Today Redditors have discovered that killing animals for food is a morally complex issue. On one hand meat is an important source of protein for many people, holds cultural significance for others, and is a pillar of the American agricultural sector. On the other hand life is a precious gift, animals are generally smarter and more self-aware than most people give them credit for, and there are legitimate concerns about their treatment and slaughter. In fact--

Wait? What’s that? This effort post is about Redditors pondering the morality of fucking animals? Goddamnit.

Kidding aside, it’s not exactly hard to see how that mistake could be made considering how the OP framed it:

But i read a news article about a guy who had sex with one of his cows and he was sent to prison and all his animals were taken away from him under the guise of animal cruelty. I found it kind of hypocritical that if he had shot the cow in the head with a bolt-gun, skinned it, cut out its internal organs and ate them no one would even bat an eyelid, he could have used a giant rubber dick to forcibly impregnate it so it would lactate and then kill its child to make… veal and this would not be considered cruelty.

While I’m not sure that that comparison is necessarily a fair one, it is a provocative one that I have seen used elsewhere to elicit condemnation of both by implying moral equivalence. To their credit this is something that Reddit almost gets. They understand that OP wants them to view the two as being similar in terms of moral magnitude, but then they decide that neither is worthy of condemnation.

That’s right, SRSters. It’s time for Redditor philosophy. Fair warning: a lot of this stuff is probably triggering and all of it is gross. So climb into your waders because we’re going in.

Part one: In their own words.

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Part Two: Rape Culture

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Part Three: The Paulites Show Up

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Part Four: Atheists Embarrass Themselves

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Part Five: Denmark for Some Reason

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Part Six: Even More Deep Thoughts

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So what did we learn? Well, for starters that Redditors are still under the impression that they should be able to stick their penises wherever they want whenever they want. But that, horrible as it is, isn’t really much of a surprise. I could also go on and on about why animals can never really consent to sex with people and that the power imbalance between the two is sickening, but again I think we’re all pretty much on the same page with that.

What I got out of all of this is that Redditors have a very shallow understanding of how moral philosophy works. I would have said that this is feels like something you would see in an Intro to Ethics type course, but actually it’s much worse. To my mind this is just an unfortunate extension of the omnipresent “STEM are the only valid fields of study” ‘jerk. By excluding the liberal arts generally and the social sciences specifically from what they consider to be valuable Redditors deprive themselves of the tools to actually analyze complicated problems like the ones I mentioned at the top of this post and then go on to completely embarrass themselves in relatively straight forward ones like bestiality or pedophilia.

And that’s strange. Most non-Redditors condemn both of those things without any sort of academic training at all. Which I think is really the basis for my second argument: the lack of empathy that general Reddit terribleness encourages actually stunts Redditors as people. I think that a lot of the time Redditors don’t genuinely embrace a lot of the crap that they put out there. I believe that Redditors don’t actually believe that they are being racist or homophobic or are prejudiced in any of the other ways that they obviously are. But the fact is that they’ve created an environment where all of that happens so casually and with so little opposition that it becomes acceptable and their compassion dies as they continually try to one up each other by saying increasing horrible things.

You should also go read u/butyournice‘s very good effort post on the same subject. I didn’t realize it was there until I’d already started writing this!