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Zeusthecat

Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?

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It doesn't even have to go that far though... like let's start with much more relaxed premise.

 

"Killing animals purely for pleasure is not good".

 

I think that is pretty agreeable.  Then it follows that for most of us, eating meat in large quantity is done purely for pleasure, and hence morally objectionable.

 

Like CollegeBaby said, it's not a binary thing.  I think the argument to lessen meat consumption is pretty basic, sound, and a good place to start..

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Like CollegeBaby said, it's not a binary thing.  I think the argument to lessen meat consumption is pretty basic, sound, and a good place to start..

 

Yeah, that's been my takeaway. I understand the reasons that people take more stringent moral stances, but they're not something I personally find sustainable, so I just try to behave as ethically as I can, without seeing an absolute as the ideal state.

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On 1/17/2015 at 4:46 PM, JonCole said:

Then again (and with a distinct hope that this doesn't derail this thread further), I also believe that the death penalty is not strictly immoral though certainly problematic. So if "killing humans is bad" doesn't gel with "killing animals is not bad", perhaps I'm actually being internally consistent.

I think you're sort of missing the point. When I said stuff like "don't kill someone," I took that to be a shorthand for "don't do things to someone that you ought not to do to them, which typically includes killing." Now of course if it's okay to kill people in some cases, like when the death penalty is justified, then it would be okay to kill non-human animals in those situations too, just like if it's okay to kill white people in certain circumstances it would be okay to kill black people in certain circumstances. The problem is inconsistency, not killing.

 

In any case, as Gaizokubanou points out, it's not killing that's the issue, it's killing for no reason other than that you would like to eat the flesh of whoever you're killing. Even if you think the death penalty can be okay, surely you don't think it's okay to kill just anyone for the purposes of eating them, right?

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In any case, as Gaizokubanou points out, it's not killing that's the issue, it's killing for no reason other than that you would like to eat the flesh of whoever you're killing. Even if you think the death penalty can be okay, surely you don't think it's okay to kill just anyone for the purposes of eating them, right?

 

I don't think it's okay to kill anyone for the purposes of eating them.

 

My point is that humans find it reasonably acceptable to kill other humans for good reasons. Like, justice or war. Similarly, I think that sustenance is a sufficient reason to kill and eat animals. Unfortunately, consumption of meat isn't purely about sustenance (evidenced by the fact that it's possible to be sustained on plant matter, so clearly convenience and pleasure do play a part as well as other things) so I draw my own moral lines on the spectrum between them.

 

Most of you vegetarians/vegans in this thread have been pretty accommodating in answering questions, so I'm curious about a few things -

  • What do you think about meat that was grown in a lab? Is it immoral to eat in vitro meat?
  • What do you think of effects on animal ecosystems that come hand in hand with being a person living in a modern society? Is it immoral to participate in modern society knowing full well that certain animals will be killed as a result of such a society existing?
  • If someone lives in a society in which they could not be sustained by non-meat products and thus consumes meat, is their act of eating immoral? Or in other words, is it just the fact that people in modern societies have choice that makes this a moral rather than a practical situation?

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I'm ultra lenient vegan-sympathizer (not even one myself but I see that as more of my own failing) so perhaps my views are not what you are interested in, but...

 

1.  If it never had sentience, I don't see an issue.

 

2.  My understanding of major ethical theories is that one ought to be held responsible for events they had substantial control over... so we live in complex world full of problems, but just being in one shouldn't condemn all of us.  That being said, there is this idea of systematic responsibility where our small inputs may contribute toward larger identifiable 'things' and this is where lot of complications occur cause just to what extent are we responsible?  That's why I'm not even calling for complete veganism transformation.  None of us are wholesomely independent moral entities that fit nicely into most ethical theories.  Like we are rarely given those choices like "press A to kill people, press B to save people".  We depend on our society for most of our lives, and those include plenty of less than ideal practices.  So why saddle in the endless (well, there is an end but impractical goal of most of us) mire of the question "does any of this matter?" and do simple, very easy to do stuff that, even if it's tiny, might make a difference towards good?

 

I think I read this in Talmud, where it says person ought to carry two pieces of paper with one that says "I'm made of dirt" and other that says "This world is made for me".  Now that text has some obvious religious context but I really appreciate its dualistic message that we ought to be both humble yet avoid pessimism, prideful yet not arrogant.  I try to take same with my existence in this crazy large modern world; I'm a tiny speck, but I'll be the best speck that I can be.  And of course, I fail so much and have done lot of shitty things but until I reach critical failure damn if I'm going to stop that.

 

3.  That would be excusable situation.  Like, it's not justified, but it's not condemn-able either.  But eating less meat is not really a pure modern consideration.  Outside of hunter-gatherers, my shallow understanding of human history is that huge proportion of our diet has always been grains, with meat added for extra and luxury.

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I can't speak for everyone, but:

On 1/17/2015 at 6:22 PM, JonCole said:

What do you think about meat that was grown in a lab? Is it immoral to eat in vitro meat?

It's totally fine to eat, unless, like, the lab treats its workers unethically or blah blah blah etc. But just like it would be fine to eat "human" meat grown in a lab, there's no issue with eating meat "from" any other animal that's grown in a lab.

 

On 1/17/2015 at 6:22 PM, JonCole said:

What do you think of effects on animal ecosystems that come hand in hand with being a person living in a modern society? Is it immoral to participate in modern society knowing full well that certain animals will be killed as a result of such a society existing?

It's exactly as moral or immoral as participating in a society knowing full well that certain humans will be killed as a result of such a society existing.

 

On 1/17/2015 at 6:22 PM, JonCole said:

If someone lives in a society in which they could not be sustained by non-meat products and thus consumes meat, is their act of eating immoral? Or in other words, is it just the fact that people in modern societies have choice that makes this a moral rather than a practical situation?

It's exactly as moral or immoral as living in a society in which they cannot be sustained by non-human-meat products and thus consumes human meat.

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On the subject of human meat for human consumption. As I understand it it's an especially taboo action because of a higher likelihood of disease transmission; not just for any cultural squeamishness. Of course in a modern society you would probably have the tools and training to mitigate possibly all of those risks.

But eating less meat is not really a pure modern consideration.  Outside of hunter-gatherers, my shallow understanding of human history is that huge proportion of our diet has always been grains, with meat added for extra and luxury.

This isn't supposed to mean too much w/r/t this thread but you can interpret the beginning of humanity's agricultural age as the beginning of the Holocene extinction event.

 

Though of course certain megafauna would have died out before the rise of agriculture.

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On the subject of human meat for human consumption. As I understand it it's an especially taboo action because of a higher likelihood of disease transmission; not just for any cultural squeamishness. Of course in a modern society you would probably have the tools and training to mitigate possibly all of those risks.

I think what's taboo and what isn't turns out to be a very poor guide to morality. Many taboos vary quite a bit from culture to culture, and even if there were a universal taboo against, for instance, homosexual intercourse, I don't think this would tell us anything about whether it is moral to engage in homosexual intercourse. Ditto for what we eat.

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I think what's taboo and what isn't turns out to be a very poor guide to morality. Many taboos vary quite a bit from culture to culture, and even if there were a universal taboo against, for instance, homosexual intercourse, I don't think this would tell us anything about whether it is moral to engage in homosexual intercourse. Ditto for what we eat.

As someone likely to be engaged in 'homosexual intercourse' I find the subject of my previous quoted sentence to be entirely replaceable. It might also be time for us to remember that generally a person's notion of disgust can relate to their personal conservative or liberal values.

I don't think I would be opposed to soylent green depending on things like necessity, utility, and palate.

However at risk of derailing this topic I would say that the difference between eating people and men having sex with men (or WwW) is that sex is an act which can fulfill emotional and even physical needs while choosing to eat humans is an action emerging from choice of diet. Humans particularly have a wider subset of things to eat to satisfy eating or dieting needs. Whereas the subset available to satisfy sexual needs is typically much smaller.

Expression of human sexuality is for consenting adults considered something of a human right in modern society, one I would dare claim is more closely guarded (or at least should be) than the right to decide what to eat.

P.s I don't think I'm comfortable with how clinically detached that term is. There's no onus on others not to use it but one of my personal goals this year is to find a term for same sex that feels as natural as simply saying sex does. It should be easy to simply say 'sex' but apparently there are times when distinctions must be made. Like when someone wants to raise a talking point between two actions commonly held as immoral.

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I disagree on a fundamental level that killing animals is equivalent morally or ethically to killing humans, and the same for eating. With your position taking that as a given truth, and you playing the defacto role of moral and ethical arbiter here, I'm not sure this is a conversation I can continue in good faith.

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On 1/17/2015 at 9:30 PM, Badfinger said:

I disagree on a fundamental level that killing animals is equivalent morally or ethically to killing humans, and the same for eating. With your position taking that as a given truth, and you playing the defacto role of moral and ethical arbiter here, I'm not sure this is a conversation I can continue in good faith.

If we took as "a given truth" that killing a black person is morally equivalent to killing a white person, or that killing a woman is morally equivalent to killing a man, or that killing a queer person is morally equivalent to killing a straight person, would you raise similar issues? Could you have "a conversation you can continue in good faith" with someone who believes these things, like me, or would these assumptions put me beyond the pale? If you're fine with these assumptions but not with the "killing a non-human animal is morally equivalent to killing a human animal," what would you take to be the main difference between the earlier assumptions and the one about non-human animals? What makes the distinction between a cow and a human being relevant to figuring out whether it's okay to torture, kill, and eat someone any more than the distinction between white and black or male and female or straight and queer?

 

Do you understand how saying "I can't accept that humans and non-humans are equal" is going to be a non-starter for me the same way saying "I can't accept that blacks and whites are equal" is going to be a non-starter for me? Can you understand why I would have the same problems with both statements, namely, that they seem to draw ethically arbitrary lines to justify mistreatment of individuals who don't deserve to be mistreated?

 

This is not to say that the idea that all animals are equal is dogma for me. I'm perfectly willing to have you or anyone else refute it. Offer LITERALLY ANY ARGUMENT. I am serious. ONE ARGUMENT. ANYTHING. Right now you put me in an awkward position: you are claiming I am wrong, but you're not telling me why. As far as I can tell, I have as much evidence for "it's wrong to kill all animals, regardless of their species" as I do for "it's wrong to kill all humans, regardless of their race." This seems pretty obvious to me. The animal part is of course not obvious to many people, but if we go back a few hundred years, the race part wasn't obvious to very many people either, so...

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In a hypothetical society where it is a crime to kill animals and a crime to kill people, if a dog is shot and killed should it carry the same punishment as a person being shot and killed?

 

I never claimed you were wrong. In fact, I'm willing to say you're probably right. But I guess I am comfortable in my morally grey wrongness. I am telling you I disagree on a level beyond forum arguments that eating an animal is equivalent to eating a person.  And since that is now the entire thread, the thread doesn't have value to me. Like, I am reading your posts and I literally can't comprehend them because your statements don't register to me on plane higher than appealing to my distaste for racism. I honestly don't see the similarity of evidence for not killing other living things vs killing other people. I promise I'm not trying to bait you, or "prove" you're wrong. I'm trying to explain what I'm feeling when I read what you've written.

 

The answer to your question below is I do not think a white person and a black person are different things, but I think animals and people are different things. Thus I have formed my judgement for how to view those things separately.

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In a hypothetical society where it is a crime to kill animals and a crime to kill people, if a dog is shot and killed should it carry the same punishment as a person being shot and killed?

In a hypothetical society where it is a crime to kill black people and a crime to kill white people, if a black person is shot and killed should it carry the same punishment as a white person being shot and killed? Why or why not? If you think the answer is "yes," but you think the answer is "no" for the dog case, on what basis are you drawing the distinction? Why is it okay to treat species differently but not to treat races differently?

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Why is it okay to treat kingdoms of biological creatures differently but not to treat species differently?

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On 1/17/2015 at 9:37 PM, Badfinger said:

I never claimed you were wrong. In fact, I'm willing to say you're probably right. But I guess I am comfortable in my morally grey wrongness.

I'm not really understanding what you are saying here. That you're "comfortable" with your "morally gray wrongness" just strikes me as a more subtle way of saying "I don't really give a shit whether I'm doing something wrong." I'm sure plenty of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and otherwise prejudiced people are "comfortable" with their "morally gray wrongness" but that's not really much of a comfort to those of us who are on the receiving end of this wrongness, as opposed to being on the perpetuating end of it.

 

On 1/17/2015 at 9:37 PM, Badfinger said:

I am telling you I disagree on a level beyond forum arguments that eating an animal is equivalent to eating a person.  And since that is now the entire thread, the thread doesn't have value to me.

I mean, I guess I understand what this means - you disagree on some level that you're either unable or unwilling to articulate, for reasons that you're either unwilling or unable to articulate, so you're going to duck out of the conversation and keep eating meat because the thread no longer has value for you. I'm confused as to why you would think that because the entire thread is me asserting the moral equivalence of all animals that this is a sign that the thread has no value anymore for you. If you were racist and the entire thread were me asserting the moral equivalence of all races, would the thread no longer have value for you? If you were heterosexist and the entire thread were me asserting the moral equivalence of all sexual orientations, would the thread no longer have value for you? I'm confused as to what would make the thread "valuable" for you - is it valuable to the degree that it supports your own positions, or what? I guess I'm missing what it is that I and others have done that have robbed this tread of value. I don't even know what value in this context means.

 

On 1/17/2015 at 9:37 PM, Badfinger said:

Like, I am reading your posts and I literally can't comprehend them because your statements don't register to me on plane higher than appealing to my distaste for racism. I honestly don't see the similarity of evidence for not killing other living things vs killing other people. I promise I'm not trying to bait you, or "prove" you're wrong. I'm trying to explain what I'm feeling when I read what you've written.

No, I totally understand that you don't understand. This is not an unusual response to being confronted with one's prejudices - the vast majority of our prejudices are not only entirely unreflective but they don't even appear to us as prejudices in this first place. Almost nobody is consciously racist or sexist or heterosexist or speciesist. Nobody wakes up one day thinking "man, black people and white people, what's up with that? I bet it's okay to treat black people worse!" And so on for the sexes, sexual orientations, species, etc. But we do have these various prejudices - less so today than in the past, but some are still around. Speciesism is by far the most common.

 

So, the reason you feel this way about what I've written is that you just have a blind, unthinking prejudice that is no more justifiable than racism, sexism, or heterosexism. That's the long and short of it.

To make this point more explicit, imagine that I'm racist. I think it's okay to treat black people worse than white people, because I'm black. What is it that you would say to me to convince me? What sorts of arguments would you use? Or is there no hope? Do we just have to let racist people alone and get on with our lives, shrugging every once in a while when they lynch us or enslave us or kill us but otherwise just trying to ignore them? Is that the best we can do?

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Why is it okay to treat kingdoms of biological creatures differently but not to treat species differently?

Some kingdoms (like plants and fungi) can't suffer - if something can't suffer, then whatever you do to it is basically irrelevant. For the same reason it's okay for me to hit a shoe with an axe (the shoe does not suffer), it is okay for me to hit a carrot with an axe. Not so for animals. The most famous articulation of this point is Bentham's "can they suffer?" quote. One interesting thing about that quote is that, as is clear from the quote itself, he was writing at a time when racism WASN'T obviously wrong, and he was drawing the parallel then to point out that hopefully one day we would overcome the various prejudices he identified back then.

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Ok, I'm really uncomfortable with basically obliquely being called a racist because I eat meat. I am not sure this is a subject where a discussion can have inroads, because it turns from a discussion into an accusation no matter how we try to be civil, but I was at least trying to articulate my thoughts or feelings in a cogent way. Now what I feel is attacked. Not my ideas, me personally.

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Some kingdoms (like plants and fungi) can't suffer - if something can't suffer, then whatever you do to it is basically irrelevant. For the same reason it's okay for me to hit a shoe with an axe (the shoe does not suffer), it is okay for me to hit a carrot with an axe. Not so for animals. The most famous articulation of this point is Bentham's "can they suffer?" quote. One interesting thing about that quote is that, as is clear from the quote itself, he was writing at a time when racism WASN'T obviously wrong, and he was drawing the parallel then to point out that hopefully one day we would overcome the various prejudices he identified back then.

I don't know that I agree with you. A cursory search of Google shows a multitude of articles like this one: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm

There is clearly evidence, although not definitive, that plants can suffer. Are you just operating on a continuum of suffering, below which it doesn't qualify as immoral, or does only anthropomorphic communication of suffering count?

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On 1/17/2015 at 10:06 PM, Gormongous said:

I don't know that I agree with you. A cursory search of Google shows a multitude of articles like this one: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm

A cursory reading of the articles mentioned on that page suggest that plants don't actually feel pain - that something "cries out" in a way detectable by a microphone isn't very convincing. A shoe "cries out" if you cut into it - it makes noise as it splits apart. That's not pain, though. That something produces a molecular response in certain situations doesn't suggest that if feels pain. Vinegar and baking soda produce molecular responses when combined. Vinegar and baking soda don't feel pain. And so on. According to our current understanding of pain, it takes something like a nervous system to be instantiated. If you're still convinced by that article you linked, here are some other articles which you might find more convincing:

 

http://tabish.freeshell.org/animals/plantpain.html

 

I'm also not sure you actually believe plants feel pain. I mean, you might. But that would be pretty out there. That's even more out there than thinking that all animals are morally equal, and look how much shit I'm getting for that!

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A cursory reading of the articles mentioned on that page suggest that plants don't actually feel pain - that something "cries out" in a way detectable by a microphone isn't very convincing. A shoe "cries out" if you cut into it - it makes noise as it splits apart. That's not pain, though. That something produces a molecular response in certain situations doesn't suggest that if feels pain. Vinegar and baking soda produce molecular responses when combined. Vinegar and baking soda don't feel pain. And so on. According to our current understanding of pain, it takes something like a nervous system to be instantiated. If you're still convinced by that article you linked, here are some other articles which you might find more convincing:

http://tabish.freeshell.org/animals/plantpain.html

I'm also not sure you actually believe plants feel pain. I mean, you might. But that would be pretty out there. That's even more out there than thinking that all animals are morally equal, and look how much shit I'm getting for that!

I'll reply to the rest later, but you're not getting shit for saying animals are morally equal. You're getting shit because you keep connecting any disagreement with your position to racism, for some reason. There are appreciable differences between a mosquito and a black man, even just in terms of the experience of pain, but mentioning any of those is represented by you as misunderstanding.

And, you know, thanks for the rest, I guess? I don't think it's particularly crazy to say that that responses to harm and signals of danger from any living creature constitute suffering, but I can see how you wouldn't want to agree, considering your views on the morality of suffering.

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I'll reply to the rest later, but you're not getting shit for saying animals are morally equal. You're getting shit because you keep connecting any disagreement with your position to racism, for some reason. There are appreciable differences between a mosquito and a black man, even just in terms of the experience of pain, but mentioning any of those is represented by you as misunderstanding.

I have asked MULTIPLE TIMES for the appreciable differences, but so far nobody has offered any. I mean, sure, there are plenty of differences in terms of, for instance, size, number of legs, etc. But there are plenty of differences between black people and white people, or women and men, or queer people and straight people, etc. I just don't think any of that matters when it comes to figuring out whether it's okay to torture, kill, and eat someone.

 

And, you know, thanks for the rest, I guess? I don't think it's particularly crazy to say that that responses to harm and signals of danger from any living creature constitute suffering, but I can see how you wouldn't want to agree, considering your views on the morality of suffering.

It sounds like you don't think it's wrong to cause suffering, then? Since I'm assuming you have some other reason for why it's wrong to stab a person in the thigh with a knife, it would be interesting to know what that reason is, and whether it applies to dogs and carrots too.

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I have asked MULTIPLE TIMES for the appreciable differences, but so far nobody has offered any. I mean, sure, there are plenty of differences in terms of, for instance, size, number of legs, etc. But there are plenty of differences between black people and white people, or women and men, or queer people and straight people, etc. I just don't think any of that matters when it comes to figuring out whether it's okay to torture, kill, and eat someone.

 

Leaving aside what I find to be the absurdity of stating unequivocally that acts of harm against two obviously different classes of living being are morally identical based on a single commonality between them, a mosquito has roughly 1/860,000th the neurons of a human brain. Not only is there more difference in behavior and experience, there is more difference in biology and genetics between a human being and mosquito than between all the human beings living on this planet right now combined. If you don't find that to be an appreciable difference, then I don't know what else to say. I just find your decision to draw the line at sentience while condemning outright those that draw the line at sapience utterly baffling. In the end, both are arbitrary compromises, aren't they?

 

It sounds like you don't think it's wrong to cause suffering, then? Since I'm assuming you have some other reason for why it's wrong to stab a person in the thigh with a knife, it would be interesting to know what that reason is, and whether it applies to dogs and carrots too.

 

I believe that causing suffering is an inevitable consequence of living, so our moral obligation is not to avoid it absolutely in a handful of areas, but rather to minimize it in as many ways as possible without causing suffering to ourselves in turn. Whether or not they feel pain when they are killed, the overwhelming majority of the plants that you eat are grown in conditions that cause environmental, cultural, and economic suffering. Producing the that energy you use to power your home, work, and transportation between the two causes environmental, economic, and political suffering. The same goes for water and waste. Unless you're very lucky, even the labor that you provide causes suffering at some point up or down the supply chain. In light of all of that, the only absolutely moral decision for me is to kill myself and feed my body to hungry cats, but since I'm mostly content with living for the time being, even though it means moral compromise, I just do my best not to eat too much meat or use too much electricity or make too much trash. Fixating so much on a single axis of suffering as an absolute, seemingly because it is easily identifiable and relatable to you personally, seems myopic in light of all that, especially if your best argument in its favor is guilting people with the suffering that they are currently doing their best to minimize.

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I guess this is a good time to give everyone the distinct reminder that some vegetarians and vegans (myself included) value animal lives equally whether they are human or not. So calling a farm slavery or making analogies to mistreatment of certain peoples is comparing like with like to us, not an exaggerated comparison. This is genuinely how we feel even if others among you don't see it that way.

 

Agreed. The reason I don't eat meat, or support any kind of animal product, is exactly the same reason I don't for humans. All animals can feel suffering as a result of having a nervous system, and all want to live because of their will for self-preservation. Because of this, I think it is ethically preferable that at the very least they are given the right to live according to their will. While I don't believe there is such a thing as an objective morality, or that you can create morals from simple physical facts of the world, this seems like a rather simple and obvious moral premise to me as an entity capable of empathy. However, the philosophy of ethics is a fuzzy topic, and possibly one of the most pointless things to be arguing about if we can't agree on moral premises.

 

It's weird because I consider myself to be moral in many other -ism situations, but it seems like I'd be wrong if I considered myself moral on this by what has been discussed in this thread.

 

This is pretty much the core reason I loathe debating this with people. Almost everyone thinks themselves to be a "good" person, so when somebody else makes the suggestion that something they are doing is unethical, they can't resolve the two thoughts. Most of the time they will deny that the behaviour is unethical, or say it is not their responsibility. It's the same issue when talking Feminism with someone who is being sexist. Most people don't want to believe they are sexist because then they must believe they are committing bad behaviour or reinforcing harmful attitudes. That is why we have stupid things like "SJW" which is somehow meant to be a slur. Likewise, vegans are cast as being stereotypically holier-than-thou for their views.
 
It is my view that eating meat, being sexist, or whatever other transgressions of injustice do not automatically make you a bad person. Good people can do bad things when the weight of a cultural status quo is bearing down upon you to define your attitudes for you and drive you towards certain behaviours. Honestly I do not even know what substance there is in defining a person as either bad or good, but that's a different topic. Like I said earlier, you absolutely can not underestimate how much the animal product industry has become a deeply rooted component of our society. You can't have an industry that large and that old, and not have it affect people's attitudes. This industry has been working very, very hard to disassociate your sense of empathy for a another living creature so that you only view it as a banal supermarket product.

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I also want to ask about keeping pets, especially indoor-only pets, because if meat is murder, then pets are slavery, aren't they? I've just realized that there's no way to frame this question so that it doesn't sound like a troll. Please feel free to ignore it.

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On 1/17/2015 at 11:31 PM, Gormongous said:

Leaving aside what I find to be the absurdity of stating unequivocally that acts of harm against two obviously different classes of living being are morally identical based on a single commonality between them, a mosquito has roughly 1/860,000th the neurons of a human brain. Not only is there more difference in behavior and experience, there is more difference in biology and genetics between a human being and mosquito than between all the human beings living on this planet right now combined. If you don't find that to be an appreciable difference, then I don't know what else to say. I just find your decision to draw the line at sentience while condemning outright those that draw the line at sapience utterly baffling. In the end, both are arbitrary compromises, aren't they?

"How many neurons do you have" sounds like an odd criterion for someone who is ready to say that plants can suffer - if you don't need a single neuron to suffer, let alone however many we've got, then surely it can't matter how many neurons something has when it comes to whether it's okay to injure it, right? Or perhaps you think neurons are important not because they allow something to experience sensations like suffering, but for some other reason. If that's the case, then I must confess that I have no idea why I should care about the number of neurons when it comes to the moral status of an organism any more than I should care about number of fingers or number of dollars in a bank account of number of melanin pigments in the skin or anything like this.

 

That said, if you think neurons are important because they are at least a good shorthand for indicating how much an organism can feel various sensations, and if you think that the mosquito's lack of neurons suggests that it feels far fewer sensations than human beings and thus it is okay to do various things to a mosquito that it would not be okay to do to a human being, that's more or less fine with me for the purposes of this thread. The end result of this line of reasoning is, I think, still basically veganism, or at least veganism with respect to most animals, because surely once you've moved past the mosquito stage and you've got as many neurons as, for instance, a pig, then surely you've got enough neurons to get you into the "deserves moral consideration" category at least as much as a human infant does, or something similar. (Notice also you sign up for weird results like "whales matter way more than human beings because holy fuck they've got a lot of neurons.") There has been a lot of work done on this topic: here are some links to check out, but if you'd rather skip them, the short version is "maybe killing mosquitos is okay, but hamburgers are almost certainly ruled out":

 

http://reducing-suffering.org/is-brain-size-morally-relevant/

http://reducing-suffering.org/do-bugs-feel-pain/

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2008.tb00075.x/abstract

 

On 1/17/2015 at 11:31 PM, Gormongous said:

I believe that causing suffering is an inevitable consequence of living, so our moral obligation is not to avoid it absolutely in a handful of areas, but rather to minimize it in as many ways as possible without causing suffering to ourselves in turn. Whether or not they feel pain when they are killed, the overwhelming majority of the plants that you eat are grown in conditions that cause environmental, cultural, and economic suffering. Producing the that energy you use to power your home, work, and transportation between the two causes environmental, economic, and political suffering. The same goes for water and waste. Unless you're very lucky, even the labor that you provide causes suffering at some point up or down the supply chain. In light of all of that, the only absolutely moral decision for me is to kill myself and feed my body to hungry cats, but since I'm mostly content with living for the time being, even though it means moral compromise, I just do my best not to eat too much meat or use too much electricity or make too much trash. Fixating so much on a single axis of suffering as an absolute, seemingly because it is easily identifiable and relatable to you personally, seems myopic in light of all that, especially if your best argument in its favor is guilting people with the suffering that they are currently doing their best to minimize.

I already addressed this earlier in the thread, so I think I would just advert to what I said there.

 

edit: actually I thought of one more thing to say on that topic. People who always try to change the "is it okay to kill and eat non-human animals for food, especially if it's not necessary for survival?" argument into the "actually ALL FOOD IS UNETHICAL, the world sucks, so shut up about veganism already" conversation remind me of the people who come into conversations about feminism and say "actually there are really serious issues that effect men, and all human beings, not just women, issues much more important than feminism, so shut up about feminism already." I mean, in one sense, that's actually true. As serious as the issues that effect women are, there are even BIGGER problems in the world: mass starvation, genocide, economic exploitation, slavery, and so on. So I guess people DO have a point when they say "hey, forget #GamerGate and all that bullshit, let's focus on REAL PROBLEMS." But I take it that a better response to this would be "uh, look, I'm not trying to pretend there aren't OTHER problems that maybe even swamp feminism. But just for once I'd like to have the feminism conversation without you hijacking it and turning it into the 'what about men' conversation." It would be nice if we could have, just for once, the veganism conversation without you hijacking it and turning into "oh but actually THE ENTIRE WORLD FOOD SYSTEM IS EVIL and that's far more important than veganism!" I mean, sure, yes. I don't deny that. But... that's not the point.

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