Yes they do. One of the consequences of eating meat when you are starving is that you get a meal. If you think that the utility gain from eating the meat outweighs the utility gain that you get by *not* eating meat in general, then you will [and *should*] eat the meat. This makes starving to death just another example of the general case, and not a special example that has to be considered separately when you come against a thing when you consider starvation!faiuwle wrote:Well, yes, whether or not something is right presumably is a function of the consequences of doing it. The consequences of eating meat (viz. supporting the corrupt meat industry in its mistreatment of animals/wastage of resources that could be more efficiently used/whatever your reason for vegetarianism is) do not change when your only option is to eat meat - they just don't effect your decision quite so much.Pthug wrote:With regular utilitarian ethical systems in which a thing is good or bad on imperfect information, a thing can very easily change from being good to being bad. This is very confusing and doesn't really happen very often -- suppose you have a Jew in a box and a Nazi is holding a gun to your head and telling you to press the poison-activating button on the side: it is quite possible that it is a bad thing to press the button. If, however, Ascended Apotheosised Hitler suddenly descends from the sixth astral plane and makes all the Jews in the world dissolve into nothingness, you would have to have a very strange reason to think it is bad to push the button if the Nazi is still going to shoot you for not doing so.
Indeed, if you have no other option than to do a thing -- as you claim is the case in starvation -- it is not an ethical problem by *definition*! But you do not claim that a vegan eating meat rather than starving is an amoral situation -- you recognise that a decision *is* being made, and that the consequentialist arguments against veganism *are* present and valid -- just that they do not "affect your decision [!] very much". Now, this is precisely what I mean when I say that the utilities at hand are different -- if you divide all the contributions to the decision of whether or not to eat the meatballs then the component of it that comprises your arguments to maintain vegan conduct do not change - you are correct. What changes is the component that is to do with how willing you are to keep on surviving at *any cost*. This does not [or *should not*] change the power of the vegan set of arguments -- it is simply the case that this negative component becomes insignificant compared to the towering bulk of utility that survival gives you.
Having said that, I guess if you prefer to think of utility as bounded -- say between [-1, 1] rather than between [0, inf] (or [-inf, inf)!, then you are applying some sort of normalisation to it and so the negative-utility contribution of vegan precepts *does* affect your decision less, in which case it becomes a matter of convention, I guess, unless it turns out there are more consequences to picking a bounded set of values for utility rather than an unbounded one which I think I remember reading somewhere.
This is, indeed, what utility is. I did not make it up -- the concept of utility is widely used by economists, utilitarian philosophers, decision theorists, psychologists etc. etc.Well, if you use "utility" as some kind of abstract scalar quality, like "redness"
This is the main problem I have with your conception of necessity, though I am having difficulty explaining it -- I should probably read more about necessity and utilitarianism.The useless/useful/necessary scale was a scale of the degree to which something is required to accomplish some end - if something is necessary, it is impossible to do whatever it is without that thing, if it is useless then having it has no effect on how easily you can do something, and if it is somewhere in the middle it is possible to do whatever it is without that thing, but more difficult.
*flashes the Salmoneus-Signal*
As I see it, one does not, strictly speaking, *need* to eat; suppose I somehow get the Jew out of the box but FUCK, Ascended Apotheosised Hitler strikes again!! *This* time, the rascally Nazi-xian sends the Jew off into a prison pocket dimension and only provides him with pork to eat!! Would you suggest to the Jew that it is *necessary* that he eat the meat [1] and *not* start a hunger-strike? Sure, if he *wanted* to stay alive, *then* it would be necessary to eat the pork, but he doesn't -- therefore the decision fits neatly according to utility principles anyway -- if he values his life over keeping kosher [1 again if you feel like nitpicking this point] -- then the utility to him of eating the pork is greater than that of his keeping kosher, otherwise it is the other way round.
Or to put it another way, you can claim that it is *necessary* to keep kosher [1!], but it is impossible to do this without not eating pork and so pork is useless!
I disagree. If you are starving, then a hearty meal is much more useful than a peeled grape. Both of them are much more useful than their equivalents offered to you when you are *not* starving, yes, and that is why it is fallacious to assume that the *only* contribution to the utility of food is how nutritious it is -- something I have not done -- but I do not see that the differential utility between them is totally wiped out when you are in extremis. After all, if the relative nutritive values of the grape and the slap-up meal were *independent* of utility, then we would expect starving people to feel extremely undecided as to which they would prefer! But this is absurd, and so it cannot be the case.Meat, for example, helps quite a bit to dispel hunger, but making it more filling (i.e. more useful) does not eventually make it necessary - it is only necessary when nothing but meat is available, and its usefulness mostly becomes independent of how filling it is at the ends of the scale, while linear increases in redness correspond to linear advancement along the scale, no matter where you started. If you have only a hamburger to eat, the hamburger does have some degree of usefulness for satisfying hunger, but what it is no longer matters as far as your choice is concerned.
[1] Of course, halakhically speaking, in situations like this, he is free to eat the pork, but let's assume that Ascended Apotheosised Hitler is
a) powerful enough to rewrite the Torah
and/or
b) so obnoxiously in need of being sent down a peg that the Jew is willing to go through with it *anyway*
