Gaudere’s law strikes again!
nutrients present in meat than from other sources is a very different…*
i’ve never seen anyone try so hard to be pretentious and mess it up as badly as gamer.
it’s actually kind of cute.
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i meant distracting.
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you don’t mean ‘cede.’
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no one said “vegetarianism is untenable because omnivorism was the basis of our society.”
no. one. said. that. you straight made that up. talk about your logical fallacies–you’re the god of strawmen. -
once again, you’re debating something i never said. i didn’t, not once in my post, use the term "vegetarianism.’ because that’s not what i was talking about.
i’m talking about VEGANISM.
i cannot stress the value of paying attention the real words people say instead of just having your own make-believe conversation. you’re making up things people didn’t say and debating the made-up stuff (aka strawman).
i assure you, you don’t need us or this forum to have these little fake conversations with yourself.
if, however, you want to debate us, STOP MAKING UP CONVERSATIONS WE DIDN’T HAVE.
vegans–as oppose to vegetarians–extend their value of animals beyond diet. that means no use of animal products. no use of honey. no riding horses. no using plow animals. no cat gut strings. no lamb skin drums. no pets. and so on and so forth.
if vegans were the architects of civilization, we would have been unable to make the progress animals have granted us. according to historians, the use and domestication of animals allowed for economies and cities to develop.
vegetarianism, in this case, is moot–**vegetarians **have no qualms with the use of animals. ***vegans ***do.
**Trust **is a vegan. **Trust **maintains it is our ethical duty to no eat nor **use **animals.
this attitude would, if you believe the historical reality of the world, be a major set-back to progress.
it is not Appeal to Tradition (serious, CLICK THAT LINK AND LEARN YOUR FALLACIES. YOU GET THEM WRONG EVERY. TIME.
in order for it to be this logical fallacy, someone would have needed to say “Omnivorous diet is ethical because people have always been that way.”
but no one is arguing that.
you have once again chosen the wrong logical fallacy.
i will give you a hint as to why:
IT’S NOT A LOGICAL FALLACY. it’s just “history,” with no commentary or bias as to it being “right” or “wrong.” it simply is the way civilization developed, with the use and consumption of animals, and *simply is 100% **not *vegan-kosher.
it’s absolutely not “Genetic Fallacy,” either–and i once again encourage you to read up on these things and learn what they really mean so you don’t keep failing.
for this to be the case, someone would have had to say something along the lines of “veganism is wrong because vegans historically use to be Pagans and were against God! so if you’re a vegan, you’re against God!” or some retarded thing like that.
listen, we get it.
you really, really want to look like you know debate strategy. but you keep getting everything wrong.
how about just…try to either contribute to or debate the actual conversation?
your attempt to debase every argument by putting a logical fallacy sticker on it is making you look like a college freshman.
call out the fallacies when they exist. stop trying to force them into the conversation where they don’t belong.
Part of your argument has been health. And if a straw man argument has been introduced into a thread about ethics of eating meat, that was introduced by you. You claim that vegans need to be super careful to be healthy. That somehow without meat or dairy they will become unhealthy. I would really appreciate some facts to back your claim that a vegan diet is somehow a Herculean task to achieve. Because there are those (professionals, physicians etc) who would disagree with your claim. As would my vegan friend of 35 years who was raised vegan by her parents btw.
And getting back to the health straw men, how ethical is it to feed the S.A.D. omny diet to children? How ethical is it to drop dead as a parent and abandon your kids in your late 30’s-early 40’s following the S.A.D. omny diet? There has been a steady increase of diseases that were only seen in adults such as type 2 diabetes, high BP, high cholesterol, heart disease. All of these are hitting younger and younger people with type 2 showing up in people as young as 9 years old. This is from that omny S.A.D. diet that is being followed by most in the states. Not the Michael Pollen omny diet, the McOmny diet. And since you are using the broad term omnivore to describe the human diet, you have to take into account the results of the S.A.D. diet (an inconvenience I know).
Thank you! It’s been exhausting…
Just like to adjust one thing - given that gamerunknown has made it irrefutably clear that he does not understand how logical fallacies work, how about he does not call out logical fallacies at all? How about he sticks to debating the issues with his own words and ideas, pointing out the flaws he perceives in others’ arguments without resorting to labels, (or Latin) because even if the labels are accurate, it’s incredibly tedious.
That should be “The study I linked to involved a cohort of more than 27,000 people”. “Cohort” means group. The group didn’t involve comparing 27000 people, the study did. Better still would have been the simpler: “The study I linked to involved comparing over 27000 people.” skipping the attempt to use “cohort” at all.
Every time you try to seem particularly learned by using Latin, or logical fallacy labels, or unusual words, and you blow it (which you do almost without exception) you make yourself seem far less learned than you would if you just didn’t try to bring those things in at all.
What do you believe you are saying here? Because what you actually wrote does not make much sense. “are used to feed animals through the trophic levels” - which trophic levels? Trophic levels = positions on the food chain. So your sentence reads as “currently crops which could be used for human consumption are used to feed animals through the positions on the food chain.” and I don’t get what that means. Can you explain?
not to jump into someone else’s battle, here–
but what the great good fuck are you talking about?
the title of the thread is “eating meat is ethical/unethical.” posted my Trust.
and i quote, from the op:
[QUOTE=Trust]
To me this seems an open and shut case. I evaluate this based on three ethical
principles.
[/QUOTE]
how in the world do you get off saying **XT **is the one who created a “strawman” “ethics on eating meat??”
*that was the whole intention of the thread as started by the op.
- xt is doing nothing more than discussing that topic.
and to touch on “vegans need to plan their diet:”
The American Dietetic Association considers well-planned vegan diets “appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy and lactation,” but recommends that vegan mothers supplement for iron, vitamin D, and vitamin B12
that’s what is known as a qualifier, or caveat. they didn’t say “any vegan diet,” or even simply “a vegan diet.” they said “WELL PLANNED.”
my gf is vegan. i discussed with her the extra planning that goes into being vegan.
she admitted that at first, she went vegan and was sick so often her dr said to knock off the vegan thing. but she persisted, once she got a job with better pay and could afford a better, more balanced vegan diet. she said people who are sick from an imbalanced vegan diet can do a better job, if they plan it a little better and spend the extra money to buy the good stuff they need.
what’s humorous to me is that she herself said both economic level is a qualifier to being a healthy vegan as well as planning what you eat more precisely, but then said “but i don’t have to plan what i eat. i wouldn’t say planning is a part of being a healthy vegan–at this point i just know what to do and it’s easy.”
well duh, silly–because you already have a plan in place you’re following.
You’re right. If people thought and felt about it in precisely the way you outline. But they don’t. They consider the issue of pain and suffering in the context of the being enduring it and why. So the ethical “value” of it is different. It doesn’t mean human pain matters and animal pain doesn’t, it means human pain matters most, the pain of animals matters less depending on the animal, the source of the pain, the other issues involved… it’s a complex and fluid equation in most people’s minds.
Determination of whether skin color is superficial when compared to differences like walking on four limbs, having a brain that won’t even permit one to be aware of oneself, mooing instead of using speech, etc. is not an issue of ethics. It’s an issue of objective reality. The differences between being a human being and being a pig or a chicken or a cow or a sheep are profound and enormously meaningful, affecting every single aspect of existence. The differnces between being a human being with black skin and a human being with white skin are meaningless.
Since that is the case, basing one’s ethics on those species-lvel differences is rational, reasonable, and fair.
They have no need to, because they don’t ponder these things. As previously noted, ethical and moral judgments are actually inventions that have no objective truth anyway.
I do not confine my own concern about suffering to people, but I do care elevate human suffering over that of non-human beings. And my care and concern for the suffering of animals is not equal across all animal species. I absolutely make value judgments on the relative importance of the suffering of a given species based on what I understand about how highly developed that particular species’ brain and nervous system are. For instance, I don’t really care much at all about the suffering of fish. They are pretty far down the chain. At the top of the chain of animals that people eat (around here, anyway) is the pig, which is a very intelligent animal and I think it’s ghastly how they are made to suffer.
If you are going to be concerned about “pain and suffering” as a “thing” unto itself, then who and what is experiencing it should matter: creatures that are more highly developed experience pain and suffering more intensely and acutely, in more circumstances, than creatures which are less highly developed. Sticking a lizard in a tiny area where it can barely turn around does not cause the same degree of actual suffering in that lizard as doing the same thing to a pig will. So yeah, I’m much more concerned about the pig’s experience.
[quote=“dontbesojumpy, post:307, topic:617064”]
not to jump into someone else’s battle, here–
but what the great good fuck are you talking about?
the title of the thread is “eating meat is ethical/unethical.” posted by Trust.
how in the world do you get off saying **XT **is the one who created a “strawman” “ethics on eating meat??”
*that was the whole intention of the thread as started by the op.
- xt is doing nothing more than discussing that topic.
and to touch on “vegans need to plan their diet:”
The American Dietetic Association considers well-planned vegan diets “appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy and lactation,” but recommends that vegan mothers supplement for iron, vitamin D, and vitamin B12
that’s what is known as a qualifier, or caveat. they didn’t say “any vegan diet,” or even simply “a vegan diet.” they said “WELL PLANNED.”
my gf is vegan. i discussed with her the extra planning that goes into being vegan.
she admitted that at first, she went vegan and was sick so often her dr said to knock off the vegan thing. but she persisted, once she got a job with better pay and could afford a better, more balanced vegan diet. she said people who are sick from an imbalanced vegan diet can do a better job, if they plan it a little better and spend the extra money to buy the good stuff they need.
what’s humorous to me is that she herself said both economic level is a qualifier to being a healthy vegan as well as planning what you eat more precisely, but then said "but i don’t have to plan what i eat. i wouldn’t say planning is a part of being a healthy vegan–at this point i just know what to do and it’s easy.
well duh, silly–because you already have a plan in place you’re following.[/QUOTE
All I am saying is that we all need to plan our diets. Eating primarily french fries and cheeseburgers is just as harmful as eating french fries and soy milk exclusively. The all vegans are going to kill themselves by eating that way is a myth. My diet and health improved as my income improved and my knowledge of nutrition increased. And I am not vegan. I suspect this is the case for many. So from my POV your point regarding the GF is irrelevant.
The supposed straw man argument is presented on page 1 of the thread by XT - “I don’t see it as either ethical or unethical…it’s reality. We are omnivorous. That’s what we are. So, eating meat is part of how we developed, as a species. We are sentient, however, so we have a choice in how much (or little) meat we eat, or if we want to eat meat at all (assuming one is careful in their diet and makes sure you are getting all the nutrients you need on an all veg. diet). I don’t see that choice as being about ethics, however…it’s simply a choice that each individual makes for themselves.” XT continues with the health angle in other posts. I will tell you that I was not of, nor do I consider this a straw man argument. But if XT is going to consider a challenge to his health claim a straw man argument, then she/he needs to own it’s creation.
The replies and post are all over the map, but you are getting on my case because IMO you think I strayed off point. The hostility towards what others eat amazes me.
your post got kind of messed up and i’m not sure i understand what you are trying to say.
on a few points, tho–
we all need to plan our diets. sure, idealistically, we should all take a lot more care in what and how we eat. however, i think XT’s point–and certainly my own point–is that being vegan requires a lot more planning to maintain a default level of rounded nutrition one would get from a thoughtless omnivorous diet.
a thoughtless vegan diet results in people being sick. a thoughtless omnivore diet results in a much more balanced diet. the girlfriend anecdote is profoundly apt, because not having a decent food budget and not planning resulted in her *being so sick her doctor demanded she change her diet.
*
that, my friend, is what an unplanned vegan diet gives you.
meanwhile, i’ve not had to go to the doctor at all for my unplanned ominvore diet.
honestly, i think it’s pretty straightforward: a haphazard vegan diet will leave you all manners of unwell.
a haphazard omnidiet will leave you much more balanced and healthy.
this isn’t rhetoric. it’s a common fact there’s nutrients that are more abundantly found and easier to absorb from meats. as a vegan, you have to make mindful substitutions to regain these nutrients. if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll miss out–you’ll be anemic, low on b12, maybe iron and who knows what else.
as for the hostility over what people eat, i’m with you, bro.
i think a lot of issue comes with the piety of vegans. they construct an arbitrary ethical debate and draw this superficial line that places them on the “right” or “moral” side of it, which implicitly makes all omnivores “immoral” and “unethical.”
it’s a nice way to start a fight, calling someone unethical.
i, for instance, would never hunt. i have Doug who is basically my dog-son. he goes everywhere with me, has never spent a night outside and in just about every way, i like him more than people. he was a rescue.
i relocate bugs and spiders and have stopped on numerous occasions to shoo animals out of the street…even picking up turtles and moving them.
the first time i had to kill a mouse, my heart broke (wow did i get over that, tho).
i don’t think my attitude about animals is unethical. i have lost friends because i let them know they were mistreating their pets (one chick was insisting on putting her dog on anti-depressants so she didn’t have to “deal” with the dog BEING A DOG.) we literally stopped being friends the day i told her how i really thought she needed to just not have a dog. at all.
i like most animals more than i like people.
but i have a practical mindset as to what they are. they are tools, friends, food, and foes. the human/animal relationship is sacred and magical, and complicated and never-ending. but XT’s dead on–we are omnis, and they are made of food, and we’ve bred a great deal of them to fulfill a role–one in most cases they are instinctively joyous to fulfill.
when someone starts out by saying “you’re unethical,” even tho i feel as i do, it’s pretty confrontational…
there’s nothing “wrong” with being a vegan. but biologically, it’s insane to say we all SHOULD be vegan. we, some of us, simply couldn’t survive. it’s not just a matter of flavor or principles for some, it’s a matter of health. some people need to eat far, far less meat. some need to eat much, much more. to level that with piety, to say it’s a matter of ethics is not just wrong, it’s patently hypocritical.
if you exist in modern society, in a civilized world, then you got here on the backs of animals. that’s just how it is.
Did you read my post on the last page where I pointed out it was perfectly correct according to the dictionary definition? At least I ceded that you could have intended “distracted”, even if it made less sense in context.
Sorry, it was a complete non sequitur from the thread’s original purpose so I missed it. The entire last page was talking about a vegan/vegetarian diet and when you used veganism, I assumed you were extrapolating from not eating meat.
Here:
P: In the past, humans used animals to advance society.
C: The use of animals will advance society now.
I’ve also heard it as:
P: Our omnivorous diet helped our brains grow in the past.
C: We need to consume an omnivorous diet in order to be intelligent.
Both of those are the genetic fallacy since they do not acknowledge changes of circumstance. They are arguably appeals to tradition as their historical purpose is appealed to.
Very well. If I were muddying the conversation, then it wouldn’t be true to state that I contributing nothing to the conversation though – your metaphor is a little inept.
Yes, I meant “through the trophic levels”, indicating there is energy loss.
Granted.
You’ve parsed his statement incorrectly. He’s saying that XT introduced the ease of diet/health of diet strawman when Trust was arguing ethics.
Can you logically demonstrate this?
Naturalistic fallacy.
A single anecdote does not consist of evidence. I’m glad you’ve alighted at the general point, but you haven’t provided evidence, nor have you proposed a null hypothesis.
Is it any surprise that people assume you’re referring to vegetarianism when you conflate eating far less meat with being a vegan?
By the way, what medical condition requires people to eat “much, much more” meat?
By the way, if anyone has a problem with my responses, I don’t mind if you ignore them. If they’re against the board rules, report the post and move on. If a moderator determines that I am contravening the board rules, I’ll bow out of the discussion (or I’ll get banned, either way).
gamer.
holy shit, guy. you’re embarrassing.
veganism is an extension of vegetarianism. vegetarianism has a lot less to do with ethics. ethics come more in to play when it’s veganism. ie the use and exploitation of animals.
**Trust **is a vegan. most of this discussion is about that.
i feel like you are unaware that veganism is about the diet as well…
christ on an ass…just. look it up. i feel like we can’t even talk to you because we get hung up on terminology.
you’re the most impossible to talk to person i’ve ever come across.
that’s not hyperbole–you’re like. seriously…from outer space or something.
i’m not even going to bother addressing all the absolutely wrong nonsense you’ve said.
shakes head
dear God.
naturalistic fallacy: “This behavior is natural; therefore, this behavior is morally acceptable”
op. yep. i guess discussing where fish lie on the food chain is not just a logical fallacy–but it’s a discussion of morality as well.
how.
do.
you.
get.
them.
ALL.
WRONG?!!
While I agree with you that the differences between species are much greater than the differences between skin colours, I’m not convinced that your choice of placement of an “ethical boundary” is any less subjective than someone else’s. You’ve simply decided to draw the line between animals and humans because the difference between animals and humans is what is relevant to you.
Similarly some people might draw the line between primates and non-primates, because the differences between primates and non-primates is what is relevant to them: For example, all primates have similar nervous systems, similar brain centers, and similar responses to external stimuli (such as stimuli that cause pain and suffering).
At the other end of the spectrum, some people might not think primates are what matter, or even humans in general. Some people might place a lot of value on skin colour instead. While you can argue and disagree with them - skin colour might be what is relevant to them. I’m not sure there’s any logical or rational argument to say that this sort of view is any “less ethical”, since ethics is purely determined subjectively.
This is reasonable. What might seem to be identical circumstances of torture and trauma, might have varied results, depending on the being enduring it. I think a chimpanzee’s experience of a tortuous and traumatic situation would be very similar to a human’s. A dog’s might be similar too, but probably slightly less so, due to differences in brain structure. A rat’s experience, however, might be quite different since rats share much fewer brain areas with humans (than chimps share with humans, for example). Of course, once you start looking at fish and insects, then you can say that whatever it is that they experience in tortuous and traumatic situations, it’s certainly not anything like what humans experience. One could even argue that many insects lack the basic abilities to experience pain and fear and suffering at all.
So yes, it’s a continuum. And it’s probably unfair to suggest that anyone has to draw a line somewhere specific, or draw a discrete line anywhere at all.
Using nature as a justification for morality.
Title of the thread “eating meat is ethical/unethical”. You brought up the veganism strawman.
Edit:
Differences in brain structure was one of the arguments for performing operations on infants without anaesthesia. It could also justify treating someone of the opposite sex differently, or someone that had a lobotomy, or someone that was autistic. Conditional empathy.
To be fair, in the past, the argument of “differences in brain structure” was a weak one, since nobody really understood brain structure the way we do know. It was an easy excuse to use back then. And while superficially, brain structure might have seemed different, they didn’t really know what they were looking at. In retrospect, their justifications turned out to be objectively and scientifically false.
But now, we have a much more detailed understanding of the brain. We know which areas are involved in pain, fear, panic, terror, stress, anxiety, etc. These brain areas that exist in most humans also exist in most chimpanzees… and in many of the more complex mammals, to some degree or another. But these brain centres do NOT exist in insects at all, for example.
My previous argument/suggestion was that if we place ethical value on “pain and suffering” in general (and not in humans, in particular), then it’s the pain and suffering that is relevant, and not the particular being/life-form that is experiencing it. Of course, this argument only holds if other animals experience pain and suffering in ways that are similar to how humans experience it. A neuroscientist or physiologist could make very strong arguments to support the idea that all primates experience pain and suffering in nearly identical ways. Other mammals like dogs, dolphins, elephants, while having different brain structures than primates, do share quite a few similarities to humans as well - and many of these overlaps involve areas dealing with pain and suffering.
The idea that brains are different, in general, isn’t a strong argument for treating people/animals differently. What is important is what the specific differences in brain structure are.
This argument is sound on its face, but there’s the hard problem of consciousness where we can’t experience another organism’s subjective state. We can point to homology of physiology and apply our empathy there, but as you point out, cut off points are relative to the society we’re in.
Here’s one of the paediatric reports, by the way.
Well, going by the premise that ethics is purely subjective… individuals can decide onto what they will grant “ethical value”. If it’s “pain and suffering, as humans feel it”, then that’s something that can be used as an objective yardstick (to a reasonable degree).
I’m just putting “pain and suffering, as humans feel it” out there as a possible way to help determine ethical behaviour - but by no means is that anything other than my personal opinion. I’ve mainly used it in my posts because it’s something that others seem to put forward fairly frequently. If I was pressed for a better yardstick, then I’d probably favour Peter Singer’s “equal consideration of interests”.
But one has to realize that some things are impossible to understand. I’m all for doing what’s best for animals and all life in general, whenever possible. But how can a human really know what’s in an animal’s best interests? Comparing brain areas for assessing pain and suffering, is one possible method - there are others, but at least this method is based on science. Some other, more general methods, are much too complex (at the present time) to be used in any practical way.
.
No. There is a vast difference between humans and other animals in terms of suffering due to pain. Animals suffer in the moment. Humans get to ponder the implications of future suffering or demise for themselves or their loved ones. This is an additional burden that the animal kingdom does not possess.
If you wish to place additional ethical value value on white people over others, you need to provide a reason why white people deserve it.
We do however place additional ethical value on humans who are born over those who are unborn for the very same reason I outlined above. Well, some of us do anyway.
It does complicate the argument a little. The natural world is a terrible place. It may be the case that animals under human stewardship have better lives than those outside of it. Of course, that’s not the case on farms where very few reach breeding age, since natural conditions prevent such a scenario from continuing indefinitely. Dawkins speaks compellingly of the cruel aspect of the natural world:
However, there is a basic ethical principle which Sam Harris expounds here, which is that we should not delegate to others a task we would find unethical to commit ourselves. I would not wish to be responsible for the death of an animal in its prime, so I do not support an industry which contributes to that. Once we accept the premise that we should not end the future pleasure of other animals for a marginal increase of our own pleasure*, we can discuss the most effective means of coexisting in the future based on the evidence. Until then I think the burden is on those that wish to demonstrate that by not contributing to the commission of suffering I am causing more suffering.
*Which Stoid has pointed out will never happen.
Nor do individuals with Korsakoff’s syndrome or other forms of brain damage.