- The moral realism is the belief that moral facts exist and are objective features of the world. It can be true independent of the mind, the same way mathematical concepts can be true.
- Panpsychism is the idea that all things have a mind or a mind-like aspect, and is a feature of reality.
- Mary's Room is a thought experiment that argues against physicalism by illustrating that the complete physical knowledge does not necessarily encompass the subjective experience of an idea, for example the experience of seeing the colour red.
- We place moral value on agents with consciousness that have the ability to generate well-being ie. pain/pleasure. In this case, bivalves are probably not sentient.
- VG's position is that violence against carnivores is acceptable, for example a Xenomorph (from the Aliens franchise). WH argued against this with a strategical and a philosophical argument. Firstly, as a proponent of strategic non-violence, taking the life of an animal must be very carefully considered, if at all, counteracting the "arrogance" that humans have. But wouldn't you create less violence if you committed violence? Correct, but you can never be confident that is what you are doing, because if you start committing violence and ignore the suffering of one being on the "ends justify the means" basis, it's hard to create a limiting principle. For example, history is filled with events that caused the slaughter of animals and humans for the idea of creating a more peaceful world. Even if you were 100% confident this would reduce the violence, it changes society, if you create institutions structures like this it is hard to limit these powers due to human nature. WH is a consequentialist, or what matters to him are outcomes. He believes that moral views are like physical laws of the universe, they change based on your perspective. For example, in an individual case of a rape of a woman in a coma, the utilitarian model isn't the right framework to think about the problem. For big picture problems like motor vehicles killing 40,000 people a year, or policies, utilitarianism matters, and for individual cases, usually some rights based framework matters. If humans are seen as the Xenomorphs of other species, would it be okay for the other animals to wipe out humans? Erica Chenoweth's research on nonviolent resistance concluded that nonviolent resistance is twice as effective as violent resistance.
- WH states that there is a difference of directly killing an animal and buying the product. The supply and demand effect of consuming an animal product is not as linear and directly linked to the suffering and violence against animals. In his essay "Boycott Veganism," WH states that there are many ways to support violence, what we do economically is just one of them. Ultimately, what matters is our net support of violence and not our particular action. For example, during slavery, the "free produce society," an organisation that was against products made from slavery, did not free any slaves or stop the suffering. What was more effective was political activism and not economic. This is backed up by Robert Fogel, who also stated that slavery was ended by a political movement. When we buy or not buy animal products, the causal impact whether the animal suffers or dies is very attenuated. Therefore, WH believes that consumer activism is not effective, and is not interested if animal activists are vegan or not. If the political system changes everyone will be vegan, including non-vegan animal activists. The question is not are they a hypocrite, but more so are they contributing to the movement to build political power to alleviate the suffering of animals. A movement that excludes and condemns non vegans who are advocating for animals with a culture of purity politics is not successful, for example Douglas Adams showed that the civil rights movement, when it condemned white people for being racist, wasn't successful. But when it had a more inclusive culture, accepting that most people were going to be racist, it was more successful. We should focus on condemning violence against animals, not specifically eating of meat.