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Originally Posted by
Alextanium
This is a bit like saying "I didn't kill the man, the bullet leaving my gun killed the man. Therefore I'm not responsible for his death". The demand you create for the supply puts the blood on your hands in a small but very real way. Before reading this thread you had the luxury of ignorance. Now armed with this knowledge that reasoning is unavailable to you, and that's what makes it morally pressing. Clearly you don't see it that way as the suffering of conscious creatures doesn't appear to weigh as heavily on your conscience as it does on others like DuB and myself. If you don't already value this in some way there is really nothing I can say that will change your mind, at which point we part company in this conversation. Perhaps a more poignant question would be of use: what possible justification, moral or otherwise, would you require to give up eating meat?
A more apt analogy would be "I demand bullets for my gun, but don't demand murder, though it happens." I would be perfectly fine with in vitro steaks or genetically brain-dead cattle that don't have the capacity to suffer, so long as cost remains reasonable. Then again, just because someone kills a person using a gun, doesn't mean I'm going to protest the bullet industry.
To give up meat...terribly unreasonable prices, or...well, that's just about it, really. I could toss out some radical hypotheticals, like liquefying the poor or homeless and feeding them to cows, but that wouldn't accomplish much.
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Under strict ultilitarianism, every one of us is guilty of not being a perfectly moral being in regards to giving to charity. The only way one could claim to be perfectly moral regarding human charity would be if you sold all your luxury items and gave away all your money to a charity that maximises the usage of that money, until the very next dollar you gave away would make you worse off than a person you are endeavouring to help. Peter Singer covers this in his book 'The Life You Can Save'. But it wouldn't be necessary for us to all reach this level of relative poverty to stop world hunger and world poverty, for if EVERYONE did it (just like in the vegetarian argument) then we'd all have to give up much less than the first scenario to achieve the world of least suffering we desire to have. Very much less. How does a (to pick a figure) 10% drop in my standard of living equate to remedying all the human (and much other animal) suffering in the entire world? The two are orders of magnitude apart.
There's a cute little site here that strives to find out exactly how much a person would have to give up to create an equitable standard of living for the entire population of earth, implying you could develop a universal, accessible infrastructure under ideal conditions. To reduce the necessary resource usage to what we have available on one planet would require relatively large changes in the lifestyles of many, many people in the civilized world. To get a few people to make the necessary changes is one thing. To get entire nations to do so is quite another.
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In effect we're all moral hypocrites, but you can choose to be more or less of a hypocrite with the decisions you make that affect the lives of other conscious creatures (human or otherwise). I believe one would be on shaky ground to attempt to argue that a person attempting to make the world a better place (even in a small barely measurable way) is less moral than someone who is not.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I donate to charity and whatnot, and it isn't like I'm on the meat-only diet. But I frankly don't see how me consuming meat in various forms in moderation makes me significantly more hypocritical than a vegetarian.
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Originally Posted by
DuB
1. Categorically denying moral consideration to non-human animals because they are "not particularly creative or conscious" is pretty far from a rigorously reasoned moral rationale. What exactly do those terms mean to you and on exactly what basis do you draw the line between humans and non-humans? The reverse argument is to treat all animals, human and non-human, as existing on a continuum of ability to have rich conscious experience--particularly the capacity to experience suffering as we would commonly recognize it--such that being relatively higher on this continuum merits relatively more moral consideration. Farm animals surely have "simple minds," but there is no reason to think that it takes a complex consciousness to experience suffering, and much reason to believe that what farm animals experience could adequately be described as suffering.
Allow me to offer the following rebuttal: I define humans as creatures that are genetically recognizable as humans, and/or have the potential for higher cognitive processes. Bovines may suffer, sure, but what if they do? I'm not supplying demand for suffering. I'm supplying demand for their spare ribs. Grow them, set them free, make them braindead, whatever you wish.
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2. The name of the game is not objective right and wrong, but moral consistency. As I explained in my last post: "If I believe that inflicting undue suffering on potentially conscious beings is wrong (as I do), and I believe that supporting a system which makes this its primary business is wrong (as I do), then there is no rational reason for me opt in." Pretty straightforward. However, if I didn't hold either of these prior beliefs, then (although I might find such a view difficult to defend) I at least wouldn't be morally inconsistent. My obligation to opt out follows strictly from my prior beliefs about what constitutes morally acceptable acts. This is an important point because I claim not that most people are committing an objective moral wrong by eating meat, but rather that most people are being morally inconsistent in doing so, that is, that they endorse certain ethical principles which can often be shown to be incompatible with the practice. However, as Alex said, if causing undue suffering to conscious beings is not a morally relevant action to you (and you are in this way morally consistent), then we have little more to discuss.
Moral consistency is not my goal, and I set right off the bat that my meat-eating stance is just about impossible to justify from a moral stance. What I'm saying now is that my decision to eat meat is not significantly immoral, nor does it bother me.
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3. This point is spilling over into what I consider to be a separate troubling issue in its own right. However, it in no way follows from this issue that we are not obligated to choose the most ethically justifiable alternative with respect to meat consumption. Also as Alex said, it can be seen as a matter of being more hypocritical or less hypocritical.
Well then call me a hypocrite, because I'm not going to give up meat. Nor am I going to live a purely utillitarian lifestyle.
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This obviously can't be true because it would imply, if we extrapolate from this reasoning, that if 1/3rd of people stopped eating meat, the remaining 2/3rds would ultimately compensate for this loss in demand by purchasing 50% more meat, thereby keeping total animal slaughter constant. Since that obviously would not happen (based both on simple imagination and more concretely on economic data on the price elasticity of meat, see for example
p.6 here on beef), it must be the case there is an incremental decline as people stop purchasing meat.
>implying there is actually a significant number of vegetarians
Alright, assume you actually managed to turn one third of Americans into vegetarians overnight. In the short term, prices would plummet and the remaining omnivores would likely stock up as best as possible. In the long term, the meat industry would indeed scale back. But now consider the opposite consequences of creating an army of voracious vegetarians. Farmlands would have to be expanded significantly, more fertilizers introduced into the environment, and more pesticides used. There will still be animal suffering inflicted (following the massive price spikes in vegetables).
