Thanks for joining in guys
You've raised a few points I'd like to address:
Originally Posted by juroara
I am against extremism because it leads to being judgemental. And there is an extremism in some spiritual communities to spread the idea that you are morally wrong if you choose to eat meat, and that vegans or fruitarians are automatically more spiritually enlightened. When spiritual enlightenment has nothing to do with what one eats, or doesn't eat. There are vegans who genuinely hate people, and or believe that humans are lowly sinners who deserve to be wiped off the face of the planet.
How specific people of a particular philosophy decide to relate to the world has zero bearing on the truth or falsity of their philosophy. Considering I don't believe in any kind of spiritual realm, I'd find it hard to claim I had a higher spiritual enlightenment. Bare in mind I'm not condemning any meat eaters in this thread for 'being horrible sinners'. I'm just enjoying engaging in an argument that is not heard often enough these days and deserves more attention than it gets. This is not an argument built out of personal purity, but one built with regards to moral conscience - is it ethical to take a sentient life that need not be taken for the sake of our palates?
The natural argument concerning food does not allow for the cruelty or mistreatment of animals. But neither does it require that every human on the face of the earth convert to veganism.
The hidden premise of your natural argument is that it is not immoral to (humanely) raise and kill another sentient animal for the sake of your taste-buds. While raising animals for slaughter from non-factory farming has its merits (it's a step in the right direction at least from the Holocaust they experience right now) it's still possible to object on philosophical grounds that they should have to die for us at all. If someone wanted to cook and eat me, I don't think there is a reason in the world they could offer me (short of extortion against my own children) to make me believe it was reasonable to allow that. And this is the challenge laid at the feet of the meat eater.
The desire to eat meat is completely natural. And yes, people desire to eat meat. A true herbivore wouldn't desire to eat meat. Ever. The smell and taste is repulsive and toxic to a herbivore. A human herbivore is repulsed by knowing where it came from. Yet the smell, especially for newly converts, can remain enticing.
Permit me an analogy to evolutionary morality theory, if you will. I recently read that it was likely our war-like nature that allowed for conditions to exist that fostered the development of altruism. When two rival families or tribes are fighting one another it benefits one particular group if they are more co-operative with their own members. This means sharing food, helping the wounded, caring for the sick, building shelter together etc. Our bloody tribal history allowed for our better moral virtues of charity, cooperation and kindness to develop. But now we live in the 21st century. We're on the verge of creating a global civilisation that requires we all get along peacefully and in cooperation. Unfortunately we still carry all our old war-like aggression and baggage - we never left it behind. But were it not for that very war-like nature, we'd never have got this far in the first place. It is now a challenge issued to us in this century to transcend and shed our warrior ancestry and cultural hang ups, lest we destroy ourselves with ever-increasingly deadly weapons.
Now compare this to eating animal flesh. In our prehistoric history this was necessary, before we domesticated plants and learned agriculture. But today we have the technology to feed every person on the planet on a plant based diet, we only lack the political and economic will to do so. This view that eating flesh is evolutionary baggage has been put forth long before I was born, and it has merit. I said this earlier in the thread but it bears repeating: old reasons for doing things are not adequate reasons for doing things today. This is an argument from tradition, a logical fallacy. And I'm afraid that what your natural argument boils down to. In order for it to hold water you need to show that eating both meat and plants (a balanced diet) is the ONLY way to live a healthy life, and I'm afraid all the statistics are against you. Veg*ns are less likely to be obese or overweight, have lower incidence of heart disease and cancer, and are statistically likely to reach 100 years of age more often than meat eaters (really good book on this called 'Blue Zones', i recommend it). Even elite athletes don't need meat to be competitive Carl Lewis competed in the Olympics as a vegan, winning 3 golds and 1 silver (look at his medals history, he started being a vegan in 1990).
Were it not completely natural, we wouldn't even be able to digest or process the meat. And contrary to what was said earlier in this thread, the human being is perfectly capable of eating uncooked, raw, riggling meat. Then why do we have to cook most meats to consume them? The same can be asked of water. .When did we become afraid that "wild" water would make us throw up or give us diarrhea? What animal is this paranoid about water? What animal is so afflicted by wild water? ... It's possible because we biologically omnivores.
One word answer: bacteria. We're not tribal nomads anymore and have lost any resistance our bodies once had to eating raw, uncooked flesh. And life expectancy in prehistoric times wouldn't have been high for a number of reasons, this probably being one of them. If we were 'biologically omnivores' (we are, but that's not the point of contention here) our incisor teeth would be serrated, not dull. Same with any other great apes teeth. Their incisors are large and dull, not serrated razors. And they eat a predominantly vegetable diet, with rare occasions of meat eating (which you acknowledged in the next paragraph).
I personally consider a plant that has lived thousands of years a lot more special than most animals. All organisms have a will independent of any human.
This is a subjective, sentimental value that you place upon the plant. There is no inner dimension to that plant, no consciousness, no internal awareness that can be detected in any shape or form. You can be no more moral towards a plant than you can a rock.
The root of the problem with farming ethics isn't the suffering of an animal. Because chicken living in a box doesn't even know that there is a sun missing from its life. Does it miserably miss the sun? It doesn't' even know there is a sun! No. The real problem is a complete and total lack of free will for sovereign creatures of the earth. Show the chicken the sun, and it would find the dark box miserable.
I disagree, it is entirely about the suffering of the animal. I invite you to watch the videos I posted earlier in the thread if you sincerely believe that animals which have been denied their natural habitats from birth just accept their lot and are happy with it. Please do so now There is a plethora of evidence that shows the natural instincts of animals to forage for their food, to flap their wings, to crow at the rising sun, to dust-bathe, to sing - are all innate urges. Putting a chicken in a cage or a pig in a stall doesn't just put the animal on standby mode like a TV that has powered down. They are restless, bored, they thrash against the sides of their pens. Their conceptual abilities are very primitive but they know they are meant to be able to move more than a few inches in any direction for their entire lives.
Many of them actually die from the stress of confinement! The poultry industry even has a name for it: Sudden Avian Death Syndrome, or SADS. A more accurate acronym was never coined. Up to 10% of a 'flock' of 80,000 caged or barn hens can die from SADS every season, but this is considered acceptable loss by the industry.
Morality only matters between sentient creatures. You can't be moral towards a rock. A single person on a desert island can't be moral to anything. Plants aren't sentient creatures, they're what I'd probably refer to as a 'merely living system', whereas something like a shrimp would be a 'merely sentient system', emphasising it's most basic level of sentience it may possess that we can infer from its behaviour. Truly it would be a terribly useless adaptation for plants to develop the ability to feel pain. Pain is used by sentient creatures to retreat from danger or to warn an organism of damage so it may flee from the cause of said damage. A plant can do neither of these things. They also possess no nervous system to speak of, or anything equivalent. Therefore there is likely nothing 'in there' to care about itself, much less for us to care about it. That we care about 900 year old Californian redwoods being cut down is more a matter of conservation of ecology and our own sentimentalism for 'old things' than any true basis in morality.
Two fun little thought experiments:
But this is a fun argument so I'd like to take it one step further: Even if I grant you that plants were sentient and could feel pain (but were on a lower order of sentience than animals, which possess a lower order of sentience than ourselves), it would still be logical for all humans to be veg*ns. If we were trying to build a world with the least possible amount of suffering (and we considered all sentient entities rights to not suffer or die needlessly EQUALLY), then the most logical course of action would be for every human being to be vegetarian as it would result in the fewest amount of plants killed to feed the animals that would otherwise be feeding us. Chicken and cattle consume around 75% of the grain and wheat produced by the developed world. That's nearly 8 times more plants that had to 'suffer and die needlessly' than would have if all humans didn't eat meat!
But I can go one step further than that. If you believe in human exceptionalism (that is, we are the highest form of life on Earth and therefore somehow 'special'), then the 'Best Possible World' we could create would be one in which the greatest number of humans could live peacefully, thrive and be happy. Now its just simple economics. If you take all the land on Earth that is possible to farm, minus the land required to preserve the territory for just enough of a population of every other species to live and replenish itself peacefully without our intervention (or with it, whatever your fancy), and farmed exclusively plants and vegetables you would achieve the Best Possible World by everyone being vegetarian. Say this number of humans happens to be 25 billion, just to pick a number at random. If all farms on Earth are operating at peak efficiency with zero wastage, it becomes a zero-sum game. If I want to eat more, you have to eat less (or someone does). For every one person in that 25 billion that wants to eat meat, you have to subtract 8 peoples food rations (or 8 people, since they couldn't live anymore) to make up for that one persons meat eating. And every person you subtract takes you further and further away from the Best Possible World of maximising the specialness of human exceptionalism. Alternatively everyone else has to go with sub-optimal nutrition to keep those extra 8 people alive, but since you are now eating less than what you need, your happiness and ability to flourish will go down, taking you further away from the idyllic Best Possible World.
Originally Posted by Photolysis
I'd agree that physical pain is likely to be pretty similar between species. However I strongly disagree with the idea that animals can psychologically suffer to the same degree as humans.
While it is true that humans have the capacity to suffer more because we can anticipate the future in a more fully realised fashion, this doesn't take away from the actual experience of the animals pain and suffering (your listed number 1). For example, if there was a serial killer abducting young people from the local park every night and murdering them, it would cause anyone living nearby emotional (and physical) stress in the knowledge that there is a killer on the loose. And this is to say nothing of whatever the victim has to experience. I wouldn't go as far as to say that animals like chickens can conceptualise this kind of 'future dread' like we can, but we would be remiss to assume that they can't make associations between events and emotions. If a human has mistreated them horribly in the past they are going to associate the two together and be terrified upon seeing that human (or another human) again. They also squawk in terror at seeing their fellow caged birds mistreated and killed. We may never have seen or heard the screams of a member of our species when they are about to die, but there is no mistaking that experience when it occurs.
Frustrating all of their natural desires is another form of stress, and as I mentioned earlier, this kills millions of animals every year. If you doubt this, just watch the videos I linked. And there are many studies to draw from also, mostly from psychological journals that are freely available online.
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