I don’t justify my meat-eating on the basis of chickens being lesser beings (or rather, being lesser beings is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition).
I justify it partly on the basis that I am hoping that the chicken has not suffered at all. I only buy free range and what I am ideally getting is a chicken that has lead as full a life as it is capable and then was killed painlessly at what was pretty much the end of its life anyway. OK, it’s naive, but that’s the idea, anything that detracts from that makes meat-eating less moral IMO.
But how can this apply to humans, because for humans to lead full lives and not suffer they generally require freedom…
I guess if a super-being offered humans the choice of being eaten (and hear me out here…), where being eaten means you live in a virtual paradise your whole life, and only when you reach extreme old age are you killed painlessly and eaten…I would not consider the alien’s actions to be immoral.
No, seriously. I’m appalled. I’m an unabashed carnivore, and you guys are single(group)handedly making me rethink that choice. If carnivorism commits one to such virtual psychopathy as what I am seeing here, then include me out.
Let me try to say this more logically.
The argument running implicitly through these threads seems to be:
When it comes to questions about what should eat what, moral categories are inapplicable. So the only questions to ask are practical and legal ones. (And legal questions are just another kind of practical question when you come down to it.) Hence any X that wants to eat any Y is justified in doing so if X finds it worth the trouble to solve whatever practical problems may be attendant on trying to eat Y.
But this is to suggest that in a lawless situation where some humans are helplessly at the mercy of other humans, then if the strong humans want to eat the helpless humans, the strong humans are justified in doing so. This is not a slippery slope argument. I am claiming that the posts I quoted above are committed to this view. Their logic entails that humans may eat other humans if they find it convenient and desirable to do so. Indeed, some of the posts basically say this out loud, for example the one referring to the difficulties of keeping humans in cages.
Of course, just mentioning an apparently distasteful consequence of an argument doesn’t refute that argument. I am suggesting that from the existence of the distasteful consequence, we can safely bet that the argument goes wrong somewhere. But that’s not to say where the argument goes wrong.
Where does the argument go wrong? For one thing I can’t see how you would justify the premise that there can be no moral question as to what should eat what? I certainly can’t find a clear one in the posts in this thread. And I’m at a loss to supply one on your behalf. Of course there can be a moral question as to what eats what. Some acts of eating necessarily involve acts that are morally wrong–for example, the act I already mentioned–killing a human being for the purpose of eating it without its consent.
Perhaps the argument assumes that when an act is determined by biology, moral judgments of the act are inapplicable. But what does it mean for an act to be determined by biology? The fact that I breathe is determined by biology, in the sense that my biological makeup requires it for my survival. But my diet is determined by biology only in the sense that it is one of a very large set of possible diets such that no member of that set is necessary for my survival, though it is necessary for my survival that some member of that set be my diet. Which diet I make my diet is up to me. Moreover, I have the capacity to choose not to have any diet. Being a naturalist, I take this capacity to be “determined by biology” as well. What “biology determines” is very complicated and open, for lizards much less for humans. And it is this fact–that biological determinism is compatible with the capacity for considerable variance as to how an organism chooses to act out its biologically determined drives–that shows how wrong it is to think that something’s being biologically determined makes moral categories inapplicable to it. My breathing’s non-moral character isn’t due to its biological determinedness, but rather, to its unavoidability for me. But my carnivorous diet is not unavoidable for me. And neither would my cannabilistic diet be unavoidable, if I had one. I have the capacity to decide whether to eat what. Even if this capacity is itself part of my biological makeup, that makes it no less a moral capacity. If biological determinedness makes this a non-moral capacity, then I don’t have any moral capacities (since everything about me is as biologically determined as my ability to choose my diet). But I do have moral capacities. (A lot of dopers want to make moral considerations a subspecies of rational means-to-ends reasoning. That’s fine. You can read my claim that I have moral capacities under that rubric, the argument still goes through, as follows. If the rationale for engaging in moral reasoning doesn’t apply concerning my choice of diet because my diet is biologically determined, then the rationale for engaging in moral reasoning doesn’t apply to any of my choices because all of my choices are as biologically determined as my choice of diet. But the rationale for engaging in moral reasoning does apply to some of my choices.)
Seriously, Dopers, you can do better than what I’ve seen so far in this thread. Please don’t make me go veg.
My own response is to fight the hypothetical. I don’t think a being like the one you describe is possible. Nothing can feel love and sorrow more deeply than a human can, because humans feel such emotions as deeply as they are capable of being felt. And Beethoven’s 9th can not seem like a tired cliche to any sentient being that understands it, because to think it is a tired cliche is ipso fact not to understand it.
Totally parochial viewpoint, I know, but there it is.
I tend to think there is a difference between biological interest and rational interest. Every animal has a biological interest in survival. But I try not to eat things that have a rational interest in survival. Meanwhile, many non-human animals have a rational interest in not suffering. (Even if they can not concieve of suffering in general, once they themselves are suffering, they can concieve of the suffering as something they wish to escape from.) And I hope not to eat anything whose rational interest in not suffering has been violated. (I’m a hypocrite about this, though. But I’m just expressing the ideal.)
Whether a thing has rational interests or not is not relative to an observer. No matter how “superior” a being may be to me, its superiority will have no effect on the matter of whether or not I have rational interests in survival and not suffering and so on. And it is the presence of these rational interests that makes it wrong to kill me for food without my consent.
I agree with Frylock post #22. You’ve all made a bunch of arguments for cannibalism. Now excuse me, but I’m getting hungry and there are a lot of slow fat children in this neighborhood.
Although it is true that farming plants kills as few animals as is currently possible, thus meeting moral test in a practical, real-world way.
Whether plants are “creatures” is subject to debate. You may see it as undifferentiated from eating animals, but many people do not share your dismissive opinion.
However, between “eating plants and animals” and “eating only plants” it’s crystal-clear which one involves more suffering.
The point I’m trying to make is that wherever you draw your line in the sand, it’s always arbitrary. A vegan swatting a mosquito trying to bite him is my usual line, but if you want a “lesser creature we kill when we think they may feel pain and anguish”, you’ve got rats. No one wants to live with a rodent infestation, not even vegans ;). No matter what kind of life you lead, your existence is always and will always be at the expense and suffering of someone or something else’s.
So, farmers cull bugs and birds and boars that’d like to eat the crop or inhabit the crop’s geographical location. Does that make the “ethical price” of the crop any better than letting cows graze in that spot, live as happy a cow life as can be construed (although I would imagine the cows would enjoy getting a lot more sex, if they had a say ) and then killing them by surprise and as painlessly as possible ?
Yes, yes, I know that’s the Disney version, and that in reality most meat farming involves gruesome living conditions for the livestock. I happen to be against that. But herding and meat eating per se ? Nah. Or rather, yeah, maybe. I’ll worry about animal suffering once we’ve dealt with human suffering, which is a lot closer to me. It’s all very well to pity the plight of the noble cow, but I’m more concerned about the noble bum freezing alive in my very street. Him I’m sure does understand his suffering perfectly.
And finaly, while it’s hard to imagine and may even seem preposterous to think plant may feel pain or anguish… who’s to say ? A thousand years ago, no one imagined animals did. Maybe in a thousand years, we’ll find a sentient plant who’ll give us an angry speech about our cruelty to salads. They have no central nervous system, and no discernable way of feeling or expressing anything, but plants are certainly living, breathing things. A number of studies have been conducted in order to determine whether or not they were aware of their surroundings, or reacted to outside stimuli - so it’s not so clear cut, is it ?
In a more anecdotical sense, I remember watching a short movie that depicted a woman gardening in a perfect, peaceful suburbian garden. Except the director had added sound effects of pain whenever she cut branches off, killed weeds, etc… IIRC, the carrot was the one that used the Wilhelm Scream when pulled out of the ground. It was quite a startling little film, really.
Here’s the key question: Is the carnivore basing his argument on the chicken’s absolute mental capacity, or on its capacity relative to his own?
Does the argument go like this?
Premise #1: There is a certain level of mental capacity, of ability to think and/or feel, above which it is immoral to eat the possessor of that mental capacity. It is immoral to eat anything above that threshold (like a human being) but not anything below that threshold (like a canteloupe).
Premise #2: A chicken falls below the “do not eat” threshold in mental capacity.
Conclusion: Therefore, there is nothing inherently wrong with eating a chicken.
If this is the argument, then the existence of a being superior to humans is irrelevant. And the argument is valid—that is, if you agree with the premeses, you have to agree with the conclusion.
On the other hand, if Premise #1 is changed to make the criterion one of relative mental capacity—where the threshold is a matter of relative difference between the eater’s and eatee’s ability to think and/or feel—then it is equally moral or immoral for the human to eat the chicken as it is for the superior being to eat the human.
Not at all. What I, at least, am saying that the specific argument in the OP is a flimsy post-hoc justification. People who eat don’t eat meat because the meat is a “lesser” being. They eat it because, for one reason or another, they are just not bothered by the fact that the being ended up dead on their plate. This could be because they are insulated from the slaughter process by layers of distance and styrofoam packaging; this could be because they figure if the death was clean and painless they figure it’s fine (even if they had to shoot the thing in the head themself); it could be because they just don’t give a damn about the animal and think the animal is tasty.
But nobody is serously like, “Hmm, I wonder if that steak was having a fulfilling life back before it was bonked on the head. Hmmmm…I deduce it didn’t, so I can eat it. That pork next to it though, that came from a highly intelligent and emotionally complex piggy, so it’s incumbent upon me not to eat it.” If they claim to have thought this, or anything close, I’m betting they’re lying - I bet such a person wouldn’t be eating any kind of meat in the first place. They’d only eat things that don’t inspire them to ask such questions or think such thoughts.
The OP didn’t pretend otherwise. Rather than saying that a chicken’s lesser stature is a reason to eat meat, he suggested someone might adduce that lesser stature as a justification for eating meat (do you see the difference between a justification and a reason?) after someone has presented them an argument that they shouldn’t eat meat because it involves unjustified killing. (Read the first sentence of the argument, beginning with the word “suppose,” if you don’t believe me.) In other words, someone might mention the lesser status as a rebuttle to an argument. The OP doesn’t suggest that anyone goes around thinking to himself, apropos of no argument to the contrary, " Aha, that’s a lesser creature. I can eat it!"
Your own argument,
is an example of a very similar rebuttle. You’re doing much like the very thing the OP says people might plausibly do. In the face of an argument that meat eating is wrong, you justified the practice by reference to people’s evaluation as to whether the meat’s suffering merits consideration.
You don’t think thoughts like this are what inspire people to buy only free range animals and take other steps to ensure the animals they eat were treated and killed humanely?
People may be bad at applying these ideas consistently, but you’re claiming no one even seriously entertains these ideas? Are you sure about that?
I will add that I don’t think anybody ever does argue that a greater difference in mental capacity is what makes killing/eating okay. Under this assumption, a fox who ate a chicken would be more immoral than a person who did so. It would conceivably be okay for a human being to eat a fish, but not for a fish to eat another fish.
I specifically mentioned that there are people who eat the meat because “they are just not bothered by the fact that the being ended up dead on their plate […]because they figure if the death was clean and painless they figure it’s fine”. If such people aren’t satisfied with how the animal was treated in the process of bringing it to their dinner table, they wouldn’t be eating the meat, would they?
The problem is that much of the above is factually wrong, despite sounding reasonable.
The cows are not killed by surprise, nor painlessly. More to the point, they don’t graze – or not enough to reduce tilling land for animal feed. 70% of crops in the US are grown as animal feed, so you’ve got the exact same problem with tilling that land as you do with tilling for vegetables for human consumption, PLUS the deaths of the cattle and chickens and whatnot. AND the plants, if that’s what you believe. So animal agriculture irreducibly involves more deaths and suffering than horticulture for veggie food.
As far as worrying about animal suffering when we’ve dealt with human suffering, that’s a very arbitrary line itself. I mean, why worry about the people in Darfur when we have yet to stop child abuse here? Why go out for entertainment when suffering is happening? Why even work for a living? We should all identify the single worst thing we can think of and then do nothing of any kind other than working tirelessly to eliminate it.
See, it’s a false analogy, devised to let one’s conscience off the hook. The fact that there’s one kind of identifiable suffering going on doesn’t mean all the rest can or should be ignored; it doesn’t mean we can’t do anything else until that one problem is entirely solved. I get this comment sometimes when protesting a puppy mill – people ask us how we can possibly DARE to be doing anything other than helping abused children or fighting abortion or whatever. There’s a wine store right next to the protest site; these people usually have an armload of wine bottles or a keg in a cart while they’re telling us we should be dropping everything else to help children. :rolleyes:
I can watch what I eat and still help reduce human suffering when I’m not chewing. In fact, a surprising amount of human suffering comes from animal agriculture. See the UN report. Just to hit a few highlights, animal agro is the leading cause of rainforest deforestation, the leading cause of water pollution – water humans have to drink! – and produces more greenhouse gas than any other industry, including all transportation combined – so eating veggies does more to reduce global warming than buying a hybrid car…or even walking. And global warming will very soon be a leading cause of human suffering, unless you like having 20,000 displaced Bangladeshis in your house. When they get there, you will find it’s a lot cheaper and a better use of arable land to feed them plants. And you can bring that bum inside too, he deserves a veggie burger just as much as the Bangladeshis.
Meat farming is a very inefficient use of arable land and water resources, feeding fewer people than we could otherwise. It takes 16 lbs grain and 30 gallons of water for a pound of beef. See here for one of many available citations. Since we’re farming those plants anyway, killing plant pests anyway, and then killing the animal we’ve produced, in order to feed fewer humans at greater expense and cost to the environment, none of your arguments hold up – not consideration of animal, plant, human, fiscal, or environmental well-being.
Now if you’re arguing that “it doesn’t matter what we do because there’s some cruelty inherent in any method,” well, uh, what would we call that philosophy, Emo Fatalism?
Yeah, yeah, butchers are sadists who get off on torturing animals :rolleyes:.
Err, no. I really do believe one *should *dedicate one’s full time to eradicate suffering by order of proximity and magnitude. And it doesn’t appease my conscience at all that I don’t. Which is part of why I drink a lot.
Well, yes. They’re not being hypocritical - they just don’t give a fuck one way or the other. But the moral high ground you have on them for doing *something *rather than nothing doesn’t automatically mean this high ground is absolute. Would someone volunteering at a soup kitchen and berating you for demonstrating against a puppy mill be justified ? I believe she would, yes.
In other words, I feel much more guilty about not doing something about the bum down my block than doing nothing for the kids in Darfur than doing nothing for cute puppies.
No one deserves a veggie burger. Who are you, Ming the Merciless ?
I prefer to think of myself as a Desperate Bastard. I stopped cutting myself a long time ago
True, though I felt that fact was not germane to the point, which was to cut off Sailboat’s presumably deliberate attempt to sub an emotionally loaded word (‘scavenger’) for a complete value neutral one (‘carnivore’) by pointing out that he was incorrect.
Now, ‘predator’ is a loaded word, as well, but it’s put in opposition to the other loaded word, not the value neutral one. (And neither loaded word properly fits humans, anyway.)
First of all, you are not reading my post properly. Second, you are incorrect.
I never made any claim whatsoever in that post as to what humans are, I was simply correcting Sailboat’s incorrect point. ‘Scavenger’ is not used in contrast to ‘carnivore’, it’s used in contrast to ‘predator’.
However, while none of the three classifications in question - carnivore, predator, and scavenger - apply to humans, that’s because they are simply incorrect for us, not because we don’t fit into the general schema. Since we eat, we do, in fact, have dietary habits, which are, in fact, describable in the same system as the dietary habits of all other animals.
We are omnivores (meaning we have a mostly unrestricted diet), who have a method of food acquisition that doesn’t fit neatly into either predation or scavenging.
It It seems to me that there are two parts to the question. The act of eating and the taking of a life are both involved. These are very different things. I would have difficulty consuming a fellow human, but have no problem consuming a fish; it is just a matter of taste. However, when it comes to taking a life, I have difficulty taking any life, from the simplest bacteria, to my most complex fellow human. Fortunately I am able to get over this problem since I can not remain alive myself without taking other lives.
) and then killing them by surprise and as painlessly as possible ?