WTF? That’s not how we justify stuff. I mean, for a very small number of things like recycling, maybe, but a cow is not a Coke bottle. Of course suffering is part of the equation, because, again, we’re dealing with a living animal here, an animal with the capacity to suffer.
Not a ton of guilt, but yeah, some guilt. On the one hand, I’m aware that it’s virtually impossible to live without causing some suffering, so I’m on the continuum that everyone’s on. On the other hand, I cause extra suffering for my own pleasure and convenience, and there’s some guilt there.
That’s not absolution, that’s rationalization. Of course you could do it if you made it a priority. You don’t prioritize it. Neither do I. But don’t pretend like you’d die if you decided to be vegan.
Utter nonsense. I’d offer counterexamples, except that there’s no need to refute such a patently insupportable claim.
Frylock, I have no idea why you’re apparently trying to argue yourself out of the perfectly sensible conclusion that you came to in your OP. (If that is what you’re doing. If you are of the opinion that you’re doing something else, then fine. I don’t care.)
Anyway, right now I think that you’re just asking the wrong questions.
The one you’re looking for is: “How can I cause less suffering?”
Is the answer: “Eat another burger”?
Or is it: “Don’t eat another burger”?
I’m reading the thread about being about the ethics of being a carnivore in modern society. Granted, “carnivore” means “someone who eats meat”, but we could grow meat like a loaf of bread using tissue-growth technology and I think we can agree that this has the same ethical implications as eating tofu.
But I’ll get back to that.
So now let’s say that I start a thread like so:
Now, alternate world me has created a topic which includes a discussion of sterility and has the word sterility in the title. But really the topic is, “What obligates a person to act as a father?” The OP’s desire to discuss sterility be as it may be, the only reason that it’s involved in the discussion is because - almost certainly - his own sterility was something that he latched onto to get out of having to ever raise a child, not because it’s actually a particularly relevant starting point for the discussion.
His desire to discuss the subject of sterility be as it may, just because the OP wants a “Yes” or “No” answer does not mean that either of those is the correct answer to give him.
So now, on the morality of “eating” meat. Meat is dead. Meat don’t care whether you eat it. As previously mentioned, it may have been grown in a vat, harvested from a single meat cell, from an animal that was anesthetized and never even noticed that a cell was being sucked out with a needle. Or the meat may have come from an animal that died of natural causes. If modern society ate meat in either of those ways, there’d be no real topic to discuss.
But the reality is that we actively kill animals for our consumption. In the case of beef, yes, it’s usually already been killed. In the case of lobster, it was probably killed just after you ordered it. In the case of yoghurt or oysters, you might be killing it in your digestive tract. Personally, I have no reason to think that you refrain from eating lobster, oysters, yoghurt or any other kind of meat. So while you could have “utilized” your logic in the case of beef, you couldn’t have in many other cases, and yet I’m doubtful that that would have stopped you.
In a discussion of the ethics of eating meat, in modern day society, to focus on the “eating” part instead of the “killing” part is bizarre, just as it is bizarre for a man to focus on the “DNA” part of child rearing rather than the “my wife and I discussed it and decided to bring a child into our home” part.
And the reason why animals are killed is not because there is a “gap in the inventory”. It’s because someone gave them money to breed, raise, and slaughter animals. He gave that money knowing full well that, that money was going to go towards breeding more animals, feeding them, and killing them so that they could be eaten. Sure, every once in a while he gets some free meat at a neighborhood barbecue. But he’d be just as happy to be the one buying all the meat and grilling it up for everyone on any other day of the week, so it all balances out.
Paying for the slaughter of animals, before or after the slaughter, is still paying for the slaughter of animals.
Tasty, tasty animals. But cold-heartedly killed them we did.
You don’t care but for the record, I’m not. I do not and never have believed I kill the cow I’m eating when I eat the cow. Yet people in this thread seem to be arguing for that very claim. It’s an incredible claim for people to argue for, and you know how it is, Internet ensues.
Not reading the rest of your post since it’s based on your misunderstanding and you don’t care.
Ah. Well, when you are interested, go ahead and come read this thread before posting in it!
ETA: The rest of your post explains why you think the thread is about something other than what it presents itself as being about. You’re basically pointing out what is obvious–that the topic being discussed has implications for the morality of eating meat. But that does not make it necessarily about the morality of eating meat. And given that the OP restricts itself strictly from discussing that topic, and all my subsequent replies have followed through on that restriction, the intention should be clear.
It is that very attempt to mind-read and to treat “implication” as “aboutness” that’s confusing you and others into arguing for an incredible claim like “you kill the cow you eat when you eat the cow.” You don’t have to argue for an incredible claim in order to show that eating meat is immoral! You can do much better than that, by using entirely believable claims instead!
And you can do it in a different thread, or at least explicitly note that you’re changing the topic a bit in this one.
And my three year old wants to see another y so: y
I don’t understand. I thought what I said was to be expected. Since the rest of your post was based on your misunderstanding of me, and since you explicitly stated you don’t care whether you misunderstood or not, does that not imply that there’s no need for me to read the rest of your post?
Lemme just clarify something, as it may be necessary to do so.
Never have I ever thought “As long as I didn’t kill a cow myself, it is definitely okay for me to eat hamburgers.”
This thread was not started in order to (even implicitly) repudiate that view, because I never held that view.
Rather, what I have thought is “I never killed a cow, but still, eating meat is ethically complicated at least.”
And I do repudiate that view. I still think eating meat is ethically complicated, but I now think that I have killed a cow.
I find it hard to believe there aren’t a bunch of people out there like me who falsely believe they never killed a cow. Hence, I posted.
Killing the animal doesn’t bother me, I am somewhat bothered by the conditions most commercially raised animals are forced to live in. I doubt there is a real viable solution to ths,
If it makes you feel better, OP, your eating a pound of hamburger only causes, depending on price elasticities, the killing of perhaps a half-pound of beef. That’s because your added consumption forces up the price of beef by a few millimicrodollars, thus lowering the demand for beef slightly.
Of course this becomes a probabilistic argument. And at the end of the day we may be left with Schrödinger’s beef: Did you kill it or not?
No sir, the cow does indeed die before you eat it, unless you are in the habit of literally eating burgers that are still mooing.
You may not have shot the cow yourself, but you did create the demand that caused someone to decide that shooting a cow (or rather, thousands of cows) for money is a good idea. You can deny your part in that reality all you want, but reality is not affected by your opinion.
No cow has ever been entirely eaten by a single person. Unless maybe that person was Ron Swanson. If someone else eats part of that cow why do you get credit for the entire kill?
If you went vegan, there damn well still would be demand for those two extra cows, from all the other people who damn sure aren’t going vegan. They were raised and slaughtered to feed many people each.
You’re saying that something I do now can have an effect in the past.
This can’t be right.
Someone else created the demand that led to the shooting of the cow I ate. And by buying a burger, I created demand that may lead to the shooting of a cow sometime soon. But what is most definitely not the case because it’s physically impossible is what you and others are saying–that I, by buying this burger now, have created the demand that caused the cow I’m eating to be shot.
(Or anyway, not shot, but hit in the head or whatever.)
Barring coincidence, the cow I’m eating was not caused to die by anything I ever did. That’s just a fact. It implies nothing about the morality of eating meat. But a fact it is, and to deny it is bizarre.
Like I said to Sage Rat, there are many great arguments for refraining from eating meat which rest on completely plausible premises. To insist on a premise that’s not only implausible but actually impossible is just I don’t even know what it is.
See guys? I’m not wrong to think there are others who think like I thought prior to the realization I gave in the OP. See here’s one right here!
TBG, per the reasoning I outlined in the OP, it’s actually not true that the demand would still be there. Once you stop buying meat, the demand for meat goes down. It may take some time (I imagine a week or two?) for that information to propagate back to the people deciding which factories will kill how many animals, but propagate it will. The effect will be miniscule, but not non-existent. Other peoples’ demand doesn’t somehow replace your own keeping the total demand as high as it ever was. Think about it this way: If that were so, then if everyone but you stopped eating meat, somehow your demand would end up equaling the entire current output of the meat industry!
Burger 1 is made from Daisy. Daisy’s owner, anticipating a market for beef, raised Daisy from a calf, contracted with a slaughtering house, and sold her carcass. (He’s a small-time craft farmer, don’t get pedantic about how McD’s meat supply chain works, please). You ate burger 1 as the first burger you ever ate. You did not kill Daisy: someone else did.
Blue-Eyes’s owner, however, saw that there’s a market for beef, a market that now includes you, raised Blue-Eyes from a calf, contracted with a slaughtering house, and sold her carcass. Part of that carcass was turned into burger 2, which you ate. You helped kill Blue-Eyes. However, it was your consumption of burger 1, made from Daisy, that helped kill Blue-Eyes.
I think Kaio is focused on how burger 1 killed Blue-Eyes, and you’re focused on how burger 2 didn’t kill Blue-Eyes. You’re both right.
You don’t. As said, you get as much kill as you eat in weight. If a cow is able to supply 100 pounds of meat, then you’ve killed (basically) 1 cow for every 100 pounds of meat that you eat. It’s not 1 cow per 1 steak.
When it comes to rounding, it probably makes more sense to use the ceiling function, since there is no 1 steak without a 1 dead cow. But two steaks doesn’t double your onus, only your 101st.
A friend met a Buddhist who would only eat meat from large animals, because there are so many more meals per death if you eat beef than if you eat chicken.
Ha! I was actually thinking about that earlier today. By my math my family kills about one cow every two years, but about 250 chickens each year. If we had to choose one or the other to give up (replacing that animal with only veggies) then the most efficient one to give up in terms of concsciousnesses preserved would be the chicken. We’d have to go beef-only.
Think about what you’re saying.