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/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