Of the total area that is used by humans (Agriculture, Urban and Built-up Land),
- urban and built-up land is 1m km²,
- agriculture is 48m km²,
so agriculture is 48 of 49 millions km² used, that’s 98%. The remaining 2% are all streets and housing and other infrastructure together.
Passive aggressive ad hominem.
Either engage directly with the portion of the argument you take issue with, or ask for clarification regarding the comment.
Okay, do you have a more polite way to ask “are you aware that you’re a nihilist?” I was genuinely curious!
Anyway, he said he’s a rule utilitarian. So, the answer is “no.”
Isolate the nihilistic portions of text, quote them, explain why they are nihilistic to all the thread readers and the OP.
Then inquire if the person you’re confronting stands by that or has a different take in it.
Or, be rude and make it more reddit-like.
If your interest is legitimate, then I can explain.
Racism, speciesism, etc. represent contradictions, and formal systems are vulnerable to the principle of explosion (ex falso quadlibet). Basically, if a contradiction is true then anything is true. That’s what makes bigotry “wrong” in the formal sense (ethics is epistemically very similar to mathematics, but that’s another story). All bigots are obligate nihilists. OP is a speciesist. Ergo, he is an obligate nihilist.
Anyway, ethics is highly abstract, like math, and using guesswork to reach moral conclusions is generally ineffective. It’s why we had slavery for 10,000 years and Donald Trump is currently in office. There are lots of reasons why people suck at ethics, but it’s mainly lack of education. We get 12 years to study math in school (and even then most people suck at math) compared to 0 years for ethics.
Thank you. Not really demanding to point out that it’s not a private DM and we aren’t mind readers.