7 ms·

I disagree. Meat CAN be ethical, and often is.

• adamnemecek 10y ago
  For some definition of ethical, maybe. I guess fundamentally my question to you is, why do you think that human life is worth more than animal life, because that is the foundation of our differences.
  • nathanaldensr 10y ago
    tjic didn't say that human life is worth more than animal life. Are you projecting? All life is precious, but we are all still animals. We need food to survive. Almost all life consumes other life for survival. There is nothing more natural than eating.
    • 1457389 10y ago
      >We need food to survive. Non sequitur, food isn't synonymous with killing animals >Almost all life consumes other life for survival Appeal to popularity, almost all life does all sorts of things that we don't condone or have decided is suboptimal. >There is nothing more natural than eating. Non sequitur and naturalistic fallacy. Eating is natural but that doesn't imply killing and eating animals is natural. Even if both are, that isn't in and of itself a valid justification for that behaviour.
      • kbenson 10y ago
        Those arguments could be applied to just about any behavior, including not eating meat. You're presupposing the need to justify eating meat, and then using generic arguments to dismantle specific statements without point. If you want to have a useful discussion, please provide an argument..
        • 1457389 10y ago
          You shouldn't eat meat because its production causes animal suffering. It's pretty simple really. I presuppose the need to justify just about everything actually. Your surprise at this approach kind of explains the gaping logical holes in your previous comments. Please though, continue with your "specific" statements, I'm enjoying this. EDIT: mixed you up with the other commenter, disregard the last 3 sentences, sorry.
          • in_the_sticks 10y ago
            You shouldn't eat veggies because their production causes animal suffering. Ever hear of pesticide runoff?
            • 1457389 10y ago
              plants -> livestock -> meat -> metabolic energy is less efficient than plants->metabolic energy. In the interest of minimizing suffering caused there is an obviously superior approach to providing our society with metabolic energy. Your move.
              • in_the_sticks 10y ago
                Nah, you've proved unwilling to entertain other viewpoints so I'll save my breath.
          • deleted 10y ago
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          • tomp 10y ago
            If animals are raised responsibly (free-range, good food) and killed unconscious, there's no suffering, no?
            • 1457389 10y ago
              Yup this is true when defined narrowly enough, but impossible in practice. Plus you'd have to address the argument that cutting short a happy life is a moral harm. If we were a society that was capable of doing this at scale, there would certainly be far less of a reason to be vegan, but I hesitate to say there would be no reason at all.
      • st3v3r 10y ago
        "Appeal to popularity, almost all life does all sorts of things that we don't condone or have decided is suboptimal." Sure it does. But eating is not one of those things. And you're going to have to do a lot better than that to convince people that eating shouldn't be condoned or is suboptimal. "Non sequitur and naturalistic fallacy." No. "Eating is natural but that doesn't imply killing and eating animals is natural." No, but the fact that it naturally happens in nature does. "Even if both are, that isn't in and of itself a valid justification for that behaviour." You haven't given valid justification for why it's not justified.
    • wes-k 10y ago
      (Warning vegan here). The idea that eating meat is natural is one of the four main reasons people give (the 4n's: natural, nice, normal, necessary). A few counters: It is also natural for animals to kill their own. We as humans have decided to rise above this "natural" existence. It is natural for animals to eat other animals. A balanced predator prey system is a healthy ecosystem. This is not what we humans are doing. We are raising a handful of species simply because meat tastes good. Sure there are some cases where humans must still hunt for survival and I take no issue there. But most of us have the resources to eat a plant based diet. Which is healthier for us and the environment.
  • drakonandor 10y ago
    If you value them as the same, you couldn't really support vegetarian diets either, as little furry mammals do die as a result of farming in general. Granted maybe less death, but you are still obviously valuing the animals as lesser than humans, as you're saying it's ok if a few field mice or rabbits die so a human can eat a tofu sandwich. Side note, if you truly believe carnivorous diets are barbaric, than you'd probably also have to kill all the carnivorous animals (especially considering many of them torture their prey, rather than quickly killing it).
    • adamnemecek 10y ago
      Lol, did you just read some listicle like "10 top anti-vegan arguments" and you are just repeating them? Because these are rehashed arguments that you can easily find convincing counter-arguments for but I can tell you haven't done the research. > If you value them as the same, They don't have to be the same value for one to still be valuable. > a few field mice or rabbits die so a human can eat a tofu sandwich. This argument is silly. How many of these do you think die from grain production? How many animals in the world are slaughtered every year? Also the ethics are also fundamentally different. > Side note, if you truly believe carnivorous diets are barbaric, than you'd probably also have to kill all the carnivorous animals I thought that we as humans accepted the fact that we have something called 'morals' and therefore things like killing and rape are bad. I cannot impose human morals on animals but I can impose human morals on humans.
      • drakonandor 10y ago
        You implied, or rather asked, if the previous poster thinks humans > animals. I replied from a standpoint of assuming you believe a human and an animal have the same value. Thusly, one can only assume that you if you are against eating meat because the cow and a few field mice will die, you must also be against eating grain because a few field mice will die (and maybe a bird or two). You certainly can (and we do) impose human morals on animals. We put down dangerous animals (rabies, mountain lions venturing into civilization). We even put down pets if they're deemed dangerous (pit bull bit the neighbor). We neuter our pets, even the "animal lovers" encourage this. We also taken it upon ourselves to kill wolves if there's too many of them and they're about to exterminate the deer. So, to re-ask your question, what makes you more valuable than the dozens of field mice and birds that die so you can have your soybean sandwich?
  • CarpetBench 10y ago
    It's an interesting question because it informs where we draw arbitrary lines about what's ok to eat and what's not. Honestly, and not to just be a smart-ass, but what are the acceptable life forms to eat? We've drawn the arbitrary line that "humans aren't ok to eat," but that's really about the only nearly-unanimous thing we can agree upon. If we move the line further, to say, "no intelligent animals," then we're stuck defining what "intelligent" means, or how complex a nervous system needs to be before we classify it as intelligent. Ok, we could say "no animals," but why do, say, sponges deserve protection that we don't extend to algae? Don't get me wrong: I'm fully in favor of re-examining our modern diet and how other living organisms are included in that. It's just an interesting discussion when we move the line further than "no humans".
    • PerfectElement 10y ago
      I think most animal rights advocates draw the line at sentience. If a being is capable of suffering, then this suffering needs to be justified. If an animal has their own desires, those desires should be taken into consideration. Intelligence is not a justifiable metric, e.g. some individual humans are less intelligent than some animal species. Yet, we don't use those humans for our own interests.
      • CarpetBench 10y ago
        Even that is a little contentious though, no? Even if we define sentience as the ability to feel pain (which is a bit of a simplification of sentience), the definition of pain seems fairly vague when talking about non-human animals. AFAIK for certain groups of animals (one that comes to mind is sharks) it's very unlikely they feel anything approximating what we would call pain. Still, I imagine few advocates would say that eating shark meat is ethical behavior. Certain animals could barely be said to do anything approximating feeling pain besides responding to external stimuli, which plants do as well. It's a fascinating, complex topic though.
        • adamnemecek 10y ago
          The topic of whether sharks feel pain is contested at best.
  • danellis 10y ago
    Human life is worth more to us because we're humans. What's wrong or surprising about that? There are plenty of valid arguments for the humane treatment of animals, but don't sit there and pretend you value all animal life equally.
    • adamnemecek 10y ago
      > you value all animal life equally. Don't deal in absolutes. They don't have to be equally valuable for both of them to be valuable.
      • hx87 10y ago
        To be fair, you originally asked > why do you think that human life is worth more than animal life which was asking whether value(human life) > value(animal life), not whether value(animal life) = 0.
    • PerfectElement 10y ago
      It's not surprising, considering our own bias, but that doesn't mean it's ethical to exploit them for our pleasure and convenience. Your line of thought is the basis for most human atrocities ever committed; you see your own group (species, race, gender, class, nationality, etc.) as more valuable, so you dismiss their own interests in favour of your own.
    • newscracker 10y ago
      This is very similar to the arguments people who discriminate against other people use based on factors like race, sex, skin color, sexual orientation, gender identification and others. The point is that many humans have evolved to or desire to becoming more compassionate and inclusive over time, and this, the species difference, is one more barrier to cross. Instead of arguing about what will happen or what will never happen, humans will always continue to look at improving things. That's why even though we still have wars after thousands of years of civilization, we still want those to reduce and stop, and take actions that will help. It will take time to manifest changes in different spheres of discrimination and oppression, but as a species this is an inherent quality that takes us all forward.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • titanomachy 10y ago
    It's not that simple. If the world consumes a million less pigs every year, that's not a million pigs that get to live happy, wild pig lives; it's a million pigs that will never exist, because we don't need to make them. You could certainly make the argument that non-existence is preferable to the life of a present-day factory-farmed animal. I wouldn't contest that. But perhaps there is some value of ethical treatment for which "a few years of peaceful farm life followed by a painless death" is preferable to non-existence.
    • adamnemecek 10y ago
      > But perhaps there is some value of ethical treatment for which "a few years of peaceful farm life followed by a painless death" is preferable to non-existence. The thing is that the planet can't handle that many beings. You realize that farm animals are a worse contributor to global warming than all cars right? > But perhaps there is some value of ethical treatment for which "a few years of peaceful farm life followed by a painless death" is preferable to non-existence. Sure. Would you find this ethical if you replaced pigs with humans? Furthermore you are describing this idyllic, farm life which only a very small fraction of animals get to live. For the most part it's industrial farming. Do you know why? Farms can't scale. Industrial processes on the other hand, oh boy do they scale.
    • PerfectElement 10y ago
      You are ignoring the fact that when you raise animals for profit, there will always be a conflict of interests between what you want and what the animals want.
  • logfromblammo 10y ago
    De gustibus non est disputandum. Why do you prefer spinach to collard greens? Why do you like Van Gogh more than Matisse? Why do you eat fries more often than onion rings? I can advance dozens of rationalizations as to why other people should share my opinion that human life is worth more than nonhuman animal life, but most of them will not find traction in any person not already at least slightly predisposed towards that opinion. The value of nonhuman animal life is very much like a religious belief. If we deconstructed the differing opinions down to their foundations and really examined them, we would likely recoil away in existential horror. The truth is that life has no inherent, objective value at all. The universe is very large, and collides a lot of random atoms and molecules together, and will be entirely unaffected on a large scale whenever some of those random reaction products develop some self-reinforcing complexity. The only value life has is that which we subjectively impart onto it. And summing up the opinions of 7 billion humans, I generally find that we tend to have a rather higher opinion of ourselves than of any other animal, and the other animals are ranked by some combination of cuteness, cleverness, market price, and deliciousness. But since that's all just subjective anyway, I could still tell the rest of the world to get bent, and just go by my own preferences.
  • gurkendoktor 10y ago
    Since I haven't seen this argument in the sibling comments: I've met a fellow vegetarian in Australia who still ate kangaroos, which are often killed for population control. Not everyone will agree that that's ethical, but it doesn't necessarily have to do with valuing human life more than animal life. I guess we'd see more of this if we'd let nature recover from human overdevelopment.
  • jessaustin 10y ago
    Disregarding what they say, 98% of humans live as if "human life is worth more than animal life".
• Falling3 10y ago
  I've never spoken to anyone who actually believes eating animals in modern society is morally defensible. They'll defend it in a very ad-hoc fashion, but almost no one's moral axioms coincide with the belief that eating other individuals is morally acceptable. Do you believe it's ethical to unnecessarily kill another sentient individual?