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Zeusthecat

Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?

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You said 4 and 7 were your favorites and I don't see why you wouldn't be allowed to kill a mosquito if those are the two you subscribe to. For 4, are you telling me that killing a mosquito would be bad because this will make the remaining living people very anxious that they too may die prematurely? Doubtful. And even if we assume that we live in a non-speciesist society where all these ingrained speciesist tendencies are gone, it would still be fine to kill a mosquito as long as you do it when nobody's watching. Unless you claim that it would make other mosquitoes sad and anxious that they too may die prematurely but I think there is less evidence to support that than there is to support the idea that plants feel pain, which you dismissed.

 

For 7, it's wrong to kill someone because it will make their family sad. Who is going to be sad when I kill that mosquito? The mosquito's family? Doubtful. And most likely no human would either unless we live in that non-speciesist society. At which point it should be fine for me to kill it when nobody's looking.

 

And yet it would still be wrong to kill a black person for obvious reasons.

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 Umm... what about infants, though? Did you want people to kill you when you were an infant?

 

 

 

Infants still have potential for responsibility.

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You obviously don't have to think killing all humans is immoral to have a fully functioning society. America got by for a while on the assumption that killing white people was bad but killing Native Americans and black people was no big deal (unless the black person was owned by someone else, in which case you owe them for the property damage). Many societies throughout history have thought it is okay to kill foreigners or people of another race or whoever loses the human sacrifice lottery or the mentally disabled or Jews or whatever.

It's true that all life comes at the expense of other life, but some of that "other life" is plant life. So, you should just eat plants. Should you contribute to the overpopulation of birds even if that means more killing, down the road? Well, tell me if you should engage in famine relief and contribute to the overpopulation of humans even if this means they're going to eat animals and murder humans later on down the line!

What I meant was more that our ability to mutually agree to not kill each other was what allowed the formation of larger groups to begin with. It was to everyone's benefit if people didn't murder each other. In that sense it was done out of practicality. Anyway, I don't want to get sidetracked into that. Regarding food aid, I obviously don't think that's wrong but we have other ways of dealing with overpopulation (even if we currently aren't). We can't tell animals to stop breeding. I know this has come up in the thread before, the communication issue. I think it's relevant because morals are a set of rules that we try to mutually agree on and impose upon ourselves. Creatures that have no ability to join that mutual understanding will to some degree be excluded from it. I can't tell a moth to not eat my sweater and that matters (it's the larvae that eat but whatever).

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On 1/23/2015 at 8:12 AM, Zeusthecat said:

You said 4 and 7 were your favorites and I don't see why you wouldn't be allowed to kill a mosquito if those are the two you subscribe to. For 4, are you telling me that killing a mosquito would be bad because this will make the remaining living people very anxious that they too may die prematurely? Doubtful. And even if we assume that we live in a non-speciesist society where all these ingrained speciesist tendencies are gone, it would still be fine to kill a mosquito as long as you do it when nobody's watching. Unless you claim that it would make other mosquitoes sad and anxious that they too may die prematurely but I think there is less evidence to support that than there is to support the idea that plants feel pain, which you dismissed.

 

For 7, it's wrong to kill someone because it will make their family sad. Who is going to be sad when I kill that mosquito? The mosquito's family? Doubtful. And most likely no human would either unless we live in that non-speciesist society. At which point it should be fine for me to kill it when nobody's looking.

 

And yet it would still be wrong to kill a black person for obvious reasons.

Yes, so if you're willing to endorse 4 and 7 then we can go down that route. I was simply assuming that you would find 4 and 7 wildly implausible.

 

On 1/23/2015 at 8:17 AM, Griddlelol said:

Infants still have potential for responsibility.

There are various responses to this. Here are a couple of the most popular ones. First, some infants don't - they have a disease that's going to kill them before they mature. Second, there's the kitten example I raised above - if we develop a serum that turns kittens into human-like intelligences, then at least some kittens (the ones I plan to inject, at least) have the potential for responsibility.

 

More relevantly, though, I think I missed the place where you originally explained what "responsibility" is and why it's the sort of thing you need in order to be immune to murder. I'm a little fuzzy on what the idea is, so it would help to have a clear statement of it.

 

On 1/23/2015 at 8:34 AM, eot said:

What I meant was more that our ability to mutually agree to not kill each other was what allowed the formation of larger groups to begin with. It was to everyone's benefit if people didn't murder each other. In that sense it was done out of practicality. Anyway, I don't want to get sidetracked into that.

Good, nor do I. We can ignore it.

 

On 1/23/2015 at 8:34 AM, eot said:

Regarding food aid, I obviously don't think that's wrong but we have other ways of dealing with overpopulation (even if we currently aren't). We can't tell animals to stop breeding. I know this has come up in the thread before, the communication issue. I think it's relevant because morals are a set of rules that we try to mutually agree on and impose upon ourselves. Creatures that have no ability to join that mutual understanding will to some degree be excluded from it. I can't tell a moth to not eat my sweater and that matters (it's the larvae that eat but whatever).

So if a group of people refuses to stop breeding, it is fine to refuse to give them food aid?

 

In general, it seems to me that the ability to join a mutual understanding explains how you could come to have certain obligations, but the fact that you don't have these obligations because you can't join the understanding doesn't seem to suggest to me that therefore you don't matter, morally.

 

In philosophy we draw the distinction between "moral agents" and "moral patients." A moral agent is a being that is morally responsible for the choices it makes, by virtue of being able to understand and act for moral reasons. You and I, for instance, are moral agents. Moral agents have moral duties to, for instance, refrain from murdering, torturing, etc. On the other hand, there are moral patients. Moral patients are things which can be treated in a moral or immoral manner but that themselves are not responsible for their choices. Moral patients include babies, people with debilitating mental illnesses that temporarily or permanently rob them of their rational capacities, people in comas, people who are sleepwalking (probably), and (almost everyone agrees) animals, or at least many animals. A cat is a moral patient because it would be wrong to torture the cat to death, but it's not a moral agent because you can't expect a cat to follow morality any more than you can expect a six month old infant to do so. These facts explain why we don't send infants or cats to jail for the bullshit they pull, but they also explain why we don't torture infants and cats to death.

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Tycho, I think you dodged my greater point. I gave you a good example of how killing a mosquito is different from killing a black person and thus where speciesism differs from racism. By the example I gave, how can you still claim speciesism is the moral equivalent of racism. Did I not provide a good example for why racist Tycho can't apply the same logic to black people?

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So if a group of people refuses to stop breeding, it is fine to refuse to give them food aid? In general, it seems to me that the ability to join a mutual understanding explains how you could come to have certain obligations, but the fact that you don't have these obligations because you can't join the understanding doesn't seem to suggest to me that therefore you don't matter, morally.

I don't think these analogies and hypotheticals are helpful. First of all, I didn't say you shouldn't feed birds. I do in fact feed them. My point was that you can't remove suffering in nature because it runs on suffering. If you help one species you'll hurt another. The overpopulation of humans is another matter and we have various ways of settling disputes. Killing people is one of those methods but I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that in the name of population decrease. Stavation is also an immediate issue and overpopulation is a more long term issue (especially since humans breed slower than birds). And I didn't say animals don't matter, I said because they can't share our morals we can't always apply those morals the same way when it comes to animals.

 

 

In philosophy we draw the distinction between "moral agents" and "moral patients." A moral agent is a being that is morally responsible for the choices it makes, by virtue of being able to understand and act for moral reasons. You and I, for instance, are moral agents. Moral agents have moral duties to, for instance, refrain from murdering, torturing, etc. On the other hand, there are moral patients. Moral patients are things which can be treated in a moral or immoral manner but that themselves are not responsible for their choices. Moral patients include babies, people with debilitating mental illnesses that temporarily or permanently rob them of their rational capacities, people in comas, people who are sleepwalking (probably), and (almost everyone agrees) animals, or at least many animals. A cat is a moral patient because it would be wrong to torture the cat to death, but it's not a moral agent because you can't expect a cat to follow morality any more than you can expect a six month old infant to do so. These facts explain why we don't send infants or cats to jail for the bullshit they pull, but they also explain why we don't torture infants and cats to death.

I don't disagree with any of this, but I still make a distinction in how I apply my own morals with regards to the two groups. It doesn't mean I don't think any morals apply to the second group. I think it's okay to kill Possums in New Zealand because they're an ecological disaster. They're not responsible for their breeding, so we are and unfortunately we can't do a lot about it except kill them. That doesn't mean I think it's okay to torture them. It's moral to kill them because it's mitigating net harm done. When dealing with humans that is rarely the case, but it happens.

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Non of this huge derailing would have happened if you lots embraced my idea of using personhood as focal point of the matter than sticking with the words 'human' and 'non-humans'.

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Non of this huge derailing would have happened if you lots embraced my idea of using personhood as focal point of the matter than sticking with the words 'human' and 'non-humans'.

 

Oh, c'mon, it's a contentious issue on the Internet. We'd have found some way to derail it no matter what. :P I do find the focus on mosquitos to be something really hard to engage with though. Pushing extreme examples can be useful to test the boundaries of an ethical stance, but there's something specific about using bugs here that doesn't really stick with me, any more than using racism as companion to the speciesism argument works for me.

I will come back to this, but simply haven't had the time to type up any additional thoughts or responses.

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Hi everyone I'd still like to encourage anyone who can still stomach checking this thread to please post some vegan and vegetarian recipes in the cooking thread, because I want them!

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Hi everyone I'd still like to encourage anyone who can still stomach checking this thread to please post some vegan and vegetarian recipes in the cooking thread, because I want them!

Yes do that so I can hopefully taste some vegetarian/vegan food that doesn't make me want to immediately stop eating.

 

(I mean... besides pasta. I make that basically every night.)

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It's been a full page since I went to work and got home, so I'll probably be ducking out of this thread and resuming observer-status after this post, but I wanted to do to things first:

 

1) Responding to Tycho, I recognized that the separation between the two paragraphs that I posted took a turn between the paragraphs. This was why I separated them into paragraphs and tried to say "The first paragraph is the foundational belief, the second is more wrinkles and internal debates among its supporters". I thought that came across, but sorry if it looked like I was taking a weird left turn in the middle.

 

2) YES PLEASE RECIPES. Being the non-vegan cook in a house who is cooking for a vegan is tough. Recipes are great for me to have.

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Let me google that for you.  On the flip side, maybe not :P

 

On the practical aspect it's intriguing how much less trouble I would have to convert completely into vegan diet than most of you cause of my acquired taste in lot of traditional East Asian foods (I can go far with rice and some bean paste (doenjang)).  But that thing literally smells like shit (and I meant that 'literally') from far away so I wouldn't recommend it to strangers online out of friendly spirit.

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On 1/23/2015 at 1:18 PM, Zeusthecat said:

Tycho, I think you dodged my greater point. I gave you a good example of how killing a mosquito is different from killing a black person and thus where speciesism differs from racism. By the example I gave, how can you still claim speciesism is the moral equivalent of racism. Did I not provide a good example for why racist Tycho can't apply the same logic to black people?

Speciesism is drawing an a moral distinction between two individuals because of their species. You did not do this. You drew a moral distinction between individuals on the basis of whether they would become anxious about dying in certain situations. It's true that mosquitoes (one species) won't become anxious the way most humans (another species) typically will, but it's not the species difference that matters. If it turned out mosquitoes did become anxious, or that humans didn't, then of course you would switch your position. In fact if mosquitoes and humans were somehow the same species, your position would NOT change. You literally don't care what species anything is. So you are not speciesist according to that line of reasoning.

 

Note that your example does NOT show that speciesism differs from racism. If your reasoning had been speciesist, like if it had been something like "it's irrelevant whether mosquitoes feel anxiety, fuck 'em anyways," this would be speciesist in the same way "fuck black people" would be racist.

 

On 1/23/2015 at 1:18 PM, eot said:

I don't think these analogies and hypotheticals are helpful. First of all, I didn't say you shouldn't feed birds. I do in fact feed them. My point was that you can't remove suffering in nature because it runs on suffering. If you help one species you'll hurt another. The overpopulation of humans is another matter and we have various ways of settling disputes. Killing people is one of those methods but I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that in the name of population decrease. Stavation is also an immediate issue and overpopulation is a more long term issue (especially since humans breed slower than birds). And I didn't say animals don't matter, I said because they can't share our morals we can't always apply those morals the same way when it comes to animals.

I guess I don't really understand how you can say "if you help one species you'll hurt another" and then say "the overpopulation of humans is another matter." Humans are a species too! If we have to trade off among various species, then so be it. I think this is a weird way to do it - surely we ought to trade off among individuals, not species, right, just like we'd trade off among individuals, not races, right? If it's a zero sum game, I shouldn't draw distinctions based on what race people are, nor should I draw distinctions based on what species someone is.

 

On 1/23/2015 at 1:18 PM, eot said:

I don't disagree with any of this, but I still make a distinction in how I apply my own morals with regards to the two groups. It doesn't mean I don't think any morals apply to the second group. I think it's okay to kill Possums in New Zealand because they're an ecological disaster. They're not responsible for their breeding, so we are and unfortunately we can't do a lot about it except kill them. That doesn't mean I think it's okay to torture them. It's moral to kill them because it's mitigating net harm done. When dealing with humans that is rarely the case, but it happens.

Then that's all fine with me. If your position is "kill as many humans as you need to, if it leads to less harm, but thankfully this is rarely the case," and "kill as many non-human animals as you need to, if it leads to less harm" then you're being consistent. If by "ecological disaster" you only mean stuff like "a bunch of plants and animal get out-competed by possums and biodiversity goes down," then this doesn't sound like we'd get "less harm" by murdering the possums, so I'm afraid you're smuggling in speciesism in the way you assume we should calculate what a "harm" is, but aside from that issue everything you say is perfectly consistent and not speciesist.

 

On 1/23/2015 at 2:25 PM, Gaizokubanou said:

Non of this huge derailing would have happened if you lots embraced my idea of using personhood as focal point of the matter than sticking with the words 'human' and 'non-humans'.

As I noted above, personhood is option #8. It leaves you unable to explain why we shouldn't be able to kill as many babies as we want, at least on the face of it. You're welcome to try to wiggle your way out of that one.

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 As I noted above, personhood is option #8. It leaves you unable to explain why we shouldn't be able to kill as many babies as we want, at least on the face of it. You're welcome to try to wiggle your way out of that one.

 

It does out of practical reasons.  1. Most babies have clear potential to develop into a person.  And for those that don't (which would include incurable or any other great, permanent damage to the mind), in theory yeah they don't share equal protection as a being that achieved personhood... but I would argue against practice of treating them as such because due to purely practical concerns, that distinction gets blurry really fast and it's just easier and safer to play safe.  And I'm happy enough with those practical reasons alone.

 

And why in the world are you trying to imply that this automatically leads to "kill as many babies as we want"?  Nowhere did I imply that personhood distinction means anything less than a person has zero value (which is what you are implying by saying that I must be ready to make a counter against an idea that requires that).  I don't need to "wiggle" my way out of anything here.

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It does out of practical reasons.  1. Most babies have clear potential to develop into a person.  And for those that don't (which would include incurable or any other great, permanent damage to the mind), in theory yeah they don't share equal protection as a being that achieved personhood... but I would argue against practice of treating them as such because due to purely practical concerns, that distinction gets blurry really fast and it's just easier and safer to play safe.  And I'm happy enough with those practical reasons alone.

So, what about dolphins, whales, and great apes? Persons or not?

 

And why in the world are you trying to imply that this automatically leads to "kill as many babies as we want"?  Nowhere did I imply that personhood distinction means anything less than a person has zero value (which is what you are implying by saying that I must be ready to make a counter against an idea that requires that).  I don't need to "wiggle" my way out of anything here.

It seems to me it either is or isn't okay, at a basic level, to kill something, absent extenuating circumstances. Like, just take a living thing that hasn't done anything particularly special, doesn't have any particular link to you, etc. It's just a thing you could or could not kill. Personhood, you say, makes it the case that you can't kill this thing. Ditto for potential personhood. It sounds like you also think there are other reasons not to kill a living thing, even if it's not a person. What might these reasons be?

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So, what about dolphins, whales, and great apes? Persons or not?

 

It seems to me it either is or isn't okay, at a basic level, to kill something, absent extenuating circumstances. Like, just take a living thing that hasn't done anything particularly special, doesn't have any particular link to you, etc. It's just a thing you could or could not kill. Personhood, you say, makes it the case that you can't kill this thing. Ditto for potential personhood. It sounds like you also think there are other reasons not to kill a living thing, even if it's not a person. What might these reasons be?

 

All much closer to being a person than say, a roach. And deserves more protection than say, a roach.  And a roach would be more of a person than say, a chair.

 

I don't see personhood as this binary thing that makes someting's life valuable or not upon passing certain threshold.  I see it as a very gradual scale.  So the extenuating circumstances, for me, is never binary but always a balancing act that changes depend on the technology and other tools you have at hand.  Say on eating pigs on our current world in NA.  I think it's unjustifiable because I see no reason how few people's pleasure of eating pork would offset the slaughter of a pig given plenty of alternatives.  But say Earth is dying and you can ship off only few lifeforms on this ship that can reach safe habitable planet.  At that point I wouldn't argue in favor of humans in general (again, distinction I dislike to use but it has it's purpose here for shorthand), I would argue for best and the brightest among the humans against those who are less bright.  And on a flip side, if we were to ever reach technological capacity to create and maintain personal utopia for everyone with zero negative environmental affects, going out and spreading pesticide on insects would be quite unforgivable.

 

I think you were just too caught up in other arguments and ascribed others' view onto mine, which is, I think, different.

 

Edit: And ultimately, I get that we have to make a decision which is very much of a binary process... but my point is that the binary aspect has more to do with practical (like time and resources) rather than something fundamental.

 

Edit 2: And I'm using 'personhood' as close analog as sentience-intelligence-ethical behavior combo, which would be a correct assumption about my view.  But one thing that I think deserves more look into is say, ants or bees.  They seem quite rudimentary in individuals, but far more complex in a group.  I'm interested in whether 'personhood' can come to being in that sort of hive capacity format.

 

Edit 3: And apologies for previously misleading use of "personhood" as a singular state instead of how I'm describing now as more of a scaling value.

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 There are various responses to this. Here are a couple of the most popular ones. First, some infants don't - they have a disease that's going to kill them before they mature. Second, there's the kitten example I raised above - if we develop a serum that turns kittens into human-like intelligences, then at least some kittens (the ones I plan to inject, at least) have the potential for responsibility.

More relevantly, though, I think I missed the place where you originally explained what "responsibility" is and why it's the sort of thing you need in order to be immune to murder. I'm a little fuzzy on what the idea is, so it would help to have a clear statement of it.Good, nor do I. We can ignore it.

 So if a group of people refuses to stop breeding, it is fine to refuse to give them food aid?

 

 

I disagree with the first response, but can't really put into words why. My initial reaction is that many, many infants are said to live for X months, but surpass expectations, and so killing something again with potential for responsibility, would be immoral. 

 

The second point is fantastical and not really worth considering. If my auntie had balls, she'd be my uncle, etc. 

 

I think I qualified what I meant but it was a while back. Non-human animals have no concern other than to themselves and their progeny. Humans can do so much more. Whether or not they do is kind of irrelevant, since they have the potential to do so. It is nothing to do with breeding. 

 

There's also the argument that humans are able to do things against their instincts. I can pick up a bowl of scorching hot soup, not many non-human can do so, at least no non-primates can. Being able to surpass such instincts on a regular basis sets us apart, and makes me feel comfortable with eating and testing on most animals. 

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On 1/26/2015 at 4:30 AM, Griddlelol said:

I disagree with the first response, but can't really put into words why. My initial reaction is that many, many infants are said to live for X months, but surpass expectations, and so killing something again with potential for responsibility, would be immoral.

So you think that the only problem with killing babies is that we're not sure whether they're going to die before they mature? That seems like the wrong description of why it's wrong to kill infants to a lot of people.

 

On 1/26/2015 at 4:30 AM, Griddlelol said:

The second point is fantastical and not really worth considering. If my auntie had balls, she'd be my uncle, etc.

I have to confess I'm not sure what you are saying. Surely if your auntie had balls (and wasn't a trans woman, etc.) she would be your uncle. That this fact is true tells us about the sorts of considerations we use to figure out which gender people are not just in this hypothetical world where your aunt is your uncle but also here in the real world where your aunt is your aunt. So if the considerations we use to figure out whether it's okay to kill someone don't work in a hypothetical world where kittens are injected with this serum, why should we think they work any better in the real world where there is no serum?

 

Obviously you think that your ethical principles ought to work in certain hypothetical situations. For instance, if hypothetically you had been living in America in 1790, you would want your ethical principles to give you the right answer about whether you ought to enslave and torture black people. This is true even if, in the real world, it is impossible for you to have lived in America in 1790: your parents weren't alive then, nor were your grandparents, etc.

 

So, which hypothetical situations do you think your ethical principles ought to work in, and which do you think they can safely ignore, and how can you draw this line? To me it just sounds like you're taking a case that shows why you are wrong and ignoring it by waving your hands and saying "la la la I don't care."

 

On 1/26/2015 at 4:30 AM, Griddlelol said:

I think I qualified what I meant but it was a while back. Non-human animals have no concern other than to themselves and their progeny. Humans can do so much more. Whether or not they do is kind of irrelevant, since they have the potential to do so. It is nothing to do with breeding.

This is definitely false - non-human animals display altruism quite often. Dolphins will sometimes save people from drowning, for instance.

 

In any case, even if it's true, it's not clear to me why ethical consideration in terms of not being enslaved, tortured, and killed should depend on whether you can show concern for something other than yourself and your progeny. It just seems strange to say that there's nothing wrong with torturing and killing my roommate's cat, because my roommate's cat doesn't give a shit about anyone else. I mean, yes, that's true, just as much as an infant human being doesn't give a shit about anyone else. Seeing as the cat and the infant can feel pain, are currently living their lives, and so on, it just seems weird to say that they literally do not matter because they had the misfortune not to end up with a brain complicated enough to let them puzzle out various ethical truths.

 

On 1/26/2015 at 4:30 AM, Griddlelol said:

There's also the argument that humans are able to do things against their instincts. I can pick up a bowl of scorching hot soup, not many non-human can do so, at least no non-primates can. Being able to surpass such instincts on a regular basis sets us apart, and makes me feel comfortable with eating and testing on most animals.

For similar reasons it's unclear to me why this should be the dividing line between torturing and killing something and not doing so. Infants, of course, don't go against their instincts. Moreover, many (if not most) animals can be trained to go against their instincts all the time. Finally, I don't know what the division between instinctual and non-instinctual behavior is. If I can pick up a bowl of hot soup because I've learned that soup cools down, I guess this doesn't count as instinctual because it's learned. If crows learn to use traffic lights to get cars to break open nuts for them, wouldn't this no longer be instinctual behavior, because it's learned? I think often when people draw the line between instinct (or "animal instinct") and human behavior, they're just marking out an arbitrary line. The things we do that are "against" instinct are behaviors we've picked up over time, and "picking up behaviors over time" is an instinct human beings (and many other animals!) have.

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Grocery shopping this weekend, bananas were $.69/lb (normal), and a number of other fruits and veggies were on sale for $1 per lot. Bought 4 pints of grape tomatoes, but rather than patting myself on the back, all I could think of was this thread and the horrible bio-engineered reality we live in.

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There's also the argument that humans are able to do things against their instincts. I can pick up a bowl of scorching hot soup, not many non-human can do so, at least no non-primates can. Being able to surpass such instincts on a regular basis sets us apart, and makes me feel comfortable with eating and testing on most animals. 

Gom Jabbar!

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I know this comes across as is weird evangelism because I'm not a regular poster here. But I'm bumping this topic to remind people that if you're really upset and worried about Trump and the Paris Agreement, the biggest immediate change you can make to your own carbon footprint is to switch to a mostly/entirely plant-based diet and encourage others to do so as well.

Drastically reducing your consumption/use of animal products is second only to refusing to take aeroplanes in this regard, and is a much more realistic and everyday thing you can accomplish. Even the smallest individual steps help to create the momentum we need to deal with global warming, and changes in agriculture not only help to mitigate the effects of climate change but will leave us better equipped to deal with its consequences. So leaving aside the (imo very persuasive) moral argument for veganism, please don't let the planet turn into Venus because you like the taste of dead pigs.

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Not having children would probably be more effective. Ignore this option if you already have them though.

Also, I'm pretty sure that animal-products make it more likely that you have cholesterol problems. So reducing those in your diet is not entirely selfless.

Also, I think the overuse of antibiotics on livestock is making it more likely that we will die of common diseases that have been easily treatable in the past.

For the record, I sometimes eat meat and I eat cheeses often. So I know that I contribute to these problems.

 

Pro tip: instead of ice-cream, I

-peel bananas and break them into chunks and place in freezer.

-fill a Magic Bullet cup 3/4 full of frozen banana chunks.

-add frozen blueberries

-add apple-sauce

-add a spoon full of chia seeds.

-fill with soy milk

Blend.

 

I like the results of this recipe and with the banana/soy'milk base you can make different flavors. My wife doesn't like it though.

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I became veg for a combination of issues with factory farming, environmental concerns, health concerns and meat being more expensive than vegetable protein. I am not 100% veg, I still go out for Dim Sum from time to time, but I never cook with it and aside from a few ethnic restaurants I avoid it while eating out. I don't want to lose my ability to digest meat since I like to travel and vegetarianism can be quite difficult in some countries.

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1 hour ago, clyde said:

Not having children would probably be more effective. Ignore this option if you already have them though.

Also, I'm pretty sure that animal-products make it more likely that you have cholesterol problems. So reducing those in your diet is not entirely selfless.

 

You're right about that, but to be fair the decision not to have kids is not an "immediate" or "everyday" thing.

 

There are definitely many selfish reasons not to eat meat, including the health benefits. Personally, especially since transitioning to vegan after a couple of years eating veggie, my cooking has improved a lot and I'm spending waaay less on food. You can make pretty much anything with various combinations of beans/lentils, rice/grains/pasta and veggies. I'm notoriously indecisive so the restricted choice has actually forced me to be more inventive and varied so I don't end up eating pasta every night. 

Any incentive you can offer people to try it or make the change is good. That's why I've been trying to nudge people concerned about climate change (particularly in light of current news) towards at least reducing their meat consumption. Everyone wants to practice what they preach to the greatest extent possible, right?

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I think I may be more of a preach-what-you-practice type of person.

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