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Zeusthecat

Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?

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W/r/t specism or racial control ism wondering how you guys feel about conservation issues such as active pest control of invasive species.

For example possums, cats, rabbits, and the like are often cuddly looking animals that many people around the world enjoy. However in case of a place like New Zealand all wild or semi wild versions of the above simply all have to die to protect endemic species of the region be they plant or animal.

But the method of mass culling is not usually just via breaking their necks by trapping; it's by a rather nasty but environmentally dissoluble poison called 1080. Or in the case of rabbits a haemotoxin which attacks like it suggests the animal's blood.

To suggest any type of method for a fellow man is certainly inhumane.

To suggest the use of it for these NZ populations is speciest no?

Yet they're the best methods of controlling hundreds of square kilometres of dense bush, plains, forest, and scrubland that we have to protect a natural ecosystem.

As a speciest (?) when one gets to this point it's easy to adopt this position for domestic animals.

I don't want them to be tortured, but i certainly know farmers and abotoirs can practice mistreatment that crosses firmly into torture.

But I see little to no ecosystem advantage of their presence beyond animal byproducts or as I mentioned before the trampling and rejuvenation of bush mats.

So I'd rather see the practice phased out than abandoned in its entirety because those animals do not belong in this environment.

But another thing I've also mentioned is that animal byproducts are currently still required for the diagnosis of plant pathogens which is crucial for any plant industry.

Or my other mention that agriculture still relies on animal cruelty both to identify viruses and to manage against pest animal infestations.

It's quite costly to simply fence out an animal from an area; a mouse can fit through a hole the size of a wedding ring.

Maybe this thought process is alien, or does not concern the average joe (simply another unfashionable question of the ills of modern society and thus pointless and distracting to mention in a discussion like this).

But it's how I've been trained to think.

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That's pretty far afield from "is it wrong to eat meat?" but in any case, questions like this are always tough, whether we're talking about non-human animals or humans. If you need to kill one group of people to save another, is it okay to do so? That's a really tough question! If you can answer that, then I'd probably be inclined to use your response to answer the question for non-human animals. At least, that would be the place to start, I think.

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Whoa. Go away for a minute.

 

For my bonafides, I'm 20 years vegan, which sort of makes it hard for for me to do any deep dive into argument, as it's just the fabric of existence for a long time, but I do not agree with the recent turn of moral equivalence. 

 

Anyway, I don't think animals and humans occupy the same moral plane, which in a roundabout way is one of arguments for veganism. I find the last few pages sort of bizarre, 1 luv to all. It's a quick trip down reductio ad absurdum. It gets us to a place nobody can relate to anymore. I'm reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes where they worry they're massacring bacteria with every breath.Are Hippos brutally immoral? Worse than the most virulent racists? They'll bite a human in half given the chance. They'll attack a car.

 

Humans biologically can eat everything. If we were hunter gathers, it makes sense, but technology and civilization has abrogated those most primal needs. While I don't find omnivorous activity to be inherently immoral I do believe we've reached a point where it isn't necessary, and the alternative is beneficial on a moral (factory farming is gross), economic, and environmental levels.

 

Also, being basically formed as a 90s punk, I'm instantly reminded of the legendary worms story. Quoting a friend, for laffs:

Rent America are responsible for the most absurd performance I saw of this era. They took awhile to set up, then they literally played a blast beat for like two seconds, and then they were all on the floor crying and rolling and crawling around. No more music was played. Also, the singer made a speech about refusing to use a microphone because it was elitist and placed him above the crowd before they played, so for the two seconds they played he was just yelling into the air. They were just lying on the floor crying for awhile, and then one of them started yelling "the worms...the worms..oh my god...the worms" and made this teary eyed speech about how because of the human race putting concrete and asphalt all over the earth when it rains the worms come out and can't find their way back to the earth and die in the sun on the concrete. At this point, people just started laughing and the rest of the set was spent by Rent America yelling at the crowd for not taking them seriously and about how it took so much guts to show that emotion in front of a crowd.After that, Agnes Moraine's Autobiography played and took forever to set up. The guitarist tuned for 20 minutes, then they played half a song, and he threw his guitar across the room and fell on the floor crying. I walked out at that point.

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See I don't really see those two questions as comparable. The animals endemic to a region support the endemic plant life of a region. So if you get a whole bunch of rabbits into a land they'll quickly eat new shoots of growth and likely create a plant biosphere more suitable to a grassland. Which of course would destroy any type of encroachment from a forest; which lets everything in that forest diminish and die off. Likewise if you let possums, cats, and the like kill birds then you cease the process that the birds go through to migrate certain seedlings of trees that have adapted to have to go through the bird type's digestive system to become active seeds.

Human groups being usually equal in terms of relative disadvantage can or could (don't really know because I'm not an anthropologist) be transplanted to most regions and create similar but distinct societies.

But different species impacts on their ecosystems create dramatically different ecosystems. With the right numbers of pests humans didn't need to deforest most of New Zealand by themselves they could have just waited for predatory animals run amok in a region that has evolved not to have any to reduce potentially all of the endemic plant or animal species given enough time.

To give examples most of our nesting birds that were initially wiped out nested on the ground because they had no need to be in trees. Tree nesting birds are still helpless because climbing animals will come to their nests eat all their young and eggs and the parents themselves. Which is pretty dramatic for a species that breeds once every twenty years with a partner chosen for life.

Which gives another point of dissimilarity for your example -growth rates of populations affected.

Killing two distinct populations of humans in an area is also more incomparable to killing distinct species because of the amount of relativity in the populations involved.

Most of the predators involved are fast breeding with large litter sizes.

I'm going to ask your opinion of an example now.

North American Pine is a species of tree with highly toxic needles. They're prevalent throughout NZ and they're distinct areas because the only major endemic bird that thrives in them are New Zealand Robins. Also the toxic pine needles alter the chemistry of the ground so that only other NA Pines are successful growing there.

Would you be opposed in destroying those forests? It's the same rational needed to condone the eradication of animal pest species. But from what I understand you'd say no to the killing of pest animals because it's too similar to murdering groups of humans arbitrarily. Even though differences between species effects upon an environment are quite distinct from what I'm assuming to be populations of urban humans. Also that I'm talking about the eradication of populations of a few dozen introduced species which have equilibrium with their environments in other parts of the world in an area that if given free run will let them destroy many hundreds if not thousands of millions of plant and animal species.

A similar situation exists for the garden plant Hibiscus.

Also it's of note that agricultural farmers kill plenty of pest species for the plant food industry in similar ways for economic reasons.

I'm also going to say that if the meat industry was phased out the land already claimed would be converted into agriculture at a loss because a higher cost of plant fertilizer would be needed.

Grassland or pasture is not expressly healthy in terms of nutrient replenishment. In fact many starting farmlands convert forestland for agricultural farming because of the high existing nutrient count. Some farmers in places like Australia are confirmed for converting bushland to cropland. In those cases its an entirely destructive ecological act But there is an argument that they're simply trying to accommodate the crop industry, possibly because the meat industry takes up other viable lands although I personally would not count that as the only reason.

See what you're actually trying to ask me when you transplant that question into human terms is if I kill this one group of people, I save not only the current generation of the people I'm saving but the ability of that group of people to exist ever again in any way. Whereas the group of people killed have many recorded habitats around the world that they thrive within in equilibrium of their environment.

It really does become us vs them because the species lost will never exist anywhere ever again while the species considered pests live virtually everywhere in North America, Australia and Europe.

It's the same logic that prevents people from condoning the aggressive expansion of human settlements to every square inch possible.

The reason I'm bringing up pests is that its very easy for me to see domestic produce animals in much the same way. That at the least these animals which I recognise to form attachments and emotional states comparable to humans should be phased out in the existing process of the meat industry than simply 'let go' somewhere in the country side.

Which is another thing I wonder about, how do you see the end of the meat industry? Phased out or with a mass shut down and release of domestic animals?

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On 1/18/2015 at 7:16 PM, feelthedarkness said:

Whoa. Go away for a minute.

 

For my bonafides, I'm 20 years vegan, which sort of makes it hard for for me to do any deep dive into argument, as it's just the fabric of existence for a long time, but I do not agree with the recent turn of moral equivalence.

It's not a "recent" turn. It goes back at least to Pythagoras, circa 500 BC. It's probably more venerable than anti-racism, in fact, and almost certainly much more venerable than anti-sexism, anti-heterosexism, and other recent turns towards toleration, understanding, equality, and kindness to our fellow living creatures.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:16 PM, feelthedarkness said:

Anyway, I don't think animals and humans occupy the same moral plane, which in a roundabout way is one of arguments for veganism. I find the last few pages sort of bizarre, 1 luv to all. It's a quick trip down reductio ad absurdum. It gets us to a place nobody can relate to anymore. I'm reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes where they worry they're massacring bacteria with every breath.Are Hippos brutally immoral? Worse than the most virulent racists? They'll bite a human in half given the chance. They'll attack a car.

One very common thought about moral responsibility is that you have to have the ability to understand morality in order to be morally responsible for something. So, for instance, an infant or a lion or a hippo is not morally responsible for anything bad it does because it doesn't understand that it it is doing anything bad. The moral equivalence of non-human animals with humans is definitely not subject to any simple, pat reductio ad absurdum articles, or one of the many philosophers who have argued for it over the past few hundred years would have noticed.

 

I find the worms story about as relevant as someone telling a story about how they went to an abolitionist convention and all these white people were getting all weepy about African slaves and so on and they're just like "lol, abolitionists." There may be a case to be made that worms don't really feel pain the way, for instance, dogs and pigs and humans and whales do, so that might explain why it's actually legitimate to laugh at people who give a shit about worms, but since I can't really think of any reason to go out of our way to kill worms we might as well err on the side of caution and not slaughter them for no reason, right?

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:58 PM, moddy said:

See I don't really see those two questions as comparable. The animals endemic to a region support the endemic plant life of a region. So if you get a whole bunch of rabbits into a land they'll quickly eat new shoots of growth and likely create a plant biosphere more suitable to a grassland. Which of course would destroy any type of encroachment from a forest; which lets everything in that forest diminish and die off. Likewise if you let possums, cats, and the like kill birds then you cease the process that the birds go through to migrate certain seedlings of trees that have adapted to have to go through the bird type's digestive system to become active seeds.

To make them comparable you just have to imagine that one group of people is needed in order to keep the ecosystem going, whereas the other will destroy it. Imagine for instance that a group of Native Americans is living in a sustainable fashion whereas a group of European settlers desires to alter the ecosystem by introducing various non-native plant species, implementing agriculture on a large scale, diverting rivers, etc.

 

Now typically it's not a kill or be killed case when it comes to people, because it's much easier to reason with human beings than with other invasive species, but there are of course instances of groups of people who refuse to compromise and leave, so whatever you think ought to be done about this, you could use this to reason analogously about the case of non-human animals.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:58 PM, moddy said:

But different species impacts on their ecosystems create dramatically different ecosystems. With the right numbers of pests humans didn't need to deforest most of New Zealand by themselves they could have just waited for predatory animals run amok in a region that has evolved not to have any to reduce potentially all of the endemic plant or animal species given enough time.

Note also that if we do face the prospect of the reduction of the endemic plant and/or animal species of an area, it's not clear why this is bad. This is not to say it isn't bad. It's just to say that if we had to choose between a group of human beings or an endemic plant species, I'm not really sure that the plant species is the obvious choice, and if we have to choose between an invading animal species and an endemic plant species, or even an endemic animal species that is just going to fade away over time because it is evolutionarily out-competed, it would at least be worth hearing the case for why we ought to care about the existence of a species as opposed to individual animals. I have a lot of reasons for caring about individual non-human animals, namely, the same reasons I care about humans. None of these reasons apply to plant species or animal species considered as a whole.

 

This whole topic gets into some of the thorniest ethical issues - anyone interested in it would do well to start with this article and the various things it cites.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:58 PM, moddy said:

Would you be opposed in destroying those forests? It's the same rational needed to condone the eradication of animal pest species. But from what I understand you'd say no to the killing of pest animals because it's too similar to murdering groups of humans arbitrarily. Even though differences between species effects upon an environment are quite distinct from what I'm assuming to be populations of urban humans. Also that I'm talking about the eradication of populations of a few dozen introduced species which have equilibrium with their environments in other parts of the world in an area that if given free run will let them destroy many hundreds if not thousands of millions of plant and animal species.

A similar situation exists for the garden plant Hibiscus.

Nothing in the basic argument against speciesism commits anyone, including myself, to any given position on the value of the existence of plant species themselves. ("Speciesism" as a term makes this a little confusing to talk about, because speciesism is the idea that some animal species ought to be privileged for no reason except that they are different species - it has nothing to do with plants. "Racism" is actually a crummy term for similar reasons, because we also use "race" to talk about different species, like "the human race." So try not to get hung up on the words.) The basic argument against speciesism neither tells you that the forests or the hibiscus plants matter, nor does it tell you that they don't matter. Answering this question isn't even really a question of animal ethics! It's the more broad case of environmental ethics, and we'd answer it by figuring out our stances on the various considerations adduced in the article I linked above. That's not to say I don't have any thoughts on the matter, it's just to say that I don't need to commit myself to any given position for the article against speciesism to go through, I think.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:58 PM, moddy said:

Also it's of note that agricultural farmers kill plenty of pest species for the plant food industry in similar ways for economic reasons.

Yes, and I take it our response to this ought to be the same as our response to the other awful things that farmers do, which have been brought up a couple times in this thread already. Namely, we ought not to be thrilled about it, but this doesn't suddenly make it okay to eat hamburgers.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:58 PM, moddy said:

See what you're actually trying to ask me when you transplant that question into human terms is if I kill this one group of people, I save not only the current generation of the people I'm saving but the ability of that group of people to exist ever again in any way. Whereas the group of people killed have many recorded habitats around the world that they thrive within in equilibrium of their environment.

It really does become us vs them because the species lost will never exist anywhere ever again while the species considered pests live virtually everywhere in North America, Australia and Europe.

It's the same logic that prevents people from condoning the aggressive expansion of human settlements to every square inch possible.

I think this is a pretty good summary, yes.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:58 PM, moddy said:

The reason I'm bringing up pests is that its very easy for me to see domestic produce animals in much the same way. That at the least these animals which I recognise to form attachments and emotional states comparable to humans should be phased out in the existing process of the meat industry than simply 'let go' somewhere in the country side.

Sure - this is the same thing we would say about a group of orphaned human children who were raised to be slaves. We wouldn't want to just shut down the orphanarium and scatter the kids to the four winds.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 7:58 PM, moddy said:

Which is another thing I wonder about, how do you see the end of the meat industry? Phased out or with a mass shut down and release of domestic animals?

If you're asking the practical question, like, what do I think is going to happen, then I think "phased out" is the clear answer - it's never going to stop on a dime. If you're asking what I think ought to be done, I don't really have an answer, because the question depends as much on complicated factual questions (what would happen if we immediately shut it all down, etc.) that I am in no position to answer. As the example above about the orphanage points out, though, probably some kind of phase out would make more sense.

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To make them comparable you just have to imagine that one group of people is needed in order to keep the ecosystem going, whereas the other will destroy it. Imagine for instance that a group of Native Americans is living in a sustainable fashion whereas a group of European settlers desires to alter the ecosystem by introducing various non-native plant species, implementing agriculture on a large scale, diverting rivers, etc.

Now typically it's not a kill or be killed case when it comes to people, because it's much easier to reason with human beings than with other invasive species, but there are of course instances of groups of people who refuse to compromise and leave, so whatever you think ought to be done about this, you could use this to reason analogously about the case of non-human animals.

 

Ideally transplants and integration work best for humans and they work the most. You'd have a system of permits, regulated growing of introduced crops if they're needed at all, rivers diverted in ways that made ecological sense (which they can) etc. But animals do not respond to the same techniques. Namely because they don't use their own reasoning for that kind of purpose for a variety of factors; and because the monetary cost of transplantation is high as well as the cost of containment, and the rapid growth rte of the species in question I would have to suggest some mix of limited trapping, baiting, and killing. However I will firmly say that what works for humans in this case cannot work for animals for the reasons I've scratched the surface of.

 

Note also that if we do face the prospect of the reduction of the endemic plant and/or animal species of an area, it's not clear why this is bad. This is not to say it isn't bad. It's just to say that if we had to choose between a group of human beings or an endemic plant species, I'm not really sure that the plant species is the obvious choice, and if we have to choose between an invading animal species and an endemic plant species, or even an endemic animal species that is just going to fade away over time because it is evolutionarily out-competed, it would at least be worth hearing the case for why we ought to care about the existence of a species as opposed to individual animals. I have a lot of reasons for caring about individual non-human animals, namely, the same reasons I care about humans. None of these reasons apply to plant species or animal species considered as a whole.

 

I don't really want to get into the question and evaluation of ecosystem services but I will say that question is at the core of ecology and conservation work.

However I will say that in the case of any generic ecosystem the multitude of services humans or the ecosystem intrinsically 'enjoys' depends on redundancy. If too many sections of a food 'web' (chain is a crappy metaphor) are destroyed then the entire system unravels.

You talk about sustainability but what is it if it isn't the preservation of resources for intrinsic reasons and their own future use?

Furthermore many species plant or animal have astounding properties that can lead to applications in research, business, pharmacology, etc. People look at the natural world for all sorts of inspiration like bio-mechanics, the synthesis of drugs to fight disease. Heck a friend of mine knew some people that did a research project into a type of fungi found only in the Amazon that breaks down plastic naturally. It's these types of discoveries that lead people to take on roles like guardians of existing ecosystems in addition for the more apparent uses.

Also at this point for a lot of regions that are extensively protected by programmes there already has been a scientific process in establishing them as such beyond "this is an issue of national pride, or they're so few in number but they have a lot of personality and bring in tourist dollars".

You'd probably be best mining groups like the Millennium Ecosystem Assesment who write reports on hows and whys and why nots.

As to species simply 'fading out' we're in the middle of the Anthropocene where the current rate of extinction is between 100-1000 times the background rate of extinction. To put it bluntly many forms of life on earth some of which we know of, many we don't are being annihilated by human practices, one of those is the practice of introducing animals. Humans have a responsibility to mitigate this risk if they wish to continue to enjoy their chosen climate and ecosystem because the global food web is being placed into a blender.

 

Put extra simply if you want to help against climate change then eventually you'll have to consume less oil; if you want to help against the destruction of your local ecosystem eventually you'll have to kill some animals.

 

It's also worth noting that I'm not talking about one plant species, I'm not talking about one animal species vs a group of humans. I'm talking about many animal and plant species that depend on each other for continued survival versus a settlement of humans and their needs or an explosive globetrotting population of small cute furry mammals that people on the internet fawn over.

This whole topic gets into some of the thorniest ethical issues - anyone interested in it would do well to start with this article and the various things it cites.

 

I read through a part of that but having been lectured by one of the co-authors of What Is Biodiversity? on ethics in ecology it felt like a very meandering waltz through old ground. Personally I prefer my articles to be a bit more straightforward without quotes from genesis or Aristotle. For reasons you can probably infer from this article on Newton's Flaming Laser Sword.

 

Nothing in the basic argument against speciesism commits anyone, including myself, to any given position on the value of the existence of plant species themselves. ("Speciesism" as a term makes this a little confusing to talk about, because speciesism is the idea that some animal species ought to be privileged for no reason except that they are different species - it has nothing to do with plants. "Racism" is actually a crummy term for similar reasons, because we also use "race" to talk about different species, like "the human race." So try not to get hung up on the words.) The basic argument against speciesism neither tells you that the forests or the hibiscus plants matter, nor does it tell you that they don't matter. Answering this question isn't even really a question of animal ethics! It's the more broad case of environmental ethics, and we'd answer it by figuring out our stances on the various considerations adduced in the article I linked above. That's not to say I don't have any thoughts on the matter, it's just to say that I don't need to commit myself to any given position for the article against speciesism to go through, I think.

I think the school of thought that term belongs to really needs to find either a new definition addendum or a new term altogether. It sounds like you or someone else from the same school would label me as a speciest yet I am not stating that populations from certain species need to die for human benefit alone but for the benefit of the other animals/ecosystem that has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Speciesism seems to include animals within a moral community however they themselves are not active members of the communities morals. I think that's fine. It's not like we put creatures on trial for committing what humans morally recognise as a crime. Which is all fine and good until an animal population begins committing (in addition to other factors -see humans and other environmental factors) genocide upon another population of animals then to protect the greater ecosystem they need to be controlled as a local population. Although from what I understand you would say that humans should take a 'hands off' approach since well, they're here now so we may as well let them fight it out I meant that's natural selection isn't it? Only natural selection tends to enable species to deal with the current threats to their environment, not cataclysm in the form of an introduced predator which has a range of diets to switch between.

The argument I'm hearing is that if say a space-faring conglomerate unleashed the Alien or the Kharaa on a planet the reaction should be "That's natural selection right? Whose to say the species and people lost are even that important?" Or maybe the conglomerate mounts a special action to retrieve the animals in the rescue shelters.

I dunno, prioritising widespread domestic animals over untold millions that you don't see at a farm, pet store, or zoo primarily for feelings of human interest or care/guilt feels a little gross to me.

 

Yes, and I take it our response to this ought to be the same as our response to the other awful things that farmers do, which have been brought up a couple times in this thread already. Namely, we ought not to be thrilled about it, but this doesn't suddenly make it okay to eat hamburgers.

 

I'm not saying that it's suddenly okay to eat hamburgers as if I went "well everything's relative so who cares?" I'm saying that there's a moral burden for pretty much any industrialised food source.

 

I think this is a pretty good summary, yes.

 

I hope you can see why given everything else I've been saying I don't have much of a problem with culling a localised population of globetrotting explosive breeding cute furry things to save hundreds of other species which are actually in equilibrium with their environment.

 

Sure - this is the same thing we would say about a group of orphaned human children who were raised to be slaves. We wouldn't want to just shut down the orphanarium and scatter the kids to the four winds.

If you're asking the practical question, like, what do I think is going to happen, then I think "phased out" is the clear answer - it's never going to stop on a dime. If you're asking what I think ought to be done, I don't really have an answer, because the question depends as much on complicated factual questions (what would happen if we immediately shut it all down, etc.) that I am in no position to answer. As the example above about the orphanage points out, though, probably some kind of phase out would make more sense.

 

Okay. I was curious to your answer.

To remind readers this giant discussion is an offshoot of my attempt to explain why I'm okay with the deaths of industrialised farm animals provided there's little cruelty done for its own sake beyond death for meat production; that is 'ethical farming'.

This discussion is beginning to significantly eat into my day so either my rate of reply is going to drop off significantly or this discussion will be tabled/concluded with the next two or three replies (hopefully some combination of the two.

This doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed the conversation.

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I have to break up my reply to keep from exceeding the quote limit in one post. Various posts follow:

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

Ideally transplants and integration work best for humans and they work the most. You'd have a system of permits, regulated growing of introduced crops if they're needed at all, rivers diverted in ways that made ecological sense (which they can) etc. But animals do not respond to the same techniques. Namely because they don't use their own reasoning for that kind of purpose for a variety of factors; and because the monetary cost of transplantation is high as well as the cost of containment, and the rapid growth rte of the species in question I would have to suggest some mix of limited trapping, baiting, and killing. However I will firmly say that what works for humans in this case cannot work for animals for the reasons I've scratched the surface of.

I know this is what "ideally" works for humans, which is why we do these things for humans, and I know this wouldn't work for non-human animals. That's not really the point, though. Simply imagine that these things didn't work for humans, or at least that we have a case where these things don't work. Perhaps the humans refuse to be transplanted, or it will cost too much, or they'll all kill themselves for religious reasons if they have to live anywhere else, or whatever. We're trying to answer the ethical question here, so we need to stipulate away as many of the irrelevant practical details as we can.

 

Of course, if the practical details aren't morally irrelevant then we definitely don't want to stipulate them away. You might think that really it just comes down to how easy it is to relocate people: the reason we relocate rather than kill human beings, perhaps, is not because murder is wrong but rather because it's relatively easy to avoid murder. The reason we kill rather than relocate non-human animals, perhaps, is not because murdering them is okay but rather because it's much easier than relocating them. This would be a consistent position but I don't find it very convincing, especially not in the human case.

 

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

I don't really want to get into the question and evaluation of ecosystem services but I will say that question is at the core of ecology and conservation work.

However I will say that in the case of any generic ecosystem the multitude of services humans or the ecosystem intrinsically 'enjoys' depends on redundancy. If too many sections of a food 'web' (chain is a crappy metaphor) are destroyed then the entire system unravels.

You talk about sustainability but what is it if it isn't the preservation of resources for intrinsic reasons and their own future use?

Furthermore many species plant or animal have astounding properties that can lead to applications in research, business, pharmacology, etc. People look at the natural world for all sorts of inspiration like bio-mechanics, the synthesis of drugs to fight disease. Heck a friend of mine knew some people that did a research project into a type of fungi found only in the Amazon that breaks down plastic naturally. It's these types of discoveries that lead people to take on roles like guardians of existing ecosystems in addition for the more apparent uses.

Also at this point for a lot of regions that are extensively protected by programmes there already has been a scientific process in establishing them as such beyond "this is an issue of national pride, or they're so few in number but they have a lot of personality and bring in tourist dollars".

You'd probably be best mining groups like the Millennium Ecosystem Assesment who write reports on hows and whys and why nots.

I don't see how any this is relevant to the question of speciesism. Surely these kind of considerations apply to human beings just as much as they apply to non-human animals. Human beings destroy ecosystems like the Amazon, and species like... all sorts of species just as much as (probably more than?) invading non-human animal species or invading plant species. Whether this means it's okay to slaughter human beings in order to preserve the possibility that we find some awesome fungi is an interesting question but it's not one that I think is different for humans compared to non-human animals.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

As to species simply 'fading out' we're in the middle of the Anthropocene where the current rate of extinction is between 100-1000 times the background rate of extinction. To put it bluntly many forms of life on earth some of which we know of, many we don't are being annihilated by human practices, one of those is the practice of introducing animals. Humans have a responsibility to mitigate this risk if they wish to continue to enjoy their chosen climate and ecosystem because the global food web is being placed into a blender.

I don't understand how the third sentence you type matches up with the first two sentences. Just because many species do go extinct doesn't mean that it's a bad thing that this happens, and much more relevantly, it doesn't mean it's okay to murder human beings who ignore the responsibility they have to mitigate the risk. This is not to say the opposite is the case: maybe in fact it is bad that species go extinct, so bad, in fact, that it's okay to murder people who fail to respect the obligations they have to prevent extinction. This doesn't seem obvious to me, though, and just as we might not think it's okay to murder human beings to save a species, it's not clear to me that it's okay to murder non-human animals to save a species.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

Put extra simply if you want to help against climate change then eventually you'll have to consume less oil; if you want to help against the destruction of your local ecosystem eventually you'll have to kill some animals.

This is true, yes. In fact, if I want to help against climate change, then eventually maybe I'll have to kill some humans (this is a pretty easy way to cut down on oil consumption). And maybe to help against the destruction of my local ecosystem I'll also have to kill some humans. This doesn't suggest to me that it's okay to kill humans to prevent climate change or to prevent the destruction of an ecosystem. (It also doesn't suggest to me that it's not okay to kill the humans.) My point is just that you're saying all these things as if they answer the question "can I murder non-human animals" but it seems to me they don't answer this question at all. They tell me whether I'll need to murder the non-human animals given a certain set of goals, but they don't tell me if these goals are important enough to justify the murder.

 

One way to help me out would be to answer these questions for human beings, so that I know what you think about that case. Then I could tell you whether, given these assumptions about human beings, what the answer would be for non-human animals. (As you might expect, I think typically the answer is the same.) So, do you think it's okay to murder human beings to avoid either climate change or the destruction of a local environment? If your answer is yes, then (assuming you're right) then I think for similar reasons it's okay to murder non-human animals. If your answer is no, then (again assuming you're right) I suspect that for similar reasons it's not okay to murder non-human animals. If you're not sure what answer to give, then that's fine, but the point here is that it's not obvious to me what the answer is for non-human animals.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

It's also worth noting that I'm not talking about one plant species, I'm not talking about one animal species vs a group of humans. I'm talking about many animal and plant species that depend on each other for continued survival versus a settlement of humans and their needs or an explosive globetrotting population of small cute furry mammals that people on the internet fawn over.

Do you think this changes the ethical situation at all (as opposed to just the practical situation)? Could you imagine a case where, for instance, we'd have to murder human beings to preserve the entire web of an ecosystem rather than just one isolated species of plant or animal? If this were the case, would it be okay to murder the human beings?

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

I read through a part of that but having been lectured by one of the co-authors of What Is Biodiversity? on ethics in ecology it felt like a very meandering waltz through old ground. Personally I prefer my articles to be a bit more straightforward without quotes from genesis or Aristotle. For reasons you can probably infer from this article on Newton's Flaming Laser Sword.

I find many of the sentiments expressed in that article to be confused, false, or otherwise unhelpful. This is not the place to have that discussion, though - if you found the article I linked unhelpful, that's fine, and I apologize. I was simply aiming to give you some resources to answer some of the questions you're asking. If you found those resources unhelpful you'll have to have recourse to other resources to answer questions like "is it morally permissible to murder human beings to preserve an ecosystem?" and so on.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

I think the school of thought that term belongs to really needs to find either a new definition addendum or a new term altogether. It sounds like you or someone else from the same school would label me as a speciest yet I am not stating that populations from certain species need to die for human benefit alone but for the benefit of the other animals/ecosystem that has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Speciesism seems to include animals within a moral community however they themselves are not active members of the communities morals. I think that's fine. It's not like we put creatures on trial for committing what humans morally recognise as a crime. Which is all fine and good until an animal population begins committing (in addition to other factors -see humans and other environmental factors) genocide upon another population of animals then to protect the greater ecosystem they need to be controlled as a local population.

I'm unclear as to why things are no longer "fine and good" when we move to the question of genocide. It seems to me just as "fine as good" when we move to this question. It's slightly unusual because we don't often (perhaps ever) encounter instances where human beings unwittingly commit genocide, so most of the thinking we do about genocide presupposes that the people responsible for it are responsible in the moral sense, too, because they know what they're doing. Just because the case of non-human animals committing genocide is different, though, it doesn't strike me as particularly morally problematic from the perspective of the anti-speciesist. We can simply replace the non-human animals with human babies and ask ourselves what the answer would be. So for instance if invasive rabbits and toads are committing genocide against various Australian plant and animal species, and we want to know whether we can kill the rabbits and toads, we would just ask ourselves what the appropriate response would be if instead of rabbits and toads we were killing human infants (orphaned human infants, of course, who aren't going to make it to adulthood, because this is more or less the position the rabbits and toads are in).

 

On 1/18/2015 at 11:57 PM, moddy said:

Although from what I understand you would say that humans should take a 'hands off' approach since well, they're here now so we may as well let them fight it out I meant that's natural selection isn't it? Only natural selection tends to enable species to deal with the current threats to their environment, not cataclysm in the form of an introduced predator which has a range of diets to switch between.

I don't think I ever professed support for a "hands off" position to these questions anywhere in this thread. This is why the passage you quote starts with the sentence "Nothing in the basic argument against speciesism commits anyone, including myself, to any given position on the value of the existence of plant species themselves." This sentence is meant to show that the arguments I have been given in this thread, as far as I can tell, don't commit me one way or another to answers to your questions about genocide, biodiversity, invasive species, and so on. It would definitely help if you would quote the relevant stuff that you think expresses this "hands off" position and I could either recant it or explain why it doesn't mean what you think it means. I don't think I have expressed any particular viewpoint on this question in this thread. The only ethical position I have committed to myself in this thread is anti-speciesism on the basis of speciesism's shared issues with racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination, as far as I can recall.

 

Another sentence in the chunk you quoted, the last one, is "That's not to say I don't have any thoughts on the matter, it's just to say that I don't need to commit myself to any given position for the article against speciesism to go through, I think." I still think this is correct: I don't think I have committed myself one way or another, or that it's necessary to commit myself one way or another in order to answer the question this thread is asking, namely, "is it wrong to eat meat?"

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The argument I'm hearing is that if say a space-faring conglomerate unleashed the Alien or the Kharaa on a planet the reaction should be "That's natural selection right? Whose to say the species and people lost are even that important?" Or maybe the conglomerate mounts a special action to retrieve the animals in the rescue shelters.

As noted above, I don't think you're hearing this argument from me, although I may be mistaken. My position in this thread, which I hope I have been consistent about, is that I have not told you what I think about these questions except that our answer to the Alien case or the Kharaa case ought to be basically the same as our answer to the human-beings-whose-actions-have-the-same-results-as-the-Alien case and the human-beings-whose-actions-have-the-same-results-as-the-Kharaa case.

 

I dunno, prioritising widespread domestic animals over untold millions that you don't see at a farm, pet store, or zoo primarily for feelings of human interest or care/guilt feels a little gross to me.

I too find this to be gross. I do not believe I have ever said we ought to prioritize domestic animals, though. If you could quote anything I say where I express the opposite sentiment I'd be happy to either recant it or explain why I don't think it has the implications you are imputing to it.

 

I'm not saying that it's suddenly okay to eat hamburgers as if I went "well everything's relative so who cares?" I'm saying that there's a moral burden for pretty much any industrialised food source.

I don't think I denied this. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, I agree that there is a moral burden with pretty much any industrialized food source. I do not think this makes it okay to eat hamburgers, though. Given that the title of this thread is "is it wrong to eat meat?" and given that I think the answer to this question is "yes," I'm not sure why you think the point about industrialized food sources is particular relevant, especially considering the other stuff I have said on this topic.

 

 

I hope you can see why given everything else I've been saying I don't have much of a problem with culling a localised population of globetrotting explosive breeding cute furry things to save hundreds of other species which are actually in equilibrium with their environment.

I actually can't see this. I don't see, anywhere in this thread, where you've said anything like "ecosystems matter more than individuals." If you're willing to say this, you are more than welcome to, and it sounds like you are committed to this viewpoint. If you are, that's fine (although then I think you're fine with the murder of lots of human beings, it seems like, if this is necessary for the preservation of an ecosystem, which is a position many don't want to commit themselves to). If you aren't, that's also fine. In either case this seems more or less irrelevant to the question "is it wrong to eat meat?" the answer to which I think is typically "yes."

 

 

To remind readers this giant discussion is an offshoot of my attempt to explain why I'm okay with the deaths of industrialised farm animals provided there's little cruelty done for its own sake beyond death for meat production; that is 'ethical farming'.

Yes, this sounds like a good summary of the issue. Meanwhile, my position would be something like "ethical farming of pigs is no more or less immoral than ethical farming of human babies for consumption." I use babies rather than human beings more generally because you would probably have to kill someone when they are a baby in order to prevent them from acquiring additional interests in life that come along with a level of intelligence that might be beyond what a pig ever reaches, namely, the level of intelligence adult human beings have.

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Finally, one more point I missed:

 

On 1/18/2015 at 1:03 PM, SuperBiasedMan said:

And to be honest, TychoCelchuuu, I think you need to bear it in mind more. I do feel the connection between human and nonhuman prejudices. But you can't aggressively argue with that as a foregone conclusion and expect people to fully engage with you. A frank and honest explanation of your belief system without challenging theirs (or the lack of theirs) will give someone far more to think about than trying to call them out on behaviour you feel is inherently immoral.

I'm not really worried about whether people "fully engage" with me. I find tone arguments as helpful in regards to specieiesm as I find them in regards to sexism, which is to say, I don't find them helpful at all. I agree 100% that people won't "fully engage" with me if I don't sugarcoat my beliefs about speciesism in a way so as to hide their full extent or make them sound more plausible to people who are prejudiced or whatever. I just don't think this matters.

 

Analogously, think about feminism. These forums are very good for people who believe that sexism is wrong. You can go into the feminism thread, or any other thread, and just take for granted that if you say something like "this is wrong because it treats women badly for no reason other than prejudice," you won't get much or any bullshit from other posters.

 

Much of the Internet is not like this, though. On many forums, especially gaming forums, if you want people to "fully engage" with you, then being straightforwardly anti-sexist is a very, very bad idea. People are not going to "fully engage" with someone who says "I am a feminist" or "I am against sexism and thus against treating women worse than men because of their gender" or something like that.

 

Does this mean that you ought not to profess anti-sexism with a strength equal to the degree to which I've been professing anti-speciesism? I don't think it does. Perhaps you disagree - this is fine. You are more than welcome to follow your route of anti-speciesism, and I would never criticize you for being more soft-spoken and indirect than I am on this issue. (As I noted above, I find tone arguments unhelpful in this context.) I don't even mind that you and others fail to show me the same respect. Police my tone all you want; it's fine with me! I just want to highlight the reasons that I don't find your statements convincing enough to make me change my tone, and I wanted to highlight this by way of saying that I would also find your statements unconvincing if we were in the feminism thread and you were telling me that I might be having a better time if I weren't so stringent and strident on the topic of women and men being morally equivalent.

 

On 1/18/2015 at 1:03 PM, SuperBiasedMan said:

Anyone here absolutely doesn't have to share my outlook, but sometimes discussing stuff like this can feel like the other person/people being sceptical is an active attempt to dissuade your own beliefs and invalidate them, rather than an explanation of personal disinterest. ie. The desert island question could certainly be a curiosity but could just as easily feel as poking holes in someone's logic to undermine their whole idea. I've only been able to skim most of this thread, so I'm not accusing anyone of that here but I've definitely had it before.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "the desert island question," because I think I've forgotten what that is and I can't find it earlier in the thread. I'm also not sure what the phrase "could just as easily feel as poking holes in someone's logic to undermine their whole idea." The grammar on that one is a little messed up and I'm not sure if the "someone's logic" is supposed to be my anti-speciesism logic, or the speciesist logic of various other people in the thread, or whether it applies to both equally.

 

In any case, I think your point here might be something like "when prejudiced people are prejudiced, it's easy to mistake their prejudice as an active attempt to dissuade you of your opposition to prejudice rather than just a lack of interest." If that's your point, I totally agree. Earlier in this thread I said something like "basically nobody is racist/sexist/etc. on purpose." I made the point that prejudice is almost always unconscious, habitual, unexamined, and uninterested. The vast majority of racist people a few hundred years ago didn't actively profess racist beliefs: they were just, on the whole, more or less uninterested in the idea that we ought not to enslave black people. The vast majority of human beings today, including many in this thread, don't actively profess speciesist beliefs: they're just, on the whole, more or less uninterested in the idea that we ought not to torture and kill pigs and cows for food.

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I'm fairly open to the idea of going vegan (or at least vegetarian), but your aggressive stance earlier on succeeded in nothing but pissing me off. And you know what? There's a difference between tone policing and just not being an asshole.

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On 1/19/2015 at 8:23 AM, Twig said:

I'm fairly open to the idea of going vegan (or at least vegetarian), but your aggressive stance earlier on succeeded in nothing but pissing me off. And you know what? There's a difference between tone policing and just not being an asshole.

I'll grant for the sake of the argument that there is a difference and that in this case I have not just used an unhelpful tone but also crossed into the realm of being an asshole. (I don't think this is true, but that's beside the point.) If we grant this, though, I still find your point about as convincing as a #GamerGate supporter saying something like "stop being an asshole to me, feminists!" Because let's be honest, we are assholes to #GamerGate supporters. Over in the #GamerGate thread we consistently say horrible things about those people. I don't really have any problems with this any more than I have a problem being an asshole to people who are prejudiced in other ways: racism, heterosexism, speciesism, etc. (Think about it from my perspective: the worst a #GamerGate sexist person does is harass women. The worst a specieist person does is murder and eat the species they are prejudiced against!)

 

Let's also grant for the sake of the argument that I had an "aggressive stance earlier." (I'm really not sure about this - if you quote some of the putatively "aggressive" stuff and replace "non-human animals" with "queer people" or "women" I suspect it will sound much less aggressive to you, and if you were racist, sexist, and heterosexist in addition to being speciesist I suspect you would find much anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-heterosexist rhetoric to be overly aggressive when in fact it's perfectly acceptable, but I digress.) That my aggressive stance succeeding in nothing but pissing you off is not really a revelation for me. This is what many advocates of equality have faced for centuries (millenia, even). This is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US, so we can use him as an example. There are many people for whom Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches did nothing but "piss them off." They were never convinced to give up racism, even by someone as articulate, unthreatening, and (in my view) clearly correct as King.

 

Now imagine how those people felt about Malcolm X! Like holy shit, if King didn't have much success in doing anything other than pissing off the racists, Malcolm X wasn't going to have much luck either.

So, I fully agree that the sorts of things I say will often do little other than piss off speciesists. If you replace "non-human animals" with "black people" in what I write, I suspect the sorts of things I say will often do little other than piss off racists. I turn out to be okay with this, although the racists aren't (they're pissed off), and as you point out, as a speciesist, you're not okay with what I've said in this thread - you're just pissed off. C'est la vie.

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Man that's a large block of text.

 

I have zero interest in debating whether or not your method of debating is valid. You came off as a huge asshole. That's it. I've said my piece, and now I leave this thread forever!

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Man that's a large block of text.

 

I have zero interest in debating whether or not your method of debating is valid. You came off as a huge asshole. That's it. I've said my piece, and now I leave this thread forever!

And you come off as a prejudiced murderer of innocents for no reason other than pleasure and who is scared by stretches of text longer than a Buzzfeed article! So perhaps you can understand why I might act like an asshole. As someone who themselves feels like an asshole surely you can have some sympathy for a fellow asshole.

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Dang, this thread actually reached the point of someone comparing themselves to MLK and Malcolm X because someone told them they were being an asshole.

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Sorry for the relatively terse response here, I'm (trying to) intentionally keep my reply short since I don't think this topic is worth my time any more, and I don't wish to 'waste' any one else's time either.

 

Killing humans to reduce ecological damage is unnecessary, we have countless other ways of mitigating the effects of human behaviour (transportation, education, laws, social engineering, etc.) that are less ethically problematic. We have far fewer ways of mitigating the effects of animal behaviour. The "rabbit proof fence" was constructed in Australia during 1901-1907 as a non lethal method of pest control and was unsuccessful. If there are non-lethal methods of pest control that are ecologically justifiable i'm all for it. There are methods like the 'sterile insect technique' that are non lethal and effective.

 

I don't think constructing a scenario where humans on the whole are incapable to be reasoned with so the only option is lethal reduction of the population is meaningful w/r/t the discussion about ethics, a scenario can just as easily and meaninglessly be constructed where animals are able to communicate and reason with humans and can be persuaded rather than killed. Obviously my views on what is ethical will depend on the specific circumstances of a situation and will be different for hypothetical realities. I'm trying to discuss the details of our actual reality and what would be most ethical in these circumstances. Humouring the question anyway (and modifying it to be more realistic), if there were groups of people that could not be dissuaded from deliberately harming the environment (e.g. for religious reasons), instead of killing them, I and apparently many others think the rest of human society has the capacity and obligation to 'balance' out the damage caused by 'others' through other non lethal means instead (for example proportionally consuming less resources, planting more trees in response to deforestation etc.).

 

I think tycho's definition of speciesism (and sexism and racism) seem different from the one I have. I don't think the 'sexes' are fundamentally equal and deserve the same rights, I think females should be prioritised over men for reproductive rights. I support affirmative action for under-represented minorities to the 'detriment' (vomit) of other groups. I don't think I'm being arbitrary, prejudiced, or seeing false differences (like the ridiculous notion that certain races are less 'intelligent' or whatever than others purely due to 'race' itself and not as a result of culture or a biased view of what constitutes intelligence), thus I don't consider myself (wilfully) sexist or racist as they are usually defined. For the same reasons, I don't consider myself speciesist. If I have different views about different organisms or 'classes' of organisms I am basing these beliefs on reasonable and empirically justifiable differences, not a prejudiced belief in arbitrary or meaningless differences. Put simply I think the capacity for humans to communicate and reason with each other (as well as countless other factors) privileges our species over others, and allows for avenues of interactions that for example are ethical in the human context, but arguably not ethical when applied to non-human animals, and vice versa. As conditions change, I am open to changing my views on ethics if necessary.

 

My final point is that it's really unfair and unwarranted for implications (e.g. from CollegeBaby) that one 'side' of the people engaging in this topic are doing so in bad faith, to force the 'vegan side' to contradict themselves by constructing elaborate and unreasonable conundrums, and to get people to concede that eating hamburgers is fine. I get that these kind of arguments happen a lot, but at least in this topic if there have been arguments made in bad faith and unfairly constructed ethical dilemmas designed to force a contradiction (and now unjustified comparisons with gamergate), it's been mostly from tycho. The whole premise of murdering humans being the same as murdering animals is something I disagree with for reasons i've stated previously, maybe in some imagined scenario proposed by tycho they can be reasonably equated, but that's only relevant to that hypothetical circumstance. My concerns about biodiversity and what constitutes ethical human actions are not based on hypothetical or uncommon situations. My reason for discussing biodiversity in a topic about the ethics of eating animals was in response to the claim that all killing of animals is unethical, and to provide examples of situations were I believe killing should not be considered unethical or at least not condemned. I am not trying to argue that therefore eating meat is right.

 

For me this topic has been interesting for the discussions about biodiversity and the complex interactions of a global ecology, for the unique first hand perspectives provided by people with experience in food production, and for the dietary recommendations and advice for affordable and nutritious vegan food. Thanks for that. I don't have anything more to say that hasn't already been said multiple times and have no interest in continuing this topic with the current climate of discussion. Sorry that this "short" response turned out to be so long again.

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On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

I don't think constructing a scenario where humans on the whole are incapable to be reasoned with so the only option is lethal reduction of the population is meaningful w/r/t the discussion about ethics, a scenario can just as easily and meaninglessly be constructed where animals are able to communicate and reason with humans and can be persuaded rather than killed. Obviously my views on what is ethical will depend on the specific circumstances of a situation and will be different for hypothetical realities. I'm trying to discuss the details of our actual reality and what would be most ethical in these circumstances.

I don't see why you think the scenario where the non-human animals can communicate is a meaningless hypothetical construction. Surely if this were the case, we ought to reason with the non-human animals rather than just murder them, right? That seems like a no brainer to me. I'm of course also trying to discuss the details of our actual reality, but I don't think doing so by having people consider hypothetical examples is at all illicit. This is because the point of the hypothetical example is to get people to think about the grounds upon which they are making their decision. If people would just come out and be honest about the way they're making decisions, we wouldn't have to use any hypothetical examples. You would simply tell me on what basis you think it is okay to kill humans, on what basis you think it is okay to kill non-humans, and then I could tell you whether I agree or disagree, and why. Since neither you nor anyone else is really up to giving a straight answer, I'm offering examples where things that are contrary to fact occur, so we can tell how your response would change in these contrary to fact situations. By figuring out whether and how your response would change, we can figure out the basis on which you're making decisions.

 

Note that there's nothing particularly bad about not being able to state, clearly and decisively, your basis for making these kinds of decisions, or any ethical decisions, really. Our society generally does not encourage people to think forthrightly or in any great detail about their ethical commitments, or about any of their philosophical commitments at all. You probably can't tell me what your epistemological, metaphysical, or logical commitments are either, because there's not really much reason to ever delve into the kind of introspection and study it takes to be able to articulate one's belief on these esoteric questions in any detail. I happen to be a philosopher, though, which means I'm used to both being able to articulate my own beliefs and also being able to tease out the beliefs of my students in order to get them to understand the philosophical topic I am asking them to study.

 

In this case, we're trying to figure out what you think about ethics, and one of the best ways to do this is to ask what you would do in certain situations. If you're not a fan of this method, you're welcome to suggest other ways for us to figure out what you believe about the issue of eating non-human animals and about any other issue. I'm welcome to any method of inquiry that's likely going to prove fruitful, and if I could get away from the hypothetical examples, I certainly would.

 

On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

Humouring the question anyway (and modifying it to be more realistic), if there were groups of people that could not be dissuaded from deliberately harming the environment (e.g. for religious reasons), instead of killing them, I and apparently many others think the rest of human society has the capacity and obligation to 'balance' out the damage caused by 'others' through other non lethal means instead (for example proportionally consuming less resources, planting more trees in response to deforestation etc.).

Would your answer be the same or different if the group weren't a group of humans but rather a group of rabbits or toads? Why or why not?

 

On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

I think tycho's definition of speciesism (and sexism and racism) seem different from the one I have. I don't think the 'sexes' are fundamentally equal and deserve the same rights, I think females should be prioritised over men for reproductive rights. I support affirmative action for under-represented minorities to the 'detriment' (vomit) of other groups.

As I noted earlier in the thread, being anti-sexist or anti-racist does not entail thinking that you ought to treat all sexes or all races literally the same, to the point where you couldn't only hit on women or men because this would display a prejudice to one sex or the other, or where you couldn't join the NAACP because this would entail giving preferential treatment on no basis. Instead, what anti-racism and anti-sexism imply is that there is no fundamental moral difference between the races or the sexes: in a perfect world, for instance, we would want to treat people such that we don't do anything morally reprehensible to someone simply on the basis that their race or sex is one race or sex as opposed to another. Since we are not in a perfect world, sometimes there are reasons to do morally reprehensible things to people on the basis of their sex or race (we might deny them a spot in college, for instance, in favor of someone of a minority race). The reason we do this, though, is not just for the BARE REASON that their race or sex is different. The reason we do these things is that some groups, on the basis of their race or sex, face discrimination, and we think we need to remedy this.

 

So, analogously, anti-speciesism does not mean we have to treat all animal species literally the same: feed the same food to cats as we do to dogs and as we do to birds, give the same medicine to cows and to whales when they are sick, etc. Anti-speciesism simply entails not doing something morally reprehensible to an animal (including a human) SIMPLY on the basis of the fact that their species is one thing rather than another. The BARE REASON that I am a human as opposed to a dog does not make it any more or less okay for you to torture me.

 

On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

I don't think I'm being arbitrary, prejudiced, or seeing false differences (like the ridiculous notion that certain races are less 'intelligent' or whatever than others purely due to 'race' itself and not as a result of culture or a biased view of what constitutes intelligence), thus I don't consider myself (wilfully) sexist or racist as they are usually defined. For the same reasons, I don't consider myself speciesist. If I have different views about different organisms or 'classes' of organisms I am basing these beliefs on reasonable and empirically justifiable differences, not a prejudiced belief in arbitrary or meaningless differences.

Yes, indeed, this is all perfectly fine. What the anti-speciesist like myself argues is not just that it's okay to have different views about various species on the bases of justifiable differences - we further argue that there are no such differences that would legitimate differing moral treatment of the kind that would allow us to torture, kill, and eat the species that we currently torture, kill, and eat, like pigs, cows, chickens, etc.

 

On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

Put simply I think the capacity for humans to communicate and reason with each other (as well as countless other factors) privileges our species over others, and allows for avenues of interactions that for example are ethical in the human context, but arguably not ethical when applied to non-human animals, and vice versa. As conditions change, I am open to changing my views on ethics if necessary.

Language is one route speciesists often pick to justify different treatment because it's one feature that humans definitely have that many other animals do not, and certainly no other animals come close to our aptitude with language. Teaching an ape or a parrot a few hundred words is obviously nowhere near what your average human can do.

 

There are a few worries I have with this approach, though, which suggest to me that it doesn't do the work you would want it to do. First of all, there seem to be a lot of animals with no capacity for language which we nevertheless think it would be wrong to torture, kill, and eat. In Western society these animals include cats, dogs, horses, and so on. In fact, most people tend to agree that, regardless of their inability to speak with each other and with us with any degree of complexity, it's wrong to torture ANY animal. They also tend not to care that the hamburger they are eating came from a cow that lived its life in extreme pain, but this I think is mostly just a combination of ignorance and inconsistency rather than evidence of some sort of weird ethical view they have vis a vis cows. If they saw the cow face to face I suspect they would be horrified by the treatment of the cow. This is why ag-gag laws exist - the meat industry understands that if people actually saw what was going on, we wouldn't be as sanguine as we currently are about eating so much meat.

 

Another issue with the language difference is that there are some human beings who do not have the sorts of language abilities that most humans do. Infants, people in comas, and people with brain damage or various psychological issues all lack the various communication and reasoning capacities that you advert to, but I take it our intuitions that it would be wrong to torture, kill, and consume infants, people in comas, brain damaged people, and mentally damaged people are just as strong as our intuitions that it would be wrong to kill hale human beings like you or I.

 

A further issue is that although I'm quite willing to grant that there is a vast difference in language capacity between human beings and other animals, it's not very clear to me why this has any moral import. For instance, imagine a heterosexist man says to you "put simply I think the capacity of men to impregnate women (as well as countless other factors) privileges heterosexuals over others, and allows for avenues of interaction that for example are ethical in the heterosexual context, but arguable not ethical when applied to homosexuals, and vice versa."

 

I suspect your reply would be something like this: "I of course agree with you that there is a natural, biological difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals, such that heterosexuals can impregnate each other via sexual intercourse whereas homosexuals cannot. Thus it's true to say that there are certain avenues of interaction (biological ones) that are only possible for heterosexuals. What I disagree about is that you have drawn an ethical conclusion from this. I don't think homosexual sex is ethically wrong, even though it differs in one natural way from heterosexual sex. In fact, I think that sex between consenting adults is obviously ethically unproblematic, and I'm basically just in a state of utter confusion as to why you would think that the possibility of pregnancy is of any ethical import."

 

This is the same reply I would give in the animal case. It's true that there is a natural difference between human beings and other animals, namely, that we have advanced powers of communication which make possible various interactions with other human beings (except infants, the mentally disabled, etc.). What's not clear to me is why this difference in communicative power would influence the morality of torturing, killing, and eating someone. Just like you are, I imagine, confused as to why the heterosexist person thinks a biological fact about reproduction has moral import when it comes to sexual intercourse, I am confused why you think a biological fact about language and reasoning abilities has moral import when it comes to torturing, killing, and eating something.

 

A final issue with this line of reasoning is that although there is a vast gulf between us and other animals, it's simply false that we're the only ones with a language (and it's even more false that we're the only ones who can reason). Animals other than humans communicate with each other in lots of ways, and non-human animals can even communicate with humans, and vice versa.

 

On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

My final point is that it's really unfair and unwarranted for implications (e.g. from CollegeBaby) that one 'side' of the people engaging in this topic are doing so in bad faith, to force the 'vegan side' to contradict themselves by constructing elaborate and unreasonable conundrums, and to get people to concede that eating hamburgers is fine. I get that these kind of arguments happen a lot, but at least in this topic if there have been arguments made in bad faith and unfairly constructed ethical dilemmas designed to force a contradiction (and now unjustified comparisons with gamergate), it's been mostly from tycho.

Please note that I don't share CollegeBaby's concerns here. I don't think anyone in this thread has been arguing in bad faith. I do think people in this thread have been trying to construct ethical dilemmas to force a contradiction, but I agree that I've been the one doing most if not all of this. I of course thus don't think there's anything wrong with this. We construct dilemmas to force contradictions all the time when we're engaged in the process of reasoning. This is, for instance, broadly the scientific method: you construct a hypothesis and thet attempt to falsify it. Faced with the impossibility of offering any dilemmas to falsify your hypothesis, you accept the hypothesis.

 

This how I (and philosophers more generally) test my own ethical beliefs. I construct ethical dilemmas for myself and try to force myself into a contradiction. If I fail, I'm left with the conclusion that my ethical beliefs must be non-contradictory, and thus in the clear on one very important avenue. Indeed, if I have a set of non-contradictory beliefs that also seem right to me for no special reason apart from some sort of intuitive plausibility, this is enough for me to hold these beliefs with a pretty large degree of confidence, as long as I have rigorously tried to find contradictions amongst the beliefs. I use the same process on others, not because I'm trying to "trick" anyone but because I think this is a fruitful way to investigate things. You're more than welcome to try to force me into contradictions - I think this is a valuable process for making sure our reasoning is sharp.

 

I find the whole idea of thinking that trying to "force a contradiction" is a bad thing to be completely alien. Surely if it's possible to force a contradiction amongst one's beliefs, this is something that it would be very valuable to know, right?! We don't want to hold contradictory beliefs! That would be a paradigmatically irrational situation to be in. If I have any contradictory beliefs, I want people to help me ferret them out. I'd like to help others ferret their own contradictory beliefs out, too. That's what I do in the classroom all the time with my students. Things get a little messier when, on the basis of beliefs I believe to be contradictory and in fact unfounded, people are torturing and murdering various innocent beings, but probably it's clear that I'm emotionally invested in this so I don't exactly have to reiterate that point.

 

On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

The whole premise of murdering humans being the same as murdering animals is something I disagree with for reasons i've stated previously, maybe in some imagined scenario proposed by tycho they can be reasonably equated, but that's only relevant to that hypothetical circumstance. My concerns about biodiversity and what constitutes ethical human actions are not based on hypothetical or uncommon situations. My reason for discussing biodiversity in a topic about the ethics of eating animals was in response to the claim that all killing of animals is unethical, and to provide examples of situations were I believe killing should not be considered unethical or at least not condemned. I am not trying to argue that therefore eating meat is right.

Did anyone ever claim that all killing of animals is unethical? This doesn't sound like anything I have written, at the very least, so to the extent that this is meant to be a criticism of my position, I think it's a little misguided.

 

On 1/19/2015 at 5:05 PM, Bolegium said:

I don't have anything more to say that hasn't already been said multiple times and have no interest in continuing this topic with the current climate of discussion. Sorry that this "short" response turned out to be so long again.

Since I guess this means you aren't even going to read the thread, I suppose I can vent my frustration without worrying about offending you. That people are constantly pulling this bullshit is expected, of course: how long would you expect a slaveowner to hang around when they're being harangued for racism or a misogynist to hang around when they're being harangued for thinking women shouldn't be able to vote? But I feel like if I were being accused of something as ethically problematic as racism or sexism, I wouldn't duck out of the conversation after, like, four posts or whatever. At the VERY LEAST I'd try to cut out what other people tell me is the offending action, if at all possible, until I had investigated the topic further, especially if the offending action is something I can so easily avoid just by not buying hot dogs.

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It's a classic Twig Thread-Flounce!

Now all we need is the pop-back-in to make it true 5/5 material.

On the subject at hand, I find Mr. Pigeon's series of posts to be internally consistent and interesting to read. It's fine to disagree with the fundamental assumption (humans and higher animals are equally important), but a lot of guff people have been giving has been unjustified in my opinion.

For what it's worth I personally eat eggs and dairy (but no animals) for reasons of convenience and pleasure. I accept the fact that this makes my behaviour less ethically sound than it would be otherwise, if one starts from the aforementioned equality assumption.

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I haven't read this whole topic because it seems to have escalated fairly quickly.

 

I did want to chime in with a bit of a recommendation about a book that's done a very good job of informing the way that I feel about eating meat, as well as about general animal rights topics: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog.

 

If I had to boil it down to a single thesis, I'd say that it's that people hold internally contradictory beliefs all the time, about all matter of things, particularly about animals. To an extent, that just isn't a big deal: there's no particular reason to expect people's beliefs to be logically coherent. If you want to analyze your own beliefs by that rubric,that's fine, but if you don't want to: that's fine, too.

 

Apparently the NY Times recently held a contest to identify ethical arguments in favor of meat eating. His entry is a reasonable distillation of his arguments (as is his recurring column, in general). The "happy animal" argument that animals-for-consumption would not have existed at all unless raised for consumption is a particular one that has always troubled me from a logical perspective, as it seems specious, but I find it difficult to completely refute it.

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On 1/20/2015 at 11:21 AM, CLWheeljack said:

If I had to boil it down to a single thesis, I'd say that it's that people hold internally contradictory beliefs all the time, about all matter of things, particularly about animals. To an extent, that just isn't a big deal: there's no particular reason to expect people's beliefs to be logically coherent. If you want to analyze your own beliefs by that rubric,that's fine, but if you don't want to: that's fine, too.

Of course it's fine just to hold various internally contradictory beliefs. When you then proceed to unnecessarily torture, murder, and consume living creatures on the basis of these beliefs, I don't think it's fine anymore. Just like a racist, sexist, or heterosexist person can't excuse themselves by saying "we all hold contradictory beliefs!" because their prejudices entail not just inconsistency but also mistreatment of others, I don't see how a speciesist person can get off the hook by saying "we all hold contradictory beliefs!" If there is some difference between the speciesist person and the racist, sexist, or heterosexist person, I would be interested to know what that difference is.

 

On 1/20/2015 at 11:21 AM, CLWheeljack said:

The "happy animal" argument that animals-for-consumption would not have existed at all unless raised for consumption is a particular one that has always troubled me from a logical perspective, as it seems specious, but I find it difficult to completely refute it.

It's almost impossible to "completely refute" an ethical argument, even one as seemingly obviously wrong as "it is totally okay to enslave, torture, and kill black people, but it's totally not okay to do this to white people." The best you can do against an ethical argument is to show that it conflicts with OTHER accepted ethical arguments, and that, given this conflict, we have to give up one or the other on pain of incoherence and inconsistency. For instance, to refute the racist argument, you would show that this conflicts with a principle that we tend to think is pretty reasonable, namely that morally differential treatment of individuals is justifiable only on the basis of morally relevant differences, and there are no good reasons to think that skin color is a morally relevant difference. Thus, you either have to give up that pretty reasonable principle, or give up the racist belief. I take it that, at least ideally, we would imagine the racist person saying to themselves "huh, now that you point that out, I guess it's true that I don't have much of a justification for the racist belief, whereas I do feel fairly certain that the other moral belief you mention sounds pretty convincing. I guess I ought to give up the racist belief."

 

Notice of course that this strategy only works if the person you are talking with thinks that they ought to have consistent ethical beliefs. If the racist person says "okay, well, I agree with that, but ALSO I guess I just hate black people, whoopsie! Inconsistency is a funny thing!" then you're pretty much fucked. Nothing you say or do is going to convince the racist. It may be the case that we all have certain prejudices that we're just never going to clear up, even when they are explained to us in tedious, exacting detail. Many racist, sexist, and heterosexist people appear quite incorrigible, and I think a quick glance through this thread or perhaps into one's own mind will provide ample evidence for the incorrigibility of speciesist people.

 

Absent some way of convincing people that irrationality that leads to potentially unethical actions is an issue, often the best we can hope for is that, over time, society comes to reject racist, sexist, heterosexist, and speciesist positions. If people don't get indoctrinated with these prejudices as children, they tend not to affirm them quite as much as adults. Current Western society, for instance, does much better against racism than it did a few hundred years ago. I think this is not because people are better at logical reasoning or that they care more about avoiding inconsistent moral beliefs. Instead I think it's just that virulent racial prejudice became less socially acceptable over time. I'm basically certain that in a few hundred years, people will look back on us today and say "holy shit, they were TORTURING AND KILLING ANIMALS and they saw NOTHING WRONG WITH IT!" just like we look back a few hundred years and say "holy shit, they were ENSLAVING HUMAN BEINGS and they saw NOTHING WRONG WITH IT!"

 

When it comes to speciesism we're in the same position. The way to attempt to refute the "happy animal" argument would be to look at the case of humans: would it be permissible to raise, kill, and consume happy human beings? Specifically, happy babies grown in test tubes? (We use test tube babies because a baby's intelligence is around the level of other animals we eat, so if we think intelligence is relevant this gets rid of that variable, and the test tube part makes sure that no parents are going to be sad when we kill the baby. We could also use orphan babies for similar reasons.) If you think it would be wrong to raise, kill, and eat the babies, it's tough to see why it would be any more ethical to raise, kill, and eat a pig.

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Hmm I don't know about that future outlook because enslaved human beings shared equal intelligence to the abusers and could fight back intelligently when given the chances and did ton of self advocacy (and that HUGE parts of the world did not participate in this specific race driven slavery, while meat eating is world wide), while the animals we kill.. let's take pigs as an example since I think they are the most intelligent animals we consume regularly... by human standard, they are pretty dumb.  And not just "hey Jimmy failed that math test cause he's dumb hurhur" dumb.  I mean what's their rough human equivalent of age level development?  I heard Dolphins are around 6 and that they are smarter than pigs so it has to be lower than that?

 

Still, I think pigs are pretty smart for me to be taken back by mass slaughter of them... but say chickens.  It's just hard to bring up sympathy for those creatures cause their interaction with the world is so basic and will stay that basic.

 

If anything, I think current form of meat eating industry will be weakened by environmental concern LONG before ethical concerns come to play, if they ever will.

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Of course it's fine just to hold various internally contradictory beliefs. When you then proceed to unnecessarily torture, murder, and consume living creatures on the basis of these beliefs, I don't think it's fine anymore. Just like a racist, sexist, or heterosexist person can't excuse themselves by saying "we all hold contradictory beliefs!" because their prejudices entail not just inconsistency but also mistreatment of others, I don't see how a speciesist person can get off the hook by saying "we all hold contradictory beliefs!" If there is some difference between the speciesist person and the racist, sexist, or heterosexist person, I would be interested to know what that difference is.

 

It wasn't really intended to be a blanket indemnfication against criticism, so much as simply an acknowledgement that people are complicated and it's a complicated topic.

 

First, let me be clear that I don't condone cannibalism (oh boy, this is getting weird fast). But I do think humans are basically just animals, so I don't see that much difference between test tube babies and pigs. So, when I think about it hard, I'm really not sure if your argument leads me to conclude I shouldn't eat pigs, or is instead forcing me to re-evaluate why I think it's bad to eat babies. But nobody (well, maybe a very very few) people would come to that conclusion. You can construct arguments about self awareness and nervous system complexity or whatever, but those are pretty much all post-hoc justifications.

 

If people are just animals it comes back to: some animals are okay to eat, some are  not, and the distinction is kind of arbitrary and seems based mostly on unconscious visceral reactions.

 

To address the broader topic, I would probably argue that the statement "we should treat all species exactly the same" needs justification. As Gaizo mentioned, a lot of justifications for slavery (intelligence, for example) fell apart under any kind of scrutiny. I'm not convinced anything similar will be possible with the intelligence / suffering metrics commonly used to justify killing animals.

 

The environmental arguments I certainly buy, but those are really practical arguments, not a priori ethical ones.

 

 

Which is to say: I agree with you re: incorrigibility of speciesists. There isn't really any argument you can make that will make me change my mind, because it isn't a logical position. If that makes me Pig-Hitler, or whatever, that's fine with me.

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If anything, I think current form of meat eating industry will be weakened by environmental concern LONG before ethical concerns come to play, if they ever will.

 

There's a guy on my undergrad's alumni blogging server who's posted at length about his hopes that greater regulations, perhaps even banning, of antibiotics in agriculture will force social change towards vegetarianism, because it's simply not feasible to raise most animals in the conditions where they're currently raised without prophylactic antibiotics, so if those are banned, farmers will be forced to raise their animals in more humane conditions, leading to price increases in meat, milk, and eggs, which in turn will lead to people buying and eating less meat, which in turn will lead to even less animals being raised... He was very optimistic about how far that spirals down, whereas I'm not, but it's still an interesting thought and a very salient point for change.

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On 1/20/2015 at 2:02 PM, CLWheeljack said:

It wasn't really intended to be a blanket indemnfication against criticism, so much as simply an acknowledgement that people are complicated and it's a complicated topic.

Sure. The reason I present everything in this thread as if it's dead simple is not because I think that's actually the case - it's because typing up a 14,000 word manifesto or whatever that answers every conceivable question is a stupid idea for like eighteen reasons. The idea is to present the basic skeleton of the view, the most important part of which is the moral equivalence of all animals, and let people complicate it in whatever way they wish with various objections. Nothing in the world is simple but we can't just start off every conversation with a fully worked out philosophical framework, because even the tiny amount I've written here has already scared a bunch of people away. I imagine the number of people who would read a detailed explanation is pretty small, and if anyone like that exists, they can go read Peter Singer or something rather than bother finding out what I think. The value of this thread is that there can be a conversation, and there can't really be a conversation if I post blocks of text far more massive than what I already post. So, to reiterate, I agree that this is a complicated issue. (Although I don't think the fact that it's complicated suggests that it's okay to keep torturing and murdering non-human animals for food. I know you didn't mean to make that claim, but it's worth keeping that central point in mind.)

 

On 1/20/2015 at 2:02 PM, CLWheeljack said:

First, let me be clear that I don't condone cannibalism (oh boy, this is getting weird fast). But I do think humans are basically just animals, so I don't see that much difference between test tube babies and pigs. So, when I think about it hard, I'm really not sure if your argument leads me to conclude I shouldn't eat pigs, or is instead forcing me to re-evaluate why I think it's bad to eat babies. But nobody (well, maybe a very very few) people would come to that conclusion. You can construct arguments about self awareness and nervous system complexity or whatever, but those are pretty much all post-hoc justifications.

Yes, definitely. The two options are eat the babies or don't eat the pigs, and as you point out, not a lot of people are sanguine about the "eat the babies" response. In this thread I don't think I've committed myself one way or another: if you want to be anti-baby-eating, that's fine, but for the purposes of my argument it's just as fine with me if you're pro-baby-eating. (The third option is to come up with some other reason it would be wrong to eat babies, which I think is not viable, although plenty of people have tried it and I'm perfectly happy to have that conversation.)

 

The main thrust of my argument is that all animals are equal, not that eating animals is always wrong: the "don't eat them" part follows from some very natural assumptions I think people make (like "don't eat babies") but if people are willing to give up those assumptions then they don't have to draw the conclusion that eating animals is wrong. I've been supposing that most people in this thread are anti-baby-eating, which is why I often sum up my point as "it's not okay to eat animals," but if I'm mistaken about what most people believe then probably I should be more careful and put things in terms of "it's not okay to eat animals solely on the basis of the fact that they are a different species from us." Because that is the basic point.

 

Similarly, being anti-racist actually doesn't say anything about whether you are anti-slavery. It just tells you that you're anti-slavery if the slavery is based on a racist justification. Since I assume most people think there aren't other ways to justify slavery, it's probably also a safe assumption that anti-racism entails anti-slavery, because without the racist justification, you're out of luck. But of course if someone thinks slavery might be justified in non-racist ways, then non-racism might be perfectly compatible with endorsing slavery. Meanwhile, anti-speciesism may be perfectly compatible with eating animals, if there's some other justification for it. (I actually don't think it's too ridiculous to come up with some kind of justification, and thus endorse the position that it would be okay to eat the babies, but again, since I've been assuming most people find this ridiculous, I haven't been saying much about this option in this thread.)

 

On 1/20/2015 at 2:02 PM, CLWheeljack said:

If people are just animals it comes back to: some animals are okay to eat, some are  not, and the distinction is kind of arbitrary and seems based mostly on unconscious visceral reactions.

Definitely, that is exactly what my point has been throughout this thread, with one small difference: instead of saying "some animals are okay to eat, some are not," I would say "some animals are thought to be okay to eat, and some are thought to be not okay to eat." Similarly, if human beings are just human beings, then (at least for the racist person) some human beings are okay to enslave, some are not, and the distinction is kind of arbitrary and seems based mostly on unconscious visceral reactions. Since we typically think that making moral decisions based on unconscious visceral reactions, like "man I just don't like black people" or "man I just don't see an issue with killing and eating a pig," is a bad idea, this suggests that we ought to examine the conclusions we've drawn on the basis of these prejudicial, visceral reactions and potentially abandon them.

 

On 1/20/2015 at 2:02 PM, CLWheeljack said:

To address the broader topic, I would probably argue that the statement "we should treat all species exactly the same" needs justification. As Gaizo mentioned, a lot of justifications for slavery (intelligence, for example) fell apart under any kind of scrutiny. I'm not convinced anything similar will be possible with the intelligence / suffering metrics commonly used to justify killing animals.

Okay, if you think that justifications for slavery fall apart under some kind of scrutiny, let's see you prove it! Here is my justification for slavery: "black people are morally different from white people in one specific way, namely, it is moral to enslave black people but not to enslave white people." Now, explain to me why I'm wrong, and in doing so, try to avoid explanations that wouldn't also work against someone who says something like "pigs are morally different from human beings in one specific way, namely, it is moral to kill and eat pigs but not to kill and eat human beings."

 

On 1/20/2015 at 2:02 PM, CLWheeljack said:

Which is to say: I agree with you re: incorrigibility of speciesists. There isn't really any argument you can make that will make me change my mind, because it isn't a logical position. If that makes me Pig-Hitler, or whatever, that's fine with me.

Do you feel the same way about racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of prejudice?

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