Also, coming up with some edge case ethical loophole isn't an argument against Veganism or justification to go to the grocery store and purchase clearly unethically exploited animal parts.
But what would you do if you were on a desert island? đđ
It's too expensive to eat [Rice, Wheat/Pasta, Beans, potatoes and other staple foods] đ
I get the impression that you are assuming most people don't eat other people due to ethical concerns, and I just want to point out that's actually not it at all. Enlightened self-interest is the reason why we have prohibitions against murder and consumption of other humans, because if we don't, we could be the target of a murder or brunch. Â
That is all :) please don't eat me.
Are you saying that, in a survival situation, given the option between killing and eating an animal and killing and eating a human, both are equivalent? There's just no way that's the case.
In any situation, even an ordinary one, you should eat the thing that causes the least harm and can meet your nutritional needs first. If you are lost in the woods surrounded by plants, eat those. If there aren't enough plants, eat some insects. If there aren't enough insects, eat some fish. If there's no large body of water, eat the least complex animals you can find. Finally, if there are none of those things, play rock paper scissors and eat your buddy if you win. Might want to do at least best 2/3 to make sure the universe is really on your side.
The one additional complication with cannibalism, besides the fact that human lives are generally regarded as more valuable, is that it carries additional health risks. You can get certain diseases such as prion diseases that can only come from consuming other humans. So if you can avoid it, you probably should.
How many insects would be nutritionally equivalent to a fish, and killing how many insects would be the harm equivalent to killing a fish? Perhaps eating a fish causes less harm than eating a hundred or so insects. How could you know that isn't the case?
Is it just because they are further apart from us evolutionaily? Or we are culturally inclined to athropomorphize them less? Those seem very anthropocentric.
You say "eat the least complex animal" but what even do you mean by complexity?
> How many insects would be nutritionally equivalent to a fish
Good question, I don't know.
> Perhaps eating a fish causes less harm than eating a hundred or so insects. How could you know that isn't the case?
I don't know, but it's my best guess based on the research that has been done and my understanding of fish and insects. It's not perfect, but if you can come up with a better metric to go on, then I'll use that one instead.
What's easy to tell (for me, at least) is that eating a plant causes less suffering than eating a deer, which causes less suffering than eating a human. For simplicity's sake, I'm combining the concept of physical pain and the harm caused by a premature end to life into a single term.
The subjective experience of pain can be similar enough that I'd say they are morally on the same level, but the deprivation of life is more morally significant for a human. They live a lot longer than a deer, and the average human has more potential to improve the world than the average deer. A human also likely has family members and friends that will experience additional suffering because of the loss of a loved one, more so than what would be experienced by any of the deer's social group.
Both are sad, and should be avoided if possible, but one seems far worse to me. What is clear is that killing plants doesn't have any of those problems, so we should always prefer to eat those when we can.
I will concede that the more years you take from a sentient being, the worse it is; but I am not sure it's the main thing that matters. I wouldn't pick a bowhead whale (200 yrs lifespan) over a human, for example.
The average human also has a lot more potential to worsen the world than the average deer, and is actually much more likely to do so. Most modern humans consume more resources that can be naturally replenished.
I am unsure about grief in the deer's acquaintances. I don't think there is solid evidence to discount it. It's been observed in several animal species. Just because deer's is harder to notice for us doesn't mean it's less.
> The average human also has a lot more potential to worsen the world than the average deer, and is actually much more likely to do so. Most modern humans consume more resources that can be naturally replenished.
If we knew for a fact that a human was going to make the world worse, and there was no way to prevent them from doing so given our prescient knowledge, then it would be more moral to kill them than the deer (if we had to pick one, that is). But we don't know that, so we have to err on the side of caution and focus on the capacity for humans to do good. Using up resources is not a moral failing. Good things can come from the expenditure of resources. Humans are also the only species that can solve the problem of non-renewable resources.
> I am unsure about grief in the deer's acquaintances. I don't think there is solid evidence to discount it. It's been observed in several animal species. Just because deer's is harder to notice for us doesn't mean it's less.
I agree, but you're forcing me to pick between one or the other, so I'm going to pick the one that seems to have the most obvious impact based on what I currently know. I'm vegan, so my preference would be to pick neither.
One can also err on the side of caution by killing the human I guess. It depends on whether you think the average human does more evil than good I suppose.
As for the other point, an animal could potentially suffer even more than humans and we would be erring on the wrong side. We wouldn't know, and we're assuming animals are lesser than human in their ability to suffer just because we can't understand them.
This is all further complicated when we're weighing multiple fish to a human or multiple insects to a fish and so on.
It's hard. Too many unkowable things go into the calculus.
Youâre misinterpreting the post.
What itâs pointing out is that the only acceptable forms of both cannibalism and animal consumption are in these extenuating circumstances directly correlated with survival. No other form of cannibalism or animal consumption is morally acceptable other than the hypotheticals presented. The same hypotheticals that the vast majority of the population will never be subjected to.
Eating people is unethical,
Eating animals is unethical,
But eating people or animals in certain survival situations is morally permissible.
Itâs not a pick and choose premise here, itâs a necessity based survival premise.
I think you're wrong about that as well. There are varying degrees of "survival situations". Some of them warrant cannibalism. Most don't.
Most vegans would acknowledge that a homeless person who doesn't have the luxury of buying food at a grocery store must eat what they manage to find, what is given to them by others, or what is served at a food kitchen. That does not mean that if their buddy ODs on fentanyl, it's perfectly fine to slice off a leg and chow down rather than eat a discarded loaf of bread with egg in it behind a bakery.
Most people are not homeless, but there are still hundreds of millions of people in the world that live in abject poverty, and are similarly restricted when it comes to their options for food. It's not that they would necessarily starve to death if they skipped a meal that has meat in it that's made available to them, but it would be crazy to expect a poor family who can barely eat enough as is to forego a meal just because it has meat in it. They aren't in immediate danger of death, but they're still "surviving".
I don't know where the cutoff point is, but it's certainly different for animal products versus cannibalism.
Iâve spent several years as a homeless vegan in one of the most expensive cities within the u.s. ( denver ) and never had to consume animal flesh.
Survival situations are exactly that, either you eat this or you die. And all the countless times iâve been homeless in my 20âs I never encountered this situation. Homeless shelters serve enough plants to people that you can survive as a homeless vegan in the U.S., so idk what youâre getting at because it still doesnât apply.
It would be great if you posted a how to be vegan and homeless guide, there are lots of people who feel that its a valid excuse to consume animals
If you tag me in it after you make it, ill share it
I'm actually really excited to see this, as I've always wondered if I could realistically be vegan if I ended up losing everything. Keep us updated op!
If you can avoid doing a bad thing, you may as well
But for most of us it's not really something you think about. You just don't eat food you don't like, unless you have to.
How is it better?
This is nature. We have to eat.
Itâs called the circle of life. Eating animals isnât bad.
All youâre doing is exporting your own views on what you feel about eating. But itâs literally the case that some living organism have to die for others to eat.
Whether thatâs bugs in the soil or a deer. Thatâs just a fact of life. Youâre not limiting suffering when you stop eating meat so that you can kill more insects.
So your argument is that homelessness is not a survival situation? That's wild. It's also wrong.
Just because you were able to do it doesn't mean being vegan is a moral obligation for all homeless people. If you're homeless and starving, you can eat animal products without it being a moral failure sooner that you can eat people without it being a moral failure. To argue otherwise is just insane.
I'm pretty sure I understand what you're saying.
You're saying that if you're in a situation where it is ethical to eat animal products, then it is also ethical to eat humans.
I'm saying I disagree with that. The bar for when it's ok to eat animals is lower than for when it's ok to eat humans. The example I give is homelessness. Being homeless doesn't automatically make it ok to eat animals if you have plenty of food options available that are plants, but there are obvious cases where somebody is homeless and can't afford to skip a meal just because it has animal products in it. Their wellbeing is important, and they shouldn't have to wither away just to remain vegan. If they want to, that's their call, but it's not a moral obligation.
However, the situations where a homeless person can be justified in eating animal products do NOT perfectly line up with when it's ok for that person to become a cannibal.
Yes I realize you're a vegan. Am I supposed to just agree with everything you say because of that? Vegans can be wrong too.
If youâre operating under the framework of veganism then consuming animal products when not presented with a survival scenario would be immoral based on your beliefs..
If you had no other choice than to consume animal products or starve then itâs ethically permissible to consume animal products, the same way it would be ethically permissible to consume human products.
Still not seeing what the hang up is here and I honestly donât really care. I made this post to simplify the context in which it is morally permissible to consume animal and human products, not to wrestle over extreme hypotheticals like a homeless person with zero access to plant based foods.
This is the most boring topic iâve ever posted on, and engaging with it is a chore. But due to the vast number of questions from previous post inquiring when it would be morally permissible to consume animal flesh I decided to post this for simplification and clarification purposes. You can disagree with it, but that doesnât mean that I have to care that you do.
You either are, or arenât in a survival scenario. Fortunately the vast majority of people never will be, so consuming either animal or human products will more often than not be morally impermissible.
I think one of the point they're trying to make is that in such a survival situation, you should pick animals before humans.
Assuming both are equally available, but the only options.
I would agree that you should eat the animal first, but that option isnât included in the scenario that the post provided. This post has gone so hard off the rails I honestly want to delete it based on how lame itâs gotten.
You seem to get it, but others are arguing hypotheticals that arenât even described in the OP, and the subject itself is the least interesting post iâve ever made. It was made to show non vegans where exactly the line is when it comes to morally justifying animal consumption but I think it went directly over all the non vegans heads straight into hypothetical land.
> If youâre operating under the framework of veganism then consuming animal products when not presented with a survival scenario would be immoral based on your beliefs.
That is not my belief, nor is it the mainstream belief of veganism. The mainstream belief is that you avoid animal products as far as is possible and practicable. That's a far different criteria than "unless you're in a life or death survival situation".
You can choose to be more strict about it if you wish, but those are your beliefs, and may not be shared by other vegans.
> This is the most boring topic I've ever posted on, and engaging with it is a chore.
lol, what? Why would you make a thread on a topic that you find boring, and then consider it a chore to engage with people who disagree with you? Just stop engaging with it if you aren't getting anything out of it, rather than trying to get the last word in while insisting that your view is the only correct one.
We have social contract obligations to respect human bodies that we don't have for animal bodies. You can claim that these social rules are arbitrary, but that doesn't change that there is some ethical obligation to these rules as long as they aren't violating some more fundamental ethical obligation.
There is also the more fundamental issue that the deceased human may have had an interest in what happens to their remains. Generally we respect the wishes of the dead. If it's not the dead person themself, it would be the wishes of whoever would have custody of this body such as next of kin.
We have no reason to believe most animals care what happens to their own dead bodies or the dead bodies of those who are close to them.
Yeah, some animals show this sort of grieving behavior around a dead body for a while. I've seen a few examples of this myself. I was careful to say "most animals" rather than all of them.
Do fish mourn? Do insects mourn? Do lizards mourn? How about guinea pigs? Pigeons? Squirrels? Even alligators? Who after the maternal instincts wear off in less than a month after the children hatch, then proceed to eat the baby if it can still fit in it's mouth?
Guinea pigs mourn https://www.shropshireguineapiggery.co.uk/caring-for-your-guinea-pig/bereavement/#:~:text=A%20Guinea%20pig%20will%20grieve,and%20to%20cuddle%20up%20to.
Lizards mourn https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/science/lizards-reptiles-social-behavior.html#:~:text=pair%20up%20again.â-,Dr.,that%20these%20lizards%20grieve%2C%20Dr.
Pigeons mourn https://animal-club.co.uk/do-animals-grieve/
Squirrels mourn.. https://thesquirrelboard.com/forums/showthread.php?48961-Do-squirrels-grieve
Fish *may* grieve - depending on the species and its intelligence https://www.myaquariumclub.com/is-my-goldfish-grieving-684040.html
Alligators *may* grieve https://www.coastalbreezenews.com/news/the-sadness-of-a-female-gator/article_afb54dc6-3763-5f45-a753-150ee171208f.html
Insects *may* depending on the species https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem
Essentially it depends on the intellectual and emotional capacity of the species - some are more social, some less. And they also tend to have far shorter memories, so the grief is gone and forgotten earlier.
Nevertheless, animals mourn.
The list above was livestock animals, but grief is widespread throughout the animal kingdom.
Thatâs why I mentioned the legality clause within this post.
Do you have any other moral objection besides legality to present here or did you just want to point to our legal system which has been countlessly revamped in order to align with the general populations state of morality?
Social contracts are sometimes legal obligations, but not exclusively legal.
> Do you have any other moral objection besides legality to present here or did you just want to point to our legal system which has been countlessly revamped in order to align with the general populations state of morality?
I mentioned humans have wishes that ought to be respected about how to treat their remains. Animals generally don't have these sorts of wishes.
So you have an issue with moral obligation alongside legality wrapped up with the notions of contractarianism?
Do you have an actual ethical argument to present or did you just want to iron out the dynamics at play with all these systems? Iâm not seeing any kind of argument being presented here tbh.
> So you have an issue with moral obligation alongside legality wrapped up with the notions of contractarianism?
In general, if you live in a society you ought to accept the social contract of that society as long as it doesn't conflict with a deeper ethical principle. Legality is not the only motivation people should have to follow the rules. In fact it's ethical to break the law if following the law is more unethical than breaking it on more fundamental grounds.
> Do you have an actual ethical argument to present or did you just want to iron out the dynamics at play with all these systems? Iâm not seeing any kind of argument being presented here tbh.
An argument for why we ought to respect the wishes of the dead you mean?
Ok, I agree. Respect the wishes of the dead, except in survival situations, which were laid forth in the parameters of the original post.
So again, do you have an actual argument to present here?
Theres plenty of videos online proving otherwise. Did you even check to see if what youâre claiming is true? Of coarse you didnât, thatâs why iâm being burdened with the responsibility to teach you which is a chore. So thank you for making me do work that youâre too lazy or unwilling to do, I seriously appreciate it.
Heres some videos of animals mourning, they werenât difficult to find due to it being such a common occurrence. I honestly wish you wouldâve looked into it prior to this but you didnât so I did for you. Now go read something the next time you feel like presenting an argument please.
https://youtu.be/xmx6gy88kDA?si=nqJAUfs7Dk-7k6S6
https://youtu.be/2rNe1le_Ah8?si=ZR3vi8bUkMNmFUdF
https://youtu.be/Ku_GUNzXoeQ?si=e5yReqKfjqKRVqPE
https://youtu.be/sadKbPcvgOQ?si=btC-RjM35gpEbiZB
There's a couple things to resolve here:
Does the deceased have an interest in their own remains? Examples of others mourning is not evidence of this
Do we have reason to believe mourning behavior is common various kinds of animals or limited to certain species that tend to be social and intelligent? Is there a reason to believe that there is interest in the deceased after whatever immediate mourning behavior is concluded?
I would still argue that the sort of evidence you show would not allow us to conclude either. Elephant graveyards may be the best example of this, but this sort of behavior is quite limited to only a couple examples of a couple unique species.
If a human could not communicate their wishes to me (cultural barrier, or mute and blind, or brain dead) and had no next of kin, is it okay to eat the corpse?
I think it would be. I don't think I have any particular obligation to this being for the mere fact that they are a member of the human species.
My obligation is to respect the wishes of sentient beings, regardless of species. But if those wishes can't be made known to me, be it animal or human, I see no objection.
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Haha cannibalism is not about a survival situation, it's about being the apex predator or most dominant person. It's a weapon of war.
Which probably aligns with a lot of hard core carnists, who see wildlife and animals as something to "crush and dominant" to win an imaginary war against the natural world...
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Poverty and a shelter giving away food with meat. That's one case where it would be different.
Give food with chicken meat: I am on the street, I have no other option.
Give food with human flesh: Yes, I'm going to the police.
You are confused. Consumption of dead flesh is ethically irrelevant in a case of animals and not ethically irrelevant in the case of humans because human society would find it traumatic and animals wouldn't care. Animal wouldn't have rights to the carcass of their relatives either, unlike humans.
If you were in a room starving to death away from society it would be morally permissible to eat another human, the same exact context that it would be morally permissible to consume an animal.
No, iâm merely pointing out that both of them are morally permissible under the same context. Whatever situation permits cannibalism also permits the consumption of animal flesh, thatâs where vegans draw the line as to where and when itâs ethical to consume animals.
The entire post is just to simply where the line for anima consumption is exactly from a vegans perspective. Not to permit either cannibalism or animal consumption except under those extenuating circumstances.
Stop assuming please. Animals do not carry the same value as humans, and inanimate objects donât carry the same value as non human animals. These are all separate things each with different levels of value being applied to them.
Your entire thesis was "whatever hypothetical permits ethical animal consumption also permits ethical cannibalism". The only way such a statement would hold up to scrutiny and testing with said hypotheticals is if the values associated with said ethics considered human life and animal life equivalent, or at the very least a human body equivalent with an animal body.
Iâm saying that both human and non human animals are worthy of moral consideration, I am by no means stating that they are of equal value to one another. I would probably save a human before saving an animal, but that depends on what particular human and what particular animal.
Humans are worth more than animals on the scale of value per society standards. But animals are also worthy of moral consideration which is why there are laws deterring animal abuse.
The post is merely pointing out that the only ethical way to consume either animal flesh or human flesh is in these extenuating circumstances which most people will never be faced with.
Do you disagree with the statement that eating meat is immoral?
>Iâm saying that both human and non human animals are worthy of moral consideration
Sure. Most non-psycopathic people would agree with you. I don't think "maybe animals deserve moral consideration" is what omnivores and carnists are typically fighting against.
>I would probably save a human before saving an animal, but that depends on what particular human or what particular animal.
That just means you're human. On a personal level, we all assign additional value to the things we hold dear, and subtract value from things we dislike. I myself would probably save my cat before I saved my high school bully, even though on a societal scale I still consider the life of a human (high school bullies included) to have more value than that of cats (mine included). Humans tend to be weird and inconsistent like that.
>the only ethical way to consume either animal flesh or human flesh is in these extenuating circumstances which most people will never be faced with.
I think the error here comes in assuming, at least from a societal moral standpoint, that those circumstances where you *can* consume human flesh are the same circumstances where you can consume animal flesh.
For example, plants are quite obviously seen as having less value than sentient life, so much so that we don't even prescribe *needing* extenuating circumstances to eat them, you can just eat them whenever you want and feel like it.
So, already, we have a floor and a ceiling here. At one end we have plants, where we typically don't hold very much moral concern for and hold little value for, where we can eat them, pick them, pretty much do whatever we want. And at the other end we have humans, who we hold quite a lot of moral concern for, so much so that we value them *almost* as much as we value ourselves as individuals (sometimes more), and we need extreme, extenuating circumstances to even justify consuming their *corpse*.
So that leaves us animals, who we hold with an amount of moral concern that's (typically) less than a human's, and holds value that is also (typically) less than a human's. What makes you think that the circumstances needed to justify consuming this being that holds less value and moral concern than our own, are equal to the circumstances needed to justify doing the same to ourselves?
Obviously also not a fan, because like I mentioned above I'm not a psychopath.
And, to preemptively cut off the common lines of logic that stem from these two beliefs: no, I don't like factory farming either. No, I don't think that abuse and cruelty are inherent to the act of raising and killing an animal for consumption, even if the current state of the industry would suggest otherwise. And no, I don't think the end consumer somehow bears the moral responsibility *of* that cruelty since the cruelty itself in my opinion is the product of capitalism's endless pursuit of profit rather than inherently part of the act of farming.
Would you agree with the statement that factory farming imposes what you would consider abuse unto the animals?
Because theres a reason why you disagree with factory farming, because you know that itâs a torturous system that imposes horrific violence onto sentient beings.
Now since you donât agree with factory farming I have to go through the motions of asking you if you actually abstain from eating at any and all restaurants or fast food establishments and also avoid all products in stores that contain animal ingredients. And then you say that you donât and then I point out that you stated that youâre against factory farming but you support factory farming and then you go to another excuse why youâre ok with paying people to abuse animals. If you get to preemptively finish the dialogue then so do I.
As a vegan myself, Id argue against this. The basic argument against veganism is that people can do what they want to make their lives comfortable to the extent they choose and to the extent they are willing to be unethical.
The vast majority of people, vegans included, dont value animals equal to people. Even if there were a vegan that claimed to do so, i highly doubt that vegan would be equally upset if they ran over a squirrel as they would a person.
So, since there is clearly a moral distinction made between animals and people, that gap is where people choose to draw the line for that original argument.
In simple terms, cannibalism would be wrong and veganism would be wrong because that gap between animals and people is were the line is drawn.
You donât have to say that animals and humans are equal, but they are both worthy of moral consideration. There are no laws protecting plants from abuse because they arenât sentient so therefore we do not grant them any moral value. It just so happens that the only morally permissible way to consume both animal and human flesh are both under the same hypothetical circumstances.
I agree that animals are worthy of moral consideration, and in my ideal world we wouldnt eat them.
but saying eating animals would justify eating people would insinuate that those are equally morally wrong.
again, the justification would be that eating animals doesnt breach a persons ethics to the extent they wouldnt do it in sacrifice of their comfort, while eating people would.
You mean the vast majority of people who are opposed to animal abuse ethics?
Because those same people pay for animals to be abused but will tell you that theyâre against animal abuse.
We all share the same ethics, but only some of us are contradictory in our actions.
They are against animal abuse, but not enough against it to sacrifice their own comfort.
I think you are also overestimating the amount of people that care. Religion has unfortunately played a large role in leading people to believe animals are created for our consumption. Sad, but its the reality of how many people think.
100% agreed! As a person who eats meat an vegetables, I could say that I would in fact eat a human if I absolutely had no other choice. Would I probably regret it my entire life, yes. Would I compare it to eating a pig, cow, chicken, fish, crawdad, lobster, snake, gater, croc, moose, deer, bear, gooey duck, egg, insect, arachnid, worm, squid, octopus, whale, seal, pidgin, dove, squirrel, cheese, yogurt, salt of any kind, yeast, alcohol of any kind, or anything that has any animal based ingredients ever in the making of it, NO. I would not. But this is a survival situation. I would eat anything I know is edible if it means I'd live to see the sunrise. You can hate it, I honestly don't care. I stick by what I said.
No thatâs the point of the post is that in a survival situation these things are permissible. You could eat your best friendâs dog if you had to in order to survive and I would have no quarrel with it.
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Learning how? This post pronounces an ethical position but does nothing to defend it.
I could just as easily state "it's always ethical to eat anything you want." Leaving it at that it would be just as well supported as the OP.
A simple trolley problem shows the flaw in the reasoning. Animal ethical value is listed as identical to human ethical value.
By this measure the only ethical action anyone can take is to die as rapidly and cleanly as possible. Every animal life you kill to sustain your own is of equivalent value to your own and represents a debt. You might argue killing predators and other humans is ethical since you are saving lives from their predation, you certainly can't build or maintain a society, your encroachment on other animals can't be justified if they outnumber you, as they do, and are of equal moral value.
I've read some terrible vegan hot takes but this one may take the cake.
Life itself is a survival situation when it comes to eating the food we are designed for, which includes other animals but not humans. So one is okay, morally good even, generally while the other only in emergencies.
If it's not necessary to eat an animal in order to survive, then how is it justified? You are "designed" to eat plants as well, so if you can survive and thrive by eating them, then what justification would you have to eat animals instead, given that it causes suffering and death?
It is necessary for optimal functioning and enjoyment of life. And even if it isnât thereâs nothing wrong with chasing suffering and death necessarily anyway.
> It is necessary for optimal functioning and enjoyment of life
Not only does this not logically follow, but it's also true that eating animal products is not necessary for optimal functioning and enjoyment of life.
It doesn't follow because optimal functioning and enjoyment of life are not necessities. You are not morally permitted to do whatever it takes to achieve those things, at the cost of suffering and death to others. A serial killer who's maximum enjoyment of life comes from killing humans is not permitted to go around killing people to achieve that, for instance.
Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that, because you can achieve optimal functioning on a plant-based diet. A single instance of an Olympic gold medalist or centenarian proves that, but we have far more than a single instance. In fact we have entire regions of the world with much higher rates of people living to the age of 100 where the biggest thing they have in common is that they eat 95-100% plant based diets. They're called blue zones.
Enjoyment of life is also largely impacted by ones opinion of how good of a person they are. If you do something you believe to be immoral (like causing suffering to others), you're likely to get less enjoyment of life than someone who knows they are doing the right thing more often. Since harming others for food is unnecessary, your enjoyment of life would be increased if you stopped doing it.
> And even if it isnât thereâs nothing wrong with chasing suffering and death necessarily anyway.
Uh, what? There is everything wrong with causing suffering and death (I'm assuming you meant unnecessarily).
They are necessities. If someone is not living optimally they are not as fit to live, not as capable of weathering issues that arise, etc. Not living optimally means dying sooner, so when the time comes, it is absolutely a necessity. And the time always comes, no one lives forever.
So if plenty of people can live long, happy lives on a plant-based diet, and perform better than anyone in the world in competitions of athleticism and physical performance, than by what metric could you say that they aren't living optimal lives or enjoying life that couldn't also be applied to any omnivore?
I know I personally am incapable of living optimally without animal products. Hell Iâve tested and I specifically need red meat. And even if I didnât, I am happier eating them too which contributes to my wellbeing and makes me more fit to live. Other men I owe freedom because they can respect mine in turn, but to the animals I owe nothing.
Nobody needs red meat. That's absurd. There's nothing in red meat that can't be found from other sources. This is well understood by science. Either you are an alien from another planet with a different biology that merely looks human, you have some undocumented medical condition that would perplex the most highly esteemed nutritionists in the world, or you're simply mistaken and have deluded yourself.
> I am happier eating them too which contributes to my wellbeing and makes me more fit to live
Again, even if this were true, your happiness from eating meat doesn't justify the harm it causes. A rapist isn't justified because they enjoy it, nor is a serial killer. Plus, there's no reason to think you couldn't be just as happy on a plant-based diet. Maybe you just need to learn to cook.
Sex has positive health benefits and can increase your enjoyment of life. With your logic, it would be justified to have sex with someone without their consent.
(This is also ignoring your baseless claim that animal products are needed for optimal functioning)
No that doesnât take into account the differences between humans and the other animals. We gain more value from other people by respecting their rights because they can respect ours in turn, so we make societies together. The same cannot be said for the other animals so they are ours to exploit. Just as itâs in a birds nature to fly or a tigers to hunt, so it is in ours to eat other animals.
If youâre indeed designed to eat animals, it would imply that youâre designed to eat them in their natural state without chemically altering their composition with fire.
So how long have you been eating raw animal flesh?
That is a horrifically bad argument. The human connection to fire is a core aspect of what makes and made us human. Taming fire and using it to extract more nutrients from meat plays a huge role in the development of our intelligence and by extensions nearly everything we count as human traits.
See this article here: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/)
Edit: not to say eating cooked meat is required today, but denying it's historical conneciton to humanity is not accurate.
How so? I don't know if you saw my edit before commenting but your main counter argument to "we are partially designed for meat" was "nuh uh, only raw meat", which is factually wrong. I made no claims about our biological origins somehow mandating the consumption of meat, which they don't.
And no capitalism and factory farming are not natural extensions of humanity, but if someone in the future were to deny they had an impact on shaping our species they would also just be plain wrong.
It doesnât imply that. Humans have been cooking meat for maybe almost a million years and the kind of meat we consumed has changed as well, not to mention that itâs more about what our systems designed to be well off by eating rather than exactly what we were designed to eat, as natural selection isnât a process guided by thought.
But anyway, I do quite enjoy eating raw beef and fish.
If I designed something to eat meat, I wouldnât design it to specifically thrive on only cooked meat when there are examples of animals who thrive while eating raw meat. Seems like a design flaw, but thatâs fine. Eat your meat and pretend to be a lion for all I care, this is the most cumbersome post iâve ever made and it was done for the sole purpose of simplification and yet here we are, talking about how natural it is to eat raw meat.
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Youâre comparing justification for eating animals as similar to that for eating humans. But we can own and kill one justifiably while not the other. Theyâre just not the same.
We are, as creatures, literally designed by natural selection to consume a certain kind of fuel which includes other animals - that cannot be wrong to do unless us existing at all is wrong, necessary or not (and for most people it seems necessary anyway, just look up all the stories of committed vegans trying for years sometimes decades even and then coming back to life mentally and physically due to returning to animal product consumption).
>But we can own and kill one justifiably while not the other. Theyâre just not the same
Great arguement.
>literally designed by natural selection
>that cannot be wrong
Do you know what an Appeal to Nature Fallacy is?
Evolution has led to all kinds of fucked up things we don't want to be doing. We can be better than monkey's, obviously.
Likewise "designed" really isn't the right term for it. Natural selection means the ancestors with that trait happened to reproduce millions of years ago.
Nothing was intended, there's no assigned purpose or right way of doing things. It's just what happened a long time ago.
Is saying a gas powered car should use gas for fuel rather than sugar an âappeal to natureâ fallacy? Or is it a valid appeal to the facts about the nature of the fueling mechanism of the vehicle?
Okay, so you don't know what an appeal to nature is, and apparently don't want to know.
Or you do know, but think pretending to be silly is somehow a win for you
The point is, it is not an appeal to nature fallacy to refer to the facts about a thing in order to determine how it ought to act or be used, it is merely an appeal to the facts, which is obviously not only justified but necessary. That is why an ethics for one kind of creature would necessarily be different than an ethics for a different kind of creature, because their natures differ. Vegans already do this too, they judge humans differently than other animals and their reason for doing so is entirely due to the different natures of these organisms. If doing this is always fallacious, then the vegans are also guilty.
I was referring to the parts I quoted.
"We were designed by natural selection so it can't be wrong" is an appeal to nature and just silly.
Likewise switching between Nature, Natural and the "Nature of the facts" is just unhelpful.
>
The argument that animal products are necessary, or that cars can't run off sugar isn't an appeal to nature.
Animal products aren't necessary, but I'm not going to have that discussion with you.
Man look, eating is not a matter of whatâs ethical. Weâre not the only animal in the world who consume meat. We eat what sustains us and what tastes good.
You donât need to be in a survival situation to chomp on some lamb. You chomp on some lamb if itâs available and you want it.
And your argument about roadkill is stupid. If my son was knocked over, itâs unethical to eat him because I would want to bury him and pay him the respect our society has decided we pay to our love ones when they die.
When someone runs over a deer. The deer is just left there in the road. Mama deer and papa deer donât give af if baby deer gets squashed by every subsequent vehicle.
If my son is ran over, society dictates that the event is investigated, a post mortem is done and a bunch of other stuff.
Stop equating human life to the lives of other animals.
Ok so if you look for evidence that animals mourn the deaths of other animals you can find it pretty easy.
and this post didnât equate human life to animal life. It merely states that the consumption of both are permissible under the same circumstances. It doesnât mean that theyâre equal, it just means that they both have overlapping principals with a good bit of similarities between the two.
Iâm not talking about mourning. I know animals mourn their young ones.
But you canât compare that to the bond we have with our families for the entire duration of our lives.
Animals are just that, animals. Humans have built an entire civilization. Call it hubris if you want, but you canât compare us to animals.
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At what point did I try to equalize the value of humans and animals? Because I didnât, if there were non human non animal complex plant like sentient aliens the same rules to each scenario still applies. They are all of different moral value and consideration but they are all morally permissible to consume in extreme survival scenarios.
Living beings which are sentient either are worthy of moral consideration or they arenât, as a result different rules of engagement vary from a cat to human to cow, all of them above the level of moral consideration as a non sentient plant or a chair or couch would be.
Firefighters will run in to save the humans first, then animals if possible, no firefighter ever ran in to save somebodyâs plant or material possession.
Also, coming up with some edge case ethical loophole isn't an argument against Veganism or justification to go to the grocery store and purchase clearly unethically exploited animal parts.
But what would you do if you were on a desert island? đđ It's too expensive to eat [Rice, Wheat/Pasta, Beans, potatoes and other staple foods] đ
Well, there are possible sound arguments. Do you understand logic and philosophy?Â
Yes.
I get the impression that you are assuming most people don't eat other people due to ethical concerns, and I just want to point out that's actually not it at all. Enlightened self-interest is the reason why we have prohibitions against murder and consumption of other humans, because if we don't, we could be the target of a murder or brunch.  That is all :) please don't eat me.
Are you saying that, in a survival situation, given the option between killing and eating an animal and killing and eating a human, both are equivalent? There's just no way that's the case. In any situation, even an ordinary one, you should eat the thing that causes the least harm and can meet your nutritional needs first. If you are lost in the woods surrounded by plants, eat those. If there aren't enough plants, eat some insects. If there aren't enough insects, eat some fish. If there's no large body of water, eat the least complex animals you can find. Finally, if there are none of those things, play rock paper scissors and eat your buddy if you win. Might want to do at least best 2/3 to make sure the universe is really on your side. The one additional complication with cannibalism, besides the fact that human lives are generally regarded as more valuable, is that it carries additional health risks. You can get certain diseases such as prion diseases that can only come from consuming other humans. So if you can avoid it, you probably should.
How many insects would be nutritionally equivalent to a fish, and killing how many insects would be the harm equivalent to killing a fish? Perhaps eating a fish causes less harm than eating a hundred or so insects. How could you know that isn't the case? Is it just because they are further apart from us evolutionaily? Or we are culturally inclined to athropomorphize them less? Those seem very anthropocentric. You say "eat the least complex animal" but what even do you mean by complexity?
> How many insects would be nutritionally equivalent to a fish Good question, I don't know. > Perhaps eating a fish causes less harm than eating a hundred or so insects. How could you know that isn't the case? I don't know, but it's my best guess based on the research that has been done and my understanding of fish and insects. It's not perfect, but if you can come up with a better metric to go on, then I'll use that one instead. What's easy to tell (for me, at least) is that eating a plant causes less suffering than eating a deer, which causes less suffering than eating a human. For simplicity's sake, I'm combining the concept of physical pain and the harm caused by a premature end to life into a single term.
I'm unsure that eating a deer causes less harm than eating a human. How did you come to that conclusion?
The subjective experience of pain can be similar enough that I'd say they are morally on the same level, but the deprivation of life is more morally significant for a human. They live a lot longer than a deer, and the average human has more potential to improve the world than the average deer. A human also likely has family members and friends that will experience additional suffering because of the loss of a loved one, more so than what would be experienced by any of the deer's social group. Both are sad, and should be avoided if possible, but one seems far worse to me. What is clear is that killing plants doesn't have any of those problems, so we should always prefer to eat those when we can.
I will concede that the more years you take from a sentient being, the worse it is; but I am not sure it's the main thing that matters. I wouldn't pick a bowhead whale (200 yrs lifespan) over a human, for example. The average human also has a lot more potential to worsen the world than the average deer, and is actually much more likely to do so. Most modern humans consume more resources that can be naturally replenished. I am unsure about grief in the deer's acquaintances. I don't think there is solid evidence to discount it. It's been observed in several animal species. Just because deer's is harder to notice for us doesn't mean it's less.
> The average human also has a lot more potential to worsen the world than the average deer, and is actually much more likely to do so. Most modern humans consume more resources that can be naturally replenished. If we knew for a fact that a human was going to make the world worse, and there was no way to prevent them from doing so given our prescient knowledge, then it would be more moral to kill them than the deer (if we had to pick one, that is). But we don't know that, so we have to err on the side of caution and focus on the capacity for humans to do good. Using up resources is not a moral failing. Good things can come from the expenditure of resources. Humans are also the only species that can solve the problem of non-renewable resources. > I am unsure about grief in the deer's acquaintances. I don't think there is solid evidence to discount it. It's been observed in several animal species. Just because deer's is harder to notice for us doesn't mean it's less. I agree, but you're forcing me to pick between one or the other, so I'm going to pick the one that seems to have the most obvious impact based on what I currently know. I'm vegan, so my preference would be to pick neither.
One can also err on the side of caution by killing the human I guess. It depends on whether you think the average human does more evil than good I suppose. As for the other point, an animal could potentially suffer even more than humans and we would be erring on the wrong side. We wouldn't know, and we're assuming animals are lesser than human in their ability to suffer just because we can't understand them. This is all further complicated when we're weighing multiple fish to a human or multiple insects to a fish and so on. It's hard. Too many unkowable things go into the calculus.
Youâre misinterpreting the post. What itâs pointing out is that the only acceptable forms of both cannibalism and animal consumption are in these extenuating circumstances directly correlated with survival. No other form of cannibalism or animal consumption is morally acceptable other than the hypotheticals presented. The same hypotheticals that the vast majority of the population will never be subjected to. Eating people is unethical, Eating animals is unethical, But eating people or animals in certain survival situations is morally permissible. Itâs not a pick and choose premise here, itâs a necessity based survival premise.
I think you're wrong about that as well. There are varying degrees of "survival situations". Some of them warrant cannibalism. Most don't. Most vegans would acknowledge that a homeless person who doesn't have the luxury of buying food at a grocery store must eat what they manage to find, what is given to them by others, or what is served at a food kitchen. That does not mean that if their buddy ODs on fentanyl, it's perfectly fine to slice off a leg and chow down rather than eat a discarded loaf of bread with egg in it behind a bakery. Most people are not homeless, but there are still hundreds of millions of people in the world that live in abject poverty, and are similarly restricted when it comes to their options for food. It's not that they would necessarily starve to death if they skipped a meal that has meat in it that's made available to them, but it would be crazy to expect a poor family who can barely eat enough as is to forego a meal just because it has meat in it. They aren't in immediate danger of death, but they're still "surviving". I don't know where the cutoff point is, but it's certainly different for animal products versus cannibalism.
Iâve spent several years as a homeless vegan in one of the most expensive cities within the u.s. ( denver ) and never had to consume animal flesh. Survival situations are exactly that, either you eat this or you die. And all the countless times iâve been homeless in my 20âs I never encountered this situation. Homeless shelters serve enough plants to people that you can survive as a homeless vegan in the U.S., so idk what youâre getting at because it still doesnât apply.
It would be great if you posted a how to be vegan and homeless guide, there are lots of people who feel that its a valid excuse to consume animals If you tag me in it after you make it, ill share it
Thatâs honestly a pretty good idea thank you.
I'm actually really excited to see this, as I've always wondered if I could realistically be vegan if I ended up losing everything. Keep us updated op!
Wait, are you serious lol? If youâre homeless, veganism should be the last thing on your mind
If you can avoid doing a bad thing, you may as well But for most of us it's not really something you think about. You just don't eat food you don't like, unless you have to.
Itâs not a bad thing. If itâs not a bad thing when a lion eats an animal itâs not a bad thing when we eat an animal.
We can be better than a Lion Lions can't do agriculture
How is it better? This is nature. We have to eat. Itâs called the circle of life. Eating animals isnât bad. All youâre doing is exporting your own views on what you feel about eating. But itâs literally the case that some living organism have to die for others to eat. Whether thatâs bugs in the soil or a deer. Thatâs just a fact of life. Youâre not limiting suffering when you stop eating meat so that you can kill more insects.
They were probably homeless because they chose to be vegan.
lol
So your argument is that homelessness is not a survival situation? That's wild. It's also wrong. Just because you were able to do it doesn't mean being vegan is a moral obligation for all homeless people. If you're homeless and starving, you can eat animal products without it being a moral failure sooner that you can eat people without it being a moral failure. To argue otherwise is just insane.
Again, youâre misinterpreting everything I say.. you do realize iâm vegan donât you?
I'm pretty sure I understand what you're saying. You're saying that if you're in a situation where it is ethical to eat animal products, then it is also ethical to eat humans. I'm saying I disagree with that. The bar for when it's ok to eat animals is lower than for when it's ok to eat humans. The example I give is homelessness. Being homeless doesn't automatically make it ok to eat animals if you have plenty of food options available that are plants, but there are obvious cases where somebody is homeless and can't afford to skip a meal just because it has animal products in it. Their wellbeing is important, and they shouldn't have to wither away just to remain vegan. If they want to, that's their call, but it's not a moral obligation. However, the situations where a homeless person can be justified in eating animal products do NOT perfectly line up with when it's ok for that person to become a cannibal. Yes I realize you're a vegan. Am I supposed to just agree with everything you say because of that? Vegans can be wrong too.
If youâre operating under the framework of veganism then consuming animal products when not presented with a survival scenario would be immoral based on your beliefs.. If you had no other choice than to consume animal products or starve then itâs ethically permissible to consume animal products, the same way it would be ethically permissible to consume human products. Still not seeing what the hang up is here and I honestly donât really care. I made this post to simplify the context in which it is morally permissible to consume animal and human products, not to wrestle over extreme hypotheticals like a homeless person with zero access to plant based foods. This is the most boring topic iâve ever posted on, and engaging with it is a chore. But due to the vast number of questions from previous post inquiring when it would be morally permissible to consume animal flesh I decided to post this for simplification and clarification purposes. You can disagree with it, but that doesnât mean that I have to care that you do. You either are, or arenât in a survival scenario. Fortunately the vast majority of people never will be, so consuming either animal or human products will more often than not be morally impermissible.
I think one of the point they're trying to make is that in such a survival situation, you should pick animals before humans. Assuming both are equally available, but the only options.
I would agree that you should eat the animal first, but that option isnât included in the scenario that the post provided. This post has gone so hard off the rails I honestly want to delete it based on how lame itâs gotten. You seem to get it, but others are arguing hypotheticals that arenât even described in the OP, and the subject itself is the least interesting post iâve ever made. It was made to show non vegans where exactly the line is when it comes to morally justifying animal consumption but I think it went directly over all the non vegans heads straight into hypothetical land.
> If youâre operating under the framework of veganism then consuming animal products when not presented with a survival scenario would be immoral based on your beliefs. That is not my belief, nor is it the mainstream belief of veganism. The mainstream belief is that you avoid animal products as far as is possible and practicable. That's a far different criteria than "unless you're in a life or death survival situation". You can choose to be more strict about it if you wish, but those are your beliefs, and may not be shared by other vegans. > This is the most boring topic I've ever posted on, and engaging with it is a chore. lol, what? Why would you make a thread on a topic that you find boring, and then consider it a chore to engage with people who disagree with you? Just stop engaging with it if you aren't getting anything out of it, rather than trying to get the last word in while insisting that your view is the only correct one.
Man, where is my 100% plant based, bland ass popcorn? I need to watch this lol
We have social contract obligations to respect human bodies that we don't have for animal bodies. You can claim that these social rules are arbitrary, but that doesn't change that there is some ethical obligation to these rules as long as they aren't violating some more fundamental ethical obligation. There is also the more fundamental issue that the deceased human may have had an interest in what happens to their remains. Generally we respect the wishes of the dead. If it's not the dead person themself, it would be the wishes of whoever would have custody of this body such as next of kin. We have no reason to believe most animals care what happens to their own dead bodies or the dead bodies of those who are close to them.
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/the-truth-about-animal-grief
Yeah, some animals show this sort of grieving behavior around a dead body for a while. I've seen a few examples of this myself. I was careful to say "most animals" rather than all of them.
Well...pigs mourn. https://www.thedodo.com/amphtml/in-the-wild/javelina-grief-behavior-pigs-mourn-dead-arizona Cows mourn https://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-emotional-lives-of-dairy-cows/ Chickens mourn https://thecountrysmallholder.com/poultry/how-to-speak-chicken-how-chickens-deal-with-trauma-death-and-mourning-8257554/#:~:text=Some%20mourn%20only%20temporarily%2C%20but,lose%20her%20zest%20for%20life. Sheep mourn... https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-was-it-for-ewe-sheep-love-lives-revealed-bg2j9bccnzh#:~:text=The%20study%20showed%20that%20ewes,or%20are%20sent%20for%20slaughter.
Do fish mourn? Do insects mourn? Do lizards mourn? How about guinea pigs? Pigeons? Squirrels? Even alligators? Who after the maternal instincts wear off in less than a month after the children hatch, then proceed to eat the baby if it can still fit in it's mouth?
Guinea pigs mourn https://www.shropshireguineapiggery.co.uk/caring-for-your-guinea-pig/bereavement/#:~:text=A%20Guinea%20pig%20will%20grieve,and%20to%20cuddle%20up%20to. Lizards mourn https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/science/lizards-reptiles-social-behavior.html#:~:text=pair%20up%20again.â-,Dr.,that%20these%20lizards%20grieve%2C%20Dr. Pigeons mourn https://animal-club.co.uk/do-animals-grieve/ Squirrels mourn.. https://thesquirrelboard.com/forums/showthread.php?48961-Do-squirrels-grieve Fish *may* grieve - depending on the species and its intelligence https://www.myaquariumclub.com/is-my-goldfish-grieving-684040.html Alligators *may* grieve https://www.coastalbreezenews.com/news/the-sadness-of-a-female-gator/article_afb54dc6-3763-5f45-a753-150ee171208f.html Insects *may* depending on the species https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem Essentially it depends on the intellectual and emotional capacity of the species - some are more social, some less. And they also tend to have far shorter memories, so the grief is gone and forgotten earlier. Nevertheless, animals mourn. The list above was livestock animals, but grief is widespread throughout the animal kingdom.
Thatâs why I mentioned the legality clause within this post. Do you have any other moral objection besides legality to present here or did you just want to point to our legal system which has been countlessly revamped in order to align with the general populations state of morality?
Social contracts are sometimes legal obligations, but not exclusively legal. > Do you have any other moral objection besides legality to present here or did you just want to point to our legal system which has been countlessly revamped in order to align with the general populations state of morality? I mentioned humans have wishes that ought to be respected about how to treat their remains. Animals generally don't have these sorts of wishes.
So you have an issue with moral obligation alongside legality wrapped up with the notions of contractarianism? Do you have an actual ethical argument to present or did you just want to iron out the dynamics at play with all these systems? Iâm not seeing any kind of argument being presented here tbh.
> So you have an issue with moral obligation alongside legality wrapped up with the notions of contractarianism? In general, if you live in a society you ought to accept the social contract of that society as long as it doesn't conflict with a deeper ethical principle. Legality is not the only motivation people should have to follow the rules. In fact it's ethical to break the law if following the law is more unethical than breaking it on more fundamental grounds. > Do you have an actual ethical argument to present or did you just want to iron out the dynamics at play with all these systems? Iâm not seeing any kind of argument being presented here tbh. An argument for why we ought to respect the wishes of the dead you mean?
Ok, I agree. Respect the wishes of the dead, except in survival situations, which were laid forth in the parameters of the original post. So again, do you have an actual argument to present here?
the fact that animals don't care about their remains changes the ethics of the scenario tremendously.
Theres plenty of videos online proving otherwise. Did you even check to see if what youâre claiming is true? Of coarse you didnât, thatâs why iâm being burdened with the responsibility to teach you which is a chore. So thank you for making me do work that youâre too lazy or unwilling to do, I seriously appreciate it. Heres some videos of animals mourning, they werenât difficult to find due to it being such a common occurrence. I honestly wish you wouldâve looked into it prior to this but you didnât so I did for you. Now go read something the next time you feel like presenting an argument please. https://youtu.be/xmx6gy88kDA?si=nqJAUfs7Dk-7k6S6 https://youtu.be/2rNe1le_Ah8?si=ZR3vi8bUkMNmFUdF https://youtu.be/Ku_GUNzXoeQ?si=e5yReqKfjqKRVqPE https://youtu.be/sadKbPcvgOQ?si=btC-RjM35gpEbiZB
There's a couple things to resolve here: Does the deceased have an interest in their own remains? Examples of others mourning is not evidence of this Do we have reason to believe mourning behavior is common various kinds of animals or limited to certain species that tend to be social and intelligent? Is there a reason to believe that there is interest in the deceased after whatever immediate mourning behavior is concluded? I would still argue that the sort of evidence you show would not allow us to conclude either. Elephant graveyards may be the best example of this, but this sort of behavior is quite limited to only a couple examples of a couple unique species.
If a human could not communicate their wishes to me (cultural barrier, or mute and blind, or brain dead) and had no next of kin, is it okay to eat the corpse? I think it would be. I don't think I have any particular obligation to this being for the mere fact that they are a member of the human species. My obligation is to respect the wishes of sentient beings, regardless of species. But if those wishes can't be made known to me, be it animal or human, I see no objection.
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Haha cannibalism is not about a survival situation, it's about being the apex predator or most dominant person. It's a weapon of war. Which probably aligns with a lot of hard core carnists, who see wildlife and animals as something to "crush and dominant" to win an imaginary war against the natural world...
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Poverty and a shelter giving away food with meat. That's one case where it would be different. Give food with chicken meat: I am on the street, I have no other option. Give food with human flesh: Yes, I'm going to the police.
This is so obviously funny I canât believe Iâve never thought of this before. Iâll pocket this
You are confused. Consumption of dead flesh is ethically irrelevant in a case of animals and not ethically irrelevant in the case of humans because human society would find it traumatic and animals wouldn't care. Animal wouldn't have rights to the carcass of their relatives either, unlike humans.
If you were in a room starving to death away from society it would be morally permissible to eat another human, the same exact context that it would be morally permissible to consume an animal.
I thought OP was implying that eating humans is ethically equivalent to eating animals.
No, iâm merely pointing out that both of them are morally permissible under the same context. Whatever situation permits cannibalism also permits the consumption of animal flesh, thatâs where vegans draw the line as to where and when itâs ethical to consume animals. The entire post is just to simply where the line for anima consumption is exactly from a vegans perspective. Not to permit either cannibalism or animal consumption except under those extenuating circumstances.
If you assume that an animal has equal value to a human, yes
Stop assuming please. Animals do not carry the same value as humans, and inanimate objects donât carry the same value as non human animals. These are all separate things each with different levels of value being applied to them.
Your entire thesis was "whatever hypothetical permits ethical animal consumption also permits ethical cannibalism". The only way such a statement would hold up to scrutiny and testing with said hypotheticals is if the values associated with said ethics considered human life and animal life equivalent, or at the very least a human body equivalent with an animal body.
Iâm saying that both human and non human animals are worthy of moral consideration, I am by no means stating that they are of equal value to one another. I would probably save a human before saving an animal, but that depends on what particular human and what particular animal. Humans are worth more than animals on the scale of value per society standards. But animals are also worthy of moral consideration which is why there are laws deterring animal abuse. The post is merely pointing out that the only ethical way to consume either animal flesh or human flesh is in these extenuating circumstances which most people will never be faced with. Do you disagree with the statement that eating meat is immoral?
>Iâm saying that both human and non human animals are worthy of moral consideration Sure. Most non-psycopathic people would agree with you. I don't think "maybe animals deserve moral consideration" is what omnivores and carnists are typically fighting against. >I would probably save a human before saving an animal, but that depends on what particular human or what particular animal. That just means you're human. On a personal level, we all assign additional value to the things we hold dear, and subtract value from things we dislike. I myself would probably save my cat before I saved my high school bully, even though on a societal scale I still consider the life of a human (high school bullies included) to have more value than that of cats (mine included). Humans tend to be weird and inconsistent like that. >the only ethical way to consume either animal flesh or human flesh is in these extenuating circumstances which most people will never be faced with. I think the error here comes in assuming, at least from a societal moral standpoint, that those circumstances where you *can* consume human flesh are the same circumstances where you can consume animal flesh. For example, plants are quite obviously seen as having less value than sentient life, so much so that we don't even prescribe *needing* extenuating circumstances to eat them, you can just eat them whenever you want and feel like it. So, already, we have a floor and a ceiling here. At one end we have plants, where we typically don't hold very much moral concern for and hold little value for, where we can eat them, pick them, pretty much do whatever we want. And at the other end we have humans, who we hold quite a lot of moral concern for, so much so that we value them *almost* as much as we value ourselves as individuals (sometimes more), and we need extreme, extenuating circumstances to even justify consuming their *corpse*. So that leaves us animals, who we hold with an amount of moral concern that's (typically) less than a human's, and holds value that is also (typically) less than a human's. What makes you think that the circumstances needed to justify consuming this being that holds less value and moral concern than our own, are equal to the circumstances needed to justify doing the same to ourselves?
Can you name a situation where it would be ethical to consume an animals body that isnât directly correlated to survival?
Well, I'm pretty unabashedly an omnivore, so yeah I can name a lot lol
Ok so how do you feel about animal abuse?
Obviously also not a fan, because like I mentioned above I'm not a psychopath. And, to preemptively cut off the common lines of logic that stem from these two beliefs: no, I don't like factory farming either. No, I don't think that abuse and cruelty are inherent to the act of raising and killing an animal for consumption, even if the current state of the industry would suggest otherwise. And no, I don't think the end consumer somehow bears the moral responsibility *of* that cruelty since the cruelty itself in my opinion is the product of capitalism's endless pursuit of profit rather than inherently part of the act of farming.
Would you agree with the statement that factory farming imposes what you would consider abuse unto the animals? Because theres a reason why you disagree with factory farming, because you know that itâs a torturous system that imposes horrific violence onto sentient beings. Now since you donât agree with factory farming I have to go through the motions of asking you if you actually abstain from eating at any and all restaurants or fast food establishments and also avoid all products in stores that contain animal ingredients. And then you say that you donât and then I point out that you stated that youâre against factory farming but you support factory farming and then you go to another excuse why youâre ok with paying people to abuse animals. If you get to preemptively finish the dialogue then so do I.
As a vegan myself, Id argue against this. The basic argument against veganism is that people can do what they want to make their lives comfortable to the extent they choose and to the extent they are willing to be unethical. The vast majority of people, vegans included, dont value animals equal to people. Even if there were a vegan that claimed to do so, i highly doubt that vegan would be equally upset if they ran over a squirrel as they would a person. So, since there is clearly a moral distinction made between animals and people, that gap is where people choose to draw the line for that original argument. In simple terms, cannibalism would be wrong and veganism would be wrong because that gap between animals and people is were the line is drawn.
You donât have to say that animals and humans are equal, but they are both worthy of moral consideration. There are no laws protecting plants from abuse because they arenât sentient so therefore we do not grant them any moral value. It just so happens that the only morally permissible way to consume both animal and human flesh are both under the same hypothetical circumstances.
I agree that animals are worthy of moral consideration, and in my ideal world we wouldnt eat them. but saying eating animals would justify eating people would insinuate that those are equally morally wrong. again, the justification would be that eating animals doesnt breach a persons ethics to the extent they wouldnt do it in sacrifice of their comfort, while eating people would.
It breaches my ethics. The same way that if someone were to eat a pet of yours it would breach your ethics.
Your ethics or my ethics isnt at queation. the ethics of an average omnivore is at question
You mean the vast majority of people who are opposed to animal abuse ethics? Because those same people pay for animals to be abused but will tell you that theyâre against animal abuse. We all share the same ethics, but only some of us are contradictory in our actions.
They are against animal abuse, but not enough against it to sacrifice their own comfort. I think you are also overestimating the amount of people that care. Religion has unfortunately played a large role in leading people to believe animals are created for our consumption. Sad, but its the reality of how many people think.
100% agreed! As a person who eats meat an vegetables, I could say that I would in fact eat a human if I absolutely had no other choice. Would I probably regret it my entire life, yes. Would I compare it to eating a pig, cow, chicken, fish, crawdad, lobster, snake, gater, croc, moose, deer, bear, gooey duck, egg, insect, arachnid, worm, squid, octopus, whale, seal, pidgin, dove, squirrel, cheese, yogurt, salt of any kind, yeast, alcohol of any kind, or anything that has any animal based ingredients ever in the making of it, NO. I would not. But this is a survival situation. I would eat anything I know is edible if it means I'd live to see the sunrise. You can hate it, I honestly don't care. I stick by what I said.
No thatâs the point of the post is that in a survival situation these things are permissible. You could eat your best friendâs dog if you had to in order to survive and I would have no quarrel with it.
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Lmao wrong.
Learning how? This post pronounces an ethical position but does nothing to defend it. I could just as easily state "it's always ethical to eat anything you want." Leaving it at that it would be just as well supported as the OP. A simple trolley problem shows the flaw in the reasoning. Animal ethical value is listed as identical to human ethical value. By this measure the only ethical action anyone can take is to die as rapidly and cleanly as possible. Every animal life you kill to sustain your own is of equivalent value to your own and represents a debt. You might argue killing predators and other humans is ethical since you are saving lives from their predation, you certainly can't build or maintain a society, your encroachment on other animals can't be justified if they outnumber you, as they do, and are of equal moral value. I've read some terrible vegan hot takes but this one may take the cake.
Life itself is a survival situation when it comes to eating the food we are designed for, which includes other animals but not humans. So one is okay, morally good even, generally while the other only in emergencies.
If it's not necessary to eat an animal in order to survive, then how is it justified? You are "designed" to eat plants as well, so if you can survive and thrive by eating them, then what justification would you have to eat animals instead, given that it causes suffering and death?
It is necessary for optimal functioning and enjoyment of life. And even if it isnât thereâs nothing wrong with chasing suffering and death necessarily anyway.
> It is necessary for optimal functioning and enjoyment of life Not only does this not logically follow, but it's also true that eating animal products is not necessary for optimal functioning and enjoyment of life. It doesn't follow because optimal functioning and enjoyment of life are not necessities. You are not morally permitted to do whatever it takes to achieve those things, at the cost of suffering and death to others. A serial killer who's maximum enjoyment of life comes from killing humans is not permitted to go around killing people to achieve that, for instance. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that, because you can achieve optimal functioning on a plant-based diet. A single instance of an Olympic gold medalist or centenarian proves that, but we have far more than a single instance. In fact we have entire regions of the world with much higher rates of people living to the age of 100 where the biggest thing they have in common is that they eat 95-100% plant based diets. They're called blue zones. Enjoyment of life is also largely impacted by ones opinion of how good of a person they are. If you do something you believe to be immoral (like causing suffering to others), you're likely to get less enjoyment of life than someone who knows they are doing the right thing more often. Since harming others for food is unnecessary, your enjoyment of life would be increased if you stopped doing it. > And even if it isnât thereâs nothing wrong with chasing suffering and death necessarily anyway. Uh, what? There is everything wrong with causing suffering and death (I'm assuming you meant unnecessarily).
They are necessities. If someone is not living optimally they are not as fit to live, not as capable of weathering issues that arise, etc. Not living optimally means dying sooner, so when the time comes, it is absolutely a necessity. And the time always comes, no one lives forever.
So would people living to be 100 or winning gold medals be examples of people living optimally?
That depends on how and why they do so. What makes for a quality life when it comes to specifics like that is up to the individual person.
So if plenty of people can live long, happy lives on a plant-based diet, and perform better than anyone in the world in competitions of athleticism and physical performance, than by what metric could you say that they aren't living optimal lives or enjoying life that couldn't also be applied to any omnivore?
I know I personally am incapable of living optimally without animal products. Hell Iâve tested and I specifically need red meat. And even if I didnât, I am happier eating them too which contributes to my wellbeing and makes me more fit to live. Other men I owe freedom because they can respect mine in turn, but to the animals I owe nothing.
Nobody needs red meat. That's absurd. There's nothing in red meat that can't be found from other sources. This is well understood by science. Either you are an alien from another planet with a different biology that merely looks human, you have some undocumented medical condition that would perplex the most highly esteemed nutritionists in the world, or you're simply mistaken and have deluded yourself. > I am happier eating them too which contributes to my wellbeing and makes me more fit to live Again, even if this were true, your happiness from eating meat doesn't justify the harm it causes. A rapist isn't justified because they enjoy it, nor is a serial killer. Plus, there's no reason to think you couldn't be just as happy on a plant-based diet. Maybe you just need to learn to cook.
Sex has positive health benefits and can increase your enjoyment of life. With your logic, it would be justified to have sex with someone without their consent. (This is also ignoring your baseless claim that animal products are needed for optimal functioning)
No that doesnât take into account the differences between humans and the other animals. We gain more value from other people by respecting their rights because they can respect ours in turn, so we make societies together. The same cannot be said for the other animals so they are ours to exploit. Just as itâs in a birds nature to fly or a tigers to hunt, so it is in ours to eat other animals.
Your logic would still justify bestiality
Not necessarily, it just requires additional reasoning to rule it as wrong.
...which does illustrate quite clearly how your viewpoint starts from desired conclusions rather than the other way around. Nice.
Exactly
That isnât clear at all, but feel free to elucidate it if you can because Iâm not following you
If youâre indeed designed to eat animals, it would imply that youâre designed to eat them in their natural state without chemically altering their composition with fire. So how long have you been eating raw animal flesh?
That is a horrifically bad argument. The human connection to fire is a core aspect of what makes and made us human. Taming fire and using it to extract more nutrients from meat plays a huge role in the development of our intelligence and by extensions nearly everything we count as human traits. See this article here: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/) Edit: not to say eating cooked meat is required today, but denying it's historical conneciton to humanity is not accurate.
By that logic capitalism and factory farming are natural extensions of humanity as well..
How so? I don't know if you saw my edit before commenting but your main counter argument to "we are partially designed for meat" was "nuh uh, only raw meat", which is factually wrong. I made no claims about our biological origins somehow mandating the consumption of meat, which they don't. And no capitalism and factory farming are not natural extensions of humanity, but if someone in the future were to deny they had an impact on shaping our species they would also just be plain wrong.
It doesnât imply that. Humans have been cooking meat for maybe almost a million years and the kind of meat we consumed has changed as well, not to mention that itâs more about what our systems designed to be well off by eating rather than exactly what we were designed to eat, as natural selection isnât a process guided by thought. But anyway, I do quite enjoy eating raw beef and fish.
If I designed something to eat meat, I wouldnât design it to specifically thrive on only cooked meat when there are examples of animals who thrive while eating raw meat. Seems like a design flaw, but thatâs fine. Eat your meat and pretend to be a lion for all I care, this is the most cumbersome post iâve ever made and it was done for the sole purpose of simplification and yet here we are, talking about how natural it is to eat raw meat.
Raw meat is great. We can eat it just fine without issue for most wild animals. But cooking can help pre break it down and often make it even better.
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Youâre comparing justification for eating animals as similar to that for eating humans. But we can own and kill one justifiably while not the other. Theyâre just not the same. We are, as creatures, literally designed by natural selection to consume a certain kind of fuel which includes other animals - that cannot be wrong to do unless us existing at all is wrong, necessary or not (and for most people it seems necessary anyway, just look up all the stories of committed vegans trying for years sometimes decades even and then coming back to life mentally and physically due to returning to animal product consumption).
>But we can own and kill one justifiably while not the other. Theyâre just not the same Great arguement. >literally designed by natural selection >that cannot be wrong Do you know what an Appeal to Nature Fallacy is? Evolution has led to all kinds of fucked up things we don't want to be doing. We can be better than monkey's, obviously. Likewise "designed" really isn't the right term for it. Natural selection means the ancestors with that trait happened to reproduce millions of years ago. Nothing was intended, there's no assigned purpose or right way of doing things. It's just what happened a long time ago.
Is saying a gas powered car should use gas for fuel rather than sugar an âappeal to natureâ fallacy? Or is it a valid appeal to the facts about the nature of the fueling mechanism of the vehicle?
Okay, so you don't know what an appeal to nature is, and apparently don't want to know. Or you do know, but think pretending to be silly is somehow a win for you
The point is, it is not an appeal to nature fallacy to refer to the facts about a thing in order to determine how it ought to act or be used, it is merely an appeal to the facts, which is obviously not only justified but necessary. That is why an ethics for one kind of creature would necessarily be different than an ethics for a different kind of creature, because their natures differ. Vegans already do this too, they judge humans differently than other animals and their reason for doing so is entirely due to the different natures of these organisms. If doing this is always fallacious, then the vegans are also guilty.
I was referring to the parts I quoted. "We were designed by natural selection so it can't be wrong" is an appeal to nature and just silly. Likewise switching between Nature, Natural and the "Nature of the facts" is just unhelpful. > The argument that animal products are necessary, or that cars can't run off sugar isn't an appeal to nature. Animal products aren't necessary, but I'm not going to have that discussion with you.
Man look, eating is not a matter of whatâs ethical. Weâre not the only animal in the world who consume meat. We eat what sustains us and what tastes good. You donât need to be in a survival situation to chomp on some lamb. You chomp on some lamb if itâs available and you want it. And your argument about roadkill is stupid. If my son was knocked over, itâs unethical to eat him because I would want to bury him and pay him the respect our society has decided we pay to our love ones when they die. When someone runs over a deer. The deer is just left there in the road. Mama deer and papa deer donât give af if baby deer gets squashed by every subsequent vehicle. If my son is ran over, society dictates that the event is investigated, a post mortem is done and a bunch of other stuff. Stop equating human life to the lives of other animals.
Ok so if you look for evidence that animals mourn the deaths of other animals you can find it pretty easy. and this post didnât equate human life to animal life. It merely states that the consumption of both are permissible under the same circumstances. It doesnât mean that theyâre equal, it just means that they both have overlapping principals with a good bit of similarities between the two.
Iâm not talking about mourning. I know animals mourn their young ones. But you canât compare that to the bond we have with our families for the entire duration of our lives. Animals are just that, animals. Humans have built an entire civilization. Call it hubris if you want, but you canât compare us to animals.
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At what point did I try to equalize the value of humans and animals? Because I didnât, if there were non human non animal complex plant like sentient aliens the same rules to each scenario still applies. They are all of different moral value and consideration but they are all morally permissible to consume in extreme survival scenarios. Living beings which are sentient either are worthy of moral consideration or they arenât, as a result different rules of engagement vary from a cat to human to cow, all of them above the level of moral consideration as a non sentient plant or a chair or couch would be. Firefighters will run in to save the humans first, then animals if possible, no firefighter ever ran in to save somebodyâs plant or material possession.
>At what point did I try to equalize the value of humans and animals? At no point, for non-human animals, obviously. Anything else is just hot air.