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A bit of a rambling, since I'm basically just thinking out loud. We'd all obviously find issue with being eaten not because we think it's unethical that the al

• aaron-lebo 12y ago
  > We'd all obviously find issue with being eaten not because we think it's unethical that the alien wants to eat us (it's unlikely that the ethics question would even come up), but because we don't want to die, as an individual and as a species (I'm trying to say that it's NOT obvious that the issue we would have with such a scenario would have anything to do with ethics, not to make a judgement whether it's ethical or not). And so your argument looks like it's saying "we don't want it to happen to us, therefore it's unethical (for anyone to do that to us, or for us to do that to others)". I know you probably doesn't mean it that way. I am no philosopher, so I'm sure there are many holes in my argument. :) > Now, whether it's ethical to eat meat itself. As someone else have mentioned, I've always wondered where do you draw the line? Pigs and cows seem obviously out of the questions, but how about cockroach, caterpillar, corepod, hydra[0]? Event certain plants do sense distress signals when they're being attacked. That's a really interesting question. I learned recently that some vegetarians consider it acceptable to eat oysters because they don't have a central nervous system. Indeed, this whole argument is about "drawing the line", and it is rather complex and interesting. > Do we actually know that it's possible for us, as a society as a whole to survive entirely on non-animal products, food or otherwise? Additionally, even if it might be just historical accident that we have a heavy meat-eating society, and another society that starts out without ever using animal products can advance to where we are right now and have a perfectly functioning society, it doesn't mean that it's ever feasible to actually switch to such a no-animal product society. In our terms, that would be a switch from not just from one programming language to another, but probably from silicon-based chips to germanium-bases chips. You are right that it would take a massive shift, and whether or not it is actually possible is a valid question. Thing is, humans have dealt with massive changes in the past, so if we really wanted to, it seems possible. We aren't really trying, at this point, though.
  • meowface 12y ago
    As a vegetarian, I think it's perfectly reasonable to draw the line at the complexity of an organiams's nervous system. That's about the closest standard we can use to estimate so-called "sentience". It does become difficult when you look at organisms with more minimal nervous systems, like very small insects. I personally avoid unnecessary death of insects most of the time, however I will kill ants and cockroaches if they intrude into my home. I'm not entirely sure if this makes me a hypocrite. I suspect it might, since ants and cockroaches may be capable of feeling pain and perhaps even emotions.
    • bane 12y ago
      > That's about the closest standard we can use to estimate so-called "sentience". The problem is that choosing "sentience" as the line is also entirely arbitrary. Sentience at best is poorly defined and almost impossible to prove or disprove about just about anything. It's understood as an intuitive concept, but sentience, consciousness and similar terms have defied solid definition for centuries. For example, it's a trivial exercise to demonstrate that a mountain might be sentient, but have qualities about itself that cloud our understanding of its sentience. As more and is understood by both AI and Cognitive Science communities, the ideas of consciousness and sentience are being better understood as perhaps just emergent phenomena and not underpinned by any spiritual or moral reasoning -- i.e. the concepts of sentience, and similar phenomena, may actually go away altogether and be tossed in with the pile of falsely observed ideas, like luminiferous aether, chi and humorism.
      • meowface 12y ago
        I agree that consciousness and sentience are likely just emergent phenomena, but that doesn't necessarily make them any less "real". Consciousness and awareness are already used as a determining factor of life and whether it is ethical to kill an organism. For example, look at the case of a brain dead hospital patient. Most people would not say it is unethical to take them off of life support even if it's basically equivalent to killing them. Even if sentience is "artificial" in the sense that it's merely a property large networks of neurons display, it's still a significant notion because it allows us to experience, or at least feel like we are experiencing, sensation and subjectiveness. And I think it's fair to apply that same reasoning to non-human animals, though obviously it is difficult to determine with certainty since you can't obtain the full subjective experience of a different species.
• bane 12y ago
  > Do we actually know that it's possible for us, as a society as a whole to survive entirely on non-animal products, food or otherwise? Yes, we know that we virtually can't, at least not in a long-term multi-generational societal context. Humans are superbly evolved to eat a little bit of just about everything, and terribly evolved to eat a lot of one kind of thing for a long time. There are millions of years of evolution built into us and inherited from our ancestors that determined that a modern homo sapien is destined to require some animal products in their consumption inventory. Meat was important enough that if we had an herbivorous ancestor, that ancestor is unknown in the fossil record. We purposely spent so much time finding animal sources, despite plentiful plant life nearly everywhere, that we even evolved brains, tools and fire and actually evolved away in-situ nutritional synthesis of various critical nutrients (that all other herbivores enjoy) all almost purely to take on the higher risk task of eating other animals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763330 In theory it might be possible to craft a healthy, sustainable, long-term diet that uses no animals whatsoever, and would last generations with no ill effects on population health. However, there's overwhelming evidence that, in practice, the kind of diet around 90% of practicing vegans practice is not that diet. In numerous serious studies, 70-90% of all tested practicing vegans test as B12 deficient, which is not a sustainable long term dietary deficiency over generations. Theoretically, after just a few generations of this kind of deficiency, if anybody is alive at all, they'll suffer from severe congenital neurological deficiencies that would make sustaining a modern society impossible. B12 sufficiency would be a non-optional part of any non-animal diet, and it appears that practicing vegans are not able to construct an alternative herbivorous diet that provides even single-generational sufficiency. Other typical deficiencies found in large vegan population studies suggest that humans are generally poorly adapted to long-term, sustained, plant-only diets: with neurological and cardiovascular issues presenting as long-term consequences of the diet. There's other challenges, some nutrients are pitifully rare or not as bioavailable to humans from plant sources as from animal ones: B12, DHA (and some important varieties of O3FAs, Vitamin A compounds, Arginine, Creatine, Carnosine, Vitamin D, Heme, and the list goes on. There's other issues to, as the nutritional balance of vegan diets isn't what we're evolved to process, humans suffer from various absorption issues as plant sources provide high quantities of some food components that prevents absorption of some critical minerals: e.g. phytates block zinc for example. One of the significant challenge for Vegans is the incredible amount of "sciency-sounding", but completely wrong nutritional advocacy advice available in the vegan community. The science is so complex, almost no vegan understands enough of the science of human biology, nutrition and agriculture to properly assemble a diet for themselves (as demonstrated through dozens of studies). Various critical dietary issues are often waived away or minimized (just eat yeast extract!) and major deficits are often covered up under a handful of dietary supplements (many of which are derived from animal sources) for long-term adherence. The flip side of the problem is that modern food practices also provide animal sources far in excess of what we evolved to need nutritionally. You could probably eat a vegan diet 4-5 days a week, and eat a healthy omnivorous diet just for dinner the other 2-3 and easily satisfy all your animal sourced nutritional requirements and come out extremely healthy with none of the Vegan diet associated health problems. And I don't mean a huge steak for those dinners. I mean just a regular old meal with a few ounces of some animal sourced protein.
• JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  "Don't want to be eaten" is a pretty high bar. There's not much we could eat if that were the criterion. What's left - fruit?