I don’t think so, but apparently there are some people who feel defensive enough about the possibility to pre-emptively mock the jerkoff in 3010 for excessive judgementalism.
Why would we need to? Unless you are saying it’s a superior species that eats intelligent tool using self aware creatures. And that is a oxymoron.
I dont eat primates or cetaceans. Nor people.
I eat only animals that have been raised for food. I dont even hunt.
I’d be a hypocrite and say it’s immoral to eat humans. But if they are a superior species then they won’t care what I have to say about it.
Rats will have sex with their siblings. How does that fit into your concept of human morals? Be honest now.
They might. I take good care of electrical appliances so when the AI takes over I can claim to be one of the thoughtful humans,
ok that was pretty funny
That whole series of posts was hilarious. Bravo, octo.
Why were you assuming I was going to be dishonest?
I would say it fits in with the idea that animals act in accord with their nature. It’s part of the nature of rats to have sex with their siblings. (Is it? I’ll admit I don’t know much about the mating habits of rats. But I’ll take your word for it.) It’s part of the nature of human animals to eat meat.
If your argument is that humans are not like animals and we have a moral awareness that other animals lack, then how can you argue that we should extend human rights to other animals?
That " be honest" bit was a joke. Sorry.
To me, the idea isn’t extending human rights to animals. It’s a decision on whether to rise above our animal nature and be caretakers rather than predators. When we decide not to dump garbage in the ocean, we aren’t giving fish/water any human rights.
But I eat meat. I just get where they’re coming from.
I mean yes many immoral things are baked into our economy and society. You can still make a personal moral choice to reduce animal suffering. I don’t really understand the resistance to this.
When people from 100 years from now are eating delicious lab grown bacon and mouth watering lab grown hamburgers and scrumptious lab grown pork chops and gravy I think they’ll understand why we went to all the trouble of raising animals, because without lab grown meat it was either doing that or eating disgusting non-meat stuff like tofu and lima beans.
The primary reason this idea has traction is that nearly all of us buy into the principle of moral progress, and that we’re wiser, smarter, and more moral today (on the average) than in the past.
I believe in this principle. I believe that society, 200 years from now, will be better than we are today, and that is makes sense to try to guess what their views might be.
On the other hand, their views might also very well be, “Morality is a product of its time, and those in the early 21st century did nothing wrong, by their own value system”
This, too, is where the comparison to slavery fails: a great many people, in 1850, believed that slavery was morally wrong. The minority, today, who argue that eating meat is morally wrong is very much smaller and less representative of our collective moral consensus.
But we have the same bodies; what’s changed?
How does ME not eating meat reduce animal suffering?
Note that in general, animals in feedlots dont suffer. Beef cattle are fed quite a bit, kept out of nasty weather, have regular vet care, and then given a very quick and painless end.
Now if we ALL stopped eating meat the suffering would be much worse. See my post up a few, #35, i think.
But there will still be idiots protesting that the yeast is suffering.
We are none of those things, as shown by Jan 6th.
What we are is well fed and comfortable, so we can make “moral decisions” our forefathers couldnt afford to, or they’d die- along with their family. We are so fat and comfortable we can even revile them for making those hard decisions , where our hardest decision is whether or not we want bacon on our double cheeseburger.
Of course there are still people all over the world starving, but we can feel superior to them because we’d never dream of eating grasshoppers.
I’ve been a vegetarian for well over half of my life.
I’ve never had a problem with the general idea of killing animals for food. If the animal has lived a relatively contented life, free from torture and excessive confinement, then I’ve got no problem with that at all. I’ve grew up going to an agricultural high school, and in my teenage years I spent time on my friends’ farms helping with the various tasks involved with raising animals for meat.
I’ve taken part in procedures like dehorning, vaccination, drenching, ear-tagging, tail-docking, crutching, castration, and a variety of other animal husbandry stuff. I did the same thing a few years ago for a friend of mine who owns a sheep farm in Australia. Some of these procedures are somewhat frightening and/or painful for the animals in question, but they are basically all designed to improve the animal’s life in some way or another. All of the farms I worked on were farms where the animals spent the vast majority of their lives standing in open fields eating grass.
My own vegetarianism came in my early twenties, mainly as a result of reading a variety of works on the ethics, economics, and global politics of meat eating and food distribution. Books included works like Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, Singer and Mason’s Animal Factories, and Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies. I found Singer’s ethical arguments interesting, and in some cases compelling, but I could never get on board with the full scope of his animal liberation ideology. I was much more influenced by accounts of the actual conditions in which factory farm animals were raised (arguments that feedlot animals don’t suffer are, quite frankly, preposterous), as well as the broader concerns about the global politics of food distribution discussed by authors like George.
Over time, my concerns also shifted to the environmental consequences of meat production, although as someone who likes to be honest in my evaluations, I have to admit that some anti-meat activists tend to overstate the environmental impact of meat, and the environmental benefits that would come from ceasing meat production.
Basically, meat eating is one of those areas where I have an opinion that is shaped by morality and ethics, but where I only feel strongly enough about it in ways that shape my own behavior. I literally don’t care about what other people choose to do, and I feel no sense of moral superiority over someone who does eat meat. My wife is not a vegetarian, and neither are most of my friends, and that causes me not even a single moment of hesitation. I think that it’s possible that in a couple of centuries society as a whole will look back on meat-eating as morally repugnant, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it.
About the only time I actively make a moral argument about eating meat (or not) is when western meat eaters display their rather selective morality and ethics on the subject. If you think it’s OK to eat animals, that’s fine, but don’t be a hypocritical asshole and condemn people who choose to eat dogs, or horses, or rabbits, or whatever other cute or cuddly or friendly creature that you happen to feel should be off limits. A lot of these arguments often seem to have an undercurrent of racism. Don’t wring your hands with faux concern when you learn that millions of unwanted dogs and cats have to be euthanized in the United States every year. Don’t whine about hunters who like to go out and shoot deer, or any other animal for that matter.
If God did not want us to eat animals, why did He make them so damn delicious?
Another factor is that slaves were undeniably human. Nobody who argued otherwise was taken seriously. So the issue was whether one group of humans should be denied the basic human rights that other humans too for granted.
That argument falls apart when you try to apply it to cows and chickens and pigs.
Our bodies have always (at least, for as long as we’ve been modern humans) been able to obtain adequate nutrients from all kinds of sources. Humans aren’t carnivores, we’re omnivores.
So the argument against carnivory in modern first-world countries, as the OP specifies, is simply that in a situation of nutritional abundance where we can get all the food we need without killing animals, killing animals for food becomes unnecessary and therefore immoral.
Like I said, I’m not a vegetarian myself, so I’m not sitting here trying to shame anybody else for eating meat. But if you’re acting like you don’t understand, or have some kind of irrefutable argument against, the basic moral critique of human carnivory in a modern developed society with abundant food sources, you’re just making yourself look silly.