for the environment, a global vegan food production is roughly as good as a food production with a little bit of livestock. But in terms of animal rights, vegan food production is better. The point is: if we start from our current situation and we shift towards a vegan diet by decreasing our consumption of animal products, we will initially see both environmental, health and animal benefits. Up to some point, a further decrease of animal products will result in further animal rights benefits but no longer in environmental and health benefits. So, at this moment, a shift in diet generates a win-win-win situation.
It can mean that to you, while meaning different things to others. For example, I might want to use the per capita GDP as a measure of making the world a better place.
What metrics are you using to measure “increase health” and “decrease rights violations”? I agree they are admirable goals, but you need to define you terms to a fairly high level of detail before any of this can be evaluated.
Only if your audience recognizes animal rights as something that exists and merits consideration. That isn’t universal so that isn’t going to hold a lot of sway to large chunks of the population.
But a decrease in consumption of animal products is feasible in the short term and will result in environmental, health and animal benefits.
over time, in the long run, we could move towards complete veganism because there will be enough health and sustainable plant-based alternatives and veganism has a benefit in terms of animal rights.
but most meat eaters share moral values and basic intuitions, and if you put all those values on the table and construct a coherent ethical system without arbitrariness and inconsistencies, we will arrive at an ethical system that says that veganism is a moral duty. In other words: the vegan duty can be derived from the moral values that meat eaters already have. See (the summary of) my PhD thesis REDACTED
and my article REDACTED
but those people are against all kinds of prejudicial arbitrary discrimination, and speciesism is such an example of discrimination.
and do you believe that your ethical system is consistent?
yes, eating small amounts of fish, eggs, dairy and poultry is neutral. But now we eat too much animal products, so if we reduce our consumption, we initially see a health benefit for consumers.
It is universal: most people have a rights ethic, and most people are against discrimination. So most people believe that everyone has a basic right not to be used against ones will as merely a means. Especially mentally disabled human orphans have such a right. And no-one is able to point at morally relevant differences between those human orphans and pigs, cows or chickens. They are all equal in terms of mental capacities and interpersonal relations. So actually, we should give this basic right to everyone and everything in the universe, without arbitrary exceptions, without discrimination. We are not allowed to arbitrarily choose our victims and treat them in a way that they do not want.
some of my proposals, especially family planning and the green tax shift, might result in higher GDP per capita.
Increase in health can be measured in terms of increase in healthy life years (decrease in disability adjusted life years or DALY’s). The decrease in rights violations can be simply counted in terms of the number of individuals who are subject to rights violations. For biodiversity, we have metrics like species-years, comparable to healthy life years. Or indirectly, we can measure CO2-emissions, ecological footprints,… My three proposals decrease the global ecological footprint of humans.
So…because some individual members of H. sap. are approximately as sentient as a cow, that creates an ethical equivalence between humans as a species and cows as a species?
Nah, not buying that one.
How do you define “better”? I like meat. My world isn’t better if I can’t eat meat.
There is no such thing as a “win-win” measure. I don’t know what “win-win-win” means, but the term “win-win” implies a deal or decision where both sides benefit. Some of your economic proposals definitely have a negative economic impact associated with them. A “green tax” on resources and carbon emissions doesn’t necessarily equate to a “more efficient economy” or “more jobs”. It equates to companies absorbing the costs of externalities such as pollution or resource depletion. Those things do have benefits. But there are also unintended consequences. A tax on resources or production means goods and services would become more expensive. That disproportionally affects low income people.
Bwah? Are you really intending to say that a mentally disabled child is morally equivalent to a chicken? And that “no-one” is able to dispute that difference?
Sure they can. Pigs, cows, and chickens aren’t human. It may not be a convincing argument to you but it is to a majority of folks. If you plan on handwaving it away you’re not going to get anywhere.
There is a “morally relevant” difference, at least to most people – humans are people and animals aren’t. Since all moral systems are based on certain assumptions, as long as most people’s moral system necessarily values people more than animals as one of these assumptions (whether derived from religion or not), this argument will be ineffective to most.
As for the “everyone and everything in the universe”, this is just kind of ridiculous, considering the countless small organisms that are killed each moment by the very basics of human activity. Everyone draws the line somewhere, and “human” seems as good a place to me as “mammal” or “vertebrate” or “multicellular”.
(emphasis mine)If you are going to make incredibly silly(and demonstrably wrong) statements like these, then you might have some problems convincing anyone here.
Why do you insist to enforce your ideals and values on me ?
You sound like you would be Pol Pot, if you ever got dictator power. Herd everyone out of the cities and into the villages to raise all the food and anyone who disagrees with you rounded up and taken to the killing fields.
You’re making an argument that these are the three most important measures, why? How are they more important than other factors that would better the world? Can’t some of these things, particularly actions on limiting population and reducing our energy footprint be done in ways other than what you suggest?
I’d really like to see some cites for a lot of these claims. For instance, Vegans have a lower risk of chronic diseases than… who? Compared to a generic American diet, sure I can believe that, but what about a diet rich in fruits and vegetables with appropriate portions of meat? Further, you fail to mention any of the health issues associated with Veganism, only the benefits. For instance, while it is possible to get all the essential amino acids on a vegan diet, it is more difficult, and many vegans struggle to do so.
Also, as mentioned upthread, strictly speaking, veganism cannot feed more people. Yes, in general, the resources per calorie in meat is much higher, but there are significant portions of land where farming is simply impractical, but perhaps where goats, sheep, or other livestock can graze. The efficiency is lower there, but because it’s otherwise useless land, it’s still best to get meat, dairy, or eggs out of that land. This is similarly true for fishing, we’re not going to extract calories any other way meaningfully from our oceans, lakes, and rivers.
And speaking of which, as far as dangers go, a lot of that is associated with certain types, and as far as safety goes, people would be less willing to do it if the demand and/or price were to drop.
I do absolutely agree with issues regarding animal suffering, but asking people not to eat meat isn’t a reasonable solution to the problem because, well, most of us aren’t willing to give up meat. I’d rather see us take steps to improve the quality of life and the humaneness of the slaughtering. Given an option between, say, free-range and humanely slaughtered meat vs. meat that isn’t, I will prefer the former unless the price difference is unrealistic.
And I, like many other meat eaters, and not driven by any sort of moral arguments that it’s “wrong” to eat meat, as we evolved as such. In fact, I think it’s unlikely we’d be as smart and as dominant as we are now had we not evolved to eat meat. It’s probably an aside to the argument here, since you’re not making it, but as such, I’m just flat unwilling to give it up.
In most developed countries, we already have cheap, high quality contraceptives. Look at the fertility rates in developed countries, many are below replacement levels, in many cases well below. Overpopulation just isn’t that much of an issue because of this, and the lesser developed nations have much bigger issues, like getting proper nutrition, education, and health care to poorer parts of the world and improving human rights. Telling them to have less babies and giving them birth control isn’t going to fix their immediate problems, and people living in extreme poverty are going to care about 20 or 30 years in the future if they can’t feed themselves now, and in many cases will hurt them in the shorter term because having children can help improve the lives of those struck by extreme poverty.
The real question we should be asking is why birth rates are lower in developed countries, why are people CHOOSING to have fewer children? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you give people birth control if they’re unwilling or unable to use it. That’s a choice here, in the US and other developed countries, not so much elsewhere.
A lot of assertions here with little substance, even your one link you provide has a lot of subjective words in here like income from owning a resource is “undeserved” or that the wealth of previous generations “belongs to the community”. How exactly to you plan to implement these sorts of taxes in a way that’s remotely feasible? I also find it interesting that there’s cites for the other two sections of your link, but absolutely none for this last section because, quite frankly, it seems to fly in the face of pretty much all economic theory I’m familiar with.
So we’re going to tax natural resources and provide goods, services, and a basic income to everyone. That sounds nice in theory, but it’s justified that taxation on labor is basically theft. Okay, but how do we take these resources currently owned by individuals or corporations and give them back to everyone but by taking it from them? If we don’t take it from them, we’ll have to generate a HUGE sum of money to purchase it, but why would they sell when all the wealth they accumulate will just get taken from them when they die anyway? In short, what’s the incentive for the wealthy to buy into this system, because they sure as hell won’t do it voluntarily.
And for the working class, the idea of a basic income is great, but what’s then their incentive to work for a corporation? The taxation on the resources will presumably go as high as the market will bear, which increases people’s basic income, which reduces their desire to work, which reduces the ability of corporations to develop those resources, which reduces their ability to pay that, which means everyone’s basic income is reduced forcing them to work. When you really work all this out, it seems to be shifting the tax burden to the corporations, but it’s far more regressive than that.
What’s going to stop corporations from doing price fixing on various resources? If the large corporations buy up the significant portions of resources and collude to keep prices low, they can basically make everyone’s basic income and government services so low as to be nearly non-existent, and thus their price fixing of the resources is tantamount to owning them in all but name. Then we’re back to the system we have now, except with even less funding for government systems.
In short, this whole system stinks of communism, and it will get exploited by the wealthy and powerful just as it was historically.
Win-win implies pareto optimal outcomes. That there is no downside. I don’t think this is the case for all of your proposals.
Even if I were inclined to agree with you, which I am not, this…
…dooms your thesis. Humans as a whole are quite incapable of constructing a coherent ethical system without arbitrariness and inconsistencies. As evidence I point to…everything. Utopias are doomed to failure by the inherent bundle of contradictions that is humanity.
Some lichens and sparse herbs/berries (mostly for flavour) but yes, traditional Inuit diet is mostly animal-based. That’s what all three of them told me, anyway.
Non-arbitrary ethics is quite the non-starter, anyway. 90% of morality is arbitrary while the rest is purely utilitarian, therefore amoral.
I can.
Pigs, cows, and chickens are not human.
If you want to find out about the morality of chickens, go stick a new rooster or hen in a pen that already has both, cold turkey(hee hee), and watch what happens.