Vulpyne

I can't even imagine the strength of character it takes to go through that and not show it outwardly. What you went through is deeply respected and appreciated! It's important work.

Suppose we couldn't have positive mental experiences (pleasure) or negative mental experiences (suffering). How could you affect an individual incapable of those experiences in a way that is salient relevant to morality?

You couldn't make them unhappy or cause them to experience any sort of distress or pain. You couldn't deprive them of happiness either.

It seems like it would be very hard for a person to remain emotionally engaged and kill so many animals for a trivial reason like flavor preference. Probably the only way to get by is to turn off your compassion and stop seeing them as sentient individuals with their own desires and emotional states — the results of coping in that way are sadly quite predictable.

I think you've misused the word "salient"

You could be right. It may not quite hit the mark. I edited my post.

b : standing out conspicuously : prominent; especially : of notable significance <similar to … Prohibition, but there are a couple of salient differences — http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salient

I had something like that in mind when I used it. At the least it would be fair to say it's probably not the clearest way to convey the point intended.

You can kill someone, which although it does not result in perceived negativity for the individual in question, is likely to bring about an unwanted state.

What does it mean for something to be unwanted if one is incapable of suffering or being deprived of benefit from one's life?

It seems in that case life and death would simply be neutral states without a positive of negative connotation.

you could also argue that pleasure/pain is an intrinsic part of life.

Pleasure and pain aren't binary, they exist on a continuum. If someone experiences a pinprick during their life and otherwise only experiences pleasure is compared with someone who experiences a fleeting moment of pleasure in a life filled with suffering, would you speak as if those lives were equal? They both contained some measure of pain and pleasure, but there's a big difference, at least to me.

In any case, that seems beside the point of my thought experiment which is imagining individuals without the capability to be affected in those ways.

In which case the question of whether or not you can affect a dead individual incapable of those experiences is rendered of equal value to the one that you posed.

Er, I don't see how this follows from the other things you said. Dead individuals can't experience anything, obviously, and they can't be affected by anything you do. It's nonsensical to talk about affecting non-existent things. You can as much affected me before I'm dead that you could affect me in the billions of years (or maybe infinite time) before I was conceived.

In short, I wasn't talking about dead individuals. I was talking about individuals that exist but aren't capable of experiencing positive/negative qualia.

that a human is a rational being is not an axiom.

That's just part of what I was talking about. What I said is "if you start out taking it as an axiom that rational humans capable of learning moral truths are be affected in morally relevant ways" (I meant to say "can be" not "are be", hopefully that was obvious).

Also, a human being isn't necessarily rational, but a human could be and some are.

you could say that I am taking as a given that moral truths exist, but I could give your reasons for this proposition

I agree with moral realism, though possibly not for the same reasons as you. I wouldn't really be inclined to argue about that particular point though.

Well, forgive me, but the way you worded it seemed to be taking as interchangeable 'positive mental experience' and 'pleasure,' and 'negative mental experience' and 'pain.'

No need to apologize. I just wanted to make it clear because words like "pain" or "pleasure" could be interpreted in narrower ways than I meant. I do use it interchangeably, as long as the interpretation is the general one. We can only use words as stand-ins for concepts or experiences that we try to describe, so there's no way to capture the true essence of the thing with the label.

So, treat what I said earlier as dealing with these categories, which you must see as broader than pleasure and pain (though I'm not sure why).

Just an example of the sort of misinterpretation I was trying to avoid is someone could possibly bring up masochists and how they enjoy pain. Since I was talking about positive/mental experiences, the masochist would experience pain but it would overall be a positive mental experience.

Are you saying that because the recipient of some other agent's action is himself incapable of positive or negative mental feelings, that the agent cannot act morally or immorally toward the recipient?

I'm saying that the recipient can't be affected in a morally relevant way. So one could try to act morally toward an inert object like a rock, but of course the rock couldn't be harmed or benefit in any morally relevant way: it's inert.

Depending on the sort of morality you subscribe to, you could say that attempting to act morally toward the rock is moral since the agent intended good. I personally am a consequentialist, so I'd be primarily concerned with the consequences.

I can only gather that you do not understand that happiness (in the classical sense) is not a mental state at all. It is action in accordance with perfect virtue.

Why would I accept that definition of it?

It leads to an individual's flourishing/well-being

If I was incapable of positive/negative mental experiences, what would it mean for me to flourish? To be effective at existing, even though existing couldn't benefit me and not existing couldn't deprive me of anything positive?

I'd ask basically the same question about well-being. What would it mean for something to affect me with well-being if I couldn't experience anything positive as a result?

You could talk about how many I would be able to affect individuals that could experience such things in positive ways, but I'd just be a means to an end then. So it wouldn't seem to support an argument for me having moral worth any more than cars benefiting people would mean cars themselves have moral worth.

which encompasses his mental states, but also expands beyond this.

I am quite curious. If we remove all positive/negative mental experiences, what remains that is morally relevant? How can flourishing or well-being exist? At present, it seems to me like those things can't exist without the capacity for positive/negative mental experiences.