Thread: Moral discussion: Why do you eat animals?

Originally Posted by Hazel

I don't know if this has been brought up, but animals eat other animals. Is it wrong for a wolf to eat a rabbit?
.

It has been brought up, by me. No one bothered to reply to this point.

Originally Posted by cmind

Efficiency is irrelevant. All that matters is end user price. Meat, in terms of nutrients, is cheaper. Now you can argue why that might be true, but it's a fact.

Actually it's not a fact. The only reason it is cheaper is because our governments subsidise the cost of corn and wheat, which artificially lowers the price of meat to ~30% of its true cost. You still pay for it, just not out of your disposable income, you pay it in your taxes.

Besides, if morality applies to animals, then we would also have to say that carnivores that eat other animals are immoral. Should we round up sharks on charges of fish murder?

I already dealt with this in post #93.

Originally Posted by cmind

Pain =/= suffering. Suffering is the emotional response to pain. Since animals don't have emotions in the human sense of the word, they can't suffer.

You are baldly asserting they have no emotion, based on no evidence at all, and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Please go back to the top of page 3 and read the section of the argument where we dealt with this already.

Originally Posted by Photolysis

Question for those who refrain from eating animals for moral reasons:

How do you handle the fact that regular farming also kills animals (loss of habitat, pesticides/chemicals, being crushed by machinery etc)? No matter what method of farming you support, these things inevitably happen.

There would be 90% less loss of habitat, 90% fewer pesticides used, and 90% fewer animals crushed by machinery if the meat industry didn't exist. This is to assume that farming practices can't be changed in some way in the future to alleviate the further 10% in each category. There are some crops grown entirely without pesticides and fertilisers, they use animal manure instead. This is sort of having our cake and eating it too however since that manure comes directly from the meat farms. I'm willing to accept the existence of certain 'necessary ills' as I get closer to living as cruelty free as I possibly can, short of becoming a fundamentalist Jain monk, paralysed by my pacifism to not squash even a single bug. Although no one could make the argument that a fundamentalist Jain is an immoral person, so there is some merit there.

Originally Posted by Photolysis

Except many of those deaths could be eliminated, at the price of having to use other methods of labour which would dramatically increase the price. It's a question of convenience. I'm personally quite skeptical that many vegetarians out there would pay 10-20x the cost for hand-picked fool to eliminate much of the loss of wildlife due to machine farming, even if such a product was on the market.

I won't deny that many aspects of the meat industry are cruel and inhumane, but I don't see that it has to be particularly cruel, and that there are ways to do it whilst ensuring a decent standard of conditions and treatment.

While I think 10-20x the price is a gross exaggeration (even cruelty free chickens are only twice the cost of cage-farmed), I'll run with it for the purpose of the argument. 10x more rodents and other animals die than is currently necessary under a meat-heavy industry. Choosing the vegetarian option lowers your moral culpability here by as much as 90%. As for the price of vegetables and fruits under a 100% cruelty free system, even if this were the case it wouldn't matter. The price of vegetables and fruit is included in the Consumer Price Index for inflation consideration, and as such any remarkable jump in their average price would be reflected 3-6 months later by a roughly equivalent wage increase across the economy (after much hubbub from our union reps of course). The net result is less intentional suffering, less unintentional suffering and we still get to eat a healthy balanced diet with the same purchasing power left in our wallets at the end of the day. Any meat produced under such a system would be look like a ghastly price by comparison.

To say that it is impossible to achieve a 100% cruelty-free lifestyle and use that as a rationale for not even aspiring to it is not a valid argument. If my best efforts could get me to a 95 or 99% cruelty free lifestyle, am I to say that because I can't reach 100% I should stay at my paltry 0 or 5%, shrug my shoulders and think about something else instead? Of course not. If this were true there would be no point in doing anything in your life ever if the chance of success was lower than absolute certainty. You'd be paralysed by your own sense of inadequacy.

Originally Posted by Mario92

By this reasoning, how the hell is eating meat therefore immoral? As a consumer, all I'm doing is supplying demand for meat. It is the people who raise and slaughter the animals who treat them cruelly, not I. I was blissfully unaware of such practices until I read this thread, even.

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?

Originally Posted by Hazel

I don't know if this has been brought up, but animals eat other animals. Is it wrong for a wolf to eat a rabbit?

Post #93 for the answer to your question. I sincerely hope you take the time to read this thread, because you've really jumped to the climax scene of the movie here without reading the meat and bones (har har) of the argument.

Originally Posted by Mario92

If eating meat is immoral, then so is choosing to partake in any form of luxury good, or doing anything to better your own life that comes at the expense of the opportunity to help others. Since I argue that all humans act in their own self-interest, there is in fact a moral argument here.

You're right bang on the mark here actually.

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Photolysis

It's an argument against the self-righteous and superior moral attitude you see from some.

I'm not attempting to argue from a position of moral superiority, if that's how its coming across. All of us here are simply engaging the argument and going where it takes us. One need not appear to be self-righteous to point out a moral ill in the world and ask another to justify their participation in it.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

Actually it's not a fact. The only reason it is cheaper is because our governments subsidise the cost of corn and wheat, which artificially lowers the price of meat to ~30% of its true cost. You still pay for it, just not out of your disposable income, you pay it in your taxes.

You're telling me that the unsubsidized dollar cost of X amount of protein from meat is greater than X amount of protein from vegetables. Unless you can show me those numbers, I find that claim laughable.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

I already dealt with this in post #93.

No you didn't. You said a bunch of semi-comprehensible stuff about choices. Perhaps you'd like to make it more clear for me? Why killing an animal is immoral for humans but not for other animals?

Originally Posted by Alextanium

You are baldly asserting they have no emotion, based on no evidence at all, and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Please go back to the top of page 3 and read the section of the argument where we dealt with this already.

You're saying that animals suffer now, solely for the purpose of debating. You don't actually believe that. If you did, you would weep every time you watch Shark Week on discovery channel.

Oh wait...animals only suffer when WE kill them, right? I see.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

Post #93 for the answer to your question. I sincerely hope you take the time to read this thread, because you've really jumped to the climax scene of the movie here without reading the meat and bones (har har) of the argument.

Ah, thank you. I read through the first few pages, but I didn't have the time or patience to read the whole thing. (I dislike serious arguing, I was just curious about the perspective on that.)

In the bible it is said that god gives us animals for the very purpous of being killed and eaten. Does that make the bible moraly wrong?

Some discussions in this thread are getting beside the point. It's becoming an economics discussion.

Originally Posted by Mario92

No, you missed the point. 1. animals have simple minds (read: not human or particularly creative or conscious). Not offing something because it "has a will to live" is both impractical and completely arbitrary. So I use a different set of criterion to determine what can and can't be morally killed. In this case, what a creature's mind is capable of, and if killing it serves a purpose. 2. Suffering is a fact of reality. My choosing to eat meat has a negligible impact on the amount of suffering. So why is it immoral to demand meat? I'm not demanding suffering, I'm demanding sirloin. 3. If eating meat is immoral, then so is choosing to partake in any form of luxury good, or doing anything to better your own life that comes at the expense of the opportunity to help others. Since I argue that all humans act in their own self-interest, there is in fact a moral argument here.

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.

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Mario92

In other words, it averages. It's a wash. No net decline or gain in animal slaughter.

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.

Originally Posted by cmind

You're telling me that the unsubsidized dollar cost of X amount of protein from meat is greater than X amount of protein from vegetables. Unless you can show me those numbers, I find that claim laughable.

I'm saying that the amount of grain that feeds the animal you dine on is largely lost to the animals metabolic processes. At least 50% is burned to keep the animal warm. Xei already mentioned that only 10% of available energy makes it through trophic levels. I'm not attempting to argue that animal flesh isn't a dense source of nutrition, far from it and I apologise if that's how it comes across. I am attempting to point out that if you were to add up how much your steak, sausage or mince meat is actually costing you it's far and above the most inefficient dollar/weight ratio of almost anything you could choose to eat.

No you didn't. You said a bunch of semi-comprehensible stuff about choices. Perhaps you'd like to make it more clear for me? Why killing an animal is immoral for humans but not for other animals?

The power of self-reflection is what gives us our moral capability. We can perceive how our choices will effect other sentient beings in the present and the future, and act accordingly (typically on a basis of attempting to minimise suffering). Any time you make a decision between two choices that contain differing content in terms of suffering and pleasure pertaining to sentient creatures other than yourself, you are making a moral decision. Morality can only be attached to situations involving at least one self-conscious, self-aware participant (a human) and at least one barely-sentient creature. Two barely-sentient animals can't act morally towards one another, they are simple reacting-entities. By contrast, the human animal is both capable of reacting and acting. A human alone in the desert or floating in interstellar space can't be moral or immoral to anyone, except perhaps themselves if you consider your 'future self' to be another person, but that's a completely different topic on the nature of personal identity which I'd rather not go into (but it is interesting none-the-less).

Does this adequately answer your question, cmind?

You're saying that animals suffer now, solely for the purpose of debating. You don't actually believe that. If you did, you would weep every time you watch Shark Week on discovery channel.

Oh wait...animals only suffer when WE kill them, right? I see.

Your sarcasm is unnecessary and uncalled for. It makes me sad when I see a buffalo taken down by a lioness, but I understand that if that buffalo doesn't die, that lioness' cubs will starve to death. That's the circle of life, the great chain of being that they are stuck in and have no other avenue available to them for a food source. Animals suffer when we kill them and they suffer when they kill each other. However I can't hold a shark morally culpable for doing what comes to it naturally when it lacks the mental capability (or the biology) to change it's behaviour. Sharks - like lions - are carnivores, not omnivores or herbivores. Even if they WERE self-conscious, self-aware creatures they would have no choice but to continue eating fish and buffalo as they are constrained by their evolutionary situation.

We aren't in that position, we have a choice of diet to pursue. That's why it's morally relevant to us, and not to them. A robot helping an old lady across a road isn't performing a moral action by it's own volition, it's following a program. When you make the choice to help her across the road, you are making a moral decision and therefore participating in a morally relevant act.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

In the bible it is said that god gives us animals for the very purpous of being killed and eaten. Does that make the bible moraly wrong?

Originally Posted by God (apparently)

Gen 1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
Gen 1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

That was after the Flood. In early Genesis it says that all animals, as well as Adam and Eve, ate a purely plant-based diet (including the carnivores). Would not a literal biblicist want to get as close to the original plan for Creation as they could? The word 'meat' doesn't mean 'animal flesh'. It's original meaning was simply 'food'. But then again the Bible is full of contradictions so take your pick.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Originally Posted by Mario92

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.

While the bolded point is true, that doesn't have any bearing on the moral significance of the action. If the right thing to do was always the easiest thing to do, we'd have far fewer problems in the world. Just for interest sake, I took the test you linked. My estimate: 7.5 tons of CO2. Average US estimate, 27 tons. Average world estimate, 5.5 tons. Definitely room for personal improvement, but I'm content in the knowledge that I'm not one of the people pushing the average up on that 27 tons.

Originally Posted by Mario92

>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).

I think about 7% of the world population is completely vegetarian, by my last check. India is as high as 44%, as previously mentioned, so it's not a complete impossibility. However I may be able to offer a counter to your argument. For every person who is being born into the world right now, they are going to need food to eat. That food is either going to be a plant based diet, or a combination of plant and animal. If it's plant and animal, they are contributing in a far greater effect to the expansion of farmland, greater fertiliser usage etc than any vegetarian could (a vego would have to eat 3-4 times their normal food intake to compete with an omnivores environmental devastation numbers). Aside from that, there is no natural or man-made law that says things won't always get worse before they get better. In some cases it can be necessary to go through a period of decline to achieve a greater good that wasn't possible beforehand.

To quote my favorite anime, "All is one, one is all."

Originally Posted by Mario92

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.

And yet here we are, with you continuing to attempt to justify it from a moral stance.

Originally Posted by Mario92

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.

That's not true at all, and by now this issue has been touched on several times in this thread. It takes more farmland to feed a meat-eater than a non-meat-eater. If the world consisted of an "army of voracious vegetarians," our environmental impact would be far less than it currently is, not more.

Originally Posted by Mario92

There will still be animal suffering inflicted

I guess you missed this and this. There will always be animal suffering. That doesn't mean that there's no use in trying to reduce it.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

In the bible it is said that god gives us animals for the very purpous of being killed and eaten. Does that make the bible moraly wrong?

The bible also says that it's acceptable to rape young girls so long as you pay their father to marry them after the fact. Please keep this filth in the R/S forum where it belongs. Thanks.

how would you feel if animals eat you?

I wouldn't see a difference. You are going to die anyway. If you die of old age, you return to the earth, and feed the plants, which inevitably feed the animals. That then feeds other humans, and so on. The circle of life, as i'm sure you know. If the animals eat you directly, it's no different than if you die naturally and are buried, other than the time needed to do so.

yes, and I'm sure the animals would enjoy eating us as much as we do them

There's no joy in dying, that's just how it is. Something has to die for something to live. We're just at the top of the food pyramid (or at least near it) so we don't experience being eaten as much as, say, deer, or fish.

how logical of you.... there is joy in eating though unless you choose to feel guilty or something

Originally Posted by Alextanium

I'm saying that the amount of grain that feeds the animal you dine on is largely lost to the animals metabolic processes. At least 50% is burned to keep the animal warm. Xei already mentioned that only 10% of available energy makes it through trophic levels. I'm not attempting to argue that animal flesh isn't a dense source of nutrition, far from it and I apologise if that's how it comes across. I am attempting to point out that if you were to add up how much your steak, sausage or mince meat is actually costing you it's far and above the most inefficient dollar/weight ratio of almost anything you could choose to eat.

Irrelevant. The point someone else (not you) was making was that being a vegetarian was a good economic decision. Which it's not, consider meat gives cheaper nutrients on the whole. And by cheaper, I mean dollars.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

The power of self-reflection is what gives us our moral capability. We can perceive how our choices will effect other sentient beings in the present and the future, and act accordingly (typically on a basis of attempting to minimise suffering). Any time you make a decision between two choices that contain differing content in terms of suffering and pleasure pertaining to sentient creatures other than yourself, you are making a moral decision. Morality can only be attached to situations involving at least one self-conscious, self-aware participant (a human) and at least one barely-sentient creature. Two barely-sentient animals can't act morally towards one another, they are simple reacting-entities. By contrast, the human animal is both capable of reacting and acting. A human alone in the desert or floating in interstellar space can't be moral or immoral to anyone, except perhaps themselves if you consider your 'future self' to be another person, but that's a completely different topic on the nature of personal identity which I'd rather not go into (but it is interesting none-the-less).

Does this adequately answer your question, cmind?

Fine, I don't agree that the animals I eat are "barely sentient". And seeing as though you haven't even defined the term, let alone proved the assertion, this discussion has ended.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

Your sarcasm is unnecessary and uncalled for. It makes me sad when I see a buffalo taken down by a lioness, but I understand that if that buffalo doesn't die, that lioness' cubs will starve to death. That's the circle of life, the great chain of being that they are stuck in and have no other avenue available to them for a food source. Animals suffer when we kill them and they suffer when they kill each other. However I can't hold a shark morally culpable for doing what comes to it naturally when it lacks the mental capability (or the biology) to change it's behaviour. Sharks - like lions - are carnivores, not omnivores or herbivores. Even if they WERE self-conscious, self-aware creatures they would have no choice but to continue eating fish and buffalo as they are constrained by their evolutionary situation.

Ah, finally, the real point. Animals can eat animals because they "need" to. Well, I "need" to eat meat because if I don't, I get hungry for meat. And I really couldn't tolerate a veggy diet. No choice for me.

Is it so serious that one stands inconsistent of their moral code? Even consistent, morals are but subjective opinions that may change at any moment. If you are one that seeks only objective truth, then dismiss away these silly morals, as they bring only conceitedness.

Let me rephrase that. There is no joy in death on the part of the one dying. Again, something has to die for something to live, and as such, something has to suffer for something to feel joy, or content. "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" Not only does this include physics, but also nearly everything else. It may seem a little odd to quote a physicist in a morality debate, but it aplies to this pretty well, in my opinion.

i had a dream where I joyfully commited suicide with group of people by getting lit on fire. Then I got reincarnated and I was looking for those same people in the next life.

Originally Posted by Burke

Let me rephrase that. There is no joy in death on the part of the one dying. Again, something has to die for something to live, and as such, something has to suffer for something to feel joy, or content. "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" Not only does this include physics, but also nearly everything else. It may seem a little odd to quote a physicist in a morality debate, but it aplies to this pretty well, in my opinion.

I really don't think this is the case. The corn that my nachos were made of didn't suffer. In this situation the equal opposite reaction is the farmer who spent his life making corn. But I don't see the negative in this situation, he lives a life and helps others live theirs, 2 positves.

plants have feelings too. your just assuming they don't.