I’ve been vegetarian for over 25 years. I have no need to “carefully design” (whatever the hell that means) my diet, and the nutritional value of what I eat easily meets the requirements of an adult human body. It’s not even close.
As for expense, my wife often eats the same food I do, but sometimes she’ll get herself some meat instead, and when she does, it is nearly always the case that her meal costs more than mine. I’ve got no problem at all with people who choose to eat meat—my vegetarianism is my thing—but to claim that it’s somehow really hard or really expensive or nutritionally deficient for a person to leave meat out of their diet is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
By your definition, there is no moral cause against anything. By your logic, there is no moral cause against slavery because plenty of people suffer at their paying jobs.
The fact that you might disagree with other people’s moral positions doesn’t mean that those positions cease to exist, or are somehow objectively invalid.
But you disagree with people’s moral positions on eating meat.
The moral argument that eating meat kills animals and thus causes suffering is invalid as eating vegetables does too, and in fact maybe in larger amounts. Of course you might consider insects, nematodes and other small animals as “not animals” for some reason.
Not to mention the huge damage to fisheries caused by fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide run-off.
This argument doesn’t hold up unless you’re trying to claim that the elimination of meat-eating would cause a net increase in the inadvertent killing of animals as a byproduct of agriculture.
I’d need to see a cite for that claim. AFAICT, raising animals for meat also kills lots of animals besides the ones actually being eaten. Insects, nematodes etc. are not unique to vegetable agriculture. (Furthermore, most meat-eaters eat lots of other foods too, so it’s not as though their carnivory is saving them from being complicit in the inadvertent animal slaughter accompanying vegetable agriculture.)
However, even if we could definitively prove that the total number of animal lives lost through vegetarian-only agriculture was greater than the number lost through our current omnivorous mix of livestock husbandry and non-animal crops, I think it would still be possible to make a moral argument against eating meat.
Such an argument would probably involve the position that deliberately rearing and killing an animal to eat it is more immoral than killing animals as an unintended consequence of plant agriculture. It could also point out that as we develop more “eco-friendly” plant agriculture we can reduce the unintended killing of animals.
??? You mean, in response to this statement of mine in post #31 several weeks ago?
You mean, if you take human existence as a continuous spectrum and try to draw a bright line, morally speaking, at some single point between the carnivory of prehistoric humans and the carnivory of modern developed-society humans, where exactly would that single point fall?
Nah, I think that’s a silly question to ask, and I don’t think anything in the OP’s hypothesis requires it. Someone can have a morally consistent view that early-human carnivory in the prehistoric struggle for existence amongst scarcity was not immoral, but that modern-human carnivory in developed societies with abundant nutrition is immoral, without needing to presume any unique precise “tipping point” date for a completely arbitrary instantaneous “morality reversal” somewhere in the intervening eight thousand years or so.
Our bodies are not “built to” do things, they are adapted to doing them. That’s not just a language nit-pick either - building something for a purpose implies a builder and intention, to the point you can argue that object being used for a different purpose is wrong. That’s not the case with adaptation; it’s neither correct or incorrect.
Both of these are social adaptations, and pretty much universal across all human populations. So yes, quite natural. Both monogamy and it’s opposite have been practiced by varying proportions of most if not all human groups all through history. It’s not a recent invention.
Well yes actually. Ancient brothels have been excavated and found to have the remains of numerous infant boys buried nearby. Those “career-minded” women got rid of the useless male children and kept the girls who could be brought up to join the family business. They just didn’t have the medical knowledge to do it chemically like we can today or they probably would have. This practice has been around for thousands of years or longer.
Well yes when you have 25 years experience doing something of course it seems easy; I assume you’ve been driving for the same amount of time or more, but that doesn’t mean that someone getting behind the wheel for the first time will find the task as easy as you do.
The facts remain that there are very real deficiencies people face when they eliminate meat from their diet; that’s just science. And yes people can learn how to make up for it… but they do need to learn and understand how in the first place. I have a feeling your menu today is not the same one you would have intuitively come up with on day 1 of your vegan diet decades ago.
If you were just brought up eating that way as part of a religious tradition then perhaps you don’t even need to understand scientifically why the meals and ingredients are what they are. But someone (many someones in fact) did over the generations and the resulting diet of today is the result of millions of people’s collective experiences. Something being easy or already figured out for you doesn’t mean it isn’t complex and can’t be messed up.
Like several others here I am not seeing why a given practice becomes immoral once a society figures out another way to do it, and hence the need for a moral defense of the old way. We have diving units called rebreathers which supply compressed air and capture the expelled air we breath so you don’t inhale or exhale from the environment; it’s all self-contained. Has it been immoral for humans to breath normally for the past 30 years without using these units?
We can also reproduce in petri dishes, grow plants using electric lighting, and make cars. Does having sex, planting a garden, and walking now require moral justification to continue doing?
But saying that I disagree with a person’s particular moral position is NOT the same as saying that such a moral position does not even exist, which is what you said in your previous post.
You didn’t say “I disagree with the moral cause against eating meat”; you said “there is no moral cause against eating meat.” Do you understand the difference between these two phrases? If you don’t, let me know; I’m sure I’ll find some single-syllable words that could help you out.
To be quite frank, it was pretty damn easy from the start.
If someone takes more than about a half-hour of moderate exertion to work this out, I’d be wondering how they managed to feed themselves even before becoming vegetarian. This isn’t rocket science, and it’s certainly nothing like the ridiculous comparison that Czarcasm made in his post.
“Thousands of years or longer” isn’t really that much on human evolutionary timescales. Ancient sophisticated economies running brothels as a “family business” date from a very long time after the emergence of physically modern humans. There’s no evidence that they have anything to do with how the human body was “built” in its evolutionary development hundreds of thousands of years earlier.
Wow, this semi-zombie thread has really blown up.
I am going to reply in reverse order because DrDeth’s last response really needs attention.
What?
If there is no moral defense to molesting children, then there is no moral cause against molesting children. What?
And, to be clear, I didn’t say that there is no moral defense per se; after all, we can each invent our own morality. The question is whether there is a defense within a particular moral framework. i.e. whether there is consistency.
Those arguing that it is a significant hardship to be a vegan would need to believe that, in general, hardship alone can justify actions, which would justify just about anything. No-one has bitten that bullet and I don’t expect any will.
Alternatively, someone could say they don’t care about animal cruelty – fine by them if you spend all day putting chimps through Saw-like torture contraptions for the fun of it. Such a person believing that, and also eating meat, is a completely consistent morality.
But posts like the ones pointing out that animals are harmed in agriculture too, tacitly admits to caring about the quantity of suffering, otherwise it would be irrelevant. (I’ll come to arguments against the idea that the suffering is equal in a separate post).
Most of the posters here have admitted, one way or another, to caring about suffering, but their justifications for it, don’t work within their own moralities.
Oh, I didn’t notice that it was also DrDeth that posted the thing about insects.
Clearly they are animals, but the question is about suffering,
We don’t know to what extent animals suffer. Heck, philosophically-speaking we cannot even know other humans feel physical pain.
However, using our own experiences as a guide to interpreting behaviours, we can come to the conclusion that other humans feel pain because they behave like I do when I am in pain. And so do mammals, to a lesser extent because they cannot vocalize as I do, but otherwise their responses broadly match mine, and even appear to experience emotional trauma.
As we go towards simpler and smaller animals, the similarity goes down and there is reason to doubt they experience suffering on anything like the same scale.
Because, something like a fly behaves in a very knee-jerk way to many stimuli, and knee-jerk responses are generally not painful as that pain would not be very useful. Furthermore it seems unlikely that a fly possesses the cognitive capability for emotional trauma.
Of course nature has not painted us a clear line between suffering and non-suffering, and I would not make the claim that insects are incapable of suffering. However, in general, if someone wanted to reduce the amount of obvious suffering they are partially responsible for, it’s pretty clear that not contributing towards battery/intensive farming of mammals and birds would be a step in the right direction.
OK, last one.
I don’t think moral relativism means what you think it does.
In most moral systems, and indeed legal systems, killing ten people is worse than killing one. That’s not relativism.
Not that there’s anything wrong with relativism, but that’s not what it means.
Moral absolutism is the idea that something is always right or wrong. So, if lying is wrong for example, then telling the Nazis that you don’t have Jews hidden in your house, when you do, would be wrong, and something you ought not do. It’s not a popular position.
Fundamental problem here, there won’t be agreement.
Most people in the US & Canada like to eat meat and feel domesticated meat animals exist for us to eat them.
Many feel raising animals in captivity and slaughtering them for meat, fur or leather is wrong.
Many fall in between.
I’m fine with raising meat animals and even more so with dairy animals. I would like to see more humane treatment of the animals. I’m against whaling very strongly and fishing techniques that disturb the ocean floor and have a fairly high incidence of catching other animals. Wearing fur just seems weird to me at this point, but at least mink is farm grown, the meat is used in animal food. Fox hunting for pelts is really sick to me. I really can’t understand at all how seal hunting is still a thing. So we all have different lines.
I despise sport hunters but am generally OK with meat hunters. Weird thing is some sport hunting ends up saving far more animals than it kills. The high fees they pay keeps the rangers employed to protect the rest of the animals from the poachers and illegal “sportsmen”.
The fact that people won’t agree doesn’t mean the end of the debate and that we shouldn’t try to convince people though. Many things that we now consider to be wrong were once just an assumed part of the cultural landscape, seen as impossible to change.
So like I say, we can all ask ourselves whether we are being consistent with our own principles.
We could ask the slaveowner whether he believes that all men are created equal and the principle of personal liberty.
And when it comes to eating meat, we can ask how people feel about unnecessary animal cruelty.
As I say, I’m sure some people don’t care at all (I mean, I have seen people literally incapable of empathy for humans), but I’d wager the majority do care, it’s just an out of sight, out of mind, thing.
And I'll quickly reiterate where I am coming from on this, as it's been a long thread.
I regularly eat meat and dairy products. I rarely if ever eat a dinner that doesn't contain some meat.
But my opinion has become that I am doing something immoral in this, as I have not heard any justifications that come close to making sense.
When I am buying meat or dairy myself, I always buy the free range, or animal welfare option, where one exists. But often there is no such option, or I am eating out.
So, right now, I am not doing enough, and I have no excuse.
The whole clubbing-baby-harp-seals thing was not good for the industry’s image. (It hasn’t been legal to kill baby or “whitecoat” seals in Canada since 1987, though.)
Moreover, AIUI the waste of the carcass in seal hunting is greater than in almost any type of wildlife hunting except trophy game? Some people do eat seal meat but the vast majority of the potentially usable meat goes to waste because purchasers are much more interested in the pelts.
Wearing wild animal pelts is still viewed negatively by a lot of people since the anti-fur campaign of a few decades ago.
So, cruel, wasteful and frivolous about sums up the “anti” perspective on seal hunting. (Mind you, there are counter-arguments to be made on the “pro” side too, but you were asking about the negative views on it.)