Me too, but I also stamp the boxes and ship them.
I don't think that too much empathy can lead to radicalism, unless it's narrowly focused, i.e., there's empathy towards one group and lack of empathy towards another. That lack of empathy is the source of radicalism.

Nice point, and nice joke :)

Inspired by your location, how about this example of a radical with too much empathy for everyone else: Jesus himself, or any martyr for others actually. ;)

As per this example, the real trade off with empathy is not between group A and B, it's between everyone and yourself, and both can lead to radical extremes.

There seems to have been a misunderstanding.
Do you think I lied somewhere? I take honesty very serious and afaik do not lie at all (which always creates lots of problems). He moved to the other end of the country, because he finally understood, that I was really determined to kill him only to be able to live in peace. I ended up always having a huge kitchen knife in reach. Ahh what a great childhood this was.
I know, that I would have done the world a favor, because lots of people had to suffer from this monster.
So I just wanted to say, that the reason for my radical "solution" here was a wish of peace for myself primarily and for others as well secondarily.

My empathy for animals lets me tend to periodically develop hatred towards people making all this suffering in mass production animal farms possible and of course especcially towards those actually working there.
Did I understand you right, that the lack of empathy from the other people is the reason for my sometimes very hard to contain radicalism instead of saying that my empathy is the reason?

If by "from" you mean "for" the yes. I meant that your lack of empathy towards people who want to eat these animals or those who provide that meat for them is the reason for your radicalism. It's a simplistic explanation, but my point is that if you're someone who can see the point of views of most people then you're less likely to be radical. To be radical you have to identify with one point of view and be unable or unwilling to understand the other side.

Hmm maybe yes on some misunderstanding? I probably muddled my answer as I didn't want to be too blunt. I agree you were radical and it's a good example, I do think at a deontological level that's ethically suspect, yet in relation to ethical consequences and based on the limited details you're providing my only feeling is of respect.

There's nothing radical about these farms. They are part of our society, and very far from wanting to change it. Radicalism is a view that thinks things should be changed. So you are the radical in this equation, not them. A radical demonises the other side, as you do, convincing himself that it doesn't deserve any empathy. And sure, that might go with empathy towards something else, but more generally it's a principle. It's that principle coupled with demonising (total lack of empathy) that makes someone radical.

For example a person could be against killing embryos. That principle coupled with lack of empathy towards the other side is what makes the person radical. Someone who believes in the principle but has some empathy towards the women who get the abortion would not be a radical. They might try to convince others of their way, but will not likely turn to demonising and violent thought.

I understand.
Yep, according to this definition a lack of empathy for people doing unimaginable cruel stuff to innocents is existing in me and I had a hard time establishing this lack.
Sometimes, it's better to block out compassion for the side that's hurting others imho, I learned this the hard way.

Everybody is a radical and it's good to know in which regards to be able to reduce it a bit now and then.
Whether radicalism is good or bad in general may always be open for debate.

The long term opposition of the national socialist party were radicals too and so were the hippies among many others, I aggree that radicalism is a wish for drastic change in many cases.

Kill the monsters who perform abortions, yeah!

Radicalism may be necessary at times, but the world certainly would have functioned better if everyone could see the other sides.

Completely pointless polemic since "sometimes" is the first word in the sentence and you still ignored it deliberately to attack.
Seems you still don't believe it possible to see the others side very clearly and judging it as malicious and destructive or deliberately ignorant at best.

No, I don't. Every zealot thinks he sees the other side very clearly. It can be even worse for those who have been on the other side, because they need to construct for themselves foolproof reasoning for breaking away, so it turns from "I didn't like it" to "they are murderers plain and simple". It's not that the person is seeing clearly, it's that the person is seeing through a very narrow lens.

Radicals are destructive by nature. Sometimes there's need to destroy, but you then need the non-radicals to rebuild.

That is not to say that the causes are bad, but people don't always take the most logical way to solve issues. For example I know someone who likes to eat meat, has no serious problem with it, but is against raising these animals in cruel conditions. The logical thing to do would have been to find places which raise them in a better way, and buy meat from them. It would take a relatively small number of people buying from such places to make them more successful and prove to the bigger meat makers that people are willing to pay more for such meat, which could encourage them to explore it. Instead she just stopped eating meat, which does very little. Sure, the fewer meat eaters there are, the fewer animals will be raised and killed, but it will still be done in a cruel way, because her actions don't tell anyone what she really cared about.

There's also "intentionalism" - the intentions are judged, not the outcomes or rules. The intentions are taken wholesale - both "what I want to do" and "what I want to accomplish" count...

I disagree here. I don't think they believe what they do is evil; I don't either think that they perceive the goals they strive towards as evil. What I do believe is that the vast majority of them fail to comprehend that their victory would make the world far worse off. It's not about consequences, since they haven't really accomplished much of anything. It's about what they intend to have the world be like... which, when understood more fully, is undesirable.

You do realize how grotesque you sound, right? What you try to present as your own belief is a sophomore thought experiment. You might as well extend this courtesy to a potato, since it can also, in a very basic sense, be hindered or helped by outside interference. Sure - it might be difficult to convincingly tell you why mankind is superior to animals, but the fact that we can ask such a question in the first place seems telling to me.

Thx, my high school philosophy and further reading only takes me so far.

Our disagreement is kind of moot, the undesirable consequences to me stem directly from their methods, which squares the circle: they mean well, but their map is wrong.

Some animals like elephants, wales, monkeys, ... might actually asking themselves the same questions, only they did never tell us about and we just might not know.

Without knowing too much about the discussion here I just want to point out that mankind was wrong already quite some times (white people are superior to black people, men are superior to women, ...) so that the chances we are wrong in thinking we might be superior to other animals is actually quite high.

Nonono, you were simply making a separate distinction: there's following the rules vs getting the best outcomes and then there's judging people based on their intentions vs their accomplishments...

I'd say it's more than that. Sure - what they do is often ugly on its own, but their goals are ill-advised as well. They're the sort of things people would go "My God, what have I done?!" over.

With every day I'm alive my conviction of being immortal gets boosted by evidence ;P...
On a more serious note - what you say is a lot more reasonable, though I still remain skeptical. What I disagreed with was a much more simplistic claim, of animals in general having the same ethical status as humans. You know - snails, bunnies, cows, and vultures alike. We've moved on since the days of having a clear hierarchy (when a horse was clearly superior to a dog and so on), but I don't buy into this whole "brothers in DNA" thing. There's a reason we distinguish minerals from plants, plants from animals, animals from people...