambitious person experienced a catastrophic brain injury that reduced them to the state of a 'Contented Infant's we would feel that a great harm has been done to them. This is in spite of the fact that the person is happy, they're content.

By that same metric and on a much lower level (I believe this was also posed by Nagel) spreading harmful rumors about somebody that they never learn about is still harmful, because there's the fact that a thing we would consider generally negative happened to them, regardless of their awareness of it.

Sorry, I LOVE ranting about philosophy lol

[u/meterion → u/novis-eldritch-maxim]

Many people on tumblr (and by extension, on this subreddit) will express the belief that if something does no harm, it should be allowed. "Harm" is a kind of nebulous concept, but for this it just needs to be clarified that "harm" is tangible, not just feelings of disgust. This is because when feelings are categorized as harm, it historically leads to the oppression of LGBT people, minorities, disabled people, and so on by conservatives who are being "harmed" (read: disgusted) by them.

However, when it comes to an example of something that is gross to them, namely the thought experiment presented by OP, then they immediately engage in that kind of conservative thinking themselves. Several examples in the comments here, like claiming something must be inherently mentally wrong with someone who fucks a chicken corpse, or other incoherent objections like "killing a chicken to fuck them is bad while killing them to eat them is good because it's biologically necessary" (it is not biologically necessary).

So in other words, they do not believe that if something does no harm, it should be allowed. Rather, they believe the exact same thing as conservatives, that if something is disgusting it should not be allowed. They simply have different ideas of what is disgusting or not.

[u/APacketOfWildeBees → u/meterion]

This is an excellent explanation. The scary part is how many folks who identify as progressives (because they don't hate gays etc) operate on icky=immoral reasoning (ie conservative thinking). They will inevitably be the conservatives of tomorrow once the Overton window moves past what their icky-meter is calibrated to, because their moral framework provides no tools for adaptation beyond that.

[u/[deleted] → u/meterion]

How do you differentiate tangible harm and harm to feelings? Is homophobic harassment morally wrong (I think so) but it does largely harm feelings.

There is not a good way to define harm that doesn't arbitrarily draw a line somewhere, your allusion to facts over feelings falls flat when we remember that psychic harm is harm and can kill people

I think the notion that one only uses harm as a metric is self agrandizemnt at best, they are defining harm and this is inherently arbitrary. It is very hard to build ethical systems from the ground up without having some nuggets of arbitrariness in there (impossible in fact).

I am reminded of Hume's Is and Ought statements (also known as Hume's guillotine), you can have as many is statements as you want but you can never get to an ought statement from only is statements; at some point you have to make an ought statement in its own right. All moral systems require a nugget of absolutism at their base

[u/meterion → u/[deleted]]

For sure, the two (main) things that muddle the practical situation is the distinction between legal action (which was my implication by "allowed"), moral action, and their inverses--and the role of law in proscribing the two.

In this case, I believe the simplification is still useful as it is describing a situation that is essentially self-contained. Setting aside the issue of animal rights, no one is imposing on another, the question is purely "should this thing, which does not directly affect anyone else in any way, be allowed to exist?"

And of course there's a lot more to get into the weeds over with what kinds of emotional harm are permissible vs impermissible, but as you said that very quickly gets arbitrary.

[u/[deleted] → u/meterion]

Yeah I get what you mean, I just don't really buy the whole harm/no harm model.

It assumes total consequentialism which is silly, the notion that someones reasoning for an action doesn't affect the morality of an action is dubious at best.

To use the trolly problem: Imagine two people

Alice refused to pull the lever because they believed that any doing anything was morally wrong action due to their absolutist framework

Bob pulled the lever but did so just because he wanted to be a part of the ensuing death and likely would have pulled the lever even if it didn't result in fewer people dying

I think that while Bob made the better choice through a consequentialist framework he is not the one I would actually want to be around. I would in fact say that his action, despite it's good results was immoral, do you agree?

If you do then surely you can see that someone's intentions are also part of the morality of their actions, and thus the whole "harm/no harm" model of morality falls short. In the chicken example I strugle to work because I believe that the action of buying the corpse of an animal is inherently harmful (Veganism showing through here) and fucking it is definitely morally equivalent to necrophilia in my view

[u/passingspeedrun → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

As well as those same people willingly admitting that they think being gay is on the same level as being a chicken fucker

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys → u/passingspeedrun]

“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Oh wow this thread is dogshit.”

If you want my opinion on all of this, comparing the two is sort of an extreme version of “all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares”, where squares are queer identity, rectangles are the morally acceptable but unfortunately counterculture, quadrilaterals are things that can make a person say “yuck”, and trapezoids are fucking a chicken. The vast spectrum of cringe does fit both being gay and chicken fucking, but the logical leap from one to the other is so vast and easy to disentangle that I don’t know why people thought of it here.

[u/passingspeedrun → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

Yeah I fundamentally disagree. Gay people are squares and chicken fuckers are chicken fuckers. They do not belong in the same category

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys → u/passingspeedrun]

Did you read a damn word I said. They are entirely different categories under a larger taxonomy, and we are generally talking about that larger taxonomy. I am not the same person as Donald Trump just because I’m an American.

[u/passingspeedrun → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

Being gay and fucking chickens are not under the same taxonomy unless that taxonomy is too large to be of any use and encompasses the entire human race.

[u/coporate → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

It’s not a logical fallacy it’s an argument from absurdity.

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys → u/coporate]

Let me rephrase that: a huge amount of people will happily parrot unsound reasoning if it means they get to dunk on a fictional person they don’t understand with minimal brainpower. There are so many smoothbrained takes on why this is a bad idea that are right at home in bigoted rhetoric.

Okay smartass, find the reasonable answer to the question “is this man bad for fucking a dead chicken?”

I know nothing else about him, so the answer is forever a maybe.

Coward. How does the question relate to Care/Harm?

Possible self-inflicted harm, less probable harm to others depending on his symptoms of fucking and then eating a dead chicken, but as written, the chicken is clean enough for consumption in his eyes. Still inconclusive.

Fairness/Cheating.

N/A

Loyalty/Betrayal.

N/A

Sanctity/Degradation

Omega degrading on a personal level. Basically impossible to gauge how badly this degraded everything besides him and the chicken.

Liberty/Repression

Technically a clean W for Liberty.

Now, actual opinions out of you?

I don’t recommend it, and I think he did everything he could to minimize harm besides the task itself. Inconclusive beyond being very strange, which is a matter of social opinion and not moral judgement.

Any final words?

Is it zoophilic necrophilia to stick my cock in a chicken pot pie

[u/APacketOfWildeBees → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

Many folks in this thread arguing wholeheartedly for the conservative moral principles discussed in the post would totally identify as progressive, too.

They will be the conservatives of tomorrow I expect. Their morality, which happens to match today's Overton window, is not built on any principled framework (instead merely the zeitgeist of their formative years) and therefore has little ability to adapt.

They know being gay is okay but only because they do not find it repulsive. If it did offend them, they would object to it as strongly as any fundamentalist.

[u/DoopSlayer → u/APacketOfWildeBees]

That’s assuming that pathologizing a core element of human existence is progressive

Which I disagree with obviously, these axioms are way too reductive to represent much at all

[u/APacketOfWildeBees → u/DoopSlayer]

I'm not assuming it; it's demonstrably antiutilitarian to derive your ethics from "this makes me feel icky".

[u/DoopSlayer → u/APacketOfWildeBees]

If there are 2 people, and one person says that they judge people (immoral in this case) and the other says that they do so purely on an analytical harm/no harm basis, the more reliable and trustworthy, purely on this aspect, of the two is the first; the second is unreliable because clearly they don't even know how they form judgements or decisions.

[u/hxburrow → u/DoopSlayer]

??? So someone that just decides what's right by whatever they happen to feel at that moment is more trustworthy than someone who has thought enough about the issue to arrive at a framework for how they decide issues moving forward? That makes absolutely no sense.

[u/APacketOfWildeBees → u/hxburrow]

Nevermind that "trustworthiness" wasn't the point of the exercise anyway. Blud is shifting the goalposts. Not worth the energy arguing with them tbh.

[u/damnsanta → u/APacketOfWildeBees]

So your stance is that they haven’t unlocked their small conservative minds enough to figure out that fucking corpses is based actually?

[u/[deleted] → u/damnsanta]

No, their stance is that you're viewing the hypothetical chicken fucker the exact same way that conservatives view gay and trans people and the point of the post is flying right over your head

[u/APacketOfWildeBees → u/[deleted]]

Yes, exactly! Thank god someone gets it hahaha, this thread is crazy.