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> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical cons
by danhak 10y ago
> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence."
Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
- kneath 10y ago"Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here."
- afandian 10y agoDid you read it? Literally the second sentence points this out.
- danhak 10y agoI did read it. The author makes an arbitrary distinction between "consequentialist" and "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians and implies the second category is comprised entirely of those concerned with animal welfare.
- afandian 10y agoOk. Well I read > Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here. as acknowledging that there are other kinds of consequentialists, those that have other ethical reasons for not eating meat, but that he's not talking about them.
- schoen 10y agoI think "ethical vegetarian" in academic philosophy has specifically been used to refer to people motivated by animal rights or welfare, and that's still what academic philosophers themselves talk about most in connection with vegetarianism.
- danhak 10y agoIsn't that effectively a straw man fallacy, then?
- greglindahl 10y agoIt's a definition. Philosophers label stuff all of the time.
- schoen 10y agoAnimal rights might be a more philosophically interesting motivation than concern with, say, climate change both because it's more controversial and because it's harder to sort of trade off with other interventions/solutions. Like with climate change, maybe a random person could, in practice, focus their efforts elsewhere more productively. (I'm a vegan but I fly a lot, so my carbon footprint is far larger than even the developed world average; I could make a bigger impact in that regard by just flying less than I do by being vegan.) With animal rights or welfare, not engaging in or supporting specific uses of animals seems like the most obvious thing that one can do to promote or respect these values (but if papers like this are right, maybe that's an illusion!).
- Kiro 10y agoWhat kind of person cares about the environment and humanity but not animals?
- CuriouslyC 10y agoAnimals are beyond sustainable - they are an integral part every ecosystem on the planet. The crime is our factory methods of raising animals. If we reintegrated livestock into their natural roles in the environment and treated meat as culling for population management, while the price would rise it would ethically sound and good for the planet.